The Harvest

  He glanced out the greasy window at the curvature of the new Artifact, still earthbound—the human Artifact, a spaceship the size of a mountain.

  “Ohio,” he said. “Your signal is weak.”

  “Sorry, Colonel… weather problem there?”

  The sky was baby-blanket blue. Windless. “Got a front moving in,” Tyler said.

  “You in any danger, Colonel?”

  “Not that serious. We might be out of touch for a while, though.”

  “Sorry to hear it. Look for you later?”

  “Indeed. Thanks, Ohio.”

  Sissy beamed approval.

  Now, Tyler instructed himself, now think.

  If the Travellers leave… If the Helpers fall silent…

  Then we’ll be safe. All our secrets safe.

  Sissy’s voice was faint but strident, like the buzz of a high-tension wire. It might not work that way, Tyler thought. We don’t know. Therefore wait. Wait and see. Wait here? Yes.

  How long?

  Until it’s over. Until the Travellers are gone, dead are gone, altogether empty skies.

  People don’t want to stay here, Tyler thought. They want Ohio. Make up something. Tell them Ohio told you to wait. Bad weather. Like you said, Bad weather along the Platte, say. Dam washed out, say. Sissy possessed a wonderful imagination.

  It might work, Tyler agreed. But not if they can talk to Ohio, or Ohio talk to us. The radio—

  You’re not stupid, Sissy said. You can fix the radio.

  * * *

  Tyler closed the dusty horizontal blinds and jammed a chair back under the knob of the door.

  It was still early morning, not much activity yet among the people Tyler had come to think of, pleased with his own sense of humor, as the Unhappy Campers. Joey was walking a perimeter, exactly the kind of idiotic task Joey adored. Jacopetti slept until noon if no one bothered him. No one else was likely to knock in the next few minutes.

  He lifted Joey’s toolbox onto the trestle table where the radio was. He unplugged the transceiver and worked out the sheet-metal screws that held the cover in place.

  He used two alligator clips and a stout piece of wire to make a jumper cable. Then he hooked one clip to the 120-volt primary of the transformer and the other clip to the positive rail of the DC supply. For insurance, he added a bare wire across the internal fuse.

  Put the lid back on, Sissy reminded him, before you plug it in.

  Tyler did so. He threw the power switch to the on position, for good measure.

  Then he hunkered down and pushed the plug into the wall socket.

  There was a half second of silence. Then the big transceiver made a sound like a gunshot and jumped a quarter-inch off the surface of the table. It belched a spark as bright as a camera flash and sizzled with high-voltage overload.

  The ceiling light flickered and faded altogether as the building’s circuit breakers cut in.

  Now hurry, Tyler thought. He unplugged the unit, then cracked the blinds to admit just enough light to work by. When he pried up the lid, the transceiver gushed sour smoke into his face. Tyler ignored the stench and hurried to disguise his handiwork. He pulled out what was left of the jumper, the alligator clips, the wire across the fuse. Then he jammed the lid back on and began to drive home the screws one by one.

  The sound of Tim Belanger’s voice came faintly through the window, something about the lights going off, anybody know where the fuse box was?

  Eight screws, four to a side. Tyler drove the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, sweating.

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway.

  He fumbled the last sheet-metal screw into its hole. The screwdriver didn’t want to find the slot in the screwhead. When it did, the screw sheered sideways. “Shit,” Tyler whispered.

  Don’t curse, Sissy scolded him.

  There was a knock at the door. Joey’s voice: “Colonel? You still in there?”

  Three twists of the wrist to drive the screw home. A couple of seconds to clear Joey’s toolbox off the table. Couple more to yank the chair away from the doorknob.

  “Dark as a bitch in here. Sorry.” He let Joey in.

  Joey sniffed the air. “What’s that stink?”

  “Had some trouble with the radio,” Colonel Tyler said.

  * * *

  “Thing’s totally fucked,” Joey said when he had examined the molten interior. “Transformer must have shorted. Though I don’t know how it could of.”

  He offered to drive into Cheyenne and get a replacement. “Fine,” Tyler said. “But not yet.” How come, Joey wanted to know.

  “I’m calling a meeting tonight. It’s important, and I need you there. As a vote and as sergeant-at-arms.”

  “I could be back by dark.”

  “I don’t want to risk it.” Tyler drew himself up. “Let it ride, Mr. Commoner. Take my word on this.” Joey nodded.

  Good soldier, Tyler thought.

  * * *

  Matt was compiling a pharmaceutical wish list to transmit to the Ohio people—he didn’t know about the radio problem yet—when he heard Abby’s anguished voice from the parking lot.

  He hurried out of his camper into the rough circle of trucks and RVs, knowing what the problem was and dreading it.

  Tom Kindle had climbed into the cab of his lumbering RV and was cranking the motor. Abby had stepped out of her own camper. She wore a denim skirt and a loose blouse and carried a hairbrush in one hand. Her feet were bare and she’d been crying. She ran a few steps across the hot, midday tarmac toward Kindle’s vehicle.

  “You CANT!” Stopping when it was obvious that he could and was. “OOOOH!”

  She threw the hairbrush. Her hard overhand toss sent it pinwheeling at Kindle’s camper; it rang the side panel like a bell.

  Kindle leaned out the driver’s window and gave her an apologetic wave.

  “YOU COWARD! YOU SELFISH OLD COWARDl”

  The camper rolled out onto the highway and began to pick up speed.

  Matt took Abby by the shoulders. She pulled away and looked at him bitterly. “Matt, why did you let him do this? We need him!”

  “Abby, Abby! I know. But he had his mind set on it. I couldn’t stop him. I don’t think anybody ever stopped Tom Kindle from doing what he wanted—do you?”

  She sagged toward him. “I know, but… oh, shit, Matt! Why now?”

  He didn’t know how to console her. He had lost too much of his own. But he held her while she cried.

  Joey Commoner came running from the truckstop, Tyler and Jacopetti a short distance behind.

  Joey cupped a hand over his eyes and watched Kindle’s camper disappearing down the highway. Then he looked at Abby. Figuring it out.

  “Son of a bitch,” Joey said. “He’s fucking AWOL!”

  Abby regarded Joey as if he’d descended from Mars.

  “Calm down,” Colonel Tyler said, to no one in particular.

  “Sir,” Joey said, “he didn’t ask permission to go somewhere!”

  “Quiet,” Tyler said. In the sunlight, the Colonel was silver-haired, imperial. His eyes lingered a moment on Matt. “We’ll discuss it at the meeting tonight.”

  Matt cleared his throat. “Thought you didn’t believe in meetings.”

  “Special occasion,” Tyler said.

  * * *

  Tyler put his motion to the Committee before everybody was finished sitting down.

  The meeting was held in the truckstop restaurant under a bank of fly-spotted fluorescent lights. Tyler stood against a window with the dark behind him and tapped a knuckle against the glass for attention.

  “News over the radio,” he said. “We’ve got some heavy weather across the state border along the Platte. Ohio thinks we ought to stay put for a while, and I agree—but I want a vote to make it official.”

  He paused to let this sink in. Everybody was still a little dazed by the departure of Tom Kindle, wary of another crisis.

  Matt Wheeler said, “I thought the radio blew up.”

&
nbsp; “Call came early this morning, Dr. Wheeler.”

  “Did it? Who took it?”

  “I did.”

  “Did anybody else hear this call?”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Wheeler. I didn’t feel it was necessary to have a witness.” Jacopetti laughed out loud.

  Wheeler said, “It would be nice to be able to confirm the message, Colonel Tyler.”

  “Mr. Commoner offered to find a replacement for the radio. I’m sure we’ll be up and running in due time. Until then, let’s keep a lid on the paranoia, shall we?”

  Abby raised her hand: “A truckstop is hardly a place to spend time.…”

  “Agreed. In the morning, we can take a look at the farmhouse to the south of here. I’m sure it’ll be more comfortable.”

  Tyler registered, but didn’t understand, the sudden look of concern from the boy, William.

  Wheeler again: “Maybe we ought to keep moving—we can always find shelter if the weather turns bad.”

  Suspicious son of a bitch refused to drop the issue.

  “After what happened to Buchanan,” Tyler said, “I don’t think we want to take any chances with a storm, do you? And there’s another consideration. One of our company chose to leave us today. A particular friend of yours, Dr. Wheeler. All things considered, maybe we should stay in the neighborhood long enough to give Mr. Kindle a chance to change his mind. If he elects to come back to camp, at least he’ll know where to find us.”

  This hit home with Abby Cushman, a potential swing vote; she folded her hands in her lap.

  “All in favor of staying,” Tyler said. “Show of hands.”

  It was an easy majority.

  Chapter 31

  Night Lights

  They filed from the restaurant, subdued and silent, until Tim Belanger stabbed a finger at the sky: “Hey—anybody notice something?”

  Tyler looked up. “The Artifact,” he said, and calmly checked his watch. “It should have risen by now.”

  By Christ, Matt thought, for once the bastard’s right. That ugly alien moon was overdue.

  Missing. Gone.

  “Dear God,” Abby said. “What now?”

  There was nothing in the sky but a bright wash of stars—no Artifact but the second one still grounded on the southern horizon.

  The Earth was alone again. Matt had wanted it so badly, for so long, he hadn’t allowed himself even to consider the possibility. It was the kind of desire you could choke on.

  But here, mute testimony, was an empty Wyoming sky.

  Too late, he thought bitterly. If they left, they left because their work was finished.

  The starlight on the second and motionless Artifact, the so-called human Artifact, was cold and merciless. In scale and design, Matt thought, that object was wholly inhuman, no matter who owned it or what went on inside.

  “The aliens are gone?” Abby asked, and Matt said, his voice a whisper, “Why not? We have our own aliens now.”

  It was an auspice that couldn’t be read, an indecipherable portent, and they went to bed weary of miracles.

  Deep in the cold Wyoming springtime dark, sooner or later, each of them slept…

  Except one old woman, one ageless boy.

  “William?”

  His eyes were wide and moon-bright. “Yes?”

  “Don’t you ever sleep?” He smiled. “Sometimes.”

  Miriam’s battery-operated bedside clock bled numbers into the night. 3:43. 3:44. There was a fresh new pain in her belly. “The Travellers are gone, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re still here.”

  “We’re still here.”

  Humanity, he meant. The polis, he had called it, the world contained in that blister on the horizon: Home. “William?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did I ever show you my journals?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to see them?”

  His smile was unreadable. “Yes, Miriam, I would.”

  She left her bed and took down from their shelf the fat scrapbooks full of clippings from the Buchanan Observer. They had gotten wet in that terrible winter storm and the pages were thick and warped. But the clippings, for the most part, were still legible.

  William sat up in his cot and leafed through the books one by one. It was a strange history contained there, Miriam thought. She remembered how everyone had been frightened by the first appearance of the Artifact in the sky. It had been enigmatic, terrifying, an emissary from another world. Now, less than two years later, it was these clippings that seemed like messages from another world.

  The universe, Miriam thought, turned out to be a more peculiar place than any of us expected.

  William said, “You obviously worked hard at this.”

  “Yes. It seemed important at the time.”

  “Not now?”

  She had fought to protect these journals. But what were they? Tonight they seemed like so much paper and ink. “No… not now.” He looked at them carefully and then put them aside.

  Miriam steeled herself to ask the essential, the final question: the question she had postponed, had dared not ask.

  Give me strength, Miriam thought. One way or the other. Give me strength.

  “William… is it too late for me?”

  She trembled in fear of his answer. She closed her eyes, squeezed them tight, tight.

  “No, Miriam,” the boy said gently. “It’s not too late. Not yet.” A chaste kiss on the lips.

  The neocytes, he said, would work quickly inside her.

  * * *

  Before dawn, when Miriam was finally asleep, the boy crept out of the camper into the chill air.

  A fingernail moon rode low in the sky. His breath made plumes of frost, and there was frost on the tarry surface of the parking lot, sparkling in the fragile light.

  The Artifact had left orbit hours ago, resuming its long itinerary through the unexplored spiral arms of the galaxy. Its physical presence wasn’t necessary any longer. The collective knowledge of the Travellers had been duplicated and stored in the human Home, and Home would begin its own journey soon—once certain controversies had been resolved.

  William’s bicycle was roped to the back of Miriam’s camper. Silently, he untied it and examined it.

  The trip from Idaho had coated the bicycle with dust. The action of the chain and the derailleurs sounded thick and gritty. But he didn’t have far to go. He climbed on the bike and pedalled down I-80, a young boy, legs pumping in the moonlight, the banner of his breath streaming behind him in the chilly air.

  He turned left past an open gate, down a private road to the Connor farmhouse.

  Rosa, hurry, he thought. They’re coming in the morning. Hurry now.

  Chapter 32

  Release

  William was with her as the sun rose.

  Rosa lay on the farmhouse bed. The winter’s cold and wind had given the bedroom a dishevelled look. The oaken dresser had faded and its mirror had dulled; the curtains had tangled on the rod. The single large window looked southeast, where Home occupied a portion of the sky. Sunrise was a faint vermilion on those distant slopes.

  The gray cocoon on the bed had cracked on its long axis and the two pieces had begun to separate. William gazed without visible emotion at the pulsating mass inside.

  Rosa—they’ll be coming soon.

  Help me, then, Rosa said.

  William moved to the bedside, considered the problem, then grasped the two chunks of dense, porous material and began to pry them apart. Hurts, Rosa said.

  William broadcast a voiceless apology. No. It has to be done.

  The boy agreed, and grasped the cocoon again and strained his thin arms until he heard the material split along its back seam—a dry, fibrous sound like the crack of a walnut shell.

  He felt her relief.

  William stood away as Rosa began to unfold.

  * * *

  The sun was well above the horizon when she stood at last beside
the bed, her enormous wings trembling in the cool air from the window.

  Rosa Perry Connor, in her present incarnation, weighed less than fifteen pounds. Her new body was a hollow shell of what had once been human bone and tissue, transformed by the action of the neocytes into something more brittle and much less dense. Her features were diminished and compressed but still recognizable. She had an attractive face, William thought. Her eyes were large and bright.

  She blinked at him, still mute. Her lungs were a fragile bellows, her vocal cords a memory. Her pupils, unaccustomed to the light, were black pinpoints. Her wings were a double ellipse around the axis of her body, and sunlight through the moist tissue made bright moires of blue and purple.

  William felt her exhilaration. Curious, he thought, the way some of us manufactured these destinies for ourselves—these last, brief incarnations on the surface of the Earth. She didn’t seem strange at all. Only a stubborn dream given fleeting substance.

  The membranes of the wings needed to dry before Rosa could use them. William didn’t hurry her—there was nothing she could do to speed the process.

  He tore the drapes away from the window, the only practical exit. It was an old-fashioned window, one fixed pane and one counterweighted pane to slide up in front of it. Rosa’s body was tiny now and her wings were flexible, but she would need more space than this.

  He shattered both panes and carefully, meticulously, plucked away the splinters of glass and tossed them to the dry earth below. Then, with surprising strength for a boy of his size, he grasped the obstructing arm of the wooden frame and pulled until it cracked and came away.

  Some splinters remained in the wood despite his effort. The palm of his right hand was scratched; the blood that oozed out was dark and viscous, almost black.

  * * *

  Tyler looked up as he crossed the truckstop parking lot with Joey Commoner beside him. “Joseph? Did you hear that?”