The Harvest

She followed an empty access lane into the deep green darkness of the park.

But it was not a complete darkness even in the rain, even at two o’clock on a January morning. A faint light radiated from the low wrack of clouds. Douglas firs tossed in ponderous slow motion, like the masts of ancient sailing ships. The rain was everywhere, a silvery presence on lips and skin.

Figures moved in the dim light.

Not human, Daddy had insisted, and Rachel supposed that was especially true here. In the human history of Buchanan, there had never been such a gathering on such a raw January night. Before Contact, no one had come to smell the wet winter earth and walk among the mossy winter trees; no one had come for the caress of flesh against flesh—at least not in the cold, not fearlessly, not openly. It wasn’t human.

But it. seemed very human to Rachel, who had recently been studying the Travellers. The Travellers in their organic form had been almost incomprehensibly strange. She had seen them in borrowed and ancient memories: porous antlery creatures like mobile sponges, slow in the thick atmosphere of their chilly moon. Like humans, their bodies had been cellular in structure, but there the resemblance ended. The Travellers were uninucleate and genetically haploid, more like algae than animals. A mature Traveller was a colony of secondary systems—as if human beings were assembled from cultivated crops of livers, hearts, lungs, brains. The parts reproduced independently of the whole. For the Travellers, “sex” was a series of protracted, continuous events… they spoke of karyogamy the way people talked about middle age.

Human sex had seemed to the Travellers equally strange: a grotesquely foreshortened reproductive whirlwind, allied to something like a repeatable religious trance.

But they understood pleasure. Rachel remembered some of their slow, protracted pleasures. She remembered a glade of crystalline fans, warmed by pale sunlight and enriched by volcanic vents of gaseous water, where an ancient Traveller whose name was a shape had come to bask and root. She remembered the pleasure of hyphae uncoiled in a solitary erotic flowering. The pleasure of germinal sterigmata scattered in glittering clouds to the tidal wind.

Rachel left her soaking-wet clothes at the entrance to the park. Bodies moved along the grassy green, or timidly, like fawns, among the trees. The emerald light made these people seem golden and diffuse.

Rachel opened an eye to the Greater World and saw them, not just as surfaces, but as lives; as shapes of lives, complex and many-colored. She longed for their touch.

She found a man whose life-shape was a pleasing, temperate complexity—his name was Simon Ackroyd, and he had once been the Rector of the Episcopal Church, but he was something else now, a creature as fresh on the Earth as herself.

Infinitely light, lightly wedded to her skin, Rachel touched and joined his rain-wet flesh in the shadows of the great trees, in the cold air after January midnight on the surface of the cradle Earth.

The rain stopped falling sometime after dawn. Matt woke from a fitful sleep on the living room sofa and noted the absence of his daughter and the silence of the rain.

At noon, Tom Kindle and Chuck Makepeace arrived in Chuck’s Nissan. Committee business: The three of them drove to the municipal reservoir at the northeastern end of town.

Next to the stone slope of the reservoir was a white limestone building, the filtration plant, a WPA project as old as the Roosevelt administration. Set in a wide, rolling lawn, it looked to Matt like the temple of some serene religion.

The three men sat in the car gazing at the building from the gravel parking lot, Kindle taking long pulls on a can of Coke. Together they were the Public Works Subcommittee, and their job was to report on the condition of water and power resources inside the county line. Starting here. But none of them seemed to want to move from the car just yet.

All three had recently been spooked. Kindle had found the human skin snagged on his azalea bush just yesterday. Makepeace had discovered a similar relic in a neighbor’s house. And Matt was still troubled by Rachel’s visit last night… worried that he might not see her again; or that, if he did, she might be changed beyond recognition.

But these were common fears and none of the men spoke about them.

Last night’s rain had left a high, cool overcast. The filtration plant, with its whitewashed steel doors, waited with infinite patience in the green.

Kindle said, “You ever see The Time Machine?”

“No,” Makepeace said.

“In the movie, the time machine gets carried off into this building where the Time Traveller can’t find it. Morlocks are in there. Nasty, ugly people. Big old building.”

“You have a point?” Makepeace asked.

“Looked like this building.” Kindle tipped back his Coke. “Fu

“You guys are pretty thoroughly out to lunch,” Makepeace said. “I hope you’re aware of that.”

Chuck Makepeace, former City Councilman, former junior member of the town’s second most prestigious law firm, was still wearing three-piece suits. To Matt this seemed deeply neurotic, like formalwear on a lifeboat, but he kept his opinion to himself.

“I was inside there once,” Matt said. “School trip. About twenty-five years ago.”

“Oh?” Kindle said. “What’s it like?”

“There’s a double row of filtration tanks and a walkway in between. I remember a lot of big-diameter pipes and valves.”

“You know how any of it works?”

“Nope.”

Makepeace laughed. “It points up the stupidity of this whole expedition. We don’t know what to look for and we won’t know what it means when we see it.”

“Not necessarily,” Kindle said. “If we go in there and everything’s humming along, we tell the folks they can use the kitchen faucet a while longer. On the other hand, if the floor’s under water and the pipes are broken, we can all put a bucket on the roof and pray for rain.”

“Let’s get it over with, then… if you’re finished with that soda.”

Kindle drained the can and tossed the empty into the backseat.

“Hey,” Makepeace said, “don’t litter my car!”

“You can get a new car,” Kindle said.

Kindle had brought a big iron crowbar with him. The filtration plant was liable to be locked and nobody knew where the maintenance people had gone, much less their keys. But when Matt approached the windowless steel door he found it standing ajar.

Inside was darkness.

No one wanted to reach out and yank the door wide. Certainly Matt didn’t. He heard the muted thump of machinery inside, like a massive heartbeat.

Kindle said, “Did it always sound like that?”

“Maybe,” Matt said. “I was ten years old when I came here last. It could have changed.”

Privately, he thought: No, it wasn’t like that. It had been quiet. This was a high reservoir; the tanks were gravity filters. “Sounds like Morlocks to me,” Kindle said. “Jesus!” Makepeace said. “Open the damn door!” Matt tugged it wide. Moist air gusted out.

There was no light in the great windowless space inside. Once there had been banks of lamps suspended from the ceiling. No more. “Got a flashlight in the car,” Makepeace said. “Get it,” Kindle said.

Makepeace ran for the cherry-red Nissan while Matt and Kindle took a tentative step through the doorway. Neither of them spoke until Makepeace arrived with the flashlight.

The beam probed the farther darkness—once systematically, once wildly.

The filtration plant didn’t look the way it had looked during Mart’s fifth-grade field trip. What had once been copper pipe was now a tangle of fibrous tubing, columns thick and knotted as mangrove roots sweating condensation into the warm interior air. Much of the floor was occupied by a black dome, a pulsating hemisphere attached by ropy ventricles to the looming black filtration tanks.