The Harvest

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The Colonel laughed a wild and unpleasant laugh. “You know what you’re saying? You’re telling me I’m the unelected President of a nation of homicidal maniacs.”

  “Hardly. People have other reasons for not wanting immortality. Such as your reason, I presume.”

  The Colonel scowled. Here was dangerous territory, William thought. He took a breath and persisted: “It’s like looking into a mirror, isn’t it? When the Travellers talk, they talk to the root of you. Not the picture of yourself you carry around in your head. The heart. The soul. The self that is everything you’ve done and wanted to do and refrained from doing. One’s truest self isn’t always a handsome sight, is it, Colonel? Mine was not, certainly.”

  Colonel Tyler had no response except a haggard exhalation of breath.

  The pigeons didn’t like this sound and they rose up in a cloud, to settle some distance away by the Reflecting Pool, where the image of the sky was pleasant in the cool wind-rippled water.

  * * *

  Over the past week, traffic inside the Beltway had been light. Official Washington had begun to close up shop, in a mutual consensus that required no debate. Capitol Hill had become a ghost town—just yesterday, William had stood in the Rotunda and listened to his footsteps echo in the dome above his head. But there were still tourists in the city, if you could call them tourists—people who had come for a last look at the governing apparatus of a nation.

  Some of these people passed quietly along the Mall. William did not feel misplaced among them, though they seemed to make Colonel Tyler nervous.

  “I want to ask you a question,” Tyler said.

  “I’m a politician, Colonel. We’re notorious for dodging the hard ones.”

  “I think you ought to take this more seriously, Mr. President.” Tyler touched the bulge of the pistol almost absently. His eyes were unfocused. And William reminded himself that the Colonel’s madness might not be new; it might be an old madness that Contact had simply aroused and let loose. It was as if Tyler generated a kind of heat. The heat was danger, and the temperature might rise at any provocation.

  “I’m sorry if I seemed flippant. Go on.”

  “What happens next? According to your scenario, I mean.”

  William pondered the question. “Colonel, don’t you have anyone else to ask? A wife, a girlfriend? Some member of your family? I have no official standing—my information is no better than anyone else’s.”

  “I’m not married,” Tyler said. “I have no living family.”

  And here was another piece of the John Tyler puzzle: a grievous, ancient loneliness. Tyler was a solitary man for whom Contact must have seemed like a final exclusion from the human race.

  It was a bleak and terrible thought.

  “In all seriousness, Colonel, it’s a difficult question. You don’t need me to tell you everything is changing. People have new needs, and they’ve abandoned some old ones—and we’re all still coming to terms with that. I think… in time, these cumbersome bodies will have to go. But not for a while yet.” It was an honest answer.

  Tyler fixed him with a terrible look—equal parts fear, outrage, and contempt. “And after that?”

  “I don’t know. It needs a decision—a collective decision. But I have an inkling. I think our battered planet deserves a renewal. I think, very soon, it might get one.”

  * * *

  They had made a circle; they stood now outside the gates of the White House, and the day had grown warm as it edged toward noon.

  Despite the threat, William was tired of dueling with John Tyler. He felt like a schoolboy waiting for some long detention to grind to an end. “Well, Colonel?” He looked Tyler in the eye. “Have you decided to shoot me?”

  “I would if I thought it would help. If I thought it would win back even an inch of this country—dear God, I’d kill you without blinking.” Tyler reached beneath his suitcoat and scratched himself. “But you’re not much of a threat. As quislings go, you’re merely pathetic.”

  William concealed his relief. Immortal I may be, he thought. But I’m not finished with this incarnation.

  Besides, how would he have explained his death to Elizabeth? She would accuse him of clumsiness—perhaps rightly so.

  “You think this conflict is over,” Tyler said. “I don’t grant that. Some of us are still willing to fight for our country.”

  But why fight, William thought. The country is yours! Colonel Tyler—take it!

  But he kept these thoughts to himself.

  “I only hope,” Tyler said as he turned away, “the rest of the geldings are as docile as you.”

  * * *

  William watched the Colonel walk away.

  Tyler was a man on a terrible brink, William thought. He was alone and vastly outnumbered and carrying some ghastly cargo of old sin. The world he lived in was receding beyond the limits of his comprehension.

  And it need not have been that way. Maybe that was the worst part. You could have said yes, Colonel. And you know that, whether you choose to admit it or not.

  * * *

  William experienced this sadness for Colonel Tyler, then folded it into memory the way he had folded his silk tie into his pocket.

  He might not have seen the last of Colonel Tyler—but that was tomorrow’s worry.

  Today was still pretty and fresh. He had fifteen minutes to spare before lunch. And no one had killed him.

  He considered the White House lawn. Scene of countless Easter egg hunts, diplomatic photo opportunities, presentations of awards. Had he ever really looked at it? The groundskeepers did excellent work. The grass was verdant and still sparkling with morning dew.

  He wondered how it would feel to unlace his shoes and peel off his socks and walk barefoot over that green and gentle surface.

  He decided it was time to find out.

  Chapter 11

  Kindle

  The dream, in Tom Kindle s opinion, was just what it appeared to be: an invitation to submerge himself in a cozy, communal immortality. And while Kindle found the idea repulsive, he harbored no illusions about the attraction it would hold for his fellow men.

  Therefore, in the two weeks and some days since that peculiar night, Kindle had stayed out of town. He wasn’t sure what Buchanan would look like when he saw it again. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  He had hoped to postpone any journey into town as long as possible, but that desire became academic when he slipped on a muddy hiking trail and came to rest twenty vertical feet down the west slope of Mt. Buchanan, his left leg broken at the hip.

  * * *

  Maybe he shouldn’t have been on the trail at all. Nothing had forced him out here. His cabin was well-stocked and he had plenty to read. Currently he was working his way through Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The book was not much more entertaining than yesterday’s dishwater, but Kindle had bought it as part of a five-foot shelf of the Classics of Western Literature, and he was determined to get his money’s worth.

  Nor had claustrophobia driven him out. The cabin was spacious enough. He had bought this little property—some miles from Buchanan up an old logging road—in 1990. The cabin itself was a kit-built project he had put up with the help of a few friends, one a building contractor with access to quality tools. Since then, every penny that didn’t maintain his boat or buy food had gone into improving the property.

  He paid for town water, since the municipality had run a public works line up here during the real-estate rush of the eighties. But his only electric power came from a gasoline generator in a shed out back. Winters were sometimes snowy, but Kindle had insulated the building and installed a woodstove to keep himself warm. No need for that this time of year, not just yet.

  It was a cabin—not quite big enough to be called a house—but it was a comfortable cabin, and he wasn’t suffering from cabin fever. The impulse to take a long walk up these back trails had been only that, an impulse, obviously a stupid one. The dry spell had
broken last week; rain had fallen for three consecutive days and the trails were wet. The trails were also, in places, steep.

  And Kindle was, he hated to admit, not awfully young anymore. When asked, he gave his age as “about fifty.” In truth, he paid little attention to his age and disliked doing the calculation. When you live alone and work alone, who gives a doughnut hole about birthdays? Who counts ’em?

  But he had turned fifty-three in January and wasn’t as agile as he used to be. Consequently, when he came up a muddy switchback where a fallen pine had carried off a square yard of the hiking trail, he wasn’t quick or canny enough to grab at the nearest root or sapling as his boots rolled under him and the world turned suddenly vertical.

  He lost consciousness when the leg snapped.

  * * *

  When he woke again, some vital instinct kept him immobile. He did not dare to move, only blinked up at a sky crowded with moist conifers and worked at interpreting this sensation of something gone terribly wrong.

  He was light-headed and not ashamed of talking to himself—not that he ever had been.

  “You fell down.” The basic datum. “You slipped off the trail, you asshole.”

  He swiveled his head and saw his own flight path traced in broken saplings and churned topsoil. Long way down. He had fetched up here: in a sort of gully in the hillside, his ass soaking in a cold stream and his legs curled at the trunk of a mossy old hemlock.

  He took particular note of something he did not like at all: the way his left knee had rotated at such a peculiar crooked angle.

  “Well, shit!” Kindle said. The sight of his broken leg made him feel both frightened and angry. Of the two, the anger was more vocal. He cursed eloquently and loudly, and when he was finished the forest fell silent—blushing, perhaps. And then there was the new and essential question that had to be faced, like it or not: “Tom Kindle, have you killed your idiotic self?”

  Maybe he had. The cabin was a quarter-mile downslope—more like a mile by trail. Suppose he made it back: The cabin lacked a telephone. Help was in Buchanan, or anyway no nearer than the closest neighbor—another three miles downhill on a dirt and gravel road.

  And there was no guarantee he could move even as far as the next sapling without passing out again.

  He shifted his body experimentally and nearly did pass out. The pain when he moved was a brand-new thing, a burning stick thrust into his leg all the way up to. the small of his back. He let out a shriek that sent birds wheeling from a nearby tree. When he was still, the agony subsided but did not entirely retreat. It was concentrated in his left leg between hip and knee; everything below that was numb.

  The leg needed a splint. It needed to be immobilized, or he simply could not move.

  He raised his head and inspected the injury. There seemed to be no blood, no exposed bone; and that, at least, was good. Kindle had once worked at a logging camp in British Columbia, and he had seen a man suffer a leg injury that left his femur projecting from his thigh like six inches of bloody chalk.

  The bad news was that this might not be a simple fracture; the knee might be involved. If Kindle recalled his first aid correctly, you don’t try to realign a joint injury. You immobilize it and “transport to medical care.”

  He scanned the immediate area and located the burled walnut walking stick he always carried on these hikes. Good old stick. Friendly presence. Sturdy enough to splint a bad break. It’ll do, he thought. But it was about a foot and a half out of easy reach.

  He pulled himself toward it, screaming.

  He screamed throughout the process of binding his leg, an act that seemed to progress in waves. The waves were of pain, and when they crested—when he felt consciousness begin to slip away—he would lie still, panting and dazed, until his vision cleared; then he would work at the splint a while longer.

  In the end, after a measureless time, the walnut walking stick was lashed around his thigh and lower leg with torn strips of his cotton shirt—a job he admired as if someone else had done it.

  And if he moved?

  The splint kept the leg more or less still and minimized the pain. Kindle dragged himself a short distance along the wet bed of the stream. The water was only a trickle, inches deep, but very cold. Not too bad on a warm afternoon like this… but it was late afternoon, and some of these end-of-summer nights got chilly when the sky was as clear and high as it was today. All this heat would leak away after the sun went down. And then he’d be wet and cold. “Hypothermia,” Kindle said out loud. Not to mention shock. Maybe he was in shock already. He was shivering and he was sweating, both at once.

  He inched downhill along the bed of the stream. The stream crossed a trail some yards down. Then he could get out of the water. But not until then. There was no way he could drag his fiery, useless leg through the undergrowth of this dense Pacific Coast forest.

  It occurred to him as he crawled along the rocky creek bed that if he had accepted the offer of the aliens he might not be in this position. He would be immortal. There would be a Place Prepared For Him, as Kindle’s mother used to say. His mother had been religious. Dakota Baptist. Cold winter Baptist. Her philosophy went something like: Kick me till I go to heaven. Kindle’s natural father had died of a heart attack while he was driving a snow plow for the municipality; two years later his mother married a carpet installer who got drunk every Saturday night. Oscar was his name. On the coldest Saturday night of a cold Dakota winter, Oscar had been seen, and become famous for, pissing out the second-story bedroom window while singing the Hank Williams tune “I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow.” Which was all well and good, and nothing Kindle would hold against a man, but Oscar was also a mean and petty drunk who used his fists more than once on Kindle’s mother. It was all right, she said, marriage was always a rough road and anyhow there was a Place Prepared For Her. Kindle, who was fifteen, put up with six months of this before he decided that if there was a place prepared for him, it was somewhere outside the city limits. He rode to New York City on a Greyhound bus, lied about his age, and served an apprenticeship as a merchant seaman. Five years later he took a trip back home. Oscar was unemployed, drinking Tokay on the steps of the Armory, not worth beating up even for the cold comfort of revenge. His mother had left long since. No forwarding address, which was probably a smart move on her part.

  Thus Kindle was alone and suspected there was no Place Prepared For Him, a suspicion the following thirty-three years had done nothing to dispel. He did not believe in heaven, and he had turned it down when it was offered. Now, however, he wondered if he’d been too hasty.

  A Place Prepared might be better than this damp forest, which was getting darker, now that he noticed.

  The sky had turned a deep and luminous blue. Had the sun set? Yes, it had, but only just. These old firs and hemlocks were heavy with shadow.

  And he was on the trail now, inching along the dirt, caked with mud. When had that happened?

  And his throat was raw with screaming, though he did not remember screaming. He wasn’t screaming now. The sound he was making was more like a moan. It was a kind of song, not entirely tuneless. It reminded him of the song the flying monkeys sang in the movie The Wizard of Oz.

  This thought made Kindle feel almost jaunty. He looked up at the stars—now there were stars—and wondered if he could sing a real song. Somewhere under all this pain, he had developed a conviction that everything was actually very funny. This was a funny position to be in. Singing would make it even funnier.

  The trouble was, he didn’t know very many songs. Oscar’s bedroom aria aside, he had never paid attention to songs. He had learned “Jesus Loves Me” at the Baptist Sunday School, but he was damned if he’d sing a Sunday School song when there wasn’t even a Place Prepared For Him. He knew “The Streets of Laredo,” but only one verse. Maybe one verse was enough.

  “As I went out walking the streets of Laredo—”

  Mind you, he shouldn’t have gone out walking.

  “A
s I went out walking in Laredo one day—”

  No longer day, but night.

  “I met a young cowboy all dressed in white linen—”

  He began to wonder if he liked the direction this song had taken.

  “All dressed in white linen and cold as the clay.”

  No, it was the wrong song entirely.

  But he went on singing it, and his sense of giddy detachment failed him, and he grew miserable with the thought that, he couldn’t even decide for himself what song he ought to sing.

  * * *

  He came within sight of his cabin as the Artifact rose in the western sky. A kind of moon, it cast a little light. That helped. But the sight of it was a fearful thing for Kindle.

  He couldn’t say he hated the Artifact. It hadn’t given him any cause for hatred. But he had always been suspicious of it. Well, so had everyone else; but Kindle’s suspicions had been broader than most. Most people suspected it was an alien spaceship come to wage war or blow up the earth or some such thing. Kindle had doubted that. His experience of the passage of time was that the thing that happened was never the thing you expected. Whatever came of this Artifact, Kindle had thought, it would not be the monster-movie scenario everyone feared. It would be something, certainly not better, but surely different—new, unexpected.

  And hadn’t events proved him right? No one had expected this visitation in the dark, this whisper in the ear about Life Eternal.

  Certainly Kindle had never guessed that tiny machines in his nervous tissue would ask him whether he wanted to give up his body and certain habits of mind and grow beyond Kindle into something that was both Kindle and much more than Kindle.