Robert Wilson - The Harvest

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.

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.