Robert Wilson - The Harvest

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 acontract 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.