The Harvest Read online

  The Harvest

  Prologue

  Part OneChapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part TwoChapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part ThreeChapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part FourChapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Annotation

  Physician Matt Wheeler is one of the few who said no to eternity. As he watches his friends, his colleagues, even his beloved daughter transform into something more-and less-than human, Matt suddenly finds everything he once believed about good and evil, life and death, god and mortal called into question. And he finds himself forced to choose sides in an apocalyptic struggle—a struggle that very soon will change the face of the universe itself.

  The Harvest by Robert Charles Wilson

  For Devon… the best I can do right now.

  And, belatedly, for my parents.

  Prologue

  “Tonight,” the President of the United States said, “as we gaze at the sky and wonder at what we see there, our minds are crowded with questions.”

  It was an Everest of understatement, Matt Wheeler thought.

  He regarded the President’s solemn face as it flickered in the blue aura of the TV screen. The man had aged in office, as presidents often do. Much of that aging, it seemed to Matt, had occurred in the past two weeks.

  He turned up the volume and opened the patio doors.

  Cool air spilled into the living room. The thermostat kicked over and the baseboard heaters began to warm up. Matt listened to the tick of hot metal in the President’s long pauses.

  The air outside was cold, but the night sky had cleared for the first time this rainy March. For the first time, Matt would get his own look at the phenomenon that had been terrifying the rest of the world for most of a week. He’d seen pictures, of course, on the screen of his nineteen-inch Sony. But that was TV. This was his backyard. This was the sky above Buchanan, Oregon : moonless, dark, and cut with bright scatters of stars.

  He checked his watch. Five minutes after ten o’clock. Back east, in the nation’s capital, it was past one in the morning. The President had delivered this speech hours ago. Mart’s daughter Rachel had been at band practice during the first broadcast… rehearsing Sousa marches at the announcement of what might, after all, be Armageddon. Matt had taped the whole thing. The networks were running excerpts at the top of every hour, but he thought she should hear all of it. Especially tonight. When the sky was clear.

  He turned back briefly into the warm shell of the house. “Rachel? About time, honey.”

  Rachel had been holed up in her bedroom since dinner, rearranging photos in the family album. Whenever she was unhappy, Rachel would deal out these old photographs across her bedspread, stare at them for a time, then shuffle them back into the vinyl-bound album in some new and presumably meaningful order. Matt had never interfered, although it troubled him when she disappeared into the past like this—unfolding family history like a road map, as if she’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.

  But it was a soothing ritual, too, and he didn’t want to deny her any scrap of consolation. Rachel had been seven when Celeste died, and Matt supposed the memory of her mother, sad as it might be, might also help sustain her through this crisis. He hoped so.

  She came out of her room dressed for bed: a nightie and a pink flannel robe. Comfort clothes. Rachel was sixteen, and he was occasionally startled that she had matured so fast—it was every parent’s lament, but he felt as if she’d grown up in an eyeblink. Not tonight, though. Tonight—in this old robe:—she could have passed for twelve. Her eyes were shadowed, maybe a little resentful as she looked at him. Maybe she felt twelve. Don’t make me see this. I’m only a kid.

  They stepped out together into the night air.

  “For the first time in human history,” the President said, “we stand in the light of a new moon.”

  “Sky sure looks big,” Rachel observed.

  Bigger than it had ever looked, Matt thought. More hostile. But he couldn’t say that. “It’s a pretty night.”

  “Chilly.” She hugged herself.

  The house stood at the crest of a hill, and Matt had always appreciated this downslope view. He pointed east across a dozen dark rooftops to a ridge where a stand of Douglas firs tangled with the stars. “We should see it about there.”

  “Many of us have reacted to recent events with fear. I have on my desk reports of rioting and looting. Perhaps this is unsurprising, but it does us all a great disservice. We are traditionally a strong and levelheaded nation. If we survived Pearl Harbor, if we kept our wits about us at Bull Run, it would be absurd—it would be un-American—to surrender to hopelessness now.”

  But the Pacific Fleet had been decimated at Pearl Harbor, the Union Army had panicked at Bull Run, and anyway, Matt thought, this wasn’t a war. It was something else. Something unprecedented.

  Rachel pressed tight against his side. He said, “Are you scared?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s okay. We’re all a little scared.”

  She gripped his hand fiercely, and Matt felt a cold rush of anger. Goddamn you, he thought at the empty sky. Goddamn you for frightening my daughter like this.

  The President’s voice was clangorous and strange under all these springtime stars.

  “Our scientists tell us we’ve travelled a long evolutionary road from the beginning of life on this planet. Whoever our visitors are, they must have travelled a similar road. Perhaps we seem as strange to them as they seem to us… or perhaps not. Perhaps they recognize us as their own kin. Distant cousins, perhaps. Perhaps unimaginably distant, but not entirely foreign. I hope this is the case.”

  But you don’t know, Matt thought. It was a pious, happy sentiment. But nobody knows.

  A screen door wheezed open and clattered shut: Nancy Causgrove, their neighbor, stepping outside. The yellow buglight in the Causgroves’ backyard made her skin look pale and unhealthy. She poured out a saucer of milk for Sookie, a fat tabby cat. Sookie was nowhere to be seen.

  “Hi,” Rachel said unhappily. Mrs. Causgrove nodded… then paused. And looked up.

  “When I was a child,” the President said, “we took our family vacation one summer in the Adirondacks. We owned a cabin by a river there. It was a wide, slow river—I don’t recall its name. That summer, when I was ten years old, I believed we were all alone, about as far from civilization as it was possible to get But that river took me by surprise. It wasn’t crowded… but every once in a while someone would come by, a hiker along the shore or a canoe out in the river where the current ran fast. I was shy about these visitors, but in time I learned to smile and wave, and they always smiled and waved back. Sometimes they stopped, and we would offer them a cup of coffee or a bite of lunch.”

  The President paused, and for a moment there was only the creak of frogs from the cold marshland down in the valley.


  “I am convinced our Earth is like that cabin. We have been alone a long time, but it seems a river runs past our habitation, and there are people on that river. Our first instinct is to shrink back—we are a little shy after such a long time by ourselves. But we also feel the impulse to smile and say hello and trust that the stranger is friendly, and I think that is a strength. I think that impulse is what will carry us through this crisis, and I urge all of you to cultivate it in your hearts. I believe that when the story of our time is written, historians will say we were generous, and we were open, and that what might have seemed at first like the end of the world was simply the beginning of a new friendship.

  “I urge you all—”

  But the President’s words were lost in Rachel’s gasp. Nancy Causgrove fumbled her grip on the milk bottle. It shattered on the stone patio, a wet explosion. Matt stared at the sky.

  Above the western horizon—stark behind the silhouette of the Douglas firs—the bone-white orb of the alien spaceship had begun to rise.

  * * *

  There were three things in this world Matt Wheeler loved above all else: his daughter, his work, and the town of Buchanan, Oregon.

  Gazing at this blank and unimaginably large structure as it glided above the trees, as it eclipsed Orion and wheeled toward Gemini, he was struck with a sudden conviction: All three of those things are in danger.

  It was a thought born in the animal fear of this new thing in the sky, and Matt worked to suppress it.

  But the thought would recur. Everything he loved was fragile. Everything he loved might be forfeit to this nameless new moon.

  The thought was persistent. The thought was true.

  * * *

  A year passed.

  Part One

  New Moon

  Chapter 1

  August

  The crisis some people call “Contact” continues to preoccupy Congress and the Administration as elections approach.

  We call it “Contact,” but as Senator Russell Welland (R., Iowa) observed last week, contact is the thing most conspicuously lacking. The spacecraft—if it is a spacecraft—has circled the Earth for more than a year without attempting any kind of signal. On the sole occasion when it displayed a sign of life—when it emitted the structures that occupy our major cities like so many monuments to the ineffectiveness of our air defenses—it was an event impossible to interpret. It’s as if we have been invaded by a troop of extraterrestrial mimes, deranged but very powerful.

  Or so the conventional wisdom would have us believe. In the City of Rumors, nothing is taken for granted. Recent high-level international summits—including several underreported jaunts by the Secretary of State—have sparked suspicion that genuine “contact” of some kind may be imminent. According to unofficial White House sources, back-channel lines to the Germans, the Russians, and the Chinese—among others—have been buzzing with traffic for at least a week. Coincidence?

  Who knows? Clearly, however, something is afoot. And Congressional leaders of both parties are demanding to be let in on it.

  —August 10 installment of the nationally syndicated column Washington Insider (from the scrapbook of Miss Miriam Flett, Buchanan, Oregon )

  A year and some months after the immense alien Artifact parked itself in a close orbit of the Earth, Matt Wheeler spent an afternoon wondering how to invite Annie Gates to the party he was hosting Friday night.

  The question was not whether to invite her—obviously he would—but how. More precisely, what would the invitation suggest about their relationship? And what did he want it to suggest?

  Pondering the question, he washed his hands and prepared to see the last two patients of the day.

  * * *

  In a town the size of Buchanan a doctor ends up treating the people he sees at backyard barbecues. His last patients were Beth Porter, daughter of Billy, a sometimes-patient; and Lillian Bix, wife of his friend Jim.

  The two women, Beth and Lillian, were posed at opposite ends of the waiting-room sofa like mismatched bookends. Lillian paged through a Readers Digest and dabbed her nose with a hankie. Beth stared at the far wall, absorbed in the music that seeped from the headphones of her Walkman like the rhythmic rattling of a pressed tin pie plate. A few more years of this, Matt thought, and he’d be treating her for hearing loss.

  The teenager was first up. “Beth,” he said.

  She gazed into space.

  “Beth. Beth!”

  She looked up with the resentment of someone startled out of a dream. The resentment faded when she recognized Matt. She thumbed a switch on the cassette player and pried the phones out of her ears.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Come on in.”

  As he turned, Annie Gates stepped out of her consulting room with a file folder in hand. She glanced at Beth, shot him a look: Good luck! Matt returned a smile.

  Annie Gates wore medical whites and a stethoscope around her neck. Unlike Beth and Lillian, Annie and Matt were a matched set. They were business partners. They were professionals. He was sort of in love with her. He had been sort of in love with her for most of a decade.

  * * *

  Matt Wheeler had been practicing primary-care medicine in this building for fifteen years. He had grown up in Buchanan, developed what he thought of as “the medical impulse” in Buchanan, and after serving his residency in a Seattle hospital and passing his general boards he had hightailed it back to Buchanan to open a private practice. His partner then had been Bob Scott, a dark-haired and high-strung Denverite who had interned with him. Together they had rented this suite, a waiting room and three consulting rooms on the seventh floor of the Marshall Building, a sandstone legacy of the Hoover era planted firmly at the intersection of Marina and Grove.

  Matt and his partner had understood the perils of family practice, or thought they did. The real money was in specialties, in “doing procedures”; the hassles were in family practice. Not just patient hassles—those they had been prepared for. But insurance hassles, Medicare and Medicaid hassles, paperwork hassles… in time, a crippling, skyrocketing overhead. Dr. Scott, professing a nostalgia for city life, bailed out and left for L. A. in 1992. Last Matt heard, he was working at the kind of corporate storefront clinic sometimes called a “Doc-in-the-Box.” Bye-bye hassles. Bye-bye independence.

  Matt persevered. He couldn’t imagine a life outside of Buchanan, and he couldn’t imagine any work more satisfying than the work he did, at least when he was allowed to do it. Celeste had died around the time Bob left for California, and the new demands on his time had been, perhaps, a blessing in disguise.

  Bob Scott’s replacement showed up in June of that year: a young female internist named Anne Gates. Matt had not expected a woman to show interest in the partnership, particularly not a young blond woman in a businesslike skirt and a pair of black-rimmed glasses that amplified her eyes into something owlish and fiercely solemn. He told her she’d have to put in long hours, make house calls, cover at the local ER, and expect nothing spectacular in the way of remuneration. “It’s not city work,” he said, thinking of Bob Scott’s defection and the cut of that Perry Ellis skirt.

  Whereupon Anne Gates informed him that she had grown up in a farm town on the prairies of southern Manitoba ; she knew what small towns were like and Buchanan didn’t look so damn small to her (though it did look decent). She had survived a residency in an inner-city hospital where most of the ER patients had been gunshot wounds, knife wounds, and drug ODs. She had emerged from this ordeal still believing in the fundamental value of primary-care medicine, and as far as “remuneration” went, she would be happy to live in the absence of cockroaches, get more than five hours’ sleep in a given week, and treat at least the occasional patient who didn’t initiate the relationship by vomiting on her.

  Whereupon Matt Wheeler discovered he had a new partner.

  They had worked together for nearly a year before they discovered each other as human beings. He was recovering from Celeste’s death and wh
at interested him about Anne Gates in that unhappy time was, for instance, her remarkable finesse with fiber-optic sigmoidoscopy, a procedure he loathed and dreaded, or her uneasiness with cranial injuries of any kind. They shifted patients according to each other’s weaknesses and strengths; Anne ended up with many of his geriatric patients, and he took an extra share of pediatrics. But she was also a woman and Matt was a widower and there were days when the vector of that equation did not escape him. On the first anniversary of her arrival in Buchanan, he took her to dinner at the Fishin’ Boat, a restaurant by the marina. Soft-shell crab, shallots in butter, margueritas, and a prearranged ban on doc-speak. By the end of the evening he was calling her Annie. They went to bed for the first time the week after that.

  They were passionately involved for most of that year. The year after, they seemed to drift apart. No arguments, but fewer dates, fewer nights together. Then the pace picked up for another six months. Then another hiatus.

  They never talked about it. Matt wasn’t certain whether these peaks and valleys were his fault or hers. Whether they were even a bad thing. He knew for a fact, however, that a pattern had been established. Nearly ten years had passed since Annie Gates stepped through that office door for the first time. Mart’s hair had grayed at the temples and run back a little from his brow, and Annie had developed frown lines at the corners of her eyes, but ten years was an eyeblink, really, and at no point in that time had they ever been entirely separate… or entirely together.

  Lately they had drifted through another vacuum, and he wondered how she would take this invitation for Friday evening. As a courtesy? Or as a suggestion to spend the night?