The Harvest

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “I’ll need bandages,” he said.

  “I don’t want you going out there where those people are.”

  “I can’t work miracles, Colonel. These wounds need bandages. Your wound, for instance. I need—well, at least, clean cloth.”

  “There should be such a thing in the house. I think there’s a linen closet in the upstairs hall.”

  “You trust me that far?”

  “Don’t be asinine. If you’re not back promptly, I’ll shoot the girl. Or if I see you out that window, I’ll shoot the girl. Get what you need. But hurry.” Tyler’s face was pale and glassy with sweat.

  * * *

  Matt was out of the room for five minutes. He came back with a stack of clean white linen, a box of Kotex from Rosa Connor’s bathroom cupboard, and a plan.

  The plan was ugly, and the plan was dangerous, but it was the only way Matt could see into a future that contained both himself and a chance, at least, for Beth.

  The room, which had been Vince Connor’s study, was bathed in bright blue light from the window. Matt was conscious of the light but couldn’t spare any thought for it. He had achieved a narrow, intense focus of attention. It reminded him of his days as an intern. There were times, at the end of a long shift, when he would be sleepless and vague and running on empty, and some emergency would arise. And either he would screw it up, maybe threatening somebody’s life, or he would force himself into this condition of unnatural clarity, this bright bubble of concentration.

  He concentrated on Tyler and Beth, the angle of his approach to the problem, the geometry of life and death.

  He went to Beth first; but Tyler said, again, “Not yet. I’m losing considerable blood. I don’t want to pass out.”

  “She’s in worse shape than you are, Colonel.”

  “I know that,” Tyler said irritably. “I want you to stop this bleeding from my shoulder. Then you can attend to the girl.”

  Matt didn’t argue. Focus, he thought. Any distraction was too much distraction.

  Tyler trained his pistol on Beth but allowed Matt close enough to examine his wound. There was enough light to see that the bullet had passed through fairly cleanly. “Joey shot you?”

  Tyler nodded. “He found me with the girl.” He watched for Mart’s reaction. “Does that shock you?”

  “Not especially.”

  “She was—what’s a polite word for it? Loose.”

  “Maybe you aren’t too tightly wrapped yourself, Colonel.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Matt took his pulse. It was rapid but not weak. “Are you nauseous? Dizzy?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “The wound isn’t as bad as it looks.”

  “I can’t feel anything in the arm.”

  “Damaged a nerve, maybe. Under the circumstances, I can’t do anything about that. You understand?” Tyler nodded.

  Matt tore away the shirt and packed a sanitary napkin against the entrance wound and a second behind the shoulder where the bullet had come out. The Kotex was absorbent and wouldn’t stick to the wound. He improvised a broad bandage and wound it around Tyler’s shoulder. Tyler winced. The pain was beginning to break through his defenses.

  When the dressing was secure, Matt opened his bag. He took a disposable syringe out of its wrapper and thumbed the plastic protector off the needle.

  His attention kept wandering to Tyler’s pistol, aimed almost casually at Beth. How much pressure was necessary to squeeze that trigger? How much awareness to keep it aimed?

  He put the hypodermic needle through the rubber seal of a small brown vial and drew up a measured amount of clear liquid.

  Tyler was watching him. “What is that?”

  “A systemic antibiotic. Bullets aren’t especially clean.”

  “Is it necessary?”

  “Depends. Do you want to risk gangrene? We’re a long way from a hospital, Colonel.”

  Tyler regarded him silently for a time. Oddly, he seemed to be listening. To what voice, Matt wondered. What invisible third party?

  “Can you inject it into the bad arm? Because I’m not putting down the pistol. I’m not that stupid.”

  “How about the leg,” Matt said. “The thigh.”

  “I’m not taking off my pants, either.”

  “It’s a broad weave. The needle will pass through the cloth. It isn’t very sanitary, however.”

  Tyler shrugged, distracted by his pain.

  Matt flushed air from the syringe, flicked away bubbles, then pushed the needle into the meat of Tyler’s leg and forced the plunger down. “May I tend the girl’s wound now?”

  “Very well,” Tyler said.

  * * *

  Sissy, Colonel Tyler pleaded. I’m too weak. You’re not, his mother’s ghost insisted. Stay awake! Stay awake! She hovered in the corner and she smelled like stale blood—or perhaps it was the room.

  You’re not hurt bad! The doctor said so. You trust him?

  He took an oath. They all take an oath. But I’m so tired, Tyler thought.

  You have it all, Sissy said. You have all the guns. All the guns are in this room. Joey’s gone, the girl is gone, Tom Kindle is gone, Tim Belanger is gone. The old woman is no threat. You can kill the doctor whenever you like. And there are only four in that trailer, and they’re unarmed, and one of them is a woman, and one of them is an old man. Four would be easy to kill.

  All this killing, Tyler thought. He was a little dazed by it.

  You must, Sissy scolded him. Or people will know.

  Tyler guessed he could do it. Shoot Wheeler. Walk out to the trailer. Walking would be the hard part. Open the door and shoot until everybody was dead.

  It wasn’t complicated, but it would be difficult. And he was so very tired. He lifted the pistol, which had drooped away from its target, Beth, but the pistol was oddly heavy—and a new suspicion entered the Colonel’s mind.

  * * *

  The light was much brighter now.

  Matt crouched over Beth. He was afraid of the wound, but he forced himself to look at it. He unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it away, exposing her small breasts, her pale skin freckled with blood.

  The bullet had penetrated the chest wall and allowed air to flow into the chest cavity. Each time she exhaled, bloody bubbles formed on the wound. Her inhalations were labored, choked, and liquid.

  He couldn’t find an exit wound. The bullet was still inside her, might have been deflected by a bone.

  He took a carotid pulse. It was weak and irregular. She was clammy and didn’t respond when he raised her eyelid.

  He took another sanitary pad from the box and used the plastic wrapping to cover Beth’s chest wound. It was urgent to seal this opening, and the plastic was reasonably clean, reasonably airtight when he fastened it with surgical tape. Then he lifted her into a semisitting position with her body inclined toward the injury, and her breathing seemed to ease a little.

  Beth! he thought. Her head lolled to one side.

  He needed to keep her blood volume up, and he needed to get her to a hospital. Even then, with modern equipment at hand, he wasn’t sure of his ability to treat the wound singlehandedly. He might have to explore for the bullet.

  He looked at Tyler.

  Tyler’s eyelids were drooping. His mouth moved, but soundlessly. Who was he talking to?

  Matt watched the Colonel’s hand sag until the pistol was aimed, not at Beth, but at the floor. Tyler’s mouth hung open now; his eyes were nearly closed. Matt turned his attention back to Beth.

  She’ll need an improvised stretcher, he thought, and which would be the fastest vehicle? And where was the nearest hospital? Laramie? Cheyenne?

  He stood up and turned to the door…

  But here was an unhappy miracle: Tyler stood up, too.

  He came out of Vince Connor’s old recliner like Neptune from the briny deep. His eyes were wide, his pupils small, and the blue light from the window made an eerie halo around him. “It wasn’t an antibiotic,”
Tyler said.

  It had been morphine, perhaps enough to kill him, certainly enough to sedate him, and what miracle of will or sheer evil had allowed him to resist it even this long?

  Tyler’s good right hand came cranking up, the pistol in it.

  I’m going to die here, Matt realized. In this stupid room. For this stupid reason.

  Then Tyler looked puzzled, turned his head aside, and vomited massively across Vince Connor’s desk.

  Matt dropped to the floor. He wanted just a little time, time enough for the morphine to do its work, as it inevitably must. He rolled into the corner of the room, knocking over a table lamp.

  At the sound, Colonel Tyler jerked his head.

  The pistol swiveled with his look.

  Simultaneously the door crashed open.

  Tom Kindle stood in the dark hallway with the barrel of his hunting rifle sweeping the room.

  Tyler pivoted to face the motion.

  Kindle fired.

  Tyler fired his pistol.

  The two sounds, in this confined space, battered the ears. Even Beth, deeply unconscious, gave an involuntary twitch.

  Kindle cried out and fell back in the hallway.

  Colonel Tyler fell, but soundlessly, with Tom Kindle’s bullet lodged in his heart.

  * * *

  John! Sissy said as he fell.

  It was the first time she had said his name, the first time since he was a child.

  Tyler looked at her as the life went out of him in a powerful sigh. It was as if he had been holding his breath for fifty-two years, and his breath was his life, and now he just opened his mouth and let it go.

  John, she said, her voice grown faint. Now you can come to live with me again.

  * * *

  It’s over, Matt thought. The words seemed to circle in his head. It had been vile and ugly and there was still Beth’s terrible wound demanding his attention, and Kindle in the hallway, but Tyler was dead: that impediment was gone.

  It’s over.

  He must have said the words aloud as he bent over Tom Kindle, who had been shot in his bad leg and was bleeding from the calf. “Matthew, it’s not,” Kindle said through gritted teeth.

  Matt wrapped the injury. “What do you mean?”

  “Are you blind? It’s bright as day out there! Two a.m. and bright as day! And the sound! Jesus, Matthew, are you deaf?”

  Not deaf, merely distracted.

  He heard it now, a faraway rumble.

  It came through the air. It came up through the bedrock.

  It began to shake the house.

  The Artifact was leaving the Earth.

  Chapter 37

  Ascension

  From the doorway of Bob Ganish’s motor home, Abby was able to see the Connor house—the dark window where Colonel Tyler was holding Matt hostage—and beyond it, on the horizon, the disc of the new Artifact, glowing like a floodlight or a bright new moon.

  Paul Jacopetti had taken a propranolol and was resting in the camper’s narrow bed. Ganish and Chuck Makepeace sat stiffly at the table in the kitchenette. They had grumbled at this confinement, but not too loudly; it was Tyler’s idea, and they were Tyler’s constituents; they seemed to think their docility would win them some brownie points when this was all over. “We don’t know for certain what’s going on,” Makepeace said. “It would be premature to pass judgment.”

  idiot, Abby thought.

  She worried about Matt, and about Miriam, grown so strangely thin, and about Tom Kindle, hiding in the shadows with that hunting rifle of his. But her eyes kept straying to the Artifact. She had grown so accustomed to that presence on the far prairie that she had forgotten what an astonishing thing it really was. It was a spaceship, she thought, as round as a marble and as big as a mountain. It was affixed to the Earth like a tick on the skin of a dog… it had fed on the Earth, filled itself with humanity, and now, sated, it was apparently ready to leave.

  It was almost too bright to look at.

  Abby shaded her eyes and stood at the door of the Glendale waiting for a resolution. For more gunfire, or for Matt to emerge from the house. Or Colonel Tyler. Or for the world to end: with this peculiar blue light radiating across the prairie, she guessed that was a possibility, too.

  “You hear something?” Bob Ganish said.

  The car salesman had cocked his head to listen.

  Chuck Makepeace looked up sullenly from a game of solitaire. “No.”

  “Like a rumble,” Ganish said. “Like a truck going by. You really don’t hear it?”

  Abby pressed her face against the cold window glass and felt another caress of the fear that had not left her for a day and a night. “I do,” she said. “I hear it.”

  The noise was faint but distinct, like thunder, like the artillery of a faraway war.

  Then it was as if the cannons had come suddenly much closer, as if the caissons had rolled up behind the Connor house where the grazing land began. The Glendale motor home began to yaw and pitch.

  Abby braced herself against the frame of the door. Jacopetti began shouting from the bed, shouting a single word over and over. The sense of it was lost in the roar; she looked at him and tried to read his lips. But he wasn’t speaking to her, he wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular; he was speaking to God, Abby thought. His eyes were wild with panic. The word was, “Earthquake!”

  Chuck Makepeace fell to the floor and pulled the table down after him. Playing cards fluttered through the air like wounded birds. Bob Ganish gazed around himself in mute startlement, then slumped into a crude duck-and-cover with his hands clasped behind his neck. He had stocked this camper with every conceivable necessity, and the floor was suddenly awash with canned goods, bottled water, spare propane tanks, and plastic jugs of gasoline.

  Somehow, Abby managed to stay upright.

  She saw the Artifact begin to rise. The horizon had obscured its lower circumference, but now a gap began to widen there.

  The spaceship rose with a gentle, impossible buoyancy.

  At its base, a dome of hot volcanic gases exploded after it.

  And the cannonfire became a deeper, more frightening growl; and the floor dropped under Abby, and rose and dropped again, until she lost her footing and fell.

  * * *

  Home had driven its roots deep into the lithosphere. Its central artery, its umbilical connection to the Earth, was a vent that reached below the basaltic crust to the fluid magma.

  Home’s departure fractured the substrate beneath it into floating chonoliths like so many loose teeth and exposed a reservoir of liquid rock to the cold night air.

  The mantle shook with protest. A tectonic shockwave radiated outward from its epicenter in northern Colorado and was followed immediately by a second shock and a third.

  The hole in the earth vented a cloud of luminous gas, a phenomenon geologists called a nute ardente. The cloud emerged at enormous speed and pressure. It carried volcanic ejecta at high velocity, peppering the retreating Home with rock fragments. It unfolded around the newly opened crater and set fire to the prairie in an expanding ring miles in diameter.

  Home rose at the crown of this maelstrom and accelerated toward the high atmosphere, toward the stars.

  From an altitude, the caldera on the land below resembled a flower: a stamen of boiling lava, petals of gray smoke touched at their tips with flame.

  Home rose silently beyond a thin waft of cloud, rose brightly and silently in the thinning air. Its motive force was silent; it transformed its few gigawatts of waste energy into a blue-white wash of photons.

  In the space inside it, deserts shimmered in virtual sunlight; alpine meadows bloomed at the approach of a virtual spring. New oceans lapped at the shores of new continents.

  Below, in the darkness, a blister of ash and fire expanded over the cold Colorado tableland.

  * * *

  The first shock knocked Matt to the floor beside Tom Kindle.

  He guessed it was an earthquake. It felt as if the Connor
house had grown legs and begun to take long, bounding leaps across the prairie.

  Maddeningly, there was nothing to hang on to. He was as helpless as a mouse in a rolling barrel. After what seemed like an endless pummeling, he managed to grab a doorjamb and brace himself firmly enough to raise his head and look around.

  The air was full of dust. The quake seemed to raise dust from every surface. Above the roar, he could hear the joists twist in the ceiling. He wondered how long the house would last.

  Tom Kindle writhed on the floor with one hand clutching his bad leg.

  Matt pulled himself into the room where Colonel Tyler had died. The shaking seemed progressively less intense, though it had not entirely stopped. He looked for Beth. The Colonel’s body and Joey’s had been thrown into a ghastly embrace, Tyler’s limp arm draped over Joey’s shoulder and his hand pawing at Joey’s ruined head. Beth was approximately where he had left her but no longer sitting up against the foot of the recliner; she had slid back to the floor and her breathing—she was still breathing—sounded tentative and very wet.

  The floor bucked again, and Matt braced himself until it steadied. He heard what must be the sound of the Connors’ front porch collapsing: a series of dry, woody explosions. The window popped out of its frame and shattered on the ground outside the house.

  When the trembling eased, Matt pulled himself up to the empty sill and took a hurried look outside.

  He couldn’t see the Artifact—the window faced the wrong direction—but he knew it must be rising. It was still radiating that vivid blue-white light, casting sundial shadows from the RVs and the prairie scrub, but now the shadows were growing shorter and inclining to the west.

  The door of the Glendale opened, and Abby stood in it looking bruised and bewildered. She raised a hand to shield her eyes against the light. Matt heard someone crying out from inside the vehicle—Jacopetti, he thought. He wanted to tell Abby to stay away from the house, it wasn’t structurally safe… the walls were inclining and it was a miracle only the porch had collapsed. The urgent thing was to get Beth outside, get Kindle outside, before the next shock or aftershock…