The Harvest

by K. Makansi

  “What are we waiting for?” he asks, and turns sharply on his heel toward the kitchen door that leads out into the garden.

  Chan-Yu scoops up the pile of pendants as Vale flings open the door and strides around the corner to where the old oak towers over the remnants of my grandfather’s shade garden.

  We stop under the outstretched branches of the oak, arching above us like beams in an ancient cathedral. Vale stares up at the branches, and Chan-Yu holds the tangled pendants out in front of him like a talisman.

  “Meera was a Wayfarer,” Chan-Yu says finally. “But not like the other Wayfarers. She had the markings, though hers were scars, not tattoos. She didn’t guide the lost to their destinations. She worked in the Sector, not in the Wilds.”

  “She found me when I was lost,” I protest. I turn to Vale. “She and Snake guided me to you, or at least helped me find where you were. She led me to Bunqu. And she kept me safe.” A sharp pain slices through me, the bitter sting of an unfinished friendship biting behind my eyes.

  “Maybe her purpose was to lead us here,” Vale says. “Is there something special about this tree?” He narrows his eyes and stares off in the distance. It looks like he’s trying to remember something from a fading dream.

  “Not really,” I say with a shrug. “It’s not that large for an oak. It’s not very old. There’s nothing unique about it.”

  “It’s a live oak,” Chan-Yu observes, running his fingertips along some of the smaller leaves, a dark green color, and crisp, unlike the wide, fleshy ones of most oaks in these parts. “Live oaks are rare here. Until Old World climate change shifted weather patterns, it was almost impossible for them to survive this far north.”

  In contrast to Chan-Yu’s measured rationality, Vale is behaving oddly. He cocks his head to one side and sniffs the air like a dog that’s caught a scent. He puts his fingers to the trunk of the tree and starts muttering to himself.

  “It’s too faint.” His voice is low, urgent. “At the very edge of my perception. There’s something … if I wasn’t thinking about it, if I wasn’t open to it, I’d probably ignore it. Do you feel it?” He whirls toward us. I shake my head no, and Vale turns back to the tree.

  “Vale?” I draw out my words, watching him with concern. “Are you okay?” He ignores me.

  “It’s there. Definitely there. A hum. A vibration. Like a tuning fork.” He presses his palms into the tree trunk, and a moment later, presses his whole body into the tree. “It’s vibrating,” he whispers.

  I stare at him, unsure what to do or how to react. I glance at Chan-Yu, seeking some reassurance that the man I love is in fact acting crazy and I’m not crazy for thinking he’s crazy. But Chan-Yu is watching Vale with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. He doesn’t look the slightest bit worried. Then, to my great surprise, Vale bends over and starts unlacing his boots.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, a hint of panic now bleeding into my voice. Vale kicks off his boots and then rips off his socks. He tosses them to the side and digs his toes into the dirt. He stands, unmoving, for a moment, then walks a few paces away, comes back to us, and then puts his hands on his hips and looks at us with none of the makings of a madman.

  “I’m sure of it.” He looks from Chan-Yu to me and back to Chan-Yu. “The earth is vibrating. But even that isn’t quite the right word. I can’t explain it. It’s like how you know an instrument is tuned correctly. A piano or a guitar. There’s nothing about it you can see, or feel, or even hear necessarily. One single note is just as good as any other, but when the instrument is tuned, when the strings vibrate just so and the frequency of the sound waves are in sync, all the notes work together, building on each other in precise mathematical intervals. It just feels right.” Vale pauses for a minute, staring at the ground, lost in thought. Chan-Yu watches him in silence. For my part, I’m starting to feel what Vale was talking about. Something on the edge of my perception. But it’s not something I’m sensing. It’s the feeling that we’re on the edge of a discovery. Like climbing astride Osprey’s oiseau, it feels like I’m in neutral, with my engine revving, waiting to shift into gear. My heart hammers against my ribcage as I close my eyes and try to let myself feel what Vale described. Then he breaks the silence.

  “This is going to sound wild, but I think the pendants are communicating with the roots of this tree. Maybe that’s how the technology works. The pendants and the astrolabes communicate through the soil, through the roots of the plants nearby.”

  Chan-Yu nods.

  “We have long known that the forests communicate in ways we cannot understand and cannot touch,” he says, and by we I understand that he doesn’t mean anyone in the Sector. “We know they communicate through their roots, through an intricate network of fungi so dense and complicated we do not have the tools to model or understand it. We know better than most others what the trees mean to say, but we cannot understand or speak with them. Yet.”

  “What if someone figured it out?” I ask. “And replicated that signaling in these pendants and astrolabes?”

  “It is possible,” Chan-Yu says. Then he turns abruptly and starts walking away. He is almost back to the house while Vale and I watch him in confused silence. Then he turns around and calls to us, “Can you feel it now?”

  Vale pauses, stands perfectly still for a moment, and then tilts his head to the side and furrows his brow as if listening to something faint. After a moment, he calls back.

  “No.”

  Chan-Yu smiles triumphantly and marches back toward us, the pendants held out in front of him. He returns to Vale’s side. “And now?”

  Vale closes his eyes and cocks his head again. His voice is barely a whisper. “Yes.”

  The gears shift, the engine roars, and I feel as though I am launched forward. Goosebumps prickle to attention on my skin. “This is right over granddad’s root cellar.”

  Vale stares at me, confused.

  “This is right over the root cellar,” I repeat. Then it clicks for him, too. He takes off in a sprint toward the house, his socks and shoes forgotten behind him. I follow, and can feel more than hear Chan-Yu’s quiet strides behind me. At the side of the house, where a host of vines and shrubs have overtaken the old entrance to the basement, Vale rips the cellar door open, almost pulling the doors off their hinges in his hurry to get inside. It’s pitch dark but for the glimmer of pale morning light shining down the stairwell. There are rows upon rows of shelves filled with canvas bags of decomposing grains, jars of canned and pickled food, bottles of homebrewed barley beer, wine, mead, kombucha. This was my grandfather’s overflow cellar, where he stored food in case of emergency. Like so many of his generation who had been touched by the Famine Years, he hoarded food, stored it obsessively, kept this cellar packed to the brim even in the heart of summer when food was as plentiful as sunlight.

  As a child I was terrified of my grandfather’s cellar. He would send me down here occasionally to collect things for whatever meal he was preparing—canned beans, dried grains, jars of sauces. I would walk downstairs trembling, talking myself through every step: there’s nothing here, there’s nothing here, there’s nothing here. Once at the bottom I would grab whatever jar he’d asked for and bolt back upstairs as fast as I could, taking the steps two at a time, leaping back outside as though I’d just narrowly escaped a closing portal to Hell.

  “Nothing down there but jars and garden tools,” my grandfather would say as I emerged back into the kitchen, flushed with fear and panting, his voice lilting with laughter.

  I touch my fingers to where I remember there being a biolight activator, but when I hit the small glass panel, nothing happens.

  “The power must be out down here,” I mutter. Fighting for the Resistance has cured me of my fear of darkness, but without infrared contacts, I see no better than I could as a child. Vale doesn’t seem to hear me. I squint, trying to see through the darkness, but Vale keeps moving confidently forward, as if it were as bright down here as it is outside. He heads
toward a dim corner of the cellar, far from the bright entrance. I don’t know why, but he seems to know, somehow, where to go, and is undaunted by the lack of light.

  Is he able to feel these ‘vibrations’ because of what Corine did to him? Is that why he can see so well down in the dark? Why he can sense things not even Chan-Yu can?

  Vale prowls forward through the corridor, which smells wet and moldy like any old root cellar would. But there’s a richness here, too. It almost smells fresh, like mint or lemon.

  “Something’s growing down here,” I say.

  “Mmm,” Chan-Yu agrees behind me, sniffing the air.

  Vale stops suddenly and turns.

  “Give me the pendants.” Chan-Yu hands them over without a word of protest. Holding the pendants outstretched in his palm like an offering to one of the old gods, Vale walks toward the darkest end of the cavern. Chan-Yu and I follow closely. We’re expectant, quiet, holding our breath for something to happen.

  But nothing does.

  “What now?” My voice is so quiet, I wonder if anyone heard me. The feeling of being on the edge hasn’t gone away. We’re almost there.

  Chan-Yu reaches past me to take one of the golden acorns from Vale’s hand. Without a word, he turns it upside down and uses his fingernail to flip the beacon switch. And then, with a whispering swoosh, a wall at end of the cellar slides away, and I am suddenly blinded by a bright light from beyond. I throw an arm up to shield my eyes.

  “By all that’s green and growing,” Vale whispers. I lower my arm, squint into the light, and find his hand waiting for mine. “What is this?”

  I walk forward, Vale at my side. The air is full of jasmine, citrus, and wet stone. I breathe in deeply. There are steps leading down to a lower level, the cellar dug deeper, I suppose, to make the ceiling higher. As we emerge into a wide, open space, with white walls on all sides and an incredible wealth of greenery, a multitude of plants are arranged carefully in rows and alleys as diverse and varied as the plants in Rhinehouse’s old lab at the Thermopylae base. Even though my eyes have adjusted to the light, my brain refuses to adjust to the reality of what I’m experiencing.

  I am in a greenhouse.

  I am in a large, underground greenhouse lit by bright grow lights and presumably powered by electricity generated in the roots of all the plants that my grandfather cultivated above ground. I am in a greenhouse built under an old oak tree that somehow communicates with thirteen little acorn pendants and when they’re all together, they vibrate in a way that Vale can sense, but Chan-Yu and I and presumably everyone normal cannot. I lead Vale in between one of the rows, staring at all the plants, tempted to reach out and touch them but remembering Rhinehouse’s sharp admonition: Don’t touch anything. I don’t know what these are or why they’re here. Are they dangerous? Then I see a small tree next to us, watered by a drip irrigation line, bright yellow fruits dripping off of it.

  “Vale,” I whisper, pointing. “Lemons.”

  “Are we walking in Lotus?” he asks, his voice full of awe, and I know he doesn’t mean nelumbo nucifera, the lotus plant, but LOTUS, the Old World seed bank database Eli, Soren, and I discovered encoded into an artificial genome.

  I shake my head. I don’t know.

  Up ahead, I see a long desk where old computers, almost laughable because of their age, are set up against the wall. There’s something painted on the wall above the desk, but it’s hard to make it out through the tangle of vines and trees that have grown far beyond their original containers, crowding out the ceiling space and blocking our view. I walk closer.

  “Oh.” I say simply, when it finally comes into view. Vale’s grip tightens around my hand. He sees it too. It’s an image of two smiling men, arms slung over each other’s shoulders. One has a toddler, a little girl with short cropped hair, sitting on his shoulders; the other holds a boy’s hand in his. The girl smiles brightly and holds her chubby hand up as if waving at someone while the boy, no more than five years old and adorable with dark, curly hair and a toothy smile, looks up adoringly at the man holding his hand. They’re standing in front of a newly planted oak tree. There’s a wooden sign next to them with writing carved into it, overlaid with red paint. It reads, “The Waystation.”

  “I don’t understand,” Vale says, his voice barely audible.

  “Do you know those men?” Chan-Yu asks, coming to stand next to us, staring at the photo, as enraptured as we are.

  “It’s my grandfather and my mother,” I say, pointing at the smiling man with the little girl on his shoulders. The dark hair and skin; round, almond-shaped eyes; and bright, gummy smile are all unmistakably my grandfather’s, though I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a picture of him that young.

  “And my grandfather, Augustus Orleán,” Vale whispers, “with my dad.”

  20 - VALE

  Summer 1, Sector Annum 106, 10h10

  Gregorian Calendar: June 21

  “Even the hydroponics system is still working,” Soren says, his fingers exploring a thin tube that leads to a glass pool flush with green plants and dangling, waterlogged root systems. The water is clean and clear. “There’s still water flowing through these hoses. ”

  “How?” Dr. Rhinehouse asks. He’s staring around us throughout the greenhouse, as amazed and awed as Remy, Chan-Yu, and I were when we first found it.

  “We think Meera made it her personal mission to keep this place alive,” Osprey says, standing off to the side, as tall and lithe as a sapling. “And to keep it secret,” she adds. “Remy said Meera suggested she come here if she ever needed a safe place. When she left Vale the note about the acorns—”

  “Where’s the power source for these grow lights?” Rhinehouse interrupts. Remy, Chan-Yu, and I asked ourselves the same question as we wandered down the aisles of the greenhouse. Eventually, we came up with a possible answer, although it doesn’t make sense. My eyes meet Soren’s, and I wordlessly point to the ceiling above us.

  “The garden? The tree?” Rhinehouse responds.

  “We’re directly underneath the oak and the garden Kanaan loved so much. Seems like he tapped into the root system to power this place, just like the biolights, but on a larger scale.”

  Though I only met him a few times, I can feel Kanaan’s ghost, his worn hands in the earth, flipping irrigation switches, taking notes, creating his plants down here as surely as he tended them above. It’s been two days since we found this place, and I still haven’t gotten over the shock of seeing my grandfather standing arm-in-arm with Kanaan, both of them with their children near at hand—children who would one day find themselves on opposite sides of an ideological war.

  I never met my grandfather. My father adored him—idolized him, even—but he died young, when my father was only six. Probably about a year or so after the photo was taken that was so carefully painted onto the wall above the bank of computers. He failed to return from one of his solo scavenging adventures, and his body was later found by another team of explorers. The cause of death was determined to be clostridium botulinum, an Old World strain of a bacterium the OAC had already effectively wiped out with genetically targeted antibiotics. No one knew exactly how he contracted the bacterium, but it was widely assumed to have come from some fish he ate while foraging in the marshy northern shores of Lake Ayrie. After the autopsy, his body was burned instead of being ceremonially planted in a garden, as is custom. His death, along with several others on the fringes of the Sector, was one of the motivating factors for the declaration of No-Go zones, areas of the Wilds where Sector citizens are forbidden to go for fear of bringing back Old World toxins or disease.

  I grew up without hearing much about him, and I think my dad was tormented by the early loss of his father, to the point where he could only speak about him on special moments of solemnity or emotion. When I successfully piloted my first airship, Philip told me how Augustus—or August as he was called more often—built the first working airship in the Sector, using the mechanical bones of an old harrier
jump jet he’d found. As a scientist, he’d pieced the airship together out of necessity. In one of the vids, he said his goal was simply to go farther on his scavenging adventures than anyone else had ever been.

  The hovering technology adapted from the harrier that allowed the airship to lift vertically into the air went on to become the basis of our hovercars and many of our drones, and the cold fusion reactor Gold discovered on one of his trips and used as an engine is now standard, with some improvements, in every airship in the Sector. He became a very rich man, and when he died, his will stipulated that half the profits from the machine’s development be given to his son, which is how my father became one of the wealthiest men in Okaria without ever lifting a finger.

  The rest of his money was donated to the Okarian Academy and the Sector Research Institute which helped catapult Okaria, once a small but growing town, into the beautiful capital city it is today, and attracted citizens from all over the Sector who hoped to send their children to the finest school in the nation.

  From what I’ve pieced together by watching old news vids, my grandfather was an impulsive adventurer, a man who lived on the edge, always willing to take risks others shied away from. This made him, for many, a hard person to deal with. My grandmother was among those who refused to put up with his erratic lifestyle, and she left him—and my father—just a year after Philip was born. For the next five years, August took care of Philip, leaving him with my grandmother for only a few months out of the year when he went scavenging.

  For the most part, my father refused to let the wealth he inherited go to his head. In fact, I think he spent most of his life trying to walk the razor’s edge between the memory of his creative father and the reality of his staid and proper mother. One thing my grandmother did say, in the few times she spoke of her ex-husband, was that Augustus Orleán loved his only child more than anything he ever invented. From the look on my father’s face in the picture on the wall, I’d say the feeling was mutual. The ache of loss blooms in my gut. Before I’d discovered the truth about my parents, I felt much the same about Philip.