The Harvest

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.