The Harvest

By the time William came cycling from the east with his wide eyes and half-a-name, Miriam had grown accustomed to doubt; she knew at once he wasn’t a normal sort of youngster.

For one thing, she liked him. During her years as a secretary at the elementary school, Miriam had not much cared for children. They were messy, impudent, and vulgar. The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light. Luke 12:19. But Miriam guessed the children of Galilee seldom addressed their elders as “fuckhead.”

Neither did William. William was different, and Miriam suspected he had once been much older. She told him so now.

He sat thoughtfully on the hood of the empty car, his heels tapping the grill. “I didn’t lie to you.”

“But you’re not what you appear to be.”

“I am what I appear to be. But I’m something else, too.”

“Older.”

“Among other things.”

“You’re not human.” He shrugged.

“You don’t want the others to know?” He shrugged again.

Miriam shifted her weight. Her feet were tired from standing for so long. “I won’t tell them,” she said. “I don’t think you’re anything to be afraid of.” William’s smile was tentative. She said, “But will you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Talk to me. Tell me about—” She couldn’t find a word for it. He said, “The Greater World?”

“Yes.” He was perceptive. She added, almost shamed by the admission, “I’m curious.…”

“All right,” William said.

“But first we should go eat di

The Colonel had organized di

The group had divided into clusters. William watched Matt Wheeler and Tom Kindle, conspicuously silent, sharing some private uneasiness.

He watched John Tyler conferring with his cadre: Joey Commoner, Paul Jacopetti, Bob Ganish. There was some troubled conversation there—hushed and indecipherable.

Beth Porter stood with a bowl in her hand, glancing nervously between the two groups.

William didn’t like the sour atmosphere of the room. The sooner we move on, he thought, the better. He thought about Miriam (who was silently spooning a bowl of soup: the chili, she said, was indigestible)—Miriam, who had guessed his secret.

He thought about Rosa Perry Co

He thought about Home.

Back at the camper, he did his best to answer Miriam’s questions.

She wanted more than he could give. She wanted a tour of the architecture of the universe. He was hobbled by words. But he did his best—tried to translate into simple English his own new grasp of time and space.

We live in a well of time, William told her. Call up your most primitive memory, a cradle memory, something from your childhood. Now think of all the hours that have passed since then, all the ticks of all the clocks in all those years. An ocean of time. Double that amount, he said, and double it again, and multiply it by a hundred and a hundred more, and still, Miriam, still you haven’t scratched the surface of the past. Multiply it by a number so large the zeroes would run off a page and you might reach as far back as the Jurassic or the Precambrian, when the Earth was a planet inhabited by monsters; but only an eyeblink in its history. Multiply again and again and eventually you reach the dawn of life, and again, the planet’s molten origins, again and again, the formation of the sun. And multiply again: the elements that would form the sun and all its planets are forged in the unimaginable furnace of a supernova. And still you haven’t removed more than a grain of sand from Time Itself.

“Lonesome,” Miriam whispered.

And space, William said, was a mystery, infinite but bounded. The galaxy was a mote among billions of galaxies; the sun, a star among billions of stars; this moment, the axis of a wheel as big as the sky.…

“It’s too much. William! How can you stand it?” Her voice was faint and sad. “So lonesome,” she repeated.

But out of all that blind tangle of particles and forces had come life itself. It was a miracle that impressed even the Travellers. Consciousness unfolding from a cocoon of stars and time. Pearls of awareness growing in the dark. “Miriam, how can it be lonely?” He couldn’t disguise the awe in his voice. “We were implicit in the universe from the moment it began. We’re the product of natural law. Every pondering creature in the deeps of the sky. We’re the universe gazing back at itself. That’s the mystery and the consolation. Every one of us is an eye of God.”

She woke three hours after midnight, turned in her bed, and saw William in his sleeping bag with his arms cradled behind his head and his eyes still open in the faint light.

The curse of age was the elusiveness of sleep. An older person, Miriam thought, gets too familiar with the dim hours of the night. But William, the boy-man, was also awake.

Both of us restless, Miriam thought. The aged and the ageless.

“William” she whispered.

He was silent but seemed attentive.

“There is something I wonder about,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about us. Us on this trip. And those in Ohio or other parts of the world—who said no. Who didn’t want that immortality. That… Greater World. Do you think about it?”

His voice small in the darkness: “Yes.”

“Do you think about why?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why some of us chose to stay in our mortal bodies?” Nod.

“William, is there an answer to the question?”

“Lots of answers.” He paused as if to assemble his words. “As many answers as there are people. Sometimes it was religious faith. Though not as often as you might think. People say they believe this or that. But on the deepest level, where the Travellers spoke, words are only words. People call themselves Christians or Moslems, but only a vanishing few held those beliefs so deeply that they turned down immortality.”

“Am I one of those?”

He nodded again.

At least, Miriam thought, I used to be. “And the others?”

“Some are so independent they don’t mind dying for it.” Tom Kindle, she thought.

“And some people want to die. They might not admit it, they might even fear it, but in the deepest part of themselves they long for it.”

Who was that, Miriam wondered. Bob Ganish, the fat used-car dealer? Maybe. Paul Jacopetti, the retired tool-and-die maker? Scared of death but secretly wanting it? Perhaps.

“Some are convinced they don’t deserve immortality. The belief in their own shamefulness has gnawed down to the bone.”

Joey, Miriam thought.

“Or some combination of these.”

Beth.

“Perhaps,” Miriam said, thinking of Colonel Tyler, whom she had distrusted from the day she set eyes on him, “perhaps some of them are simply evil.”

“Perhaps,” William agreed. “But some evil people laid down that part of themselves as gratefully as they might have given up a tumor. Others didn’t. Others… Miriam, this is hard to accept, but some people are born so hollow at the heart of themselves that there’s nothing there to say yes or no. They invent themselves out of whatever scrap comes to hand. But at the center—they’re empty.”

“Colonel Tyler,” Miriam said.