The Harvest

by Robert Charles Wilson

  But he couldn’t say this to Beth without sounding paranoid or petty. Anyway, her vote hadn’t mattered any more than Chuck Makepeace’s vote, or Bob Ganish’s. It was only bad timing that made it seem that way.

  She had done what she thought was the right thing, and in the end maybe her call was as good as his.

  She said, “I guess I should leave.”

  “Only if you want to.”

  Tentatively: “You’re not angry?”

  “No.” He realized he wasn’t.

  She sat beside him. Relieved, weary, she put her head against him.

  He stroked her long hair and listened to the night wind tugging at the corners of the RV. He would never get used to these inland plains. He missed the sea.

  He thought about Beth—all the aspects of Beth Porter. The neglected, sullen Beth: the Beth who had tattooed WORTHLESS on her shoulder, who had baited Joey Commoner until Joey felt compelled to pull a knife.

  And this other Beth. Beth treating Jacopem’s anxiety with the anodyne of her own calm. Beth studying anatomy textbooks with the dedication of a monk.

  Something clean and strong rising out of all the garbage in her life. “Joey’s standing watch,” she said. “He has a campfire on the highway facing west.”

  “Did he see you come?”

  “No. Anyway, I’m tired of worrying about Joey. He’s acting like an asshole.”

  “Maybe a dangerous one.”

  “Joey and his pocketknife? I doubt it.”

  “After what you said that night…”

  “I shouldn’t have. I know. But he doesn’t own me. He never did.”

  “We’re a fragile community. I don’t want to create one more problem.”

  “Then should I leave?” Challenging him. “Beth—you know you don’t have to.”

  “I want to stay a while longer.”

  “Then stay.”

  A cold night. A little warmth.

  Chapter 27

  Destinations

  The caravan of ten dusty RVs and trailers, led by Colonel Tyler in a four-wheel-drive Ford pickup, turned south on Interstate 84 toward Utah.

  Tyler drove with the windows rolled down, admitting a breeze so dry it made his lips bleed. He drove at a cautious, steady pace. Sometimes he felt fettered by the train of ponderous vehicles behind him. But it was a privilege, he thought, to blaze the trail. To see the way ahead.

  The highway seemed wider for being empty. Periodically he passed an abandoned truck or car, and it was nice to know that in an emergency the Committee could siphon gas from one of these. But no emergency arose. Most of the roadside gas stations had functional pumps, and Joey Commoner and Bob Ganish had been scrupulous about keeping the convoy’s engines in decent repair.

  Tyler led them across the Great Basin into Utah, joined what had once been a populous stretch of 1-15 north of Brigham City, then veered east on 1-80 where the towns grew sparse again.

  Tyler read the road maps with great care. He was worried about crossing the Rockies. 1-80 skirted much of the mountains, followed the Union Pacific route through the Red Desert in Wyoming, but late or early storms had been known to strand unwary travellers.

  He called a halt at a town named Emory and pressed on in the morning. The sky when he started his engine was bright with herringbone clouds.

  The road climbed and subsided and began to climb again.

  He felt better when the road wound away from civilization. Those empty towns were oppressive. Mountain and desert were simply eternal. Granite and sagebrush and cheat grass: invulnerable to all the discord that had dropped like bad magic out of a starry sky.

  He was alone in the cab of the pickup truck, although Sissy kept him company.

  * * *

  Sissy had been keeping him sporadic company since that town in Georgia—Loftus.

  She spoke to him, a voice out of the wind, but he didn’t actually see her until one afternoon in rural Texas while he was driving the Hummer west. It seemed appropriate that Sissy should appear in the desert. The desert was a place of mirages, dust-devils, chromium-blue lakes shimmering where the highway touched the horizon. Sissy had seemed exactly that tenuous, sitting next to him where A.W. Murdoch used to be. She was a translucent, desert-dry Sissy—dressed as inappropriately as ever in cotton and nylon and polyester of all colors, clothes so brittle with old dirt that any motion emitted a greasy rustle and exuded an odor too stale to be offensive. It was the smell, Tyler thought, of something dead that had dried a long time in the sunlight.

  The radio was good, Sissy told him, good to be talking to those people, smart, but be careful, she said: stay away from the crowds, all those East Coast city survivors, clever and dangerous in some way she never explained. Talk to that Joseph, Sissy said. He admires you.

  Sissy was an illusion. Tyler knew that. Of course he did. You’d have to be crazy to believe she was really sitting there, some kind of ghost.

  She was, as the psychologists would no doubt say, a private revenant, a fragment of himself. She was Tyler giving Tyler Tyler’s advice.

  But in another way she really was Sissy: Sissy cut loose from memory. His memory had lost its grip on Sissy the way a child might lose its grip on a balloon; and like a balloon she had risen up, had floated out of his head and come to rest in the passenger seat beside him.

  Sissy advised him to drive to Oregon, hike down from the coastal mountains to Buchanan, assume a leadership position among these ragged refugees.

  Lead them east, Sissy said.

  To the gathering place of the survivors, a new home in the valley of the Ohio River, a sheltered place—or so Tyler told them, and it had even seemed true for a while.

  But Sissy—always a repository of unpleasant surprises—had been coy about their destination.

  Tyler led his caravan up a road walled with granite, threading a path around fallen rock. Whenever he turned his head to the right he found Sissy gazing at him. Today she was bright as the sun, her plump cheeks a blazing white, difficult to look at.

  Those people back east, Sissy said. They surrounded themselves with Helpers. They talk to Helpers.

  “True,” Tyler said.

  Helpers are the voice of that thing in the sky… “I know,” Tyler said, weary of these cryptic pronouncements. Sissy’s eyes, volatile and relentless, demanded answers he was helpless to produce… and of the dead. “Dead what?” The skinless living.

  The Contactees, Tyler interpreted. Contactees who had died might be able to speak through the Helpers. The dead might talk to the living. Tyler said, “The danger…”

  They’ll talk about you, John. That girl you killed in Loftus. Maybe it will be Murdoch talking. Maybe Murdoch crossed over, too. And who else might talk? They might talk about Stuttgart. They might remember every sin you ever committed.

  This was a new and unwelcome idea.

  People will know what you are.

  Peevishly: “I’m no worse than the rest.”

  They’ll know about Loftus. They’ll call you killer.

  Would they? Extraordinary circumstances, Tyler thought. Alien possession. The girl had been… not human.

  Anyway, he told himself, I’m a man of some stature. A man who served his country, a man who made a place for himself in the business world. A man who had once been a familiar presence in the Capitol Building, a man accustomed to lunching with Defense Department functionaries or the members of oversight committees. Above certain kinds of innuendo.

  That’s a joke, Sissy said. Another Washington crook. What’s the difference?

  Tyler worked at remembering that period of his life. It had been structured, formal, complex. In those days he had known how to seal off this Sissy part of himself. Compartment A: The presentable Colonel Tyler. Compartment B: Certain phantoms. Certain urges.

  But with Contact, the borders had grown tenuous. Like a naval vessel, he thought. Bulkheads breached. Flooding in the engine room. Fire in the hold.

  The sad fact was, he talked to this gho
st because he had no choice. Pay attention, Sissy scolded him. To…?

  The danger! You can’t risk being exposed.

  But even Colonel Tyler had dreamed of that green valley in Ohio. A gathering place, a new life—safety. A trap, Sissy said.

  “But if not there,” Tyler said aloud, “if that’s not where we’re going…”

  But when he turned to pose the question, Sissy had vanished.

  * * *

  They came across a fallen telephone pole blocking the highway. Tyler called a halt, then enlisted Joey Commoner and Chuck Makepeace to work a chain around the pole and hook it to the rear of the pickup.

  Tyler revved the Ford’s heavy-duty engine, inching forward against the drag. The pole gave a moan of stressed timber and then began to shift.

  Tyler took careful note of the people who had climbed out of their campers and RVs to drink bottled soda and watch the show.

  Kindle and Wheeler stood together, both poker-faced. Wheeler in particular seemed to be working to disguise some emotion. His resentment, Tyler supposed, at being elbowed out of the leadership position.

  Among the rest Tyler identified idle curiosity, some cautious frowns from the likes of Abby Cushman and Miriam Flett, frank idolatry from Joey Commoner.

  He turned away to measure his progress, and when he looked again he was surprised to see Sissy among the crowd—a more ethereal presence.

  A dry wind came rivering down this pass, but Sissy’s long, tangled hair hung limply over her shoulders; her layered clothes stirred not at all.

  She extended her hand over the head of the new boy, William.

  This one, Sissy said. Her lips moved soundlessly, but Tyler heard the words as if they were his own. Watch out for this one.

  He drove until sunset.

  * * *

  “A lot of settlers came through here,” Kindle said. “Mormons, especially, but also people on the Oregon Trail, the California Trail. You can still find their wagon tracks on the scrub prairie about forty miles north.”

  Matt walked with his friend along the highway away from camp.

  They had stopped for the night along a stretch of high Wyoming rock desert that seemed to Matt infinitely dry, silent, and immense. Dinner was over now and the watch fires had been lit.

  “Matthew,” Kindle had said, “let’s walk a bit. Get the kinks out.” And Matt understood that the older man had something difficult to tell him.

  Neither moon nor Artifact had risen and the stars were bright in a cold sky. When he spoke, Kindle’s voice seemed to hover in the air.

  “It was called the South Pass,” Kindle said. “You followed the North Platte to the Sweetwater, Sweetwater to Pacific Creek, Sandy Creek, the Green River Crossing. The Overland Stage Route came through that way. Pony Express.”

  Scuff of shoes on empty road. Matt said, “Sounds like you know the territory.”

  “Lived two years up in the Wind River Range. Did a lot of hiking through Whiskey Mountain and Popo Agie. Beautiful country.”

  “You miss it?”

  “Been thinkin’ about it a lot.”

  They approached the small fire where Joey Commoner was keeping watch. Joey stood up at the sound of footsteps, turned to face them with his hand hovering at the pistol Colonel Tyler had supplied him.

  “Halt,” Joey said, his voice cracking.

  Kindle yawned and regarded the boy. “Joey, if you ever aim a loaded pistol in my direction I’ll feed it to you—fair warning.”

  “The Colonel doesn’t like people outside camp perimeter at night.”

  “I don’t suppose he does. I don’t suppose he likes my shirttail untucked, either, but he’ll have to put up with it, won’t he?”

  “You go on report if you’re out of bounds.”

  “Fine,” Kindle said. “Maybe later the Colonel can slap my wrist.”

  “You’re such a shithead,” Joey said.

  Kindle looked at him a long moment—sadly, Matt thought. Then they walked on, past the fire, past Joey.

  Matt tried to imagine crossing this blank immensity in a covered wagon. No highways, no gas stations, no motels. No Helpers. The stars sharp as needles.

  “Matthew… can you believe this bullshit? Pass a checkpoint before we can take a walk?”

  He shrugged. “Joey’s just—”

  “Joey isn’t ‘just’ anything. Joey’s following orders and loving every minute of it. We’re not living in a town anymore, we’re living in a barracks. That’s why—”

  Kindle hesitated. Matt said, “Why what?”

  “That’s why I’m leaving.”

  No. “You can’t.”

  Kindle was a shadow in the starlight, large and gray. “Matthew—”

  “Christ, Tom, I know what’s going on as well as you do. Tyler did his little putsch, and now we have to live with it. It’s painful. But we’re still moving. Heading for a place where Tyler will be one small frog in a big pond. They’re holding real elections in Ohio. According to the radio—”

  “When’s the last time you heard the radio? The Colonel’s got it locked up.”

  “Beside the point. In Ohio, the Colonel won’t matter.”

  “Don’t underestimate the man.”

  “The bottom line,” Matt said, “is that we’re more likely to get there if you’re with us.”

  “The bottom line is that it’s not my job.” Kindle selected a pebble and threw it into the darkness, an invisible trajectory. “Anyway—I never wanted to live in Ohio. Tell you a story. Once upon a time I hiked along the Titcomb Valley, that’s up in the Wind River Range. I was thirty-three years of age, and I thought that was pretty damn old. East side of the valley is Fremont Peak. North is Mount Sacajawea. At the head of the valley is Gannett Peak, highest in Wyoming. All well above the timberline. Glaciers on those mountains like blue rivers of ice. So pretty it hurts. I camped there a night. When I left, I promised myself I’d come back, one way or another, before I died. See all this a second time. I never got around to it.”

  “Tom—”

  “I know you don’t understand this, Matthew. You’re happy with people. Happiest when you’re helping them. That’s admirable. I can’t do it, however. I’d be happy by myself in the Winds. Or the Tetons, or the Beartooths.”

  Matt tried to imagine this wiry, strong, aging man alone in the wilderness. “Break a leg out there,” he said, “no one comes to help.”

  “I don’t relish the idea of dying alone. Who the hell does? But what choice is there? Don’t we all die alone?” He shrugged. “Used to be Shoshone and Arapahoe through there. Might still be people around.”

  Matt said, “In Ohio—”

  “In Ohio there’s nothing but people. People and Helpers. Which is another question. Seems to me there’s only two ways it can go, Matt. Maybe the Travellers move on and leave us alone—no Helpers, no electricity unless we make it ourselves. And pretty soon the planet is repopulated and we’re back in the same bind. Or else they build us a private Eden, which is pretty much what they promised. A safe place, a protected place, easy food and probably some kind of population control. And maybe that’s okay, too. But think about it. Everything the Travellers are capable of, doesn’t that qualify them as gods? I think it does—by the standards humanity’s used for thousands of years. But do you want to live with a god? A real one, I mean, one who appears in the sky every night? God who makes the rain fall, god who makes the crops grow, god who cures the sick child? What would we be after ten years of that—or a thousand years? Maybe about as human as those people who dropped their skins. Maybe less.”

  “It might not be that way.”

  “Uh-huh. But it might.”

  Matt was tired again. It was as if he had made some silent bargain, traded sorrow for fatigue. Ever since Rachel left, he had been empty of grief but full of this daily exhaustion.

  He wondered whether Kindle was right, whether they were headed toward a kind of domestication. He wondered what dark marvels the Earth might harbor in a h
undred years or a thousand. Two species of humanity, perhaps: the wild and the tame.

  He said, “Have you talked to Abby about leaving?”

  “Have I told her, you mean? No. I thought I’d speak to her closer to the event. Say I’m going, then go. No time to blame herself.”

  “She will, though.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It won’t be good for her.”

  “She’s survived worse. Hell, I don’t mean all that much to Abby Cushman. Target of opportunity. If she were fifteen years younger I’d say you and her might hit it off. You both need somebody to doctor. Kindred souls. But she’ll be happy in Ohio.”

  “Easy as that?”

  “Not easy at all, Matthew. Abby’s been generous. You’ve been generous.”

  “It’s been paid back often enough.”

  Kindle looked at the stars, scratched himself. “We should maybe get back before Joey starts layin’ eggs.” They began to walk. “I’ll ride as far as Laramie,” Kindle said. “Turn back from there.”

  “It’ll be hard,” Matt said. “One less voice against the Colonel.”

  “Told you,” Kindle said. “It’s not my job.”

  Unspoken, in a glance from Kindle to Matt, in the darkness far from the firelight: It’s your job now.

  * * *

  The next day dawned clear and cool. Engines revved in morning light, RVs threw long shadows over the scrub.

  Colonel Tyler, leading the caravan as it wound through long miles of Wyoming prairie, was first to catch sight of the miraculous new thing:

  It was a dusty blue dome on the horizon, too perfectly symmetrical to be a product of nature; capped with white, like a mountain.

  Something artificial. Something large beyond comprehension. A work of engineering that beggared any solely human effort.

  Calm and pretty in the dry blue distance.