“I’m only one man,” Matt said.
“Maybe one is all it takes. Maybe they can look at a thousand things at once—maybe everything matters.”
“I have to help her.” It was the only answer he could formulate. “Why?”
“Because sometimes we help each other. It’s the only decent thing we do.” He turned to the door. “Matthew!” He looked back.
“Don’t let that thing come near me. I don’t care how badly off I am. I don’t want it near me. Promise me that.” He nodded.
* * *
The Helper was at the foot of the stairs of the Wyoming state capitol building.
Scabs of wet ash clung to it in the frigid rain. Matt reached up and brushed away these impediments.
He was a little feverish and immensely weary. It was strange to be standing here at the foot of this alien structure in the ash, in the rain, with the domeless capitol building burning fitfully in the dark.
He shivered. The shiver became a convulsion, and he bent at the waist until it passed and hoped he wouldn’t faint.
Rain settled on the Helper in thick, dark drops. This Helper seemed to Matt less tall, less perfectly formed than the one at the City Hall Turnaround. He wondered whether it might have begun to erode. Perhaps it would eventually sink into the earth, a shapeless mound, discarded.
It didn’t develop eyes. It didn’t look at him. It remained impassive.
He told it about Beth. He described her wounds. Some part of him listened to the sound of his own voice and marveled at the melancholy note it added to the rainfall and the wind. He felt like an intern on rounds, reciting a patient’s symptoms for a hostile resident. Was this necessary? It seemed to be.
He said, “I know what you can do. I saw that woman. That insect woman. If you can change a human being from the inside out, you must be able to heal a chest wound. And Cindy Rhee, the little girl with the brain tumor. She was cured.”
The Helper remained impassive.
Was it dead? Deaf? Or simply not listening? “Answer me,” Matt said. “Talk to me now.”
The cold seemed to claw inside his body. He knew he couldn’t stand out in this night rain much longer. He put his hands on the body of the Helper. The Helper was as cold as the air. He left bloody prints on the alien matter.
It didn’t speak.
* * *
He carried Beth from the camper.
He knew this bordered on the insane, taking a dying woman into the cold night. But he seemed to be out of options. There was no reasoning, only a slow panic.
Beth was heavy. He held her with one hand supporting her shoulder and the other under her knees. She was a small woman, but he was terribly tired. He staggered under her weight. Her head lolled back and her breathing stopped. He waited for it to resume. Breathe, he thought. She gasped. A bubble of blood formed on her lips.
He told her how sorry he was that all this had happened. She didn’t deserve it. She wasn’t bad. It was one of those unforeseeable tragedies, like an earthquake, like a fire.
He put her down in front of the alien sentinel. She was pale and limp in the wet gray ash. Rain fell on her. Matt put his jacket over her. He pulled away one limp strand of hair that had fallen across her face.
Then he addressed the Helper.
“Here she is,” he said. “Fix her.”
Was this too peremptory? But he didn’t know another way to say it.
From that black obelisk: nothing.
“I know you can fix her. You have no excuse.”
An infinitely long time seemed to pass. A gusty wind turned the rain to needles on his skin. The wind made a sound in the ruins of the capitol building. It sounded like whispering.
The Helper was connected to the Artifact, he supposed, and the Artifact was full of humanity—or something that had once been humanity. “Are you all in there?” Several billion human souls. “Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
He was light-headed. He leaned against the Helper to steady himself. The Helper was cold, substantial, inanimate.
“Everybody in there?” He was hoarse with all this talking. “Jim Bix in there? Lillian? Annie, are you in there? Rachel?”
Silence and the sound of the spattering rain.
“You have no excuse. You can help this girl. Rachel, listen to me! This isn’t good at all. Just standing there letting this girl die. We didn’t raise you to do that.”
He closed his eyes.
Nothing had changed.
He felt himself sliding down, felt himself sitting in the wet ash beside Beth. He couldn’t hear Beth anymore. He wondered if she had stopped breathing. There was a buzzing in his ears that drowned all other sound.
“If you were human,” he said, “you would help.”
He fought to cling to his awareness, but the sense was eroding from his words. There was nothing left inside him but a weary frustration.
“If you were human. But you aren’t. I suppose we don’t matter anymore. This girl doesn’t matter. This dying girl. That offends me. Fuck you. Fuck all of you.”
He wanted to open his eyes but couldn’t. Time passed.
He roused for a moment.
“Rachel! Come out of there!”
He felt the stony body of it cradling his head.
“Rachel!”
* * *
Asleep, he dreamed that she did come out.
He dreamed that the Helper changed, that its contours melted, that it became the shape of his daughter, Rachel, as if carved from black ice, black against a gray sky, rain on the polished skin of her like dew.
He dreamed that she touched Beth, touched Matt himself, and the touch was warm.
He dreamed that she said a word to him: some wonderful, comforting word he could not understand, because the language she spoke was not a human language.
Chapter 39
Direction
As soon as he thought it would be safe to leave Matt for a few hours, Tom Kindle located a functioning automobile—a Honda that had been buried under ash but washed more-or:less clean by the rain—and drove north to Casper.
His leg nagged him relentlessly. The bullet wound was a knob of fire in the meat of his calf. But it had been a clean wound, and Matt had bandaged it well, and Kindle found he was able to move around all right if he favored the leg. He wondered how he looked with a limp.
Like a lopsided old son of a bitch, he supposed. Which was approximately true.
A wave of cool, dry Canadian air had chased the rain away. He drove an empty road north beyond the limits of the ashfall. He marveled at how good it was to see some green grass again. Wildflowers were blooming in the gullies.
He saw a number of dead animals along the way. The departure of the human Artifact had killed a lot of livestock. Did they know? Did they care, the so-called heirs of mankind? But Kindle guessed it was no worse than a natural disaster—a unique event, unlike the perpetual hardships human beings had imposed on the animal kingdom since the year zip. The herd animals would come back quickly now that so many of the range fences were down.
In Casper he picked up a ham radio he believed would operate from a twelve-volt car battery. He wasn’t sure how to hook it up, but it came with instructions—he could probably figure it out. He could have used Joey’s help, however.
As daylight faded, Kindle hunted for water. Water was a scarce commodity since the taps had ceased to work. A supermarket, its big windows shattered in the quake, yielded a dozen plastic gallon jugs of distilled H20.
He loaded them into a new car for the trip back: a Buick wagon with a nearly full tank of gas. Gas pumps didn’t work any better than the plumbing, but there was plenty of this old Detroit rolling stock free for the taking.
Night fell. He drove with the Buick’s heater running, with the smell of hot metal and a pine-scent air freshener, south toward that glow on the horizon, the smoldering volcanic crater, as if 1-25 crossed a border into the western precincts of Hell.
* * *
&n
bsp; In Cheyenne the next morning Kindle assembled two wooden crosses from lumber stock and loose nails.
When the crosses were solid, Kindle used a nail to scratch a letter deep into the horizontal board of the first of the two markers. It was awkward, clumsy work. But he persisted.
He wrote the letters A, B, B.
Then he paused to think. Would she prefer Abigail or Abby? Or Abbey, or Abbie, come to that?
He had only ever known her as Abby, and in the end he inscribed the simplest version of her name:
ABBY CUSHMAN
And on the second cross:
JOSEPH COMMONER
And he took the two crosses out and hammered them into the ash-gray lawn in front of the ruins of the Wyoming state capitol building, next to the statue of Esther Hobart Morris. Of course Joey and Abby weren’t buried here; their bodies were lost. But they deserved some memorial more dignified than the burned-out hulk of a Glendale motor home.
As for Jacopetti, Ganish, Makepeace, Colonel Tyler—Let ’em rot.
* * *
He went back to the camper and stood vigil over the inert forms of Matthew Wheeler and Beth Porter.
Matthew seemed to be asleep. His hands appeared to be gloved: they were encased in a glossy substance the color of bituminous coal.
“Matthew?” Kindle said. “Matthew, can you hear me?”
But the doctor didn’t answer—as he had not answered yesterday or the day before.
Beth was covered from the waist up in the same inert black material. Kindle didn’t speak to her. Why bother? Her head was all enclosed. Her nose, her mouth.
* * *
He built a fire and watched the smoke rise up into the blue twilight.
Probably no one would recognize the signature of a campfire in Cheyenne. Much of the city was still smoldering. But he would have to be careful out on the rangelands where it would be easy to spot a man’s fire at night. There might be other people who hadn’t chosen the option of Ohio. There might be more like Colonel Tyler.
* * *
Matt was awake in the morning.
The black substance had left his hands. Kindle wondered where it had gone. Had it been absorbed by the body? Had it evaporated into the air? “Thirsty,” Matt said.
Kindle brought him some water. The skin on the doctor’s hands was pink and new.
“I dreamed about Beth,” Matt said. “I dreamed they fixed her.”
“Maybe they did,” Kindle said.
* * *
Matt helped him build the evening’s fire. They brewed coffee and sat huddled at the flickering warmth.
“I thought maybe you had gone over,” Kindle said. “Maybe you’d end up an empty skin, like everybody else.”
Matt shook his head: No, that wasn’t the decision he had made.
Kindle allowed the silence to grow to its natural length. The stars had come out tonight, all these bright Wyoming stars. He said, “I talked to Ohio.”
“Hooked up a radio?”
He nodded. “Their Helpers are working again. I gather they weren’t for a while. Everything went down when the Traveller Artifact left. Power went down. The Travellers had been running all the turbines and so forth, keeping electricity on line, I guess all over the country—all over the world. Now it’s back on. But only in Ohio, the man says, a certain perimeter around that encampment. And a few similar places on other continents.”
“A perimeter?”
“Not a fence. But I gather, if you stray too far, you’re on your own. No power, no water, no guarantees.”
“It’s a safe place,” Matt said.
“Eden,” Kindle said. “Can you think of a better name for it? Kind of a garden. Live there, you’re taken care of. God looks after you for your natural span. God makes the sun shine, God makes the grass grow.”
“They’re not God,” Matt said.
“Might as well be.”
“But only in Ohio,” Matt said. “Maybe only as long as the Artifact stays in orbit.”
“Artifact might not leave. Guy in Ohio says it’s not decided yet, according to the Helpers.”
“War in Heaven?”
“An argument, at least.”
Matt looked across the gray lawn of the capitol building, at the local Helper, their Helper—the pillar to which he had prayed. “If we talked to it—”
“It was alive for a while, Matthew, but I think it’s not anymore. I think if you want to talk to a Helper you have to go to Ohio.”
Matt nodded. Periodically, he looked at his hands—his new, raw hands.
He said, “You think I’m responsible for this?”
“For keeping the Artifact here?” Kindle shrugged. He had thought about this. “Who knows? We’re talking about the collective decision of ten billion souls—I don’t think Matthew Wheeler tipped the pot. But you walked into their debate, I think. Made them look at what they left behind. And maybe you weren’t the only one. Maybe the same scene got played out a thousand times, different places on the Earth. People saying: If you want to be God, show a little compassion. Or if you’re still human, some human compassion.”
“You blame me?”
“No.”
“But you don’t like it.”
“No.” Kindle sipped his coffee. It was hot and bitter. “No, I do not.”
* * *
Beth woke up groggy the next morning—groggy but well. There was only a pucker of healthy skin where the bullet had entered her chest.
She asked about Joey and Colonel Tyler. Matt explained, not gently because there was no gentle way to say this, what had happened.
She listened carefully but didn’t speak much after that.
She sat at the evening fire hugging herself and drinking coffee. The talk flowed around her silence like a river around a stone.
Periodically, her hand strayed to her right shoulder and touched her jacket above the place where her tattoo had been—where it remained, Matt corrected himself; the Helper had not taken it away. He supposed some wounds were easier to heal than others.
* * *
She slept that night curled around herself on a mattress on the floor of the camper.
In the morning they began the journey east, across the border from Wyoming into Nebraska.
Tom Kindle said he would ride along for a while. But only a while.
* * *
Nebraska was a half-and-half state—arid in the west, wetter in the agricultural east. Interstate 80 joined the Platte River east of the Kingsley Dam, and the Platte fed a valley of rich alluvial soil where acre upon acre of corn, beets, potatoes, and beans had grown wild and high in an empty springtime.
Matt drove most of the time. Tom Kindle’s leg was still bothering him; it tended to cramp after a time behind the wheel. So Matt drove through these empty agricultural towns, pretty little towns made ragged by a hard, windy winter: Brady, Gothenburg, Lexington, Kearny. Sometimes Kindle rode in the cab beside him; mostly it was Beth.
Out of Kindle’s earshot, Beth talked a little more about what had happened—and what might happen.
“They’re still inside us,” she said. “The—what are they called? Neocytes.”
He nodded.
“They’ll be with us for a long time.” He nodded again.
She said, “You know about this, too?”
“Yes.”
“Same as me? I mean… nobody told you, you just know it, right?”
“Right.”
“They’re inside us. But dormant. Not doing anything. Until…”
“You can say it,” Matt told her. There was a potent magic in saying things out loud.
“Until we die,” Beth said. “And then they’ll give us another chance to say yes. To go with them.” He nodded.
“Like heaven,” she said. “A little like.”
“And not just us. Everybody in that town on the river, that town in Ohio.”
Everybody in Eden, Matt thought.
They did some night driving.
It was
Kindle who pointed out the line of division that had appeared on the orbiting Artifact, a dark equator on that bright circle.
“It’s dividing,” said Kindle, who had been talking on the radio again. “That’s what Ohio tells me. It’ll be two Artifacts, not one. One to go roving among the stars. One to stay here.”
“Like a custodian,” Matt said.
“Or a local god.” He gave Matt a long look. “You don’t seem surprised.”
He admitted, “I’m not.”
“You knew about it?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
He shrugged.
Kindle turned away. He watched the road pass. He said, “You’re not what you used to be.”
“Not entirely.”
“God damn,” Kindle said. It was not a particular lament. It wasn’t aimed at Matt. It was just a sad curse to rattle away in the chilly night air. “God damn.”
Epilogue
As wise as they were, the Travellers had come to the Earth with their own assumptions and for their own reasons. They were benevolent but clumsy giants; and the human polis, alone in orbit, began to tinker with certain changes the Travellers had made.
In the oceans, the population of Traveller phytoplankton dropped to a fraction of its earlier numbers. The work continued—there was still much excess C02 to be bound into the sea—but it needn’t be done in a season, and it needn’t inject so much violent energy into the atmosphere.
The Harvest Page 44
