Текст книги "The Harvest"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Chapter 38
Eye of God

It was cold in the shadow of the volcanic cloud.

The sun was a tenuous brightness in a dark sky, pewter or brass on a field of featureless gray. Matt drove with the camper’s high beams on.

He drove toward Cheyenne on 1-80. The place where the Artifact had been anchored to the Earth was sometimes visible on his right—not the caldera itself, but the glow of distant fires, of lava flows, a second brightness, not sunlight. Periodically, the road shook under his vehicle.

The road was difficult to follow. Ash fell from the sky in a continuous sheeting rain. It collected on the tarmac and drifted across the highway in charcoal dunes. At times the road seemed to disappear altogether; he navigated by the vague shapes of retaining walls, by road signs and mile markers transformed into gray cenotaphs. The camper’s wheels spun in the drifts, grinding for purchase on the buried blacktop. Progress was slow and painful.

He passed through Laramie, a landscape of hopeless ruins. At noon—he supposed it was noon—he stopped at a gas station that had lost its windows but was otherwise reasonably intact. He fought through a drift of ash, his shirt tied over his mouth and nose. The volcanic ash was a fine-textured grit that smelled a little like rotten eggs. He stepped through the space where a window had been, and in the meager shelter of the depot he located a road map of Colorado and Wyoming.

The camper could have used some gas, but the pumps were dead.

Matt shivered in the cold. Across the highway, a charred frame building smoldered. All else was ash, a concealing darkness, a smudged snowfall. Time to check on Kindle. Time to check on Beth.

* * *

He had left them in the coach, bandaged and wrapped in blankets against the cold. All his medical supplies, carefully hoarded, had been destroyed in the fire. But he had treated both patients with the antibiotics in his bag.

Kindle was occasionally conscious. Beth was not. Her breathing was terribly, desperately faint. Her pulse was rapid and weak. She was bleeding internally, and she was in shock.

He checked her bandage, decided it didn’t need changing. There was so little he could do. Keep her warm. Keep one shoulder up so her good lung wouldn’t fill with blood, so she wouldn’t drown in blood.

He worked by the light of a Coleman battery lantern. The daylight that penetrated the ash-caked windows was powerless and bleak.

He turned to Kindle next. Kindle opened his eyes as Matt examined the leg wound.

The injury didn’t appear serious but the bullet might have taken a chip from the fibula—and this was the leg Kindle had broken last fall. It would need to be immobilized until he could make a more thorough evaluation.

He looked up from his work and found Kindle staring at him. “Jesus, Matthew—your hands.”

His hands?

He held them up to the light. Ah—his burns. He had burned his hands trying to get Abby out of the Glendale. The palms were red, blistered, peeling—weeping in places. He took a strip of clean linen and tore it in half, wrapped a piece around each hand.

“Must hurt like hell,” Kindle said.

“We have painkillers,” Matt said. “Enough to go around.”

“You been driving since last night?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Taking painkillers, and you can drive like that?”

“Painkillers and amphetamines.”

“Speed?” He nodded.

“You carry amphetamines in that black bag?”

“Found them in Joey’s trailer,” Matt said.

“You crazy fucker. No wonder you look like shit.” Kindle moaned and moved a little under his blanket. “Beth alive?”

“Yes.”

“Where are we?”

“A few miles out of Cheyenne.”

Kindle turned his head to the window. “Is it dark out?”

“Day.”

“Is that snow?”

“Ash.”

“Ash!” Kindle said, marvelling at it.

* * *

But Kindle was right: he had gone without sleep for too long. When he looked at the map, all the names seemed obscurely threatening. Thunder Basin. Poison Spider Creek. Little Medicine Creek.

We have very little medicine at all, Matt thought.

Progress was maddeningly slow. The ash continued to fall. Hard to believe the earth could have yielded so much ash, the refuse of such an enormous burning.

Volcanic ash was rich in phosphorous and trace elements. He had read that somewhere. The rangeland would be fertilized for years to come. He wondered what might grow here, next year, the year after.

The speedometer hovered around ten miles per hour.

* * *

He was overtaken by a thought as the afternoon lengthened: Beth might die.

He had hesitated at the brink of this idea for hours. He was afraid of it. If he allowed the thought into his head, if he spoke the words even to himself—would it affect the outcome? If he named death, would he summon it?

But in the end it was unavoidable, a contingency that demanded his attention. Beth might die. She might die even if he found a source of whole blood, even if he found a functional hospital… and those things seemed increasingly unlikely.

He should be ready for it.

After all, he had chosen to live in this world: a world where people not only might die but inevitably, unanimously, would die. The mortal world.

He remembered Contact. The memory came back easily in this desolate twilight. He could have chosen that other world, the world of mortality indefinitely postponed, the world of an immense knowledge… the Greater World, they had called it.

The world of no murder, no fatal fires, no aging, no evil. There was a poem Celeste had loved. Land of Heart’s Desire. He couldn’t remember who wrote it. Some sentimental Victorian. Matt gripped the steering wheel with bloody hands, and the memory of her reading it aloud took on a sudden tangibility, as if she were sitting beside him:

I would mould a world of fire and dew

With no one bitter, grave, or over wise,

And nothing marred or old to do you wrong…

He guessed that was what they had built out on this prairie: their curious round mountain, their world of fire and dew.

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,

But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song…

It was tempting, Matt thought. It was the ancient human longing, a desire written in the genes. It was every dream anyone ever hated to wake up from.

But it was bloodless. Not joyless, nor sexless; the Contactees had preserved their pleasures. What they had given up was something more subtle.

It had taken Matt most of his life to learn to live in a world where everything he loved was liable to vanish—and he had never loved that vanishing. But he had learned to endure in spite of it. He had made a contract with it. You don’t stint your love even if the people you love grow old or grow apart. You save a life, when you can, even though everyone dies. There was nothing to be gained by holding back. Seize the day; there is no other reward.

But the price, Matt thought. Dear God, the price.

All our grief. All our pain. Pain inflicted by an indifferent universe: the cruelties of age and the cruelties of disease. Or pain inflicted, as often as not, by ourselves. Grief dropped from the open bays of bombers, grief inflicted by scared or sullen young men coaxed into military uniform. Grief delivered by knife in dark alleys or by electrode in the basements of government offices. Grief parceled out by the genuinely evil, the casually evil, or such walking moral vacuums as Colonel John Tyler.

So maybe they were right, Matt thought, the Travellers and Rachel and the majority of human souls: maybe we are irredeemable. Maybe the Greater World was better for its bloodlessness, its exemption from the wheel of birth and death.

Maybe he had made the wrong decision.

Maybe.

* * *

He came into Cheyenne at what he calculated was nightfall.

The streets were all but impassable. In this darkness, it was too easy to lose the road. He turned off 80 onto what he guessed was 16th Street and faced the necessity of stopping for the night.

But then, as he was ready to switch off the engine, he peered up at the sky and saw, by some unanticipated miracle, the stars.

A wind had come up from the north. It was a cold wind, brisk enough to stir these ashes into more dangerous, deeper drifts. But the ash itself had ceased falling. There was a little light, blue shadows on a gray landscape.

He took his hands off the steering wheel, an experiment. It didn’t hurt. He was beyond hurting. But he left some skin behind.

* * *

Much of the city had burned.

He passed ash-shrouded rubble, strange columns of brick like broken teeth, the shells of empty buildings.

Two hospitals were marked on the map. De Paul Hospital: a smoking ruin.

And the V. A. Medical Center, not far away. It hadn’t burned—but the earthquake had shaken it to the ground.

* * *

He checked on Beth and Kindle once more.

Kindle drifted up from sleep and nodded at him. Kindle was okay.

Beth, on the other hand—

Was not dead. But he couldn’t say why. Her pulse was impossibly tenuous. She wasn’t getting much oxygen; her lips were faintly blue. Her pupils were slow to dilate when he lifted her eyelids.

Still, she continued to breathe.

There was something awe-inspiring about each breath. For Beth, each breath had become a challenge, a kind of Everest, and it seemed to Matt that she met the challenge bravely and with a fierce resolve. But no single breath would meet the needs of her oxygen-starved body, and each breath must be followed by the next, a new mountain to scale.

She wasn’t dead, but she was plainly dying.

What city might have an intact medical center? He looked at the map. His eyes seemed reluctant to focus. Somewhere beyond the range of the ashfall. But what was beyond the range of the ashfall? Denver? No: He would have to travel too close to the caldera itself; the journey might be impossible and would surely be too long. North to Casper? He wasn’t sure what he might find in Casper; it was still a long distance away.

Everything was too far away.

She might not last another hour. Two hours would surprise him. “Sleep,” Kindle said. “I know how it is, Matthew. But you won’t gain anything by killing yourself. Get some sleep.”

“There isn’t time.”

“You’ve been looking at that map for a quarter hour. Looking for what, someplace to go? Someplace with a hospital? Not finding it, I bet. And you can’t drive in this.” He had pulled himself to a sitting position. “Looks like Armageddon out there.”

Matt folded the map meticulously and put it aside. “Beth is badly hurt.”

“I can see that. I can hear how she breathes.”

“I don’t have what I need to help her.”

“Matthew, I know.” Gently: “I’m not telling you to give up. Just we can’t work a miracle. And it does no good to beat yourself for it. Look at you. You’re a mess. Lucky you can walk.”

It was true that they couldn’t reach a hospital. He might as well admit it.

But something pushed forward in his mind, an idea he had not wanted to entertain.

“There’s another possibility,” he said.

* * *

He explained to Kindle, and listened to Kindle’s objections for a while, but grew impatient and fearful for Beth and hurried back to the cab of the vehicle and turned it around.

He glimpsed the new Artifact as it finished a quick eastward transit of the sky. But the sky was closing in again; most of the stars had disappeared; and it was not ash that began to fall but a brutally cold rain.

The ash on the ground absorbed the water and became a slick, intransigent mud. He was forced to drive even more slowly, and even so, the rear end of the camper fishtailed now and then on what seemed like a river of liquid clay.

But he didn’t have far to go.

He found the state capital building, or what was left of it, at the end of a broad avenue lined with ash-coated trees and fallen limbs. Three-quarters of the dome had collapsed. One section of it, like an immense splinter, remained in place, lit from below by fires still burning in the shell beneath. The broad space in front of the building was a field of ash, and the rain had given it a wet sheen, and the firelight was reflected there.

Matt wasn’t certain he would find what he wanted. But the capital buildings were the centerpiece of the city, like Buchanan’s City Hall, the most logical place, therefore, to find a Helper.

He parked and climbed out of the cab. There was blood on the steering wheel, blood on his pants.

He struggled for footing on the slick, compressed ash beneath his feet. The rain on his skin was not only cold, it was dirty. It carried soot out of the air. It turned his skin black. Matt realized he had left his jacket in the coach, with Kindle. He went to fetch it.

Beth’s breathing was barely audible.

“Don’t do this,” Kindle said.

Matt shrugged into his jacket.

Kindle sat up and took his arm. “Matthew, most likely it won’t work. And that’s bad enough. But if it does—have you thought about that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a hospital out there. That’s not a doctor. It’s something from outer space. Something we never did understand. And that thing in orbit isn’t humanity. How could it be? And what you’re doing, it’s not asking for help. It’s praying.”

“She’ll die,” Matt said.

“Christ, don’t I know she’ll die? Haven’t I been listening to her die? But she’s dying like a human being. Isn’t that what we decided to do last August? When it comes down to it, what we said was no thanks, I’ll die like a human being. You, me—even Colonel Tyler. Even Beth.”

“That’s not the issue.”

“The hell it isn’t! Matthew, listen. The Travellers left. They went away. Best thing that could happen. And that new Artifact, probably it’ll go away too. Go star-chasing or whatever it is they do. And that’s fine. Because we’ll be left here with some human dignity. But if you go out and pray to that thing for help—my fear is that it will help, and it won’t stop helping, and we’ll have a new God in the sky, and that’ll be the end of us, one way or another.”

“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.

* * *

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.”