The Harvest

“This is contentious bullshit,” Tyler said, but he looked suddenly miserable and distracted.

“Colonel Tyler, it would not surprise me if you were the highest-ranking military officer not under the influence of what you call a disease. I don’t know how the chain of command operates in a case like this. It’s something the Constitution doesn’t anticipate. But if you want the job—”

“My Christ, you’re completely insane,” Tyler said. But the gun wavered in his hand.

“It’s a question of constituency. That’s the fundamental problem. Colonel, do you know how many people turned down the opportunity to live forever? Roughly one in ten thousand.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s assume I do. The population of the Earth is roughly six billion, which yields six hundred million individuals who are not, as you say, diseased. Quite a number. But not all of them are Americans—not by a long shot. Colonel Tyler, do you recall the last census estimate of the American population? It’s vague in my mind. Something on the order of three hundred million. That would give you a constituency of roughly thirty thousand people. The size of a large town. Quite an amenable size for a democracy, in my opinion. Under ideal circumstances, you could establish direct representative government… if you mean to continue holding elections.”

Colonel Tyler’s eyes had begun to glaze. “I can’t accept that. I—”

“Can’t accept what? My argument? Or the Presidency?”

“You can’t confer that on me! You can’t hand it to me like some kind of Cracker Jack prize!”

“But you were willing to take it away with a gun—you and your allies.”

“That’s different!”

“Is it? It’s not exactly due process.”

“I’m not the fucking President! You’re the fucking President!”

“You can shoot me if you want, Colonel Tyler.” He stood up, a calculated risk, and made his voice imperious. He became the President of the United States—as Tyler had insisted—one more weary time. “If you shoot me once or twice I might survive. I understand this body of mine is a little tougher than it used to be. If you shoot me repeatedly, the body will be beyond repair. Though it seems a shame to-clutter Lafayette Square with a corpse on such a fine su

Colonel Tyler stood up and kept the pistol against William’s belly. “If you can die, you’re not immortal.”

“The body is mortal. I’m not. There is a portion of the Artifact that contains my—I suppose essence is the best word. I am as much there as I am here. I am awake here, Colonel, and I am asleep there… but if you shoot me you’ll only reverse the equation.”

A wind swept through the park. A dozen yards away, the boy’s kite flapped and hesitated. Pull, William thought. Work the string.

The kite soared, black and yellow in a blue sky.

“Let’s take a walk, Colonel,” William said. “My legs cramp if I don’t stretch them once in a while.”

They walked along 17th toward Potomac Park, past the Corcoran Art Gallery and the offices of the OAS, the blind jumble of Washington architecture.

The city’s most revealing buildings were still its monuments, William thought. The Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial. An American idea of a British idea of a Roman idea of the civic architecture of the Greeks.

But the Athenians had operated their democracy in the agora. We should have copied their marketplaces, not their temples. Should have moved in some fruit stands, William thought. A rug vendor or two. Called Congress to session among the peanut carts on Constitution Avenue.

He had once loved the idea of democracy. He had loved it the way he loved his beach in Maine. Like his love of the beach, he had misplaced his love of democracy in the long journey to the White House.

Oh, he mentioned the word in speeches. But all the juice had gone out of it.

He wondered if Colonel Tyler had ever really loved democracy. He suspected the Colonel had never loved a beach.

“You gave all this away,” Tyler was saying. “It went without a battle. Not a raised fist, Mr. President. It’s a crime worth a bullet, don’t you think?”

The gun had retreated into a holster under the Colonel’s jacket, but William was still acutely aware of its presence.

“What are you suggesting I gave away, Colonel?”

“ America,” Tyler said. “The nation. It’s sovereignty.”

“Hardly mine to give up.”

“But you collaborated.”

“Only if you persist in seeing this as an invasion. Well. I suppose I did collaborate, in a certain way.” It was true, the President’s significant dream had come a few nights before the rest. Early Contacts fell into two categories: the very ill and the very powerful. The ill, so their diseases wouldn’t carry them off at the eleventh hour. The powerful, so dangerous mistakes might not be made. “I think of it as cooperation, not collaboration.”

“I think of it as treason,” Tyler said flatly.

“Is it? What choice did I have? Was there some way to resist? Would a panic have changed anything?”

“We’ll never know.”

“No, I don’t suppose we will. But, Colonel, the process has been democratic. I think you have to admit that much. The question—the question of living forever and all that it entails—was asked of everyone. You think I should have spoken for America. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t have to. America spoke for itself. Colonel, it’s obvious you were able to turn down that offer. Others could have made the same choice. By and large, they didn’t.”

“Absurd,” Tyler said. “Do you really believe that? You think creatures who can invade your metabolism and occupy your brain can’t lie about it?”

“But did they? You were as ‘invaded’ as everyone else. And yet, here we are.”

“I said I might be immune.”

“To the compulsion but not to the asking? It’s an odd kind of immunity, Colonel.”

They settled on a bench in the Constitution Gardens where pigeons worried the grass for crumbs. William wondered what the pigeons had made of all these sweeping changes in the human epistemos. Fewer tourists. But the few were more generous.

He should have brought something to feed the birds.

“Think about what you’re telling me,” Tyler said. “They approached everyone? Every human being on the surface of the earth? Including infants? Senile cripples in rest homes? Criminals? The feebleminded?”

“I’m given to understand, Colonel, that the children always said yes. They don’t believe in death, I think. An infant, a baby, might not have the language—but the question was not posed entirely in language. The infants and the senile share a will to live, even if they can’t articulate it. Similarly the mentally ill. There is a nugget of self that understands and responds. Even the criminals, Colonel, though it is a long journey for them even if they accept this gift, because it comes with the burden of understanding, and they have many terrible things they may not want to know about themselves. Some of the worst of them will have turned down the offer.”

The Colonel laughed a wild and unpleasant laugh. “You know what you’re saying? You’re telling me I’m the unelected President of a nation of homicidal maniacs.”

“Hardly. People have other reasons for not wanting immortality. Such as your reason, I presume.”

The Colonel scowled. Here was dangerous territory, William thought. He took a breath and persisted: “It’s like looking into a mirror, isn’t it? When the Travellers talk, they talk to the root of you. Not the picture of yourself you carry around in your head. The heart. The soul. The self that is everything you’ve done and wanted to do and refrained from doing. One’s truest self isn’t always a handsome sight, is it, Colonel? Mine was not, certainly.”