Текст книги "The Harvest"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

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.

Debate was raging through the Greater World. As the human polis expanded to completion, it had begun to take over certain tasks from the Travellers—chiefly, the management of the Earth. It was an onerous burden.

The Travellers had approached the Earth like a benevolent but clumsy giant. For all their wisdom, they hadn’t foreseen a ratio of resistance as high as one in ten thousand. They had underestimated the stubbornness of humanity, William thought, no doubt an easy mistake to make. Their own transition from a biological/planetary species to a virtual/interstellar epistemos had been self-generated and nearly unanimous.

But the question remained: How should the human collectivity, the Greater World, relate to this stubborn minority?

Leave them, one faction asserted. They’ve chosen their independence and we ought to respect it Let them find their own destiny. The destiny of the polis was among the stars; the Earth could fend for itself.

It’s inhumane to abandon them, other voices argued. They’re free to choose for themselves, but what about their children? If the human birthright is among the stars, how can we condemn another generation to death?

No resolution had emerged.

William’s problem was a miniature of the larger debate. He knew what Colonel Tyler was; he understood the threat Colonel Tyler posed… but should he intervene?

For the sake of his last sojourn on Earth he had elected to become a child again. He had put a great many memories behind him, stored them temporarily elsewhere, because he wanted this unmediated experience—not just to feel like a twelve-year-old but to be one. And so the Presidency had vanished into the misty past; the Greater World became a presence vaguely perceived.

Now this crisis had forced him out of his ekstasis and troubled him with doubt.

He supposed it wasn’t coincidence that had led him back to Colonel Tyler. Some unperceived connection had been forged as long ago as that day in Washington when he sat in the park with Colonel Tyler’s pistol at his throat. The boy had pedaled aimlessly across America; the man inside had maneuvered him into meeting this sad expedition. It wasn’t clear what events might unfold, but he felt a role for himself in their unfolding.

And a scant half mile down the road was the Connor farmhouse, another dilemma. {Rosa, he broadcast silently. Rosa, hurry!)

He heard Miriam come up behind him. Her footsteps dragged on the gritty parking lot. She’s tired, William thought. Miriam had demonstrated an enormous strength for her age—she insisted on driving her own camper. William recognized and appreciated her resilience. But she tired easily and was often short of breath.

She stood beside him, looking at Home where it dominated the horizon.

“In its own way,” Miriam said, “it’s beautiful.”

It was. Like a vast canyon wall at sunset, Home was every shade of blue, from the palest pastel at its summit to the indigo shadows at its base. A few tenuous clouds had formed along its western slope.

“You look sad,” Miriam said.

“I was thinking,” William told her.

“About what?”

He shrugged. “Things.”

There was a distant clatter of broken glass, the sound of Colonel Tyler breaking into the truckstop restaurant.

“William,” Miriam said. Her voice was solemn. “I wasn’t sure whether I ought to mention this. But perhaps the time has come. William, you don’t have to lie to me anymore. It’s not necessary to pretend. You see, I know what you are.” She regarded him loftily. “You’re one of them”

* * *

Miriam had doubted him from the beginning.

Why not? Doubt had been her constant companion for months. Since Contact, all her certainties had melted away.

Miriam had said a resounding No/ to the offer of immortality, but she had seen certain things that long-ago August night—had glimpsed certain immensities that shook her to the roots.

She went back to the Red Letter Bible her father had given her and read it from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21. The Bible had always been a cornerstone for Miriam. Not because it explained everything, as the TV evangelists alleged. The opposite. She trusted the Bible because it was mysterious. Like life, it was dense and contradictory and resisted interpretation. Rightly so, Miriam thought. How authentic could a book of wisdom be if you understood it at a glance? Wisdom didn’t work like that. Wisdom was a mountain; you climbed it, short of breath, dizzy, unsure of yourself even as you approached the summit.

But after Contact—

Here is a solemn blasphemy, Miriam thought, but after Contact the Holy Bible had seemed almost provincial.

All that earthly preoccupation with slaves and kings, shepherds and patriarchs.

For one unforgettable moment last August, Miriam had beheld in her mind’s eye the universe itself—indescribably ancient, large beyond comprehension, and as full of worlds as the sea was full of water.

Where was God in that immensity?

Perhaps everywhere, Miriam thought. Perhaps nowhere. It was a question the Travellers had refrained from answering. Increasingly, Miriam doubted her own access to the answer.

No, she told them. I don’t want your immortality. She would be immortal at the Throne of God. It was enough.

But the world had never looked the same since.

By the time William came cycling from the east with his wide eyes and half-a-name, Miriam had grown accustomed to doubt; she knew at once he wasn’t a normal sort of youngster.

For one thing, she liked him. During her years as a secretary at the elementary school, Miriam had not much cared for children. They were messy, impudent, and vulgar. The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light. Luke 12:19. But Miriam guessed the children of Galilee seldom addressed their elders as “fuckhead.”

Neither did William. William was different, and Miriam suspected he had once been much older. She told him so now.

He sat thoughtfully on the hood of the empty car, his heels tapping the grill. “I didn’t lie to you.”

“But you’re not what you appear to be.”

“I am what I appear to be. But I’m something else, too.”

“Older.”

“Among other things.”

“You’re not human.” He shrugged.

“You don’t want the others to know?” He shrugged again.

Miriam shifted her weight. Her feet were tired from standing for so long. “I won’t tell them,” she said. “I don’t think you’re anything to be afraid of.” William’s smile was tentative. She said, “But will you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Talk to me. Tell me about—” She couldn’t find a word for it. He said, “The Greater World?”

“Yes.” He was perceptive. She added, almost shamed by the admission, “I’m curious.…”

“All right,” William said.

“But first we should go eat dinner.” She hugged herself and shivered. “It gets so cold these nights. I’m cold to the bone.”

* * *

The Colonel had organized dinner in the truckstop cafeteria. Abby Cushman had uncovered a cache of canned chili, and she warmed it in a big steel pot over the restaurant stove. It tasted like tin and vinegar, William thought. But any kind of hot food was a pleasure nowadays.

The group had divided into clusters. William watched Matt Wheeler and Tom Kindle, conspicuously silent, sharing some private uneasiness.

He watched John Tyler conferring with his cadre: Joey Commoner, Paul Jacopetti, Bob Ganish. There was some troubled conversation there—hushed and indecipherable.

Beth Porter stood with a bowl in her hand, glancing nervously between the two groups.

William didn’t like the sour atmosphere of the room. The sooner we move on, he thought, the better. He thought about Miriam (who was silently spooning a bowl of soup: the chili, she said, was indigestible)—Miriam, who had guessed his secret.

He thought about Rosa Perry Connor struggling out of her confinement a scant half-mile away.

He thought about Home.

* * *

Back at the camper, he did his best to answer Miriam’s questions.

She wanted more than he could give. She wanted a tour of the architecture of the universe. He was hobbled by words. But he did his best—tried to translate into simple English his own new grasp of time and space.

We live in a well of time, William told her. Call up your most primitive memory, a cradle memory, something from your childhood. Now think of all the hours that have passed since then, all the ticks of all the clocks in all those years. An ocean of time. Double that amount, he said, and double it again, and multiply it by a hundred and a hundred more, and still, Miriam, still you haven’t scratched the surface of the past. Multiply it by a number so large the zeroes would run off a page and you might reach as far back as the Jurassic or the Precambrian, when the Earth was a planet inhabited by monsters; but only an eyeblink in its history. Multiply again and again and eventually you reach the dawn of life, and again, the planet’s molten origins, again and again, the formation of the sun. And multiply again: the elements that would form the sun and all its planets are forged in the unimaginable furnace of a supernova. And still you haven’t removed more than a grain of sand from Time Itself.

“Lonesome,” Miriam whispered.

And space, William said, was a mystery, infinite but bounded. The galaxy was a mote among billions of galaxies; the sun, a star among billions of stars; this moment, the axis of a wheel as big as the sky.…

“It’s too much. William! How can you stand it?” Her voice was faint and sad. “So lonesome,” she repeated.

But out of all that blind tangle of particles and forces had come life itself. It was a miracle that impressed even the Travellers. Consciousness unfolding from a cocoon of stars and time. Pearls of awareness growing in the dark. “Miriam, how can it be lonely?” He couldn’t disguise the awe in his voice. “We were implicit in the universe from the moment it began. We’re the product of natural law. Every pondering creature in the deeps of the sky. We’re the universe gazing back at itself. That’s the mystery and the consolation. Every one of us is an eye of God.”

* * *

She woke three hours after midnight, turned in her bed, and saw William in his sleeping bag with his arms cradled behind his head and his eyes still open in the faint light.

The curse of age was the elusiveness of sleep. An older person, Miriam thought, gets too familiar with the dim hours of the night. But William, the boy-man, was also awake.

Both of us restless, Miriam thought. The aged and the ageless.

“William” she whispered.

He was silent but seemed attentive.

“There is something I wonder about,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about us. Us on this trip. And those in Ohio or other parts of the world—who said no. Who didn’t want that immortality. That… Greater World. Do you think about it?”

His voice small in the darkness: “Yes.”

“Do you think about why?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why some of us chose to stay in our mortal bodies?” Nod.

“William, is there an answer to the question?”

“Lots of answers.” He paused as if to assemble his words. “As many answers as there are people. Sometimes it was religious faith. Though not as often as you might think. People say they believe this or that. But on the deepest level, where the Travellers spoke, words are only words. People call themselves Christians or Moslems, but only a vanishing few held those beliefs so deeply that they turned down immortality.”

“Am I one of those?”

He nodded again.

At least, Miriam thought, I used to be. “And the others?”

“Some are so independent they don’t mind dying for it.” Tom Kindle, she thought.

“And some people want to die. They might not admit it, they might even fear it, but in the deepest part of themselves they long for it.”

Who was that, Miriam wondered. Bob Ganish, the fat used-car dealer? Maybe. Paul Jacopetti, the retired tool-and-die maker? Scared of death but secretly wanting it? Perhaps.

“Some are convinced they don’t deserve immortality. The belief in their own shamefulness has gnawed down to the bone.”

Joey, Miriam thought.

“Or some combination of these.”

Beth.

“Perhaps,” Miriam said, thinking of Colonel Tyler, whom she had distrusted from the day she set eyes on him, “perhaps some of them are simply evil.”

“Perhaps,” William agreed. “But some evil people laid down that part of themselves as gratefully as they might have given up a tumor. Others didn’t. Others… Miriam, this is hard to accept, but some people are born so hollow at the heart of themselves that there’s nothing there to say yes or no. They invent themselves out of whatever scrap comes to hand. But at the center—they’re empty.”

“Colonel Tyler,” Miriam said.

William was silent.

But she recognized the description at once. John Tyler, hollow to the core; she could practically hear the wind whistle in his bones.

“But there are people like Dr. Wheeler—or that Abby Cushman. They don’t seem exceptional.”

The prairie wind rattled a window. William hesitated a long while.

Then he said, “Miriam, did you ever read Yeats?”

“Who is Yates?”

“A poet.”

She had never read any poetry but the Psalms, and she told him so.

“Yeats wrote a line,” William said, “which always stuck in my memory. Man is in love, he said, and loves what vanishes. I don’t think it’s true—not the way the poet meant it. Not of most people. But it may have been true of Yeats. And I think it’s true of a certain few others. Some few people are in love with what dies, Miriam, and they love it so much they can’t bear to leave it behind.”

What a difficult kind of love that must be, Miriam thought.

* * *

By some miracle of Traveller intervention, there was water pressure in the restrooms of the truckstop restaurant. A pleasure—Miriam despised chemical toilets.

At dawn, the new Artifact a crescent of pearl and pink on the horizon, Miriam hurried from her camper into the cold green-tiled ladies’ room with the Bible clasped in her hand.

She opened it at random and began to read.

Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Matthew 28:20.

There was blood in the toilet again this morning. I am dying, Miriam thought.

Chapter 30
Fireworks

Matt woke to a knock at the door of his camper: Tom Kindle in ancient jeans, a cotton shirt, high-top sneakers, and a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap. He was carrying a rifle.

“Looks like you’re loaded for bear.”

“Rifle’s for you,” Kindle said. “Kind of a gift.”

“Don’t you need it?”

“I can pick up a fresh one plus ammunition in Laramie. Matthew, you might not like it, but you’re on some dangerous turf these days. You’re liable to need this.”

Matt took the rifle in his hands. He didn’t come from a hunting family, and he’d never done military duty. It was the first time he’d held a rifle. It was heavier than it looked. Old. The stock was burnished where it had been handled over the years. The metal parts had been recently oiled.

He didn’t like the sad weight of it, any more than he liked the sad weight of Kindle’s leaving.

He gave it back. “Not my kind of weapon.”

“Matthew—”

“I mean it.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Don’t be stubborn.”

“Shit,” Kindle said, but he took back the rifle in his left hand and looked more comfortable with it there. “Talked to Abby yet?”

“I’m about to. Not looking forward to it.”

“You could change your mind.” Kindle shrugged. “I doubt it.” He put out his hand; Matt shook it. “Take care of yourself, old man.”

“Watch your back, Dr. Kildare.”

* * *

“We thought you should know,” the radio said, “all our Helpers have gone silent.”

It was not a routine call, coming at this hour of the morning, and Tyler listened with a rising interest.

He and Joey had set up the receiver in a seedy staff lounge at the back of the truckstop cafeteria. Tyler had made the room his command quarters, and he was alone in it.

As alone as he ever got, these days.

He held the microphone in his right hand and thumbed the talk button. “Say again, Ohio?”

The transceiver was hooked to a mobile antenna and plugged into a wall socket. Since they came over the Coast Range, they’d been doing radio wherever they found live AC. Joey wanted to rig a ham unit to run off a car battery—it was easy, he claimed, and would be more convenient. But Tyler had discouraged him. Tyler didn’t much care for the radio anymore. He had begun to see it as a liability.

“Helpers have fallen silent,” the Ohio man said. Ohio ran a twenty-four-hour radio watch, and this was their morning shift, a guy named Carlos with a faint Hispanic accent. “Wondered if you had the same experience.”

“We’re not currently near a Helper, Ohio.”

“Theory here is that the Travellers are fixing to move on. Maybe the Contactees take over, maybe not. Could be we’ll see the Artifact move out of orbit soon. End of an era, huh? If that’s true.” The man seemed to want to chat.

Sissy appeared in a corner of the room, faintly luminous and anxious to speak.

“All the Helpers are silent?” Tyler wanted to nail down this new fact. “Every one,” Carlos said. “They don’t talk anymore. Or move or nothing.”

Tyler thought about it. He turned it over in his head, wanting to make sense of it.

He glanced out the greasy window at the curvature of the new Artifact, still earthbound—the human Artifact, a spaceship the size of a mountain.

“Ohio,” he said. “Your signal is weak.”

“Sorry, Colonel… weather problem there?”

The sky was baby-blanket blue. Windless. “Got a front moving in,” Tyler said.

“You in any danger, Colonel?”

“Not that serious. We might be out of touch for a while, though.”

“Sorry to hear it. Look for you later?”

“Indeed. Thanks, Ohio.”

Sissy beamed approval.

Now, Tyler instructed himself, now think.

If the Travellers leave… If the Helpers fall silent…

Then we’ll be safe. All our secrets safe.

Sissy’s voice was faint but strident, like the buzz of a high-tension wire. It might not work that way, Tyler thought. We don’t know. Therefore wait. Wait and see. Wait here? Yes.

How long?

Until it’s over. Until the Travellers are gone, dead are gone, altogether empty skies.

People don’t want to stay here, Tyler thought. They want Ohio. Make up something. Tell them Ohio told you to wait. Bad weather. Like you said, Bad weather along the Platte, say. Dam washed out, say. Sissy possessed a wonderful imagination.

It might work, Tyler agreed. But not if they can talk to Ohio, or Ohio talk to us. The radio—

You’re not stupid, Sissy said. You can fix the radio.

* * *

Tyler closed the dusty horizontal blinds and jammed a chair back under the knob of the door.

It was still early morning, not much activity yet among the people Tyler had come to think of, pleased with his own sense of humor, as the Unhappy Campers. Joey was walking a perimeter, exactly the kind of idiotic task Joey adored. Jacopetti slept until noon if no one bothered him. No one else was likely to knock in the next few minutes.

He lifted Joey’s toolbox onto the trestle table where the radio was. He unplugged the transceiver and worked out the sheet-metal screws that held the cover in place.

He used two alligator clips and a stout piece of wire to make a jumper cable. Then he hooked one clip to the 120-volt primary of the transformer and the other clip to the positive rail of the DC supply. For insurance, he added a bare wire across the internal fuse.

Put the lid back on, Sissy reminded him, before you plug it in.

Tyler did so. He threw the power switch to the on position, for good measure.

Then he hunkered down and pushed the plug into the wall socket.

There was a half second of silence. Then the big transceiver made a sound like a gunshot and jumped a quarter-inch off the surface of the table. It belched a spark as bright as a camera flash and sizzled with high-voltage overload.

The ceiling light flickered and faded altogether as the building’s circuit breakers cut in.

Now hurry, Tyler thought. He unplugged the unit, then cracked the blinds to admit just enough light to work by. When he pried up the lid, the transceiver gushed sour smoke into his face. Tyler ignored the stench and hurried to disguise his handiwork. He pulled out what was left of the jumper, the alligator clips, the wire across the fuse. Then he jammed the lid back on and began to drive home the screws one by one.

The sound of Tim Belanger’s voice came faintly through the window, something about the lights going off, anybody know where the fuse box was?

Eight screws, four to a side. Tyler drove the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, sweating.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway.

He fumbled the last sheet-metal screw into its hole. The screwdriver didn’t want to find the slot in the screwhead. When it did, the screw sheered sideways. “Shit,” Tyler whispered.

Don’t curse, Sissy scolded him.

There was a knock at the door. Joey’s voice: “Colonel? You still in there?”

Three twists of the wrist to drive the screw home. A couple of seconds to clear Joey’s toolbox off the table. Couple more to yank the chair away from the doorknob.

“Dark as a bitch in here. Sorry.” He let Joey in.

Joey sniffed the air. “What’s that stink?”

“Had some trouble with the radio,” Colonel Tyler said.

* * *

“Thing’s totally fucked,” Joey said when he had examined the molten interior. “Transformer must have shorted. Though I don’t know how it could of.”

He offered to drive into Cheyenne and get a replacement. “Fine,” Tyler said. “But not yet.” How come, Joey wanted to know.

“I’m calling a meeting tonight. It’s important, and I need you there. As a vote and as sergeant-at-arms.”

“I could be back by dark.”

“I don’t want to risk it.” Tyler drew himself up. “Let it ride, Mr. Commoner. Take my word on this.” Joey nodded.

Good soldier, Tyler thought.

* * *

Matt was compiling a pharmaceutical wish list to transmit to the Ohio people—he didn’t know about the radio problem yet—when he heard Abby’s anguished voice from the parking lot.

He hurried out of his camper into the rough circle of trucks and RVs, knowing what the problem was and dreading it.

Tom Kindle had climbed into the cab of his lumbering RV and was cranking the motor. Abby had stepped out of her own camper. She wore a denim skirt and a loose blouse and carried a hairbrush in one hand. Her feet were bare and she’d been crying. She ran a few steps across the hot, midday tarmac toward Kindle’s vehicle.

“You CANT!” Stopping when it was obvious that he could and was. “OOOOH!”

She threw the hairbrush. Her hard overhand toss sent it pinwheeling at Kindle’s camper; it rang the side panel like a bell.

Kindle leaned out the driver’s window and gave her an apologetic wave.

“YOU COWARD! YOU SELFISH OLD COWARDl”

The camper rolled out onto the highway and began to pick up speed.

Matt took Abby by the shoulders. She pulled away and looked at him bitterly. “Matt, why did you let him do this? We need him!”

“Abby, Abby! I know. But he had his mind set on it. I couldn’t stop him. I don’t think anybody ever stopped Tom Kindle from doing what he wanted—do you?”

She sagged toward him. “I know, but… oh, shit, Matt! Why now?”

He didn’t know how to console her. He had lost too much of his own. But he held her while she cried.

Joey Commoner came running from the truckstop, Tyler and Jacopetti a short distance behind.

Joey cupped a hand over his eyes and watched Kindle’s camper disappearing down the highway. Then he looked at Abby. Figuring it out.

“Son of a bitch,” Joey said. “He’s fucking AWOL!”

Abby regarded Joey as if he’d descended from Mars.

“Calm down,” Colonel Tyler said, to no one in particular.

“Sir,” Joey said, “he didn’t ask permission to go somewhere!”

“Quiet,” Tyler said. In the sunlight, the Colonel was silver-haired, imperial. His eyes lingered a moment on Matt. “We’ll discuss it at the meeting tonight.”

Matt cleared his throat. “Thought you didn’t believe in meetings.”

“Special occasion,” Tyler said.

* * *

Tyler put his motion to the Committee before everybody was finished sitting down.

The meeting was held in the truckstop restaurant under a bank of fly-spotted fluorescent lights. Tyler stood against a window with the dark behind him and tapped a knuckle against the glass for attention.

“News over the radio,” he said. “We’ve got some heavy weather across the state border along the Platte. Ohio thinks we ought to stay put for a while, and I agree—but I want a vote to make it official.”

He paused to let this sink in. Everybody was still a little dazed by the departure of Tom Kindle, wary of another crisis.

Matt Wheeler said, “I thought the radio blew up.”

“Call came early this morning, Dr. Wheeler.”

“Did it? Who took it?”

“I did.”

“Did anybody else hear this call?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Wheeler. I didn’t feel it was necessary to have a witness.” Jacopetti laughed out loud.

Wheeler said, “It would be nice to be able to confirm the message, Colonel Tyler.”

“Mr. Commoner offered to find a replacement for the radio. I’m sure we’ll be up and running in due time. Until then, let’s keep a lid on the paranoia, shall we?”

Abby raised her hand: “A truckstop is hardly a place to spend time.…”

“Agreed. In the morning, we can take a look at the farmhouse to the south of here. I’m sure it’ll be more comfortable.”

Tyler registered, but didn’t understand, the sudden look of concern from the boy, William.

Wheeler again: “Maybe we ought to keep moving—we can always find shelter if the weather turns bad.”

Suspicious son of a bitch refused to drop the issue.

“After what happened to Buchanan,” Tyler said, “I don’t think we want to take any chances with a storm, do you? And there’s another consideration. One of our company chose to leave us today. A particular friend of yours, Dr. Wheeler. All things considered, maybe we should stay in the neighborhood long enough to give Mr. Kindle a chance to change his mind. If he elects to come back to camp, at least he’ll know where to find us.”

This hit home with Abby Cushman, a potential swing vote; she folded her hands in her lap.

“All in favor of staying,” Tyler said. “Show of hands.”

It was an easy majority.