The Harvest

  Home required immense tonnages of raw matter. The building machines began by digging into the earth, cratering the prairie and displacing the antelope herds. But that was only a modest first step. As Murdoch approached, he felt a series of rhythmic tremors. Under the imponderable substance of Home, he knew, a conduit had been opened into the magma of the earth itself.

  The days remained clear, but a cold wind blew steadily from the west. Murdoch felt weaker, the farther he walked.

  He understood that he couldn’t get as close to Home as he might have liked. It wasn’t a healthy environment. The wind, curling around a sphere more than thirty miles in circumference, created a turbulence that could sweep.him off his feet. Deadly gases vented from the magma tap, and the heat at the cratered base was well beyond human tolerance.

  But he could get a little closer than this.

  “Suh,” he pronounced. “Suh—suh—”

  It wasn’t good enough.

  * * *

  The snow came back that night.

  It was a hard, granular snow, difficult to walk through. Murdoch slept in an empty Best Western motel, in a hallway away from windows that had been broken by the winter storms, and walked on in the morning. His compass—he had pocketed it in Loftus—and his road map kept him aimed in the right direction.

  But Home was hidden by the weather.

  The weather settled in and showed no inclination to change. He walked for three days blindly… walked until he was forced to stop by a violent tremor and a wind so sulfurous and hot that it melted the snow on the ground.

  Murdoch felt himself growing lighter. When he was finished here, there was no reason to cling to the flesh; he understood that. But he worried that the process might be happening too quickly, that he would be gone before the weather cleared.

  He curled under a tarpaulin in the rear of a gas station… drifting in and out of sleep, listening to the hard snow sift across the roof, the gas pumps, the empty road.

  * * *

  Time passed. He couldn’t have guessed at day or month; knew only that it was after midnight when the snow stopped.

  He woke to a blanketing silence, stood up stiffly, and hurried outside.

  The clouds had passed on. There were stars—vivid prairie stars—and a few, faint streaks of cirrus.

  And Home.

  Murdoch caught his breath.

  It was a wall that dominated the sky. Perspective made it seem truncated, a looming dome about to tumble over and crush him. A crescent of snow at its apex reflected the starlight, but most of that part of the sphere was a occluded by its nearer slope. The lower section of Home wasn’t solid; it was a gridwork, a lace of bone-white struts and spars, as fine, from Murdoch’s vantage, as spider silk; but each one must be immense, he thought, columns as wide as towns, as long as highways.

  It was illuminated from within by the light—many miles away—of the magma tap, and by the luminescence of the earth’s own toxic gases, pearlous and strange.

  Periodically, balls of blue lightning seemed to flow and stutter along the countless struts and spars of the structure. And there was a sound—a distant, continuous thunder that had been obscured by the snow, but echoed now, in the cold night air, across the plain.

  A wind blew, and Murdoch anchored himself between the pillars of the gas pumps.

  Here was the strangest and most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He felt both fragile and grateful; he had been lifted up, exposed to the elements, abandoned to this vision. His uniform was a rag. He felt his own tenuous existence flickering inside it. This was the moment he had saved himself for.

  He opened his mouth to make some exclamation, to vent his human awe. But what came out was: “Suh—suh—Soo!”

  He felt her presence.

  He felt it so strongly that he looked left, looked right. He was alone, of course. She was with him, but not here; with him in the new life. He was rising now. He was lighter than air.

  Murdoch gazed at the Home growing out of the plain, at its astonishing size and its interior lights and its reflection on the snowy plain.

  “Soo,” he said faintly, proudly. And she reached for him.

  * * *

  The wind took what was left of Murdoch, took his rags and his skin and carried them away, up beyond the snowbound Colorado flatlands, up and away from the mountains.

  Chapter 22

  Flesh

  On a windy afternoon late in January, Tom Kindle found a human skin snagged on the leafless azalea bush outside his front door.

  The skin had been carried some distance by the wind. It was tattered and incomplete, bleached by the weather to so colorless a shade that Kindle thought for a moment it was some old ghost that had fetched up on his doorstep.

  Kindle studied the object for a time, then ducked back into the warmth of the house and telephoned Matt Wheeler.

  * * *

  Matt drove the short distance to Delmar Estates with his black bag on the car seat beside him. Not that this was a doctor’s job, if he had understood Tom Kindle correctly. A coroner’s, perhaps.

  He examined the skin where it was trapped in the naked branches of the azalea, his expression fixed but emotionless. Then he looked at Kindle. “Do you have a pair of tongs?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Kitchen tongs. Barbecue tongs.”

  “Well… I think Abby brought over a pair. Hang on.” He disappeared into the house and returned with a pair of kitchen tongs. The handles were cartoon-blue plastic; the business end, stainless steel. Matt used them to lift the tattered skin away from the spindly bush and carry it into the garage, out of the reach of the wind.

  He laid out the tissue with some care across the gasoline-stained concrete floor, unfolding it meticulously, layer by layer, until it resembled a nearly transparent pair of body tights torn beyond any utility. One leg ended in frayed nothingness at the knee. One arm was missing entirely. The head—there was very little of the head.

  Kindle stood well back. “I wonder who the hell it is? I mean—is it somebody, like a corpse? Or just a piece of somebody?”

  Matt crouched over the object. It didn’t frighten or disgust him—he had encountered worse things as an intern. But he was careful not to touch it with his naked hands. “This is the first one I’ve seen.”

  “First?” Kindle cocked his head. “There are others?”

  “You should have come to the meeting Sunday night. Bob Ganish found a couple of them in his neighbor’s house. Paul Jacopetti says the farms out in his area are all empty—except for these.”

  “Jesus, Matthew! Empty skins?”

  He nodded.

  “What about the people inside?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone where?” Matt shrugged.

  “So,” Kindle said, “does everybody end up like this?”

  “I think so. Eventually. Except us, of course. Abby said she’s worried about her husband, her grandchildren. She says they’re getting… well, thinner. Paler.”

  “Jesus,” Kindle repeated. “What about—”

  He checked himself. But the question was obvious. What about Rachel?

  Matt couldn’t bring himself to form an answer, not even to himself.

  Kindle looked back at the fragile envelope arrayed on the floor of the garage. “Matthew, is there something—I mean, what should I do with it?”

  “Put it outside. Let it blow away. It won’t last long. A few days in the sun and it’ll turn to dust.”

  “Not much to leave behind,” Kindle said.

  “What is?”

  * * *

  He drove home to Rachel.

  She had arrived at the house this morning and hinted that it might be her last visit. Matt made the obvious connection between this and the discovery of the skins throughout Buchanan. But it was an impossible thought, a thought he must not allow himself. The image of a dry shell of Rachel, of his daughter, abandoned to the wind, lonely and empty in the cold rain—dear God, not this.

 
He told her what the call from Tom Kindle had been about. He described the skin, described it clinically, made himself the Doctor Machine, because this was his last defense, his only defense. And when the telling was done, he shook his head, dazed at his own story. “It isn’t human, Rachel. I know what you’ve said. But this isn’t—it isn’t something human beings do.”

  He expected an argument. She only nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”

  She was pale, somehow ethereal; she moved with a certain new lightness—and these observations, too, Matt didn’t care to mark or consider.

  “Maybe too much has changed. Maybe the word ‘human’ doesn’t apply anymore.” Her voice was solemn. “I don’t feel different—not basically different. The basic part of me is still Rachel Wheeler. But there’s more now. More layers. More ways of seeing things. If I leave this behind—” Gesturing at herself, her body. “Am I Rachel? Am I human? I don’t know.”

  She might have been confessing to some disease, some terrible wasting illness.

  She seemed to feel the thought. Lately she had seemed able to interpret the smallest nuance of his expression, although he was laboring to conceal his grief.

  “Daddy, I’m not sorry. About any of it. You’re a doctor—you know how many lives were saved. Even at the local hospital, how many terminal cancers were cured? How much heart disease? And in the world, my God, all the starvation, the malnutrition, the crippled lives—”

  But Matt could not dispel the memory of the skin that had fetched up, a pathetic and unassailable statement of grim fact, on Tom Kindle’s leafless azalea bush. “Rachel, is this better?”

  “Yes.” Firmly. “We couldn’t have gone on, you know, the way we were. The planet wouldn’t support us. We were damaging it beyond recognition, beyond its ability to recover. Something had to change, something human had to change. Do you know who said yes to Contact? Who accepted the offer of eternal life? Almost everybody. Everybody—including dictators, pickpockets, child molesters, murderers… people who killed people for their wristwatches, killed them for their tennis shoes. People who tortured children to death in front of their parents. But it was immortality with a price. They had to understand what it means to hurt someone, to damage someone. And if that didn’t work, if they could witness human pain and understand it intimately and still not care, or worse, enjoy it—that meant they were flawed, broken, not complete. So they had to be repaired.”

  “They can’t choose to commit violence?”

  “Anyone can choose anything. But only if they understand what they’re choosing and why.”

  “Rachel… it sounds like compulsion.”

  “Daddy, you’ve told me since I was a baby that there’s no good reason for all the wars, all the bullying, all the hurt in the world.”

  It was what one told a child. And, pressed, he would have admitted to believing it himself. But the fact was—as Scott Fitzgerald had written, if Matt remembered his American Literature correctly—the fundamental decencies were parceled out unequally at birth. “There’s no excuse for it. But people don’t seem to know that.”

  “Now they do.”

  “You can’t change human nature, Rachel—not without taking away the thing that makes people human.”

  “Then we’re not human. In a way, that was always the point. Humanity was reaching its limits, facing problems we couldn’t even begin to solve in the usual human way—global problems, planetary problems. And the main victim of our inadequacy was us! Our children*. They were already dying by the millions in Africa, and we were too human to do anything about it!”

  Matt bowed his head. This was true, of course. The Contactees had done a better job. At least in the short term. “But what were they saved for, if their humanity wasn’t saved?”

  “But it wasn’t lost, either, just outgrown. Do you know what we’re building? Has anyone told you? A spaceship. An Artifact of our own. A human one. Daddy, do you know what’s inside it? The Earth is inside it. Not literally, of course. But a model of it. All of it, every leaf of every tree, every mountaintop.…”

  A memory of this was mingled with his own fading memory of Contact. “You mean a simulation. Like a computer program.” Or a paperweight, he thought: the Earth, in a globe of water, with snowflakes.

  “More than a simulation. It’s a place, as real as this place, except that it doesn’t occupy a physical space. It’s alive in a very real way. It has winds. It has seasons. We’re human enough to need that—not just immortality, but a place to live.”

  “Even if it’s an illusion?”

  “Is it? Is an idea an illusion? Is the value of pi a hallucination, just because you can’t touch it?”

  “Rachel, it’s not really the Earth.”

  “No one pretends it is. No matter where we stand, we’ll know that. Because there will always be a door, not a physical door, but a sort of direction, a way to turn, and through the door is always the bigger world, all our knowledge and the knowledge we inherited from the Travellers—the epistemos, people are calling it; the idea-world.”

  “We might have done it by ourselves,” Matt said. “Given time. If we’d survived a couple of centuries without vaporizing ourselves, without poisoning the planet, we might have moved into space. Maybe it seems trivial, but we walked on the moon without anyone’s help. Given time, maybe we could have met the Travellers on their own terms.”

  Rachel’s eyes widened. “What a terrible thought!”

  “Is it?”

  She frowned. “Daddy… I know more human history than I used to. It’s an ugly parade. Infanticide, bloody warfare, human sacrifice—those are the norm. They’re not exceptional at all. And modern history is no better. When I was in school, we studied Roman history and we pretended to be horrified by it. The Romans left unwanted children to die by the side of the road, did you know that? How horrible. Well, it is horrible… but compared to what? The century of Auschwitz, of Hiroshima and the Khmer Rouge? Going into space wouldn’t have civilized us. We’d have had our robots disemboweling Moslems on the surface of Mars. You know we would.”

  “Is that how the Travellers saw it?”

  “Yes. And it terrified them. There’s no monopoly on power or knowledge. Given time, given our own survival, maybe we could have stopped them… destroyed them before they got close enough for Contact.”

  “And that’s why all this is happening? Not because they’re doing us a favor. It’s self-defense.”

  “In part. But they didn’t have to go to all this trouble. They had the means to exterminate us. That would have worked, too.”

  The coldness of the statement made him feel both frightened and ashamed.

  He took a long look at Rachel: who used to be his daughter, who used to be a human being.

  “There wasn’t just brutality, Rachel. People lived lives—small, useful lives. Sometimes helped one another. Often loved one another. There was beauty. Sometimes there was even decency.”

  Her expression softened. “Daddy, I know. They know. The Travellers know that about us.” She paused. “That’s why they couldn’t exterminate us.”

  “Only change us.”

  “Yes. Change us.”

  A silence filled the room.

  * * *

  Rachel left the house before midnight, after her father had fallen asleep on the sofa.

  She had wanted a better goodbye, but she supposed there was no way to say what she meant—no words to encompass her grief and fear.

  She loved her father enormously and hated the idea of abandoning him to an empty planet… abandoning him to die.

  A cold rain had begun to fall and the wind in the street was sharp and gusty. Rachel adjusted herself so that the temperature ceased to be unpleasant. Then she paused—alone among dark houses—and listened to the trees talk their sibilant winter language.

  The wind lifted her hair and waved it behind her like a sad flag. Overhead, high above the streetlights, midnight clouds tumbled and dipped.

  It was a storm
y night, and there was worse to come. Although it was winter in the northern hemisphere, temperature gradients in the tropical oceans had risen dramatically; winds in the upper atmosphere had shifted. North and east of Hawaii, a low-pressure cell, a vast and powerful weather-engine, had begun to churn above the turbulent ocean. A typhoon—unheard of, this time of year. But all things were new.

  Her father would learn about the storm soon enough, because he had begun to talk to the Helper.

  Still, Rachel thought, he was so fragile…

  She wondered why he had resisted the offer of immortality—why anybody had. But she didn’t submit the question to the Greater World, where there might have been an answer; she didn’t want to dwell on it more tonight.

  There was not much left of her time on the cradle Earth, and Rachel wanted to make the most of these hours.

  Not everyone relished the flesh. Many had already abandoned it—whole towns, in some cases, some as large as Buchanan. Buchanan itself was largely empty and would be emptier by the day. But some chose to linger… a leavetaking made strange by personal transformation, in some cases, like the group hidden in the basement of the high school, some forty strong, who had elected to share each other’s memories in every detail. They were there still, cross-legged on the floor and welded at the fingertips; motionless, enraptured, waiting to surrender their joined flesh in a single communal act.

  Others—mainly but not exclusively the young—just wanted to play a little longer on the surface of the Earth… stay up past bedtime, do what had been forbidden.