Robert Wilson - The Harvest

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.

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.