The Harvest

“Now they do.”

“You can’t change human nature, Rachel—not without taking away the thing that makes people human.”

“Then we’re not human. In a way, that was always the point. Humanity was reaching its limits, facing problems we couldn’t even begin to solve in the usual human way—global problems, planetary problems. And the main victim of our inadequacy was us! Our children*. They were already dying by the millions in Africa, and we were too human to do anything about it!”

Matt bowed his head. This was true, of course. The Contactees had done a better job. At least in the short term. “But what were they saved for, if their humanity wasn’t saved?”

“But it wasn’t lost, either, just outgrown. Do you know what we’re building? Has anyone told you? A spaceship. An Artifact of our own. A human one. Daddy, do you know what’s inside it? The Earth is inside it. Not literally, of course. But a model of it. All of it, every leaf of every tree, every mountaintop.…”

A memory of this was mingled with his own fading memory of Contact. “You mean a simulation. Like a computer program.” Or a paperweight, he thought: the Earth, in a globe of water, with snowflakes.

“More than a simulation. It’s a place, as real as this place, except that it doesn’t occupy a physical space. It’s alive in a very real way. It has winds. It has seasons. We’re human enough to need that—not just immortality, but a place to live.”

“Even if it’s an illusion?”

“Is it? Is an idea an illusion? Is the value of pi a hallucination, just because you can’t touch it?”

“Rachel, it’s not really the Earth.”

“No one pretends it is. No matter where we stand, we’ll know that. Because there will always be a door, not a physical door, but a sort of direction, a way to turn, and through the door is always the bigger world, all our knowledge and the knowledge we inherited from the Travellers—the epistemos, people are calling it; the idea-world.”

“We might have done it by ourselves,” Matt said. “Given time. If we’d survived a couple of centuries without vaporizing ourselves, without poisoning the planet, we might have moved into space. Maybe it seems trivial, but we walked on the moon without anyone’s help. Given time, maybe we could have met the Travellers on their own terms.”

Rachel’s eyes widened. “What a terrible thought!”

“Is it?”

She frowned. “Daddy… I know more human history than I used to. It’s an ugly parade. Infanticide, bloody warfare, human sacrifice—those are the norm. They’re not exceptional at all. And modern history is no better. When I was in school, we studied Roman history and we pretended to be horrified by it. The Romans left unwanted children to die by the side of the road, did you know that? How horrible. Well, it is horrible… but compared to what? The century of Auschwitz, of Hiroshima and the Khmer Rouge? Going into space wouldn’t have civilized us. We’d have had our robots disemboweling Moslems on the surface of Mars. You know we would.”

“Is that how the Travellers saw it?”

“Yes. And it terrified them. There’s no monopoly on power or knowledge. Given time, given our own survival, maybe we could have stopped them… destroyed them before they got close enough for Contact.”

“And that’s why all this is happening? Not because they’re doing us a favor. It’s self-defense.”

“In part. But they didn’t have to go to all this trouble. They had the means to exterminate us. That would have worked, too.”

The coldness of the statement made him feel both frightened and ashamed.

He took a long look at Rachel: who used to be his daughter, who used to be a human being.

“There wasn’t just brutality, Rachel. People lived lives—small, useful lives. Sometimes helped one another. Often loved one another. There was beauty. Sometimes there was even decency.”

Her expression softened. “Daddy, I know. They know. The Travellers know that about us.” She paused. “That’s why they couldn’t exterminate us.”

“Only change us.”

“Yes. Change us.”

A silence filled the room.

Rachel left the house before midnight, after her father had fallen asleep on the sofa.

She had wanted a better goodbye, but she supposed there was no way to say what she meant—no words to encompass her grief and fear.

She loved her father enormously and hated the idea of abandoning him to an empty planet… abandoning him to die.

A cold rain had begun to fall and the wind in the street was sharp and gusty. Rachel adjusted herself so that the temperature ceased to be unpleasant. Then she paused—alone among dark houses—and listened to the trees talk their sibilant winter language.

The wind lifted her hair and waved it behind her like a sad flag. Overhead, high above the streetlights, midnight clouds tumbled and dipped.

It was a stormy night, and there was worse to come. Although it was winter in the northern hemisphere, temperature gradients in the tropical oceans had risen dramatically; winds in the upper atmosphere had shifted. North and east of Hawaii, a low-pressure cell, a vast and powerful weather-engine, had begun to churn above the turbulent ocean. A typhoon—unheard of, this time of year. But all things were new.

Her father would learn about the storm soon enough, because he had begun to talk to the Helper.

Still, Rachel thought, he was so fragile…

She wondered why he had resisted the offer of immortality—why anybody had. But she didn’t submit the question to the Greater World, where there might have been an answer; she didn’t want to dwell on it more tonight.

There was not much left of her time on the cradle Earth, and Rachel wanted to make the most of these hours.

Not everyone relished the flesh. Many had already abandoned it—whole towns, in some cases, some as large as Buchanan. Buchanan itself was largely empty and would be emptier by the day. But some chose to linger… a leavetaking made strange by personal transformation, in some cases, like the group hidden in the basement of the high school, some forty strong, who had elected to share each other’s memories in every detail. They were there still, cross-legged on the floor and welded at the fingertips; motionless, enraptured, waiting to surrender their joined flesh in a single communal act.

Others—mainly but not exclusively the young—just wanted to play a little longer on the surface of the Earth… stay up past bedtime, do what had been forbidden.

Rachel encapsulated her grief and set it aside. She focused all her attention on this January night—the bite of rain on her exposed skin, trickle and drip of water in storm drains, creak of tree limb, rush of wind.

She hiked through the maze of tract housing that had overgrown the northern foothills of Mt. Buchanan. Rainwater streamed off the shingles of silent houses, empty houses where abandoned human skins were crumbling to dust. She paused at every high cul-de-sac that allowed a view. The rain obscured much, but there were still a few lights in Buchanan itself, lonely and far and fog-obscured. And she could sense as much as see the ocean, feel its enormous mass troubled by the climatic adjustments the Travellers had begun to perform.

She was wet to the skin. Her clothes were sodden and heavy. But none of that mattered. It was a cold rain, Rachel knew, but the touch of it was soothing, like the rain that carries away the heat of a summer day.

She walked toward Old Quarry Park, where sleepless others had gathered by unspoken mutual consent to share the pleasure of the night.

It was a long walk, nearly two hours by foot from her father’s house, but Rachel finished it without weariness. She was lighter and stronger than she had ever been before. A year ago, a hike this long in this weather would have left her exhausted and ill. Tonight there was no fatigue at all; only a growing excitement, a first tremulous presentiment of joy.