Текст книги "The Harvest"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Chapter 34
Precipice

Matt was not quite asleep when the knock came at the door of his camper.

He sat up and peered out the window at prairie night. The stars were the color of ice and there was a milky glow on the eastern horizon where the moon was about to rise.

Beth? he wondered. But it was late even for Beth.

And it hadn’t sounded like her knock. Not that reckless. Three discreet taps. Dear God, he thought wearily, what now?

He pulled on a T-shirt and briefs and stumbled to the door.

Tap tap tap.

“All right! Christ’s sake! Hold on!”

He opened the door and stood mute in a river of night air.

“Matthew,” Tom Kindle said. “Lemme in before I freeze my balls off.”

* * *

Kindle didn’t look good. He wasn’t hurt, but he looked chastened. Matt tried to remember where he had seen that look on Tom Kindle before.

Of course: it was when he came into the hospital with his broken leg, raving about monsters. About a thousand years ago.

Matt kept the light low and poured his friend a cup of lukewarm coffee from a thermos. “You didn’t get too damn far, did you? Not much farther than Laramie, I’ll bet.”

Kindle put aside his rifle and shrugged. His eyes were lost among wrinkles like crevices. “I took a little trip south. Toward that, uh, that thing—”

“The new Artifact.”

“I admit I was curious about it. Aren’t you? Even sitting on the horizon, it’s big enough to fill half a sky.” He took a long, noisy sip of coffee. “And it’s strange, Matthew. It draws the attention. You ever been down to Moab? The canyonlands around there? Same kind of strangeness. Red rock, blue sky, and everything’s too big. Maybe a person loses some judgment. I looked at that thing a long time, and then I started to wonder if I could get up close to it.”

“Did you?”

“Get close? No, not very.” He shook his head. “Close enough, though. The air gets foul. It smells like sulphur and it burns your lungs. The ground isn’t too steady, either. Matthew—the thing is rooted to the earth! Literally, it looks like it put down roots, roots made of some kind of stone. Black sandstone or maybe pumice. Miles wide. And, Matthew, in the shadow of those roots, there were certain things moving around.…”

“Things?”

“Machines. I guess. Or animals. Or both, somehow. But they were big enough to see from miles away. Hazy in the distance, the way you might see a city from across a lake—they were as big as that. Big as a city and taller than they were wide, and different shapes, like giraffes, or gantries, or spiders, or cranes.” He shuddered. “They must have built that entire thing since last August—have you thought about that? A thing the size of a mountain in half a year? God Almighty! And, Matthew… while I was watching those creatures move around, a thought occurred to me. They must be about finished their work, I thought. It doesn’t look like a half-made thing. And it’s a spaceship, right? When it’s ready, it goes into orbit. Spaceship the size of Delaware. And here we are sitting practically on its tail. I came back north this morning and found you folks still parked here, and I don’t think that’s too intelligent.”

“It’s Tyler,” Matt said. “He claims there was a radio message. Some bad weather east of here. So we’re staying put.”

“There was a vote on this?”

“One of the Colonel’s votes.”

“Bullshit and gerrymander.”

“Yeah, basically.”

“He claims there was a radio message?”

“Well—the radio blew up.”

“While he was using it?”

“Supposedly.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Nope.”

“You put up with this horseshit?”

“He’s not a stupid man, Tom. He had the Committee rolled up like a carpet. Made me look paranoid.”

“A little paranoia’s not a bad thing. I was careful coming toward camp. Left my camper in back of a billboard and hiked away from the road. I spent most of the afternoon hidden behind a rise south of here watching folks mill around. Am I crazy, or is Joey Commoner standing guard on Abby’s trailer?”

Matt told him about the insect woman, about William’s death and Abby’s altercation with the Colonel.

Kindle listened carefully, eyes wide. “She had wings?”

“I saw her in the air,” Matt said. “Yes, she had wings. They looked like butterfly wings.”

“Oh, Matt… too many fuckin’ miracles,” Kindle said.

“Uh-huh.” That about summed it up.

Kindle held his rifle in his lap. “The question is, what are you planning to do about it?”

“He can’t keep Abby in her trailer indefinitely. Weather or no weather, we’ll have to move on soon.”

“Might not be time. I don’t know why Tyler’s stalling, but I don’t think it matters. That mountain on the horizon isn’t going to wait for us. It’s not just Tyler’s risk. There’s Abby—and that old lady, Miriam—”

And Beth, Matt thought. “But Tyler’s still got the Committee wrapped up.” ^ ^

“I’m not talking about a vote, I’m talking about haying. Bugging out. Soon. Say, tonight.”

“You just got back.”

“I mean everybody. Everybody who isn’t playing handmaiden to Colonel Tyler. I saw Tim Belanger headed east by himself. Obviously he’s got the right idea. So we round up Abby, we get Miriam—”

“Beth,” Matt said.

“And Beth, and we take one of these big RVs and leave before the Colonel gets his act together.”

“It would have to be this camper. I don’t want to leave my medical supplies behind.”

“Okay, this camper. There’s room for everybody until we can find more transportation. We’re only a couple of days from Ohio if we keep moving.”

“I thought you didn’t want to go to Ohio. I thought you wanted to see the Wind River Range.”

“Maybe I just want to see the last of Tyler. Maybe I don’t like the fact that he locked up Abby Cushman.” Kindle lifted his rifle and sighted down the length of it. “Or maybe some asshole talked me into thinking of this fuckin’ trailer camp as a town.”

* * *

Beth was ashamed of what she had told Joey… but tantalized by it, too.

He had reacted with an enraged denial, and here was the scary part: she liked it.

She had always liked her ability to rouse Joey from his slumberous complacency—to make him horny; to make him mad. Poke the tiger and see if he bites. Even if it was her he bit. Maybe especially if it was her.

She had left Joey by the dead fire in back of the house, had left him stewing in his own anger, and it was only fair, Beth told herself; not nice, but fair; now they were even.

She was restless in her bed with the memory.

You want to know where I’m spending the night?

In that camper, Joey had said. Like you always do.

Not every night. Not the whole night. Listen—

Remembering it made her weak-kneed. And hot. In every sense of the word.

If she left her camper now… would Joey notice?

He was guarding Abby Cushman. With her cheek pressed against the rear window, Beth could just see the light of the burning Sterno he used to keep himself warm. Joey took his guard duty seriously. He hardly ever slept anymore. He didn’t seem to need to.

He was crouched against the meager light like a troll.

Beth thought, If I leave on the other side of the camper and circle around toward the house…

It might be possible.

She put on her old jeans and a blouse. Then she took three deep breaths and opened the door into cold prairie night. She stepped out barefoot with her long hair loose, like a country girl.

There was more light than she really liked. The moon had just come up. And was it a reflection of the moonlight or was the earthbound Artifact glowing with some subtle light of its own? A pale white pulsation, as if it were storing up some peculiar kind of energy?

Beth moved lightly, silently, in the radiant night.

* * *

Miriam, back in her camper, understood that distant glow. It registered on her eyelids and behind them as she lay in bed, her body eroding from within.

Miriam was two places now: here and Home. The neocytes had worked quickly. Miriam at Home was not made of blood and skin, was not even altogether material, and Miriam became more wholly that Miriam with every tick of the clock, as this Miriam—the old and used-up and ailing Miriam—grew increasingly hollow and fragile.

She turned her head to the window and saw Home bathed in a ghostly nimbus, summoning the energies that would lift it free of the Earth.

Summoning the energies, Miriam thought, that would carry it to the stars, a human epistemos in the growing awareness of the galaxy.

Very soon now, Miriam thought.

* * *

Colonel Tyler had occupied a downstairs room in the Connor house—a room that once had been Vince Connor’s study, with a filing cabinet full of deeds, insurance documents, and bookkeeping ledgers, and a leather sofa long enough to stretch out on.

Colonel Tyler sat in what had been Vince’s favorite chair: a high-backed recliner finished in olive-green Naugahyde. Although it was very late, the Colonel was awake. He hadn’t slept for three nights now—a bad sign.

He hated the dark. In the dark, Sissy tended to disappear; and as bad as her presence was, to be alone was often worse. The days were all right. In the day there was sunlight, a horizon. At night, doubts came swarming.

Doubts… and sometimes madness.

It seemed to Colonel Tyler that his madness, which had once been a sealed box, had spilled out into his everyday life. Madness was everywhere: in Sissy, whose persistence was probably not normal; in the derangement of the world; in the appearance of the insect woman and the death of the pseudo-child William.

And today Tim Belanger had left camp, and that seemed the worst omen of all, the symptom of a disintegration that had begun to move from the peripheral Tom Kindle to the more central Tim Belanger and would eventually strike at the core: Ganish, Jacopetti, Joey, even himself…

“Colonel Tyler?”

He looked up, startled.

Beth Porter stood in the doorway. He hadn’t heard her knock. He cleared his throat. “Beth?” He summoned up the daylight Colonel John Tyler.

She glanced at him and then at the service revolver he had placed on the arm of the recliner. “Are you okay?”

Who had last asked him that? A. W. Murdoch, he thought. In that little town in Georgia. In Loftus. “Certainly I am.”

“May I come in?”

He nodded. She stepped into the meager light of a single lamp and closed the door behind her. She was not a child, Tyler thought, nor yet quite an adult; she still moved like a teenager, with a teenager’s unconscious coltishness. “What brings you out so late?”

“Just that I was lonely,” Beth said. “I thought it might be warmer in here.”

* * *

Matt and Kindle approached the Sterno fire in front of Abby’s trailer expecting a brisk who-goes-there from Joey. The fire cast tall, nervous shadows on the aluminum wall of the camper. The camper was dark and the door was closed, but Joey wasn’t there.

“Maybe he got tired and found somewhere to sleep,” Matt said. “Or took a bathroom break.”

Kindle shook his head. “Joey doesn’t sleep, and he pees in the bushes when he figures he’s alone. This is peculiar.” He rapped his bony knuckles on the door.

Abby’s voice, sleepy and chastened, came from inside: “Who’s there?”

“Me,” Kindle said. “Me and Matt. We need to talk.”

A few seconds later, she was at the door in an old blue nightgown, looking at Kindle with sleepy eyes and a stew of emotions. “You selfish son of a bitch—you left.”

“Selfish SOB came back,” Kindle said. “Abby, I didn’t know he was going to lock you up.”

“Where is Joey?” Abby wondered.

She turned her head at the sound of the gunshot.

* * *

“Hold up!” Kindle said. “Christ’s sake! Hold up!”

He stopped Matt and Abby before they ran across the open space to the Connor house. The shot had seemed to come from there. “Think about this. Who’s in the house?”

“Tyler, probably,” Matt said. ” I don’t know who else.”

“Which room is Tyler using?”

“Around the side.”

“Show me. But stay back from the house.”

They circled clockwise in the dark behind the row of RVs, where lights had begun to come on.

“That window,” Matt said.

It was a small side window with a roll blind across it. They saw a second flare of light in that confined space, a second gunshot; and moments later, a third.

* * *

Rosa Perry Connor didn’t hear the shots. She was far away, attending to another summons.

She had flown miles from the Connor farmhouse. Carried more by wind than volition, she had flown south past the Artifact, had soared high above the faint smudge of Denver, an abandoned city, and then away from the mountains and across the plains in a wordless ecstasy of flight.

Her lifespan in this altered body was short but sufficient. Night fell. She approached the stars on gusts of colder, darker air. She grew lighter as her physical resources were exhausted.

It was time to go Home. The summons had gone out all over the world. Sojourners in the air, the sea, on the land: come Home, come Home now. Time for the great departure. But like a guilty child at bedtime, Rosa lingered a moment longer.

The moon rose over the lightless immensity of the high plains. One wingbeat more, Rosa thought, one more, savoring the brisk night wind that would carry her dust away.

Chapter 35
Wounds

Joey had been doing sentinel duty every night since they crossed the Snake, and he had learned how to listen to the dark.

Every night, he made a fire to keep himself warm. It was spring and the days were often hot, but after dark the heat bled into the sky, the air grew cold, and the wind cut close to the bone.

Make a fire too big, though, and the sound of it would obliterate every other sound. At first he burned windfall, roadside trash, loose barn boards or stick furniture from wasteland shacks abandoned long before Contact. Pine knots in the old wood exploded like gunshots, and their sparks threatened to ignite the dry sage beyond the blacktop highway. It was Colonel Tyler who showed him how to light the little cans of Sterno jelly, and Joey had begun to collect them from the sports-supply and general-merchandise shops in the towns they passed. The Sterno burned almost silently, just a whisper as the wind whipped the flames. It gave off precious little heat—with luck, enough to warm his hands. But in his leather jacket he was generally okay.

The campers were lined up outside the Connor house, and Joey sat minding his Sterno fire on the concrete drive at Abby Cushman’s door, listening.

He had honed his listening skills quickly. The world might seem empty, but Joey knew it wasn’t. There were animals, for one thing. Dogs: ex-pets, maybe, learning how to survive in the wild; or wild dogs; or wolves—he had heard some howling the last couple of nights. And people. It was amazing, the variety of noises people made on a still night. These camper-trailers had thin walls, and he often heard the murmur of night talk. People talking to themselves, talking in their sleep. Or rolling over in bed, rocking the RV a little. Maybe somebody trotting into the house to use a toilet; somebody else, restless, stepping outside to look at the stars.

Tonight he tried to calm himself, to make his ears come alive.

But he couldn’t help rerunning his encounter with Beth.

It was stupid, what she had said. Joey knew what went on in this camp, especially at night. He knew all about Beth and what Beth did at night: slept alone, mostly; snuck over to the doctor’s RV sometimes.

Which was bad enough. The mystery of Beth was that he simultaneously wanted her and didn’t. Sometimes just looking at the way she moved across the tarmac in her blue jeans was enough to give Joey a raging hard-on. Other times she was as appealing as a day-old cut of meat. Sometimes he hated to think about her; sometimes he hated to think of anyone else thinking about her.

He guessed she was fucking the doctor; and as bad as that was, he had begun to live with the idea.

But the thing she had told him tonight—her dirty comments about Colonel Tyler—

No.

It was impossible. Colonel Tyler, Joey thought, was like an avenging angel, a pure and powerful force from far beyond the limits of this ratty trailer caravan. It was Colonel Tyler who had come into the ruins of Buchanan with clean clothes and a pistol on his hip and asked to talk to Mr. Joseph Commoner. It was Tyler who had trusted Joey to walk the perimeter, Tyler who had trusted him with a gun.

The idea that the Colonel would stoop to some furtive little night fuck with a nonentity like Beth—it was obscene, and he didn’t believe it.

But the night wore on, and the moon began to rise, and the new Artifact radiated a pale light of its own, and Joey heard Beth’s door ease open—the whine of the hinges above the moth-flutter of the Sterno flame—and he stood and took three silent steps to the corner of Abby’s camper, helplessly curious, and watched Beth moving, a shadow, to the front door of the Connor house and inside.

Probably she was just using the toilet. But Joey itched with the insult of what she had told him, and he circled around the house to the side, to the window where Colonel Tyler’s light was still burning. The blind was down, but Joey put his face to the glass and was able to capture an angle of vision where the blind gapped against the sill. Colonel Tyler sat motionless in a chair. His pistol rested on the arm.

Joey touched his own pistol, snug against his belt. He knew the Colonel couldn’t see him, that the lamp and the blind would have made a mirror of the window on a night this dark, but his face was hot with shame and suspicion and his heart was beating wildly.

He saw Colonel Tyler look toward the door, saw his lips move but couldn’t make out the words.

The door was at the wrong angle and Joey wasn’t able to see who had arrived… but who else could it be?

He began to take small, sharp breaths.

Colonel Tyler spoke, paused, spoke again.

Joey registered these images but ceased to think about them. He couldn’t think any longer; could only watch.

Now Beth moved into his range of vision. She was dressed too lightly for the weather. She was blushing a little. She looked nervous and aroused, her – hair hanging loose around her shoulders.

She came and stood beside Tyler’s chair. Tyler didn’t move. Beth spoke. Words inaudible. She reached for Tyler’s huge hand and took it in her own. She put his hand on her blouse, on her breast, and moved against it in a way that seemed to Joey brutally obscene.

Joey took his pistol out of his belt and hurried to the front of the house.

* * *

Once it was obvious why Beth had come, Tyler felt in control of the situation.

She wasn’t much different from the hundreds of such women Tyler had hired at various times in his life, and there was nothing very surprising, he thought, about her presence tonight. Apparently he had inherited more than a gavel from the deposed Matt Wheeler.

She put his hand against her blouse and he felt the shape of her breast, the hard nugget of the nipple. He admired the sight of his hand there, the creviced skin against the flimsy cloth.

He stood up and pressed her against him. She wasn’t very tall. Her head was tilted back, her eyes half-closed, expecting a kiss. Tyler didn’t kiss—it was a dirty habit. Instead, he tangled his right hand in her hair and pulled.

Her eyes widened. He warned her not to speak, not to say anything. He didn’t like women who talked.

He pressed his hips against her, put his left hand under her blouse and explored. He pulled her head back until her throat was exposed in a fine white curve. She wasn’t sure what to make of the pain, seemed to hover between arousal and fear.

Her blue jeans were closed with a row of buttons. Tyler had opened two of them when Joey kicked open the door.

* * *

Colonel Tyler had never been wounded in combat—he had never experienced combat firsthand—and he was surprised when the bullet hit him.

There was pain and anger but first of all, above all else, an enormous surprise, as if it were an act of God, a causeless momentum that tumbled him backward.

He caught himself against the recliner with his right hand. The left hand, his left arm, in fact, wouldn’t answer to the helm. It felt as if someone had cut off the arm and replaced it with a fleshy, useless slab of rubber. There was blood all over his shoulder.

Beth was still standing, though the shot must have come very near her head. Tyler realized that she was screaming, that the sound was exterior to him.

“Move away,” Joey was telling her—the Colonel recognized Joey’s petulant whine. “Get out of the way.”

Tyler braced his hip against the recliner and reached for his own pistol.

He had loaded it earlier tonight. He had meant only to touch its cold steel against his forehead, perhaps taste the barrel with his tongue, as was his habit. Never to pull the trigger. Sissy always talked him out of that. But now someone else had pulled a trigger, someone else had shot him. Joey had shot him.

He grasped the pistol and swiveled around.

One foot slid against the polished oak floor and Tyler bumped to a sitting position with his back against the recliner. Joey must have tracked this motion as a fall, or ignored it altogether; his attention was still on Beth. To the Colonel’s eyes Joey looked grotesque, inflated with jealousy to bullfrog proportions.

“Move aside,” Joey repeated, and Beth seemed finally to understand; she took two steps toward the window and turned to look for Tyler. Perhaps she saw the blood for the first time; her eyes widened and Tyler wondered if she would scream again. Beth looked a little ridiculous, too, with her smooth belly showing through the gap of her unbuttoned pants.

Joey looked at the Colonel and the Colonel shot him in the head.

There was no precision or elegance in the act, only the raising of the pistol and the pulling of the trigger and Joey falling down and convulsing for a horrible thirty or forty seconds before he died.

Beth went to Joey and knelt above him and made a choked sound at the sight of his injury. Her hand rested on the pistol Joey had dropped beside him. Colonel Tyler watched that hand. Watch that hand, Sissy instructed him. Sissy was a sudden, nebulous presence hovering near the ceiling of the room, but Tyler didn’t look for her, merely followed her advice, watched Beth’s hand on the pistol.

She took up the pistol and turned it toward Tyler.

Was she offering it? Threatening him with it? The expression on her face was unreadable, opaque with grief. There was no way to calculate the danger.

So Colonel Tyler shot her, too.

* * *

At the sound of the third gunshot, Matt ran to his trailer and collected his Gladstone bag.

Kindle tried to restrain him at the door. “It’s stupid to go in there, Matthew. We don’t know what happened. Matthew! Just wait, for Christ’s sake!”

Matt ignored him, ran past him to the Connor house in its patch of moonlight, and inside, where it was dark.