The Harvest

Tyler put three more shots into the girl’s prostrate body. Bang, bang, bang. He felt the recoil in his arm and shoulder. It felt good.

He had drawn the obvious inference from Murdoch’s silences and night visits, his hysteria and his quicksilver urges to leave or stay. But look, Tyler wanted to say, consider this evidence: She can die after all. She can die as dead as any human being.

Her blood was dark, viscous, and strange, and the sight of the body mesmerized him for a time.

Then he turned and looked for Murdoch; but Murdoch had slipped out the open door.

Not good.

Tyler hurried down to the lobby and into the street.

Murdoch was a block away, frantically rattling the doors of parked cars. Murdoch had forsaken him for the girl. Murdoch himself might be infected; there had been hints, a word or two Tyler had heard through the door. Now we can be together.

Tyler sighted down the barrel of the pistol. Sunlight gleamed on the fenders and windows of these parked cars; Tyler moved to shade his eyes.

Murdoch caught sight of him and ducked away. The pistol bucked and the shot went wide; Tyler saw it kick dust from the brick facing of a muffler shop. Murdoch crouched and hurried on to the next car, an old Ford; Tyler walked out into the street quickly but calmly and assumed a shooter’s stance.

He had begun to squeeze the trigger when the door of the Ford popped open and Murdoch ducked for the interior.

Tyler cursed but followed the motion. The pistol kicked again in his hand.

He saw Murdoch lurch as if he’d been hit—a gout of blood came from the left leg or thigh—then the car door slammed and the engine turned over twice, rattled on the edge of a stall, finally began to roar. Murdoch threw it into gear and Tyler watched helplessly as the vehicle screamed away from the curb. The Ford made a drunken swerve; its rear fender caught a lamp standard on the left side of the street, then it straightened and accelerated west.

Tyler turned and ran back to the Hummer… but the Exxon station was three blocks away; precious time was lost.

He drove west on the highway for an hour without sighting the Ford. Murdoch might have followed one of these dirt side roads, Tyler thought, or hidden the car in a barn, in back of a billboard, even along some back street in Loftus.

But I hurt him, Tyler thought with some satisfaction. In a place without doctors, without medical care, maybe that was enough.

It was a question of principle, Tyler thought. Murdoch had forsaken his humanity. And Tyler was better off without him. Murdoch had seen too many of his lapses. Murdoch had seen him shoot the girl. It was precisely the kind of baggage Tyler wished to leave behind.

He pulled over to the side of the road well beyond the limits of Loftus, in a patch of cool November sunlight, and listened to the silence. It was the new silence of his aloneness in this increasingly empty world. Murdoch was gone. That second voice, second self, was gone. There was only Tyler now, Tyler talking to Tyler ; or those other voices, the Sissy voices, whispering from the trees, the earth, the air.

Murdoch’s wound was more serious than the Colonel had guessed.

The bullet entered his hip, shattered a wedge of bone, and opened a raw round exit wound. Blood instantly soaked the seat of the Ford. The pain was blinding; but Murdoch was sustained by the vivid memory of Soo Constantine dead under the barrel of Tyler’s gun.

He drove two blocks at high speed, turned right, and rolled into the first empty garage he spotted.

The car wouldn’t be invisible here, but it might be inconspicuous in the shadows. Murdoch didn’t have a choice. It was stop now or pass out on the street. The car came up the driveway too fast; he fumbled his right foot ineffectually between the gas and the brake pedal; the Ford coasted into the garage and collided with a stack of pineboard shelves. Murdoch fell against the steering wheel as a pair of garden shears dented the hood of the car and a can of Varsol cracked the windshield.

He managed to turn off the engine before he slipped into unconsciousness, curled in the hot salt smell of his own blood.

The Helper responded promptly to the distress of a soul in transition. The transition had hardly begun; but the neocytes in Murdoch’s body broadcast the terrible news of the organism’s impending death.

Moments after Tyler ran west in the M998, bouncing over buckled tarmac and hunting vainly for Murdoch’s Ford, the reconstructed Helper moved from its place in the center of Loftus and glided to the garage where Murdoch was dying.

It came up swiftly along the driver’s side of the car and stopped there. The only sound was the drip of dilute Prestone from the Ford’s cracked radiator.

The Helper was many awarenesses, some of them human. One of them was Soo Constantine, who had recently been killed by Colonel John Tyler. Her distress was its distress.

The Helper looked at Murdoch’s bloody organism with pity and grief.

If he died—and he was nearly dead now—Murdoch would be dead forever. There hadn’t been time to engineer a transition, to grow a second Murdoch for the Murdoch-essence to inhabit. There was only this fragile plasmic Murdoch with a scant few neocytes inside him. The neocytes had only reproduced a few tens of tens of times. They had not mapped or expanded Murdoch in any significant way.

But Murdoch had made his choice. This was an involuntary death, which the Travellers found abhorrent.

The Helper made an arm and reached out to the window of the car. The window glass shattered and fell away in a fine gray powder. The arm extended further, reached inside the car to Murdoch and touched his damaged body.

Mass surged inward from the body of the Helper, which was proportionately diminished. Multiple millions of its subunits anticipated new tasks—sealing broken blood vessels, containing and fostering the spark of plasmic life.

Soon Murdoch was covered in what appeared to be a featureless black cocoon.

The cocoon was motionless; Murdoch was motionless inside it. Prompt and feverish activity had begun, but it was internal and below the threshold of perception. Superficially, nothing changed.

Days and nights passed. The sky outside the open garage roiled with clouds.

Periodically, that December, there was lightning.

Murdoch woke in January.

The Helper had retreated; he was alone in the car. He opened the door and staggered out into dim daylight.

The sky was gray and threatening. The weather was bleak and dangerous everywhere that winter; he had been warned about storms.

The neocytes were still at work inside him. Murdoch could have chosen to move directly into his new life, his virtual life; but he wasn’t finished with the flesh… Tyler’s gunshot had interrupted him.

There were things he wanted to see.

He couldn’t say precisely what things—literally could not say, to himself or to anyone else. In the aftermath of his injury, he had very nearly died; the flow of blood to the brain had been interrupted for too long. The neocytes were reconstructing that tissue, but much of their work was conjectural and slow, elaborating the holon of Murdoch’s self from its fragmented parts. He was himself, but he was inarticulate and he didn’t trust himself to drive; too much neuromuscular memory remained unreconstructed.

Mute, he walked in the direction of the setting sun.