The Harvest

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Like telepathy?”

  “In a way. But I think that gives the wrong impression. The lines they’re drawing are knowledge lines. The Travellers think there should be as few barriers to knowledge as possible. People’s lives are private, if they want them to be, but knowledge—knowledge is infinitely sharable.”

  “What kind of knowledge?”

  “More or less any kind.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Well… suppose I want to know how to get from here to Chicago. Used to be I’d have to look at a map. Now I can just remember it.”

  “Rachel, you’ve never been there.”

  “No, but I’m not remembering it from myself, I’m remembering it from somebody else. Anyone who’s ever looked at a road map. It isn’t my knowledge, but I can get to it if I need it.”

  “That’s all there is to it? Remembering?”

  “That’s hardly all there is to it, but that’s what it feels like. I suppose it’s more like data sharing or something computery like that. But it feels like remembering. You have to actually do it, I mean there’s a mental effort involved—like thinking really hard. Shifting gears. But then you just… remember.”

  “What if it’s something complicated? Quantum theory, say. Neurosurgery.”

  She frowned, and Matt wondered if she was shifting gears right now, as they spoke.

  “You can do that,” she said, “but it has to be orderly. In the Traveller world, knowledge is infinitely available but functionally hierarchic. You have to take the logical steps. What’s the good of knowing, for instance, that you can derive classical probability from the squared modulus of the quantum complex amplitude, if you don’t know what a modulus is, in physical terms, or an amplitude? The knowledge is available, but if you want to understand it you still have to eat it one bite at a time. Like this salad. Thank you, Arturo.”

  “My pleasure. Get you something to drink?”

  “A Coke,” Rachel said.

  “For you, sir?”

  “Anything.” His mouth was dry.

  * * *

  Rachel said, “I didn’t mean to be scary.”

  “No. You took me by surprise, that’s all.”

  “I surprise myself sometimes.”

  The meal passed in awkward silence. Matt noticed Rachel glancing off across the water—checking for eagles. Once you started, it was hard to stop. “You still look sad,” she said when Arturo had brought his coffee. “Do I?”

  “You were happy for a little while. Because we talked. But only for a while. Because of what’s happening.”

  “Because it’s stealing you, Rachel. You’re right, I’m happy we talked. But it doesn’t change anything, does it? You’re going somewhere I can’t follow.”

  “Doesn’t that happen anyway? If I’d gone off to college, or—”

  “It’s hardly the same. I know you’re not a teenager forever. You go to college, maybe you get married, you have a career, things are different. Of course. But, my God, this is something else entirely. You go to college, I can phone you on weekends. Next year—can you guarantee we’ll even be able to talk to each other?” She looked away.

  “So what do we have?” Matt asked. “A few months?” She pondered the question. Her eyes strayed to the harbor, the calm water there. “Maybe a few months. Maybe less.”

  “You are going away.”

  “Yes.”

  “All of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where? When?”

  “It’s not—it isn’t altogether clear.” He balled his napkin and threw it on his plate. She said, “Daddy, it works both ways. You made a choice, too. I’m entitled to a little resentment.”

  “Oh?”

  “Because you’re going to die. And I’m not. And it didn’t have to be that way.”

  * * *

  He followed the bay road toward home.

  “You know I mean to save this town,” Matt told his daughter.

  “I’ve heard you say so.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible?”

  “I’m… not sure.”

  “Rachel, listen to me. If you know anything about the future, anything at all about what might happen to this town—to the planet—I need you to tell me. Because we can’t plan for what we can’t imagine.”

  She was silent for a long time in the passenger seat. Then she said: “Things will go on as they are now. At least for a little while. Maybe into the winter. After that… people will start to disappear.”

  “Disappear?”

  “Give up the physical body. Oh, Daddy, I know how horrible that must sound! But it isn’t. It really isn’t.”

  “If you say so, Rachel. What happens to these people?”

  “They move to the Artifact, at least temporarily.”

  “Why temporarily?”

  “Because we’ll have a place of our own before long.”

  “What are you saying—a human Artifact?”

  “That kind of environment, yes.”

  “For what purpose—to leave the planet?”

  “Maybe. Daddy, these decisions haven’t been taken yet. But the planet is a serious consideration. We’ve left a terrible mark on it. The Travellers have already started cleaning it up. Erasing some of the changes we made. Taking some of the C02 out of the air.…”

  “They can do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “So people disappear,” Matt said. “So Buchanan is empty.”

  “We don’t all disappear. Or at least, not all at once. In the short run… What would you call a day like today? Indian summer? Last nice day of the year. Last chance to get in a ballgame, maybe, or go to the park. Well, I think the next four or five months are going to be Indian summer for a lot of us. Our last chance to wear skin and walk around on the earth.”

  “Last chance before winter,” Matt said.

  “Last chance before something better. But even if you were moving from a log cabin into the Taj Mahal, you’d still want to look around the old place before you locked the door.” Her eyes were vague, unfocused. Her voiced seemed faint. “It’s the cradle of mankind. Not always easy, leaving the cradle.”

  Curious, Matt thought, how a sunny day could feel so cold.

  * * *

  After dinner, she curled up in the easy chair with Dostoevsky in her lap. “How come you still need to read that?” Matt asked. “How come you can’t just remember it?”

  “I’m not that good yet.”

  “So the library’s not defunct.”

  “Not yet.”

  “But the time is coming.”

  “Yes.” She looked up. He was wearing his jacket; the evening had turned cooler. “Are you going out?”

  “Just for a drive.”

  “Want company?”

  “Thank you, Rache. No. Not this time.”

  * * *

  He drove down to the parking lot where the summer ferry took tourists over to Crab Pot Island, a dot of National Park greenery in the embrace of the bay. The parking lot was low to the water, and Matt parked facing west, where the sky was still gaudy with sunset, although the light had begun to fade.

  He used to come here in the bad time after Celeste died. When you wanted privacy and you lived with a daughter, you found your own retreats. A parking lot was one place where you could sit by yourself in an automobile and be left in peace. People assumed you were waiting for someone. They didn’t look closely. A person could be alone with his grief… could even weep, if he did so discreetly, if he forestalled the kind of helpless sobbing that would attract a stranger’s attention.

  He was past that now. But he wanted the solitude.

  It was that time of evening when the streetlights flicker on and everything solid seems hollow and flat; when dark thoughts come easily and are harder to ignore.

  He wondered what he was trying so hard to save.

  What was he sorry to lose, in this new world they were making? War was finished, after all. Disease, apparently, was a
thing of the past. Starvation was history. Lies were becoming impractical.

  He had never loved war, disease, starvation, or deceit.

  So what was it?

  What had he loved so much that he turned down the offer of eternal life?

  Something evanescent. Something fragile.

  A family. Rachel’s childhood. Celeste. The possibility of a human future.

  All these things were illusions. He thought of Willy’s IWW banner, an old rag invested with glory by his stubborn defiance. Or the eagles of Dos Aguilas, a beautiful lie.

  The sky above the bay was empty.

  But the eagles flew, Matt thought. They flew when we believed in them. Willy flew, those ten minutes on the hillside. I will save this town, Matt thought. See if I don’t.

  And if I can’t save the town… if it comes to that… then, by God, I will save some part of it.

  Someone.

  Chapter 18

  Annie and Bobby

  On the Saturday Matt took his daughter to Old Quarry Park, Annie Gates drove south for an hour on the coast highway.

  She had made this drive one weekend out of two—sometimes Saturday, sometimes Sunday—for ten years now.

  She had never spoken of it, even to Matt.

  She was going to visit Bobby.

  * * *

  Bobby lived in a room in the east wing of a long, low building in a pine grove near the sea. His window overlooked a broad green lawn and a portion of the lot where Annie parked her car. Of course, Bobby seldom looked out the window. But maybe that had changed. Maybe he was beginning to appreciate the view. Annie hoped so.

  The sign at the front door of the building said:

  WELLBORNE CARE COMMUNITY

  Where Caring Is Commonplace

  Commonplace but very expensive. Since Bobby moved in, Annie had been paying Wellborne the equivalent of a Park Avenue monthly rental. She had cut a great many corners. The furniture in her apartment was fifteen years old. Her salad and tuna diet was not for cosmetic purposes. She rarely bought a hardcover book, which had been the most difficult economy of all.

  Worth it, of course, to know that Bobby was decently looked after.

  She checked in at the desk—Wellborne was still fully staffed, the effects of Contact slow to take hold among its patients—and walked down the east corridor to Bobby’s room, 114.

  She’d noticed an improvement on her last visit. Usually Bobby retreated into a fetal curl when he saw her coming. Last time she visited, he had unbent and regarded her with a solemn expression on his face… an expression, however, that Annie could not decipher. Nor could Bobby explain it. He never spoke to her. He spoke to the staff sometimes, simple food and bathroom words. But never to Annie.

  Today… her hopes were high.

  She crossed her fingers and said a silent, wordless prayer before she knocked and opened the door.

  * * *

  “Annie!” he said.

  Her heart did a startled double-beat. How long since she’d heard his voice?

  Almost thirty years, she thought. She remembered quite distinctly, too distinctly, the last words Bobby had spoken to her. Annie, don’t.

  He had been nine years old; she had been ten. Annie, he had said. Please don’t.

  He looked good today. He was dressed in clean blue jeans and a white cotton T-shirt. The T-shirt said “I LOVE WELLBORNE,” except that “love” was a heart shape. He was still way too skinny. For the last couple of years, Bobby had been a problem eater. Just before Contact, he had bottomed out at 102 pounds. The staff doctor had called to discuss intravenous feeding as an option.

  Now he was eating again, and although she could see the staves of his chest through the T-shirt, she could tell he was gaining weight.

  His face was terribly thin. His smile was skeletal. But it was a smile, and that was miracle enough. His eyes, deep in their sockets, twinkled at her.

  “Hi, Bobby,” she managed through the lump in her throat.

  He climbed off the bed where he had been sitting cross-legged watching baseball on TV. “They said I could go out today. Annie! Go for a walk with me?”

  “Sure, Bobby,” she said.

  * * *

  He looked painfully fragile as he hobbled down the front steps onto the lawn, but Annie supposed it really was all right for him to be outside. The medical staff at Wellborne knew what they were doing. And of course, since Contact, Bobby was immortal. Like everyone else. But it was hard to convince herself of that.

  He walked like an old man. He was thirty-four years old. He talked like a nine-year-old, which was how old he had been when the accident happened.

  Annie walked with him across the sunny lawn. She ventured a question: “Bobby, do you like it here?”

  “It’s not bad,” he said. “The food is all right.”

  “You want to stay?”

  He shrugged. She recognized the gesture, a particular Bobby-shrug. The shrug meant: Don’t know. Don’t want to talk about it.

  “Nice day,” she said, helplessly. After all these mute years! Discussing the weather!

  Bobby just grinned.

  She said, “What have you been doing?”

  “Watching TV,” he said. “Remembering.”

  “Remembering?”

  “I remember a lot. Since they came.” He touched his head—the side of it that was not quite symmetrical—and pointed to the sky: the Travellers. “Annie… guess what I remember?”

  She cringed at the thought of what he might remember.

  “I remember lawn tag” And he tapped her on the shoulder and went hobbling away.

  She pretended to chase, smiling to herself. All that last summer, they had played lawn tag through the long evenings. Daddy was the town doctor in Bruce, a little Canadian prairie town, a one-road grain town; of all the lawns in Bruce, the Gates’s lawn was the biggest.

  Lawn tag was a simpleminded chase: under the privet hedge, past the willow tree, mustn’t stray beyond the border of the sidewalk, around back, past the doghouse. Annie, a year older, could have caught Bobby anytime. But she liked the sound of his laughter when he dodged her hand. Some evenings she tagged him once, twice, played hard to get, then let him win. Some evenings she let him win from the start.

  Now… she could scarcely believe he was running again. The sunlight was radiant on the big Wellborne lawn; the air was silky cool. He moved in a slip-jointed lope, his jeans threatening to fall off his bony hips. It would have been easy to catch him.

  She pretended to chase. Bobby looked back and laughed out loud. Annie savored the sound.

  * * *

  Sometimes, of course, he made her mad.

  The hardest part of Contact had been facing this memory. But it was a memory that had to be faced: Most of Annie had said yes to the Travellers, but this memory part of her had said Annie doesn’t deserve to live.

  She was ten. Only ten. A child. Impulsive. Wasn’t every child?

  Bobby and Annie were playing on the roof of the house on the hottest day of summer.

  It was easy to get onto the roof. Bring the ladder from the old bunk beds in the basement, step onto the tiny balcony outside Annie’s room, up to the steep and baking slope of the shingles. You could lie there and see all the way out past the water tower, past the highway, past the granaries, past yellow quilts of wheat to the horizon.

  Bobby was scared of the roof. Annie always helped him up, helped him down. But she sometimes took a shameful pleasure in his fear. Bobby, the younger, often got more attention than he deserved. Bobby was the baby of the family. Annie was expected to help with the dishes. Bobby never did.

  Today—well, it was hot. Prairie-summer-itchy-sunburn-tight-clothes hot. Bobby had been whining about it. So she went up on the roof by herself, hoping he wouldn’t follow.

  Of course, he did.

  He pulled himself over the eavestrough and scuttled up the shingles behind her, clinging to her foot until he could safely lie down. Stay still, silly, and you won’t
slip. But that’s not what Annie said.

  If you get scared, she said, your hands get all sweaty.

  Bobby’s frown deepened.

  And if your hands get sweaty… you might slip. He looked at her aghast across a space of cedar shakes and hot air. Annie, don’t.

  It’s a lo-o-ong way down, Bobby.

  Panicking a little, he grabbed her left foot with both hands. Hey, let go, no fair!

  But he hugged it tighter. She was wearing shorts and no shoes. In the hot air, his fingers felt sticky as tar… his touch was an intolerable itch. Bobby! Let go of me!

  She kicked her ankle out to shake him loose. Annie, he said, don’t.

  Now she was starting to get scared. Her gaze drifted down from the blue deeps of the sky, across those farms, grain elevators, houses, streets, to the rain gutter and the paved walk down below. Mama had put the garbage out. The garbage cans shivered in the rising heat.

  She thought of Bobby tumbling down there and carrying her with him.

  She shook her foot again, harder.

  One hand came loose. Bobby scrabbled against the shingled roof. She kicked again. Annie. Please don’t.

  It was peculiar, it was maddening, how calm his voice still sounded.

  Annie kicked to pry him loose, felt his hand separate from her ankle. She had turned her head away and when she looked back she caught the briefest glimpse of him as he disappeared over the edge, an expression of vast surprise on his face.

  She scrambled down the bunk-bed ladder and looked over the edge of the balcony and saw Bobby on the paved walk beside the garbage cans. She looked for a long time, unable to make sense of what she saw. His head was broken open and some of what was inside had come out.