The Harvest

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It’s that spaceship, Sissy told him. To take the dead away.

  He recalled the idea, dimly, from Contact, from rumors he had heard on the radio: a vast thing nearly alive that harbored emigrant souls, and a miniature of the Earth inside it; Elysian fields, a world without evil.

  Her voice was like a sizzle in his ears:

  We must see it more closely. We must abide here for a time.

  Even Sissy was excited.

  Chapter 28

  Earthbound

  Rosa Perry Connor had always dreamed of flying.

  She had grown up earthbound. Chained to a suburban Southern California tract development, restless by nature, Rosa spent her childhood summers exploring concrete storm drains, half-made houses, and the neighborhood’s few surviving orange groves. A reader, she devoured stacks of Little Golden Books, then the Bobbsey Twins, finally her older brother’s collection of How and Why Wonder Books, wherein she discovered a volume devoted to Airplanes—which ignited her long romance with the idea of flight.

  The Orange County air was full of a number of things, mainly petrochemicals, but including passenger jets, helicopters, and military aircraft. Whenever one of these machines passed overhead, Rosa would come to a stop. She would stand at attention, head craned upward, one hand raised, as if in salute, to shade the sun from her eyes. “F-104,” she would announce, or, “Looks like a DC-8.” She became a student of silhouettes, a connoisseur of contrails. Always meticulous, she taught herself the history of flight from Montgolfier to the Atlas rocket.

  Her obsession baffled her friends. Her parents were barely aware of it. Her father designed circuits for an electronics firm. Her mother played bridge with women whose suntans had acquired the quality of aged leather and whose jaw muscles stood out like taut little ropes when they laughed. Rosa imagined herself in a Fokker, strafing her parents’ barbecues and garden parties. No more fat men in business suits exhaling sour whiskey clouds, no more creased women in pastel shorts drinking martinis. She would rise above all this.

  Her parents hated flying.

  They had family back east—Grandma Perry in Wisconsin, Grandma Hagstrom in Florida. Sometimes Rosa’s parents took her visiting. By car. Across the desert. Across the farmland. Earthbound. Wheeling through an interstate hell of Stuckeys, Bide-a-Wees, and souvenir shops. Instead of above these dreadful things!

  Rosa, from the age of seven to the age of seventeen, begged her parents to fly, at least once, one summer. Leave the car at home, she pleaded. The car was hot, crowded, and took forever. An airplane would save days of travel. An airplane would turn torture into ecstasy.

  “But if we drive,” Rosa’s mother said with maddening patience, “we can see the country.”

  Ye gods, Rosa wanted to scream, we’ve seen the country! Every inch of every road was tattooed indelibly into their brains! What could be left to see? One more plastic teepee? One more jackalope postcard?

  Meanwhile, she made plans. She would go to college. She would study… well, whatever was useful to a pilot. Mathematics, aerodynamics. Her eyes were good. She would take a job in civilian aeronautics. Somehow, she would find her way into a cockpit.

  And then—ten days before her eighteenth birthday—her parents announced yet another trip to Florida. “But this time we’re flying.”

  It was the best present ever, and it almost made up for all those miles on the road.

  Rosa waited with itchy impatience for the appointed day. The trip to Los Angeles International was novelty enough. From the waiting room at the gate she was able to study in gratifying detail the silvery bodies of Vanguards, Convairs, 707s. They were cumbersome on the ground; out of their element, like beached whales. The distant runways turned them into sleek sky-things through the redeeming magic of speed and altitude. Watching, Rosa trembled with excitement.

  The boarding call startled her. After an eternity of waiting, it seemed almost—too soon.

  Their plane was a new Douglas DC-8 Super 61, a stretched version of the standard DC-8. Rosa had picked out, had insisted upon, a window seat, and she watched with honed attention as the luggage was loaded from a cart, thumping into an invisible space under the passenger compartment; listened with keen ears to the final latching of the door, revving of engines, rumble of wheels as the taxiing began.

  She was able to see the runway before the plane turned for takeoff. The runway was long and empty, a strange road for this massive machine. The stewardess demonstrated oxygen masks and advised passengers that their seat cushions could be used for flotation. Rosa watched and listened with a sense of unreality. Flotation? She was interested in flying, not floating.

  Then the engines whined to a higher pitch. The sound invaded every part of the plane: the bulkhead, the window, her seat, herself. A brake was released and the aircraft began to roll.

  To accelerate. She had not been prepared for this brutal burst of speed. From below, every takeoff had seemed graceful. Elegant. From inside, it was patently an act of force. The wings, which had seemed so solid, bounced and wobbled against the air. The fuselage rattled as if its rivets were about to pop.

  And Rosa began to entertain her first doubt.

  Was this practical? Would all this machinery really work? Could this fragile bus possibly sustain itself a mile from the surface of the earth?

  She believed in flight. She was not sure she believed in the invulnerability of engine parts manufactured by sweaty men in a Pratt Whitney factory.

  But then the wheels lifted from the runway… and she was flying.

  The DC-8 rose with the prompt efficiency of an elevator. The ground simply dropped away at an angle that seemed to Rosa precipitously steep… She couldn’t help imagining the DC-8 as if on a hill, stalling and rolling backward.

  Her hands began to sweat. She wiped them on her skirt.

  There was a knot of excitement in her stomach. I’m flying, she told herself. This is the real thing; I am true-to-God FLYING. She gazed at Los Angeles below her, its gridwork vanishing into a gray diffusion of smog. The aircraft tilted and seemed to rotate around the point of the wing as it banked over the Pacific. Rosa’s parents read magazines. Incredible, she thought. Her mother read Redbook. Her father read Time. As if they were in some dentist’s waiting room! Not a metal cylinder high above the ocean!

  The airplane circled as it rose until it was high and heading east.

  A stewardess offered soft drinks. Rosa said, “No, thank you.” The knot of excitement in her stomach had become… something else.

  She felt flushed and hot and unwell. Her eyes crept to the window and back again. If she didn’t look at the window, she wouldn’t see the ground. Wouldn’t be reminded of their astonishing height. Of the distance the plane would fall, if it fell.

  But I’m FLYING!

  But she wasn’t. She was just sitting here, strapped in. Helpless! In a metal box, suspended above the San Gabriel Mountains by the clumsy rotation of a few greasy turbofans.

  It might be flying… but it felt more like risking her life.

  The aircraft lurched in a pocket of air, and Rosa gasped and tightened her grip on the armrest.

  Her mother glanced over. “Are you all right, dear? You look pale.”

  “I think—” She swallowed hard. She couldn’t decide what was worse: the fear, the humiliation, or the disappointment. A dreadful lump had formed in her throat. “How long is the flight?”

  “Five hours. More or less.”

  Five hours? Could these engines really operate for five hours? Full of volatile jet fuel? Revolving at God-knows-what velocity? Bearings hot as griddles? Metal fatigue tearing at the fuselage?

  She glimpsed mountains down below. Clouds. And an impossible volume of empty air.

  “Rosa?” Her mother again. “Dear, what’s the matter?”

  “God’s sake,” she heard her father say. “Give her the goddamn paper bag. That’s what it’s there for.”

  * * *

  She traded in her return ticket and rode
a bus back to California.

  The trip was long, uncomfortable, and depressing. Every inch of highway under the wheels was a confession of failure. She spoke to no one. She focused her eyes on the horizon, the uneasy intersection of Earth and sky.

  Home, she registered at UCLA. Midway through the fall semester she met a B. A. student named Vincent Connor who drove all thoughts of flight and recrimination from her mind. Vince was a farmboy, gauche and handsome. He came from Wyoming, his daddy was a sheep rancher there, but to Rosa’s glazed and grateful eye he was something out of the Broadway musical Oklahoma!: a sweet, big-boned blond man in a checkerboard cotton shirt. At any moment, Rosa thought, he might break into song.

  She married him in the spring and became Rosa Perry Connor. Five of his cousins, brave about airplanes, flew in from Wyoming with his widowed father. The church was full. Her twin nieces, four years old, her brother’s girls, carried Rosa’s train. After the reception Vince began their honeymoon drive to San Francisco; they spent a night at a motel on Highway One where the sea fog came winding through the pines. They made love for the first time as man and wife, which seemed to inject a new vigor into the act. Rosa called him Cowboy, and he grinned.

  After that—

  Years later, she would wonder at how fast the time had passed. Vince took a series of jobs, one of them with her father’s electronics firm in Orange County. Briefly, Rosa was thrust into the garden-party and country-club circle she had despised as a girl. She wasn’t good at it. Vince was worse. He didn’t know how to dress. At parties, he told coarse jokes or refused to say anything at all. “He has ‘Wyoming’ stamped on his forehead,” a friend told Rosa, “and it’s fucking indelible.” Vince had dreams of opening his own business, but he couldn’t manage to save any money. He began to drink too much. So did Rosa. Her garden parties became haphazard affairs, at which she was liable to sit cross-legged on the patio steps indulging her old Fokker fantasy. Watch out, girls, it’s the Red Baroness. Airsick bags provided for your comfort on the seatback.

  When his father died, Vincent drove her across the desert to Wyoming, which Rosa regarded as a hostile alien planet. To her horror, Vince had decided to take over the family ranch.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he told her, not much interested in her objections. “It’s not so bad here.”

  But it was. It was a huge, lonely land full of bellicose men and submissive women. Rosa did nothing but cook meals, keep house, and watch TV. Vince wasn’t keen on children, he said, and neither was Rosa—she thought about a pregnancy just to relieve the boredom, but never seriously enough to skip her pills. And yet, Rosa thought, for all the tedium, my God, how the years flew! Crackling cold winters, muddy springs, summers so dry her small garden plots inevitably failed before autumn. Seasons and seasons of network television. She drove into Cheyenne with Vince sometimes, but good lord, Cheyenne? The last refuge of the bolo tie?

  Her life became eventless, as smooth as the eastern horizon, and worse… somehow, her life passed. It eroded. She grew old. Yes, old. She was forty in Wyoming, and how had that happened? Then forty-five. Then, oh, Christ, fifty. Fifty years old on a sheep ranch in Wyoming!

  She was fifty-one when the Artifact appeared in the sky like an ivory moon.

  Rosa wasn’t frightened of it, not even in the beginning. Vince thought it portended the end of the world. Maybe it did. Nevertheless, Rosa liked it. She liked its glide, smooth and effortless in the dark. It was flight as she had once imagined flight to be.

  And didn’t that stir some old memories?

  She was more earthbound now than ever, of course, chained to this vast acreage of prairie. Chained to Vince. And she had put on weight over the years, a considerable poundage: her girlish walk had become a waddle. The revenge of gravity, Rosa thought. What was weight but the measure of her bondage to the Earth?

  Then, the next summer, like everyone else, she came down with Contact flu… and woke to the realization that her life had been only a prologue.

  Vince submitted to Contact just as readily, which surprised her. Vince had seemed satisfied with his life in Wyoming. The ranch had prospered under his supervision, and he seemed happy enough. Vince, after all, had never wanted to fly.

  But Vince was suddenly eager for the Golden Age to commence, happy to drop his stolid Marlboro Man exterior and plunge into the fluid deeps of the Greater World.

  After Contact she felt closer to Vince but at the same time more distant. She was able to appreciate the shape of his life, the spikes of pride and canyons of ambition that had driven him to California and back. There was even a broad, pastel bump of affection that comprised his feelings for Rosa, a pleasant discovery.

  But she could see, too, that their connection had been arbitrary and accidental. Their love had peaked in a motel on Highway One, and what persisted was fondness, at best; boredom, at worst.

  She wasn’t surprised when Vince abandoned his skin. Winter was setting in, and Vince had never relished the bitter storms and cold Canadian air that came rolling each year from the north.

  Rosa, however, had conceived a different plan for herself.

  She had in mind a certain transformation, a dramatic farewell to the planet that had borne her.

  It would take time. It would mean staying on the Earth longer than most. Therefore she began as soon as Vince was gone—his skin a delicate memory, carried off on a brisk autumn wind.

  She retired to the bedroom of the ranch house, to the old double bed she had shared with him for so many years.

  Then Rosa took off her clothes and looked at herself for the last time in the vanity mirror. She saw a bulging gray-haired woman whose expression was no longer perennially sad. Then she stretched out on the bed.

  The neocytes in her body dimmed her awareness to make the time pass more speedily. Rosa was suddenly dreamy and afloat.

  She weighed 237 pounds that day, a significant mass—enough for the neocytes to work with. Adipose tissue began to change its structure. Rosa’s pores exuded a gray fibrous substance. Within days, it covered her body. Her physical functions dropped to negligible levels. After a week, Rosa ceased to breathe; her heart ceased beating.

  Inside her hardened chrysalis, she began to change.

  * * *

  The pale cocoon lay motionless on the bed all that winter.

  Around it, the world evolved. The winter storms that year were particularly fierce. Not the hurricanes that had wreaked so much damage on the coast, but snowstorms that froze the water in the pipes and beveled the house with glittering blue dunes. The wind in January was so violent it broke a downstairs window. Rosa’s bedroom turned cold and a fine lace of frost formed on the mirror; but Rosa was protected from the cold and the wind.

  Vince, before he left, had torn down his fences and put the sheep out on the grazing land to fend for themselves. But the sheep were stupid and most of them died that terrible winter.

  Not very many miles from the ranch, south past the Colorado border, Traveller organisms had begun to construct the new Artifact. If Rosa had stood at her ice-clad window she would have seen it grow; would have felt the tremors in the bedrock as the Earth’s magma was tapped and channeled; would have seen a ghostly luminescence on starry winter nights.

  That spring, as the snow melted and the ground softened, she would have seen Home dominate the southern horizon, a new mountain… would have seen it as A.W. Murdoch had seen it on the day he abandoned the flesh.

  But Rosa Perry Connor slept on.

  * * *

  The days were warming when Rosa finally began to stir. The nights were cold, but the snow was long past.

  Each day, she quickened a little inside her chrysalis.

  Awareness grew. She felt the process reaching its consummation; felt her new self struggling against confinement.

  In a matter of days she would burst free.

  Rosa felt the Greater World, too, all the new complexity of it since so many souls had gone over.

  But she was
not the only one left on the Earth. There had been other transformations.

  Many, in fact, on every continent: New creatures half-human or ex-human or subtly post-human.

  Like the man, Rosa thought as she rose toward dim consciousness… the boy… the old man who had become a boy…

  …who was aware of her, too…

  …who, in fact, was very close…

  Clamoring for her attention through the medium of the Greater World…

  Rosa, he said…

  … while she struggled up from a winter’s hibernation… Rosa, we’re very close…

  I hear you, boy, she thought. But I’m sleepy. What is it you want? Rosa, the boy said. We’re very close. Rosa, hurry. Rosa, finish what you have to finish, because we’re close now, and you might be in danger.

  Chapter 29

  I Know What You Are

  The caravan pulled into an empty truckstop on I-80.

  Home, a mountainous three-quarters disc above the southeastern prairie, turned a deep royal blue as the sun dropped below the horizon. A faint last light played about its apex and gave the high frost a reddish glow.

  We shouldn’t linger here, William thought. Home was nearly finished, and soon—within a very few days—it would cast loose from the Earth. No doubt it would be a spectacular sight, but also a dangerous one to any unreconstructed humans in the area. The creation of Home had opened a deep wound in the mantle of the planet. When Home rose toward orbit, the wound would bleed magma; the bedrock would tremble and quake.

  William knew all this through the agency of the Greater World, but he didn’t speak of it.

  It wasn’t clear whether he should.

  He walked a distance from Miriam’s camper, across the still-hot tarmac of the parking lot to an abandoned Honda, and sat on the dusty hood. He wore a sky-blue T-shirt, too big, and a pair of jeans unravelling at the knees, and when he closed his eyes he felt the gentle touch of the cooling air on his young skin.