The Harvest

Chapter 8 Buchanan Awake

Simon Ackroyd, D.D., Rector of St. James Episcopal Church since his appointment to Buchanan in 1987, woke from a long sleep thinking about the Aztecs.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the Aztec Empire had brought the practice of ritual sacrifice to such a pinnacle of efficiency that on one occasion in 1487 eighty thousand individuals—prisoners of war—were systematically killed, their beating hearts extracted with obsidian knives. The lines of victims stretched for miles. They had been caged, fattened, and sedated with a plant drug called toloatzin so they would endure the nightmare without struggling.

The Aztecs, when Simon read about them in college, had been the first real test of his faith. He had grown up with what he recognized now as a sanitized Christianity, a pastel Sunday School faith in which a gentle Jesus had redeemed humanity from the adoration of similarly pastel pagan idols—Athena and Dionysus worshiped in a glade. The problem of evil, in this diorama, was small and abstract.

There was the Holocaust, of course, but Simon had been able to rationalize that as a terrible aberration, the horrendous face of a world in which Christ commanded but did not compel.

The Aztecs, however… the Aztecs had lodged in his mind like a burning cinder.

He could not dispel the persistent, horrible vision of those lines of prisoners snaking through angular stone colonnades to the temple at Tenochtitlan. It suggested whole worlds of unredeemed history: centuries fathomless, Christless, and unimaginably cruel. He envisioned the sacrificial victims and thought: These were men. These were human beings. These were their lives, alien and terrible and brief.

And then, one night in Episcopal Seminary, he had dreamed himself talking with an Aztec priest—a bony, nut-brown man in a feathered headdress, who had misunderstood his horror as religious awe and who responded with his own attempt at a compliment. Our knives are trivial, the priest had said. See what your people have achieved. All your missile silos, your invisible bombers, each one an obsidian knife aimed at the hearts of tens of millions of men and women and children; each one a temple, painstaking, ingenious, the work of an army of engineers, contractors, politicians, taxpayers. We have nothing to compare, the Aztec priest had said.

And Simon had awakened with the chilly suspicion that his own life, his own culture, everything familiar and dear, might in its essence be as twisted and cruel as the stone altars and kaleidoscopic deities of the Aztecs.

His faith sustained him through college, through his divinity degree, through his appointment to this parish. He was a thoughtful Christian, and on his good days he suspected his doubts only made him stronger. Other times—when the winter fogs enclosed Buchanan, or on moonless summer nights when the pines seemed to take on the barbed and thorny aspect of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of the underworld, in the repulsive mural of Tepantitla—he wished his doubts could be abolished, annihilated in a light of faith so intense it would wash away all these shadows.

Then—last night—he had had a very different dream.

He woke tentatively, as if exploring a world made new and unpredictable. Which perhaps it was.

Simon felt the world wake up around him. It was waking, he knew, from a very dramatic and peculiar kind of sleep.

But the immediate world, his world, was still the same: same bed, same bedroom, same creaking wooden floors.

The fair weather had not broken. Simon opened the bedroom drapes. The rectory was a wood-frame house erected in the boom years after the Second World War, next door to the church, in the old part of Buchanan riding up the foothills from the bay. A modest house: its luxury was this view. The morning sky was luminous above blue ocean water. Wind stirred up foam on the crests of the waves.

The world was transformed but not new, Simon thought. Or rather, it was the human landscape that had been transformed. They are at work inside us now.

He shaved and wondered at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Here was a gaunt forty-five-year-old man, receding hair and graying beard, quite ordinary, but all of us, he thought, have become remarkable underneath. He dressed and padded downstairs in his bare feet. It was Simon’s special indulgence to go barefoot around the house on pleasant summer mornings. His housekeeper, Mary Park, disapproved. She would glare at his feet as if they were a display of obstinence or bad taste, then shake her head. In fact, Simon rather admired his feet. His feet were unpretentious, unadorned, unbeautiful. They appealed to his Protestant impulses. They were “plain” feet, as the Amish might say.

Mrs. Park knocked and entered as Simon was tuning his small television set in the parlor—actually the church’s television set, usually appropriated by the Sunday School for audiovisual displays. The rectory had been connected to cable last June at Simon’s expense and for the purpose of indulging his addiction to news broadcasts and PBS. He tuned in CNN this morning, where a dazed female announcer was describing the events of the last thirty-two hours in baffled generalities. Apparently Western Europe was still asleep. Simon had a momentary vision of the Earth as an animal, a bear perhaps, groggy after a winter’s hibernation, stumbling toward the light.

Mrs. Park offered a distracted “Good morning.” She ignored his bare feet for once and began to assemble his breakfast—two eggs, bacon, and buttered toast. It was a cholesterol sin he could never bring himself to renounce. In any case, he was hungry this morning: He had slept for a night, a day, and another night. He thought with some awe of the morning he had missed, of the silent afternoon no human being had seen.

Mrs. Park seemed to be keeping an eye on the television through the kitchen doorway. Simon turned up the volume for her.

“Evidence of this ‘enforced sleep’ is inescapable,” the newswoman was saying. “Reports of injuries, remarkably, are nil. Reports of the subjective experience suggest a direct, almost telepathic, contact with the orbiting Artifact.”

And so on. Simon wondered how long this pretense at objectivity would be maintained. Good grief, he thought, we know all this.

No one wanted to name what was looming in the future. Elysium, he thought. Jerusalem. The illud tempus.

He adjourned to the kitchen when Mrs. Park summoned him. Had breakfast ever smelled this good before? Or was his body already different in some way?

She hovered at his shoulder. “Dr. Ackroyd—”

“Yes, Mary?”

“You had the dream?”

“We all did.”

His housekeeper confessed: “I told them—I told them yes.”

“Yes, Mary. So did I.”

She was obviously surprised. “But you were religious!”

“Why, Mary, I still am. I think I still am.”

“But then how could you answer them yes? If it’s all right to ask, I mean.”

He considered the question. Not a simple one. Many of his deepest beliefs had been challenged in the last thirty-odd hours. Some had been abrogated. Had he been tempted? Had he yielded to temptation?

He pictured the temple at Tenochtitlan, the arc and fall of the obsidian knives.

“Because of the Aztecs,” he said. “Sir?”

“Because there won’t be any Aztecs in the world anymore,” the Rector said. “That’s all finished now.”

The question had been posed in democratic fashion and it was becoming obvious that the yeas outnumbered the nays.

Mary Park had said yes, and so had her husband Ira; and they had known this about each other as soon as they woke and exchanged glances across the bedsheets. Ira was sixty this year, seven years older than Mary. All spring and all summer his emphysema had kept him housebound and weak as a child—his day a slow rotation of morning game shows, afternoon movies, evenings rereading the sports magazines that came in the mail. This morning he sat up and took a deep, experimental breath… then coughed, but not as deeply or painfully as the morning before. The air felt good. Sweet summer morning air, fresher than hospital oxygen. It was like a memory long forgotten and suddenly recalled. Do you want to live? Yes, by God! This morning he wanted very much to live. Even if it meant—in the long run—a certain strangeness.

Lingering in bed, Ira Park thought briefly about the possibility of going back to work at Harvest Hardware, where he had labored behind the counter for twenty-five years. Then he figured not. He had spent twenty-five years in retail sales and that was enough for one lifetime. Find something new to do for the next twenty-five years. Or twenty-five hundred.

He had been replaced at Harvest by Ted Keening, eighteen, who had been described by his high-school guidance counselor (in a private joke in the teachers’ lounge) as “not exactly college material. Too dumb for an academic scholarship, too fat for a sports scholarship, and too poor to buy his way in.”

Ted was a television junkie and still some twenty pounds bigger than he’d like, but he’d lost weight since he started working at the store. There was a fair amount of physical labor involved, hauling stock up from the basement and so forth. But Ted was beginning to realize that his future contained more than a career in measuring chain and weighing nails. He had awakened this morning with the knowledge that he didn’t have to die and that pretty soon no one would be liable to call him fat or stupid—which was how he had thought of himself even before he paused by the east window of the teacher’s lounge and overheard his guidance counselor’s joke. His reaction to this morning’s revelation wasn’t triumphant or gloating, just… he guessed “astonished” might be the best word. He didn’t completely understand what was happening. It was too big to understand. But he felt the future. His own. The world’s. The future had become a curious and wonderful thing. It shimmered on the horizon like a heat mirage, as hard to see, as achingly bright, but much more real.

He told his boss he might not be working at Harvest much longer. Mr. Webster, who had also said yes to an unvoiced question during his long sleep, told him he understood and that, as far as he could tell, there might not be hardware stores much longer. Which would be kind of a shame, given the years and money he had invested in this place. “But what the hell. I’m sixty-five years old. I’d have to give up the store one way or another. I guess I’d sooner walk away from it than get shut in a coffin. Ted, I think we’re all bound for something we can’t even guess at. It’s as strange a thing as I have encountered, and you probably feel the same. But unless you’re done with us already, would you mind ringing up these items for Mr. Porter?”

Billy Porter, Beth’s father, was a fairly steady customer. Usually he came in for car parts from the automotive section. Billy was always fiddling with his ten-year-old Subaru, a car that stalled at intersections no matter what he did to the choke or the idle or any other part he could get his hands on. Or he came in to buy shells for his hunting rifle, Billy being an occasional hunter whenever his friends offered to drive him up into the mountains. Today he had bellied up to the checkout with a selection of garden tools, which Mr. Webster found vaguely amusing: The idea of Billy down on his hands and knees in the mulch… planting tulips, maybe…

But maybe it wasn’t so funny. “Becky always kept the garden in such fine shape,” Billy said. “I’m ashamed how I let it go. I thought it wouldn’t take much cleaning up. A little work, what the hell.”

“Taking the day off?” Mr. Webster asked.

“Taking an easy shift, anyhow. I don’t know how much longer they’ll need me down at the mill.” Billy had also said yes.

Some few had not.

Billy’s daughter Beth had answered No!—had understood the offer and rejected it. She couldn’t say exactly why. Something in her had grown sullen and hard and had drawn away from this alien touch. No, not me. You won’t steal from me my dying.

But she woke knowing what she had turned down and it made her a little sad. The real question was, What next? What threats and possibilities lurked in this soon-to-be-new world?

She hiked down to the mall and called Joey Commoner from a pay phone.

Joey didn’t want to talk about it, but Beth understood from his cryptic responses to her careful questions that Joey had also said No.

Wouldn’t you know it? Birds of a feather, thought Beth. Well, damn. The last real people.

The last Aztecs, Rector Ackroyd might have said.

There were others.

Miriam Flett, who woke that morning with her agonies and virtues intact, but with a new idea of whose Hand had touched her during the night.

Tom Kindle, who had lived on the slopes of Mt. Buchanan for five years in a cabin without city electricity. He came into town summer weekends, when he operated a private ferry to the bay islands, but he spent his winters alone and liked it that way. What he didn’t like was the shape of the miracle he had been offered in the night. A lemming future, Kindle thought. No damn privacy.

One junior member of the City Council and one city clerk. A salesman at Highway Five Buick.

Matt Wheeler.

Chapter 9 Many Mansions

When he woke, Mart’s first observation was that his fever had broken. He felt clearheaded and alert—there was nothing left of the sedation of the night before. But something was wrong.

He rolled over and reached for Annie, but his hand touched empty sheets.

Like everyone else, he had spent the night dreaming. His dream had seemed vividly real… was real, some part of him insisted. But Matt was equally determined that it must not be real, and he screwed down that determination like a carpenter’s clamp over all errant and contrary thoughts. A dream, he instructed himself, was only a dream.

The house smelled of frying bacon and buttered toast. Matt dressed in weekend clothes, Levi’s and a sweatshirt, and headed for the kitchen. A bar of sunlight crossed the tiled mosaic floor. A window stood open and morning air plucked at the curtains.

Annie and Rachel were collaborating on breakfast. Matt stood in the doorway a moment before they noticed him. They were giggling at some joke, heads together, Rachel in shorts and an old khaki shirt, Annie still in her nightgown. They cracked eggs into a blue plastic bowl.

It was Annie who turned and saw him. Her smile didn’t fade, exactly. But there was a hitch in it—a blink of uncertainty.

“Breakfast coming up,” she said. “For late risers. Jim and Lillian left early, by the way. They said thanks for the party and they’d stop for food at McDonald’s.”

“Wasn’t much of a party,” Matt said.

“Some wine, some friends. What else do you need?” Annie shooed him toward the table. “Go on, Matt, sit down. If you try to help you’ll just get in the way.”

He watched her move around the kitchen, tousle-haired and pretty in her nightgown. They hadn’t made love last night. Blame it on the Taiwan Flu. But it had been much, much too long since the last time. Matt recalled five separate occasions when he had considered asking Annie to marry him, and each time he had shied away from the question, diverted by some lingering guilt or just a fear of disturbing the status quo, their fragile dalliance. Should have asked her, he thought. We’d have had more of these mornings. More nights in bed.

Rachel was curiously cheerful serving up the scrambled eggs. It was a rare pleasure to see her smiling. When she was a toddler, that grin had been big and infectious. Celeste would take her shopping and strangers would offer compliments—“Such a happy baby.” She’d been a happy baby, happy toddler, happy little girl. It had taken Celeste’s death to erase that smile, and Matt was surprised at the depth of his own reaction now that he was seeing it again. How long since she’d smiled like that? Not a brave smile or a halfhearted smile but a big Rachel grin?

But this was a thought both maudlin and dangerous, and Matt suppressed it and focused his eyes willfully on the varnished tabletop.

Rachel joined him at the table; Annie did not. He said, “You’re not eating?”

“I ate. I have to dress. You two take your time.”

She left the room, but not before Matt noticed a glance that traveled between Annie and Rachel like a semaphore signal.

He looked at his watch and saw that the date crept ahead an extra day. How had that happened? In his dream he had seemed to sleep much too long—but that was only a dream. Focus, Matt thought. He suffered a momentary fear that the world might fade around him, the walls of reality shatter to reveal… a void.

“Want to hear the radio?” Rachel asked.

Christ, no, Matt thought. “No—please.” He was afraid, for reasons he could not admit, of what the radio might say. She recoiled a little. “Sorry, Daddy.”

“It’s all right.”

She picked at her eggs. The silence in the room was suddenly weighty, and Rachel’s smile had faded.

“Daddy,” she said, “I’m okay. Really.”

“Of course you are.”

“You’re worried about me. But I’m fine. I really am. Daddy?” She looked at him intently. “Daddy, did you dream last night?”

He would not endure the weight of the question. He fought a childish urge to close his eyes and cover his ears. He looked away from Rachel and said, through a wave of shame that seemed to thicken his tongue, “No, honey, I didn’t. I didn’t dream at all.”

He drove Annie home along the bay shore.

Buchanan was quiet again today, but it was a normal Saturday quiet, not yesterday’s odd and uneasy tranquility Folks were out in the morning cool, mowing lawns, weeding, making grocery runs. Matt allowed himself a moment’s appreciation of all this suburban peace.

A blue haze rode up the slope of the mountain. The air through the wing window carried a rich bouquet of pine resin and sun-warmed asphalt. Matt followed the lazy curve of the road past the commercial dock, where a trawler stood in rust-colored repose, through the business district and beyond a high bluff of land to the apartment complex where Annie lived.

He had never understood why she chose to live in this down-at-the-heels corner of town, in an old walk-up building with pasteboard walls. She had never explained. There were a lot of things Annie had never explained. Where she disappeared to the second Saturday of every month, for instance; or why she had never replaced her genteel but ancient furniture.

But she invited him up, and he accepted the invitation. For all its apparent poverty, this was still very much an Annie kind of place: a bedroom and a big living room overlooking the bay, sparsely furnished, clean wooden floors, the elderly tabby-cat Beulah snoozing in a patch of sunlight. The apartment was as economical as a haiku: Every detail mattered.

Annie spooned out coffee into the basket of her coffee maker. Beulah had been fed by a neighbor; she paid no attention to the kitchen noises. The machine began to burble. Annie said, “We have to talk, Matt.”

He knew that “we have to talk” was polite code for an impending emotional meltdown, and he didn’t like it. He stood at the window and watched the ocean roll out blue and calm to the horizon. Did they have to talk? Was silence such a bad thing?

“Matt?” she said. “Did you dream last night?”

It was almost possible to hate her for the question.

He said, “Rachel asked me the same thing.”

“Oh? What did you tell her?”

“I told her no.”

“I don’t think she believed you.”

“She didn’t say.”

“J don’t believe you.”

He turned away with enormous reluctance from his view of the sunlit sea. “What’s this about, Annie?”

“I had a dream,” she said. “Rachel had a dream. I think every living human being on the surface of the Earth had that dream. Even you.”

He fought an urge to bolt for the door. He was sweating, he was tense, and he couldn’t resist his own diagnosis: Denial, announced the premed hotshot inside him. You’re denying what you don’t want to face.

He sat down at Annie’s lacquered pine dinner table and closed his eyes. Beulah bumped against his leg. He picked her up. Beulah began to purr.

“All right,” he said flatly. “Tell me what you dreamed.”

But it wasn’t a dream, Annie said, not really. It was a visitation, and the agency of that visitation had been the microorganisms—or machines—Jim Bix had warned him about.

(“No, Matt, don’t ask me how I know these things. I just do. Let me finish.”)

The microbes were neither organism nor mechanism, Annie said; they were an amalgam of both, or something beyond either. They were capable of reproduction and were even, in their own dim way, intelligent. They had been distributed into the atmosphere by the trillions upon trillions, had ridden the jet stream to the extremities of the Earth, and by the end of July they had colonized every human organism on the surface of the planet. Within the last week they had begun to reproduce; their growth and their activity was what had produced the alarming hematology results.

Their job was to function as the voice of the Artifact. That is, of the Travellers.

Annie called them “Travellers” because that was their name for themselves: It defined them. Like the microbes they created, they were not organic beings. Unlike their creations, they once had been. They had been both organic and planetbound: creatures like ambulatory sponges, building their cities in the methane-rich tidal sinks of an Earth-sized moon orbiting a Jovian planet of an unimaginably distant star.

They had outgrown their world. They had poisoned it with organic and machine wastes, a catastrophe averted only by their abandonment of both organism and mechanism. In the wake of that crisis they became Travellers: planetless, bodiless.

The Artifact was their world now. It was both a physical structure and a much larger virtual environment. They inhabited it, a greater number of souls than the Earth contained human beings, but only a few of them occupied physical bodies at any given time, and then only for the purpose of repairing and maintaining the Artifact itself.

They were, she told Matt, not a hive or a computer or any such easily imagined thing; they were separate creatures, individuals, unique—but capable of so much more, being immaterial; of complex joinings and indefinite sleeps, of enduring the long journeys between stars without boredom or decline, of learning without ending. Their lifespan was indefinite, unlimited. They had achieved a kind of immortality.

They had been Travellers, Annie said—-knowing some of these things only as she said them—since the Earth was a whirl of dust and the sun a hot new star, and they had forgotten nothing of what they had seen in those millennia. They were a vast library of inconceivably ancient wisdom, and they had arrived at the Earth at what they considered a critical and fortuitous moment, because, Annie said, we are what they had once been: intelligent, planetbound, and poisoning a world with our waste products.

It was obvious, she said, why they hadn’t communicated with governments or world leaders. They had a better means of communication, the cybernetic microbes, a kind of arm of themselves with which they could touch each human being individually. This more intimate contact was the only communication worthy of the word. The microbes, which might be called neocytes, interfaced with nervous tissue, touching but not changing it. At the brink of Contact they had soothed the frightened population of the Earth—sedated us, Annie said, yes, but only long enough and deeply enough to prevent panic. Then they had induced a kind of long, deep sleep, and in that sleep the Travellers had spoken. They had spoken to six billion human beings over the course of the next thirty hours, and what they spoke was not merely language but a complex of, for lack of a better word, understandings, deeper and more profound than language could ever be. And they had explained all this and more, much more than Annie could tell.

But Matt, she said, you must have felt it: All the possibilities… the literally infinite possibilities… the lives they led… and their place, the Artifact, like a nautilus shell, not dead, as it had seemed, but filled with lives strange and various beyond belief. They must have showed you that.

They must have offered it to you, Annie said. Because they offered it to me.

They said I could have it, too.

Do you want to live? they had asked. Live without dying? Live, in effect, forever?

And Annie had said yes.

Do you want to live, they had asked, even if you change? Even if you become, in time, something no longer entirely human?

And that had given her pause; but she thought again of their long, complex, interesting lives; she understood that everything changed, that death itself was a kind of change, that of course it was impossible to live forever without changing—change was to be expected.

And again she said yes.

She poured coffee and put the cup in front of Matt. Matt examined the cup. It was a solid thing, gratifyingly real. A familiar thing.

Beulah yawned and jumped out of his lap; preferred, apparently, the sunlit floor.

Annie put her hand on his shoulder. “What did you tell them, Matt?” He pulled away from her touch. “I told them no.”

Chapter 10 Etiquette

The President, whose given name was William, did what he had not done in quite this way for many years: he took a walk.

He left the White House by the Main Portico and crossed Pennsylvania Avenue into Lafayette Square. He walked alone.

It was a fine September morning. The air was cool, but a gentle sunlight warmed his hands and face. The President paused as he entered the park. Then he smiled and shrugged off his jacket. He unbuttoned his collar and pulled off his tie. He folded the black silk tie into a square and tucked it absentmindedly into his hip pocket.

No etiquette in the new world, he thought.

He was reminded of the story about Calvin Coolidge, who had shocked the fashionable guests at a White House breakfast by pouring his heavily creamed coffee into a saucer. Shocked but unfailingly polite, Coolidge’s guests had done the same. They waited wide-eyed for the President to take the first sip. At which point Coolidge picked up the saucer, leaned over, and presented it to the White House cat.

The story was funny, but it seemed to William there was something ugly about it, too—too much of the ancient vertebrate politics of dominance and submission. After all, what was a President that anyone should be frightened of one? Only a title. A suit of clothes—and not a particularly comfortable one.

He was ashamed that there had been times when he thought of himself as “the President”—as a sort of icon, less man than emblem. He supposed that was how the Roman emperors might have felt, anointed by the gods; or their Chinese counterparts ruling under the Mandate of Heaven. These are dream-names we give ourselves, he thought; indeed, much of his life seemed like a dream, a dream he had been dreaming too deeply and for too long. A dream from which he had been awakened by a dream. The morning air made him feel young. He remembered a summer his family had spent at a beach resort in Maine. Not the riverside cabin he had recalled in that long-ago address to the nation. That had been an isolated July in the Adirondacks, much embroidered by his speechwriter. The family’s summer place in William’s twelfth year had been a fabulous old resort hotel, erected in the Gilded Age and preserved against the solvent properties of salt air and progress. Its attractions were its fine linens, its European cuisine, and its two miles of wild Atlantic beach. William’s mother had admired the linen. William had admired the beach.

He had been allowed to explore the beach by himself as long as he promised to stay out of the water, which was, in any case, too chilly and violent for his liking. He loved the ocean from a cautious distance, but he loved it nonetheless. All that summer, every morning, he would choke down breakfast and bolt from the hotel like a wild horse vaulting a fence. He ran where the sand was packed and hard, ran until his side stitched and his lungs felt raw. And when he couldn’t run anymore he would take off his shoes and explore the wetter margin of the beach, where water oozed between his toes and odd things lived in the tide pools and among the rocks.

When he tired of that, he would sit in the high salt grass and gaze at the juncture of ocean and sky for as much as an hour at a time. England was across that water. England, where American flyers had gone to join the battle against the Luftwaffe. Beyond England, Vichy France. Europe under the heel of the Nazis; embattled Stalingrad.

He watched the great clouds roll along the ocean rim, clouds that might have come from war-torn Europe, but more likely from the tropics, from seas that still carried a whiff of Joseph Conrad and H. Rider Haggard when he saw their names on a map: the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal. He would dream in such a fashion, and then he would eat his lunch: cold roast beef from the hotel kitchen and a thermos of sweet iced tea.

I was once as alive as that.

What fairy tales our lives are, William thought. How strange that that child could have conceived an ambition to rule the United States—could have pursued his ambition so relentlessly that he became something stony and patrician. It seemed to him now that he had fallen into a kind of trance, though he could not say exactly when. In law school? When he first ran for office? He had folded himself into the cloak of his career until it dimmed his urge to run away down some sunny summer beach. What a shame.

He drifted into sleep, sun-warmed on a park bench by the statue of Rochambeau… but the touch of the pistol barrel on his neck woke him instantly.

The steel barrel was pressed against a space two inches below his left ear, sliding minutely against a knot of muscle under the skin.

William turned his head cautiously away from the pressure and looked up.

He did not immediately recognize the man who was holding the pistol. He was a tall man with a neat brush of white hair. A strong man, but not a young man—on the shy side of sixty, the President guessed. He was wearing an immaculate three-piece suit with the jacket open. William saw all this in the blink of an eye.

The face was startlingly handsome. And not completely unfamiliar.

He probed his memory. “Ah,” he said at last. “Colonel Tyler.”

John Tyler kept his body tight against the weapon to disguise it from the few tourists strolling in the park. He slid the barrel across William’s collarbone and into his belly as he sat beside him on the bench.

John Tyler’s name had cropped up every so often in the National Intelligence Daily or the President’s FTPO briefings. Tyler had been a minor player in the planned coup d’etat, which had been derailed, of course, by Contact. He was one of those ex-military men who lead odd little careers in the defense lobby, the so-called Iron Triangle. Revolving-door connections with—who was it? Ford Aerospace? General Dynamics? In exchange for some ground-floor lobbying with the House Armed Services Committee or the Subcommittee on Procurement. A man with contacts at the Pentagon, and Langley, and at certain banks. Tyler was an educated man and a convincing public speaker, and his prospects might have been brighter if not for the hint of a scandal that had ended his military career—some sexual impropriety, as William recalled.

He knew one other thing about John Tyler. A small piece of intelligence from a loyalist Air Force general. The architects of the coup had had a particular role in mind for Colonel Tyler: If William had refused to retire peaceably to some country dacha, it was John Tyler who was to put a bullet in his brain.

“I watched you,” Tyler said. His voice was quiet but bitter. “I watched you leave the White House. My God, it’s startling to see a President in public without a Secret Service escort. Did you think it was all over? You didn’t need the bodyguards anymore?”

“It is over. The guards all went home, Colonel.” He looked at Tyler’s pistol. An ugly little machine. “Is this your revolution? I thought that was over, too.”

“Keep your hands down,” Tyler said. “I should kill you right now.”

“Is that what you mean to do?”

“Most likely.”

“What would be the point, Colonel Tyler?”

“The point, sir, would be that a dead President is better than a live traitor.”

“I see.”

In fact, William understood several things from this small speech:

He understood that the coup was a thing of the past; that Colonel Tyler had come here representing no one but himself.

He understood that Tyler had said no to the Travellers and was only beginning to grasp the significance of Contact.

And he understood that beneath his rigid calm, the Colonel was teetering on the brink of panic and madness. Would Tyler shoot him? He might or might not. It was an open question. It would be decided by impulse.

Choose your words carefully, William told himself.

“You had friends,” he said to Tyler, “but they all changed their minds. They woke up and saw that the world is a different place now. Not you, Colonel?”

“You can bank on that.”

“That was a week ago. Did you wait all this time to see me?” William nodded at the White House behind its spiked fence. “You could have walked in the front door, Colonel. No one would have stopped you.”

“I talked to your friend Charlie Boyle yesterday. He told me the same thing. I didn’t believe him.” Tyler shrugged. “But maybe it’s true. I mean, if you’re out taking a goddamn stroll.”

Charlie Boyle has only been my friend since he woke up immortal, William thought; but yes, Charlie had been telling the truth. The White House was open to the public. Like any other museum.

There was a twitch of impatience from Tyler, a slight pursing of the lips. William drew a slow breath.

“Colonel Tyler, surely you know what’s happening. Even if you don’t want any part of it. Even if you said no to it. This isn’t an alien invasion. The flying saucers haven’t landed. The Earth hasn’t been occupied by a hostile military force. Look around.”

Tyler’s frown deepened, and for a space of some seconds his finger tightened on the trigger. William felt the barrel of the gun pulse against his body with the beating of Tyler’s heart.

Death hovered over the park bench like a third presence.

That shouldn’t frighten me anymore, William thought. But it does. Yes, it still does.

“What I think,” Tyler said, “is that everybody has been infected with a hallucination. The hallucination is that we can live forever. That we can cohabit like the lamb and the lion in a Baptist psalm book. I think most people succumbed to this disease. But some of us didn’t. Some of us recovered from it. I think I’m a well man, Mr. President. And I think you’re very sick.”

“Not a traitor? Just sick?”

“Maybe both. You collaborated—for whatever reason. You’re not qualified to hold office any longer.”

“Am I sick? You’re the one with the pistol, Colonel Tyler.”

“A weapon in the right hands is hardly a sign of illness.”

How strange it was to be having this conversation on such a gentle day. He looked away from Colonel Tyler and saw a ten-year-old attempting to fly a kite from the foot of the statue of Andrew Jackson. The breeze was fitful. The kite flailed and sank. The boy’s skin was dark and gleaming in the sunlight. The kite was a beauty, William thought. A black-and-yellow bat wing.

For a moment the boy’s eyes caught his and there was a flash of communication—an acknowledgment in the Greater World of each other’s difficulties.

J may yet talk my way out of this, William thought.

“Colonel Tyler, suppose I admit I’m unqualified to hold the office of President of the United States.”

“I have a gun on you. You might admit any damn thing.”

“Nonetheless, I do admit it. I’m not qualified. I say it without reservation, and I’ll continue to say it when you put the gun away. I’ll sign a paper if you like. Colonel, would you care to help me nominate a successor?”

For the first time, Tyler seemed uncertain.

“I’m quite sincere,” William hurried on. “I want your advice. Whom did you have in mind? Charlie Boyle? But he’s not trustworthy anymore, is he? He’s ‘diseased.’ The Vice-President? The same, I’m afraid. The Speaker of the House?”

“This is contentious bullshit,” Tyler said, but he looked suddenly miserable and distracted.

“Colonel Tyler, it would not surprise me if you were the highest-ranking military officer not under the influence of what you call a disease. I don’t know how the chain of command operates in a case like this. It’s something the Constitution doesn’t anticipate. But if you want the job—”

“My Christ, you’re completely insane,” Tyler said. But the gun wavered in his hand.

“It’s a question of constituency. That’s the fundamental problem. Colonel, do you know how many people turned down the opportunity to live forever? Roughly one in ten thousand.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s assume I do. The population of the Earth is roughly six billion, which yields six hundred million individuals who are not, as you say, diseased. Quite a number. But not all of them are Americans—not by a long shot. Colonel Tyler, do you recall the last census estimate of the American population? It’s vague in my mind. Something on the order of three hundred million. That would give you a constituency of roughly thirty thousand people. The size of a large town. Quite an amenable size for a democracy, in my opinion. Under ideal circumstances, you could establish direct representative government… if you mean to continue holding elections.”

Colonel Tyler’s eyes had begun to glaze. “I can’t accept that. I—”

“Can’t accept what? My argument? Or the Presidency?”

“You can’t confer that on me! You can’t hand it to me like some kind of Cracker Jack prize!”

“But you were willing to take it away with a gun—you and your allies.”

“That’s different!”

“Is it? It’s not exactly due process.”

“I’m not the fucking President! You’re the fucking President!”

“You can shoot me if you want, Colonel Tyler.” He stood up, a calculated risk, and made his voice imperious. He became the President of the United States—as Tyler had insisted—one more weary time. “If you shoot me once or twice I might survive. I understand this body of mine is a little tougher than it used to be. If you shoot me repeatedly, the body will be beyond repair. Though it seems a shame to-clutter Lafayette Square with a corpse on such a fine sunny morning.”

Colonel Tyler stood up and kept the pistol against William’s belly. “If you can die, you’re not immortal.”

“The body is mortal. I’m not. There is a portion of the Artifact that contains my—I suppose essence is the best word. I am as much there as I am here. I am awake here, Colonel, and I am asleep there… but if you shoot me you’ll only reverse the equation.”

A wind swept through the park. A dozen yards away, the boy’s kite flapped and hesitated. Pull, William thought. Work the string.

The kite soared, black and yellow in a blue sky.

“Let’s take a walk, Colonel,” William said. “My legs cramp if I don’t stretch them once in a while.”

They walked along 17th toward Potomac Park, past the Corcoran Art Gallery and the offices of the OAS, the blind jumble of Washington architecture.

The city’s most revealing buildings were still its monuments, William thought. The Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial. An American idea of a British idea of a Roman idea of the civic architecture of the Greeks.

But the Athenians had operated their democracy in the agora. We should have copied their marketplaces, not their temples. Should have moved in some fruit stands, William thought. A rug vendor or two. Called Congress to session among the peanut carts on Constitution Avenue.

He had once loved the idea of democracy. He had loved it the way he loved his beach in Maine. Like his love of the beach, he had misplaced his love of democracy in the long journey to the White House.

Oh, he mentioned the word in speeches. But all the juice had gone out of it.

He wondered if Colonel Tyler had ever really loved democracy. He suspected the Colonel had never loved a beach.

“You gave all this away,” Tyler was saying. “It went without a battle. Not a raised fist, Mr. President. It’s a crime worth a bullet, don’t you think?”

The gun had retreated into a holster under the Colonel’s jacket, but William was still acutely aware of its presence.

“What are you suggesting I gave away, Colonel?”

“ America,” Tyler said. “The nation. It’s sovereignty.”

“Hardly mine to give up.”

“But you collaborated.”

“Only if you persist in seeing this as an invasion. Well. I suppose I did collaborate, in a certain way.” It was true, the President’s significant dream had come a few nights before the rest. Early Contacts fell into two categories: the very ill and the very powerful. The ill, so their diseases wouldn’t carry them off at the eleventh hour. The powerful, so dangerous mistakes might not be made. “I think of it as cooperation, not collaboration.”

“I think of it as treason,” Tyler said flatly.

“Is it? What choice did I have? Was there some way to resist? Would a panic have changed anything?”

“We’ll never know.”

“No, I don’t suppose we will. But, Colonel, the process has been democratic. I think you have to admit that much. The question—the question of living forever and all that it entails—was asked of everyone. You think I should have spoken for America. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t have to. America spoke for itself. Colonel, it’s obvious you were able to turn down that offer. Others could have made the same choice. By and large, they didn’t.”

“Absurd,” Tyler said. “Do you really believe that? You think creatures who can invade your metabolism and occupy your brain can’t lie about it?”

“But did they? You were as ‘invaded’ as everyone else. And yet, here we are.”

“I said I might be immune.”

“To the compulsion but not to the asking? It’s an odd kind of immunity, Colonel.”

They settled on a bench in the Constitution Gardens where pigeons worried the grass for crumbs. William wondered what the pigeons had made of all these sweeping changes in the human epistemos. Fewer tourists. But the few were more generous.

He should have brought something to feed the birds.

“Think about what you’re telling me,” Tyler said. “They approached everyone? Every human being on the surface of the earth? Including infants? Senile cripples in rest homes? Criminals? The feebleminded?”

“I’m given to understand, Colonel, that the children always said yes. They don’t believe in death, I think. An infant, a baby, might not have the language—but the question was not posed entirely in language. The infants and the senile share a will to live, even if they can’t articulate it. Similarly the mentally ill. There is a nugget of self that understands and responds. Even the criminals, Colonel, though it is a long journey for them even if they accept this gift, because it comes with the burden of understanding, and they have many terrible things they may not want to know about themselves. Some of the worst of them will have turned down the offer.”

The Colonel laughed a wild and unpleasant laugh. “You know what you’re saying? You’re telling me I’m the unelected President of a nation of homicidal maniacs.”

“Hardly. People have other reasons for not wanting immortality. Such as your reason, I presume.”

The Colonel scowled. Here was dangerous territory, William thought. He took a breath and persisted: “It’s like looking into a mirror, isn’t it? When the Travellers talk, they talk to the root of you. Not the picture of yourself you carry around in your head. The heart. The soul. The self that is everything you’ve done and wanted to do and refrained from doing. One’s truest self isn’t always a handsome sight, is it, Colonel? Mine was not, certainly.”

Colonel Tyler had no response except a haggard exhalation of breath.

The pigeons didn’t like this sound and they rose up in a cloud, to settle some distance away by the Reflecting Pool, where the image of the sky was pleasant in the cool wind-rippled water.

Over the past week, traffic inside the Beltway had been light. Official Washington had begun to close up shop, in a mutual consensus that required no debate. Capitol Hill had become a ghost town—just yesterday, William had stood in the Rotunda and listened to his footsteps echo in the dome above his head. But there were still tourists in the city, if you could call them tourists—people who had come for a last look at the governing apparatus of a nation.

Some of these people passed quietly along the Mall. William did not feel misplaced among them, though they seemed to make Colonel Tyler nervous.

“I want to ask you a question,” Tyler said.

“I’m a politician, Colonel. We’re notorious for dodging the hard ones.”

“I think you ought to take this more seriously, Mr. President.” Tyler touched the bulge of the pistol almost absently. His eyes were unfocused. And William reminded himself that the Colonel’s madness might not be new; it might be an old madness that Contact had simply aroused and let loose. It was as if Tyler generated a kind of heat. The heat was danger, and the temperature might rise at any provocation.

“I’m sorry if I seemed flippant. Go on.”

“What happens next? According to your scenario, I mean.”

William pondered the question. “Colonel, don’t you have anyone else to ask? A wife, a girlfriend? Some member of your family? I have no official standing—my information is no better than anyone else’s.”

“I’m not married,” Tyler said. “I have no living family.”

And here was another piece of the John Tyler puzzle: a grievous, ancient loneliness. Tyler was a solitary man for whom Contact must have seemed like a final exclusion from the human race.

It was a bleak and terrible thought.

“In all seriousness, Colonel, it’s a difficult question. You don’t need me to tell you everything is changing. People have new needs, and they’ve abandoned some old ones—and we’re all still coming to terms with that. I think… in time, these cumbersome bodies will have to go. But not for a while yet.” It was an honest answer.

Tyler fixed him with a terrible look—equal parts fear, outrage, and contempt. “And after that?”

“I don’t know. It needs a decision—a collective decision. But I have an inkling. I think our battered planet deserves a renewal. I think, very soon, it might get one.”

They had made a circle; they stood now outside the gates of the White House, and the day had grown warm as it edged toward noon.

Despite the threat, William was tired of dueling with John Tyler. He felt like a schoolboy waiting for some long detention to grind to an end. “Well, Colonel?” He looked Tyler in the eye. “Have you decided to shoot me?”

“I would if I thought it would help. If I thought it would win back even an inch of this country—dear God, I’d kill you without blinking.” Tyler reached beneath his suitcoat and scratched himself. “But you’re not much of a threat. As quislings go, you’re merely pathetic.”

William concealed his relief. Immortal I may be, he thought. But I’m not finished with this incarnation.

Besides, how would he have explained his death to Elizabeth? She would accuse him of clumsiness—perhaps rightly so.

“You think this conflict is over,” Tyler said. “I don’t grant that. Some of us are still willing to fight for our country.”

But why fight, William thought. The country is yours! Colonel Tyler—take it!

But he kept these thoughts to himself.

“I only hope,” Tyler said as he turned away, “the rest of the geldings are as docile as you.”

William watched the Colonel walk away.

Tyler was a man on a terrible brink, William thought. He was alone and vastly outnumbered and carrying some ghastly cargo of old sin. The world he lived in was receding beyond the limits of his comprehension.

And it need not have been that way. Maybe that was the worst part. You could have said yes, Colonel. And you know that, whether you choose to admit it or not.

William experienced this sadness for Colonel Tyler, then folded it into memory the way he had folded his silk tie into his pocket.

He might not have seen the last of Colonel Tyler—but that was tomorrow’s worry.

Today was still pretty and fresh. He had fifteen minutes to spare before lunch. And no one had killed him.

He considered the White House lawn. Scene of countless Easter egg hunts, diplomatic photo opportunities, presentations of awards. Had he ever really looked at it? The groundskeepers did excellent work. The grass was verdant and still sparkling with morning dew.

He wondered how it would feel to unlace his shoes and peel off his socks and walk barefoot over that green and gentle surface.

He decided it was time to find out.

Chapter 11 Kindle

The dream, in Tom Kindle s opinion, was just what it appeared to be: an invitation to submerge himself in a cozy, communal immortality. And while Kindle found the idea repulsive, he harbored no illusions about the attraction it would hold for his fellow men.

Therefore, in the two weeks and some days since that peculiar night, Kindle had stayed out of town. He wasn’t sure what Buchanan would look like when he saw it again. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

He had hoped to postpone any journey into town as long as possible, but that desire became academic when he slipped on a muddy hiking trail and came to rest twenty vertical feet down the west slope of Mt. Buchanan, his left leg broken at the hip.

Maybe he shouldn’t have been on the trail at all. Nothing had forced him out here. His cabin was well-stocked and he had plenty to read. Currently he was working his way through Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The book was not much more entertaining than yesterday’s dishwater, but Kindle had bought it as part of a five-foot shelf of the Classics of Western Literature, and he was determined to get his money’s worth.

Nor had claustrophobia driven him out. The cabin was spacious enough. He had bought this little property—some miles from Buchanan up an old logging road—in 1990. The cabin itself was a kit-built project he had put up with the help of a few friends, one a building contractor with access to quality tools. Since then, every penny that didn’t maintain his boat or buy food had gone into improving the property.

He paid for town water, since the municipality had run a public works line up here during the real-estate rush of the eighties. But his only electric power came from a gasoline generator in a shed out back. Winters were sometimes snowy, but Kindle had insulated the building and installed a woodstove to keep himself warm. No need for that this time of year, not just yet.

It was a cabin—not quite big enough to be called a house—but it was a comfortable cabin, and he wasn’t suffering from cabin fever. The impulse to take a long walk up these back trails had been only that, an impulse, obviously a stupid one. The dry spell had broken last week; rain had fallen for three consecutive days and the trails were wet. The trails were also, in places, steep.

And Kindle was, he hated to admit, not awfully young anymore. When asked, he gave his age as “about fifty.” In truth, he paid little attention to his age and disliked doing the calculation. When you live alone and work alone, who gives a doughnut hole about birthdays? Who counts ’em?

But he had turned fifty-three in January and wasn’t as agile as he used to be. Consequently, when he came up a muddy switchback where a fallen pine had carried off a square yard of the hiking trail, he wasn’t quick or canny enough to grab at the nearest root or sapling as his boots rolled under him and the world turned suddenly vertical.

He lost consciousness when the leg snapped.

When he woke again, some vital instinct kept him immobile. He did not dare to move, only blinked up at a sky crowded with moist conifers and worked at interpreting this sensation of something gone terribly wrong.

He was light-headed and not ashamed of talking to himself—not that he ever had been.

“You fell down.” The basic datum. “You slipped off the trail, you asshole.”

He swiveled his head and saw his own flight path traced in broken saplings and churned topsoil. Long way down. He had fetched up here: in a sort of gully in the hillside, his ass soaking in a cold stream and his legs curled at the trunk of a mossy old hemlock.

He took particular note of something he did not like at all: the way his left knee had rotated at such a peculiar crooked angle.

“Well, shit!” Kindle said. The sight of his broken leg made him feel both frightened and angry. Of the two, the anger was more vocal. He cursed eloquently and loudly, and when he was finished the forest fell silent—blushing, perhaps. And then there was the new and essential question that had to be faced, like it or not: “Tom Kindle, have you killed your idiotic self?”

Maybe he had. The cabin was a quarter-mile downslope—more like a mile by trail. Suppose he made it back: The cabin lacked a telephone. Help was in Buchanan, or anyway no nearer than the closest neighbor—another three miles downhill on a dirt and gravel road.

And there was no guarantee he could move even as far as the next sapling without passing out again.

He shifted his body experimentally and nearly did pass out. The pain when he moved was a brand-new thing, a burning stick thrust into his leg all the way up to. the small of his back. He let out a shriek that sent birds wheeling from a nearby tree. When he was still, the agony subsided but did not entirely retreat. It was concentrated in his left leg between hip and knee; everything below that was numb.

The leg needed a splint. It needed to be immobilized, or he simply could not move.

He raised his head and inspected the injury. There seemed to be no blood, no exposed bone; and that, at least, was good. Kindle had once worked at a logging camp in British Columbia, and he had seen a man suffer a leg injury that left his femur projecting from his thigh like six inches of bloody chalk.

The bad news was that this might not be a simple fracture; the knee might be involved. If Kindle recalled his first aid correctly, you don’t try to realign a joint injury. You immobilize it and “transport to medical care.”

He scanned the immediate area and located the burled walnut walking stick he always carried on these hikes. Good old stick. Friendly presence. Sturdy enough to splint a bad break. It’ll do, he thought. But it was about a foot and a half out of easy reach.

He pulled himself toward it, screaming.

He screamed throughout the process of binding his leg, an act that seemed to progress in waves. The waves were of pain, and when they crested—when he felt consciousness begin to slip away—he would lie still, panting and dazed, until his vision cleared; then he would work at the splint a while longer.

In the end, after a measureless time, the walnut walking stick was lashed around his thigh and lower leg with torn strips of his cotton shirt—a job he admired as if someone else had done it.

And if he moved?

The splint kept the leg more or less still and minimized the pain. Kindle dragged himself a short distance along the wet bed of the stream. The water was only a trickle, inches deep, but very cold. Not too bad on a warm afternoon like this… but it was late afternoon, and some of these end-of-summer nights got chilly when the sky was as clear and high as it was today. All this heat would leak away after the sun went down. And then he’d be wet and cold. “Hypothermia,” Kindle said out loud. Not to mention shock. Maybe he was in shock already. He was shivering and he was sweating, both at once.

He inched downhill along the bed of the stream. The stream crossed a trail some yards down. Then he could get out of the water. But not until then. There was no way he could drag his fiery, useless leg through the undergrowth of this dense Pacific Coast forest.

It occurred to him as he crawled along the rocky creek bed that if he had accepted the offer of the aliens he might not be in this position. He would be immortal. There would be a Place Prepared For Him, as Kindle’s mother used to say. His mother had been religious. Dakota Baptist. Cold winter Baptist. Her philosophy went something like: Kick me till I go to heaven. Kindle’s natural father had died of a heart attack while he was driving a snow plow for the municipality; two years later his mother married a carpet installer who got drunk every Saturday night. Oscar was his name. On the coldest Saturday night of a cold Dakota winter, Oscar had been seen, and become famous for, pissing out the second-story bedroom window while singing the Hank Williams tune “I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow.” Which was all well and good, and nothing Kindle would hold against a man, but Oscar was also a mean and petty drunk who used his fists more than once on Kindle’s mother. It was all right, she said, marriage was always a rough road and anyhow there was a Place Prepared For Her. Kindle, who was fifteen, put up with six months of this before he decided that if there was a place prepared for him, it was somewhere outside the city limits. He rode to New York City on a Greyhound bus, lied about his age, and served an apprenticeship as a merchant seaman. Five years later he took a trip back home. Oscar was unemployed, drinking Tokay on the steps of the Armory, not worth beating up even for the cold comfort of revenge. His mother had left long since. No forwarding address, which was probably a smart move on her part.

Thus Kindle was alone and suspected there was no Place Prepared For Him, a suspicion the following thirty-three years had done nothing to dispel. He did not believe in heaven, and he had turned it down when it was offered. Now, however, he wondered if he’d been too hasty.

A Place Prepared might be better than this damp forest, which was getting darker, now that he noticed.

The sky had turned a deep and luminous blue. Had the sun set? Yes, it had, but only just. These old firs and hemlocks were heavy with shadow.

And he was on the trail now, inching along the dirt, caked with mud. When had that happened?

And his throat was raw with screaming, though he did not remember screaming. He wasn’t screaming now. The sound he was making was more like a moan. It was a kind of song, not entirely tuneless. It reminded him of the song the flying monkeys sang in the movie The Wizard of Oz.

This thought made Kindle feel almost jaunty. He looked up at the stars—now there were stars—and wondered if he could sing a real song. Somewhere under all this pain, he had developed a conviction that everything was actually very funny. This was a funny position to be in. Singing would make it even funnier.

The trouble was, he didn’t know very many songs. Oscar’s bedroom aria aside, he had never paid attention to songs. He had learned “Jesus Loves Me” at the Baptist Sunday School, but he was damned if he’d sing a Sunday School song when there wasn’t even a Place Prepared For Him. He knew “The Streets of Laredo,” but only one verse. Maybe one verse was enough.

“As I went out walking the streets of Laredo—”

Mind you, he shouldn’t have gone out walking.

“As I went out walking in Laredo one day—”

No longer day, but night.

“I met a young cowboy all dressed in white linen—”

He began to wonder if he liked the direction this song had taken.

“All dressed in white linen and cold as the clay.”

No, it was the wrong song entirely.

But he went on singing it, and his sense of giddy detachment failed him, and he grew miserable with the thought that, he couldn’t even decide for himself what song he ought to sing.

He came within sight of his cabin as the Artifact rose in the western sky. A kind of moon, it cast a little light. That helped. But the sight of it was a fearful thing for Kindle.

He couldn’t say he hated the Artifact. It hadn’t given him any cause for hatred. But he had always been suspicious of it. Well, so had everyone else; but Kindle’s suspicions had been broader than most. Most people suspected it was an alien spaceship come to wage war or blow up the earth or some such thing. Kindle had doubted that. His experience of the passage of time was that the thing that happened was never the thing you expected. Whatever came of this Artifact, Kindle had thought, it would not be the monster-movie scenario everyone feared. It would be something, certainly not better, but surely different—new, unexpected.

And hadn’t events proved him right? No one had expected this visitation in the dark, this whisper in the ear about Life Eternal.

Certainly Kindle had never guessed that tiny machines in his nervous tissue would ask him whether he wanted to give up his body and certain habits of mind and grow beyond Kindle into something that was both Kindle and much more than Kindle.

His answer had been immediate. No, by God. He had clung to his aging body and intemperate ego all these years and he wasn’t eager to give them up. He disliked the idea of his soul mingling with other souls. He was alone by choice and by nature, and he wanted to keep it that way.

But he wanted to live, too. It was not a love of dying that made him turn down the offer. He wanted desperately to survive. But on his own terms.

He wanted to live, and that was why he was here, prostrate at the door of his thirteen-year-old Ford pickup truck, singing “The Streets of Laredo” in a faint raw voice and wondering how to endure the thing he must do next.

To enter a vehicle one must stand up.

Even a one-legged man can stand, Kindle thought.

Unless his pain prevents him.

Unless the act of pulling himself up by the door handle of an old pickup truck grinds bone against ragged bone and causes him to stop singing and makes him scream again instead.

Unless he passes out.

But Kindle remained conscious even as the landscape performed a pirouette around the fiery axis of his spine.

His useless leg, bound and curled at the knee like the leg of a dead fly, flopped against the door of the truck.

Key! Kindle shrieked to himself.

He carried his keys with him always. He braced himself with his right hand and fished in his pocket with his left. Maybe it was stupid to lock up his truck when he lived this far from people. Who would come out here to steal such a wreck? But it was his habit to lock up the things he owned: his truck, his boat, his cabin.

He found the key, transferred it to his right hand, somehow fumbled it into the lock without moving the rest of his body.

Then he took a deep breath, slid away from the door and opened it a crack.

Good work.

But his left leg was splinted, and he dared not tamper with the splint—so how was he supposed to cram himself behind the wheel? Once behind the wheel—what then?

He took the key from the door and clasped it tight in his right hand. “Tom,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “this is the hard part. That other part was easy. This is the hard part.”

Easier still to lie down and go to sleep. Drive in the morning. Or die before dawn.

More likely that second possibility, Kindle thought. Dying would be the easiest thing of all. Maybe he could even drag himself to the cabin and die on his own sofa, which would at least lend some dignity to the event. People would find him after a while. Maybe they would find his worm-track leading down from the mountain. Goddamn, they would say, look at what this man did! What an admirable man whose corpse is lying on this sofa!

Was this his sofa? Nope, Kindle realized: This was the front seat of the old Ford pickup, and he was stretched out across the length of it.

These memory lapses were disturbing, but he imagined he could hear the echo of his own screams fading down the hillside. So perhaps it was better not to dwell on the past.

He pulled himself into a sitting position with his back against the driver’s-side door and both legs stretched out across the seat. He could see over the dash well enough. But there was no way to get a foot down to the floor pedals.

At least he was out of the wind. That was no mean accomplishment. He looked around for a way to push the pedals. His resources were meager. Within reach: an empty styrofoam cup, a snow brush, and a copy of Guns and Ammo. Not too helpful.

Oh, and one other thing. The walking stick he had used to splint his leg. The leg had swollen enormously. From crotch to knee, it looked like a cased sausage. The rags he had used to bind the splint were deeply embedded, the knots pulled tight by the pressure.

Don’t make me do this, Kindle thought. No, this is too much. I can’t even begin to do this.

But his traitorous hands were already fumbling against the feverish flesh down there.

When he came to himself again, he found the walking stick clutched in his trembling left hand.

It was still nighttime, though the Artifact had set. Maybe it was coming on toward morning. Kindle didn’t know; he didn’t wear a watch. The stars looked like morning stars.

He was shaking like a sick animal. This shaking was a bad thing, it seemed to him. Made it hard to keep the broad end of his walking stick secure against the floor pedals. And it would only get harder when the truck was moving.

He put the key into the ignition, pumped the gas pedal twice and turned the key.

The engine coughed but didn’t catch.

That was normal. Kindle sometimes thought of this old Ford as his “hiccup truck” for the way its engine fought him. It would catch, run, stall; or nearly stall, misfire, rattle and bounce for a time before it settled down. “Come on, you sack of shit,” Kindle whispered. “Come on, you lazy turd.”

The engine caught and lurched and Kindle screamed as the truck jogged on its ancient shocks. His broken leg was braced against the seat, but there was nothing to hold it and no way to prevent it flopping around in that sickening, loose way.

Kindle tried to sing “The Streets of Laredo” as he put the truck into gear and pressed the gas—a terrible stagger forward—and steered out of this dirt turnoff away from the cabin toward the logging road.

He switched on the lights. The pines crowding the roadside loomed in eerie grids of shadow.

He was sitting sideways and a little low. He wasn’t accustomed to steering with his left hand and his reflexes were shot, but he managed to aim the Ford approximately midway down this column of spooky-looking trees. God help anybody coming uphill, but who would be, at this hour?

From here into the outskirts of Buchanan was mainly a downhill ride, and Kindle found he didn’t have to work the gas pedal much; it was struggle enough to keep the walking stick pressed against the brake to impede the acceleration of the truck. It occurred to him he’d be in some profound trouble if he passed out again. “So stay awake,” he told himself. He remembered that a Place Had Been Prepared For Him in the regional hospital as long as he didn’t run his hiccup truck off the Streets of Laredo.

He passed two other cabins—the property of men as solitary as himself—but he didn’t stop. If he stopped, nobody might be home; and Kindle did not relish the prospect of starting up this truck again. Better to drive as far as possible toward Buchanan, or at least down to where the streetlights began.

But then—in a wash of fear that took him by surprise—Kindle remembered that Buchanan might not be the Buchanan he remembered.

Last week, the monsters had come to Buchanan.

Curious ambulatory sponge-things who had infected everybody’s blood.

Was this a real memory or some kind of trauma hallucination? Well, Kindle thought, it sure felt like a real memory.

Still: Monsters?

And if that was true…

He did not summon the images, but here they came: Monsters out of comic books, tentacle-headed things unloading from a flying saucer; or the zombie-eyed human eunuchs out of a dozen movies, slaves of the Overmasters and hungry for human flesh. They had Prepared a Place For Him on the communal barbecue.

Kindle shook his head. He couldn’t decide whether this was funny or scary. Maybe it would be smart just to press on the brakes and die in the dark up this mountain.

(He did, in fact, apply a sudden pressure there, because the truck had picked up a great deal of speed without his noticing.)

No, Kindle told himself sternly. No dying allowed. Go for help. Follow the plan.

See the monsters if you must.

The truck rattled on.

He had reached the suburban margin of the town just inside the city-limits sign when his pain and fatigue crested, and the truck rolled into an embankment and came to rest with its headlights pointed at Orion.

The impact dashed Kindle against the steering wheel, causing the horn to emit a squawk; then he rolled back, semiconscious, into the seat. The truck’s motor rumbled on.

The sound of the horn and the grinding engine woke a thirty-year-old insurance investigator named Buddy Winkler, who had recently become immortal but who still liked to get a good night’s sleep. He went to the window of his two-year-old tract house and gazed with sleepy astonishment at the semivertical Ford riding a dirt bank in the vacant lot next door. Then he phoned 911. He gathered up a blanket and hurried out to the accident, where he quickly surmised there was nothing he could do to help the injured man inside—a screaming and broken mortal man whose eyes rolled wildly at the sight of him.

Monsters, Kindle thought—dimly, when he thought at all.

Monsters leering down at him.

He screamed until he was mute.

And after a dark time he recognized hospital corridors, and understood for one lucid moment that he was lying on a gurney cart with medical staff bustling around him.

A frowning face lofted into proximity, and Kindle reached up with what remained of his strength and took this person by the collar of his gown.

“Get me,” Kindle gasped, “a human doctor.”

“Relax,” the entity pronounced. “I am human.”

“You know what I mean, you alien shitsack! Get me a human doctor, you monster!”

Kindle fell back gasping.

The man looming over him turned away. “Can we have some sedation here? The patient’s hysterical. Oh, and somebody call Matt Wheeler.”

Now I think maybe I am safe, Kindle thought, and embarked upon a sleep that would last for two days running.

Giddy light-headedness and fog. Kindle awoke once again.

He was in bed. His leg was bound and in traction. It hurt, but only a little. Kindle guessed he was sedated and that right now nothing would hurt very much.

He felt distant and vague, and he supposed if you tore off his arm and beat him with it that would be okay, too. Probably a nice opiate drip on that IV.

But the main thing was that he had made it to the hospital. He took a certain pride in that. His memory was fuzzy, but he recalled that it had been a long and harrowing journey.

A man in medical whites approached. Kindle watched this process with languorous detachment. He managed, “You must be the doctor.”

“That’s right, Mr. Kindle.”

“I asked for a human being.”

“You got one. My name is Matt Wheeler.”

Matthew Wheeler was an ordinary-looking man with a woebegone face. He’s too young, Kindle thought idly, for all those frown lines. “You’re human, Dr. Wheeler?”

“As human as you are, Mr. Kindle.”

“Not one of them?”

“No. But they can treat you as well as I can. There’s no need to worry.”

“Maybe,” Kindle said. “Has the town changed much? I’ve been up in the hills since, since—” Since what was it called? Contact.

“Not much.” Dr. Wheeler looked uncomfortable. “Not yet.”

“How’s my leg?”

“It should mend reasonably well. In time. May I ask how you broke it?”

“Walking out back of my cabin. Fell in the fuckin’ mud.”

“How did you get into town?”

“Dragged my ass down to my truck.” The memory was a little clearer now. “Then I drove.” He shrugged.

“That’s remarkable. That’s quite an accomplishment.”

Kindle was alert enough to recognize a compliment. “I guess I’m hard to kill, huh?”

“I guess you are. You were a sorry mess when the ambulance brought you in, or so I’m told. The leg will heal, Mr. Kindle, but you’re going to be here for a while.” The doctor made a notation on his clipboard. “I understand your attitude about… human beings. But I can’t be in the room twenty-four hours a day. You’ll have to cooperate with the hospital staff. Will you do that for me?”

“You’ll be around, though?”

“I’ll be around. I’ll make a point of it.”

Kindle nodded agreement.

“You’ll probably want some more sleep.” The doctor turned to leave the room.

Kindle closed his eyes, then opened them. “Dr. Wheeler?”

“Yes, Mr. Kindle?”

“How many of us are there? I mean—there are more of us in town, aren’t there?”

The doctor looked even wearier. “A few. I want to get us all together in a couple of weeks. Kind of a town meeting. Maybe you can be there. If you lie still and let that bone mend.”

Kindle nodded, but vaguely; he had already forgotten the question, was already easing back into sleep.

Chapter 12 Brookside (II)

For the memorial service Miriam picked out what she still thought of as her church clothes, though she hadn’t been to church for years: black dress and hat, white gloves, an unscuffed pair of orthopedic shoes.

She adjusted the hat a final time in the mirror by the front door, then stepped out into a hazy summer morning.

More than two weeks had passed since the night she was touched by the Thing.

No longer the Eye of God—what a mistake that had been! It was, Miriam supposed, still the agency of God, as a plague of locusts might be His agency; but it was alien, insinuating, false, and quite un-Godlike in its offer of unconditional absolution. Miriam supposed she would recognize God easily enough when she faced Him: God was Justice, and carried a sword. The Thing, contrarily, had spoken in the plangent and intimate voice of a lover. It offered too much and did not hate sufficiently.

But the world was a different place for its coming. Even over the course of two weeks, Miriam had seen the changes.

The news, for instance. The news wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on or the time it displaced on TV. In a handful of days, the Buchanan Observer had shrunk to a few negligible pages—mostly cooking columns, gardening tips, and a few syndicated columns. Large stories had made small headlines: undeclared but universal ceasefire in all the world’s wars, presidents and premiers unavailable for comment, no film at eleven. What they ought to have, Miriam thought, is a generic headline. NOTHING HAPPENS. NOBODY CARES.

At least the memorial service was still on schedule. Her father’s body had been committed to the earth a day before Contact, but the service had been postponed to allow Miriam’s uncle, a man she had never met, to fly in from Norway, where he worked. Naturally, the flight had been canceled—there had been something in the news about civilian aircraft commandeered for relief flights into the African famine zones. So the service would go on this afternoon with or without Uncle Edward.

Or so Miriam hoped. Was anything certain these days?

Dr. Ackroyd had been willing to go ahead with the service, but even the Rector had changed. Last week, Simon Ackroyd had confessed to being one of them. The Rector was engaged in the same transformation that had overtaken the rest of the world, and Miriam was not at all sure she would like what the man had turned into, or that he would like her, or that she would be safe at the end of the world’s strange new evolution.

She didn’t think of herself as an Episcopalian, but her father had called himself that even though he seldom attended services. She suspected he’d picked the Episcopalians because they were the most upscale congregation in town; barring the Catholics, whom Daddy had regarded as a fanatical sect, like Shiites or Communists.

The Episcopal Church squatted like a gray stone bulldog on its acre of lawn and peered across a long slope of rooftops to the sea. Miriam parked and climbed the stairs to the parish office. Dr. Ackroyd had said he would meet her here and they would drive together to Brookside Cemetery.

The Rector was waiting in his office with a concerned expression on his homely face. “Sit down, Miriam,” he said.

She listened as he explained how the memorial service would proceed, though they had arranged all this in advance. Does he think I’m senile? Miriam wondered. Or had the ministry lowered his expectations? Perhaps he often dealt with stupid people.

The ceremony would be outdoors, at the graveside. It was to be simple and brief. Above all, Miriam hoped, brief. She hated all mumbling over the dead and would never have agreed even to this much if Uncle Edward, the hypocrite, hadn’t insisted.

“I didn’t know your father very well,” the Rector was saying, “but there are people in my congregation who did, and they tell me he was a good man. A loss like this is never easy. I know you’re going through a difficult time, Miriam—for this and other reasons. I want you to know I’m here if you need to talk.”

The offer struck Miriam as both laughable and strange. Her response was spontaneous: “All I want to know is—how you can do this?” Tm sorry?”

“After what happened that night. You know what I mean.”

He drew back. “This is my job. That hasn’t changed.”

“You were touched by the Thing.”

He looked bewildered. “You mean Contact?”

“Nobody calls anything by its right name. Doesn’t matter. I’m a Christian woman, Rector. When the Thing touched me I knew it was nothing a Christian should have anything to do with, and I gave it a Christian response. I don’t see the point of immortality outside the Throne of God. But you. You shook hands with it—am I right? And yet, there you sit. Prepared to read Scripture over the body of my father. How can you do that?”

Dr. Ackroyd seemed dismayed; he took a long time answering.

“Miriam,” he said finally, “you may be right.” He paused as if to summon thoughts. “I’m not sure I know what a Christian is. I’ve thought about this a great deal since Contact. The harder I look for Christianity, Miriam, the more it evaporates before my eyes. Is it Martin Luther or is it Johann Eck? Is it Augustine, or is it John Chrysostom? Is it Constantine? Is it Matthew and Mark and Luke, and did they write the Scriptures we call by their names? Or was Christianity buried along with the apocrypha at Nag Hammadi?”

Now it was Miriam’s turn to be bewildered.

“I simply don’t know,” the Rector confessed. “I think I never did know. I think there is something in the Artifact nearly as rich and strange as all our earthly religions put together. Nearly. Miriam, when I spoke with the Travellers I put some of these questions to them. I have a sense of what their spirituality consists of… and I think it may not be incompatible with ours. They don’t claim to have unraveled every mystery. In fact, they’re quite humble about their ignorance. They think consciousness might have some special relationship to the hidden order of the universe, even a persistence after absolute death. I’m not sure whether this ought to be called religion or cosmology. But they acknowledge that some subtlety of mind may be bound into the functioning of stars and time.

“They didn’t ask me to abandon my Christianity, Miriam. It’s only that I’ve had to be more honest with myself about the things I know and the things I don’t. The divinity of Christ, the extrinsic nature of God… maybe I was never really convinced of those things. Only wanted to believe them.

“So you’re right, Miriam. I don’t guess I’m entitled to call myself a Christian any longer. But I can perform the memorial service. I can help you say goodbye to your father, and I can mark the mystery of death, and I can honor it—perhaps more sincerely than ever before. I would be pleased to perform that service for you. But if you feel I’m unqualified, I’ll step aside. Maybe we can find someone else, maybe even here in town.”

Miriam was stunned. She gazed at the Rector, then shook her head. “No… that’s all right. You do it.”

“Thank you, Miriam.”

“It’s not a vote of confidence. I don’t think it matters who says the words. If there’s a Heaven, it’s beyond our commanding, and if there’s a Hell, our prayers won’t keep us out of it.” She looked at her watch. “Shouldn’t we leave? It’s getting late.”

She drove with him to Brookside Cemetery, through the gates and up a winding road to the graveside. She had wanted an outdoor service. Miriam hated chapels. They smelled like overripe sachets, like decaying lavender.

Mist still lingered in the lowlands and across the water, but the sun had burned the sky blue overhead. Mt. Buchanan rose up behind the cemetery like the shoulders of a green and granite colossus. This was a hillside plot, and it was pleasant to see the rows of graves running down to the main gate and the road.

From this hillside Miriam watched the crowd begin to gather.

She had mailed an announcement of the memorial service to those few of Daddy’s friends still living, mainly retired staff from the Community College and the members of the Bridge Club whose company he had enjoyed before his stroke. She was surprised by the relative youth of the crowd beginning to gather—too many strangers, faces she did not recognize—and by its size.

Cars had filled the chapel parking lot at the foot of the hill, and more cars had begun to park along the road, all the way down to the intersection and out of sight.

Troubled and vaguely frightened, Miriam turned to Rector Ackroyd. “Daddy didn’t know all these people.”

“The service was announced in the Observer”

She knew that; she had clipped the announcement. “But why are they here? What for?”

“To mark a solemn occasion. Miriam, your father was the last man in Buchanan to die before Contact. Do you know what that means? His was the last involuntary death in this town.”

But it was a reasoning that made Miriam hostile, for reasons she didn’t wholly understand.

“I don’t want strangers here.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. But it’s not a joke. They’re sincere—their feelings are genuine.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“I know,” the Rector said simply.

Miriam frowned but acquiesced. She was beginning to feel numbed by the morning’s events. Rector Ackroyd read the service and Miriam listened distantly, unable to associate this ceremony with her father; he had become intangible, a fading memory of a pleasanter time. I’m here to mourn, she reminded herself sternly. But what about all these other people?

The hillside was covered with people, all silent and attentive, even those who must be too far away to hear the service.

Half the population of Buchanan must have come here, Miriam thought.

Maybe they had also come to mourn.

Not for her father. For something they had lost or given up. For what they couldn’t have back. For a way of life.

For the town, the country—for the planet, Miriam thought.

Chapter 13 Arguments and Unwindings

When Lillian refused to see him for a physical exam—despite his nudging, his cajoling, and at last his ill-concealed anger—Matt decided enough was enough. Extraterrestrial mysticism was one thing; jeopardizing her health and the health of her unborn child was quite another.

He arranged to have lunch with Jim, see if he could attack the problem from that angle.

A few weeks ago, it might have been hard to fit lunch into his schedule. Today, free time was easy to come by. His office consultations had dropped to a trickle. He spent most of his time at the hospital doing shifts for absentee residents, and much of that time convincing Tom Kindle to submit to physical therapy. He had not seen a new patient, nor more than a handful of his reliables, since what they were starting to call “Contact.”

Nor, despite the hours at Buchanan General, had he seen much of Jim Bix. Jim—like Lillian, like Annie Gates, like so many others—had accepted the promise of immortality that night in August.

Matt had still not developed a strategy for talking to such people.

Jim had been his closest friend. Contact had turned him into a stranger.

They met in the cafeteria. The staff cafeteria was a basement room the size of a basketball court, and today it was almost deserted. The ventilators hummed like meditating monks and the air smelled faintly of cabbage.

Jim sat at a corner table picking at salad and rice pilaf. Matt pulled up another chair and regarded his friend. Same old ugly son of a bitch he ever was, Matt thought.

But the conversation was like an old car on a cold day, hard to start and hard to keep running.

“You don’t look like you’re sleeping much,” Jim said.

In fact he hadn’t been. Too much to think about. Too many things he didn’t want to think about. His days were either empty or surrealistic and his nights were often sleepless. But he didn’t want to say that. “I didn’t come to complain. Actually, I wanted to talk about Lillian. She refused to come in for monitoring. I wondered if you knew that. I don’t anticipate any problems with the pregnancy, but it seems like a bad precedent.”

Jim listened carefully. Then he wiped his chin with a paper napkin and shrugged. “If she says she doesn’t need to see you, and there’s no pressing problem, maybe we ought to leave it at that.”

“There isn’t currently a problem. But she’s pregnant and forty, and that’s hardly a risk-free scenario. And you know it, Jim. If she wants to change doctors—for whatever reason—okay. Fine. We’ll set her up with a specialist. But she has to see somebody.”

“Does she?”

“Christ’s sake, Jim!”

His exclamation echoed around the empty room.

“All I’m saying, Matt, is that she has more access to her internal condition than she used to. It sounds strange, but it’s true. She knows things you might not expect her to know.”

“I’m skeptical of that.”

“I guess I would be too, in your position. I don’t know what I can say to convince you. If it means anything, Tm convinced.”

“Convinced of what? That Lillian doesn’t need medical care?”

“That she knows whether she needs it or not. If she did, Matt, I’m sure she’d come to you.” He folded the napkin. “We miss seeing you. Why don’t you stop by the house sometime? Talk to her yourself. She’d be happy to talk.”

“Can she perform an ultrasound on herself? Can she diagnose an ectopic pregnancy?”

“I believe she can.”

“Jesus!”

“Matt, would you calm down? I can explain it… but not if you’re raving.”

He wondered if he ought to simply leave the table. But Jim was his friend, or had been his friend; maybe he was obliged to listen a while longer.

“It feels like a century since we talked about this. That night at your house. Less than a month ago. Remember that? Just before Contact. We got drunk.”

“You were talking about machines in the blood.”

“Neocytes.”

“Is that what you call them?”

“It’s the consensus name.” Matt let this pass.

“The point is,” Jim said, “they’re still here. Not in you. You sent ’em packing. Your blood is original stock—and I guess you know that, since I haven’t seen you down in the path lab doing your own smears.”

True. The Travellers, as Annie called them, had told Matt they would leave his body, and he had believed it—he had never questioned the matter.

“But the rest of us are still carrying neocytes,” Jim said, “and they’re doing some work. Nothing too obvious yet. But take Lillian. If she was ectopic, or preeclamptic, or anything like that, the neocytes would deal with it. Or they would let her know so she could take the appropriate steps. I’m not sitting here telling you Lillian should go through this pregnancy unmonitored. The point is, she is monitored. She’s getting better attention than you or I could give her, and she’s getting it twenty-four hours a day.”

“And that’s…” He couldn’t contain his horror. “That’s okay with you?”

“It’s a benevolent process, Matt. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“My God. My God. What about the fetus? We’re talking about your child. Are they working on it, too? Is the child full of… neocytes?”

“Yes, it is.”

Matt stood up too quickly. The table rocked and an empty cafeteria glass dropped and shattered on the floor.

Jim bent to pick up the pieces. He put two daggerlike shards on the table, out of harm’s way. He said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You’re bleeding,” Matt said.

He’d cut his hand. The blood that oozed out was thick. It was the color and consistency, Matt thought, of hot blackstrap molasses.

Later in the afternoon, he stopped by Tom Kindle’s room.

The floor nurse called Kindle “a handful,” her code word for a patient who was uncooperative but good-humored about it. Kindle, who had lived alone on the slopes of Mt. Buchanan for some years, seemed to be adjusting fairly well to the new situation—his injury, Contact. Matt guessed he had the advantage of not feeling suddenly like an outsider… he had been an outsider all along.

When Matt entered the room, Kindle was watching TV; when he noticed Matt, he hit the mute button on the remote control.

“They moved in the TV this morning. I said I didn’t want to pay for it. They said I didn’t have to. Nobody else using it. It’s been years since I watched TV much.” Kindle shook his head. “Now I get a chance and there’s nothing good on. Nothing but the news.”

“Last time I looked,” Matt said, “there wasn’t any news. Not the kind of news I’m used to. All the armies went home and nobody robbed the grocery store.”

“I think that is news,” Kindle said. “Seems like it’s a more peaceful world.”

“Shit on that. The graveyard is peaceful.” Kindle turned back to the TV screen. “Have you seen this?”

Matt looked at the picture. It was the octahedron in Central Park. There was a CNN logo in the lower-left corner of the screen.

“I’ve seen it before.” He remembered when the octahedrons came out of the sky last spring, all those dark and ominous shapes—how Rachel had watched the videotape replays almost obsessively. Everybody had been afraid of the octahedrons, which had functioned, as far as Matt knew, mainly as monuments, or at most as a diversion. The real war had been microscopic and brief. Why invade the Earth when you can invade the bloodstream? A question of scale.

“I’ve seen the fuckin’ thing a dozen times too,” Kindle said. “That’s not the point. Watch!”

And with a deep reluctance Matt took a second look at the TV screen. This was videotape, but recent.

Kindle said he’d been watching it all day, over and over again.

Matt stared without comprehension as the octahedron—that vast black shape featureless and tall as a ten-story building—somehow unwound itself.

The motion was difficult to focus on even in slow-motion playback. It reminded him of a spring uncoiling. It was that kind of action… but multidimensional and terrifyingly fast.

Nothing decent moved like that. It made him think of a trap sprung, a cannon fired, a rattlesnake striking, every fast and deadly thing.

He blinked at the screen with his mouth open.

Kindle laughed. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

No. It was frightening. He felt nauseated.

The octahedron unwound into countless smaller shapes. The CNN camera zoomed closer, and Matt was able to see that each shape was the same, a bulbous saucer mounted on a truncated cone. Perhaps about the size of a person, though it was difficult to judge. He couldn’t tell whether these devices touched the ground or hovered above it. “Thousands of ’em,” Kindle said. “More.”

They began to move, radiating away from their point of origin through the trees and along the bike paths like an obscenely strange mass of strolling tourists.

Like a nest of ants, Matt thought, swarming out of its hole. “One for every town and city in North America,” Kindle said. “How do you know that?”

“The guy on the newscast said so. Don’t ask me how he knows.”

“What are they?”

Kindle shrugged. “Helpers. So the TV says.”

“ ‘Helpers’?”

“That’s what CNN is calling them. Don’t blame me, Matthew—I don’t write the news.”

He looked at the screen. There was a Helper in close focus now. It was a featureless matte-black object, and it looked about as helpful as a mace, a claymore, or a ballistic missile.

“Sit down, Matthew,” Kindle said gently. “You don’t look too well.”

Later—when the shock wore off—Matt told Kindle some of the things Jim Bix had said, about “neocytes” and the possibility of physical changes in the body.

Kindle absorbed all this with a thoughtful expression. “Matthew,” he said, “did you ever hear of a nurse log?”

Matt said he hadn’t—did it have something to do with the floor nurse, Miss Jefferson?

“No, not that kind of nurse. Back in the eighties, I worked for a while in Canada. Logging on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I got to know some of the forest there, what they call climax forest, meaning a forest that hasn’t been burned for a long time. Centuries. They have some 800-year-old cedars over there. Amazing trees. And it rains nonstop half the year, so in places you get what they call a temperate rain forest. Very dense vegetation, very wet.

“Decay is one of the main things that happens in a place like that. Every time one of these huge hemlocks falls down, or a cedar, say, or an amabilis fir, it’s not just a dead tree. It’s food. It turns into what’s called a nurse log, because it’s nursing new trees, among other things. When it’s rotting, that log might contain more organisms than there are people on the surface of the Earth. It’s so full of life it actually heats up—as much as five or six degrees warmer than the air.”

“This is interesting,” Matt said, “but—”

“I’m almost finished. Shit, you doctors are impatient people! All I mean to say is that it strikes me maybe the Earth is like a nurse log. All that talk about pollution, global warming, and so on. People used to say, Are we killing the Earth? My theory is, we already killed it. It’s dead. Like a nurse log. So all these decay organisms just arrowed in on it. Maybe humanity was already the first stage of decay, like a fungus growing in the heartwood. Then the insects move in to eat the wood rot and the birds eat the insects…”

“That’s disgusting,” Matt said.

“A little. It’s how nature works, though. Why should it be different when we’re talking about the whole planet? This thing in space, the Artifact, the octahedrons, these Helpers—” Kindle shrugged. “They just smell a rotting log, that’s all.”

Matt wasn’t cheered by these speculations, and he left the room sour-minded and unhappy. It was almost six o’clock—he’d wasted an afternoon staring at the horrors on Tom Kindle’s TV set. Time to go home.

Dinner with Rachel. Another evening to endure.

He had come to dread this time of day.

Worse, Kindle’s forest analogy haunted him during the drive home. Maybe the Earth was a nurse log; maybe the old hermit was right.

But he thought about Jim Bix, his smile fixed in place, his blood the color of thirty-weight motor oil.

A worse thought: Maybe Jim was a nurse log.

Something new growing in the hollow shell of him.

Maybe Lillian was a nurse log.

Maybe they all were.

Chapter 14 B E

Beth Porter was accustomed to seeing the Artifact suspended in every clear night sky and seldom gave it much thought. It was something people talked about on TV, like war or the economy. About as insubstantial as that. There had never been a war in Buchanan; the economy just meant people getting laid off, or not, at the pulp mill; and the Artifact was a light in the sky, as alarming as a streetlamp.

Or so she had thought.

Now, Beth had to admit, things were changing. Now things were beginning to get… well, scary.

She spent Friday night at Joey Commoner’s before they decided to do the B E.

Joey lived with his father, who was divorced and worked part-time for a building contractor; but Joey’s father had taken off in July to spend a couple of months on a Seattle job and to shack up for a while with his girlfriend, a Canadian-born typesetter who used to secretary for a drywall firm in Buchanan. So Joey had had the house to himself for the summer.

Labor Day had come and gone, but Joey wasn’t sure when his father would be back. His old man had telephoned three times since Contact, but Joey wouldn’t talk about what he said. Joey, Beth knew, was also a little scared of what had been happening since that feverish Friday night.

So they sat in the basement, which was Joey’s private apartment, with its own bathroom and even a little kitchenette; and they watched a rental movie and smoked dope.

Joey was a cautious doper. He was wary of drugs, in a strange way, and limited himself to a once-a-week smokathon, usually Friday night. That was why he always showed up at the 7-Eleven Friday nights, buying frozen pies and ice cream. Marijuana, microwave cherry pies, and vanilla ice cream were Joey’s customary vices. After they got to know each other he had invited Beth to join him in the ritual. When she was transferred to the day shift, she did.

Beth herself was careful about drugs. Contrary to her high-school reputation, she was not keen to break the law… or hadn’t been, in those days. But she soon learned that this Friday night dope binge wasn’t the scariest thing about Joey—in a way, it was the least scary thing about him. Joey Commoner in a stoned condition was accessible, in some ways even a little more human. He’d kick back and laugh at some TV movie, and they would feast on reconstituted cherry pie and ice cream until their lips looked rouged, and sooner or later they would make love. Stoned, Joey made love to her. Other times they simply fucked.

So Beth learned to look forward to Friday nights, and would have enjoyed this one except for what they saw on TV.

The rental movie ended and when Joey hit the rewind button the network came back on: a picture of an octahedron unwinding, this one somewhere in Europe.

Beth set aside her 7-Eleven cherry pie, and Joey put down the 1970’s-vintage blue plastic bong he had ripped off from one of his cousins, and the two of them gawked at the screen.

“Holy shit,” Joey said, with what sounded to Beth like a combination of awe and deep discomfort.

Beth, thoroughly stoned, was especially impressed with a close-up still of what the announcer called a Helper. She remembered, her last year of high-school biology, peering through a microscope at a bread mold, black pin-shaped structures called “sporangiophores,” a word that had eluded her during the final exam but that came back now with the odd precision of a dope revery. That’s what these Helpers looked like. A crowd of sporangiophores spreading over the landscape. Coming soon to your town, if she understood the commentary correctly.

It was too much. Joey hit the off button and turned his back on the screen.

Joey was very much into not believing what was happening around him. For instance, Joey did hobby electronics, built hi-fi gear and radios and things, and this had fascinated Beth at first, because—like everybody else—she had Joey pegged as being a little stupid. It turned out he read circuit diagrams better than he read English. There was always a tangle of wire and junk parts in one corner of the basement and often the air reeked of solder. Which was okay; it was interesting. But Beth had come to realize that electronics wasn’t just a skill Joey had—it was a wall, a moat, a hiding place. It shut out everything scary. It even shut out Beth.

And now, scared by what they’d seen on TV, he began to look restless—like if Beth cleared out he might dip another circuit board in aluminum sulfate or something. Fuck, not tonight, Beth thought. She didn’t want to be alone tonight.

That was when the idea of the B E occurred to her.

She thought of it strictly as a means of holding his attention. In the old days Beth had been more or less indifferent to Joey’s attention. Now, suddenly, helplessly, she was hungry for it. Not that there was anyone competing with her; Joey had never shown much interest in other women, perhaps excluding that night with the hooker in Tacoma. What she was competing with was the dense forest inside Joey’s own head. Where he liked to get lost. Where she couldn’t go.

But the cemetery vandalism last month had seemed to keep him interested—so why not a similar adventure? Similar but more daring? Why not a B E, in fact?

She posed the question. Joey looked thoughtful.

“Where?” he asked.

“The Newcomb house,” Beth said. Sudden inspiration. “You know the place? House up on View Ridge with two lawn jockeys in front? Bob Newcomb used to be my father’s boss at the mill. He’s been on vacation since August first. Some place in Mexico. My father thinks anybody who goes to Mexico in August is an idiot.”

“Long vacation,” Joey said.

“They might not be coming back at all.” Because of Contact. But she didn’t say that.

“Two lawn jockeys and a garden with a sun clock,” Joey said.

“That house, right.”

“Stupid fuckin’-looking house, Beth.”

“There might be something inside.”

He shrugged. “What do we want?”

“I don’t know!”

“We can’t fence anything. Do you know how to fence stolen property?” She didn’t. “We could just mess it up. Or take whatever we liked. The stereo.”

“Or cameras,” Joey said, warming to the idea. “Or even a video-camera or something like that. Except if they’re on vacation they probably took it with them. ”

Suddenly he was hooked. Switched on like a light.

There was a well of restless anger inside Joey, and she had tapped it… but it was a strange talent, the ability to wind up Joey Commoner toward petty crime, and something she was only intermittently proud of.

The horse, the spur.

Dangerous, Beth.

Did she really want to do this? Maybe it was an idea that only made sense in dope-logic, one of those smoke-ring thoughts with no real beginning I or end. Or just a dumb, transient impulse.

Too late for second thoughts, however. Joey was already putting on his motorcycle jacket.

He drove north along the coast in a misty rain.

The night had turned cool. The motorcycle stitched through valleys of fog, Beth with her visor down and everything blue with rain. Streetlights seemed dim, the white line tentative.

There was no traffic. Since Contact, people didn’t go out so much. They stayed inside, especially in bad weather.

The things in their brains had made them cautious—meek, in Beth’s opinion. Wasn’t it the meek who were supposed to inherit the Earth? { Now is the hour.

Joey wasn’t meek. The sound of the motorcycle bounced around these sodden hillsides like an announcement of Armageddon. He drove recklessly fast.

She tightened her grip on his waist and squeezed her thighs around the saddle. Wet face, wet hair, Joey’s leather jacket wet and slippery in the rain.

He drove to the top of View Ridge and killed the engine, r Beth, still stoned, was suddenly absorbed in the view: tumbling clouds and the foggy ocean downslope to the west! Everything in shades of night gray or night blue except the buzzing amber streetlights. A paper flapped on a telephone pole, a wet photocopied announcement of a meeting of regular human people at the hospital next Wednesday night, Dr. Matthew Wheeler presiding, an event Beth had already marked on her calendar. She thought she might attend, might bring along Joey, see who was left. But that was a daylight plan for the daylight world.

Joey wheeled his motorcycle down the rain-slick sidewalk, quietly, not talking. Beth felt alternately conspicuous and fog-hidden, paranoid and fuzzily excited. No one seemed to be watching. There were only a few lights in these big hillside houses. But these weren’t normal houses anymore, or at least not normal homes; the people inside weren’t normal. Maybe, Beth thought, they can see us with some kind of third eye. Maybe they don’t need to look.

Joey took the Yamaha up the Newcombs’ long driveway and stood it in the shadows behind the garage. The Newcomb house had a light in it, too, the token light people leave on when they’re out of town, supposed to frighten burglars, who are supposed to be that stupid. Beth followed Joey into the backyard. Nothing but shadows and wet grass here. Smell of lawn clippings, garden loam, rain.

Beth’s paranoia began to peak. The trouble with getting stoned was that sometimes it opened a moment of great clarity, like a window. Too much clarity was a bad thing. She didn’t always like what she saw.

Tonight she saw herself alone. She felt herself alone on this dark lawn and alone on the planet, as alone as she had ever been.

She knew about being alone. She had known about it ever since her fourteenth birthday, when her mother sent her to a clinic in Portland to defuse a little ovarian timebomb set ticking by Martin Blair, her then-boyfriend, fifteen, saved from reproach by the status of his family, the Blair Realty Blairs—Martin who had actually bragged some to his friends: Yeah, he got a girl pregnant… Alone on the suction table and alone when she came back to school, Buchanan’s youngest suburban slut, according to Martin’s schoolyard testimony. Alone sitting by herself at an empty cafeteria table. Alone but daggered with stares, sniggered at in hallways, propositioned in corners by boys who lacked the courage to speak to anyone real. Alone with shame so intense that after a while she lost the ability to blush.

But that was one kind of alone, and this was another.

All these houses, Beth thought… empty of families, empty of people, full of something else, something that only looked human.

Joey broke a pane of glass in the back door of the Newcomb house and reached inside to open the lock. To Beth it sounded like a cymbal crash, a shrieking announcement of their presence.

Suddenly this wasn’t what she wanted. Not at all.

Maybe to have a normal life, do normal things… she had never let herself even imagine that. But it would be better than this. Better than breaking into an empty house on a rainy night. Better than riding Joey Commoner’s motorcycle down some dark highway. Better than any future she could imagine for herself now that the monsters had taken over the world.

The house smelled like a stranger’s house. Broadloom, air freshener, old cooking. She felt uninvited, unwanted, criminal.

Joey seemed to thrive on the sensation. His eyes were alert, his steps small and agile. The light the Newcombs had left burning was a lamp in the downstairs bedroom; it made long shadows through the doorway. Joey headed for this room first, where he pulled open dresser drawers and tossed their contents, picking out nothing in particular: a handful of twenty dollar bills, probably Mrs. Newcomb’s mad money; an empty keychain with a Volvo tag. Beth was mute, immobilized by her own guilty presence in a bedroom where she didn’t belong. Her eyes registered details she wished she could forget: the Japanese print over the bed, birds on ink-line trees; the oak dresser with cigarette burns clustered at one end; worst of all, Mrs. Newcomb’s nightgowns and Mr. Newcomb’s jockey shorts tumbled together and soaking in the contents of an overturned perfume bottle. Seeing all this was the real theft, Beth thought.

She said, “This is too weird. I don’t like this.”

“It was your idea.”

“I know, but…”

But it didn’t matter. He wasn’t listening. He was gone, vanished into the dimmer light outside the bedroom, and Beth was forced to hurry after or be left here with no company but her conscience.

The worst part was yet to come.

She lost track of time as Joey rummaged through the house. He turned on no lights, seemed to navigate by instinct or animal vision. He wasn’t robbing the house so much as possessing it, Beth thought—making it his own through an act of violation. He was fucking it. No, raping it. He left his mark everywhere: tables overturned, doors flung open, closets stripped. She followed in a daze, inarticulate even in the space of her own skull, waiting for him to finish, waiting until they could leave.

In a hallway closet, Joey found his prize, a palm-size camcorder—since when had he cared about video?—small enough to slip into his leather jacket, which he zipped up around it. Take it, she thought. Then, Christ, let’s go!

She turned away. Turning, she saw red light wash shadows of raindrops against the wall… saw this light blink on and off and on again…

Her terror began before she could pin a word on it and name the dreaded thing. She tugged Joey’s arm, almost pulled him off balance. “Joey, the police—a police car—”

He took her by the wrist and pulled her away from the window. Things were happening too quickly now; there wasn’t time to think. She followed Joey out the back door into the rainy yard. Joey inched along the wall toward the corner of the garage. She kept a hand on his jacket.

We’ll be arrested, Beth thought. Put on trial. Sent to jail.

Or—

Or something worse. Something new.

Please let it be prison, Beth thought. Not some unhuman thing, bugs in the brain, alien punishment.

Her breath hitched, and she wondered if she might begin to cry. But Joey took her hand and pulled her forward, and she was suddenly too busy for that.

He jumped onto the motorcycle and kicked over the engine while Beth scurried on behind.

From here in the shadow of the garage, protected from streetlights, perhaps invisible, Beth had a clear view of the cop car. It was parked at an angle in the street, not blocking the driveway. A Buchanan Sheriff’s Department black-and-white. There was no sound, only that relentlessly whirling dome light. It lit up the street. Red light under dripping eaves, red light spidering up tree trunks and disappearing in the leaves. Nobody had come out to watch—none of the neighbors in their yards or standing in open doorways. Maybe they already know what’s happening, Beth thought. Maybe they don’t have to look.

The Yamaha’s engine screamed; Beth clung desperately to Joey and the saddle as they roared down the Newcombs’ driveway. Now Beth saw the man inside the cruiser, at least the shadow of his face as he turned to track their motion. The cop car had been silent, not even idling; Beth expected its siren to howl, motor gun, tires squeal, perhaps the beginning of a chase, dangerous on these steep wet streets…

But the car remained silent, and Joey leaned into the curve as he pulled out of the driveway, came up short, and stopped with one foot on the road, engine idling—what was he doing? Go! Beth thought.

And then she understood: It was a dance between Joey and the cop.

Beth looked at the cop through his car window and knew from his joyless but placid expression that nothing more was going to happen: no chase, no trial, no jail.

Only this shadowy gaze… this observation.

We know you. We know what you’re doing. A raw shiver ran up her spine.

Arrest us! She aimed the thought at the cop car. Wave your gun! Yell! But there was only a dreadful silence behind the idling of the motorcycle engine.

Then Joey twisted the throttle and the Yamaha roared downhill. Crime and punishment in the new world.

Chapter 15 Meeting

Matt found Tom Kindle waiting in the empty hospital boardroom when he arrived. He had staked out a place by the window, lean and patient in his wheelchair.

“You’re early,” Kindle observed.

“So are you.”

“Nurse wheeled me down before she went off shift. There’s hardly any staff in this building anymore—you notice that, Matthew?”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Gets to be like a ghost town at this hour. Kind of scary after the sun goes down. Makes you wonder what they’re all doing with their time. Watching Dallas reruns and eating popcorn, I guess.”

Matt wasn’t in the mood. He took a notebook out of his briefcase and propped it on the podium, open to the page on which he had outlined every potential emergency and worst-case scenario he had been able to imagine (and there was no shortage) in the last month or so. He checked the clock: 7:30. Meeting was set for eight.

Kindle followed his look. “Almost time… assuming anybody shows up.”

“Well, there’s us,” Matt said.

“Uh-huh. You know, I asked Nurse Jefferson how many people… you know, how many made the decision she did. She said, ‘Almost everybody.’ I said, ‘Well, then, who didn’t?’ She said, ‘About one in ten thousand.’”

“Really? How would Nurse Jefferson know?”

“Shit, Matthew, how do any of these people know the things they say? My theory is they’re all hooked into the same library. ESP or something, but I’m only human—I have to guess. Last night I asked the janitor the same thing when he came down the hall. How many people turned down this wonderful offer of eternal life? He leaned on the waxer and said, ‘Oh, about one in ten thousand.’ ”

“Tom, the night janitor on your floor is Eddy Lovejoy. He’s mute and nearly deaf.”

“Mm? Well, he isn’t anymore.”

They looked at each other.

Kindle said, “What do you really expect to accomplish here tonight? One in ten thousand—so we get maybe five people if everybody who ought to show up really does. Maybe six or seven if the notice got as far as Coos Bay or Pistol River. A pitiful handful, in other words. So what’s the point?”

“The point,” Matt said, “is that I mean to save Buchanan.”

Kindle winced and shifted in his chair. “The world’s been hijacked, Matthew. The whole fuckin’ world. In the face of that, how do you propose to save one piddling little town?”

“I don’t know,” Matt said. “But I mean to do it.”

Kindle’s estimate had been pessimistic, but not by much. At fifteen minutes after the hour, eight people had shown up—six from Buchanan, two from outlying farms.

One in ten thousand? Was that really possible?

Matt supposed it might be. He was reminded that one in ten thousand was roughly the number of ALS cases in the general population—what people commonly called Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He had heard of two such cases in all of Morgan County, which included Buchanan and three smaller towns.

If the numbers were correct, this turnout was a testimony to the effort Matt had expended, placing ads in the Observer, posting leaflets, even cadging a few minutes on the local radio news. The radio session had been especially difficult, since no one seemed to know a polite word to differentiate the humans in the audience from the recently immortal. “Shoot, Dr. Wheeler, we’re all human,” the station manager had insisted. Well, perhaps. Anyway, no one had made much mention of Contact even in the local news;

it was still too novel, too profound in its implications—or maybe they understood it collectively: ESP, as Kindle had said.

The radio news department settled on what Matt considered a cumbersome circumlocution: “Those unconvinced by the experience so many of us shared on the last Friday in August are invited to a meeting to be held in Room 106 at Buchanan Regional Hospital, the evening of September the 28th. For details, contact Dr. Matthew Wheeler,” and his home and office phone numbers, followed by six seconds of dead air and a weather report.

He was grateful for the announcement, but the experience seemed to foreshadow a whole world of negotiations and misunderstandings—precisely what he hoped to anticipate and even forestall.

For the sake of Buchanan. For the sake, he supposed, of himself and Tom Kindle and these eight doubtful-looking souls waiting for him to speak.

He cleared his throat and introduced himself. He felt more than a little misplaced up here. He had attended how many meetings in his life—how many graduation exercises, board meetings, staff briefings? Too many. He had never liked any of them. Meetings, in Mart’s opinion, were an excuse to drink coffee, accumulate career karma, and avoid the threat of real work. But here he was. He had even wheeled in the big silver coffee urn from the cafeteria, from which Tom Kindle was tapping a cup. Kindle glanced at him with an air of patient amusement—tilt on, Don Quixote.

He thanked everyone for coming.

“We’re here to talk about the future,” he said. “I think we share some common interests, and I think we’re facing some common problems. Maybe if we get together now we can do something about that. But since there’s not many of us present, maybe we should begin with introductions. Let’s start with the front row. Thank you.”

Matt jotted each name in his notebook as it was spoken:

Miriam Flett. Front row left. In her mid-sixties, Matt guessed, not infirm, but thin as a straw. She wore a silver stickpin in the shape of a cross, and she announced her name as if she expected an argument. She sat down immediately and without comment and folded her arms.

Bob Ganish. Two seats away from Miriam. A salesman, he said, at Highway Five Ford. A round man of middle age dressed as if he had just left a golf game. Were people still golfing, Matt wondered, or was it just that nobody cared anymore if you walked around in polyester slacks and a scuffed pair of putting shoes? “I agree we have a lot of problems, Dr. Wheeler, but I don’t know what we can do about it. But it’s nice to know there are people left who still think the old way.” Ganish sat down.

“I’m Beth Porter and this is Joey Commoner.” No need to jot these names. Beth had dressed up tonight—wore a long-sleeved shirt to cover her tattoo. But Joey, who had also been Mart’s patient more than once in the last fifteen years—who had been buying antibiotics on Mart’s prescription since Beth dragged him into the office—sat with a grim expression, arms clasped together over a black T-shirt, sullen.

Clockwise from Beth and Joey: Chuck Makepeace, a sitting member of the City Council. That might be useful, Matt thought. Mid-thirties, three-piece suit, receding hairline, natty little wire-rimmed glasses. “If we do this again, Dr. Wheeler, we should elect a chairman and follow some rules of order—but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.”

“Excellent suggestion,” Matt said. “But let’s get to know each other first.”

Tim Belanger, about Joey’s age; blond, puppyish and eager to cooperate. “I work at City Hall, too. I’m a records clerk for Water and Power. Or I used to be. Hardly anybody shows up at the office anymore.”

Abigail Cushman, who had driven in from her husband’s farm out in Surrey Heights, “an hour in that old truck, but Buddy said take it. He doesn’t give a damn, pardon me, what I do anymore.” She wore a discount-house dress and sweater and thick glasses with masculine rims taped at one joint. Matt guessed she might be fifty years old, maybe older. “Buddy’s looking after the kids. Our grandchildren, actually. Our daughter and son-in-law died last year, so we took the two boys. They’re at home. They didn’t want to come. I’m the only one who… I mean, they’re not…” The words ran out. She paused and blinked at the room as if she’d forgotten what she was doing here. Bob Ganish coughed into his hand. “Anyway,” she said. “Call me Abby.” Abby sat down.

Paul Jacopetti, big, barrel-chested, sunburned, sixty-five, retired manager of a tool-and-die company in Corvallis, owned a hobby farm out along the Lake Roads. “Not sure if there’s any point in being here,” he said. “We can talk all we want, but it looks to me like the horse left the barn some time ago.”

Tom Kindle introduced himself from his wheelchair, then turned to face the podium. “Mr. Jacopetti’s got a point, Matthew. It’s nice we’re all here and everything, but what’s the purpose? Therapy or strategy?”

“Strategy,” Matt said. “Though a little therapy might be welcome.” There were a few nervous smiles. He turned a page in his notebook. “The big problem ahead, it seems to me, is that you can’t run a national economy when nobody’s going to work. Everything seems all right so far. The grocery stores are open, the trucks are bringing in food, the water runs, and the lights are on. Good. But you’ve all noticed the changes. Mr. Belanger mentioned that people aren’t showing up for work at City Hall. I guess nobody minds if the tax bills don’t get out.” Smiles—but only a few. Some of these people, like Mrs. Cushman, obviously hadn’t thought this far ahead.

“But there are such things as essential services, and if those people stop working we could be in trouble. The hospital, for instance. There hasn’t been much call for our work, admittedly, but even so, I can’t maintain a twenty-four-hour emergency room all by myself. I’m not the only physician on call, but there are fewer every day. The administration tells me the hospital won’t close entirely… at least not yet. It’s the ‘not yet’ that worries me. I hear it a lot. People are vague about the future—maybe you’ve noticed. I don’t think they know what’s going to happen much better than we do. But they seem to expect something. Some kind of massive, sweeping change.”

“Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out,” Jacopetti put in. “It’s like I said—we know the barn’s on fire.”

“Not exactly,” Abby Cushman said. “Could be a fire. Could be a flood or an earthquake. We don’t know what the problem is… isn’t that what you mean, Dr. Wheeler?”

“That’s right. The best we can do is make some general plans. We’re going to want to maintain as much of the quality of life in Buchanan as we can, and I think we’ll have to be able to deal with a breakdown at the telephone company, say, or the interruption of food deliveries.”

Makepeace, the City Hall functionary, was frowning. “How is that our responsibility? It doesn’t follow. If these… other people… can’t maintain basic services, won’t they suffer right along with us?”

Tom Kindle raised his hand. “Use your imagination, Mr.—Makepeace, is it? It’s not like everybody got converted to some new religion—though maybe they did that, too. Outside this room, people are physically different. They have things living inside them. Who knows what that means? Come next summer, they might all turn to stone, or live on air and sunshine, or move to Canada.”

“And there are those things,” Miriam Flett added. (Her voice, Matt thought, was as steely and rosinous as a violin note—and it commanded the same kind of attention.) “Those things on television, the Helpers, so-called, though they look like some kind of death robot to me. Probably one of them is coming to Buchanan.”

“Lord, don’t remind me,” Abby Cushman said. “It makes me shudder to think of it. I got a phone call from my cousin Clifford in New York State. He said he saw one down on 1-90, cruising toward Utica at about forty miles an hour. It stood a foot above the road, like an eight-foot-tall ace of spades, he said, and traffic parted like the Red Sea all around it.”

“Tom’s right,” Matt said, trying to steer the conversation back on course. “Anything could happen, and I think we’re obliged to do the most general kind of emergency planning. These are a few of the areas I’m concerned about.”

The boardroom was equipped with a green chalkboard along the front wall. Tom scrawled out four categories:

Everyone stared at the board for a long moment. It was Abby Cushman who broke the silence: “Holy God, Dr. Wheeler, is all that up to us?”

Jacopetti snorted. “That’s nuts. There’s ten of us in this room, Dr. Wheeler. Two of us, I would guess, over sixty. Three of us teenagers or not much older. None of us with much useful experience—though we do have a medical man. If all these things fail, I’d say it’s game over. We couldn’t truck food here from Portland—if there was food in Portland, which I don’t guess there would be—or run the electric company, or pump water from the reservoir.”

Kindle looked interested. “The numbers could be an advantage, though. Ten people can’t run a town, but they can sure as hell run themselves. It’s a survival problem, seems to me. If there’s no electricity, we can operate generators, as long as the gasoline holds out—which would be a hell of a long time if we had free access to every gas station between here and Portland. Similarly water. We don’t need every faucet in town running, only one or two.”

“There might not even be ten of us,” Bob Ganish said. “I’ve got family in Seattle. I guess they might be… you know, changed. But I still might try to get up there and see ’em. In the kind of emergency you’re talking about, why stick around?”

“Why leave?” This was Tim Belanger, the City Hall clerk, frowning massively. “Things would be bad all over, wouldn’t they?”

“We can assume that,” Matt said. “But there’s another point. We may be the only human beings in Buchanan, but there’s the whole northwest to think about. If we have a plan in place, we might attract refugees from Portland or Astoria or even farther away. A small town is easier to manage than a city. We could turn Buchanan into a kind of safe haven.”

“No room,” Jacopetti said.

“Not if the original population is still here. But they might not be. That’s one possibility, anyhow.”

“Communications,” Kindle said. “If we’re a refugee camp, people have to know about us.”

“No telephone,” Makepeace mused, “no mail, no newspapers… this is hard to imagine. There’s the local radio station, but I don’t think we could run it by ourselves.”

“Ham radio,” Kindle said. “Shit—excuse me—any radio ham who didn’t go over to the enemy must be laying eggs and hatching kittens. They love this emergency shit. Only there’s nobody to talk to.”

“We should look into that as soon as possible,” Matt agreed. “Any hams present?”

No one spoke.

“Okay. I know we haven’t elected a chairman, but does anybody object if I appoint Tom Kindle as our radio committee?” No objection. “Tom, you ought to be mobile by the end of the month. I suggest you price a decent ham radio rig—there’s an electronics shop down by the marina, I recall. In the meantime, I can find you some books on the subject.”

“Okay… but I’m not licensed, Matt.”

“Do you suppose the FCC gives a damn right now?”

Kindle grinned. “I spose not.”

Miriam Flett put up her hand: “Dr. Wheeler… are we expected to pay for this radio nonsense?”

“We should talk about funding. But I’m prepared to underwrite the Radio Committee for the time being.”

Makepeace and Ganish both offered to chip in; Matt said he’d get back to them—no money was being spent until next week at the earliest.

“There’s a fifth category,” Jacopetti said. “One you neglected to write down.”

Matt glanced at the chalkboard. “What would that be, Mr. Jacopetti?”

“Defense.”

A chill seemed to settle in the room. Joey Commoner uttered a small, scornful laugh.

Kindle said, “We get the point, Mr. Jacopetti, but as you yourself said, we’re kinda outnumbered. If this is the Alamo, we might as well pack it in.” Jacopetti folded his hands on his belly. “I agree. And I think it’s the likeliest prospect. We don’t fit into this new world of theirs. They’ll get tired of us, and then they’ll dispose of us.”

“Not my kids,” Abby Cushman said faintly. “They wouldn’t do that to me… not my grandchildren.”

Jacopetti gave her a stony look. “I wouldn’t count on that. We have to be prepared—isn’t that why we’re here, Dr. Wheeler?”

“I don’t think that’s something we can prepare for, Mr. Jacopetti. And I don’t think it’s as likely as all that. No one’s threatened us yet.”

“And no one will.”

A new voice. Heads turned toward the doorway. A small presence there. It was Cindy Rhee.

Matt had the involuntary thought She ought to be dead by now.

He was visited by the memory of Ellen Rhee wiping drool from her daughter’s chin as Cindy’s eyes roamed aimlessly and without focus.

That was before the intervention of the neocytes, this miracle cure. Now Cindy Rhee was walking—albeit stiffly—and talking, although her words were solemn and curiously deliberate.

“She’s one of them,” Miriam Flett announced. “She shouldn’t be here.”

The twelve-year-old focused her eyes on Miriam before Matt could frame an answer. “I won’t stay if you don’t want me to, Miss Flett. I came so that someone could speak for us.” The collective, the inclusive, the universal us. She turned to Matt. “Dr. Wheeler, it’s probably sensible, what you’re doing here. But Mr. Jacopetti is wrong. We’re not a threat to you.”

“Cindy,” Matt said, “are you speaking for everyone? All the Contactees?”

She remained in the doorway, a small silhouette. “Yes.”

“How is that possible?”

She shrugged.

“Cindy, if you really know what’s going to happen—next month, next year—I wish you’d tell us.”

“I can’t. It hasn’t been decided yet, Dr. Wheeler.”

Paul Jacopetti had turned a shade of-brick red that caused Matt to speculate about hypertension. “Who is this kid? And how does she know my name?” To Cindy: “What were you doing, listening through the door?”

“She’s a patient of mine,” Matt said. “She—”

“They know everything” Miriam interrupted. “Haven’t you figured that out? We don’t have any secrets from them.”

Jacopetti stood up. “I vote to have her removed. She’s a spy, obviously.”

“I’ll go,” Cindy Rhee said.

“No,” Matt said. Lacking a gavel, he slapped shut his notebook. “I was about to declare a coffee break. Cindy, please stay until we reconvene. Twenty minutes.”

He asked Cindy to sit in one of the boardroom chairs and pulled up a second chair in front of her. He felt he should take the opportunity to examine the child, though he couldn’t say what moved him—sympathy, curiosity, dread. He took a penlight from his shirt pocket and shone it into her eyes.

The others had crowded around the coffee urn, talking in low voices and sparing an occasional glance at Matt and Cindy. He hoped he hadn’t jeopardized his credibility by talking to the girl.

Tom Kindle sat apart, thoughtful in his wheelchair.

Cindy’s pupils still seemed slow to contract, but their reaction was equivalent and otherwise normal. She tracked the penlight adequately when he moved it right to left, up and down.

He touched her forehead; the skin was cool.

“Thank you for being worried about me, Dr. Wheeler. I’m all right.”

“I’m glad, Cindy. It’s good to see you walking.”

“But you think it’s strange.”

“I’m happy about it. But yes, it seems strange to me.”

More than that. He wondered what kind of miracle it really was. He wondered what was inside her skull right now. Normal brain tissue, somehow regenerated? Or something else? Something fed by blood like dark molasses?

She seemed to sense the thought. “They had to work on me before Contact, Dr. Wheeler, because I was so sick. So I’m a little farther on than most people.”

“That’s why you came here?”

“Partly. Partly because even Mr. Jacopetti can’t be too scared of a twelve-year-old.” She suppressed a smile. The smile looked authentic. It was the way she had smiled last year, before the neuroblastoma put an end to all her smiling. “We aren’t dangerous to you. It’s important to understand that. You’re right about the future. It might be difficult. But we’re not the danger.”

She was still woefully thin.

“You mean to help,” Matt said. “I appreciate that. But it would be better if you didn’t stay.”

“I know. Thank you for the examination.”

She stood up and seemed ready to leave, then frowned and tugged at his sleeve. “Dr. Wheeler…”

“Yes?”

“It’s about your daughter.…” He felt a deep interior chill. “Rachel? What about her?”

“You should talk to her. You haven’t really talked to her since Contact. She misses you.”

“How do you know that?”

It had become the great unanswerable question. Cindy just shrugged—sadly.

“Talk to Rachel, Dr. Wheeler.”

There wasn’t much more meeting. Chuck Makepeace said they should invest in a few copies of Robert’s Rules of Order and elect a chairman at the next meeting. Matt agreed. Tim Belanger volunteered to take minutes next time. Abby Cushman said they would need a name—“You can’t have us just be nameless.”—and were there any suggestions? Abby herself thought “Committee of the Last True Human Beings” would be good.

“Too confrontational,” Makepeace said. “That’s not what we’re about.”

Jacopetti raised his hand. “Committee of Cockeyed Optimists. Council of Lost Causes.”

Matt said he thought it could be the “Emergency Planning Committee” for the time being. Heads nodded, though Abby seemed disappointed.

It was past ten o’clock and people were eager to leave. Matt asked them to write their names, addresses, and phone numbers on a piece of paper, which he would photocopy and distribute to everyone on the list along with an announcement of the next get-together. Meeting adjourned. Beth and Joey Commoner were first out the door; Miriam Flett, last. Matt stood at the window watching cars pull out of the parking lot.

Tom Kindle wheeled himself to the door. “Care to push me as far as the elevator? Jeez, I hate this fuckin’ chair.”

“You’ll be walking before long.” Matt guided the chair down the semidarkened corridor. The walls were painted a shade of green that was supposed to be soothing but looked, under the ceiling fluorescents, unearthly. Kindle wouldn’t be alone in this cavernous building—there was still a skeleton night staff on duty—but in some other sense he would be very alone, and Matt felt sorry for him.

“So,” Kindle said, “are you going to take the girl’s advice?”

“You heard that?”

“A little. None of my business, of course. Didn’t know you had a daughter.”

“I used to.” He rang for the elevator and worked to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “I’m not sure I do anymore.”

Chapter 16 The Battle of U.S. 95

The problem, John Tyler thought, was that all the armies had gone home, all the factories had closed their doors, all the Congressional committees had adjourned forever—and where did that leave him?

Sidelined. Down, in other words. But not out.

Tyler lived alone in a two-story Georgian-style townhouse in Arlington, Virginia. He had equipped the spare bedroom with a formidable array of Nautilus exercise equipment, and in the days after his unproductive conversation with the Chief Executive he spent a great deal of time working out.

Tyler was a month away from his fifty-second birthday, and though he was in fairly good civilian trim, he wanted more: He wanted to be in fighting shape. At his age, it was a difficult proposition. Not that it couldn’t be done. But he was paying for the effort. The token of exchange in this bargain was pain. First the obvious pain of a hard workout, the pain he took to a certain brink and backed away from. Then the stealthy pain that crept up in the night—the aching tendons, the protesting spine, the humiliating discomforts that sent him to the drugstore in search of Ben-Gay, Tylenol, something to help him sleep, something to help him move his bowels.

But there came a time when he was able to look at himself in the full-length bedroom mirror without flinching. Taut chest, lean belly tapering into the waistband of his Jockey shorts, firm legs. Gray stubble hair on his head and a down of gray hair on chest and limbs. It seemed to Tyler that he had created something good here, a reflection he could take some pride in. Appearances had always mattered to Tyler a great deal.

But the important thing was that he was fit for duty.

If anyone could be fit for the kind of duty he had in mind.

On the second Monday in October he took his old Army jacket out of mothballs, decided he liked the way it looked over a crisp white shirt and dress pants, and climbed into his car and headed for the Marine base at Quantico.

The Virginia countryside was deep in a sweet-tempered autumn. The sky was blue and the full blush of color was on the woods. The highway was mainly empty—as most highways were these days.

Tyler had given a great deal of thought to the crisis facing the country, and he rehearsed his logic as he drove. The problem, he thought once again, was that all the armies had gone home, and how do you engage an enemy without an army?

Guerrilla warfare was the obvious response to an occupying power of superior strength… but you still needed an infantry, a militia, a power base. “The revolutionary moves among the people like a fish in the sea.” Mao Tse-tung. But “the people” had been coopted. The fish was beached. Tyler had seen videotape of African armies, Central American armies, Asian and European and even Israeli and American armies, rabble and trained troops alike, laying down their arms, bailing out of tanks, abandoning trenches and revetments like something from a hippie pipe dream of the sixties. It had happened from Ethiopia to Lebanon, from Turkestan to Latin America, and it had happened without exception.

But it seemed to Tyler that even this defeat could be used to his advantage. Weapons that were rusting in the field couldn’t be turned on an insurgency. He could move among this pacified population, not like a fish in the sea, more like-—say—a shark among the minnows or a whale among the kill.

But not by himself. One could be outnumbered. One ought not to be alone.

One in ten thousand, the President had told him.

Tyler didn’t know if that was a reliable statistic. It surely wasn’t an encouraging one. But the military had been a major employer prior to Contact, and even if the situation was as bleak as it seemed, he should be able to find one or two good men.

Maybe he’d waited too long. Maybe the plan he had devised wouldn’t work… but that remained to be seen.

Quantico was a disappointment.

Last month, the Marine Reservation had been a hive of activity. Local newscasts had shown an apparently endless relay of Hercules transport aircraft buzzing in and out, part of the post-Contact grain airlift to the famine zones of the world.

But that airlift was over now, and the huge USMC complex at Quantico appeared to be deserted. He drove among these brick buildings and overgrown parade fields honking his horn until he grew weary of the echoes rolling back.

He drove to the main gate, stopped his car, and opened the trunk. Sunlight warmed the skin of his neck and dappled the huge statue of the Iwo Jima flagraising. From the trunk, he unwound ten yards of bright orange rip-stop nylon on which he had painted, painstakingly, in letters of waterproof black acrylic, the words:

Any Member of the Aimed Forces Remaining on Duty

Call Colonel John Tyler (202)212-5555

or Report to 731 Portage Street Arlington ASAP

God Bless the USA

He had sewn nylon cords into the fabric at several points, and he attached these to the fenceposts so that the banner hung suspended across the road.

The nylon drooped in the still air, but the message was easy to read.

Over the course of a week and a half Tyler constructed similar banners and left them at smaller military installations from Baltimore down to Richmond. Every evening, he checked his answering machine for messages. To date: None.

On his trips, Tyler was able to monitor the evolution of the new world. Superficially, not much had changed. Traffic was substantially lighter, especially on the interstates. Tyler saw more people out walking than there used to be, and fewer at work. A lot of small businesses (muffler shops, hairstylists, bookstores) were closed or unattended. People were still running the food stores and shopping at the malls, but he wondered how much longer that would last. Come to that, he wondered how several hundred thousand military and government employees were surviving without paychecks.

The thought was intriguing enough that Tyler tried an experiment. He went into a suburban Arlington grocery store—not in his neighborhood—and filled a cart with canned goods and bottled water. When he came to the checkout he told the clerk, “I don’t have any money. I used to work for HUD.”

He expected security guards. Instead, the clerk—a chubby young redhead wearing a nametag that said “Sally”—smiled and waved him through.

So why was anybody paying? Tyler lingered by the door and took an eyeball survey of the tills. According to his count, it was roughly half and half—half paid, half didn’t. Those who did seemed to be operating mainly by force of habit. Tyler guessed that paying for what you take was a reflex deeply entrenched in the American psyche—not an easy habit to break. It continued regardless, like the Major League playoffs. But he guessed the country was already well on the way to a moneyless economy.

Perfect communism, he thought, as practiced by perfect robots.

Tyler heard a voice inside him say, You’re surrounded by monsters.

It was Sissy’s voice. Sissy was an old, sad ghost. Tyler squared his shoulders and paid no attention. Sissy had been telling him he was surrounded by monsters since the day he was born.

Over the years, all his memories of Sissy had condensed into a single image. Here was Sissy as she appeared in his dreams: A middle-aged woman in a swaddling of canvas and polyester skirts, two sweaters buttoned over her pillowing breasts, gypsy-bright and red-faced, pushing a wire buggy full of old newspapers on a too-bright city sidewalk.

A bag lady, as they would say nowadays. She was his mother.

His father had been a salesman for a company that sold plastic novelty cups on which the name of a business could be printed in gold flash. The cup Tyler drank from for the first seven years of his life was inscribed with the legend Fletcher’s taxidermy, 33 east fith st, Cincinnati. When Tyler learned to read—he taught himself to read at the age of four years—he discovered the word FIFTH had been misspelled. Which made him cry, for no good reason he could think of. By then, his father was long gone.

His mother (she demanded he call her Sissy) lived in an ancient three-story row house on a hilly street in an urban neighborhood declining toward slum status. She owned the house. Sometime in her younger days, Sissy had inherited money from an aunt in Pittsburgh. Sissy had been young and childless and perhaps, Tyler thought, aware of her own impending dementia. She had bought the row house outright and put the remainder of the money in a trust, which issued her a monthly check.

Tyler’s father had come and gone without gaining access to any of this money. Sissy, a cautious woman by nature, had remained tightfisted even as the world began to slip past comprehension.

Tyler wasn’t sure when he figured out that Sissy was crazy. Probably some other child had been kind enough to let him know. Hey, Tyler, your mothers dressed like Freddy the Freeloader! Hey, Tyler, your house smells like shit!

He learned early on that the best response was a firm and uncompromising Fuck you. It got him beat up a lot. But in the long run, it also got him left alone. And it taught him a valuable lesson about people. You could be afraid of them or you could hate them; those were your choices. Anything else was a trap… a temptation to punishment.

He hated and feared Sissy, but she was also the exception to the rule. Although she was insane, Sissy was still his mother. She fed him, sporadically; she clothed him, eccentrically. She was supposed to care about him, and she was capable of hurting him with her indifference.

He could tolerate the indifference of anyone but Sissy.

That was why, when he went to school for the first time in his life—five days late and in the company of a truant officer—he was driven to tears when everyone laughed at his torn pants, his food-stained shirt.

Not because he cared what they thought. It was Sissy who had wounded him, Sissy who had sent him off so badly dressed.

Sissy, why?

Didn’t she know any better?

Obviously, she didn’t. Sissy had moved into a land where reason and custom had given way to bright strokes of invisible lightning, fearsome revelations too private to share. Sissy, the adult Tyler recognized, had been schizophrenic. Sissy had been defending her home by stockpiling it with garbage and rags, and it was a miracle she had dressed him at all.

Sissy had been dead now for many years. But she visited Tyler regularly and she wasn’t shy about making her opinions known.

The phone call came while he was watching television. Tyler had installed a satellite dish on the roof and an illegal descrambler in his living room. The descrambler was a neat little sync regenerator based on a CMOS chip and a 3.58 MHz oscillator. He could decode anything, including C-SPAN, HBO, and military broadcasts—not that any of these were on the air anymore.

In fact, since mid-October, there had been only a couple of hours of national TV a day—skeleton CNN broadcasts, mostly coverage of the disarming of the world and the continuous slow unwinding of the octahedrons.

It was this last that interested Tyler. Today, another bright autumn morning, windows open and a breeze tangling the curtains, he sipped a diet soda and watched a videotape of a lone Helper, so-called, gliding along an empty highway near Atlanta.

He was fascinated by the look of it. Seven feet of matte-black formless menace. It was a “Helper” the way Stalin had been “Uncle Joe.”

These curious items had been unwinding steadily from their octahedral bases in New York and Los Angeles, spreading out, forming a network across the country—the world—for purposes unannounced. You can call them Helpers, Tyler thought, but he recognized an occupation force when he saw one.

What would you need to take out one of these dreadnoughts? Well, Tyler thought, let me see… And then, as if in answer, the telephone rang. He stood up from the chair with his heart battering his ribs. Christ! How long since he’d heard that sound?

He had just about given up waiting.

He thumbed the mute button on the remote TV control and snatched up the telephone handset. “Hello?”

It’ll be a wrong number, he thought. Some Contactee who dialed a 5 instead of a 6. Or did they still make such human errors?

“Colonel Tyler?” asked a male voice.

“Speaking,” he managed.

“Saw your sign, sir. Down at Quantico.” Pause. “One of the strings came loose, but I hooked it up again.”

“I thank you for that,” Tyler said. “Are you a Marine?”

Turned out he was, a fairly raw one: a weapons specialist, twenty-one years old. “Name’s A.W. Murdoch.”

“What’s the A for?”

“Alphonse, I’m sorry to say.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. I won’t ask about the W. Do I understand you managed to turn down the invitation to Life Eternal?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, then, we ought to get together.”

“We will. Uh, Colonel Tyler… I take it you’re thinking of offering some resistance here? Meaning no offense, I’m not in need of company for company’s sake. I thought, from your sign, you’d probably want to kick a little ass?”

Eager young buck, Tyler thought. Well, so am I. Eager, at least. “I think that’s a safe assumption. When can I see you?”

“You can see me right now if you step to the window, sir.”

Tyler did so. He peered down from his second-story bay window into the sunny street. Parked there…

…parked on a quiet tree-lined Arlington avenue…

…was a camouflage-brown M998 Hummer, the one-and-three-quarter-ton vehicle that had replaced the Jeep of Tyler’s youth, a sturdy and versatile machine…

… on the roof of which was mounted an M-109 TOW launcher, a tank killer par excellence, looking a little like a ray gun from an old science fiction movie…

… or like an answer to a prayer, Tyler thought…

…and grinning up from the interior of this vehicle was a lanky blond youth whose regulation haircut had grown a little shaggy but whose uniform remained relatively clean, holding in his right hand what appeared to be a cellular phone.

Obviously a smart-ass, Tyler thought, but a smart-ass bearing gifts.

Murdoch saluted, squinting into the sunlight.

“It appears we have a lot to talk about,” Tyler said.

“I’ll be right up, sir.”

“No. I’ll be right down.”

Tyler had learned how to establish a certain tone in male conversation, a certain rank. In the military, the rules of conduct were explicit. In civilian conversation the matter was more subtle; thus it was important to take command and do so quickly. It was the inability to take command that had frustrated him during his interview with the President, which was still a sore memory. He’d been off balance, at a disadvantage; taking a pistol to the White House was an impulse he should never have obeyed in the first place. It was hasty.

Here, the situation favored Tyler.

A. W. Murdoch was an active Marine Sergeant. John Tyler was a retired Army officer, technically a civilian, a superior officer by courtesy only. But it started well, Tyler thought, when Murdoch addressed him as “sir.” Given that, Tyler thought, all else falls into place.

They sat in the front of the Hummer and swapped stories of the invasion as a prelude to more serious talk.

Murdoch was a California boy, the kind of adolescent drifter that state had so often produced, until he drifted into the Corps and discovered a purpose in life. That purpose was the maintenance of portable weaponry and the instruction of recruits in the use of same, and it was the only thing Murdoch seemed to care much about. When Contact emptied Quantico, Murdoch was devastated. He kept driving back to the base, he said, every few days, like an ant to an empty nest.

Then he saw John Tyler’s sign and guessed there might be a future for him after all.

Tyler offered in exchange some of his own recent history. It was hard to explain the civilian work he’d done, since it crossed so many borders—Congress, the defense industry, banking. His job had been to know people, but not too well; to say things, but not too explicitly. In fact, that life was already beginning to feel vague and distant; the intricacies that had once intrigued and compelled him seemed as abstruse now as the mating dance of an extinct species…

He didn’t say exactly this to Murdoch. He did make some mention of the revolt that had been derailed, at the last minute, by Contact. Murdoch was fascinated: he’d been aware of the high-level alert that August night, the furtive troop movements. “It was exciting,” Murdoch said. “Like something out of the Civil War. Firing on Fort Sumter. I never did care for that windy old fart in the White House.”

Bolstered by this, the Colonel described his last meeting with the Commander in Chief—a somewhat polished version.

Murdoch was wide-eyed. “You actually had a pistol on him?”

“Yes,” Tyler said.

“You could have killed him.”

He nodded.

“Why didn’t you?”

“It wouldn’t have helped. It might have attracted attention. Anyway, he was… too malleable. Too yielding. Do you understand, Mr. Murdoch?”

“I know what you mean. I meet people. People I used to know, even. They’re real nice. Too nice. It’s scary, but you can’t hate ’em for it. Much less shoot ’em. Be like killing a rabbit with a pipe wrench.”

Tyler nodded.

Murdoch extracted two cans of Coors from a cooler in the back of the vehicle. He offered one to Tyler, who popped the tab and listened to the hiss.

“No,” Murdoch said, “they’re not the enemy. Those things on the road, on the other hand…”

“Helpers,” Colonel Tyler said.

“Uh-huh. Now, to me, they look like the enemy.”

“I share your thought,” Tyler said.

“You thought about what to do about it?”

“Obviously. But why don’t you give me your perspective first.”

“Well… there’s all this technology lying around, but most of it you can’t manage if you’re just one person—or just two. Might be fun zooming over the treetops with an A-10 and twelve-hundred rounds of those depleted uranium-tipped slugs, say. But, shit, I’m no pilot. Sir, are you?”

“About a hundred hours in a Piper Cub.”

“We couldn’t even preflight an A-10. So we’re looking at portable ground weapons. Not a tank or a self-propelled Howitzer or anything sluggish like that. I mean, we don’t know for sure what we’re up against. So, something lean. A Dragon, an AT-4. Okay, we can get lots of those. The whole world’s an armory, right? And the doors are wide open. But for a first encounter, I’m thinking power and mobility. I’m thinking shoot and scoot.”

“The Hummer,” Tyler interpreted.

“The Hummer, and more specifically that TOW on the roof. The way I see it, we encounter a Helper on the open road, we can bust it and break away before their cavalry arrives.”

Tyler sipped his beer and pretended to be thinking it over.

“Mr. Murdoch, we don’t know what defenses those things might possess.”

“I don’t think we can find out except by shooting at ’em.”

“Might be dangerous.”

Murdoch heard something in Tyler’s voice, some unsuccessfully suppressed note of mischief. He smiled. “Sir, it might indeed. It’s a pretty day for shooting, though, isn’t it?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. You have to teach me how to operate this TOW.” Tyler glanced up at a sky the color of blue chalk. “It’s a pretty day for some live-fire exercises, too.”

Murdoch wasn’t pleased with this. “I’d hoped to operate the TOW myself—you know—when it comes time.”

“Rank has its privileges, Mr. Murdoch. I expect we’ll both get a chance.”

“Yes, sir,” Murdoch said.

They came to know each other that first week they were together on the live-fire range at Quantico, Murdoch teaching him the TOW and some smaller tank-killers. Tyler guessed you could say they were friends, the barrier of command fractured a little by their odd situation. Tyler shared some secrets, as friends do. But there were secrets he simply couldn’t share, had never shared with anyone—such as the history of his madness.

“Madness,” too strong a word, but Tyler used it to remind himself that it was not merely unhappiness, not merely self-pity, it was a darker and more powerful presence that from time to time settled upon him.

Ever since Sissy died.

These memories came back at night.

Key events during his twelfth year: He achieved a B+ average at school, scored well above the norm on a Stanford-Binet intelligence test administered by the school board, and fainted twice, once in gym, once in homeroom. The school nurse asked him what he usually ate for breakfast and dinner, and he answered, both times, “Frosted Flakes.” He liked the picture of the tiger on the box. He did most of the shopping himself. He never bought vegetables because he wasn’t sure how: you put them in these plastic bags, you weighed them… it was confusing; he worried he might spend more than the three or four dollars Sissy let him carry to the store.

As for canned vegetables—he had tried that once. Canned peas, which came out pale green and wrinkly, not much like the picture on the label. Sissy said they tasted like rat poison. Had he ever watched a poisoned rat die? Sissy had. Sissy described the event. “You want to do that to me?”

Tyler thought he’d better stick to Frosted Flakes.

The nurse and his homeroom teacher conferred, which led to a visit from a social worker, which led, after no little trauma, to Tyler’s installation in a foster home and Sissy’s forcible remittance to a white brick building out of town, where she died six months later of “an accident while bathing.” Tyler had seen the guards who worked at this institution: They were barrel-chested, stupid, and permanently pissed off. Sissy used to spit at them. So Tyler was suspicious when they told him the “accident” part. But Sissy was dead—that was a fact.

He never found out what happened to the old row house or Sissy’s remittance money. He didn’t want to have anything to do with either one. He was glad Sissy was gone. Life was better without Sissy.

Still, when he overheard a social worker say the same thing—that he would be better off without Sissy— Tyler tried to kill the woman with the sharp end of a blue Bic pen.

He didn’t do much more than scratch her face, though he privately hoped the ink had dyed the skin beneath the wound, a permanent tattoo, a reminder that such calculations were not hers to make.

The act propelled him out of his foster home and into a grim institution (perhaps not unlike the white brick building in which Sissy had died spitting at her captors) in which Tyler was kicked, assaulted, humiliated, sometimes brutalized, at best ignored. He was rescued from this limbo when a legal inquiry into Sissy’s holdings discovered a living relative who was willing to take custody of the boy.

Tyler never actually met this man, who preferred to remain safely distant; he was a retired lawyer, Tyler understood, who paid his way into a military boarding school of some repute. The boy was bright; everyone admitted that. Sullen sometimes. Given to fantasy. A loner. But smart as a whip.

He enlisted in the Army with good prospects, earned his lieutenant’s bars, earned a bachelor’s degree at the government’s expense, faced a bright future as a commissioned officer.

He did carry a few black marks on his record. During basic infantry training, he had come close to killing another man, a memory that still troubled him. It was an impulse. There was no other word to describe it. One moment he was practicing a takedown; the next he was strangling the man. It was nobody in particular. It happened to be a stringbean named Delgado, who was actually a friend of his, more or less. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was the sudden and overwhelming need to do harm, to carve his name on a stranger’s life as painfully as strangers had carved their names on his. Plus it gave him an erection.

Three other men had dragged him off Delgado, who gagged and vomited. No permanent damage had been done, however, and in view of Tyler’s otherwise excellent record, the event was written off as an anomaly. It was a pattern he would come to recognize. The phrase in light of this soldiers otherwise commendable performance decorated a whole drawer of complaints. Not insubordination—never that. Drunkenness, fistfights, slovenly dress, once a speed run through Saigon with the military police behind him. But only at certain intervals, certain dark passages in his life, certain times when he heard Sissy’s voice too often in his head—that is, only during his madnesses.

It had slowed his rise from the ranks. When you reach a certain point, Tyler discovered, your private life begins to matter. You start being seen at parties with embassy personnel, in a decorative role, offering dances to the wives of ambassadors and the daughters of diplomats; consorting with people who want you to be their little brother in uniform, an American Centurion with a cute little pixie wife and maybe a freckled three-year-old in military housing somewhere. They didn’t want you trafficking, for instance, with Asian prostitutes, unless you were very discreet, and they didn’t look kindly on the rumor that you’d been seen in a different red-light district altogether, where the traffic leaned toward young Asian boys.

It was only that his passions inclined to youth, a certain androgynous beauty he craved but couldn’t define. He came to the Asian boys, Asian girls, telling himself it was simply a need to be satisfied, and he left hating them for their grace, their wantonness, their doe-eyed acquiescence.

He learned discretion. Discretion served him well for some years. Discretion did not fail him until his posting to West Germany, where his military career came to an end. He had found a whorehouse in Stuttgart, in a pretty little building next to a pretty little beer garden in a part of the city not much frequented by Americans; and he had selected a Turkish immigrant girl who claimed to be thirteen years old and by her looks might not have been lying; and he had been upstairs with her, the girl naked and mumbling “Bitte, bitte,” through a mouth filled with the Colonel’s erect penis, while he held his service revolver to her head and stroked its trigger, gently, not even near the point of firing the weapon—when the house matron came through the door screaming at him.

Apparently it was her custom to keep an eye on her employees through a number of peepholes in the old plaster walls, and she had seen Tyler put his revolver to the girl’s head—but it was really only a kind of play; was that so hard to understand?—and believed he was about to commit a murder.

Tyler was startled by the woman, and when he turned the revolver did go off—he shot the girl through her skinny left arm. It was a mistake.

An ambulance came, the police came, he was arrested. He was held for questioning by a red-faced man who told him, “This is not the Wild West! This is not where you shoot and fuck!”

He was never charged. But he was held for three days, and the incident was reported to his superiors; there was an investigation, some local scandal-mongering. People began to look at him differently. That was the hard part. People knew. They looked at him… well, the way people used to look at Sissy.

He resigned his commission. He had made enough friends to ease the transition into civilian life, but it was a difficult time. The Stuttgart incident seemed to be always at his heels, seemed to follow him like some odorous lost dog.

It fades, Sissy said. Memory fades. Everyone forgets everything. That’s the rule.

But the nights were long. Some nights were too long, and on those nights he would drive his second car, an anonymous brown sedan, along dark city streets where the girls were usually black or Hispanic and very young, to cheap hotel rooms that stank of insecticide and perspiration, where he would sometimes, even after Stuttgart, play the Gun Game with them.

And in the aftermath, home before dawn, alone, he might toy with his service revolver, pick it up, put it down, put it to his temple, the touch of the steel a familiar sensation after all these years, the oily smell of it a comforting smell. Sissy always talked him out of pulling the trigger. The Sissy in his head. Sad ghost. Don’t kill yourself and be like me.

And in time his daylight life grew bearable. He was trustworthy, he was discreet—he had learned all about discretion—and he was smart. He moved between the military, the defense contractors, and the congressional committees with a growing familiarity. His job was to say plainly what his employers could only hint at, and to hint at what his employers would publicly deny.

And his madnesses came and ebbed in their own slow, tidal rhythm; never predictable and impossible to resist. And the years passed.

Meeting A.W. Murdoch and wearing himself out on the firing range had postponed the madness for now. But it would come again, Tyler knew. It always came. And came again.

When he had learned the basics of the TOW, he drove with Murdoch to an empty stretch of U.S. 95 and parked in the breakdown lane under a stand of shade trees.

Yesterday Murdoch had roamed up and down this pike in a commandeered sports car making notes on the position of the Helpers. A stream of the devices had been flowing through Baltimore on 95 for some weeks now, always travelling at a steady forty miles per hour and at regular intervals. Some turned west on 70 or installed themselves in road towns like Columbia or Wheaton ; most continued south on 95. One had taken up a position on the White House lawn.

Tyler himself hadn’t seen one with his own eyes, only the TV pictures. It was worse close up, Murdoch told him. “They aren’t just black, like painted black or anodized black. They don’t shine in the sunlight at all. They’re blacker than their own shadows. And when they move, Colonel, they don’t tremble or bounce. They glide. You ever play a computer game, sir? You know how things move on a video screen? Like math. Like oiled perfection. That’s how these things move.” The idea of trying to stop one, Murdoch confessed, as much as it appealed to him, it also… well, it scared him a little.

“You can deal with it, though?”

“Oh, hell, yes. Sir, I’m anxious to deal with it.”

So here they were, parked on a sunny stretch of road at the edge of a cow pasture where a few Holsteins grazed, or perhaps they were Guernseys, Tyler got those confused; a dairy breed, in any case. Crickets sang in the high grass and faint clouds dappled the horizon. The air was cool. November was only a day away.

“Any old minute now, sir,” said Murdoch, who had calculated this somehow.

Tyler focused his attention on the highway where it crossed a low ridge a couple of thousand yards north. The Helper would be coming over that ridge. Well within range. But nothing moved there now, not even traffic. The roads were sparsely travelled these days.

Murdoch popped a can of Dr. Pepper, which made Tyler jump. “Christ’s sake.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Tyler’s mouth was dry. He envied Murdoch that can of pop fresh from the cooler. But he had to be ready to man the TOW. He guessed this was Murdoch’s revenge for not being allowed first shot at a Helper. Tough luck, Tyler thought. I guess I can wait for a cold drink.

“Sir? I think you have a target, sir.”

Tyler stood up on the shooting platform and manned the weapon.

The TOW was manufactured by Hughes, a company Tyler had done some business with. He had a lot of respect for the TOW. It was a wire-guided weapon, almost mind-numbingly complex, but reliable in service. It was designed to penetrate heavy armor plate and render even the best-protected tank functionally unserviceable, i.e., blow it the hell up.

He got his first good look at a Helper through the cross hairs of the 13x optical sight.

The Helper looked like a death-black ball and cone—the aliens seemed to love these Euclidian shapes—and it was travelling well below the speed limit along the slow curve of the road. The image rippled slightly in the heat rising from the asphalt.

The cattle shuffled and raised their heads as if they sensed this presence.

Tyler was suddenly nervous—suddenly this seemed like real combat—but he didn’t let the anxiety affect his timing. He kept the Helper in his sights until it cleared the high spot in the road. He wanted this target clean.

“Sir,” Murdoch said nervously. “We’re a little exposed here.”

“Keep your shirt on, Mr. Murdoch.”

A long pause, then: “Sir?”

Tyler triggered the weapon.

The TOW performed a number of complex tasks between one eyeblink and the next. Tyler’s finger on the firing button ignited a rocket motor, which popped the missile from its launch container. All the rocket fuel was used up before the missile left the tube, which was what protected Tyler, Murdoch, and the vehicle they were sitting in from the backwash. The sound of the launch was blisteringly loud. It was a sound Murdoch had compared to the hiss of Satan’s own steam press.

When the missile was well clear, a sustainer motor ignited; the missile unfolded four wings and accelerated to 900 feet per second.

Tyler’s eyes were on the Helper.

The TOW missile trailed two fine wires attached to the launcher. Tyler actually used the sight and a joystick to drive the missile, which never failed to astonish him, this video-game aspect of it. He steered the missile down a trajectory that seemed eternally long, but was not. He kept the cross hairs centered on the moving Helper. Picture-book launch.

The missile arrived in the vicinity of its target travelling at 200-plus miles per hour.

The warhead was fitted with a standoff probe that exploded fifteen inches from the target.

The main warhead detonated a fraction of a second later. Hell of an explosion, Tyler thought, his ears ringing. “Holy damn!” Murdoch whooped. The cows and crickets had fallen silent.

Tyler had once seen a movie called War of the Worlds, loosely based on the H. G. Wells novel.

Martians land in California and build monstrous killing machines.

Conventional weapons fail. At last, the Air Force drops a nuclear device.

Explosion. Mushroom cloud. Nervous observers wait for visibility to improve. The firestorm abates, the dust settles… The Martian machine is still there.

Tyler leaned against the hot mass of the TOW launcher, scrutinizing the spot on the highway where the missile had detonated.

The smoke swirled up and away in a lazy easterly breeze… And nothing at all was left behind.

Murdoch couldn’t resist driving to the spot, though Tyler’s instinct was to get away as quickly as possible.

He stopped and idled a few feet from the scorch marks.

Nothing remained of the Helper but a fine, sooty-black dust—a thick arc of it clean across the highway.

“Nice shot,” Murdoch said.

“Thank you.”

“Spose you’re right, though, Colonel. Spose we ought to scoot.”

“Commence scooting,” Tyler said.

It was a small beginning. But it was also, Tyler thought, the first human victory after a long humiliation. He closed his eyes as Murdoch raced the Hummer into the cool October air. It had been a genuinely lovely autumn, Tyler thought. A beautiful fall.

After a time, the crickets started up again.

Chapter 17 Two Eagles

Northwest autumn weather moved in from the ocean on the third of October and settled over coastal Oregon like a contented guest. The sky darkened, the rain came in mists and drizzles, dusk began at lunch and lingered till dinnertime.

Matt was afraid this would go on through the winter, that they wouldn’t see the sun again until April. He was happy to be proved wrong. Five days before Halloween, the clouds parted. One last bubble of warm air, drawn across the Pacific from Hawaii, paused above Buchanan. The dew dried on the pine needles and the grass wondered whether it ought to start growing again.

Over breakfast, Matt recalled what Cindy Rhee had told him.

Talk to your daughter.

The child was right, of course.

He had barely spoken to Rachel since Contact. He’d been busy—spending time at the hospital, trying to keep the ER functional, then organizing the Committee.

But even when he was alone with her in the long evenings, too silent, when the sun declined and the Artifact cast its bony light, or the rain talked to the roof… still, he couldn’t bring himself to speak.

Not to say the important things.

He was too much aware of the change in her, of the neocytes, so-called, at work inside her skull.

Changing her. Carrying her away.

To speak of it would be to invite the grief, which he could not allow, because there had been too much grief in his life already. He couldn’t afford more grief. He was tired of grief.

But maybe the time had come.

He found her sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal and reading a library book. The book was propped against the cornflake box and braced with her left hand. It was Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and it seemed to Matt she was turning the pages a trifle too quickly. Better not to dwell on that. Her hair was uncombed and she was wearing a blue nightgown. She looked at him as he entered the kitchen, a look both hopeful and wary.

He moved to the counter and started measuring out coffee. His hands were hardly shaking at all. “Busy today, Rache?”

“No,” she said.

“Feel like a drive? I thought maybe we could ride out to Old Quarry Park. Last nice day of the year, maybe.”

“We haven’t been up there for a long time,” Rachel said. “In the mood for it?” She nodded.

Rachel understood that her father wanted to talk, wanted to make sense of what had happened; and she knew how hard it was for him. She wanted to help but didn’t know how.

He drove the long way up toward Old Quarry Park. As the road rose along the flank of Mt. Buchanan, she could see the town sparkling in its bay, polished bright as a jewel by all that rain. There was no plume of smoke from the Dunsmuir pulp and paper mill down south. There’d been no smoke from the mill for a couple of weeks now.

The car turned down a side road past the reservoir, and Rachel realized where this detour was taking them: “The Old House!”

Her father nodded.

They always called it the Old House. It was the house where Daddy had grown up. Back in the old days, before her mother died, they would go on this drive every once in a while… maybe twice a year, when Daddy was in the mood. They would drive past the Old House, and Daddy would talk about what Buchanan had been like long ago; and Rachel would picture him as a child, as strange as that seemed, her father as a ten-year-old in jeans and a grubby T-shirt, trekking through the power company clearcuts on his way to school, or carrying peanut butter sandwiches out to the bluffs on warm Saturdays like this.

The street where he had grown up was called Floral Drive, a grand name for ten 1950s box houses on a cul-de-sac with backyard views of the distant bay. Rachel recognized the Old House at once as Daddy slowed the car. There was nothing special about it. It had a shake roof and aluminum siding painted brown. The number 612 was marked on a gatepost with ornate brass numerals. Daddy didn’t know who lived here now. Strangers. He hadn’t lived in the house himself for more than twenty years.

There was no traffic; he stopped the car and let it idle.

“My grandfather died here,” he said. He was looking at the house, not at Rachel. “I was ten. He lived with us for the last three weeks of his life. He died of a bone cancer just before Christmas. But he loved to talk, and he was fairly lucid those last three weeks. I sat in the bedroom with him so he’d have somebody to talk to. He was born one year before the century turned, if you can imagine such a thing. He was twenty during the labor troubles in 1919. He talked about that a lot. Seattle was the big IWW capital of the Northwest, but there was a lot of labor trouble in Buchanan, too. Buchanan was a logging town back then. Some bars, a hotel, City Hall, the harbor, loggers in on weekends to drink and carry on. The Wobblies were organizing at the Dunsmuir mill. In 1919 they called the big general strike up in Seattle. Buchanan had its own sympathy strike. Just like Seattle, the strike was put down with clubs and cops. Your great-grandfather—this was Willy, on the Hurst side of the family—he worked at Dunsmuir. He was part of the labor parade. Two hundred men marched into the City Hall Turnaround with red banners. The mayor in those days was Bill Gunderson, he was in the pocket of the Dunsmuir family—he called out a bunch of Army regulars and they advanced with fixed bayonets. Three people were killed before the fight was over. Everybody went home bloody. Willy said the big fight was over the IWW banner. Everybody was yelling, ‘Protect the flag!’ Two guys got hurt, one blinded, the banner went down, but Willy and another man grabbed it and carried it up the hill behind City Hall and planted it in the Civic Gardens—it stood there ten minutes before the troops fought through the crowd and pulled it down.”

He turned to face Rachel. “That was his victory. That bloody flag. Ten minutes. He wanted me to know that before he died. He wanted me to know he wasn’t just an old man sick in bed. He was Willy Hurst, and he had saved the flag from the soldiers.”

“You never told me that before,” Rachel said.

“It was the first time I really understood this town had a history… that people had histories. A town is a living thing, Rachel. It has memories.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I can’t walk away from it. Not without trying to save it.” She nodded unhappily. “I know.”

“That’s how it is for me.” He shifted gears and drove away from the Old House, back toward the road, toward Old Quarry Park. The morning sunlight was hot through the car windows. “Now you,” he said. “I want to know how it is for you.”

Old Quarry Park was a wooded ridge running from the northern slope of Mt. Buchanan to the sea, a mile southwest of the abandoned mineral quarry that had given it its name. Hiking trails wound through the tall coastal firs, but the center of the park had been developed in the 1970s: There was a bandstand, a Little League diamond, a playground. Rachel had been taken to play here on summer weekends since she was three years old.

On one of those long-ago summer Saturdays, she had fallen and cut her forehead on the rim of the whirl-around. Matt had cleaned and bandaged the cut. She remembered his hands, huge and warm. Doctor hands. Their confident touch.

These memories had been coming back to her lately. It was part of the change.

He walked beside her from the parking lot through the trees to the picnic grounds. He was superimposed on her memory of him, an older version of himself. It seemed as if he had aged years in the last few weeks.

They sat at a wooden table at the western end of the picnic grounds where they could see through the trees to the ocean. The sun was bright and high. A couple of jays made a quarrelsome sound overhead, but the bees, a summer peril, had deserted the park altogether.

I want to know how it is for you. She was a dutiful daughter and she meant to give him an answer. But it wasn’t easy.

There was so much to say.

“Daddy, you know what Contact was like. You must remember, even if you said no. That feeling of doors opening up… of a promise of something wonderful. Of being something that doesn’t live and die but goes on, changing all the time but not stopping.”

“I remember,” he said. His face was drawn, expressionless, pale in the sunlight. “That didn’t frighten you?”

“Not when I understood what it meant. It was hard at first being so… transparent. They talk to you, but they’re talking to the inside of you. Your, I guess, soul. And your soul talks back. That’s scary. You can’t hold anything back, you can’t hide anything. But then you understand they’re not sitting in judgment, it’s not St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. They’re not even offering forgiveness, that’s not their business—their business is understanding. And then you start to realize how big they are. Big with all the growing and learning they’ve done over the centuries. Like some kind of beautiful seashell that gets more complicated and more colorful the longer you look at it, every chamber with a smaller chamber on one side and a bigger chamber on the other, all echoes and alabaster.…”

Her eyes were closed, and she realized she’d drifted into rhapsody. This Contact memory was strong. But she wasn’t accustomed to talking about it and she was probably scaring her father.

She glanced at him. His lips were drawn tight.

“I couldn’t say no,” she finished, inadequately.

“Even though it means giving up so much?”

“Giving what up?”

“Life. A normal life. A family. The way human beings have lived since they came out of the trees.”

“But I haven’t given that up. People used to say, is there marriage in heaven? Well, this isn’t exactly heaven. But I think there will still be marriage. People are people, Daddy. They’re each unique, they want different things from each other. They find partners. They fall in love. Maybe they don’t get married at the First Baptist anymore. But we’re not turning into loveless monsters.”

“It’s hard for me to know that.”

Rachel said, “I don’t know how to convince you.”

“What troubles me is that there’s a mechanism that’s altering your brain. Physically changing it. Rachel, that’s where love is. Loyalty, trust—even the way we perceive the truth. I tell myself this is all voluntary, you’re not being deceived. But I’ve seen surgeons produce bliss with an electrode in the cerebral cortex.”

“Have I changed?”

“Yes. You don’t talk the same way. Aren’t you aware of it?”

“I know about that. But me. Everything that makes me Rachel. Has that changed?”

He was silent for a long time. Finally he looked away from her, and the pain in his eyes was nearly unbearable. “I don’t know, Rache. I honestly don’t know.”

She felt herself on the verge of tears. She didn’t want to be understood.

She wanted to be held. She wanted him to wrap his arms around her, tell her it was okay, tell her he still loved her.

Voice trembling, indignant, she could only manage: “I’m not different.”

Not inside, she meant. Not where it counted.

On the day Rachel turned four years old, Matt had caught her drawing on the living room wall with her birthday crayons—big lime-green loops and whorls. The wall had been painted two weeks previously, and it must have looked to Rachel like a big blank sheet of paper.

Matt had paid for the painting the same week the car insurance came up for renewal. The household budget had bottomed out; Celeste was cooking Kraft Dinner instead of steak. Rachel’s tricycle, which she had ignored since this morning, had pushed their VISA card to the credit limit.

He went a little crazy when he saw the wall.

He grabbed the crayon out of her clenched fist and pushed her back. “Bad,” he said, “bad, Rachel, bad, bad!”

Her legs went out from under her. She sat down hard and her face clouded instantly.

Almost as immediately, Mart’s remorse began to flush away the anger. Rachel stammered through tears: “I’m… not… bad!”

He thought it was a cogent moral point. He also thought he wanted to shoot himself.

He picked up his daughter and held her. “You’re right, Rachel. You’re not bad. But it was a bad thing to do. Even good people do bad things sometimes. That’s what I meant to say. It’s a bad thing to draw on the wall. But you’re not bad.”

It was the way she phrased her objection in Old Quarry Park that convinced Matt he still had a daughter—at least for the time being.

I’m NOT different.

He felt those old father tears well up.

“Ah, Rache,” he said. “This is all… so confusing.”

She came around the picnic table to him. He stood up and barked his knee on the pineboard tabletop. It was an awkward ballet, but the hug went on a long time.

After a while, she went to a swing and asked him to push. A little bit of old times, Matt supposed. Maybe it was good for her to be ten years old for a few minutes. Maybe it was good for him.

He pushed her, she laughed, the sky was blue.

After that they walked the short trail that looped into the forest, but the track was muddy after all the rain. When they emerged into the sunlight, Rachel said, “We should have packed a lunch.”

“I have a better idea. Lunch at Dos Aguilas.”

“Really?”

“My treat.” He added, “If it’s open.”

“I think it is,” Rachel said… and he wondered how she knew.

Dos Aguilas was a Mexican restaurant at the bayshore. Matt recalled that Celeste had once classified it as a “linen-tablecloth” restaurant, as opposed to the plastic-booth kind at the malls. It had a cook, not a controlled-portion dispensing machine.

Arturo, the manager, had inherited the business from his father. The restaurant itself had been here since 1963. A landmark. It was still open for business. Empty, but open.

Arturo welcomed them in, and Matt nodded to him, but he understood by the glance that passed between Arturo and Rachel that they were of the same tribe now; Matt was the outsider here.

He chose a table by the window where they could watch the sunlit water lap the pier.

“It means Two Eagles,’” Matt said.

Rachel opened a menu over her cutlery. “What?”

“Dos Aguilas. It means Two Eagles.’ The story is that a pair of harbor eagles have a nest near here. You can have dinner some nights and maybe see them circling over the crab boats, diving for fish.”

“Really?” She gazed out across the water. “Did you ever see them?”

“Nope. Don’t know anybody who ever did. The story’s almost half a century old. But people still look.”

Rachel nodded, smiling at the thought.

Arturo came to the table. He took their order and headed for the kitchen, disappearing into a foliage of decor: sombreros, pistol belts, pottery. Matt said to his daughter, “You knew the restaurant would be open.” She nodded.

“You know things. Not just you. Other people, too.” He told her about the figure Tom Kindle had been quoting, one in ten thousand. “Rachel, how would anyone know that?”

She looked thoughtful. “It’s approximately the right number.”

“Okay. But how do you know?”

“Oh, I just… shift gears.” Tm sorry?”

“Well, that’s what I call it. It has to do with making connections.” A pause. “Daddy, do you want all the details of this?”

“Yes.”

“Because it’s strange.”

“I kind of took that for granted, Rache.”

She gave him a look: Well, okay… if you insist.

“It has to do with the neocytes,” she said. “One of the things they are is a kind of connector. You can think of them as drawing invisible lines—between people, between people and the Artifact.”

“Like telepathy?”

“In a way. But I think that gives the wrong impression. The lines they’re drawing are knowledge lines. The Travellers think there should be as few barriers to knowledge as possible. People’s lives are private, if they want them to be, but knowledge—knowledge is infinitely sharable.”

“What kind of knowledge?”

“More or less any kind.”

“Give me an example.”

“Well… suppose I want to know how to get from here to Chicago. Used to be I’d have to look at a map. Now I can just remember it.”

“Rachel, you’ve never been there.”

“No, but I’m not remembering it from myself, I’m remembering it from somebody else. Anyone who’s ever looked at a road map. It isn’t my knowledge, but I can get to it if I need it.”

“That’s all there is to it? Remembering?”

“That’s hardly all there is to it, but that’s what it feels like. I suppose it’s more like data sharing or something computery like that. But it feels like remembering. You have to actually do it, I mean there’s a mental effort involved—like thinking really hard. Shifting gears. But then you just… remember.”

“What if it’s something complicated? Quantum theory, say. Neurosurgery.”

She frowned, and Matt wondered if she was shifting gears right now, as they spoke.

“You can do that,” she said, “but it has to be orderly. In the Traveller world, knowledge is infinitely available but functionally hierarchic. You have to take the logical steps. What’s the good of knowing, for instance, that you can derive classical probability from the squared modulus of the quantum complex amplitude, if you don’t know what a modulus is, in physical terms, or an amplitude? The knowledge is available, but if you want to understand it you still have to eat it one bite at a time. Like this salad. Thank you, Arturo.”

“My pleasure. Get you something to drink?”

“A Coke,” Rachel said.

“For you, sir?”

“Anything.” His mouth was dry.

Rachel said, “I didn’t mean to be scary.”

“No. You took me by surprise, that’s all.”

“I surprise myself sometimes.”

The meal passed in awkward silence. Matt noticed Rachel glancing off across the water—checking for eagles. Once you started, it was hard to stop. “You still look sad,” she said when Arturo had brought his coffee. “Do I?”

“You were happy for a little while. Because we talked. But only for a while. Because of what’s happening.”

“Because it’s stealing you, Rachel. You’re right, I’m happy we talked. But it doesn’t change anything, does it? You’re going somewhere I can’t follow.”

“Doesn’t that happen anyway? If I’d gone off to college, or—”

“It’s hardly the same. I know you’re not a teenager forever. You go to college, maybe you get married, you have a career, things are different. Of course. But, my God, this is something else entirely. You go to college, I can phone you on weekends. Next year—can you guarantee we’ll even be able to talk to each other?” She looked away.

“So what do we have?” Matt asked. “A few months?” She pondered the question. Her eyes strayed to the harbor, the calm water there. “Maybe a few months. Maybe less.”

“You are going away.”

“Yes.”

“All of you?”

“Yes.”

“Where? When?”

“It’s not—it isn’t altogether clear.” He balled his napkin and threw it on his plate. She said, “Daddy, it works both ways. You made a choice, too. I’m entitled to a little resentment.”

“Oh?”

“Because you’re going to die. And I’m not. And it didn’t have to be that way.”

He followed the bay road toward home.

“You know I mean to save this town,” Matt told his daughter.

“I’ve heard you say so.”

“You don’t think it’s possible?”

“I’m… not sure.”

“Rachel, listen to me. If you know anything about the future, anything at all about what might happen to this town—to the planet—I need you to tell me. Because we can’t plan for what we can’t imagine.”

She was silent for a long time in the passenger seat. Then she said: “Things will go on as they are now. At least for a little while. Maybe into the winter. After that… people will start to disappear.”

“Disappear?”

“Give up the physical body. Oh, Daddy, I know how horrible that must sound! But it isn’t. It really isn’t.”

“If you say so, Rachel. What happens to these people?”

“They move to the Artifact, at least temporarily.”

“Why temporarily?”

“Because we’ll have a place of our own before long.”

“What are you saying—a human Artifact?”

“That kind of environment, yes.”

“For what purpose—to leave the planet?”

“Maybe. Daddy, these decisions haven’t been taken yet. But the planet is a serious consideration. We’ve left a terrible mark on it. The Travellers have already started cleaning it up. Erasing some of the changes we made. Taking some of the C0₂ out of the air.…”

“They can do that?”

“Yes.”

“So people disappear,” Matt said. “So Buchanan is empty.”

“We don’t all disappear. Or at least, not all at once. In the short run… What would you call a day like today? Indian summer? Last nice day of the year. Last chance to get in a ballgame, maybe, or go to the park. Well, I think the next four or five months are going to be Indian summer for a lot of us. Our last chance to wear skin and walk around on the earth.”

“Last chance before winter,” Matt said.

“Last chance before something better. But even if you were moving from a log cabin into the Taj Mahal, you’d still want to look around the old place before you locked the door.” Her eyes were vague, unfocused. Her voiced seemed faint. “It’s the cradle of mankind. Not always easy, leaving the cradle.”

Curious, Matt thought, how a sunny day could feel so cold.

After dinner, she curled up in the easy chair with Dostoevsky in her lap. “How come you still need to read that?” Matt asked. “How come you can’t just remember it?”

“I’m not that good yet.”

“So the library’s not defunct.”

“Not yet.”

“But the time is coming.”

“Yes.” She looked up. He was wearing his jacket; the evening had turned cooler. “Are you going out?”

“Just for a drive.”

“Want company?”

“Thank you, Rache. No. Not this time.”

He drove down to the parking lot where the summer ferry took tourists over to Crab Pot Island, a dot of National Park greenery in the embrace of the bay. The parking lot was low to the water, and Matt parked facing west, where the sky was still gaudy with sunset, although the light had begun to fade.

He used to come here in the bad time after Celeste died. When you wanted privacy and you lived with a daughter, you found your own retreats. A parking lot was one place where you could sit by yourself in an automobile and be left in peace. People assumed you were waiting for someone. They didn’t look closely. A person could be alone with his grief… could even weep, if he did so discreetly, if he forestalled the kind of helpless sobbing that would attract a stranger’s attention.

He was past that now. But he wanted the solitude.

It was that time of evening when the streetlights flicker on and everything solid seems hollow and flat; when dark thoughts come easily and are harder to ignore.

He wondered what he was trying so hard to save.

What was he sorry to lose, in this new world they were making? War was finished, after all. Disease, apparently, was a thing of the past. Starvation was history. Lies were becoming impractical.

He had never loved war, disease, starvation, or deceit.

So what was it?

What had he loved so much that he turned down the offer of eternal life?

Something evanescent. Something fragile.

A family. Rachel’s childhood. Celeste. The possibility of a human future.

All these things were illusions. He thought of Willy’s IWW banner, an old rag invested with glory by his stubborn defiance. Or the eagles of Dos Aguilas, a beautiful lie.

The sky above the bay was empty.

But the eagles flew, Matt thought. They flew when we believed in them. Willy flew, those ten minutes on the hillside. I will save this town, Matt thought. See if I don’t.

And if I can’t save the town… if it comes to that… then, by God, I will save some part of it.

Someone.

Chapter 18 Annie and Bobby

On the Saturday Matt took his daughter to Old Quarry Park, Annie Gates drove south for an hour on the coast highway.

She had made this drive one weekend out of two—sometimes Saturday, sometimes Sunday—for ten years now.

She had never spoken of it, even to Matt.

She was going to visit Bobby.

Bobby lived in a room in the east wing of a long, low building in a pine grove near the sea. His window overlooked a broad green lawn and a portion of the lot where Annie parked her car. Of course, Bobby seldom looked out the window. But maybe that had changed. Maybe he was beginning to appreciate the view. Annie hoped so.

The sign at the front door of the building said:

Commonplace but very expensive. Since Bobby moved in, Annie had been paying Wellborne the equivalent of a Park Avenue monthly rental. She had cut a great many corners. The furniture in her apartment was fifteen years old. Her salad and tuna diet was not for cosmetic purposes. She rarely bought a hardcover book, which had been the most difficult economy of all.

Worth it, of course, to know that Bobby was decently looked after.

She checked in at the desk—Wellborne was still fully staffed, the effects of Contact slow to take hold among its patients—and walked down the east corridor to Bobby’s room, 114.

She’d noticed an improvement on her last visit. Usually Bobby retreated into a fetal curl when he saw her coming. Last time she visited, he had unbent and regarded her with a solemn expression on his face… an expression, however, that Annie could not decipher. Nor could Bobby explain it. He never spoke to her. He spoke to the staff sometimes, simple food and bathroom words. But never to Annie.

Today… her hopes were high.

She crossed her fingers and said a silent, wordless prayer before she knocked and opened the door.

“Annie!” he said.

Her heart did a startled double-beat. How long since she’d heard his voice?

Almost thirty years, she thought. She remembered quite distinctly, too distinctly, the last words Bobby had spoken to her. Annie, don’t.

He had been nine years old; she had been ten. Annie, he had said. Please don’t.

He looked good today. He was dressed in clean blue jeans and a white cotton T-shirt. The T-shirt said “I LOVE WELLBORNE,” except that “love” was a heart shape. He was still way too skinny. For the last couple of years, Bobby had been a problem eater. Just before Contact, he had bottomed out at 102 pounds. The staff doctor had called to discuss intravenous feeding as an option.

Now he was eating again, and although she could see the staves of his chest through the T-shirt, she could tell he was gaining weight.

His face was terribly thin. His smile was skeletal. But it was a smile, and that was miracle enough. His eyes, deep in their sockets, twinkled at her.

“Hi, Bobby,” she managed through the lump in her throat.

He climbed off the bed where he had been sitting cross-legged watching baseball on TV. “They said I could go out today. Annie! Go for a walk with me?”

“Sure, Bobby,” she said.

He looked painfully fragile as he hobbled down the front steps onto the lawn, but Annie supposed it really was all right for him to be outside. The medical staff at Wellborne knew what they were doing. And of course, since Contact, Bobby was immortal. Like everyone else. But it was hard to convince herself of that.

He walked like an old man. He was thirty-four years old. He talked like a nine-year-old, which was how old he had been when the accident happened.

Annie walked with him across the sunny lawn. She ventured a question: “Bobby, do you like it here?”

“It’s not bad,” he said. “The food is all right.”

“You want to stay?”

He shrugged. She recognized the gesture, a particular Bobby-shrug. The shrug meant: Don’t know. Don’t want to talk about it.

“Nice day,” she said, helplessly. After all these mute years! Discussing the weather!

Bobby just grinned.

She said, “What have you been doing?”

“Watching TV,” he said. “Remembering.”

“Remembering?”

“I remember a lot. Since they came.” He touched his head—the side of it that was not quite symmetrical—and pointed to the sky: the Travellers. “Annie… guess what I remember?”

She cringed at the thought of what he might remember.

“I remember lawn tag\” And he tapped her on the shoulder and went hobbling away.

She pretended to chase, smiling to herself. All that last summer, they had played lawn tag through the long evenings. Daddy was the town doctor in Bruce, a little Canadian prairie town, a one-road grain town; of all the lawns in Bruce, the Gates’s lawn was the biggest.

Lawn tag was a simpleminded chase: under the privet hedge, past the willow tree, mustn’t stray beyond the border of the sidewalk, around back, past the doghouse. Annie, a year older, could have caught Bobby anytime. But she liked the sound of his laughter when he dodged her hand. Some evenings she tagged him once, twice, played hard to get, then let him win. Some evenings she let him win from the start.

Now… she could scarcely believe he was running again. The sunlight was radiant on the big Wellborne lawn; the air was silky cool. He moved in a slip-jointed lope, his jeans threatening to fall off his bony hips. It would have been easy to catch him.

She pretended to chase. Bobby looked back and laughed out loud. Annie savored the sound.

Sometimes, of course, he made her mad.

The hardest part of Contact had been facing this memory. But it was a memory that had to be faced: Most of Annie had said yes to the Travellers, but this memory part of her had said Annie doesn’t deserve to live.

She was ten. Only ten. A child. Impulsive. Wasn’t every child?

Bobby and Annie were playing on the roof of the house on the hottest day of summer.

It was easy to get onto the roof. Bring the ladder from the old bunk beds in the basement, step onto the tiny balcony outside Annie’s room, up to the steep and baking slope of the shingles. You could lie there and see all the way out past the water tower, past the highway, past the granaries, past yellow quilts of wheat to the horizon.

Bobby was scared of the roof. Annie always helped him up, helped him down. But she sometimes took a shameful pleasure in his fear. Bobby, the younger, often got more attention than he deserved. Bobby was the baby of the family. Annie was expected to help with the dishes. Bobby never did.

Today—well, it was hot. Prairie-summer-itchy-sunburn-tight-clothes hot. Bobby had been whining about it. So she went up on the roof by herself, hoping he wouldn’t follow.

Of course, he did.

He pulled himself over the eavestrough and scuttled up the shingles behind her, clinging to her foot until he could safely lie down. Stay still, silly, and you won’t slip. But that’s not what Annie said.

If you get scared, she said, your hands get all sweaty.

Bobby’s frown deepened.

And if your hands get sweaty… you might slip. He looked at her aghast across a space of cedar shakes and hot air. Annie, don’t.

It’s a lo-o-ong way down, Bobby.

Panicking a little, he grabbed her left foot with both hands. Hey, let go, no fair!

But he hugged it tighter. She was wearing shorts and no shoes. In the hot air, his fingers felt sticky as tar… his touch was an intolerable itch. Bobby! Let go of me!

She kicked her ankle out to shake him loose. Annie, he said, don’t.

Now she was starting to get scared. Her gaze drifted down from the blue deeps of the sky, across those farms, grain elevators, houses, streets, to the rain gutter and the paved walk down below. Mama had put the garbage out. The garbage cans shivered in the rising heat.

She thought of Bobby tumbling down there and carrying her with him.

She shook her foot again, harder.

One hand came loose. Bobby scrabbled against the shingled roof. She kicked again. Annie. Please don’t.

It was peculiar, it was maddening, how calm his voice still sounded.

Annie kicked to pry him loose, felt his hand separate from her ankle. She had turned her head away and when she looked back she caught the briefest glimpse of him as he disappeared over the edge, an expression of vast surprise on his face.

She scrambled down the bunk-bed ladder and looked over the edge of the balcony and saw Bobby on the paved walk beside the garbage cans. She looked for a long time, unable to make sense of what she saw. His head was broken open and some of what was inside had come out.

When Bobby left the hospital, he was back in diapers. Mama had to change him all the time.

Once, she shook a soiled cotton diaper in Annie’s face. “This is your fault,” Mama said.

Bobby’s head was curiously flat on one side and he didn’t talk, but whenever he saw Annie coming he curled away from her and closed his eyes.

Mama died a couple of years after that.

Annie had hoped to win back her father’s affection with a medical degree; but he died, too, while she was away at school.

She finished her degree anyhow. Bobby was institutionalized, and the estate was paying for everything, but that money wouldn’t last forever, and she would need a good income—a doctor’s income—to keep Bobby cared for.

Her residency was the hardest part. The sight of a head wound still made her dizzy.

When she took up the partnership with Matt Wheeler, he talked about his wife Celeste and how he had lost her. Annie never talked about Bobby. Bobby was a secret. It kept them apart, but Annie understood that this was what they both needed: something more than friendship, something less than love. Matt was guilty about loving someone after Celeste. And Annie… Annie wasn’t convinced she deserved to be loved.

The Travellers had stirred up these memories, but the Travellers had offered something in return: objectivity, as cool and cleansing as mountain water. The ability to forgive herself.

Annie forgave Annie, a quarter-century down the line.

But it wasn’t her own forgiveness she really craved.

Bobby tired himself out playing lawn tag, so they retreated to the shade of the patio at Wellborne. Annie brought out two glasses of lemonade from the staff cafeteria. The lemonade was tart and perfect. They sat on the steps, drinking it.

“We’re going on a trip,” Bobby said.

She thought he meant the Wellborne patients. “That’s nice,” she said. “To the seashore, Bobby?”

“No, I mean—us. We’re all going on a trip.”

“Oh. That trip. Yes.”

“Are you excited, Annie?”

“It’s not for some time yet, Bobby. A few months, anyhow.”

“They have to build the spaceship.”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “I have a lot of growing up to do.”

“There’s no rush.”

“I got kind of… left behind.”

She wanted to say, “I’m sorry!”—but couldn’t find her voice.

“I’m getting stronger,” Bobby said. “Annie—look what I can do!”

A wooden railing ran all around the patio of the Wellborne building. Before she could say anything, Bobby had boosted himself onto the banister. He was clinging to the narrow timber with hands and feet… then he stood up, like a tightrope walker, balancing himself.

His hips stuck out in bony ridges from the loose jeans. His arms, thrown out for balance, were fragile as twigs.

A brisk wind could knock him down from there. She felt a surge of panic. “Bobby, stop it!”

“No, Annie, look\” He took two tentative steps. Proud of his balance. Proud of his new life.

“Bobby, you’ll hurt yourself!”

“No, I—”

But she was up without thinking about it, running to him, grabbing him around his painfully thin waist and lifting him down. He was lighter than she expected. He was as light as a nine-year-old.

“Annie, Annie, it’s okay!”

Bobby wrapped his skinny arms around her and pressed his misshapen head against her cheek.

“I know why you’re crying,” he whispered. Did he? Oh, God!

“That was all a long time ago,” Bobby said. “We were kids. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

And Annie cried in her brother’s arms as if she had tapped a reservoir of tears, a well of sorrow ancient and eager for the light.