The Harvest

He walked for weeks.

His legs were u

Some nights he slept in the rain. His body had been changed on the inside; extremes of hot and cold no longer bothered him. He seldom ate. He didn’t need to, though he drank copiously when there was water.

He crossed the Mississippi at Cairo and passed into the prairies, where the storms were often fierce. One night, crouched in a pipe section where a four-lane bypass had been abandoned in mid-construction, he watched a blizzard unroll from the western horizon like a flat white wall. The wind made a sound like freight trains passing through the sky. After midnight, when the snow had almost blocked the pipe at each end, a wild fox—drenched and miserable—crept inside with him. The fox was terrified of Murdoch but more terrified of the blizzard. Murdoch strengthened his tegument and let the fox chew harmlessly on a finger until the animal was exhausted and no longer afraid of him. Then he cradled the fox against the warmth of his body until both of them were asleep.

In the morning it was gone, but Murdoch was startled and pleased that he had remembered the name of the animal during the night. Fox: the animal was a fox. He said it out loud. “Fox!”

It made his throat hurt. He didn’t care. The pleasure of speech was almost unbearable.

“Fox!”

He walked west and north along a road shrouded in glittering blue-white snow.

“Fox!” he exclaimed from time to time, and the word fell away across the empty winter farmland. “Fox, fox, fox!”

Late that winter, Murdoch passed through Kansas and crossed the state border into Colorado, where he glimpsed for the first time the thing he had come all this distance to see: the Home he had heard about from the Travellers.

This was what had drawn him, this was his reason for clinging to the flesh. Some stubborn fraction of A.W. Murdoch had wanted to see this miracle with his own eyes.

From a great distance it looked like a mountain, a curvature of blue and white nearly lost in the haze of the horizon.

It was Murdoch’s good fortune that the skies had cleared in the eastern lee of the Rockies. With a little more luck, the weather would hold until he was closer. But distances were hard to calculate with such an object. How many more miles to go? How far to the horizon, and how far beyond that?

He walked a day and a night and another day and another night.

Words returned to him piecemeal as the days passed and his neural tissue was restored. The effect was sometimes comic, as when Murdoch would suddenly halt along the verge of an empty road, point his index finger, and a

Proper names were more elusive. He could barely pronounce his own. “Murdoch,” he said, but it sounded clumsy and grotesque. Nor could he remember the name of the girl he had met in Loftus, though the memory was vivid and he often felt her silent presence. Maddeningly, the name lingered on his tongue but couldn’t be coaxed from his mouth. “Suh-suh-suh…” He worked at it, day after day, until his jaw was sore.

Home stood on the horizon, closer now. It drew the eye irresistibly, a miraculous blue pearl capped with white. The white was snow. Like a mountain, Home rose more than 50,000 feet into the rarified air, up where it was always cold, where the snow never melted.

The Travellers had explained to him, wordlessly but vividly, how the creation of Home had begun. Months ago, on the eve of Contact, a single microscopic neocyte—a kind of seed—had come to rest on this plain of dry, rolling land where Colorado met Wyoming. Instantly, the Traveller organism had begun to reproduce itself. One made two, two made four, four made eight—in less than an hour, a million; two million; four million. The organisms grew themselves from the constituent parts of soil, sand, water, air, and light. When their numbers were large enough—uncountably, inconceivably large—they organized themselves into machines, into devices as big as cities.

Home required immense to

The days remained clear, but a cold wind blew steadily from the west. Murdoch felt weaker, the farther he walked.

He understood that he couldn’t get as close to Home as he might have liked. It wasn’t a healthy environment. The wind, curling around a sphere more than thirty miles in circumference, created a turbulence that could sweep.him off his feet. Deadly gases vented from the magma tap, and the heat at the cratered base was well beyond human tolerance.

But he could get a little closer than this.

“Suh,” he pronounced. “Suh—suh—”

It wasn’t good enough.

The snow came back that night.

It was a hard, granular snow, difficult to walk through. Murdoch slept in an empty Best Western motel, in a hallway away from windows that had been broken by the winter storms, and walked on in the morning. His compass—he had pocketed it in Loftus—and his road map kept him aimed in the right direction.

But Home was hidden by the weather.

The weather settled in and showed no inclination to change. He walked for three days blindly… walked until he was forced to stop by a violent tremor and a wind so sulfurous and hot that it melted the snow on the ground.

Murdoch felt himself growing lighter. When he was finished here, there was no reason to cling to the flesh; he understood that. But he worried that the process might be happening too quickly, that he would be gone before the weather cleared.

He curled under a tarpaulin in the rear of a gas station… drifting in and out of sleep, listening to the hard snow sift across the roof, the gas pumps, the empty road.

Time passed. He couldn’t have guessed at day or month; knew only that it was after midnight when the snow stopped.

He woke to a blanketing silence, stood up stiffly, and hurried outside.

The clouds had passed on. There were stars—vivid prairie stars—and a few, faint streaks of cirrus.

And Home.

Murdoch caught his breath.

It was a wall that dominated the sky. Perspective made it seem truncated, a looming dome about to tumble over and crush him. A crescent of snow at its apex reflected the starlight, but most of that part of the sphere was a occluded by its nearer slope. The lower section of Home wasn’t solid; it was a gridwork, a lace of bone-white struts and spars, as fine, from Murdoch’s vantage, as spider silk; but each one must be immense, he thought, columns as wide as towns, as long as highways.

It was illuminated from within by the light—many miles away—of the magma tap, and by the luminescence of the earth’s own toxic gases, pearlous and strange.

Periodically, balls of blue lightning seemed to flow and stutter along the countless struts and spars of the structure. And there was a sound—a distant, continuous thunder that had been obscured by the snow, but echoed now, in the cold night air, across the plain.