The Harvest

  Murdoch opened his mouth but no sound came out.

  Tyler put the pistol back on the table. “Maybe you should get your things together, Mr. Murdoch.”

  Murdoch blinked until he realized he had been excused, the ordeal was over. Then he stood up on shaky legs, walked to the door, turned, and took a last bewildered look at Tyler before he left and closed the door behind him.

  Tyler’s headache was much worse.

  Later, it occurred to him to look for the bullet he’d palmed; but it wasn’t beside the chair, nor in his pocket, nor on the tabletop. Finally he opened the pistol and found the bullet resting in the chamber—exactly where he had led Murdoch to believe it was. Which worried him a little. It was a strange sort of mistake to have made.

  * * *

  Murdoch lay awake for what remained of the night with the door of his hotel room locked and chained—eyes open, because when he closed them he saw the barrel of Tyler’s service revolver pointed at him.

  Or Soo Constantine, pale and naked in a darkened room.

  Or an empty human skin littering the doorway of an old house.

  Dear God, he thought, what if Tyler had shot him? He wouldn’t be a skin. He’d be a corpse. A messier object, as Soo had pointed out.

  She’d talked about the missing people as if they had really gone somewhere. Had they? True, the Travellers had promised that. The memory of Contact was vague in Murdoch’s mind, a dream that paled by daylight. But he remembered the promise of a new kind of life, both physical and bodiless… an idea that had made sense, somehow, in the intensity of Contact.

  It’s not too late, Soo had said.

  And why did the words linger on?

  Was he actually tempted by the offer? Was such a thing possible? But that’s terrible, Murdoch thought: I don’t want to be an empty skin on some empty street, like a bottle somebody drained and threw away. It’s something they choose. No. Bullshit, Murdoch thought. But she hadn’t seemed like a liar.

  He tried to imagine himself travelling on with Tyler, watching the old man sink into outright lunacy, firing missiles at something, anything—trying to make sense of the world by dismantling it.

  Christ, Murdoch thought miserably, I don’t even know where I am! I couldn’t find this town on a map. Loftus? Where is it?

  I’m lost, Murdoch thought.

  Rain tapped on the window.

  He tossed and slept a little in the last hour before dawn.

  * * *

  Tyler woke regretting the incident of the night before and tried to act as if it hadn’t happened. He knocked on Murdoch’s door and asked for some help loading up the Hummer. Murdoch nodded—both of them a little sheepish, Tyler thought, in the sober light of morning—and began to assemble the cooking gear.

  They carried their personal items to the street, around the corner to the Exxon station where the Hummer was parked under cover. Tyler arranged the baggage in the rear of the vehicle and made sure everything was strapped down. Murdoch, looking baleful and confused, watched from a few feet away.

  Then Tyler took the passenger seat and waited for Murdoch to climb in behind the wheel. It was a conciliatory gesture, giving Murdoch the reins, a small apology for the night before.

  But Murdoch didn’t move. “Sir,” he said, “I think I left something in the room.”

  Tyler took a pair of sunglasses from his breast pocket and polished them on a handkerchief. “What sort of thing, Sergeant?”

  “Compass,” Murdoch mumbled.

  “Isn’t that with the mess kit? I thought I saw it there.”

  “Sir, I don’t think so.” He made no move to look.

  The air in the garage was thick. It smelled of gasoline and old solvents. This is a dark place, Tyler thought, an oppressive place.

  “It was a cheap compass,” he said. “We can find one like it anywhere.”

  “It’s easier if I just go back, sir.”

  “Back to the hotel room?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tyler understood the lie and the significance of the lie. It made him feel enormously sad—this shabby little betrayal.

  “Well,” Tyler said. “You’d better hurry, then, Sergeant.” Embarrassingly, Murdoch couldn’t hide his relief. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Colonel Tyler watched his young blond-haired friend leave the Exxon garage. Murdoch was haloed for a moment in the morning light—the rain had finally stopped—then he turned into the shadow of a taller building and was gone.

  * * *

  Soo was in the manager’s office of the Roxy, only just awake, wearing a gray sweatshirt that reached nearly to her knees. She looked up as Murdoch came through the door.

  The room was different in the morning light, Murdoch thought. Sunlight came through the small, high window. The floorboards were lustrous and ancient. The mattress looked disheveled, as if the girl hadn’t slept much herself.

  “Soo—” he began.

  “You don’t have to explain, A.W. I understand.” She stood up. “I know why you’re here. It’s okay.”

  He was as scared as he had ever been. More frightened than when Tyler was pointing his pistol at him. The impulse that had brought him here seemed reckless, foolish.

  She moved closer.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “I mean I’m still not sure if I—”

  “It doesn’t hurt or anything.”

  That’s what they tell you about vaccinations, Murdoch thought. About dentists.

  “It’s just life.” She touched him. She put her hands on his shoulders and tilted up her head. “A new kind of life.”

  And Murdoch closed his eyes and kissed her.

  * * *

  He guessed the neocytes entered his body at that moment. There was no sensation, nothing more ominous than the touch of her lips. It reassured him that she still smelled like Soo, still tasted like Soo. The fear began to subside.

  She stepped back and smiled at him. “Now we can be together, A.W. Together as long as we want.”

  He was about to frame a reply when three things happened almost simultaneously:

  The door flew open, striking Murdoch across the ribs and throwing him aside…

  And John Tyler strode into the room, his pistol at arm’s length…

  And there was a sound like the snapping of an immense tree limb, as Tyler’s weapon kicked and Soo Constantine’s head shuddered in an explosion of blood and tissue.

  * * *

  Tyler put three more shots into the girl’s prostrate body. Bang, bang, bang. He felt the recoil in his arm and shoulder. It felt good.

  He had drawn the obvious inference from Murdoch’s silences and night visits, his hysteria and his quicksilver urges to leave or stay. But look, Tyler wanted to say, consider this evidence: She can die after all. She can die as dead as any human being.

  Her blood was dark, viscous, and strange, and the sight of the body mesmerized him for a time.

  Then he turned and looked for Murdoch; but Murdoch had slipped out the open door.

  Not good.

  Tyler hurried down to the lobby and into the street.

  Murdoch was a block away, frantically rattling the doors of parked cars. Murdoch had forsaken him for the girl. Murdoch himself might be infected; there had been hints, a word or two Tyler had heard through the door. Now we can be together.

  Tyler sighted down the barrel of the pistol. Sunlight gleamed on the fenders and windows of these parked cars; Tyler moved to shade his eyes.

  Murdoch caught sight of him and ducked away. The pistol bucked and the shot went wide; Tyler saw it kick dust from the brick facing of a muffler shop. Murdoch crouched and hurried on to the next car, an old Ford; Tyler walked out into the street quickly but calmly and assumed a shooter’s stance.

  He had begun to squeeze the trigger when the door of the Ford popped open and Murdoch ducked for the interior.

  Tyler cursed but followed the motion. The pistol kicke
d again in his hand.

  He saw Murdoch lurch as if he’d been hit—a gout of blood came from the left leg or thigh—then the car door slammed and the engine turned over twice, rattled on the edge of a stall, finally began to roar. Murdoch threw it into gear and Tyler watched helplessly as the vehicle screamed away from the curb. The Ford made a drunken swerve; its rear fender caught a lamp standard on the left side of the street, then it straightened and accelerated west.

  Tyler turned and ran back to the Hummer… but the Exxon station was three blocks away; precious time was lost.

  He drove west on the highway for an hour without sighting the Ford. Murdoch might have followed one of these dirt side roads, Tyler thought, or hidden the car in a barn, in back of a billboard, even along some back street in Loftus.

  But I hurt him, Tyler thought with some satisfaction. In a place without doctors, without medical care, maybe that was enough.

  It was a question of principle, Tyler thought. Murdoch had forsaken his humanity. And Tyler was better off without him. Murdoch had seen too many of his lapses. Murdoch had seen him shoot the girl. It was precisely the kind of baggage Tyler wished to leave behind.

  He pulled over to the side of the road well beyond the limits of Loftus, in a patch of cool November sunlight, and listened to the silence. It was the new silence of his aloneness in this increasingly empty world. Murdoch was gone. That second voice, second self, was gone. There was only Tyler now, Tyler talking to Tyler ; or those other voices, the Sissy voices, whispering from the trees, the earth, the air.

  * * *

  Murdoch’s wound was more serious than the Colonel had guessed.

  The bullet entered his hip, shattered a wedge of bone, and opened a raw round exit wound. Blood instantly soaked the seat of the Ford. The pain was blinding; but Murdoch was sustained by the vivid memory of Soo Constantine dead under the barrel of Tyler’s gun.

  He drove two blocks at high speed, turned right, and rolled into the first empty garage he spotted.

  The car wouldn’t be invisible here, but it might be inconspicuous in the shadows. Murdoch didn’t have a choice. It was stop now or pass out on the street. The car came up the driveway too fast; he fumbled his right foot ineffectually between the gas and the brake pedal; the Ford coasted into the garage and collided with a stack of pineboard shelves. Murdoch fell against the steering wheel as a pair of garden shears dented the hood of the car and a can of Varsol cracked the windshield.

  He managed to turn off the engine before he slipped into unconsciousness, curled in the hot salt smell of his own blood.

  * * *

  The Helper responded promptly to the distress of a soul in transition. The transition had hardly begun; but the neocytes in Murdoch’s body broadcast the terrible news of the organism’s impending death.

  Moments after Tyler ran west in the M998, bouncing over buckled tarmac and hunting vainly for Murdoch’s Ford, the reconstructed Helper moved from its place in the center of Loftus and glided to the garage where Murdoch was dying.

  It came up swiftly along the driver’s side of the car and stopped there. The only sound was the drip of dilute Prestone from the Ford’s cracked radiator.

  The Helper was many awarenesses, some of them human. One of them was Soo Constantine, who had recently been killed by Colonel John Tyler. Her distress was its distress.

  The Helper looked at Murdoch’s bloody organism with pity and grief.

  If he died—and he was nearly dead now—Murdoch would be dead forever. There hadn’t been time to engineer a transition, to grow a second Murdoch for the Murdoch-essence to inhabit. There was only this fragile plasmic Murdoch with a scant few neocytes inside him. The neocytes had only reproduced a few tens of tens of times. They had not mapped or expanded Murdoch in any significant way.

  But Murdoch had made his choice. This was an involuntary death, which the Travellers found abhorrent.

  The Helper made an arm and reached out to the window of the car. The window glass shattered and fell away in a fine gray powder. The arm extended further, reached inside the car to Murdoch and touched his damaged body.

  Mass surged inward from the body of the Helper, which was proportionately diminished. Multiple millions of its subunits anticipated new tasks—sealing broken blood vessels, containing and fostering the spark of plasmic life.

  Soon Murdoch was covered in what appeared to be a featureless black cocoon.

  The cocoon was motionless; Murdoch was motionless inside it. Prompt and feverish activity had begun, but it was internal and below the threshold of perception. Superficially, nothing changed.

  Days and nights passed. The sky outside the open garage roiled with clouds.

  Periodically, that December, there was lightning.

  * * *

  Murdoch woke in January.

  The Helper had retreated; he was alone in the car. He opened the door and staggered out into dim daylight.

  The sky was gray and threatening. The weather was bleak and dangerous everywhere that winter; he had been warned about storms.

  The neocytes were still at work inside him. Murdoch could have chosen to move directly into his new life, his virtual life; but he wasn’t finished with the flesh… Tyler’s gunshot had interrupted him.

  There were things he wanted to see.

  He couldn’t say precisely what things—literally could not say, to himself or to anyone else. In the aftermath of his injury, he had very nearly died; the flow of blood to the brain had been interrupted for too long. The neocytes were reconstructing that tissue, but much of their work was conjectural and slow, elaborating the holon of Murdoch’s self from its fragmented parts. He was himself, but he was inarticulate and he didn’t trust himself to drive; too much neuromuscular memory remained unreconstructed.

  Mute, he walked in the direction of the setting sun.

  * * *

  He walked for weeks.

  His legs were unnaturally strong and his stamina seemed unlimited. The weather was only a minor hindrance, and his wordless contact with the Artifact helped him anticipate and avoid the worst winds and lightnings. He sheltered in abandoned buildings, storm cellars, gullies.

  Some nights he slept in the rain. His body had been changed on the inside; extremes of hot and cold no longer bothered him. He seldom ate. He didn’t need to, though he drank copiously when there was water.

  He crossed the Mississippi at Cairo and passed into the prairies, where the storms were often fierce. One night, crouched in a pipe section where a four-lane bypass had been abandoned in mid-construction, he watched a blizzard unroll from the western horizon like a flat white wall. The wind made a sound like freight trains passing through the sky. After midnight, when the snow had almost blocked the pipe at each end, a wild fox—drenched and miserable—crept inside with him. The fox was terrified of Murdoch but more terrified of the blizzard. Murdoch strengthened his tegument and let the fox chew harmlessly on a finger until the animal was exhausted and no longer afraid of him. Then he cradled the fox against the warmth of his body until both of them were asleep.

  In the morning it was gone, but Murdoch was startled and pleased that he had remembered the name of the animal during the night. Fox: the animal was a fox. He said it out loud. “Fox!”

  It made his throat hurt. He didn’t care. The pleasure of speech was almost unbearable.

  “Fox!”

  He walked west and north along a road shrouded in glittering blue-white snow.

  “Fox!” he exclaimed from time to time, and the word fell away across the empty winter farmland. “Fox, fox, fox!”

  * * *

  Late that winter, Murdoch passed through Kansas and crossed the state border into Colorado, where he glimpsed for the first time the thing he had come all this distance to see: the Home he had heard about from the Travellers.

  This was what had drawn him, this was his reason for clinging to the flesh. Some stubborn fraction of A.W. Murdoch had wanted to see this miracle with his own eyes.
br />   From a great distance it looked like a mountain, a curvature of blue and white nearly lost in the haze of the horizon.

  It was Murdoch’s good fortune that the skies had cleared in the eastern lee of the Rockies. With a little more luck, the weather would hold until he was closer. But distances were hard to calculate with such an object. How many more miles to go? How far to the horizon, and how far beyond that?

  He walked a day and a night and another day and another night.

  Words returned to him piecemeal as the days passed and his neural tissue was restored. The effect was sometimes comic, as when Murdoch would suddenly halt along the verge of an empty road, point his index finger, and announce to the heedless air some newly acquired noun—“Window/” or “Fence!”

  Proper names were more elusive. He could barely pronounce his own. “Murdoch,” he said, but it sounded clumsy and grotesque. Nor could he remember the name of the girl he had met in Loftus, though the memory was vivid and he often felt her silent presence. Maddeningly, the name lingered on his tongue but couldn’t be coaxed from his mouth. “Suh-suh-suh…” He worked at it, day after day, until his jaw was sore.

  Home stood on the horizon, closer now. It drew the eye irresistibly, a miraculous blue pearl capped with white. The white was snow. Like a mountain, Home rose more than 50,000 feet into the rarified air, up where it was always cold, where the snow never melted.

  The Travellers had explained to him, wordlessly but vividly, how the creation of Home had begun. Months ago, on the eve of Contact, a single microscopic neocyte—a kind of seed—had come to rest on this plain of dry, rolling land where Colorado met Wyoming. Instantly, the Traveller organism had begun to reproduce itself. One made two, two made four, four made eight—in less than an hour, a million; two million; four million. The organisms grew themselves from the constituent parts of soil, sand, water, air, and light. When their numbers were large enough—uncountably, inconceivably large—they organized themselves into machines, into devices as big as cities.