Текст книги "The Harvest"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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* * *

They closed the empty office at four.

“I walked to work,” Annie said. “Maybe you can drive me back to your place.” Matt looked blank. “Your dinner party. Remember?”

He almost laughed. The idea was ludicrous. How was he supposed to conduct a dinner party? Serve salt peanuts and play “Nearer My God to Thee?”

Annie smiled. “It’s okay, Matt. Some cancellations phoned in this morning. Check your memo pad. There are probably more on your machine at home. You can call it off if you want… I’ll get dinner at a restaurant.”

He shook his head. “No. Annie, I want you to come home with me. But there might not be anybody else.”

“I know.”

“Nothing to celebrate.”

“I know, Matt. Maybe we can have a drink. Watch the lights.”

“I’d like that,” Matt said.

* * *

She was right about the party, of course. Everybody had canceled—most citing the flu—except for Jim and Lillian Bix, who showed up with a bottle of wine.

The mood was not celebratory, though Lillian had announced her pregnancy to Jim and Jim announced it to Annie. It was obvious from their slightly dazed expressions that his friends felt the way Matt did: fenced off, somehow, from the significance of all these strange events. “Like a patient etherized upon a table”—T. S. Eliot, if Matt recalled correctly. The phrase echoed in his head as the four of them fumbled around the kitchen, improvising dinner, while Rachel watched a TV newscast in the next room. The President, Rachel said, had canceled his Friday night speech. But everything was quiet in Washington.

Later, Matt switched off the air conditioning and the adults adjourned to the backyard deck. Lawn chairs in a cooling breeze, wine in stemmed glasses. Sunset faded; the first stars emerged. The breeze swayed the big Douglas fir at the back of the yard and Matt listened to the sound of its branches stirring, as gentle in the dusk as the rustling of a woman’s skirt. “My God,” he said, “it’s—quiet”

Jim looked quizzical. “What do they say in the movies? Too quiet.”

“Seriously,” Matt said. “Listen. You can hear the trees.”

Now they crooked their heads at the evening and grew attentive.

“I can hear the frogs,” Annie marveled. “From the river, I guess. My gosh. Way down the valley.”

“And that ringing sound,” Lillian said. “I know what that is! The flagpole over at the elementary school. I walk by there some mornings. The rope bangs against the staff when the wind blows. It always reminds me of a bell.”

A distant, random tolling. Matt heard it, too. Jim said, “Is all this so odd?”

“Friday night,” Matt said. “The highway runs along the river. You can usually hear the traffic. Usually nothing but. People going to the movies, guys out at the bars, maybe a lumber truck roaring by. It’s the kind of sound you can put out of your mind, but you notice it when it’s gone. There’s always some kind of noise up here, even after midnight. A train whistle. A siren once in a while. Or—”

“TV,” Annie said. “Everybody in the neighborhood with their TV turned up. On a summer night like this? With the windows open?” She shivered, a tiny motion; Matt felt it when he took her hand. She said, “I guess hardly anybody’s watching TV tonight.”

Matt glanced back at the house, where Rachel had switched off the TV and was standing at the window of her room, the light behind her, gazing moodily into the twilight.

“So everybody went to bed early,” Jim offered. “The flu.”

This offended Lillian, who sat upright in her chair. “You don’t have to protect me. I know what’s happening.”

Matt and Jim exchanged glances. Matt said gently, “If you know what’s happening, Lillian, you’re one up on the rest of us.”

Her voice was raw, her eyes mournful. “Everything’s changing. That’s what’s happening. That’s why there’s nobody here tonight but us.”

There followed a silence, which Matt guessed was acquiescence, then Jim raised his glass: “To us, then. The hardy few.”

Lillian drank to show she wasn’t angry. “But I shouldn’t,” she said. “Wine puts me to sleep. Oh, and the baby. It’s bad for the baby, isn’t it? But I suppose just a sip.”

Tang, clang, said the distant flagpole.

* * *

Matt stopped to say goodnight to Rachel and found her already dozing, tucked in a pink bedsheet, the window open to admit a breath of night air.

He pulled up a chair beside the bed, mindful of its creak as he sat.

Rachel hadn’t changed her room significantly since her mother died. It was still very much a child’s bedroom, lace blinds on the window and stuffed animals on the dresser. Matt knew for a fact that she still owned all her old toys: a vanity chest full of My Little Ponies and Jem; of miniature stoves, TV sets, refrigerators; a complete Barbie Camper set neatly folded and stored. The chest was seldom opened, but he supposed it served its purpose as a shrine: to Rachel’s mother, or just to childhood, security, the kingdom of lost things.

He looked at his daughter, and the thought of the toy chest made him suddenly, inconsolably sad.

I would give it all back if I could, Rache. Everything the world stole from you.

Everything the world is stealing.

She turned on her side and opened her eyes. “Daddy?”

“Yes, Rache?”

“I heard you come in.”

“Just wanted to say goodnight.”

“Is Annie staying over?”

“I think so.”

“Good. I like it when she’s here in the morning.” She yawned. Matt put a hand on her forehead. She was a little warm.

A troubling thought seemed to hold her attention for a moment. “Daddy? Is everything going to be all right?”

Lie to her, Matt thought. Lie and make her believe it. “Yes, Rache,” he said.

She nodded and closed her eyes. “I thought so.”

* * *

He unwound the studio bed in the basement for Jim and Lillian, who had both had too much wine, or were otherwise “etherized”: too dazed, in any case, to drive.

I know how they feel, Matt thought. Bound up in cotton. Buoyant but sleepy. There had been occasions, as a college student, when he had smoked marijuana in a friend’s dorm room. It had sometimes made him feel like this… encased in a protective and faintly luminescent fog… afloat, after he had found his way home, on the gently undulating surface of his bed.

Tonight he climbed into bed beside Annie.

It had been a while since they’d slept together, and now he wondered why. He’d missed this, the presence of her, her warmth and what he thought of as her “Annie-ness.” She was a small woman, all her vivid energies and enigmatic silences packaged tightly together. She rolled on her side but snuggled closer; he curled himself around her.

The first time Annie came home with him Matt had been guilt-ridden—this had still been very much Celeste’s house and Annie an intruder in it, an insult, he worried, to her memory. And he had wondered how Rachel might take it. A rivalry between Annie and his daughter was a complication he had dreaded.

But Rachel had taken to Annie at once, accepted her presence without question. “Because she mourned,” Annie suggested later. “She mourned for her mother and I think in some ways she’s still mourning, but she isn’t hiding it from herself. She’s letting go of it. She knows it’s all right for me to be here because Celeste isn’t coming back.”

Matt winced.

Annie said, “But you, Matt, you don’t like letting go. You’re a collector. You hoard things. Your childhood. This town. Your idealism. Your marriage. You can’t bear the idea of giving any of it up.”

This was both true and maddening. “I gave Celeste up,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“It’s not that simple. There’s a certain way you shouldn’t let her go—she’s a part of you, after all. And there’s the giving up you couldn’t help, which is her dying. And there’s the space in between. Not a very big space right now. But that’s the space where I fit in.”

Matt wondered, holding Annie close to him, what had provoked this old memory.

You’re a collector. You don’t like letting go. He guessed it was true.

Clinging to Annie now. Clinging to Rachel. Clinging to Jim and Lillian and the practice of medicine and the town of Buchanan. Everything’s changing, Lillian had said. But it was too much to let go of.

A cool finger of air touched the skin of his shoulder, and Matt pulled up the bedsheet and closed his eyes in the summer dark; and then, like Annie, like Rachel, like Jim and Lillian and everyone else in Buchanan and in the sleeping world, he began to dream.

A wave of sleep crossed the globe like the shadow of the sun, a line of dreaming that lagged only a few hours behind the border of the night.

It was a sleep more complete than the planet had known since the human species migrated out of Africa. Sleep tracked across North America from the tip of Labrador westward, and it possessed almost everyone equally: possessed the shift workers, the insomniacs, the wealthy, and the homeless; possessed the alcoholic and the amphetamine addict alike.

It possessed farmers, fishermen, the inmates of penitentiaries, and penitentiary guards. It possessed Methedrine-saturated truckers spinning Waylon Jennings tapes in the cabs of eighteen-wheelers, who pulled into the breakdown lanes of empty highways and slept in their rigs; possessed airline pilots, who landed 747s on the tarmac of sleeping airports under the direction of air-traffic controllers who methodically emptied the sky, and then slept.

There were isolated, and temporary, exceptions. Medical emergencies were rare, but telephone lines were maintained by a few dazed workers (who slept later); ambulances evacuated injuries to hospitals, where a few residents, functional but dazed beyond wondering at the events that had overtaken them, stanched the few wounds of a few sleeping patients… whose injuries, in any case, seemed to heal without much intervention. Fire crews remained functionally alert, though curiously sedated. No one slept until they had attended—without much conscious thought—to the obvious dangers: cigarettes were extinguished, ovens switched off, fireplaces damped.

Chapter 7
The Quiet

The fires that did break out were accidents of nature, not humanity. In Chicago, a welfare mother named Aggie Langois woke from a powerful and incomplete dream—which was not a dream—to find flames licking out of a 1925-vintage wall socket and kindling the paper curtains of her two-room apartment. She took her sleeping baby and her wakeful but calm three-year-old and hurried them downstairs, two flights to the sidewalk… and was surprised to find the other occupants of the building calmly filing out behind her. The crack dealer from 3-A was carrying the legless old man from 4-B; and Aggie’s personal nemesis, the neighbor girl who was a cocktail waitress and who liked to party after hours when the children were trying to sleep, had brought out a score of blankets and handed three of them to Aggie without comment.

Someone had paused long enough to dial 911. The fire engines arrived, not just promptly, but in eerie silence; the crew hooked up their hoses with an easy, economical motion. It was as if only a part of them was awake: the fraction necessary to do this job and do it efficiently. A man from the building next door—a stranger—offered Aggie a sofa to sleep on and a bedroll for her babies. Aggie accepted. “It’s an unusual night,” the man said, and Aggie nodded, mute with wonder. Before an hour had passed, the fire was extinguished and the occupants of the building had been dispersed to new locations, all in a strange and dignified silence. Safe and with her children safe beside her, Aggie began once more to dream.

Apart from the telephone exchanges, local communications dwindled and international networks began to fail. Within hours, the Earth had dimmed appreciably in the radio and microwave frequencies. Night overtook the western cities of Lima, Los Angeles, and Anchorage, and began to darken the ocean, while Israelis watched their CNN satellite feed shutting down due to “unexpected staff shortages,” according to one weary Atlanta announcer; and then there was only a static logo, then only static—as overseas subscribers blinked at the horizon and guessed something was wrong, something must be seriously wrong, and it was odd how calm they felt, and later sleepy.

* * *

Some resisted longer than others. By some quirk of will or constitution, a few individuals were able to shake off their sedation, or at least postpone it a few moments, a few hours.

A sales rep for the Benevolent Shoe Company of Abbotsford, Michigan, driving a rental Chrysler northbound on 87 from the Denver airport, pondered the miracle that had overtaken him in the darkness. He was due to check in at a Marriott in Fort Collins and face a convention of western footware retailers, beginning with a “reception buffet” at seven, for Christ’s sake, in the morning. The miracle was that some kind of formless disaster had spared him the necessity of scrambled eggs and bacon with a bunch of sleepy entrepreneurs wearing “Hello My Name Is” stickers.

The miracle had seemed to commence sometime after sunset, when his flight landed at Stapleton. The airport was nearly empty despite the fact that its gates were crowded with motionless aircraft. At least half the passengers on his flight stayed aboard, curled up in their seats… flying on to some other destination, he supposed, but it struck him as peculiar nonetheless. The terminal itself was cavernous and weirdly silent; his luggage was a long time arriving and the woman at the Hertz booth was so spaced out he had trouble holding her attention long enough to arrange a rental. Driving north, he was startled by the emptiness of the highway… cars pulling over into the emergency lane until his was the last mobile vehicle on the road, humming along like a sleepy wraith, listening to a Eurythmics tune that seemed to rattle in his head like a loose pea. Then the Denver oldies station abruptly signed off, and when he tried to find something else there was only one other signal, a country-and-western station, which promptly faded. Not normal, he admitted to himself. No, more than that. This was way past not normal, and it should have been scarier than it was. He pulled into the emergency lane, like everybody else, and climbed out of the car. Then he climbed up on top of the car and sat on the roof with his heels kicking at the passenger door, because—well, why not? Because he understood, in a feverish flash, that the world was ending. Ending in some strange and unanticipated and curiously sedate fashion, but ending, and he was alive at the end of it, sitting on top of this dung-colored Chrysler in a cheap suit and hearing for the first time the quiet of an abandoned night, a night without human noises. His own scuffles on the car top seemed achingly loud, and the wind made a hushed sound coming over farmland through the grain, and the smell of growing things mixed with the hot-engine smell of his car and his own rank sweat, and a dog barked somewhere, and the stars were bright as sparks overhead… and it was all a single phenomenon, the quiet, he named it, and it was awesome, frightening. He thought of his wife, of his seven-year-old son. He knew—another sourceless “knowing”—that whatever this was, it had overtaken them, too. Which made it a little easier to cooperate with the inevitable. He felt suddenly light-headed, too much alone on this immense table of sleeping farmland, so he climbed down and scurried back inside the womb of the car, where the silence was even louder, and curled up on the upholstery and obeyed a sudden and belated urge to sleep.

Among many other things, he dreamed that a mountain had begun to grow from the prairie not far from his car—a mountain as big as any mountain on the Earth, and as perfectly round as a pearl.

* * *

A thousand miles south, Maria Montoya, an expensive private escort, as she thought of herself—or whore, as her customers were occasionally unwise enough to whisper (or shout) in the transport of their passions—attempted to keep an appointment with a German businessman at one of the tourist hotels on Avenida Juarez in the Zocalo district of Mexico City.

Keeping the appointment proved mysteriously difficult. For one thing, there were no taxis that evening. Which was, as the Americans would say, a bitch. She depended on taxis. She had an arrangement with one company, Taxi Metro: She took a 10 percent fare cut in exchange for leaving the company’s business card on her clients’ hotel bureaus. Tonight the taxis were absent, the dispatchers failed to answer their phones, and the streets, in any case, were full of traffic that had parked along the sidewalks like clotted blood in an aging artery. The whole city was in this stalled condition. As bad as an earthquake! Of course, there hadn’t been an earthquake or any other discernible disaster; the nature of this confusion was much more mysterious… but Maria didn’t care about the details. She felt feverish, dazed, uneasy. She fixed her attention entirely on the need to meet this client. An important man, a wealthy man. She tried phoning to say she’d be late; the phones seemed to work but the hotel switchboard refused to answer. At last, Maria cursed and went out from her rented room into the unpleasantly hot night, the air glutinous and stagnant, and walked ten long blocks to the hotel district past all these stalled cars… but not stalled, exactly, because the drivers had pulled to the side of the road, sometimes onto the sidewalk, leaving a neat lane down the middle of the street, and they had turned their engines off, and all the lights. The cars had become dark caverns, and through their windows, mostly open, Maria saw the slumped shapes of sleeping passengers. Not dead—that would have worried her—just sleeping. How did she know? It was impossible to say. But the knowledge was inside her.

It was a harrowing journey. She almost fell asleep on her feet. She took a wrong turn and found herself wandering past the Palacio Nacional, its ugly tezontle masonry brooding over the motionless plaza and a hundred stalled cars. Her shoes clicked on the sidewalk, and an echo came rattling back.

She arrived at the hotel an hour late and with a broken heel. Her determination had wavered during the long walk and she was sleepy herself.

But she rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor, negotiated the pine-smelling and air-conditioned hallway to the room marked 1413, knocked and then opened the unlocked door when no one answered. Her client was inside—asleep, of course. A fat German snoring on the bedspread in his underwear, skin pale as eggshell and unpleasantly hairy. She felt a wave of contempt, an occupational hazard, and suppressed it. Obviously, she wasn’t needed here. Not a chance of waking this man, who had made such an issue of her promptness. She ought to go home… but the thought of the journey made her weary.

Conscientious to the last, Maria placed a Taxi Metro card on the nightstand and lay down beside the sleeping German, a stranger, with whom she chastely slept, and with whom she dreamed.

* * *

Dreaming marched westward. Dreaming crossed the Aleutians from Alaska into Siberia. Dreaming descended on ancient Asian cities: on Hanoi, Hong Kong, Bangkok. Tokyo slept with such condensed uniformity that it seemed to Hiroshi Michio, the last traffic cop to close his eyes on the cloistered neon of the Akihabara, that so much sleep, like a fog, might rise up and obscure the stars.

Sleep followed night across the Russian steppes, across rusting collective farms and lightless arctic forests, across the Urals and the Caucasus, sleep like an army moving west until it crossed the Finnish border, marched into Ukraine and then Romania, then Poland, where it met no opposition but the cool night air.

Sleep conquered China and rolled into Tibet, Pakistan, India, swept from Calcutta across two longitudes to Hyderabad.

Sleep took Africa in a space of hours. It moved westward from the Gulf of Aden into the dry hinterlands, took the dying children in the refugee camps and suspended them in darkness; followed the equator through jungles and grasslands and consumed the stony deserts of Egypt, Libya, Algeria; took its final subject in a fish shop in Dakar.

Dreaming unwound the cities of Europe, interrupting a river of human night noise that had run without surcease since the founding of Rome. Dreaming silenced Berlin and Leipzig; captured Naples and Milan; shut down the humming grids of Paris and Amsterdam; crossed the English Channel and conquered, finally, London, where a few frightened individuals had monitored the systematic dysfunction of the world with their shortwave radios, silent now, but who slept at last with everyone else, and with everyone else dreamed.

* * *

It was the same dream for everyone. The dream was complex, but the dream in its most fundamental form was a single thought, a question posed in six billion human skulls and more than three thousand languages.

The question was: Do you want to live?