Robert Wilson - The Harvest

The hole in the earth vented a cloud of luminous gas, a phenomenon geologists called a nute ardente. The cloud emerged at enormous speed and pressure. It carried volcanic ejecta at high velocity, peppering the retreating Home with rock fragments. It unfolded around the newly opened crater and set fire to the prairie in an expanding ring miles in diameter.

Home rose at the crown of this maelstrom and accelerated toward the high atmosphere, toward the stars.

From an altitude, the caldera on the land below resembled a flower: a stamen of boiling lava, petals of gray smoke touched at their tips with flame.

Home rose silently beyond a thin waft of cloud, rose brightly and silently in the thinning air. Its motive force was silent; it transformed its few gigawatts of waste energy into a blue-white wash of photons.

In the space inside it, deserts shimmered in virtual sunlight; alpine meadows bloomed at the approach of a virtual spring. New oceans lapped at the shores of new continents.

Below, in the darkness, a blister of ash and fire expanded over the cold Colorado tableland.

The first shock knocked Matt to the floor beside Tom Kindle.

He guessed it was an earthquake. It felt as if the Connor house had grown legs and begun to take long, bounding leaps across the prairie.

Maddeningly, there was nothing to hang on to. He was as helpless as a mouse in a rolling barrel. After what seemed like an endless pummeling, he managed to grab a doorjamb and brace himself firmly enough to raise his head and look around.

The air was full of dust. The quake seemed to raise dust from every surface. Above the roar, he could hear the joists twist in the ceiling. He wondered how long the house would last.

Tom Kindle writhed on the floor with one hand clutching his bad leg.

Matt pulled himself into the room where Colonel Tyler had died. The shaking seemed progressively less intense, though it had not entirely stopped. He looked for Beth. The Colonel’s body and Joey’s had been thrown into a ghastly embrace, Tyler’s limp arm draped over Joey’s shoulder and his hand pawing at Joey’s ruined head. Beth was approximately where he had left her but no longer sitting up against the foot of the recliner; she had slid back to the floor and her breathing—she was still breathing—sounded tentative and very wet.

The floor bucked again, and Matt braced himself until it steadied. He heard what must be the sound of the Connors’ front porch collapsing: a series of dry, woody explosions. The window popped out of its frame and shattered on the ground outside the house.

When the trembling eased, Matt pulled himself up to the empty sill and took a hurried look outside.

He couldn’t see the Artifact—the window faced the wrong direction—but he knew it must be rising. It was still radiating that vivid blue-white light, casting sundial shadows from the RVs and the prairie scrub, but now the shadows were growing shorter and inclining to the west.

The door of the Glendale opened, and Abby stood in it looking bruised and bewildered. She raised a hand to shield her eyes against the light. Matt heard someone crying out from inside the vehicle—Jacopetti, he thought. He wanted to tell Abby to stay away from the house, it wasn’t structurally safe… the walls were inclining and it was a miracle only the porch had collapsed. The urgent thing was to get Beth outside, get Kindle outside, before the next shock or aftershock…

But he couldn’t speak or wave or make any coherent gesture before Abby opened her mouth in an O of dismay and clutched at the door of the motor home.

Matt supposed—much later—that there must have been a sinkhole under the RV, some old hollow in the bedrock that had been opened by the violence of the quake. All he knew as it happened was that the big Glendale tilted leftward, and the camper in front of it—Mart’s camper—tilted right; one tumbled frontward into a sudden depression that might have been five or ten feet deep; the other tumbled back. The two vehicles collided, made the shape of a flattened V, and the Glendale began to slide sideways.

Abby fell back into the dark interior. Jacopetti’s strained shouting ceased abruptly.

The exposed engine of the Glendale ground against a torn flank of Mart’s camper and sparks fountained into the night air. “Christ, no,” Matt whispered.

The motor home was on fire as soon as that terrible possibility entered his mind.

Events were outrunning him. The fire didn’t spread. It was much quicker than that. There was no fire—and then the fire was everywhere. The side door of the Glendale rolled up to an impossibly steep angle.

Matt vaulted through the window and ran across the Connors’ dry garden to the burning vehicles. Both were on fire now. A propane tank popped, and Matt heard shrapnel scream past his ear.

The subsidence wasn’t deep. He scrambled down toward the Glendale just as flames licked up the undercarriage, forcing him back.

He called Abby’s name. She didn’t answer. He ran to the rear of the Glendale. There were no flames here—not yet—but the paint was peeling off the aluminum, and when he tried to climb up to the window, the skin of his hands sizzled on the metal.

He dropped to the ground and crawled away until the heat from the burning vehicles was no longer painful.

The Artifact, shrunken by altitude, dropped away beyond the western horizon. Its light faded.

It left behind the light of the burning campers, and a more baleful light from the caldera far away, a column of smoke impossibly wide, fan-shaped where it had risen into the dark sky.

The prairie was still undulating, Matt thought. Long, low-frequency waves. Like the swell of the ocean on a gentle night. Or maybe it was his imagination.

There might be stronger aftershocks.

He thought about Beth. Still work to do.

Time lurched forward in a drunkard’s walk. Somehow, he dragged Beth away from the Connor house. Somehow, he went back for Tom Kindle, who had pulled himself most of the way to the door before passing out.

He remembered Miriam. The old woman had been too sick to be sequestered with the others. Her small camper was still intact. Matt hurried to the door and forced it open.

But Miriam wasn’t inside—only a relic of Miriam. Only her empty skin.

In that interval, the sun had risen.

The southern horizon was a bank of roiling gray smoke larger than the Artifact had been. The sky was grayer by the minute and a gray ash had begun to fall like snow.

Beth continued to breathe. But each breath was a miracle; each breath was a victory against great odds.

Somehow, he lifted Beth and Tom Kindle into the coach of an undamaged camper.

Somehow, he began the longest journey of his life.

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.