The Harvest

Chapter 25 Traveller

The boy had come a long way.

He had the skinny body of a twelve-year-old, toughened by his time on the road. His eyes were blue, his hair a dusty brown. He wore jeans, a plain white T-shirt loose at the waist, and a fresh pair of high-top sneakers.

He liked the sneakers. Laced tight, they braced his ankles. They felt good on his feet, a second skin.

He rode an expensive Nakamura mountain bike he had found in a store window in Wichita. The bike had grown dusty as he pedaled north on 15, crossing the border from Utah into Idaho. Last night, camped at an Exxon station, the boy had cleaned the bike with a damp rag. He had oiled the freewheel and the brake calipers, the cables and derailleurs. He had tightened the chain and the crank arm and adjusted the bearings. This morning, the small Nak ran like a dream.

The air was cool. The sky was a hard, glassy blue—the color of a marble he had once owned.

The boy wheeled through sagebrush plains where Interstate 84 followed the Snake River, humming to himself, as absentminded as a bird. He liked the way the wind tossed his hair and snapped his T-shirt behind him like a flag.

In eighty days, he had seen a great deal of the country. He had crossed the Mississippi at Cairo, rolled through Arkansas into Texas, and sheltered for three weeks in the empty city of Dallas while storms raged overhead. He had skirted the Mexican border at El Paso and headed north along the Rio Grande, then west again on 1-40 across the Continental Divide.

He had pedaled through the immense deserts of the southwest, landscapes as large and strange as the moon. A cloudburst caught him in Arizona, filling the arroyos, spiking the arid hills with lightning and drenching him before he could find shelter. But he was never ill; he was never tired.

Now he was looking forward to the Salmon River Mountains, some of the most impassable territory in the continental United States—a wilderness of larch and hemlock, cedar and spruce.

At noon, he stopped at a nameless little farm town for lunch. He broke into a gas station cooler and pulled out two bottles of Grape Crush, drank one immediately and saved the second for later. In some towns, like this one, the electricity was still working—the soda was cool, if not icy. In the Handi-Mart next door he found TV dinners still preserved in a working freezer. That was unusual. The freezers didn’t always last without maintenance, even if the electricity was on. The TV dinners were past their best-by date, but only a little. The boy opened one and heated it in the store’s microwave oven. It tasted okay. He drank the second bottle of Grape Crush. It turned his lips purple.

The boy carried some items in a bag attached to the rear of the bike. After lunch, he opened the bag and took out a hat—a khaki bush hat from a hunting-and-fishing store back east. It didn’t fit too well, but it kept the afternoon sun off his face and neck.

He climbed onto his bike and pedaled down the white line, the precise meridian of the empty road. The wheel bearings sang a high, keen note into the silence.

He passed irrigation farms, big Ore-Ida potato plantations gone brown in the absence of humanity, then more sage prairie as he followed the Snake westward.

Near dusk, as he was thinking about breaking camp, the boy came around a slow curve into another tiny road town where a number of trucks and campers had parked in a string. He saw the motion of people among the vehicles.

The boy realized he knew a few things about who these people were and where they were going.

Their presence was troubling. It demanded a decision.

Paths diverged here. One way: the Salmon River Mountains, a last dalliance before he went Home. The other way: a less certain future.

It was perhaps not an accident that he had come across these people.

The boy stood with his bike between his legs, frowning at the choice.

Then he sighed and walked his bicycle to the nearest camper.

The camper was a dusty Travelaire. The rear door was open and an elderly woman sat in the doorway with a book across her knees. She wore a baggy cotton print dress and a blue quilt jacket over it. Her hair was gray and sparse. She was reading by the light of the low sun, squinting at the ricepaper pages of a King James Bible.

She looked up at the tick of the Nakamura’s oiled bearings. The boy stopped a yard away. He stood beside his bicycle gazing at her.

She gazed back.

“Hello,” she said at last.

Cautiously, the boy said, “Hi.”

She set the book aside. “I haven’t seen you before.”

“I was riding this way. From the east.”

“Are you alone?”

He nodded.

“No mother? No father?”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh. Well, that’s too bad.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Are you going somewhere?”

“Nowhere in particular.”

“Are you hungry?”

It had been hours since lunch. He nodded.

“I have some food,” the woman said. “Fresh eggs and cured beef. And a little stove to cook it over. Would you care to join me?”

“All right,” the boy said.

He followed her into the camper. There was a propane stove inside. She lit it and put a skillet over the flame. The camper began to warm up. The day had been sunny and fairly nice, but nights were cold this time of year. The boy looked forward to sleeping inside.

He looked around the camper while she cooked. There wasn’t much to see. A few books, including the dog-eared Bible. A stack of scrapbooks that must have soaked up water at some time in the past—the covers were round, the pages wrinkled. Some clothes, unwashed. He sat at a small table, the folding kind.

Eggs sizzled in the skillet. The woman hummed a tune. The boy recognized it. It was an old song. “Unforgettable.” Nat King Cole made that one famous.

Long time ago.

He waited while she said grace, then tucked into a plate of scrambled eggs. “Here’s the salt,” the woman said. “Here’s pepper. I’m boiling water for coffee. Do you drink coffee?”

He nodded, mouth full.

“I suppose I’ll have to introduce you around.” She picked at her own eggs. “We’re a travelling group. We’re going east. There are other people east. We’re from Oregon. The coast. There was a terrible storm, and then—oh, but it’s a long story. You can hear it all later. Tell me, are you tired?”

“A little.”

“You must have come a long way on that bicycle.” He nodded.

“Yes,” she said, “I’ll introduce you tonight. There’s a meeting. Sort of a town meeting. If you call us a town. We can leave early if you like, but I think people will want to know you’re here… My Lord, I don’t even know your name! Pardon my manners. I’m Miriam. Miriam Flett. And you are—?”

“William,” he said.

“William—?”

“Just William.”

“Misplaced your last name?”

He shrugged.

“Well. I’m pleased to meet you anyway, William. And I’m sure everyone else will be, too.” She took a delicate bite of eggs, eating slowly, old-lady style. “It won’t be troublesome,” she said. “There are only ten of us. Well, eleven, including that Colonel Tyler.”

Chapter 26 Election

Beth Porter shook the boy’s hand and gazed a moment at his wide blue eyes.

They were strange eyes for a kid that age, Beth thought. Too… something. Calm? Calm but observant.

But he seemed like a nice-enough kid. People seemed to enjoy seeing a new face. Everybody shook William’s hand and made welcome noises at him. Even Colonel Tyler bent and ruffled the boy’s hair—though William’s smile at that moment looked suddenly less genuine. And that was odd, too, Beth thought.

Then Matt Wheeler called the meeting to order.

They had gathered in the living room of a little wood-frame house next to a gas station. The house was dusty and stale from being closed up so long, but cozy enough on a chilly spring night. Matt had brought in ten folding chairs from his camper. Tom Kindle had plugged in an electric heater, which was minimal help, but what really mattered, Beth thought, was that they had come over the Cascades into the Land of the Functioning Wall Sockets. She guessed it was some Helper voodoo that kept the electricity working in all these derelict towns… as in Buchanan before the storm trashed everything. She didn’t care. Lights that didn’t need batteries: heaven. Hot water: bliss.

This very afternoon they had broken into the house and taken turns under a working shower. Beth recalled that first amazing flourish of steamy water on the skin of her back. It was like the caress of some fiery angel. She’d been savoring the memory for hours.

She settled into a folding chair next to Abby Cushman, a row behind Joey. Up front, with the room’s two sixty-watt floor lamps making him look pale and skinny, Matt Wheeler zipped through some old business, chiefly the news that Joey had scavenged a portable ham rig in Twin Falls, plus a quick unanimous “aye” on the proposition to continue east first thing tomorrow.

Then it was time for the serious vote of the evening… the one Beth had been dreading.

Matt looked tired when he announced it. “Last week we resolved to open the position of Chairman to an election. We can start with nominations—anyone?”

Joey jumped up, almost knocked his chair into Beth’s knees. “I nominate Colonel John Tyler!”

“Seconded,” Jacopetti said.

Well—that was quick, Beth thought.

Abby Cushman, looking a little startled, put her hand up. “Matt, you’ve been doing a fine job. Can’t we just carry on? I nominate you.” Now it was Miriam who seconded. Another surprise. “Two candidates,” Matt said. “Anyone else?” Jacopetti said, “Isn’t two enough? Why don’t we all run?” No more.

“Okay,” Matt said. “Do we need debate on this? I think everyone knows where the Colonel and I stand.” Conceded.

“We’ll vote by show of hands. Colonel Tyler and I will abstain—and maybe our new resident should, too, at least until he’s more familiar with current events.”

Miriam smiled. “I’m sure that’s all right with William.”

“Good. Show of hands for Colonel Tyler?”

Beth looked around hastily. Joey’s hand shot up, of course. Jacopetti’s, in a gesture that was somehow smug. Two, Beth thought. Two out of nine.

Bob Ganish offered a plump hand. Three.

There was a long, tense moment. Nothing.

“Hands for yours truly?”

Abby’s, at once, and Tom Kindle’s; then Miriam’s hand went up. Three versus three, Beth thought. Abby said, “In the event of a tie?”

“Ordinarily,” Matt said, “the Chair would cast the deciding vote… but that’s hardly fair, since both Colonel Tyler and I agreed to abstain. There’s probably something in the Rules of Order. Maybe it would be simpler just to try it again—we had a lot of abstentions. Maybe some of those folks will change their minds.”

Meaning me. Beth found herself blushing. Me and Chuck Makepeace and Tim Belanger.

Makepeace she couldn’t predict. As for Belanger… Matt had saved the guy’s life, dragging him down a hospital corridor during the storm. But Belanger had been pretty close to Tyler ever since the Colonel arrived. And this was only a chairmanship vote, after all, not a test of loyalty… or at least that was all it seemed to be.

Makepeace, Belanger…

And me, Beth thought. Please God, don’t let it come down to me. “Hands for Colonel Tyler?”

The same three: Joey, Jacopetti, Bob Ganish… and now, uh-oh, Beth thought, a fourth—Chuck Makepeace had slid into the Tyler camp. “Could still be a tie,” Abby commented. “No cheerleading,” Matt said. “For yours truly?” Miriam, Abby, Tom Kindle. Beth folded her hands in her lap and stared at them. When she looked up, Belanger had raised his hand for Matt. Four to four.

Jacopetti turned to her. “Time to shit or get off the pot, m’dear.”

She thought about Matt: weary, unhappy at the front of the room.

She thought about Colonel Tyler. The way he shook her hand one time. The way he smiled.

She couldn’t bring herself to look at either candidate. Or at Joey. Or Jacopetti, the toothless SOB. “Tyler” she said, a whisper.

Jacopetti: “Pardon me?”

She gave him a hateful stare. “Colonel Tyler!”

There was a silence in the room.

Joey turned, offered an evil grin.

Matt cleared his throat. “Colonel?”

Tyler stood up, immaculate in his uniform. “Yes, Dr. Wheeler?”

“I believe this is your gavel now.”

Beth remembered when Colonel Tyler came to town. It was in that desperate time when the storm had passed, when Beth had climbed out of the rubble into a world of no landmarks—a world of everything flat and broken, where you might find a bedframe nestled in the hollow shell of a Volkswagen, or a pleasure boat riding on a sea of windfall pines.

After a few days, Beth had been assigned to the food search. With Abby Cushman and Bob Ganish, she had hiked south on the highway—which was not even a road anymore, barely a trail among the scattered detritus of ruined buildings—to the place where the big A P had stood. Just finding it was an act of archaeology. Beth had always navigated by the man-made markers, road signs and intersections and malls. Now there was nothing except the curve of the bay, the cryptic angle of Mt. Buchanan above a plain of homogeneous junk.

The storm had left chalk-blue skies and a chill wind behind it. Beth was cold in a ragged sweater, soon dirty from prying up soggy drywall and ancient lathing, hunting for canned food, which they loaded into big double-ply garbage bags for the trip back into town. She felt like something medieval. A ragged, scrounging peasant.

Mid-afternoon, her nose running from the chill, she stood up straight to ease the ache in her back; and that was when she saw him.

Colonel John Tyler.

She knew immediately who that distant figure was. Joey had talked to him on the radio. More recently, Chuck Makepeace had announced that the Colonel was on his way to Buchanan. But that was before the storm. Beth thought the storm must have changed everything—all plans had been erased.

But Colonel Tyler had arrived as promised.

He was on foot. He was a little dusty. But he came along the ruin of the highway with his head high, face clean-shaven, his Army jacket threadbare but neat, and Beth felt a voiceless rush of pleasure at the sight of him—ghost of a world that had seemed so lost.

She didn’t tell the others. Let them scrounge in the ruins while Beth watched this man come closer. She wished her face was less dirty, her hair not so tangled.

Then Abby straightened and caught sight of him.

“Well, gosh,” she said.

Bob Ganish stood with a green garbage bag in one hand, mouth open and his belly spilling over his belt. Some welcoming committee, Beth thought. A middle-aged lady, a grimy ex-car dealer. Me.

Tyler smiled as he approached. You could see his age. He wasn’t young. But he was in good shape. His gray hair was cut close to his skull. He looked like he wasn’t tired. He looked like he could walk forever.

Beth, suddenly embarrassed, plucked at the hem of her ratty sweater.

Ganish stepped forward and introduced himself. Colonel Tyler shook hands solemnly. “We talked once on the radio,” he said: a resonant, calm voice. “Nice to meet you in person.” And Abby. “Heard a lot about you, Mrs. Cushman.”

Smiles and breathless welcome-stranger bullshit. Then they introduced Beth.

Colonel Tyler shook her hand.

His hand was big and warm. Her own hand was cold from the weather, raw from the work. She was grateful for the touch. She thought his hand was one of the most interesting things she had ever seen—a big man’s hand, creased and hard, but gentle.

“Prettiest face I’ve encountered in a long time,” Tyler said, “if you don’t mind me saying so, Miss Porter.”

“Beth,” she managed.

“Beth.”

She liked the way it sounded when he said it.

Then they all hiked back into town, Tyler sharing the weight of the canned food, and he talked a little about how bad the roads had been, “but it’s a different story over the mountains,” and how they would have to take their time, plan for the journey east, and so on and so forth, Beth not speaking or really listening much; and then all the others had to meet Tyler, show him the shelter they’d made of the intact corner of the hospital basement; and Joey was beside himself, glowing whenever Tyler talked to him, which was often, since Tyler and Joey had become good radio buddies. Then there was planning to do, Tyler conferring with Matt and Tom Kindle mainly, and the days had run in a busy torrent ever since.

But she remembered the touch of his hand.

Prettiest face I’ve seen in a long time.

Beth had passed her twenty-first birthday on the road out of Oregon. She didn’t mention it; no one knew. But it got her thinking. Maybe she’d been acting like a teenager well past her due date—riding around on Joey’s motorcycle committing penny-ante vandalism. But she was twenty-one years old; she was a woman; maybe not the world’s most attractive or well-bred specimen, but the only woman under forty among the local survivors. A fact that made Joey paranoid (not that he had any right to be) and everyone else a little nervous. Chuck Makepeace had made a couple of very tentative passes; so, even more tentatively, had Tim Belanger.

But they didn’t attract her.

Who did?

Well… Joey had, once, but that was over. An aspect of her life she didn’t much care to recall.

Matt Wheeler attracted her.

Colonel Tyler attracted her.

None of this was very surprising. What was new was the idea that she might attract them. And maybe (and here was the real novelty), maybe not just because she was the only game in town.

Since Matt, since her experience with Jacopetti in the hospital basement, Beth had been exploring a new idea—the idea that she might have some work of her own to do in this new world.

Something more significant than clerking at a 7-Eleven.

A new world, new work, a new Beth Porter coming up through the rubble.

Which reminded her of the tattoo on her shoulder.

WORTHLESS

It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Maybe it had been.

Maybe it had been true.

Maybe it wasn’t anymore.

She would have to explain to Matt about the vote. Not something she looked forward to.

For now, she watched Colonel Tyler at the front of the room. He smiled, thanked Matt for everything he’d done, thanked everybody for demonstrating their confidence in a relative newcomer. He said he took the chairmanship seriously and he’d do his best to live up to their expectations.

Then he looked at his watch. “It’s late and I guess we all want to get some sleep before we move on in the morning. So just a little bit of business here. Some people have been complaining about the weekly meetings. We see each other every day, maybe there’s no reason to have a formal assembly so often when there’s no special business pending. Seems reasonable. I think we can safely schedule full Committee meetings at a rate of once a month, and I’ll ask your consent for that—unless there’s any objections?”

No objections, though Matt was frowning massively.

“Okay,” Tyler said. “Some picayune items… I’ve posted a watch tonight, and I think we should make that a permanent fixture. Joseph and Tim volunteered for duty. They can be our regular standing guard as far as I’m concerned—until they get tired of it, and unless anybody has a reason why not.”

Kindle said, “We’re talking armed guards here?”

“Handguns,” Tyler said.

Abby: “Is that necessary, Colonel?”

Tyler smiled his gentle smile. “I hope it isn’t, Mrs. Cushman. I trust it won’t be. But we’d be stupid to take an unnecessary risk. There’s always the possibility of wild animals, if nothing else. I won’t ask a man to sit alone all night without some form of protection.”

(“Holy crow,” Kindle said softly.)

And more such items, none offered for a vote, but the Colonel pausing briefly for “objections,” which never came. It was businesslike, Beth thought. A little dizzying, however.

There was something about the radio: Makepeace and Joey were a joint committee and controlled access. Communication with Helpers—there was a Helper in every one of these microscopic towns—would be strictly through a designated representative: Tim Belanger. “Helper communication should be kept to a minimum, in my opinion, since we’ve all suffered at the hands of the Travellers, and I’m not sure we should place absolute trust in their emissaries, though I’ll be the first to admit they’ve been useful from time to time.”

Finally a motion to adjourn. Hands shot up. Kindle whistled appreciatively from the back row. “Fast work, Colonel.” Tyler looked mildly irritated. “You can voice your dissent at any time, Mr. Kindle. That’s what this forum is all about. However, we’re adjourned.”

“We sure are,” Kindle said.

Matt had picked up some material for Beth at a local lending library—a Red Cross first-aid handbook with a chapter on traumatic injuries, which he had annotated in the margin where it was out of date. In a couple of weeks, he wanted her familiar with the use of a hypodermic needle and a range of common antibiotics. The problems they were most likely to be looking at, aside from Jacopetti’s coronary trouble and Miriam’s geriatric complaints, were injuries and bad food. He had scheduled a session with her tonight.

But the meeting had run late… she might not show up.

Might not want to, Matt thought. It was cold in his RV. A lot of people were sleeping indoors tonight. Kindle had been warning people about turning on long-disused oil furnaces ever since they passed that burned-out section of Twin Falls, and gas furnaces weren’t working anymore, anywhere, for no known reason. But the Travellers had been scrupulous about electricity. Kindle had hooked up expensive space heaters, the kind with gravity switches to turn off the juice if somebody knocked the thing over. Heat a room, let people camp in it. It was reasonably safe and it took the chill off some arthritic bones, including Miriam’s.

But Matt preferred his camper. He had converted the RV into a combination of home and consulting office. It provided a little continuity in a world that had turned so many things so completely upside-down.

He picked up another library book, a Raymond Chandler mystery, its urban setting so distant in time and circumstance that it felt like science fiction. And he switched on a battery light and settled down.

The wind came briskly along the dry margins of the Snake River and rocked the RV on its old, loose shocks. Matt found his attention drifting: from the book to Tyler, the election, the boy who had wandered into camp this afternoon…

He was yawning when Beth knocked.

She let herself in. Matt checked his watch. “Beth, it’s late—”

“I know. Everybody’s asleep.” She hesitated. “I came to explain.”

About the election, she obviously meant. Explain, Matt noted. Not apologize. “It’s all right,” he said.

“No.” She frowned. “It’s not all right. I don’t want to leave it hanging. Matt, it’s not that I don’t trust you or you haven’t done a good job. Everybody knows you have. But when you were standing up there, it just seemed like… you just looked so fucking tired.”

Had he? Well, maybe. Was he tired?

More than he dared admit.

She said, “It might have been the wrong thing to do.”

“You did what seemed right at the time. That’s all anybody can ask.”

“It just seemed like you didn’t really want the job.”

“I didn’t.”

“But you don’t want Colonel Tyler to have it.”

“Well—no.”

“He doesn’t seem like a bad person.”

“That’s not the issue. He didn’t just take over the Committee, Beth, he bulldozed it. Ten minutes of Colonel Tyler, and what do we have? Restricted access to Helpers. Restricted access to the radio. The camp under an armed guard.”

Beth looked uneasy. “You make it sound sinister.”

“It is sinister.”

“I think he’s just used to the military way of doing things.”

Colonel Tyler, by his own testimony, had left the military almost fifteen years ago. It wasn’t force of habit that had put him in charge tonight. It was careful planning, Matt thought, and a couple of partisan malcontents: Paul Jacopetti and Joey Commoner.

And something else. Matt sensed in the Colonel a certain restlessness, an impatience that always seemed about to break out into violence. Catch him in a quiet moment and you’d find Tyler tapping his foot to some inner rhythm, his eyes fixed and absent and his big hands closed into fists.

But he couldn’t say this to Beth without sounding paranoid or petty. Anyway, her vote hadn’t mattered any more than Chuck Makepeace’s vote, or Bob Ganish’s. It was only bad timing that made it seem that way.

She had done what she thought was the right thing, and in the end maybe her call was as good as his.

She said, “I guess I should leave.”

“Only if you want to.”

Tentatively: “You’re not angry?”

“No.” He realized he wasn’t.

She sat beside him. Relieved, weary, she put her head against him.

He stroked her long hair and listened to the night wind tugging at the corners of the RV. He would never get used to these inland plains. He missed the sea.

He thought about Beth—all the aspects of Beth Porter. The neglected, sullen Beth: the Beth who had tattooed WORTHLESS on her shoulder, who had baited Joey Commoner until Joey felt compelled to pull a knife.

And this other Beth. Beth treating Jacopem’s anxiety with the anodyne of her own calm. Beth studying anatomy textbooks with the dedication of a monk.

Something clean and strong rising out of all the garbage in her life. “Joey’s standing watch,” she said. “He has a campfire on the highway facing west.”

“Did he see you come?”

“No. Anyway, I’m tired of worrying about Joey. He’s acting like an asshole.”

“Maybe a dangerous one.”

“Joey and his pocketknife? I doubt it.”

“After what you said that night…”

“I shouldn’t have. I know. But he doesn’t own me. He never did.”

“We’re a fragile community. I don’t want to create one more problem.”

“Then should I leave?” Challenging him. “Beth—you know you don’t have to.”

“I want to stay a while longer.”

“Then stay.”

A cold night. A little warmth.

Chapter 27 Destinations

The caravan of ten dusty RVs and trailers, led by Colonel Tyler in a four-wheel-drive Ford pickup, turned south on Interstate 84 toward Utah.

Tyler drove with the windows rolled down, admitting a breeze so dry it made his lips bleed. He drove at a cautious, steady pace. Sometimes he felt fettered by the train of ponderous vehicles behind him. But it was a privilege, he thought, to blaze the trail. To see the way ahead.

The highway seemed wider for being empty. Periodically he passed an abandoned truck or car, and it was nice to know that in an emergency the Committee could siphon gas from one of these. But no emergency arose. Most of the roadside gas stations had functional pumps, and Joey Commoner and Bob Ganish had been scrupulous about keeping the convoy’s engines in decent repair.

Tyler led them across the Great Basin into Utah, joined what had once been a populous stretch of 1-15 north of Brigham City, then veered east on 1-80 where the towns grew sparse again.

Tyler read the road maps with great care. He was worried about crossing the Rockies. 1-80 skirted much of the mountains, followed the Union Pacific route through the Red Desert in Wyoming, but late or early storms had been known to strand unwary travellers.

He called a halt at a town named Emory and pressed on in the morning. The sky when he started his engine was bright with herringbone clouds.

The road climbed and subsided and began to climb again.

He felt better when the road wound away from civilization. Those empty towns were oppressive. Mountain and desert were simply eternal. Granite and sagebrush and cheat grass: invulnerable to all the discord that had dropped like bad magic out of a starry sky.

He was alone in the cab of the pickup truck, although Sissy kept him company.

Sissy had been keeping him sporadic company since that town in Georgia—Loftus.

She spoke to him, a voice out of the wind, but he didn’t actually see her until one afternoon in rural Texas while he was driving the Hummer west. It seemed appropriate that Sissy should appear in the desert. The desert was a place of mirages, dust-devils, chromium-blue lakes shimmering where the highway touched the horizon. Sissy had seemed exactly that tenuous, sitting next to him where A.W. Murdoch used to be. She was a translucent, desert-dry Sissy—dressed as inappropriately as ever in cotton and nylon and polyester of all colors, clothes so brittle with old dirt that any motion emitted a greasy rustle and exuded an odor too stale to be offensive. It was the smell, Tyler thought, of something dead that had dried a long time in the sunlight.

The radio was good, Sissy told him, good to be talking to those people, smart, but be careful, she said: stay away from the crowds, all those East Coast city survivors, clever and dangerous in some way she never explained. Talk to that Joseph, Sissy said. He admires you.

Sissy was an illusion. Tyler knew that. Of course he did. You’d have to be crazy to believe she was really sitting there, some kind of ghost.

She was, as the psychologists would no doubt say, a private revenant, a fragment of himself. She was Tyler giving Tyler Tyler’s advice.

But in another way she really was Sissy: Sissy cut loose from memory. His memory had lost its grip on Sissy the way a child might lose its grip on a balloon; and like a balloon she had risen up, had floated out of his head and come to rest in the passenger seat beside him.

Sissy advised him to drive to Oregon, hike down from the coastal mountains to Buchanan, assume a leadership position among these ragged refugees.

Lead them east, Sissy said.

To the gathering place of the survivors, a new home in the valley of the Ohio River, a sheltered place—or so Tyler told them, and it had even seemed true for a while.

But Sissy—always a repository of unpleasant surprises—had been coy about their destination.

Tyler led his caravan up a road walled with granite, threading a path around fallen rock. Whenever he turned his head to the right he found Sissy gazing at him. Today she was bright as the sun, her plump cheeks a blazing white, difficult to look at.

Those people back east, Sissy said. They surrounded themselves with Helpers. They talk to Helpers.

“True,” Tyler said.

Helpers are the voice of that thing in the sky… “I know,” Tyler said, weary of these cryptic pronouncements. Sissy’s eyes, volatile and relentless, demanded answers he was helpless to produce… and of the dead. “Dead what?” The skinless living.

The Contactees, Tyler interpreted. Contactees who had died might be able to speak through the Helpers. The dead might talk to the living. Tyler said, “The danger…”

They’ll talk about you, John. That girl you killed in Loftus. Maybe it will be Murdoch talking. Maybe Murdoch crossed over, too. And who else might talk? They might talk about Stuttgart. They might remember every sin you ever committed.

This was a new and unwelcome idea.

People will know what you are.

Peevishly: “I’m no worse than the rest.”

They’ll know about Loftus. They’ll call you killer.

Would they? Extraordinary circumstances, Tyler thought. Alien possession. The girl had been… not human.

Anyway, he told himself, I’m a man of some stature. A man who served his country, a man who made a place for himself in the business world. A man who had once been a familiar presence in the Capitol Building, a man accustomed to lunching with Defense Department functionaries or the members of oversight committees. Above certain kinds of innuendo.

That’s a joke, Sissy said. Another Washington crook. What’s the difference?

Tyler worked at remembering that period of his life. It had been structured, formal, complex. In those days he had known how to seal off this Sissy part of himself. Compartment A: The presentable Colonel Tyler. Compartment B: Certain phantoms. Certain urges.

But with Contact, the borders had grown tenuous. Like a naval vessel, he thought. Bulkheads breached. Flooding in the engine room. Fire in the hold.

The sad fact was, he talked to this ghost because he had no choice. Pay attention, Sissy scolded him. To…?

The danger! You can’t risk being exposed.

But even Colonel Tyler had dreamed of that green valley in Ohio. A gathering place, a new life—safety. A trap, Sissy said.

“But if not there,” Tyler said aloud, “if that’s not where we’re going…”

But when he turned to pose the question, Sissy had vanished.

They came across a fallen telephone pole blocking the highway. Tyler called a halt, then enlisted Joey Commoner and Chuck Makepeace to work a chain around the pole and hook it to the rear of the pickup.

Tyler revved the Ford’s heavy-duty engine, inching forward against the drag. The pole gave a moan of stressed timber and then began to shift.

Tyler took careful note of the people who had climbed out of their campers and RVs to drink bottled soda and watch the show.

Kindle and Wheeler stood together, both poker-faced. Wheeler in particular seemed to be working to disguise some emotion. His resentment, Tyler supposed, at being elbowed out of the leadership position.

Among the rest Tyler identified idle curiosity, some cautious frowns from the likes of Abby Cushman and Miriam Flett, frank idolatry from Joey Commoner.

He turned away to measure his progress, and when he looked again he was surprised to see Sissy among the crowd—a more ethereal presence.

A dry wind came rivering down this pass, but Sissy’s long, tangled hair hung limply over her shoulders; her layered clothes stirred not at all.

She extended her hand over the head of the new boy, William.

This one, Sissy said. Her lips moved soundlessly, but Tyler heard the words as if they were his own. Watch out for this one.

He drove until sunset.

“A lot of settlers came through here,” Kindle said. “Mormons, especially, but also people on the Oregon Trail, the California Trail. You can still find their wagon tracks on the scrub prairie about forty miles north.”

Matt walked with his friend along the highway away from camp.

They had stopped for the night along a stretch of high Wyoming rock desert that seemed to Matt infinitely dry, silent, and immense. Dinner was over now and the watch fires had been lit.

“Matthew,” Kindle had said, “let’s walk a bit. Get the kinks out.” And Matt understood that the older man had something difficult to tell him.

Neither moon nor Artifact had risen and the stars were bright in a cold sky. When he spoke, Kindle’s voice seemed to hover in the air.

“It was called the South Pass,” Kindle said. “You followed the North Platte to the Sweetwater, Sweetwater to Pacific Creek, Sandy Creek, the Green River Crossing. The Overland Stage Route came through that way. Pony Express.”

Scuff of shoes on empty road. Matt said, “Sounds like you know the territory.”

“Lived two years up in the Wind River Range. Did a lot of hiking through Whiskey Mountain and Popo Agie. Beautiful country.”

“You miss it?”

“Been thinkin’ about it a lot.”

They approached the small fire where Joey Commoner was keeping watch. Joey stood up at the sound of footsteps, turned to face them with his hand hovering at the pistol Colonel Tyler had supplied him.

“Halt,” Joey said, his voice cracking.

Kindle yawned and regarded the boy. “Joey, if you ever aim a loaded pistol in my direction I’ll feed it to you—fair warning.”

“The Colonel doesn’t like people outside camp perimeter at night.”

“I don’t suppose he does. I don’t suppose he likes my shirttail untucked, either, but he’ll have to put up with it, won’t he?”

“You go on report if you’re out of bounds.”

“Fine,” Kindle said. “Maybe later the Colonel can slap my wrist.”

“You’re such a shithead,” Joey said.

Kindle looked at him a long moment—sadly, Matt thought. Then they walked on, past the fire, past Joey.

Matt tried to imagine crossing this blank immensity in a covered wagon. No highways, no gas stations, no motels. No Helpers. The stars sharp as needles.

“Matthew… can you believe this bullshit? Pass a checkpoint before we can take a walk?”

He shrugged. “Joey’s just—”

“Joey isn’t ‘just’ anything. Joey’s following orders and loving every minute of it. We’re not living in a town anymore, we’re living in a barracks. That’s why—”

Kindle hesitated. Matt said, “Why what?”

“That’s why I’m leaving.”

No. “You can’t.”

Kindle was a shadow in the starlight, large and gray. “Matthew—”

“Christ, Tom, I know what’s going on as well as you do. Tyler did his little putsch, and now we have to live with it. It’s painful. But we’re still moving. Heading for a place where Tyler will be one small frog in a big pond. They’re holding real elections in Ohio. According to the radio—”

“When’s the last time you heard the radio? The Colonel’s got it locked up.”

“Beside the point. In Ohio, the Colonel won’t matter.”

“Don’t underestimate the man.”

“The bottom line,” Matt said, “is that we’re more likely to get there if you’re with us.”

“The bottom line is that it’s not my job.” Kindle selected a pebble and threw it into the darkness, an invisible trajectory. “Anyway—I never wanted to live in Ohio. Tell you a story. Once upon a time I hiked along the Titcomb Valley, that’s up in the Wind River Range. I was thirty-three years of age, and I thought that was pretty damn old. East side of the valley is Fremont Peak. North is Mount Sacajawea. At the head of the valley is Gannett Peak, highest in Wyoming. All well above the timberline. Glaciers on those mountains like blue rivers of ice. So pretty it hurts. I camped there a night. When I left, I promised myself I’d come back, one way or another, before I died. See all this a second time. I never got around to it.”

“Tom—”

“I know you don’t understand this, Matthew. You’re happy with people. Happiest when you’re helping them. That’s admirable. I can’t do it, however. I’d be happy by myself in the Winds. Or the Tetons, or the Beartooths.”

Matt tried to imagine this wiry, strong, aging man alone in the wilderness. “Break a leg out there,” he said, “no one comes to help.”

“I don’t relish the idea of dying alone. Who the hell does? But what choice is there? Don’t we all die alone?” He shrugged. “Used to be Shoshone and Arapahoe through there. Might still be people around.”

Matt said, “In Ohio—”

“In Ohio there’s nothing but people. People and Helpers. Which is another question. Seems to me there’s only two ways it can go, Matt. Maybe the Travellers move on and leave us alone—no Helpers, no electricity unless we make it ourselves. And pretty soon the planet is repopulated and we’re back in the same bind. Or else they build us a private Eden, which is pretty much what they promised. A safe place, a protected place, easy food and probably some kind of population control. And maybe that’s okay, too. But think about it. Everything the Travellers are capable of, doesn’t that qualify them as gods? I think it does—by the standards humanity’s used for thousands of years. But do you want to live with a god? A real one, I mean, one who appears in the sky every night? God who makes the rain fall, god who makes the crops grow, god who cures the sick child? What would we be after ten years of that—or a thousand years? Maybe about as human as those people who dropped their skins. Maybe less.”

“It might not be that way.”

“Uh-huh. But it might.”

Matt was tired again. It was as if he had made some silent bargain, traded sorrow for fatigue. Ever since Rachel left, he had been empty of grief but full of this daily exhaustion.

He wondered whether Kindle was right, whether they were headed toward a kind of domestication. He wondered what dark marvels the Earth might harbor in a hundred years or a thousand. Two species of humanity, perhaps: the wild and the tame.

He said, “Have you talked to Abby about leaving?”

“Have I told her, you mean? No. I thought I’d speak to her closer to the event. Say I’m going, then go. No time to blame herself.”

“She will, though.”

“Maybe.”

“It won’t be good for her.”

“She’s survived worse. Hell, I don’t mean all that much to Abby Cushman. Target of opportunity. If she were fifteen years younger I’d say you and her might hit it off. You both need somebody to doctor. Kindred souls. But she’ll be happy in Ohio.”

“Easy as that?”

“Not easy at all, Matthew. Abby’s been generous. You’ve been generous.”

“It’s been paid back often enough.”

Kindle looked at the stars, scratched himself. “We should maybe get back before Joey starts layin’ eggs.” They began to walk. “I’ll ride as far as Laramie,” Kindle said. “Turn back from there.”

“It’ll be hard,” Matt said. “One less voice against the Colonel.”

“Told you,” Kindle said. “It’s not my job.”

Unspoken, in a glance from Kindle to Matt, in the darkness far from the firelight: It’s your job now.

The next day dawned clear and cool. Engines revved in morning light, RVs threw long shadows over the scrub.

Colonel Tyler, leading the caravan as it wound through long miles of Wyoming prairie, was first to catch sight of the miraculous new thing:

It was a dusty blue dome on the horizon, too perfectly symmetrical to be a product of nature; capped with white, like a mountain.

Something artificial. Something large beyond comprehension. A work of engineering that beggared any solely human effort.

Calm and pretty in the dry blue distance.

It’s that spaceship, Sissy told him. To take the dead away.

He recalled the idea, dimly, from Contact, from rumors he had heard on the radio: a vast thing nearly alive that harbored emigrant souls, and a miniature of the Earth inside it; Elysian fields, a world without evil.

Her voice was like a sizzle in his ears:

We must see it more closely. We must abide here for a time.

Even Sissy was excited.

Chapter 28 Earthbound

Rosa Perry Connor had always dreamed of flying.

She had grown up earthbound. Chained to a suburban Southern California tract development, restless by nature, Rosa spent her childhood summers exploring concrete storm drains, half-made houses, and the neighborhood’s few surviving orange groves. A reader, she devoured stacks of Little Golden Books, then the Bobbsey Twins, finally her older brother’s collection of How and Why Wonder Books, wherein she discovered a volume devoted to Airplanes—which ignited her long romance with the idea of flight.

The Orange County air was full of a number of things, mainly petrochemicals, but including passenger jets, helicopters, and military aircraft. Whenever one of these machines passed overhead, Rosa would come to a stop. She would stand at attention, head craned upward, one hand raised, as if in salute, to shade the sun from her eyes. “F-104,” she would announce, or, “Looks like a DC-8.” She became a student of silhouettes, a connoisseur of contrails. Always meticulous, she taught herself the history of flight from Montgolfier to the Atlas rocket.

Her obsession baffled her friends. Her parents were barely aware of it. Her father designed circuits for an electronics firm. Her mother played bridge with women whose suntans had acquired the quality of aged leather and whose jaw muscles stood out like taut little ropes when they laughed. Rosa imagined herself in a Fokker, strafing her parents’ barbecues and garden parties. No more fat men in business suits exhaling sour whiskey clouds, no more creased women in pastel shorts drinking martinis. She would rise above all this.

Her parents hated flying.

They had family back east—Grandma Perry in Wisconsin, Grandma Hagstrom in Florida. Sometimes Rosa’s parents took her visiting. By car. Across the desert. Across the farmland. Earthbound. Wheeling through an interstate hell of Stuckeys, Bide-a-Wees, and souvenir shops. Instead of above these dreadful things!

Rosa, from the age of seven to the age of seventeen, begged her parents to fly, at least once, one summer. Leave the car at home, she pleaded. The car was hot, crowded, and took forever. An airplane would save days of travel. An airplane would turn torture into ecstasy.

“But if we drive,” Rosa’s mother said with maddening patience, “we can see the country.”

Ye gods, Rosa wanted to scream, we’ve seen the country! Every inch of every road was tattooed indelibly into their brains! What could be left to see? One more plastic teepee? One more jackalope postcard?

Meanwhile, she made plans. She would go to college. She would study… well, whatever was useful to a pilot. Mathematics, aerodynamics. Her eyes were good. She would take a job in civilian aeronautics. Somehow, she would find her way into a cockpit.

And then—ten days before her eighteenth birthday—her parents announced yet another trip to Florida. “But this time we’re flying.”

It was the best present ever, and it almost made up for all those miles on the road.

Rosa waited with itchy impatience for the appointed day. The trip to Los Angeles International was novelty enough. From the waiting room at the gate she was able to study in gratifying detail the silvery bodies of Vanguards, Convairs, 707s. They were cumbersome on the ground; out of their element, like beached whales. The distant runways turned them into sleek sky-things through the redeeming magic of speed and altitude. Watching, Rosa trembled with excitement.

The boarding call startled her. After an eternity of waiting, it seemed almost—too soon.

Their plane was a new Douglas DC-8 Super 61, a stretched version of the standard DC-8. Rosa had picked out, had insisted upon, a window seat, and she watched with honed attention as the luggage was loaded from a cart, thumping into an invisible space under the passenger compartment; listened with keen ears to the final latching of the door, revving of engines, rumble of wheels as the taxiing began.

She was able to see the runway before the plane turned for takeoff. The runway was long and empty, a strange road for this massive machine. The stewardess demonstrated oxygen masks and advised passengers that their seat cushions could be used for flotation. Rosa watched and listened with a sense of unreality. Flotation? She was interested in flying, not floating.

Then the engines whined to a higher pitch. The sound invaded every part of the plane: the bulkhead, the window, her seat, herself. A brake was released and the aircraft began to roll.

To accelerate. She had not been prepared for this brutal burst of speed. From below, every takeoff had seemed graceful. Elegant. From inside, it was patently an act of force. The wings, which had seemed so solid, bounced and wobbled against the air. The fuselage rattled as if its rivets were about to pop.

And Rosa began to entertain her first doubt.

Was this practical? Would all this machinery really work? Could this fragile bus possibly sustain itself a mile from the surface of the earth?

She believed in flight. She was not sure she believed in the invulnerability of engine parts manufactured by sweaty men in a Pratt Whitney factory.

But then the wheels lifted from the runway… and she was flying.

The DC-8 rose with the prompt efficiency of an elevator. The ground simply dropped away at an angle that seemed to Rosa precipitously steep… She couldn’t help imagining the DC-8 as if on a hill, stalling and rolling backward.

Her hands began to sweat. She wiped them on her skirt.

There was a knot of excitement in her stomach. I’m flying, she told herself. This is the real thing; I am true-to-God FLYING. She gazed at Los Angeles below her, its gridwork vanishing into a gray diffusion of smog. The aircraft tilted and seemed to rotate around the point of the wing as it banked over the Pacific. Rosa’s parents read magazines. Incredible, she thought. Her mother read Redbook. Her father read Time. As if they were in some dentist’s waiting room! Not a metal cylinder high above the ocean!

The airplane circled as it rose until it was high and heading east.

A stewardess offered soft drinks. Rosa said, “No, thank you.” The knot of excitement in her stomach had become… something else.

She felt flushed and hot and unwell. Her eyes crept to the window and back again. If she didn’t look at the window, she wouldn’t see the ground. Wouldn’t be reminded of their astonishing height. Of the distance the plane would fall, if it fell.

But I’m FLYING!

But she wasn’t. She was just sitting here, strapped in. Helpless! In a metal box, suspended above the San Gabriel Mountains by the clumsy rotation of a few greasy turbofans.

It might be flying… but it felt more like risking her life.

The aircraft lurched in a pocket of air, and Rosa gasped and tightened her grip on the armrest.

Her mother glanced over. “Are you all right, dear? You look pale.”

“I think—” She swallowed hard. She couldn’t decide what was worse: the fear, the humiliation, or the disappointment. A dreadful lump had formed in her throat. “How long is the flight?”

“Five hours. More or less.”

Five hours? Could these engines really operate for five hours? Full of volatile jet fuel? Revolving at God-knows-what velocity? Bearings hot as griddles? Metal fatigue tearing at the fuselage?

She glimpsed mountains down below. Clouds. And an impossible volume of empty air.

“Rosa?” Her mother again. “Dear, what’s the matter?”

“God’s sake,” she heard her father say. “Give her the goddamn paper bag. That’s what it’s there for.”

She traded in her return ticket and rode a bus back to California.

The trip was long, uncomfortable, and depressing. Every inch of highway under the wheels was a confession of failure. She spoke to no one. She focused her eyes on the horizon, the uneasy intersection of Earth and sky.

Home, she registered at UCLA. Midway through the fall semester she met a B. A. student named Vincent Connor who drove all thoughts of flight and recrimination from her mind. Vince was a farmboy, gauche and handsome. He came from Wyoming, his daddy was a sheep rancher there, but to Rosa’s glazed and grateful eye he was something out of the Broadway musical Oklahoma!: a sweet, big-boned blond man in a checkerboard cotton shirt. At any moment, Rosa thought, he might break into song.

She married him in the spring and became Rosa Perry Connor. Five of his cousins, brave about airplanes, flew in from Wyoming with his widowed father. The church was full. Her twin nieces, four years old, her brother’s girls, carried Rosa’s train. After the reception Vince began their honeymoon drive to San Francisco; they spent a night at a motel on Highway One where the sea fog came winding through the pines. They made love for the first time as man and wife, which seemed to inject a new vigor into the act. Rosa called him Cowboy, and he grinned.

After that—

Years later, she would wonder at how fast the time had passed. Vince took a series of jobs, one of them with her father’s electronics firm in Orange County. Briefly, Rosa was thrust into the garden-party and country-club circle she had despised as a girl. She wasn’t good at it. Vince was worse. He didn’t know how to dress. At parties, he told coarse jokes or refused to say anything at all. “He has ‘Wyoming’ stamped on his forehead,” a friend told Rosa, “and it’s fucking indelible.” Vince had dreams of opening his own business, but he couldn’t manage to save any money. He began to drink too much. So did Rosa. Her garden parties became haphazard affairs, at which she was liable to sit cross-legged on the patio steps indulging her old Fokker fantasy. Watch out, girls, it’s the Red Baroness. Airsick bags provided for your comfort on the seatback.

When his father died, Vincent drove her across the desert to Wyoming, which Rosa regarded as a hostile alien planet. To her horror, Vince had decided to take over the family ranch.

“You’ll get used to it,” he told her, not much interested in her objections. “It’s not so bad here.”

But it was. It was a huge, lonely land full of bellicose men and submissive women. Rosa did nothing but cook meals, keep house, and watch TV. Vince wasn’t keen on children, he said, and neither was Rosa—she thought about a pregnancy just to relieve the boredom, but never seriously enough to skip her pills. And yet, Rosa thought, for all the tedium, my God, how the years flew! Crackling cold winters, muddy springs, summers so dry her small garden plots inevitably failed before autumn. Seasons and seasons of network television. She drove into Cheyenne with Vince sometimes, but good lord, Cheyenne? The last refuge of the bolo tie?

Her life became eventless, as smooth as the eastern horizon, and worse… somehow, her life passed. It eroded. She grew old. Yes, old. She was forty in Wyoming, and how had that happened? Then forty-five. Then, oh, Christ, fifty. Fifty years old on a sheep ranch in Wyoming!

She was fifty-one when the Artifact appeared in the sky like an ivory moon.

Rosa wasn’t frightened of it, not even in the beginning. Vince thought it portended the end of the world. Maybe it did. Nevertheless, Rosa liked it. She liked its glide, smooth and effortless in the dark. It was flight as she had once imagined flight to be.

And didn’t that stir some old memories?

She was more earthbound now than ever, of course, chained to this vast acreage of prairie. Chained to Vince. And she had put on weight over the years, a considerable poundage: her girlish walk had become a waddle. The revenge of gravity, Rosa thought. What was weight but the measure of her bondage to the Earth?

Then, the next summer, like everyone else, she came down with Contact flu… and woke to the realization that her life had been only a prologue.

Vince submitted to Contact just as readily, which surprised her. Vince had seemed satisfied with his life in Wyoming. The ranch had prospered under his supervision, and he seemed happy enough. Vince, after all, had never wanted to fly.

But Vince was suddenly eager for the Golden Age to commence, happy to drop his stolid Marlboro Man exterior and plunge into the fluid deeps of the Greater World.

After Contact she felt closer to Vince but at the same time more distant. She was able to appreciate the shape of his life, the spikes of pride and canyons of ambition that had driven him to California and back. There was even a broad, pastel bump of affection that comprised his feelings for Rosa, a pleasant discovery.

But she could see, too, that their connection had been arbitrary and accidental. Their love had peaked in a motel on Highway One, and what persisted was fondness, at best; boredom, at worst.

She wasn’t surprised when Vince abandoned his skin. Winter was setting in, and Vince had never relished the bitter storms and cold Canadian air that came rolling each year from the north.

Rosa, however, had conceived a different plan for herself.

She had in mind a certain transformation, a dramatic farewell to the planet that had borne her.

It would take time. It would mean staying on the Earth longer than most. Therefore she began as soon as Vince was gone—his skin a delicate memory, carried off on a brisk autumn wind.

She retired to the bedroom of the ranch house, to the old double bed she had shared with him for so many years.

Then Rosa took off her clothes and looked at herself for the last time in the vanity mirror. She saw a bulging gray-haired woman whose expression was no longer perennially sad. Then she stretched out on the bed.

The neocytes in her body dimmed her awareness to make the time pass more speedily. Rosa was suddenly dreamy and afloat.

She weighed 237 pounds that day, a significant mass—enough for the neocytes to work with. Adipose tissue began to change its structure. Rosa’s pores exuded a gray fibrous substance. Within days, it covered her body. Her physical functions dropped to negligible levels. After a week, Rosa ceased to breathe; her heart ceased beating.

Inside her hardened chrysalis, she began to change.

The pale cocoon lay motionless on the bed all that winter.

Around it, the world evolved. The winter storms that year were particularly fierce. Not the hurricanes that had wreaked so much damage on the coast, but snowstorms that froze the water in the pipes and beveled the house with glittering blue dunes. The wind in January was so violent it broke a downstairs window. Rosa’s bedroom turned cold and a fine lace of frost formed on the mirror; but Rosa was protected from the cold and the wind.

Vince, before he left, had torn down his fences and put the sheep out on the grazing land to fend for themselves. But the sheep were stupid and most of them died that terrible winter.

Not very many miles from the ranch, south past the Colorado border, Traveller organisms had begun to construct the new Artifact. If Rosa had stood at her ice-clad window she would have seen it grow; would have felt the tremors in the bedrock as the Earth’s magma was tapped and channeled; would have seen a ghostly luminescence on starry winter nights.

That spring, as the snow melted and the ground softened, she would have seen Home dominate the southern horizon, a new mountain… would have seen it as A.W. Murdoch had seen it on the day he abandoned the flesh.

But Rosa Perry Connor slept on.

The days were warming when Rosa finally began to stir. The nights were cold, but the snow was long past.

Each day, she quickened a little inside her chrysalis.

Awareness grew. She felt the process reaching its consummation; felt her new self struggling against confinement.

In a matter of days she would burst free.

Rosa felt the Greater World, too, all the new complexity of it since so many souls had gone over.

But she was not the only one left on the Earth. There had been other transformations.

Many, in fact, on every continent: New creatures half-human or ex-human or subtly post-human.

Like the man, Rosa thought as she rose toward dim consciousness… the boy… the old man who had become a boy…

…who was aware of her, too…

…who, in fact, was very close…

Clamoring for her attention through the medium of the Greater World…

Rosa, he said…

… while she struggled up from a winter’s hibernation… Rosa, we’re very close…

I hear you, boy, she thought. But I’m sleepy. What is it you want? Rosa, the boy said. We’re very close. Rosa, hurry. Rosa, finish what you have to finish, because we’re close now, and you might be in danger.

Chapter 29 I Know What You Are

The caravan pulled into an empty truckstop on I-80.

Home, a mountainous three-quarters disc above the southeastern prairie, turned a deep royal blue as the sun dropped below the horizon. A faint last light played about its apex and gave the high frost a reddish glow.

We shouldn’t linger here, William thought. Home was nearly finished, and soon—within a very few days—it would cast loose from the Earth. No doubt it would be a spectacular sight, but also a dangerous one to any unreconstructed humans in the area. The creation of Home had opened a deep wound in the mantle of the planet. When Home rose toward orbit, the wound would bleed magma; the bedrock would tremble and quake.

William knew all this through the agency of the Greater World, but he didn’t speak of it.

It wasn’t clear whether he should.

He walked a distance from Miriam’s camper, across the still-hot tarmac of the parking lot to an abandoned Honda, and sat on the dusty hood. He wore a sky-blue T-shirt, too big, and a pair of jeans unravelling at the knees, and when he closed his eyes he felt the gentle touch of the cooling air on his young skin.

Debate was raging through the Greater World. As the human polis expanded to completion, it had begun to take over certain tasks from the Travellers—chiefly, the management of the Earth. It was an onerous burden.

The Travellers had approached the Earth like a benevolent but clumsy giant. For all their wisdom, they hadn’t foreseen a ratio of resistance as high as one in ten thousand. They had underestimated the stubbornness of humanity, William thought, no doubt an easy mistake to make. Their own transition from a biological/planetary species to a virtual/interstellar epistemos had been self-generated and nearly unanimous.

But the question remained: How should the human collectivity, the Greater World, relate to this stubborn minority?

Leave them, one faction asserted. They’ve chosen their independence and we ought to respect it Let them find their own destiny. The destiny of the polis was among the stars; the Earth could fend for itself.

It’s inhumane to abandon them, other voices argued. They’re free to choose for themselves, but what about their children? If the human birthright is among the stars, how can we condemn another generation to death?

No resolution had emerged.

William’s problem was a miniature of the larger debate. He knew what Colonel Tyler was; he understood the threat Colonel Tyler posed… but should he intervene?

For the sake of his last sojourn on Earth he had elected to become a child again. He had put a great many memories behind him, stored them temporarily elsewhere, because he wanted this unmediated experience—not just to feel like a twelve-year-old but to be one. And so the Presidency had vanished into the misty past; the Greater World became a presence vaguely perceived.

Now this crisis had forced him out of his ekstasis and troubled him with doubt.

He supposed it wasn’t coincidence that had led him back to Colonel Tyler. Some unperceived connection had been forged as long ago as that day in Washington when he sat in the park with Colonel Tyler’s pistol at his throat. The boy had pedaled aimlessly across America; the man inside had maneuvered him into meeting this sad expedition. It wasn’t clear what events might unfold, but he felt a role for himself in their unfolding.

And a scant half mile down the road was the Connor farmhouse, another dilemma. {Rosa, he broadcast silently. Rosa, hurry!)

He heard Miriam come up behind him. Her footsteps dragged on the gritty parking lot. She’s tired, William thought. Miriam had demonstrated an enormous strength for her age—she insisted on driving her own camper. William recognized and appreciated her resilience. But she tired easily and was often short of breath.

She stood beside him, looking at Home where it dominated the horizon.

“In its own way,” Miriam said, “it’s beautiful.”

It was. Like a vast canyon wall at sunset, Home was every shade of blue, from the palest pastel at its summit to the indigo shadows at its base. A few tenuous clouds had formed along its western slope.

“You look sad,” Miriam said.

“I was thinking,” William told her.

“About what?”

He shrugged. “Things.”

There was a distant clatter of broken glass, the sound of Colonel Tyler breaking into the truckstop restaurant.

“William,” Miriam said. Her voice was solemn. “I wasn’t sure whether I ought to mention this. But perhaps the time has come. William, you don’t have to lie to me anymore. It’s not necessary to pretend. You see, I know what you are.” She regarded him loftily. “You’re one of them”

Miriam had doubted him from the beginning.

Why not? Doubt had been her constant companion for months. Since Contact, all her certainties had melted away.

Miriam had said a resounding No/ to the offer of immortality, but she had seen certain things that long-ago August night—had glimpsed certain immensities that shook her to the roots.

She went back to the Red Letter Bible her father had given her and read it from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21. The Bible had always been a cornerstone for Miriam. Not because it explained everything, as the TV evangelists alleged. The opposite. She trusted the Bible because it was mysterious. Like life, it was dense and contradictory and resisted interpretation. Rightly so, Miriam thought. How authentic could a book of wisdom be if you understood it at a glance? Wisdom didn’t work like that. Wisdom was a mountain; you climbed it, short of breath, dizzy, unsure of yourself even as you approached the summit.

But after Contact—

Here is a solemn blasphemy, Miriam thought, but after Contact the Holy Bible had seemed almost provincial.

All that earthly preoccupation with slaves and kings, shepherds and patriarchs.

For one unforgettable moment last August, Miriam had beheld in her mind’s eye the universe itself—indescribably ancient, large beyond comprehension, and as full of worlds as the sea was full of water.

Where was God in that immensity?

Perhaps everywhere, Miriam thought. Perhaps nowhere. It was a question the Travellers had refrained from answering. Increasingly, Miriam doubted her own access to the answer.

No, she told them. I don’t want your immortality. She would be immortal at the Throne of God. It was enough.

But the world had never looked the same since.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Older.”

“Among other things.”

“You’re not human.” He shrugged.

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“All right,” William said.

“But first we should go eat dinner.” She hugged herself and shivered. “It gets so cold these nights. I’m cold to the bone.”

The Colonel had organized dinner in the truckstop cafeteria. Abby Cushman had uncovered a cache of canned chili, and she warmed it in a big steel pot over the restaurant stove. It tasted like tin and vinegar, William thought. But any kind of hot food was a pleasure nowadays.

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

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

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

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

He thought about Rosa Perry Connor struggling out of her confinement a scant half-mile away.

He thought about Home.

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

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

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

“Lonesome,” Miriam whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“William” she whispered.

He was silent but seemed attentive.

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

His voice small in the darkness: “Yes.”

“Do you think about why?”

“Sometimes.”

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

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

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

“Am I one of those?”

He nodded again.

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

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

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

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

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

Joey, Miriam thought.

“Or some combination of these.”

Beth.

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

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

“Colonel Tyler,” Miriam said.

William was silent.

But she recognized the description at once. John Tyler, hollow to the core; she could practically hear the wind whistle in his bones.

“But there are people like Dr. Wheeler—or that Abby Cushman. They don’t seem exceptional.”

The prairie wind rattled a window. William hesitated a long while.

Then he said, “Miriam, did you ever read Yeats?”

“Who is Yates?”

“A poet.”

She had never read any poetry but the Psalms, and she told him so.

“Yeats wrote a line,” William said, “which always stuck in my memory. Man is in love, he said, and loves what vanishes. I don’t think it’s true—not the way the poet meant it. Not of most people. But it may have been true of Yeats. And I think it’s true of a certain few others. Some few people are in love with what dies, Miriam, and they love it so much they can’t bear to leave it behind.”

What a difficult kind of love that must be, Miriam thought.

By some miracle of Traveller intervention, there was water pressure in the restrooms of the truckstop restaurant. A pleasure—Miriam despised chemical toilets.

At dawn, the new Artifact a crescent of pearl and pink on the horizon, Miriam hurried from her camper into the cold green-tiled ladies’ room with the Bible clasped in her hand.

She opened it at random and began to read.

Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Matthew 28:20.

There was blood in the toilet again this morning. I am dying, Miriam thought.

Chapter 30 Fireworks

Matt woke to a knock at the door of his camper: Tom Kindle in ancient jeans, a cotton shirt, high-top sneakers, and a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap. He was carrying a rifle.

“Looks like you’re loaded for bear.”

“Rifle’s for you,” Kindle said. “Kind of a gift.”

“Don’t you need it?”

“I can pick up a fresh one plus ammunition in Laramie. Matthew, you might not like it, but you’re on some dangerous turf these days. You’re liable to need this.”

Matt took the rifle in his hands. He didn’t come from a hunting family, and he’d never done military duty. It was the first time he’d held a rifle. It was heavier than it looked. Old. The stock was burnished where it had been handled over the years. The metal parts had been recently oiled.

He didn’t like the sad weight of it, any more than he liked the sad weight of Kindle’s leaving.

He gave it back. “Not my kind of weapon.”

“Matthew—”

“I mean it.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Don’t be stubborn.”

“Shit,” Kindle said, but he took back the rifle in his left hand and looked more comfortable with it there. “Talked to Abby yet?”

“I’m about to. Not looking forward to it.”

“You could change your mind.” Kindle shrugged. “I doubt it.” He put out his hand; Matt shook it. “Take care of yourself, old man.”

“Watch your back, Dr. Kildare.”

“We thought you should know,” the radio said, “all our Helpers have gone silent.”

It was not a routine call, coming at this hour of the morning, and Tyler listened with a rising interest.

He and Joey had set up the receiver in a seedy staff lounge at the back of the truckstop cafeteria. Tyler had made the room his command quarters, and he was alone in it.

As alone as he ever got, these days.

He held the microphone in his right hand and thumbed the talk button. “Say again, Ohio?”

The transceiver was hooked to a mobile antenna and plugged into a wall socket. Since they came over the Coast Range, they’d been doing radio wherever they found live AC. Joey wanted to rig a ham unit to run off a car battery—it was easy, he claimed, and would be more convenient. But Tyler had discouraged him. Tyler didn’t much care for the radio anymore. He had begun to see it as a liability.

“Helpers have fallen silent,” the Ohio man said. Ohio ran a twenty-four-hour radio watch, and this was their morning shift, a guy named Carlos with a faint Hispanic accent. “Wondered if you had the same experience.”

“We’re not currently near a Helper, Ohio.”

“Theory here is that the Travellers are fixing to move on. Maybe the Contactees take over, maybe not. Could be we’ll see the Artifact move out of orbit soon. End of an era, huh? If that’s true.” The man seemed to want to chat.

Sissy appeared in a corner of the room, faintly luminous and anxious to speak.

“All the Helpers are silent?” Tyler wanted to nail down this new fact. “Every one,” Carlos said. “They don’t talk anymore. Or move or nothing.”

Tyler thought about it. He turned it over in his head, wanting to make sense of it.

He glanced out the greasy window at the curvature of the new Artifact, still earthbound—the human Artifact, a spaceship the size of a mountain.

“Ohio,” he said. “Your signal is weak.”

“Sorry, Colonel… weather problem there?”

The sky was baby-blanket blue. Windless. “Got a front moving in,” Tyler said.

“You in any danger, Colonel?”

“Not that serious. We might be out of touch for a while, though.”

“Sorry to hear it. Look for you later?”

“Indeed. Thanks, Ohio.”

Sissy beamed approval.

Now, Tyler instructed himself, now think.

If the Travellers leave… If the Helpers fall silent…

Then we’ll be safe. All our secrets safe.

Sissy’s voice was faint but strident, like the buzz of a high-tension wire. It might not work that way, Tyler thought. We don’t know. Therefore wait. Wait and see. Wait here? Yes.

How long?

Until it’s over. Until the Travellers are gone, dead are gone, altogether empty skies.

People don’t want to stay here, Tyler thought. They want Ohio. Make up something. Tell them Ohio told you to wait. Bad weather. Like you said, Bad weather along the Platte, say. Dam washed out, say. Sissy possessed a wonderful imagination.

It might work, Tyler agreed. But not if they can talk to Ohio, or Ohio talk to us. The radio—

You’re not stupid, Sissy said. You can fix the radio.

Tyler closed the dusty horizontal blinds and jammed a chair back under the knob of the door.

It was still early morning, not much activity yet among the people Tyler had come to think of, pleased with his own sense of humor, as the Unhappy Campers. Joey was walking a perimeter, exactly the kind of idiotic task Joey adored. Jacopetti slept until noon if no one bothered him. No one else was likely to knock in the next few minutes.

He lifted Joey’s toolbox onto the trestle table where the radio was. He unplugged the transceiver and worked out the sheet-metal screws that held the cover in place.

He used two alligator clips and a stout piece of wire to make a jumper cable. Then he hooked one clip to the 120-volt primary of the transformer and the other clip to the positive rail of the DC supply. For insurance, he added a bare wire across the internal fuse.

Put the lid back on, Sissy reminded him, before you plug it in.

Tyler did so. He threw the power switch to the on position, for good measure.

Then he hunkered down and pushed the plug into the wall socket.

There was a half second of silence. Then the big transceiver made a sound like a gunshot and jumped a quarter-inch off the surface of the table. It belched a spark as bright as a camera flash and sizzled with high-voltage overload.

The ceiling light flickered and faded altogether as the building’s circuit breakers cut in.

Now hurry, Tyler thought. He unplugged the unit, then cracked the blinds to admit just enough light to work by. When he pried up the lid, the transceiver gushed sour smoke into his face. Tyler ignored the stench and hurried to disguise his handiwork. He pulled out what was left of the jumper, the alligator clips, the wire across the fuse. Then he jammed the lid back on and began to drive home the screws one by one.

The sound of Tim Belanger’s voice came faintly through the window, something about the lights going off, anybody know where the fuse box was?

Eight screws, four to a side. Tyler drove the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, sweating.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway.

He fumbled the last sheet-metal screw into its hole. The screwdriver didn’t want to find the slot in the screwhead. When it did, the screw sheered sideways. “Shit,” Tyler whispered.

Don’t curse, Sissy scolded him.

There was a knock at the door. Joey’s voice: “Colonel? You still in there?”

Three twists of the wrist to drive the screw home. A couple of seconds to clear Joey’s toolbox off the table. Couple more to yank the chair away from the doorknob.

“Dark as a bitch in here. Sorry.” He let Joey in.

Joey sniffed the air. “What’s that stink?”

“Had some trouble with the radio,” Colonel Tyler said.

“Thing’s totally fucked,” Joey said when he had examined the molten interior. “Transformer must have shorted. Though I don’t know how it could of.”

He offered to drive into Cheyenne and get a replacement. “Fine,” Tyler said. “But not yet.” How come, Joey wanted to know.

“I’m calling a meeting tonight. It’s important, and I need you there. As a vote and as sergeant-at-arms.”

“I could be back by dark.”

“I don’t want to risk it.” Tyler drew himself up. “Let it ride, Mr. Commoner. Take my word on this.” Joey nodded.

Good soldier, Tyler thought.

Matt was compiling a pharmaceutical wish list to transmit to the Ohio people—he didn’t know about the radio problem yet—when he heard Abby’s anguished voice from the parking lot.

He hurried out of his camper into the rough circle of trucks and RVs, knowing what the problem was and dreading it.

Tom Kindle had climbed into the cab of his lumbering RV and was cranking the motor. Abby had stepped out of her own camper. She wore a denim skirt and a loose blouse and carried a hairbrush in one hand. Her feet were bare and she’d been crying. She ran a few steps across the hot, midday tarmac toward Kindle’s vehicle.

“You CANT!” Stopping when it was obvious that he could and was. “OOOOH!”

She threw the hairbrush. Her hard overhand toss sent it pinwheeling at Kindle’s camper; it rang the side panel like a bell.

Kindle leaned out the driver’s window and gave her an apologetic wave.

“YOU COWARD! YOU SELFISH OLD COWARDl”

The camper rolled out onto the highway and began to pick up speed.

Matt took Abby by the shoulders. She pulled away and looked at him bitterly. “Matt, why did you let him do this? We need him!”

“Abby, Abby! I know. But he had his mind set on it. I couldn’t stop him. I don’t think anybody ever stopped Tom Kindle from doing what he wanted—do you?”

She sagged toward him. “I know, but… oh, shit, Matt! Why now?”

He didn’t know how to console her. He had lost too much of his own. But he held her while she cried.

Joey Commoner came running from the truckstop, Tyler and Jacopetti a short distance behind.

Joey cupped a hand over his eyes and watched Kindle’s camper disappearing down the highway. Then he looked at Abby. Figuring it out.

“Son of a bitch,” Joey said. “He’s fucking AWOL!”

Abby regarded Joey as if he’d descended from Mars.

“Calm down,” Colonel Tyler said, to no one in particular.

“Sir,” Joey said, “he didn’t ask permission to go somewhere!”

“Quiet,” Tyler said. In the sunlight, the Colonel was silver-haired, imperial. His eyes lingered a moment on Matt. “We’ll discuss it at the meeting tonight.”

Matt cleared his throat. “Thought you didn’t believe in meetings.”

“Special occasion,” Tyler said.

Tyler put his motion to the Committee before everybody was finished sitting down.

The meeting was held in the truckstop restaurant under a bank of fly-spotted fluorescent lights. Tyler stood against a window with the dark behind him and tapped a knuckle against the glass for attention.

“News over the radio,” he said. “We’ve got some heavy weather across the state border along the Platte. Ohio thinks we ought to stay put for a while, and I agree—but I want a vote to make it official.”

He paused to let this sink in. Everybody was still a little dazed by the departure of Tom Kindle, wary of another crisis.

Matt Wheeler said, “I thought the radio blew up.”

“Call came early this morning, Dr. Wheeler.”

“Did it? Who took it?”

“I did.”

“Did anybody else hear this call?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Wheeler. I didn’t feel it was necessary to have a witness.” Jacopetti laughed out loud.

Wheeler said, “It would be nice to be able to confirm the message, Colonel Tyler.”

“Mr. Commoner offered to find a replacement for the radio. I’m sure we’ll be up and running in due time. Until then, let’s keep a lid on the paranoia, shall we?”

Abby raised her hand: “A truckstop is hardly a place to spend time.…”

“Agreed. In the morning, we can take a look at the farmhouse to the south of here. I’m sure it’ll be more comfortable.”

Tyler registered, but didn’t understand, the sudden look of concern from the boy, William.

Wheeler again: “Maybe we ought to keep moving—we can always find shelter if the weather turns bad.”

Suspicious son of a bitch refused to drop the issue.

“After what happened to Buchanan,” Tyler said, “I don’t think we want to take any chances with a storm, do you? And there’s another consideration. One of our company chose to leave us today. A particular friend of yours, Dr. Wheeler. All things considered, maybe we should stay in the neighborhood long enough to give Mr. Kindle a chance to change his mind. If he elects to come back to camp, at least he’ll know where to find us.”

This hit home with Abby Cushman, a potential swing vote; she folded her hands in her lap.

“All in favor of staying,” Tyler said. “Show of hands.”

It was an easy majority.

Chapter 31 Night Lights

They filed from the restaurant, subdued and silent, until Tim Belanger stabbed a finger at the sky: “Hey—anybody notice something?”

Tyler looked up. “The Artifact,” he said, and calmly checked his watch. “It should have risen by now.”

By Christ, Matt thought, for once the bastard’s right. That ugly alien moon was overdue.

Missing. Gone.

“Dear God,” Abby said. “What now?”

There was nothing in the sky but a bright wash of stars—no Artifact but the second one still grounded on the southern horizon.

The Earth was alone again. Matt had wanted it so badly, for so long, he hadn’t allowed himself even to consider the possibility. It was the kind of desire you could choke on.

But here, mute testimony, was an empty Wyoming sky.

Too late, he thought bitterly. If they left, they left because their work was finished.

The starlight on the second and motionless Artifact, the so-called human Artifact, was cold and merciless. In scale and design, Matt thought, that object was wholly inhuman, no matter who owned it or what went on inside.

“The aliens are gone?” Abby asked, and Matt said, his voice a whisper, “Why not? We have our own aliens now.”

It was an auspice that couldn’t be read, an indecipherable portent, and they went to bed weary of miracles.

Deep in the cold Wyoming springtime dark, sooner or later, each of them slept…

Except one old woman, one ageless boy.

“William?”

His eyes were wide and moon-bright. “Yes?”

“Don’t you ever sleep?” He smiled. “Sometimes.”

Miriam’s battery-operated bedside clock bled numbers into the night. 3:43. 3:44. There was a fresh new pain in her belly. “The Travellers are gone, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re still here.”

“We’re still here.”

Humanity, he meant. The polis, he had called it, the world contained in that blister on the horizon: Home. “William?”

“Yes?”

“Did I ever show you my journals?”

“No.”

“Would you like to see them?”

His smile was unreadable. “Yes, Miriam, I would.”

She left her bed and took down from their shelf the fat scrapbooks full of clippings from the Buchanan Observer. They had gotten wet in that terrible winter storm and the pages were thick and warped. But the clippings, for the most part, were still legible.

William sat up in his cot and leafed through the books one by one. It was a strange history contained there, Miriam thought. She remembered how everyone had been frightened by the first appearance of the Artifact in the sky. It had been enigmatic, terrifying, an emissary from another world. Now, less than two years later, it was these clippings that seemed like messages from another world.

The universe, Miriam thought, turned out to be a more peculiar place than any of us expected.

William said, “You obviously worked hard at this.”

“Yes. It seemed important at the time.”

“Not now?”

She had fought to protect these journals. But what were they? Tonight they seemed like so much paper and ink. “No… not now.” He looked at them carefully and then put them aside.

Miriam steeled herself to ask the essential, the final question: the question she had postponed, had dared not ask.

Give me strength, Miriam thought. One way or the other. Give me strength.

“William… is it too late for me?”

She trembled in fear of his answer. She closed her eyes, squeezed them tight, tight.

“No, Miriam,” the boy said gently. “It’s not too late. Not yet.” A chaste kiss on the lips.

The neocytes, he said, would work quickly inside her.

Before dawn, when Miriam was finally asleep, the boy crept out of the camper into the chill air.

A fingernail moon rode low in the sky. His breath made plumes of frost, and there was frost on the tarry surface of the parking lot, sparkling in the fragile light.

The Artifact had left orbit hours ago, resuming its long itinerary through the unexplored spiral arms of the galaxy. Its physical presence wasn’t necessary any longer. The collective knowledge of the Travellers had been duplicated and stored in the human Home, and Home would begin its own journey soon—once certain controversies had been resolved.

William’s bicycle was roped to the back of Miriam’s camper. Silently, he untied it and examined it.

The trip from Idaho had coated the bicycle with dust. The action of the chain and the derailleurs sounded thick and gritty. But he didn’t have far to go. He climbed on the bike and pedalled down I-80, a young boy, legs pumping in the moonlight, the banner of his breath streaming behind him in the chilly air.

He turned left past an open gate, down a private road to the Connor farmhouse.

Rosa, hurry, he thought. They’re coming in the morning. Hurry now.

Chapter 32 Release

William was with her as the sun rose.

Rosa lay on the farmhouse bed. The winter’s cold and wind had given the bedroom a dishevelled look. The oaken dresser had faded and its mirror had dulled; the curtains had tangled on the rod. The single large window looked southeast, where Home occupied a portion of the sky. Sunrise was a faint vermilion on those distant slopes.

The gray cocoon on the bed had cracked on its long axis and the two pieces had begun to separate. William gazed without visible emotion at the pulsating mass inside.

Rosa—they’ll be coming soon.

Help me, then, Rosa said.

William moved to the bedside, considered the problem, then grasped the two chunks of dense, porous material and began to pry them apart. Hurts, Rosa said.

William broadcast a voiceless apology. No. It has to be done.

The boy agreed, and grasped the cocoon again and strained his thin arms until he heard the material split along its back seam—a dry, fibrous sound like the crack of a walnut shell.

He felt her relief.

William stood away as Rosa began to unfold.

The sun was well above the horizon when she stood at last beside the bed, her enormous wings trembling in the cool air from the window.

Rosa Perry Connor, in her present incarnation, weighed less than fifteen pounds. Her new body was a hollow shell of what had once been human bone and tissue, transformed by the action of the neocytes into something more brittle and much less dense. Her features were diminished and compressed but still recognizable. She had an attractive face, William thought. Her eyes were large and bright.

She blinked at him, still mute. Her lungs were a fragile bellows, her vocal cords a memory. Her pupils, unaccustomed to the light, were black pinpoints. Her wings were a double ellipse around the axis of her body, and sunlight through the moist tissue made bright moires of blue and purple.

William felt her exhilaration. Curious, he thought, the way some of us manufactured these destinies for ourselves—these last, brief incarnations on the surface of the Earth. She didn’t seem strange at all. Only a stubborn dream given fleeting substance.

The membranes of the wings needed to dry before Rosa could use them. William didn’t hurry her—there was nothing she could do to speed the process.

He tore the drapes away from the window, the only practical exit. It was an old-fashioned window, one fixed pane and one counterweighted pane to slide up in front of it. Rosa’s body was tiny now and her wings were flexible, but she would need more space than this.

He shattered both panes and carefully, meticulously, plucked away the splinters of glass and tossed them to the dry earth below. Then, with surprising strength for a boy of his size, he grasped the obstructing arm of the wooden frame and pulled until it cracked and came away.

Some splinters remained in the wood despite his effort. The palm of his right hand was scratched; the blood that oozed out was dark and viscous, almost black.

Tyler looked up as he crossed the truckstop parking lot with Joey Commoner beside him. “Joseph? Did you hear that?”

“Sir? Uh—no.”

“A sound like breaking glass?”

“No, sir.”

Sound carries a distance in this still air, Tyler thought, across this dry prairie. He took a shallow breath, listening, but there was only silence.

“Hurry everybody along,” he said. “Breakfast is over. We have business to attend to.”

“Sir,” Joey said.

William heard the engines come to life one by one, though he couldn’t see the truckstop from this window.

I know, Rosa assured him. Soon now.

There was not much margin, the boy thought, on this brink of time.

The caravan of RVs made its way up the private road and parked in a ponderous line outside the Connor farmhouse.

Abby Cushman liked the look of the house. It was a fancy two-story frame house, a comforting contrast to the range land all around it. It occupied its space with a doughty colonial dignity.

The front door was unlocked. Abby filed in behind Colonel Tyler and his lieutenants. The inside of the house was nice, too, she thought—though a broken window in the living room had let in the wind and tumbled some of the contents.

This big, central room was decorated in a southwest/Hopi style that had been fashionable some years ago and seemed curiously misplaced on a northern prairie. Pattern rugs, beige walls, a long sand-colored sofa, and Kachina dolls on a sideboard; squat porcelain lamps. She wondered who had lived here. Someone dislocated, Abby thought. Someone out of place.

Colonel Tyler had gone off to investigate the kitchen and the cellar for supplies. Abby said, “I’ll check upstairs,” to Matt Wheeler, who was helping a breathless Miriam Flett into a chair.

It was odd that William wasn’t with her. The old woman and the boy were almost inseparable these days. Come to think of it, Miriam had been acting strangely for days.

She thought of asking, thought better of it. Mind your own business, Abby. There had been much discontent in camp lately, and none of it was mysterious. This journey had demonstrated all too graphically the emptiness of the world and the inadequacy of the human temperament. America is as empty as an old cup, Abby thought, and the best we can do by way of survivors is a cowardly old man like Tom Kindle.

Unpleasant thought.

She hurried upstairs to a carpeted hallway, cool and dim, and three closed doors—the bedrooms, Abby supposed.

William heard the rattle of the doorknob behind him. Rosa—

I know, she said. She took a step—a delicately balanced pirouette—toward the window. He felt her unsteadiness. Thank you, she said. Whatever happens.

So accustomed had Abby grown to the vacancy of the world that she was astonished, above all else, to find the second bedroom occupied. “William!” she said.

Then she looked at the window… at the thing in front of the window.

It was a delicate silhouette in the morning light. She thought at first it must be a kind of decoration—some eccentric assemblage of cellophane panels meant to break the morning light into these fractions of purple and blue. But then it moved. It was alive, somehow organic… she discovered eyes, a sort of face.

William raised his fingers to his lips, a child’s Be quiet! And Abby stifled an urge to cry out.

“Don’t be afraid,” the boy whispered.

But of course she was afraid. She saw the broken cocoon on the faded bedspread. It was an insect thing. Abby had never liked insects. Her older brothers used to torment her with caterpillars. The cocoon on the bed implied that this creature was a kind of human bug, and the idea was so distasteful that Abby wanted to flee the room or call out for help.

William appeared to sense her distress. “Abby,” he said—it was the first time William had called her by her given name, as if he were an adult—“this is Rosa Connor. She can’t speak. But she won’t hurt you. All she wants to do is leave. She’s fragile, and I’m afraid she’ll get hurt if the others find her here. Abby, do you understand?”

Of course she did not. How could one understand such things?

But she recognized the sincerity in William’s voice. He was an odd child, Abby thought dizzily. Abby knew children. She had raised a daughter of her own and had been raising her daughter’s two boys when Contact took them away. William looked a little like Cory, her oldest grandson. Cory had always been bringing things home. Stones, bottletops—cocoons. She had tried to share his interest, at least from a distance; had tried to enter that child’s world where everything was a mystery and a fascination. Perhaps William was fascinated with this—creature.

Abby’s heart was pounding desperately against her ribs. But she thought of Paul Jacopetti in the basement of the Buchanan hospital, and she resolved to quell her panic this time, not make the same mistake.

She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “If it wants to leave,” she said, “why doesn’t it?”

“Abby, did you ever see a butterfly when it’s new? The wings are wet. They have to dry. Otherwise it would just fall.”

“I see. How much longer?”

“Minutes.”

“William—I can’t stop anyone from coming upstairs.”

“But if you don’t call out—”

“I won’t.” She was steadily calmer. “But Colonel Tyler is searching the house.”

“We only need a short time, Abby.”

“A short time is all you may have.”

Even in this extremity, William was impressed by Rosa’s grace. She grasped the window frame with arms as delicate as strings, fingers like threads. She pulled herself up, paused on the sill facing inward, then unfolded her wings behind her, stretched them to their full span, wide sails, coral-patterned, the blues and purples a lighter hue in the sunlight. She was like an enormous orchid blossom. When the wind blew, she trembled.

Almost, Rosa told him. Now.

Then Abby gasped, the door opened: Colonel Tyler.

It was remarkable, Abby thought, how quickly Tyler seemed to grasp the situation. His eyes flickered from Abby to William to the insect woman. He was obviously shocked. But not shocked motionless, as Abby had been. His hand was suddenly active.

He drew that pistol he always carried.

“No,” Abby said.

The Colonel paid her no attention. His attention was wholly focused on the creature William had called Rosa, and his face was a twisted grimace of distaste. Abby had been afraid, but the Colonel—the Colonel, she realized, was offended.

He stood with his legs braced apart and aimed the pistol at Rosa with both hands.

Abby felt as if time had slowed to a miserly crawl. There was time to see everything. See William’s sadness and concern. See the insect woman arching her impossible wings against the morning sky. See Tyler’s pistol in all its intricacy, a complex steel-gray machine.

She heard the rasp of her own breath in her throat like the tick of a metronome. Time to see; no time to act.

But now William was moving.

For all the compression of time, Abby thought, the boy was quick. Impossibly quick. Inhumanly quick.

He threw himself at Tyler’s body. The impact turned the Colonel’s pistol toward the ceiling. Tyler fired, and the sound in the enclosed room was an insult to the ears, cruelly loud. Plaster rained from the ceiling. There was a hole there, ragged and small. “Christ!” Tyler raged.

Abby looked to the window, where the insect woman’s wings lifted, caught air, rippled; and then Rosa was away, dropping in a long trajectory, a glide… then rising…

Tyler staggered to the window, raised his pistol once more.

William was beside him, tugging his arm down.

Tyler pushed the boy aside. Abby heard William’s head crack against the wall.

“No!” she cried.

It was not a decent way to treat a child.

William straightened, unhurt; but Tyler’s gun was pointed at him now. “No!” Abby said furiously. “Colonel, stop!” Was he deaf?

William turned his face toward her. It was absurd, but Abby felt he wanted to reassure her. To tell her he would be all right. He was not all right.

The boy looked at Colonel Tyler and said, quite clearly, “I know what you are.”

Colonel Tyler pulled the trigger. William’s chest exploded. “NOOOO!” Abby’s voice was a wail of grief.

Tyler fired again, now at William’s head, where his eyes were still blinking. Abby could not bear the sound of the shot or the result of it. So much blood. She could not help thinking of Cory or her other grandson, Damian; of her daughter Laura. She had lost Laura to an airplane tragedy and Cory and Damian to the Greater World and although William wasn’t family Abby could not tolerate the loss of another child, any child, for the sin of impeding Colonel John Tyler’s line of fire. So she did what William had done, hurried across the room through slow-motion time, knowing it was too late, seeing but not seeing the impossible amount of blood, and threw herself at Colonel Tyler, who fell backward. Then they were wrestling for the pistol, Abby surprised by her own physical strength and the strength of her hatred, eyes blurred by tears, wanting to rip the pistol from Tyler’s hand and punish him with it but managing only to twist it in his grip, and Tyler pulled the trigger twice more, both shots wild, chipping paint and dust from the wallboard, until at last her strength and courage ebbed and Tyler thrust her aside and sat with the pistol aimed at her—Abby thinking Shoot me, go ahead, you child-murdering bastard!—then someone was holding her from behind, and Tyler, horribly, was pointing his pistol at the boy’s corpse:

“Abby, he’s not human. Look!” Nudging the limp body with his foot. “This isn’t blood! Christ’s sake! It looks like thirty-weight motor oil! Jesus!”

Did any of that matter?

No, Abby thought.

In a gesture that surprised even herself, Abby collected all the saliva that remained in her dry mouth and spat into Colonel Tyler’s face. Her aim was precise.

Tyler froze.

Everyone in the room—a crowd, now, including Bob Ganish, Paul Jacopetti, and Joey Commoner, who was holding her from behind—froze and waited.

“Take her to her trailer,” the Colonel said. The spittle ran down his cheek, and his voice was a razory whine. “Take her there and keep her there. I’ll deal with this later.”

Rosa Perry Connor rode the morning thermals up long inclines of warming air until the ranch was far below her.

She moved in the sky with an easy familiarity. The sky was not an empty space, not a vacuum; it was an ocean, Rosa thought, rich with currents, inviting discovery, appreciation, acrobatics: glides and sweeping, sensuous curves. It was intoxicating.

She watched her shadow flow across dry rangeland, over scrub and cheat grass like ocean swells far below. The sun was warm on her wings.

She knew what had happened in the Connor house. She felt William’s release. It was premature. He had been a sojourner like herself, an old man in a boy’s body. She broadcast her sorrow in the direction of Home. The ecstasy of flight and this unhappiness mingled in her. William accepted her consolation, but lightly; he was also sharing her pleasure in the flight.

It was the human tragedy that saddened him.

Tragedy is what they live in, Rosa thought. Tragedy is their ocean, William—their air.

He touched her with a sad rebuke that was not quite contradiction. You were human once.

Yes, Rosa acknowledged. She fixed her attention on the far peak of Home, china-blue in the morning light. Human once, she thought. But not anymore.

Abby Cushman was confined after some struggle in her camper with Joey standing guard at the door.

Dazed beyond thinking and weak with grief, she pressed her face against the window and watched Rosa’s orchid-colored wings grow small in the southern sky.

Chapter 33 Provocation

Beth came out of her camper at the sound of the gunshot and hurried into the farmhouse. She found Abby Cushman in tears, Joey and Bob Ganish leading her away.

Upstairs, Matt Wheeler was arguing with Colonel Tyler. Beth stood at the stairway end of the corridor, too far away to hear the argument clearly, but she was startled by the ferocity of it and by the way Colonel Tyler’s hand hovered near his pistol.

The unexplained violence in the air made her dizzy. These two admirable men, Matt in faded jeans and shirt, the Colonel in a threadbare officer’s jacket, looked used-up, worn out by their own anger.

She heard Matt say something about killing. And Colonel Tyler, fiercely: He was some kind of spy.

Not human, she heard Tyler say.

Who were they talking about?

Then Matt told Tyler he couldn’t make a prisoner of Abby Cushman, and Tyler said the doctor wasn’t in a position to give orders, and there were more of these bitter, clipped words, until Matt stalked away—Beth concealed herself in an empty bedroom as he passed—and the argument was finished.

She was surprised by a sudden thought that both of these men had touched her: Tyler with his large hand, Matt more intimately. Somehow, she was a party to this.

She walked down the corridor to Colonel Tyler.

He registered her presence, though his eyes were distant.

Beth said, “What happened?” Peering past him into a room where the window was open, broken, and there was an acrid smell—“Is that blood in there?”

The Colonel put his hand on her shoulder, another touch, and steered her away.

“I’ll explain,” he said.

It was William who had been the spy. The boy was dead.

The Colonel explained, and Beth retired to her camper.

They had acquired all these vehicles at a dealership in the Willamette Valley, on the eastern side of the Coast Range where the storm hadn’t done as much damage. It was strange, Beth thought, everybody driving these $40,000 Travelaire and Citations with connections for running water and TV sets, these fancy boxes on wheels.

Everything we ever made, Beth thought—we human beings—most of it was boxes. A house is a box, she thought; an office building is a box. A TV is a box, and a microwave oven is a box of radiation. All these boxes. Nobody made boxes anymore. All the boxes we’ll ever need, Beth thought idly, people left them lying around for free.

Alone, she listened to the morning’s violence echo and rebound through the camp. Footsteps, doors slammed, angry voices now and then.

She wasn’t accustomed to violence. Her family had never been violent, unless you counted her father’s occasional deer hunts. Her mother was a careful, prim woman who left home and moved to Terre Haute with a new husband when Beth was fifteen years old. Her father was often angry, but he never actually hit her. Since that trouble when she was fourteen, her quick D C at a Seattle hospital, he had seldom even looked at her. Nobody had looked at her, except to laugh or make fun—except Joey.

She dozed through the afternoon, afraid of what might be happening outside. At dinnertime, she left the camper and found Tyler and Joey and Paul Jacopetti building a fire in a barbecue pit behind the farmhouse: people didn’t want to eat a meal inside the house where William had died. The Colonel ignored her; Jacopetti ignored her.

Joey watched her the way he always watched her—following her with i his eyes, not making a big deal of it, but relentlessly. She felt his attention like a toothache. He had been watching her like this every day since they had left Buchanan, a casual proprietary surveillance that made her itch with indignation.

She decided she wasn’t hungry. She turned her back on the men and walked to the front of the farmhouse and inside, although the hot-metal odor of this morning’s bloodshed was still hanging in the air. Miriam Flett was inside, sitting in a chair doing nothing. Watching the dust float. Beth approached her with caution. She imagined the old woman must be horribly sad. It was obvious she’d liked that boy; even if he was a spy, not human.

Miriam looked up at Beth’s approach, her face crowded with wrinkles.

“I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s all right.” Miriam’s voice was a dry whisper.

“You must—” Was this the right thing to say? “You must feel terrible. I’m sorry about what happened.”

“They told you about it?”

“The Colonel did. He said William was—uh—”

“Not entirely human,” Miriam supplied. “But I knew that about him.”

“Did you? Still… he died. It’s sad.”

“If he wasn’t human,” Miriam said primly, “he didn’t die.”

It took Beth a moment to interpret this. “I guess not. It’s hard to get used to the idea, though.”

Then Miriam did something Beth had not seen her do before: She smiled.

“It was hard for me, too,” she said.

There was some talk of moving on, or back to the truckstop, some place away from this unhappy house, but Colonel Tyler vetoed the idea, at least until morning. They could sleep in their vehicles; there was no real urgency. Beth supposed he was right. But the encampment that evening was steeped in an ugly silence.

Just before dark, while there was still a rosy light around the high slope of the human Artifact, Tim Belanger unhooked the camper-trailer from the rear of his pickup truck and went roaring away east. He escaped, Beth thought, just like Tom Kindle—another refugee.

Another one gone, Beth thought sadly.

Nine of us left altogether.

She wished it had been Joey who left.

She found him damping the fire in back of the farmhouse. The fire had been the only significant light on this prairie, and she was sorry to see it flicker out.

Joey wore his ancient skull-and-roses T-shirt and a leather jacket to keep away the night chill. His pistol was tucked under his belt. It was a small-caliber pistol, but Beth thought it was reckless of Colonel Tyler to have given Joey any kind of gun. It was a miracle Joey hadn’t blown his own balls off with it.

She hadn’t come looking for him. She wanted to walk a distance into the Connors’ grazing land and be by herself… watch the stars come out and try to make some sense of everything that had happened. But Joey waved her over.

“Sit down,” he said.

“I was going somewhere,” Beth said, aware of how pathetic it sounded.

“Taking in a movie? Goin’ down to the mall, Beth?” He laughed. “It’s a fuckin’ desert out here. Everywhere we go is some kind of desert or other. Doesn’t it rain anywhere but Buchanan?”

“It rains in Ohio.”

“Ohio,” Joey said scornfully.

He poured another bucket of sand over the embers until even that faint light was lost. “Some wild events this morning.” She nodded.

“I saw the whole thing. Two shots.” He cocked his index finger. “Bam, the chest. Bam, the head. You don’t want to know what it looked like. It was obvious the kid wasn’t human. Inside, he was like—shit, I don’t know. Like a watermelon full of motor oil.”

“Christ, Joey!”

He smiled at her. “Facts of life.”

“Is Abby Cushman still under guard?”

“Jacopetti’s outside her door. Not that he could stop her from coming out. I take over from him when I’m done here. It doesn’t really matter—where’s she gonna go?”

“Like Tom Kindle or Tim Belanger, maybe. Just leave.”

“Nope. I pulled the distributor cable out of her engine.”

“Does Colonel Tyler know that?”

“He said it showed initiative.” Big grin.

Beth resented Joey’s access to the Colonel. It was Joey’s influence that had caused most of their problems, she was sure of it. She remembered Tyler’s hand on her shoulder this morning. Familiar hand. She had memorized the sensation.

His touch was like a token of everything she’d gained since Contact, and Joey was everything she wanted to forget. The two of them together… it was an unbearable combination.

“Bam” Joey said, reminiscing. “I’ll tell you one thing there’s less of now. There’s less bullshit.”

It was a callous, stupid thing to say, and it made her angry. “The end of the world is a good thing because you get to carry a gun for the first time in your life? Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“If the world hadn’t ended, I wouldn’t be carrying a pistol. True. If the world hadn’t ended, you wouldn’t be fucking a doctor.”

She flushed with anger. “You don’t know who I sleep with. You don’t have a clue.”

“All I’m saying is don’t act superior when you’re out there with a Tor Sale’ sign between your legs.”

Maybe the rage she felt had been inside her all along, and maybe it wasn’t even Joey she was mad at. But, oh, Christ, after a long and fucked-up day when somebody had died, for God’s sake, to have Joey Commoner call her a slut, to be sneered at by him—it erased everything she had pretended to achieve; it was unspeakable, and she hated him for it.

She blinked back tears. Joey was watching her, was maddeningly attentive, his face calm and slack in the starlight, and suddenly Beth recalled a dream she had once had:

Joey as a wild horse. Beth the rider. She rides him to the top of some high cliff. He balks, and she spurs him. And he jumps.

Shut up, Beth. Just close your mouth. Don make it worse.

She felt light-headed, utterly weightless.

This cliff, she thought. This desert.

“Bastard,” she said. “You don’t know everything that goes on in this camp.”

“Try me,” Joey said.

Chapter 34 Precipice

Matt was not quite asleep when the knock came at the door of his camper.

He sat up and peered out the window at prairie night. The stars were the color of ice and there was a milky glow on the eastern horizon where the moon was about to rise.

Beth? he wondered. But it was late even for Beth.

And it hadn’t sounded like her knock. Not that reckless. Three discreet taps. Dear God, he thought wearily, what now?

He pulled on a T-shirt and briefs and stumbled to the door.

Tap tap tap.

“All right! Christ’s sake! Hold on!”

He opened the door and stood mute in a river of night air.

“Matthew,” Tom Kindle said. “Lemme in before I freeze my balls off.”

Kindle didn’t look good. He wasn’t hurt, but he looked chastened. Matt tried to remember where he had seen that look on Tom Kindle before.

Of course: it was when he came into the hospital with his broken leg, raving about monsters. About a thousand years ago.

Matt kept the light low and poured his friend a cup of lukewarm coffee from a thermos. “You didn’t get too damn far, did you? Not much farther than Laramie, I’ll bet.”

Kindle put aside his rifle and shrugged. His eyes were lost among wrinkles like crevices. “I took a little trip south. Toward that, uh, that thing—”

“The new Artifact.”

“I admit I was curious about it. Aren’t you? Even sitting on the horizon, it’s big enough to fill half a sky.” He took a long, noisy sip of coffee. “And it’s strange, Matthew. It draws the attention. You ever been down to Moab? The canyonlands around there? Same kind of strangeness. Red rock, blue sky, and everything’s too big. Maybe a person loses some judgment. I looked at that thing a long time, and then I started to wonder if I could get up close to it.”

“Did you?”

“Get close? No, not very.” He shook his head. “Close enough, though. The air gets foul. It smells like sulphur and it burns your lungs. The ground isn’t too steady, either. Matthew—the thing is rooted to the earth! Literally, it looks like it put down roots, roots made of some kind of stone. Black sandstone or maybe pumice. Miles wide. And, Matthew, in the shadow of those roots, there were certain things moving around.…”

“Things?”

“Machines. I guess. Or animals. Or both, somehow. But they were big enough to see from miles away. Hazy in the distance, the way you might see a city from across a lake—they were as big as that. Big as a city and taller than they were wide, and different shapes, like giraffes, or gantries, or spiders, or cranes.” He shuddered. “They must have built that entire thing since last August—have you thought about that? A thing the size of a mountain in half a year? God Almighty! And, Matthew… while I was watching those creatures move around, a thought occurred to me. They must be about finished their work, I thought. It doesn’t look like a half-made thing. And it’s a spaceship, right? When it’s ready, it goes into orbit. Spaceship the size of Delaware. And here we are sitting practically on its tail. I came back north this morning and found you folks still parked here, and I don’t think that’s too intelligent.”

“It’s Tyler,” Matt said. “He claims there was a radio message. Some bad weather east of here. So we’re staying put.”

“There was a vote on this?”

“One of the Colonel’s votes.”

“Bullshit and gerrymander.”

“Yeah, basically.”

“He claims there was a radio message?”

“Well—the radio blew up.”

“While he was using it?”

“Supposedly.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Nope.”

“You put up with this horseshit?”

“He’s not a stupid man, Tom. He had the Committee rolled up like a carpet. Made me look paranoid.”

“A little paranoia’s not a bad thing. I was careful coming toward camp. Left my camper in back of a billboard and hiked away from the road. I spent most of the afternoon hidden behind a rise south of here watching folks mill around. Am I crazy, or is Joey Commoner standing guard on Abby’s trailer?”

Matt told him about the insect woman, about William’s death and Abby’s altercation with the Colonel.

Kindle listened carefully, eyes wide. “She had wings?”

“I saw her in the air,” Matt said. “Yes, she had wings. They looked like butterfly wings.”

“Oh, Matt… too many fuckin’ miracles,” Kindle said.

“Uh-huh.” That about summed it up.

Kindle held his rifle in his lap. “The question is, what are you planning to do about it?”

“He can’t keep Abby in her trailer indefinitely. Weather or no weather, we’ll have to move on soon.”

“Might not be time. I don’t know why Tyler’s stalling, but I don’t think it matters. That mountain on the horizon isn’t going to wait for us. It’s not just Tyler’s risk. There’s Abby—and that old lady, Miriam—”

And Beth, Matt thought. “But Tyler’s still got the Committee wrapped up.” ^ ^

“I’m not talking about a vote, I’m talking about haying. Bugging out. Soon. Say, tonight.”

“You just got back.”

“I mean everybody. Everybody who isn’t playing handmaiden to Colonel Tyler. I saw Tim Belanger headed east by himself. Obviously he’s got the right idea. So we round up Abby, we get Miriam—”

“Beth,” Matt said.

“And Beth, and we take one of these big RVs and leave before the Colonel gets his act together.”

“It would have to be this camper. I don’t want to leave my medical supplies behind.”

“Okay, this camper. There’s room for everybody until we can find more transportation. We’re only a couple of days from Ohio if we keep moving.”

“I thought you didn’t want to go to Ohio. I thought you wanted to see the Wind River Range.”

“Maybe I just want to see the last of Tyler. Maybe I don’t like the fact that he locked up Abby Cushman.” Kindle lifted his rifle and sighted down the length of it. “Or maybe some asshole talked me into thinking of this fuckin’ trailer camp as a town.”

Beth was ashamed of what she had told Joey… but tantalized by it, too.

He had reacted with an enraged denial, and here was the scary part: she liked it.

She had always liked her ability to rouse Joey from his slumberous complacency—to make him horny; to make him mad. Poke the tiger and see if he bites. Even if it was her he bit. Maybe especially if it was her.

She had left Joey by the dead fire in back of the house, had left him stewing in his own anger, and it was only fair, Beth told herself; not nice, but fair; now they were even.

She was restless in her bed with the memory.

You want to know where I’m spending the night?

In that camper, Joey had said. Like you always do.

Not every night. Not the whole night. Listen—

Remembering it made her weak-kneed. And hot. In every sense of the word.

If she left her camper now… would Joey notice?

He was guarding Abby Cushman. With her cheek pressed against the rear window, Beth could just see the light of the burning Sterno he used to keep himself warm. Joey took his guard duty seriously. He hardly ever slept anymore. He didn’t seem to need to.

He was crouched against the meager light like a troll.

Beth thought, If I leave on the other side of the camper and circle around toward the house…

It might be possible.

She put on her old jeans and a blouse. Then she took three deep breaths and opened the door into cold prairie night. She stepped out barefoot with her long hair loose, like a country girl.

There was more light than she really liked. The moon had just come up. And was it a reflection of the moonlight or was the earthbound Artifact glowing with some subtle light of its own? A pale white pulsation, as if it were storing up some peculiar kind of energy?

Beth moved lightly, silently, in the radiant night.

Miriam, back in her camper, understood that distant glow. It registered on her eyelids and behind them as she lay in bed, her body eroding from within.

Miriam was two places now: here and Home. The neocytes had worked quickly. Miriam at Home was not made of blood and skin, was not even altogether material, and Miriam became more wholly that Miriam with every tick of the clock, as this Miriam—the old and used-up and ailing Miriam—grew increasingly hollow and fragile.

She turned her head to the window and saw Home bathed in a ghostly nimbus, summoning the energies that would lift it free of the Earth.

Summoning the energies, Miriam thought, that would carry it to the stars, a human epistemos in the growing awareness of the galaxy.

Very soon now, Miriam thought.

Colonel Tyler had occupied a downstairs room in the Connor house—a room that once had been Vince Connor’s study, with a filing cabinet full of deeds, insurance documents, and bookkeeping ledgers, and a leather sofa long enough to stretch out on.

Colonel Tyler sat in what had been Vince’s favorite chair: a high-backed recliner finished in olive-green Naugahyde. Although it was very late, the Colonel was awake. He hadn’t slept for three nights now—a bad sign.

He hated the dark. In the dark, Sissy tended to disappear; and as bad as her presence was, to be alone was often worse. The days were all right. In the day there was sunlight, a horizon. At night, doubts came swarming.

Doubts… and sometimes madness.

It seemed to Colonel Tyler that his madness, which had once been a sealed box, had spilled out into his everyday life. Madness was everywhere: in Sissy, whose persistence was probably not normal; in the derangement of the world; in the appearance of the insect woman and the death of the pseudo-child William.

And today Tim Belanger had left camp, and that seemed the worst omen of all, the symptom of a disintegration that had begun to move from the peripheral Tom Kindle to the more central Tim Belanger and would eventually strike at the core: Ganish, Jacopetti, Joey, even himself…

“Colonel Tyler?”

He looked up, startled.

Beth Porter stood in the doorway. He hadn’t heard her knock. He cleared his throat. “Beth?” He summoned up the daylight Colonel John Tyler.

She glanced at him and then at the service revolver he had placed on the arm of the recliner. “Are you okay?”

Who had last asked him that? A. W. Murdoch, he thought. In that little town in Georgia. In Loftus. “Certainly I am.”

“May I come in?”

He nodded. She stepped into the meager light of a single lamp and closed the door behind her. She was not a child, Tyler thought, nor yet quite an adult; she still moved like a teenager, with a teenager’s unconscious coltishness. “What brings you out so late?”

“Just that I was lonely,” Beth said. “I thought it might be warmer in here.”

Matt and Kindle approached the Sterno fire in front of Abby’s trailer expecting a brisk who-goes-there from Joey. The fire cast tall, nervous shadows on the aluminum wall of the camper. The camper was dark and the door was closed, but Joey wasn’t there.

“Maybe he got tired and found somewhere to sleep,” Matt said. “Or took a bathroom break.”

Kindle shook his head. “Joey doesn’t sleep, and he pees in the bushes when he figures he’s alone. This is peculiar.” He rapped his bony knuckles on the door.

Abby’s voice, sleepy and chastened, came from inside: “Who’s there?”

“Me,” Kindle said. “Me and Matt. We need to talk.”

A few seconds later, she was at the door in an old blue nightgown, looking at Kindle with sleepy eyes and a stew of emotions. “You selfish son of a bitch—you left.”

“Selfish SOB came back,” Kindle said. “Abby, I didn’t know he was going to lock you up.”

“Where is Joey?” Abby wondered.

She turned her head at the sound of the gunshot.

“Hold up!” Kindle said. “Christ’s sake! Hold up!”

He stopped Matt and Abby before they ran across the open space to the Connor house. The shot had seemed to come from there. “Think about this. Who’s in the house?”

“Tyler, probably,” Matt said. ” I don’t know who else.”

“Which room is Tyler using?”

“Around the side.”

“Show me. But stay back from the house.”

They circled clockwise in the dark behind the row of RVs, where lights had begun to come on.

“That window,” Matt said.

It was a small side window with a roll blind across it. They saw a second flare of light in that confined space, a second gunshot; and moments later, a third.

Rosa Perry Connor didn’t hear the shots. She was far away, attending to another summons.

She had flown miles from the Connor farmhouse. Carried more by wind than volition, she had flown south past the Artifact, had soared high above the faint smudge of Denver, an abandoned city, and then away from the mountains and across the plains in a wordless ecstasy of flight.

Her lifespan in this altered body was short but sufficient. Night fell. She approached the stars on gusts of colder, darker air. She grew lighter as her physical resources were exhausted.

It was time to go Home. The summons had gone out all over the world. Sojourners in the air, the sea, on the land: come Home, come Home now. Time for the great departure. But like a guilty child at bedtime, Rosa lingered a moment longer.

The moon rose over the lightless immensity of the high plains. One wingbeat more, Rosa thought, one more, savoring the brisk night wind that would carry her dust away.

Chapter 35 Wounds

Joey had been doing sentinel duty every night since they crossed the Snake, and he had learned how to listen to the dark.

Every night, he made a fire to keep himself warm. It was spring and the days were often hot, but after dark the heat bled into the sky, the air grew cold, and the wind cut close to the bone.

Make a fire too big, though, and the sound of it would obliterate every other sound. At first he burned windfall, roadside trash, loose barn boards or stick furniture from wasteland shacks abandoned long before Contact. Pine knots in the old wood exploded like gunshots, and their sparks threatened to ignite the dry sage beyond the blacktop highway. It was Colonel Tyler who showed him how to light the little cans of Sterno jelly, and Joey had begun to collect them from the sports-supply and general-merchandise shops in the towns they passed. The Sterno burned almost silently, just a whisper as the wind whipped the flames. It gave off precious little heat—with luck, enough to warm his hands. But in his leather jacket he was generally okay.

The campers were lined up outside the Connor house, and Joey sat minding his Sterno fire on the concrete drive at Abby Cushman’s door, listening.

He had honed his listening skills quickly. The world might seem empty, but Joey knew it wasn’t. There were animals, for one thing. Dogs: ex-pets, maybe, learning how to survive in the wild; or wild dogs; or wolves—he had heard some howling the last couple of nights. And people. It was amazing, the variety of noises people made on a still night. These camper-trailers had thin walls, and he often heard the murmur of night talk. People talking to themselves, talking in their sleep. Or rolling over in bed, rocking the RV a little. Maybe somebody trotting into the house to use a toilet; somebody else, restless, stepping outside to look at the stars.

Tonight he tried to calm himself, to make his ears come alive.

But he couldn’t help rerunning his encounter with Beth.

It was stupid, what she had said. Joey knew what went on in this camp, especially at night. He knew all about Beth and what Beth did at night: slept alone, mostly; snuck over to the doctor’s RV sometimes.

Which was bad enough. The mystery of Beth was that he simultaneously wanted her and didn’t. Sometimes just looking at the way she moved across the tarmac in her blue jeans was enough to give Joey a raging hard-on. Other times she was as appealing as a day-old cut of meat. Sometimes he hated to think about her; sometimes he hated to think of anyone else thinking about her.

He guessed she was fucking the doctor; and as bad as that was, he had begun to live with the idea.

But the thing she had told him tonight—her dirty comments about Colonel Tyler—

No.

It was impossible. Colonel Tyler, Joey thought, was like an avenging angel, a pure and powerful force from far beyond the limits of this ratty trailer caravan. It was Colonel Tyler who had come into the ruins of Buchanan with clean clothes and a pistol on his hip and asked to talk to Mr. Joseph Commoner. It was Tyler who had trusted Joey to walk the perimeter, Tyler who had trusted him with a gun.

The idea that the Colonel would stoop to some furtive little night fuck with a nonentity like Beth—it was obscene, and he didn’t believe it.

But the night wore on, and the moon began to rise, and the new Artifact radiated a pale light of its own, and Joey heard Beth’s door ease open—the whine of the hinges above the moth-flutter of the Sterno flame—and he stood and took three silent steps to the corner of Abby’s camper, helplessly curious, and watched Beth moving, a shadow, to the front door of the Connor house and inside.

Probably she was just using the toilet. But Joey itched with the insult of what she had told him, and he circled around the house to the side, to the window where Colonel Tyler’s light was still burning. The blind was down, but Joey put his face to the glass and was able to capture an angle of vision where the blind gapped against the sill. Colonel Tyler sat motionless in a chair. His pistol rested on the arm.

Joey touched his own pistol, snug against his belt. He knew the Colonel couldn’t see him, that the lamp and the blind would have made a mirror of the window on a night this dark, but his face was hot with shame and suspicion and his heart was beating wildly.

He saw Colonel Tyler look toward the door, saw his lips move but couldn’t make out the words.

The door was at the wrong angle and Joey wasn’t able to see who had arrived… but who else could it be?

He began to take small, sharp breaths.

Colonel Tyler spoke, paused, spoke again.

Joey registered these images but ceased to think about them. He couldn’t think any longer; could only watch.

Now Beth moved into his range of vision. She was dressed too lightly for the weather. She was blushing a little. She looked nervous and aroused, her — hair hanging loose around her shoulders.

She came and stood beside Tyler’s chair. Tyler didn’t move. Beth spoke. Words inaudible. She reached for Tyler’s huge hand and took it in her own. She put his hand on her blouse, on her breast, and moved against it in a way that seemed to Joey brutally obscene.

Joey took his pistol out of his belt and hurried to the front of the house.

Once it was obvious why Beth had come, Tyler felt in control of the situation.

She wasn’t much different from the hundreds of such women Tyler had hired at various times in his life, and there was nothing very surprising, he thought, about her presence tonight. Apparently he had inherited more than a gavel from the deposed Matt Wheeler.

She put his hand against her blouse and he felt the shape of her breast, the hard nugget of the nipple. He admired the sight of his hand there, the creviced skin against the flimsy cloth.

He stood up and pressed her against him. She wasn’t very tall. Her head was tilted back, her eyes half-closed, expecting a kiss. Tyler didn’t kiss—it was a dirty habit. Instead, he tangled his right hand in her hair and pulled.

Her eyes widened. He warned her not to speak, not to say anything. He didn’t like women who talked.

He pressed his hips against her, put his left hand under her blouse and explored. He pulled her head back until her throat was exposed in a fine white curve. She wasn’t sure what to make of the pain, seemed to hover between arousal and fear.

Her blue jeans were closed with a row of buttons. Tyler had opened two of them when Joey kicked open the door.

Colonel Tyler had never been wounded in combat—he had never experienced combat firsthand—and he was surprised when the bullet hit him.

There was pain and anger but first of all, above all else, an enormous surprise, as if it were an act of God, a causeless momentum that tumbled him backward.

He caught himself against the recliner with his right hand. The left hand, his left arm, in fact, wouldn’t answer to the helm. It felt as if someone had cut off the arm and replaced it with a fleshy, useless slab of rubber. There was blood all over his shoulder.

Beth was still standing, though the shot must have come very near her head. Tyler realized that she was screaming, that the sound was exterior to him.

“Move away,” Joey was telling her—the Colonel recognized Joey’s petulant whine. “Get out of the way.”

Tyler braced his hip against the recliner and reached for his own pistol.

He had loaded it earlier tonight. He had meant only to touch its cold steel against his forehead, perhaps taste the barrel with his tongue, as was his habit. Never to pull the trigger. Sissy always talked him out of that. But now someone else had pulled a trigger, someone else had shot him. Joey had shot him.

He grasped the pistol and swiveled around.

One foot slid against the polished oak floor and Tyler bumped to a sitting position with his back against the recliner. Joey must have tracked this motion as a fall, or ignored it altogether; his attention was still on Beth. To the Colonel’s eyes Joey looked grotesque, inflated with jealousy to bullfrog proportions.

“Move aside,” Joey repeated, and Beth seemed finally to understand; she took two steps toward the window and turned to look for Tyler. Perhaps she saw the blood for the first time; her eyes widened and Tyler wondered if she would scream again. Beth looked a little ridiculous, too, with her smooth belly showing through the gap of her unbuttoned pants.

Joey looked at the Colonel and the Colonel shot him in the head.

There was no precision or elegance in the act, only the raising of the pistol and the pulling of the trigger and Joey falling down and convulsing for a horrible thirty or forty seconds before he died.

Beth went to Joey and knelt above him and made a choked sound at the sight of his injury. Her hand rested on the pistol Joey had dropped beside him. Colonel Tyler watched that hand. Watch that hand, Sissy instructed him. Sissy was a sudden, nebulous presence hovering near the ceiling of the room, but Tyler didn’t look for her, merely followed her advice, watched Beth’s hand on the pistol.

She took up the pistol and turned it toward Tyler.

Was she offering it? Threatening him with it? The expression on her face was unreadable, opaque with grief. There was no way to calculate the danger.

So Colonel Tyler shot her, too.

At the sound of the third gunshot, Matt ran to his trailer and collected his Gladstone bag.

Kindle tried to restrain him at the door. “It’s stupid to go in there, Matthew. We don’t know what happened. Matthew! Just wait, for Christ’s sake!”

Matt ignored him, ran past him to the Connor house in its patch of moonlight, and inside, where it was dark.

Chapter 36 Prophylaxis

The girl was a mistake, Sissy said.

Colonel Tyler, weak with blood loss, climbed from the floor into the recliner and gave his mother’s ghost a weary look.

It was unusual for Sissy to be out after dark. But she was not merely present tonight, she was almost tangible. Her layered skirts billowed around her large body; her skin was fish-white and her eyes were crazed and attentive. If I walked over to that corner of the room, Tyler thought, I bet I could touch her.

You shouldn’t have shot the girl. You might have been able to explain about the boy. You might have gotten away with that. But not the girl. “You told me to watch her hand.” Nor to shoot her. “She picked up the gun!” She wouldn’t have used it.

Tyler began an answer but stopped as the door opened.

Matthew Wheeler stood there with his Gladstone bag and a dazed expression, obviously struggling to sort out what had happened. His eyes flickered from body to body—Joey, Beth, Tyler.

Tyler raised his pistol, an action that was almost reflexive, and aimed it at the doctor.

Now listen to me, Sissy said. If you don’t do this exactly right, everyone will come in here. Everyone will come nosing into this room to see what you did. They’ll know what you are. And we’ll be lost. So listen to me. Listen.

“Colonel Tyler,” the doctor said, “I can’t treat anyone if you’re pointing a gun at me. Let me come in.”

But his attention was obviously on Beth. The girl’s breathing was wet and loud in the room. It reminded Tyler of the sound bathwater made as it ran down the drain.

Tyler held the pistol firmly and listened to Sissy’s urgent whispers. Then he answered the doctor.

“Come in. Close the door behind you.”

“I’ll come in if you put down the gun.”

“You’ll come in or I’ll shoot you, Dr. Wheeler. It’s as simple as that.” Wheeler hesitated, but he entered the room after another long look at Beth.

“Now close the door,” Tyler said.

Wheeler did so. He moved to lean over the girl, was fumbling with his bag, but Tyler said, “No—not yet.”

The doctor’s irritation was obvious. “She needs attention. She’s badly injured.”

“Of course she is. I shot her. Now go to the window.” Wheeler looked skeptically at the pistol.

“I won’t hesitate to use this. Does it look like I would? We have two corpses here already.”

“One corpse,” Wheeler said. “She’s still alive.”

Tyler nodded impatiently and took more silent advice from Sissy: He leaned forward, though it hurt his bad arm, and trained the pistol on the girl. “So she is. I guess you want to keep it that way. Now go to the fucking window.”

Wheeler stood erect, finally, and did as he was told. “Pull up those blinds. All the way. Good. Now open the window. Good. And turn off the lamp.”

“I’ll need the lamp to work.”

“You’re not working yet, Dr. Wheeler. Turn off the lamp, please.”

Wheeler switched it off. Now the room was dark, no light but moonlight and a fainter, bluer radiance that might have come from the direction of the human Artifact. Tyler looked out at the space beyond the Connor house. The last RV in the caravan, Bob Ganish’s big Glendale, was framed in the window.

“I want everyone assembled where I can see them.”

“How am I supposed to manage that, Colonel?”

“Use your well-known powers of persuasion. Tell them I have a gun on you.”

Wheeler leaned through the open window and signaled to Abby Cushman, who was standing not far away.

Sissy was distracted by the light from the Artifact, which flared brighter as Tyler watched.

That mountain may be ready to rise.

Good, Tyler thought. Then we can go to Ohio.

And no one will know what we are.

Except these few.

Who mustn’t go with us.

How to stop them?

You know how.

It’s an awful lot of people to kill, Tyler thought. We’ll be clever, Sissy said. We’ll think of something.

Matt waved over Abby Cushman and told her to assemble everyone in the space between this window and Bob Ganish’s Glendale. “Have them stand there where the Colonel can see them, Abby.”

She stood a wary distance from the window, squinting at him. “What’s this all about? Matt? Is anyone hurt?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

She took another step forward. Her eyeglasses reflected the moonlight. She looks like an owl, Matt thought. A frightened owl.

He thought of vaulting this windowsill, joining her outside and leaving the Colonel to tend his own injury. But Beth was under the Colonel’s gun and badly hurt. He heard her terrible, stertorous breathing. He wanted to finish with all this menacing foolishness and get on with the business of helping her.

Abby came close enough to see Tyler in the dim room, the pistol aimed at Beth.

“Dear God.”

“Just do as he says, Abby. Get everybody in one place. And try not to worry.”

She pressed her fist to her mouth but nodded and turned away. “Now stand back from the window, Dr. Wheeler,” Tyler said. He did so. “May I treat the girl?”

“Not yet.”

“She may be dying.”

“Probably,” Tyler said. “But let’s get our ducks in order first.”

“Jesus Christ, Tyler!” It was too much.

The Colonel gestured with his pistol at Beth’s prostrate body. “If you mean to be uncooperative, it would be easy to resolve the issue right now.”

Looking at Tyler was like peering into an open cesspool. In a single day this man had killed two people, and he might be killing a third by delaying medical attention. Obviously, some internal restraint had snapped. Obviously, Tyler was mad.

It was vital to watch what he said, to weigh his words before he spoke. “I’ll need more than what I have in my bag. I’ll need bandages—”

“In due course. Be quiet.”

The Colonel’s attention was focused beyond the window. Abby had begun lining up people in front of the aluminum moonglow of Ganish’s RV. Matt counted them off impatiently. Abby, Bob Ganish, Chuck Makepeace, Paul Jacopetti… the count seemed short.

Kindle, he thought. Where was Tom Kindle?

But wait: Kindle had come back into camp only an hour ago; Tyler wouldn’t expect to see him in the line up. As far as the Colonel knew, Tom Kindle was still absent.

Okay—nevertheless, where was he?

Abby gestured for his attention.

“Go back to the window,” Tyler said. “Slowly.”

He did.

“Wave her over.” Matt waved. “Tell her there’s someone missing.” Matt gave Tyler an involuntary stare. Somehow he knows about Kindle. Tyler said, “The old woman—Miriam Flett.”

He relayed the message to Abby.

“I know!” Abby said. She stood at the window with her eyes fixed on Tyler’s pistol, obviously hating it, hating him. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Miriam’s in her trailer. We can’t wake her up.”

Christ almighty! The last thing he needed was another casualty—and where was all this light coming from?

“Very well,” Tyler was saying. “Tell Mrs. Cushman to take everyone inside that Glendale and close the door.”

Abby said, “I can hear you quite well, Colonel Tyler. For how long?”

“Until further notice.”

“Go on, Abby,” Matt said. “Everything will be fine. I promise.”

She stalked off and herded three sullen figures into the RV: Ganish, Chuck Makepeace, Jacopetti, the last sullen remnant of Buchanan, Oregon. The door closed behind her, and Matt felt suddenly much more alone.

He was about to turn away from the window when his eye tracked a glimmer of moonlight (or whatever peculiar light this was) at the right rear corner of the Glendale. He might be mistaken… but it looked like the barrel of Tom Kindle’s rifle.

Had Tyler seen it?

Apparently Tyler had not. Tyler’s uniform was sodden with blood. He must be weak, Matt thought. He ought to be in shock, by all rights. There was something more than frightening about the Colonel’s calm facade; it was almost supernatural.

“I’ll need bandages,” he said.

“I don’t want you going out there where those people are.”

“I can’t work miracles, Colonel. These wounds need bandages. Your wound, for instance. I need—well, at least, clean cloth.”

“There should be such a thing in the house. I think there’s a linen closet in the upstairs hall.”

“You trust me that far?”

“Don’t be asinine. If you’re not back promptly, I’ll shoot the girl. Or if I see you out that window, I’ll shoot the girl. Get what you need. But hurry.” Tyler’s face was pale and glassy with sweat.

Matt was out of the room for five minutes. He came back with a stack of clean white linen, a box of Kotex from Rosa Connor’s bathroom cupboard, and a plan.

The plan was ugly, and the plan was dangerous, but it was the only way Matt could see into a future that contained both himself and a chance, at least, for Beth.

The room, which had been Vince Connor’s study, was bathed in bright blue light from the window. Matt was conscious of the light but couldn’t spare any thought for it. He had achieved a narrow, intense focus of attention. It reminded him of his days as an intern. There were times, at the end of a long shift, when he would be sleepless and vague and running on empty, and some emergency would arise. And either he would screw it up, maybe threatening somebody’s life, or he would force himself into this condition of unnatural clarity, this bright bubble of concentration.

He concentrated on Tyler and Beth, the angle of his approach to the problem, the geometry of life and death.

He went to Beth first; but Tyler said, again, “Not yet. I’m losing considerable blood. I don’t want to pass out.”

“She’s in worse shape than you are, Colonel.”

“I know that,” Tyler said irritably. “I want you to stop this bleeding from my shoulder. Then you can attend to the girl.”

Matt didn’t argue. Focus, he thought. Any distraction was too much distraction.

Tyler trained his pistol on Beth but allowed Matt close enough to examine his wound. There was enough light to see that the bullet had passed through fairly cleanly. “Joey shot you?”

Tyler nodded. “He found me with the girl.” He watched for Mart’s reaction. “Does that shock you?”

“Not especially.”

“She was—what’s a polite word for it? Loose.”

“Maybe you aren’t too tightly wrapped yourself, Colonel.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Matt took his pulse. It was rapid but not weak. “Are you nauseous? Dizzy?”

“Not particularly.”

“The wound isn’t as bad as it looks.”

“I can’t feel anything in the arm.”

“Damaged a nerve, maybe. Under the circumstances, I can’t do anything about that. You understand?” Tyler nodded.

Matt tore away the shirt and packed a sanitary napkin against the entrance wound and a second behind the shoulder where the bullet had come out. The Kotex was absorbent and wouldn’t stick to the wound. He improvised a broad bandage and wound it around Tyler’s shoulder. Tyler winced. The pain was beginning to break through his defenses.

When the dressing was secure, Matt opened his bag. He took a disposable syringe out of its wrapper and thumbed the plastic protector off the needle.

His attention kept wandering to Tyler’s pistol, aimed almost casually at Beth. How much pressure was necessary to squeeze that trigger? How much awareness to keep it aimed?

He put the hypodermic needle through the rubber seal of a small brown vial and drew up a measured amount of clear liquid.

Tyler was watching him. “What is that?”

“A systemic antibiotic. Bullets aren’t especially clean.”

“Is it necessary?”

“Depends. Do you want to risk gangrene? We’re a long way from a hospital, Colonel.”

Tyler regarded him silently for a time. Oddly, he seemed to be listening. To what voice, Matt wondered. What invisible third party?

“Can you inject it into the bad arm? Because I’m not putting down the pistol. I’m not that stupid.”

“How about the leg,” Matt said. “The thigh.”

“I’m not taking off my pants, either.”

“It’s a broad weave. The needle will pass through the cloth. It isn’t very sanitary, however.”

Tyler shrugged, distracted by his pain.

Matt flushed air from the syringe, flicked away bubbles, then pushed the needle into the meat of Tyler’s leg and forced the plunger down. “May I tend the girl’s wound now?”

“Very well,” Tyler said.

Sissy, Colonel Tyler pleaded. I’m too weak. You’re not, his mother’s ghost insisted. Stay awake! Stay awake! She hovered in the corner and she smelled like stale blood—or perhaps it was the room.

You’re not hurt bad! The doctor said so. You trust him?

He took an oath. They all take an oath. But I’m so tired, Tyler thought.

You have it all, Sissy said. You have all the guns. All the guns are in this room. Joey’s gone, the girl is gone, Tom Kindle is gone, Tim Belanger is gone. The old woman is no threat. You can kill the doctor whenever you like. And there are only four in that trailer, and they’re unarmed, and one of them is a woman, and one of them is an old man. Four would be easy to kill.

All this killing, Tyler thought. He was a little dazed by it.

You must, Sissy scolded him. Or people will know.

Tyler guessed he could do it. Shoot Wheeler. Walk out to the trailer. Walking would be the hard part. Open the door and shoot until everybody was dead.

It wasn’t complicated, but it would be difficult. And he was so very tired. He lifted the pistol, which had drooped away from its target, Beth, but the pistol was oddly heavy—and a new suspicion entered the Colonel’s mind.

The light was much brighter now.

Matt crouched over Beth. He was afraid of the wound, but he forced himself to look at it. He unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it away, exposing her small breasts, her pale skin freckled with blood.

The bullet had penetrated the chest wall and allowed air to flow into the chest cavity. Each time she exhaled, bloody bubbles formed on the wound. Her inhalations were labored, choked, and liquid.

He couldn’t find an exit wound. The bullet was still inside her, might have been deflected by a bone.

He took a carotid pulse. It was weak and irregular. She was clammy and didn’t respond when he raised her eyelid.

He took another sanitary pad from the box and used the plastic wrapping to cover Beth’s chest wound. It was urgent to seal this opening, and the plastic was reasonably clean, reasonably airtight when he fastened it with surgical tape. Then he lifted her into a semisitting position with her body inclined toward the injury, and her breathing seemed to ease a little.

Beth! he thought. Her head lolled to one side.

He needed to keep her blood volume up, and he needed to get her to a hospital. Even then, with modern equipment at hand, he wasn’t sure of his ability to treat the wound singlehandedly. He might have to explore for the bullet.

He looked at Tyler.

Tyler’s eyelids were drooping. His mouth moved, but soundlessly. Who was he talking to?

Matt watched the Colonel’s hand sag until the pistol was aimed, not at Beth, but at the floor. Tyler’s mouth hung open now; his eyes were nearly closed. Matt turned his attention back to Beth.

She’ll need an improvised stretcher, he thought, and which would be the fastest vehicle? And where was the nearest hospital? Laramie? Cheyenne?

He stood up and turned to the door…

But here was an unhappy miracle: Tyler stood up, too.

He came out of Vince Connor’s old recliner like Neptune from the briny deep. His eyes were wide, his pupils small, and the blue light from the window made an eerie halo around him. “It wasn’t an antibiotic,” Tyler said.

It had been morphine, perhaps enough to kill him, certainly enough to sedate him, and what miracle of will or sheer evil had allowed him to resist it even this long?

Tyler’s good right hand came cranking up, the pistol in it.

I’m going to die here, Matt realized. In this stupid room. For this stupid reason.

Then Tyler looked puzzled, turned his head aside, and vomited massively across Vince Connor’s desk.

Matt dropped to the floor. He wanted just a little time, time enough for the morphine to do its work, as it inevitably must. He rolled into the corner of the room, knocking over a table lamp.

At the sound, Colonel Tyler jerked his head.

The pistol swiveled with his look.

Simultaneously the door crashed open.

Tom Kindle stood in the dark hallway with the barrel of his hunting rifle sweeping the room.

Tyler pivoted to face the motion.

Kindle fired.

Tyler fired his pistol.

The two sounds, in this confined space, battered the ears. Even Beth, deeply unconscious, gave an involuntary twitch.

Kindle cried out and fell back in the hallway.

Colonel Tyler fell, but soundlessly, with Tom Kindle’s bullet lodged in his heart.

John! Sissy said as he fell.

It was the first time she had said his name, the first time since he was a child.

Tyler looked at her as the life went out of him in a powerful sigh. It was as if he had been holding his breath for fifty-two years, and his breath was his life, and now he just opened his mouth and let it go.

John, she said, her voice grown faint. Now you can come to live with me again.

It’s over, Matt thought. The words seemed to circle in his head. It had been vile and ugly and there was still Beth’s terrible wound demanding his attention, and Kindle in the hallway, but Tyler was dead: that impediment was gone.

It’s over.

He must have said the words aloud as he bent over Tom Kindle, who had been shot in his bad leg and was bleeding from the calf. “Matthew, it’s not,” Kindle said through gritted teeth.

Matt wrapped the injury. “What do you mean?”

“Are you blind? It’s bright as day out there! Two a.m. and bright as day! And the sound! Jesus, Matthew, are you deaf?”

Not deaf, merely distracted.

He heard it now, a faraway rumble.

It came through the air. It came up through the bedrock.

It began to shake the house.

The Artifact was leaving the Earth.

Chapter 37 Ascension

From the doorway of Bob Ganish’s motor home, Abby was able to see the Connor house—the dark window where Colonel Tyler was holding Matt hostage—and beyond it, on the horizon, the disc of the new Artifact, glowing like a floodlight or a bright new moon.

Paul Jacopetti had taken a propranolol and was resting in the camper’s narrow bed. Ganish and Chuck Makepeace sat stiffly at the table in the kitchenette. They had grumbled at this confinement, but not too loudly; it was Tyler’s idea, and they were Tyler’s constituents; they seemed to think their docility would win them some brownie points when this was all over. “We don’t know for certain what’s going on,” Makepeace said. “It would be premature to pass judgment.”

idiot, Abby thought.

She worried about Matt, and about Miriam, grown so strangely thin, and about Tom Kindle, hiding in the shadows with that hunting rifle of his. But her eyes kept straying to the Artifact. She had grown so accustomed to that presence on the far prairie that she had forgotten what an astonishing thing it really was. It was a spaceship, she thought, as round as a marble and as big as a mountain. It was affixed to the Earth like a tick on the skin of a dog… it had fed on the Earth, filled itself with humanity, and now, sated, it was apparently ready to leave.

It was almost too bright to look at.

Abby shaded her eyes and stood at the door of the Glendale waiting for a resolution. For more gunfire, or for Matt to emerge from the house. Or Colonel Tyler. Or for the world to end: with this peculiar blue light radiating across the prairie, she guessed that was a possibility, too.

“You hear something?” Bob Ganish said.

The car salesman had cocked his head to listen.

Chuck Makepeace looked up sullenly from a game of solitaire. “No.”

“Like a rumble,” Ganish said. “Like a truck going by. You really don’t hear it?”

Abby pressed her face against the cold window glass and felt another caress of the fear that had not left her for a day and a night. “I do,” she said. “I hear it.”

The noise was faint but distinct, like thunder, like the artillery of a faraway war.

Then it was as if the cannons had come suddenly much closer, as if the caissons had rolled up behind the Connor house where the grazing land began. The Glendale motor home began to yaw and pitch.

Abby braced herself against the frame of the door. Jacopetti began shouting from the bed, shouting a single word over and over. The sense of it was lost in the roar; she looked at him and tried to read his lips. But he wasn’t speaking to her, he wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular; he was speaking to God, Abby thought. His eyes were wild with panic. The word was, “Earthquake!”

Chuck Makepeace fell to the floor and pulled the table down after him. Playing cards fluttered through the air like wounded birds. Bob Ganish gazed around himself in mute startlement, then slumped into a crude duck-and-cover with his hands clasped behind his neck. He had stocked this camper with every conceivable necessity, and the floor was suddenly awash with canned goods, bottled water, spare propane tanks, and plastic jugs of gasoline.

Somehow, Abby managed to stay upright.

She saw the Artifact begin to rise. The horizon had obscured its lower circumference, but now a gap began to widen there.

The spaceship rose with a gentle, impossible buoyancy.

At its base, a dome of hot volcanic gases exploded after it.

And the cannonfire became a deeper, more frightening growl; and the floor dropped under Abby, and rose and dropped again, until she lost her footing and fell.

Home had driven its roots deep into the lithosphere. Its central artery, its umbilical connection to the Earth, was a vent that reached below the basaltic crust to the fluid magma.

Home’s departure fractured the substrate beneath it into floating chonoliths like so many loose teeth and exposed a reservoir of liquid rock to the cold night air.

The mantle shook with protest. A tectonic shockwave radiated outward from its epicenter in northern Colorado and was followed immediately by a second shock and a third.

The hole in the earth vented a cloud of luminous gas, a phenomenon geologists called a nute ardente. The cloud emerged at enormous speed and pressure. It carried volcanic ejecta at high velocity, peppering the retreating Home with rock fragments. It unfolded around the newly opened crater and set fire to the prairie in an expanding ring miles in diameter.

Home rose at the crown of this maelstrom and accelerated toward the high atmosphere, toward the stars.

From an altitude, the caldera on the land below resembled a flower: a stamen of boiling lava, petals of gray smoke touched at their tips with flame.

Home rose silently beyond a thin waft of cloud, rose brightly and silently in the thinning air. Its motive force was silent; it transformed its few gigawatts of waste energy into a blue-white wash of photons.

In the space inside it, deserts shimmered in virtual sunlight; alpine meadows bloomed at the approach of a virtual spring. New oceans lapped at the shores of new continents.

Below, in the darkness, a blister of ash and fire expanded over the cold Colorado tableland.

The first shock knocked Matt to the floor beside Tom Kindle.

He guessed it was an earthquake. It felt as if the Connor house had grown legs and begun to take long, bounding leaps across the prairie.

Maddeningly, there was nothing to hang on to. He was as helpless as a mouse in a rolling barrel. After what seemed like an endless pummeling, he managed to grab a doorjamb and brace himself firmly enough to raise his head and look around.

The air was full of dust. The quake seemed to raise dust from every surface. Above the roar, he could hear the joists twist in the ceiling. He wondered how long the house would last.

Tom Kindle writhed on the floor with one hand clutching his bad leg.

Matt pulled himself into the room where Colonel Tyler had died. The shaking seemed progressively less intense, though it had not entirely stopped. He looked for Beth. The Colonel’s body and Joey’s had been thrown into a ghastly embrace, Tyler’s limp arm draped over Joey’s shoulder and his hand pawing at Joey’s ruined head. Beth was approximately where he had left her but no longer sitting up against the foot of the recliner; she had slid back to the floor and her breathing—she was still breathing—sounded tentative and very wet.

The floor bucked again, and Matt braced himself until it steadied. He heard what must be the sound of the Connors’ front porch collapsing: a series of dry, woody explosions. The window popped out of its frame and shattered on the ground outside the house.

When the trembling eased, Matt pulled himself up to the empty sill and took a hurried look outside.

He couldn’t see the Artifact—the window faced the wrong direction—but he knew it must be rising. It was still radiating that vivid blue-white light, casting sundial shadows from the RVs and the prairie scrub, but now the shadows were growing shorter and inclining to the west.

The door of the Glendale opened, and Abby stood in it looking bruised and bewildered. She raised a hand to shield her eyes against the light. Matt heard someone crying out from inside the vehicle—Jacopetti, he thought. He wanted to tell Abby to stay away from the house, it wasn’t structurally safe… the walls were inclining and it was a miracle only the porch had collapsed. The urgent thing was to get Beth outside, get Kindle outside, before the next shock or aftershock…

But he couldn’t speak or wave or make any coherent gesture before Abby opened her mouth in an O of dismay and clutched at the door of the motor home.

Matt supposed—much later—that there must have been a sinkhole under the RV, some old hollow in the bedrock that had been opened by the violence of the quake. All he knew as it happened was that the big Glendale tilted leftward, and the camper in front of it—Mart’s camper—tilted right; one tumbled frontward into a sudden depression that might have been five or ten feet deep; the other tumbled back. The two vehicles collided, made the shape of a flattened V, and the Glendale began to slide sideways.

Abby fell back into the dark interior. Jacopetti’s strained shouting ceased abruptly.

The exposed engine of the Glendale ground against a torn flank of Mart’s camper and sparks fountained into the night air. “Christ, no,” Matt whispered.

The motor home was on fire as soon as that terrible possibility entered his mind.

Events were outrunning him. The fire didn’t spread. It was much quicker than that. There was no fire—and then the fire was everywhere. The side door of the Glendale rolled up to an impossibly steep angle.

Matt vaulted through the window and ran across the Connors’ dry garden to the burning vehicles. Both were on fire now. A propane tank popped, and Matt heard shrapnel scream past his ear.

The subsidence wasn’t deep. He scrambled down toward the Glendale just as flames licked up the undercarriage, forcing him back.

He called Abby’s name. She didn’t answer. He ran to the rear of the Glendale. There were no flames here—not yet—but the paint was peeling off the aluminum, and when he tried to climb up to the window, the skin of his hands sizzled on the metal.

He dropped to the ground and crawled away until the heat from the burning vehicles was no longer painful.

The Artifact, shrunken by altitude, dropped away beyond the western horizon. Its light faded.

It left behind the light of the burning campers, and a more baleful light from the caldera far away, a column of smoke impossibly wide, fan-shaped where it had risen into the dark sky.

The prairie was still undulating, Matt thought. Long, low-frequency waves. Like the swell of the ocean on a gentle night. Or maybe it was his imagination.

There might be stronger aftershocks.

He thought about Beth. Still work to do.

Time lurched forward in a drunkard’s walk. Somehow, he dragged Beth away from the Connor house. Somehow, he went back for Tom Kindle, who had pulled himself most of the way to the door before passing out.

He remembered Miriam. The old woman had been too sick to be sequestered with the others. Her small camper was still intact. Matt hurried to the door and forced it open.

But Miriam wasn’t inside—only a relic of Miriam. Only her empty skin.

In that interval, the sun had risen.

The southern horizon was a bank of roiling gray smoke larger than the Artifact had been. The sky was grayer by the minute and a gray ash had begun to fall like snow.

Beth continued to breathe. But each breath was a miracle; each breath was a victory against great odds.

Somehow, he lifted Beth and Tom Kindle into the coach of an undamaged camper.

Somehow, he began the longest journey of his life.

Chapter 38 Eye of God

It was cold in the shadow of the volcanic cloud.

The sun was a tenuous brightness in a dark sky, pewter or brass on a field of featureless gray. Matt drove with the camper’s high beams on.

He drove toward Cheyenne on 1-80. The place where the Artifact had been anchored to the Earth was sometimes visible on his right—not the caldera itself, but the glow of distant fires, of lava flows, a second brightness, not sunlight. Periodically, the road shook under his vehicle.

The road was difficult to follow. Ash fell from the sky in a continuous sheeting rain. It collected on the tarmac and drifted across the highway in charcoal dunes. At times the road seemed to disappear altogether; he navigated by the vague shapes of retaining walls, by road signs and mile markers transformed into gray cenotaphs. The camper’s wheels spun in the drifts, grinding for purchase on the buried blacktop. Progress was slow and painful.

He passed through Laramie, a landscape of hopeless ruins. At noon—he supposed it was noon—he stopped at a gas station that had lost its windows but was otherwise reasonably intact. He fought through a drift of ash, his shirt tied over his mouth and nose. The volcanic ash was a fine-textured grit that smelled a little like rotten eggs. He stepped through the space where a window had been, and in the meager shelter of the depot he located a road map of Colorado and Wyoming.

The camper could have used some gas, but the pumps were dead.

Matt shivered in the cold. Across the highway, a charred frame building smoldered. All else was ash, a concealing darkness, a smudged snowfall. Time to check on Kindle. Time to check on Beth.

He had left them in the coach, bandaged and wrapped in blankets against the cold. All his medical supplies, carefully hoarded, had been destroyed in the fire. But he had treated both patients with the antibiotics in his bag.

Kindle was occasionally conscious. Beth was not. Her breathing was terribly, desperately faint. Her pulse was rapid and weak. She was bleeding internally, and she was in shock.

He checked her bandage, decided it didn’t need changing. There was so little he could do. Keep her warm. Keep one shoulder up so her good lung wouldn’t fill with blood, so she wouldn’t drown in blood.

He worked by the light of a Coleman battery lantern. The daylight that penetrated the ash-caked windows was powerless and bleak.

He turned to Kindle next. Kindle opened his eyes as Matt examined the leg wound.

The injury didn’t appear serious but the bullet might have taken a chip from the fibula—and this was the leg Kindle had broken last fall. It would need to be immobilized until he could make a more thorough evaluation.

He looked up from his work and found Kindle staring at him. “Jesus, Matthew—your hands.”

His hands?

He held them up to the light. Ah—his burns. He had burned his hands trying to get Abby out of the Glendale. The palms were red, blistered, peeling—weeping in places. He took a strip of clean linen and tore it in half, wrapped a piece around each hand.

“Must hurt like hell,” Kindle said.

“We have painkillers,” Matt said. “Enough to go around.”

“You been driving since last night?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Taking painkillers, and you can drive like that?”

“Painkillers and amphetamines.”

“Speed?” He nodded.

“You carry amphetamines in that black bag?”

“Found them in Joey’s trailer,” Matt said.

“You crazy fucker. No wonder you look like shit.” Kindle moaned and moved a little under his blanket. “Beth alive?”

“Yes.”

“Where are we?”

“A few miles out of Cheyenne.”

Kindle turned his head to the window. “Is it dark out?”

“Day.”

“Is that snow?”

“Ash.”

“Ash!” Kindle said, marvelling at it.

But Kindle was right: he had gone without sleep for too long. When he looked at the map, all the names seemed obscurely threatening. Thunder Basin. Poison Spider Creek. Little Medicine Creek.

We have very little medicine at all, Matt thought.

Progress was maddeningly slow. The ash continued to fall. Hard to believe the earth could have yielded so much ash, the refuse of such an enormous burning.

Volcanic ash was rich in phosphorous and trace elements. He had read that somewhere. The rangeland would be fertilized for years to come. He wondered what might grow here, next year, the year after.

The speedometer hovered around ten miles per hour.

He was overtaken by a thought as the afternoon lengthened: Beth might die.

He had hesitated at the brink of this idea for hours. He was afraid of it. If he allowed the thought into his head, if he spoke the words even to himself—would it affect the outcome? If he named death, would he summon it?

But in the end it was unavoidable, a contingency that demanded his attention. Beth might die. She might die even if he found a source of whole blood, even if he found a functional hospital… and those things seemed increasingly unlikely.

He should be ready for it.

After all, he had chosen to live in this world: a world where people not only might die but inevitably, unanimously, would die. The mortal world.

He remembered Contact. The memory came back easily in this desolate twilight. He could have chosen that other world, the world of mortality indefinitely postponed, the world of an immense knowledge… the Greater World, they had called it.

The world of no murder, no fatal fires, no aging, no evil. There was a poem Celeste had loved. Land of Heart’s Desire. He couldn’t remember who wrote it. Some sentimental Victorian. Matt gripped the steering wheel with bloody hands, and the memory of her reading it aloud took on a sudden tangibility, as if she were sitting beside him:

I would mould a world of fire and dew

With no one bitter, grave, or over wise,

And nothing marred or old to do you wrong…

He guessed that was what they had built out on this prairie: their curious round mountain, their world of fire and dew.

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,

But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song…

It was tempting, Matt thought. It was the ancient human longing, a desire written in the genes. It was every dream anyone ever hated to wake up from.

But it was bloodless. Not joyless, nor sexless; the Contactees had preserved their pleasures. What they had given up was something more subtle.

It had taken Matt most of his life to learn to live in a world where everything he loved was liable to vanish—and he had never loved that vanishing. But he had learned to endure in spite of it. He had made a contract with it. You don’t stint your love even if the people you love grow old or grow apart. You save a life, when you can, even though everyone dies. There was nothing to be gained by holding back. Seize the day; there is no other reward.

But the price, Matt thought. Dear God, the price.

All our grief. All our pain. Pain inflicted by an indifferent universe: the cruelties of age and the cruelties of disease. Or pain inflicted, as often as not, by ourselves. Grief dropped from the open bays of bombers, grief inflicted by scared or sullen young men coaxed into military uniform. Grief delivered by knife in dark alleys or by electrode in the basements of government offices. Grief parceled out by the genuinely evil, the casually evil, or such walking moral vacuums as Colonel John Tyler.

So maybe they were right, Matt thought, the Travellers and Rachel and the majority of human souls: maybe we are irredeemable. Maybe the Greater World was better for its bloodlessness, its exemption from the wheel of birth and death.

Maybe he had made the wrong decision.

Maybe.

He came into Cheyenne at what he calculated was nightfall.

The streets were all but impassable. In this darkness, it was too easy to lose the road. He turned off 80 onto what he guessed was 16th Street and faced the necessity of stopping for the night.

But then, as he was ready to switch off the engine, he peered up at the sky and saw, by some unanticipated miracle, the stars.

A wind had come up from the north. It was a cold wind, brisk enough to stir these ashes into more dangerous, deeper drifts. But the ash itself had ceased falling. There was a little light, blue shadows on a gray landscape.

He took his hands off the steering wheel, an experiment. It didn’t hurt. He was beyond hurting. But he left some skin behind.

Much of the city had burned.

He passed ash-shrouded rubble, strange columns of brick like broken teeth, the shells of empty buildings.

Two hospitals were marked on the map. De Paul Hospital: a smoking ruin.

And the V. A. Medical Center, not far away. It hadn’t burned—but the earthquake had shaken it to the ground.

He checked on Beth and Kindle once more.

Kindle drifted up from sleep and nodded at him. Kindle was okay.

Beth, on the other hand—

Was not dead. But he couldn’t say why. Her pulse was impossibly tenuous. She wasn’t getting much oxygen; her lips were faintly blue. Her pupils were slow to dilate when he lifted her eyelids.

Still, she continued to breathe.

There was something awe-inspiring about each breath. For Beth, each breath had become a challenge, a kind of Everest, and it seemed to Matt that she met the challenge bravely and with a fierce resolve. But no single breath would meet the needs of her oxygen-starved body, and each breath must be followed by the next, a new mountain to scale.

She wasn’t dead, but she was plainly dying.

What city might have an intact medical center? He looked at the map. His eyes seemed reluctant to focus. Somewhere beyond the range of the ashfall. But what was beyond the range of the ashfall? Denver? No: He would have to travel too close to the caldera itself; the journey might be impossible and would surely be too long. North to Casper? He wasn’t sure what he might find in Casper; it was still a long distance away.

Everything was too far away.

She might not last another hour. Two hours would surprise him. “Sleep,” Kindle said. “I know how it is, Matthew. But you won’t gain anything by killing yourself. Get some sleep.”

“There isn’t time.”

“You’ve been looking at that map for a quarter hour. Looking for what, someplace to go? Someplace with a hospital? Not finding it, I bet. And you can’t drive in this.” He had pulled himself to a sitting position. “Looks like Armageddon out there.”

Matt folded the map meticulously and put it aside. “Beth is badly hurt.”

“I can see that. I can hear how she breathes.”

“I don’t have what I need to help her.”

“Matthew, I know.” Gently: “I’m not telling you to give up. Just we can’t work a miracle. And it does no good to beat yourself for it. Look at you. You’re a mess. Lucky you can walk.”

It was true that they couldn’t reach a hospital. He might as well admit it.

But something pushed forward in his mind, an idea he had not wanted to entertain.

“There’s another possibility,” he said.

He explained to Kindle, and listened to Kindle’s objections for a while, but grew impatient and fearful for Beth and hurried back to the cab of the vehicle and turned it around.

He glimpsed the new Artifact as it finished a quick eastward transit of the sky. But the sky was closing in again; most of the stars had disappeared; and it was not ash that began to fall but a brutally cold rain.

The ash on the ground absorbed the water and became a slick, intransigent mud. He was forced to drive even more slowly, and even so, the rear end of the camper fishtailed now and then on what seemed like a river of liquid clay.

But he didn’t have far to go.

He found the state capital building, or what was left of it, at the end of a broad avenue lined with ash-coated trees and fallen limbs. Three-quarters of the dome had collapsed. One section of it, like an immense splinter, remained in place, lit from below by fires still burning in the shell beneath. The broad space in front of the building was a field of ash, and the rain had given it a wet sheen, and the firelight was reflected there.

Matt wasn’t certain he would find what he wanted. But the capital buildings were the centerpiece of the city, like Buchanan’s City Hall, the most logical place, therefore, to find a Helper.

He parked and climbed out of the cab. There was blood on the steering wheel, blood on his pants.

He struggled for footing on the slick, compressed ash beneath his feet. The rain on his skin was not only cold, it was dirty. It carried soot out of the air. It turned his skin black. Matt realized he had left his jacket in the coach, with Kindle. He went to fetch it.

Beth’s breathing was barely audible.

“Don’t do this,” Kindle said.

Matt shrugged into his jacket.

Kindle sat up and took his arm. “Matthew, most likely it won’t work. And that’s bad enough. But if it does—have you thought about that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a hospital out there. That’s not a doctor. It’s something from outer space. Something we never did understand. And that thing in orbit isn’t humanity. How could it be? And what you’re doing, it’s not asking for help. It’s praying.”

“She’ll die,” Matt said.

“Christ, don’t I know she’ll die? Haven’t I been listening to her die? But she’s dying like a human being. Isn’t that what we decided to do last August? When it comes down to it, what we said was no thanks, I’ll die like a human being. You, me—even Colonel Tyler. Even Beth.”

“That’s not the issue.”

“The hell it isn’t! Matthew, listen. The Travellers left. They went away. Best thing that could happen. And that new Artifact, probably it’ll go away too. Go star-chasing or whatever it is they do. And that’s fine. Because we’ll be left here with some human dignity. But if you go out and pray to that thing for help—my fear is that it will help, and it won’t stop helping, and we’ll have a new God in the sky, and that’ll be the end of us, one way or another.”

“I’m only one man,” Matt said.

“Maybe one is all it takes. Maybe they can look at a thousand things at once—maybe everything matters.”

“I have to help her.” It was the only answer he could formulate. “Why?”

“Because sometimes we help each other. It’s the only decent thing we do.” He turned to the door. “Matthew!” He looked back.

“Don’t let that thing come near me. I don’t care how badly off I am. I don’t want it near me. Promise me that.” He nodded.

The Helper was at the foot of the stairs of the Wyoming state capitol building.

Scabs of wet ash clung to it in the frigid rain. Matt reached up and brushed away these impediments.

He was a little feverish and immensely weary. It was strange to be standing here at the foot of this alien structure in the ash, in the rain, with the domeless capitol building burning fitfully in the dark.

He shivered. The shiver became a convulsion, and he bent at the waist until it passed and hoped he wouldn’t faint.

Rain settled on the Helper in thick, dark drops. This Helper seemed to Matt less tall, less perfectly formed than the one at the City Hall Turnaround. He wondered whether it might have begun to erode. Perhaps it would eventually sink into the earth, a shapeless mound, discarded.

It didn’t develop eyes. It didn’t look at him. It remained impassive.

He told it about Beth. He described her wounds. Some part of him listened to the sound of his own voice and marveled at the melancholy note it added to the rainfall and the wind. He felt like an intern on rounds, reciting a patient’s symptoms for a hostile resident. Was this necessary? It seemed to be.

He said, “I know what you can do. I saw that woman. That insect woman. If you can change a human being from the inside out, you must be able to heal a chest wound. And Cindy Rhee, the little girl with the brain tumor. She was cured.”

The Helper remained impassive.

Was it dead? Deaf? Or simply not listening? “Answer me,” Matt said. “Talk to me now.”

The cold seemed to claw inside his body. He knew he couldn’t stand out in this night rain much longer. He put his hands on the body of the Helper. The Helper was as cold as the air. He left bloody prints on the alien matter.

It didn’t speak.

He carried Beth from the camper.

He knew this bordered on the insane, taking a dying woman into the cold night. But he seemed to be out of options. There was no reasoning, only a slow panic.

Beth was heavy. He held her with one hand supporting her shoulder and the other under her knees. She was a small woman, but he was terribly tired. He staggered under her weight. Her head lolled back and her breathing stopped. He waited for it to resume. Breathe, he thought. She gasped. A bubble of blood formed on her lips.

He told her how sorry he was that all this had happened. She didn’t deserve it. She wasn’t bad. It was one of those unforeseeable tragedies, like an earthquake, like a fire.

He put her down in front of the alien sentinel. She was pale and limp in the wet gray ash. Rain fell on her. Matt put his jacket over her. He pulled away one limp strand of hair that had fallen across her face.

Then he addressed the Helper.

“Here she is,” he said. “Fix her.”

Was this too peremptory? But he didn’t know another way to say it.

From that black obelisk: nothing.

“I know you can fix her. You have no excuse.”

An infinitely long time seemed to pass. A gusty wind turned the rain to needles on his skin. The wind made a sound in the ruins of the capitol building. It sounded like whispering.

The Helper was connected to the Artifact, he supposed, and the Artifact was full of humanity—or something that had once been humanity. “Are you all in there?” Several billion human souls. “Can you hear me?”

Nothing.

He was light-headed. He leaned against the Helper to steady himself. The Helper was cold, substantial, inanimate.

“Everybody in there?” He was hoarse with all this talking. “Jim Bix in there? Lillian? Annie, are you in there? Rachel?”

Silence and the sound of the spattering rain.

“You have no excuse. You can help this girl. Rachel, listen to me! This isn’t good at all. Just standing there letting this girl die. We didn’t raise you to do that.”

He closed his eyes.

Nothing had changed.

He felt himself sliding down, felt himself sitting in the wet ash beside Beth. He couldn’t hear Beth anymore. He wondered if she had stopped breathing. There was a buzzing in his ears that drowned all other sound.

“If you were human,” he said, “you would help.”

He fought to cling to his awareness, but the sense was eroding from his words. There was nothing left inside him but a weary frustration.

“If you were human. But you aren’t. I suppose we don’t matter anymore. This girl doesn’t matter. This dying girl. That offends me. Fuck you. Fuck all of you.”

He wanted to open his eyes but couldn’t. Time passed.

He roused for a moment.

“Rachel! Come out of there!”

He felt the stony body of it cradling his head.

“Rachel!”

Asleep, he dreamed that she did come out.

He dreamed that the Helper changed, that its contours melted, that it became the shape of his daughter, Rachel, as if carved from black ice, black against a gray sky, rain on the polished skin of her like dew.

He dreamed that she touched Beth, touched Matt himself, and the touch was warm.

He dreamed that she said a word to him: some wonderful, comforting word he could not understand, because the language she spoke was not a human language.

Chapter 39 Direction

As soon as he thought it would be safe to leave Matt for a few hours, Tom Kindle located a functioning automobile—a Honda that had been buried under ash but washed more-or_:less clean by the rain—and drove north to Casper.

His leg nagged him relentlessly. The bullet wound was a knob of fire in the meat of his calf. But it had been a clean wound, and Matt had bandaged it well, and Kindle found he was able to move around all right if he favored the leg. He wondered how he looked with a limp.

Like a lopsided old son of a bitch, he supposed. Which was approximately true.

A wave of cool, dry Canadian air had chased the rain away. He drove an empty road north beyond the limits of the ashfall. He marveled at how good it was to see some green grass again. Wildflowers were blooming in the gullies.

He saw a number of dead animals along the way. The departure of the human Artifact had killed a lot of livestock. Did they know? Did they care, the so-called heirs of mankind? But Kindle guessed it was no worse than a natural disaster—a unique event, unlike the perpetual hardships human beings had imposed on the animal kingdom since the year zip. The herd animals would come back quickly now that so many of the range fences were down.

In Casper he picked up a ham radio he believed would operate from a twelve-volt car battery. He wasn’t sure how to hook it up, but it came with instructions—he could probably figure it out. He could have used Joey’s help, however.

As daylight faded, Kindle hunted for water. Water was a scarce commodity since the taps had ceased to work. A supermarket, its big windows shattered in the quake, yielded a dozen plastic gallon jugs of distilled H₂0.

He loaded them into a new car for the trip back: a Buick wagon with a nearly full tank of gas. Gas pumps didn’t work any better than the plumbing, but there was plenty of this old Detroit rolling stock free for the taking.

Night fell. He drove with the Buick’s heater running, with the smell of hot metal and a pine-scent air freshener, south toward that glow on the horizon, the smoldering volcanic crater, as if 1-25 crossed a border into the western precincts of Hell.

In Cheyenne the next morning Kindle assembled two wooden crosses from lumber stock and loose nails.

When the crosses were solid, Kindle used a nail to scratch a letter deep into the horizontal board of the first of the two markers. It was awkward, clumsy work. But he persisted.

He wrote the letters A, B, B.

Then he paused to think. Would she prefer Abigail or Abby? Or Abbey, or Abbie, come to that?

He had only ever known her as Abby, and in the end he inscribed the simplest version of her name:

And on the second cross:

And he took the two crosses out and hammered them into the ash-gray lawn in front of the ruins of the Wyoming state capitol building, next to the statue of Esther Hobart Morris. Of course Joey and Abby weren’t buried here; their bodies were lost. But they deserved some memorial more dignified than the burned-out hulk of a Glendale motor home.

As for Jacopetti, Ganish, Makepeace, Colonel Tyler—Let ’em rot.

He went back to the camper and stood vigil over the inert forms of Matthew Wheeler and Beth Porter.

Matthew seemed to be asleep. His hands appeared to be gloved: they were encased in a glossy substance the color of bituminous coal.

“Matthew?” Kindle said. “Matthew, can you hear me?”

But the doctor didn’t answer—as he had not answered yesterday or the day before.

Beth was covered from the waist up in the same inert black material. Kindle didn’t speak to her. Why bother? Her head was all enclosed. Her nose, her mouth.

He built a fire and watched the smoke rise up into the blue twilight.

Probably no one would recognize the signature of a campfire in Cheyenne. Much of the city was still smoldering. But he would have to be careful out on the rangelands where it would be easy to spot a man’s fire at night. There might be other people who hadn’t chosen the option of Ohio. There might be more like Colonel Tyler.

Matt was awake in the morning.

The black substance had left his hands. Kindle wondered where it had gone. Had it been absorbed by the body? Had it evaporated into the air? “Thirsty,” Matt said.

Kindle brought him some water. The skin on the doctor’s hands was pink and new.

“I dreamed about Beth,” Matt said. “I dreamed they fixed her.”

“Maybe they did,” Kindle said.

Matt helped him build the evening’s fire. They brewed coffee and sat huddled at the flickering warmth.

“I thought maybe you had gone over,” Kindle said. “Maybe you’d end up an empty skin, like everybody else.”

Matt shook his head: No, that wasn’t the decision he had made.

Kindle allowed the silence to grow to its natural length. The stars had come out tonight, all these bright Wyoming stars. He said, “I talked to Ohio.”

“Hooked up a radio?”

He nodded. “Their Helpers are working again. I gather they weren’t for a while. Everything went down when the Traveller Artifact left. Power went down. The Travellers had been running all the turbines and so forth, keeping electricity on line, I guess all over the country—all over the world. Now it’s back on. But only in Ohio, the man says, a certain perimeter around that encampment. And a few similar places on other continents.”

“A perimeter?”

“Not a fence. But I gather, if you stray too far, you’re on your own. No power, no water, no guarantees.”

“It’s a safe place,” Matt said.

“Eden,” Kindle said. “Can you think of a better name for it? Kind of a garden. Live there, you’re taken care of. God looks after you for your natural span. God makes the sun shine, God makes the grass grow.”

“They’re not God,” Matt said.

“Might as well be.”

“But only in Ohio,” Matt said. “Maybe only as long as the Artifact stays in orbit.”

“Artifact might not leave. Guy in Ohio says it’s not decided yet, according to the Helpers.”

“War in Heaven?”

“An argument, at least.”

Matt looked across the gray lawn of the capitol building, at the local Helper, their Helper—the pillar to which he had prayed. “If we talked to it—”

“It was alive for a while, Matthew, but I think it’s not anymore. I think if you want to talk to a Helper you have to go to Ohio.”

Matt nodded. Periodically, he looked at his hands—his new, raw hands.

He said, “You think I’m responsible for this?”

“For keeping the Artifact here?” Kindle shrugged. He had thought about this. “Who knows? We’re talking about the collective decision of ten billion souls—I don’t think Matthew Wheeler tipped the pot. But you walked into their debate, I think. Made them look at what they left behind. And maybe you weren’t the only one. Maybe the same scene got played out a thousand times, different places on the Earth. People saying: If you want to be God, show a little compassion. Or if you’re still human, some human compassion.”

“You blame me?”

“No.”

“But you don’t like it.”

“No.” Kindle sipped his coffee. It was hot and bitter. “No, I do not.”

Beth woke up groggy the next morning—groggy but well. There was only a pucker of healthy skin where the bullet had entered her chest.

She asked about Joey and Colonel Tyler. Matt explained, not gently because there was no gentle way to say this, what had happened.

She listened carefully but didn’t speak much after that.

She sat at the evening fire hugging herself and drinking coffee. The talk flowed around her silence like a river around a stone.

Periodically, her hand strayed to her right shoulder and touched her jacket above the place where her tattoo had been—where it remained, Matt corrected himself; the Helper had not taken it away. He supposed some wounds were easier to heal than others.

She slept that night curled around herself on a mattress on the floor of the camper.

In the morning they began the journey east, across the border from Wyoming into Nebraska.

Tom Kindle said he would ride along for a while. But only a while.

Nebraska was a half-and-half state—arid in the west, wetter in the agricultural east. Interstate 80 joined the Platte River east of the Kingsley Dam, and the Platte fed a valley of rich alluvial soil where acre upon acre of corn, beets, potatoes, and beans had grown wild and high in an empty springtime.

Matt drove most of the time. Tom Kindle’s leg was still bothering him; it tended to cramp after a time behind the wheel. So Matt drove through these empty agricultural towns, pretty little towns made ragged by a hard, windy winter: Brady, Gothenburg, Lexington, Kearny. Sometimes Kindle rode in the cab beside him; mostly it was Beth.

Out of Kindle’s earshot, Beth talked a little more about what had happened—and what might happen.

“They’re still inside us,” she said. “The—what are they called? Neocytes.”

He nodded.

“They’ll be with us for a long time.” He nodded again.

She said, “You know about this, too?”

“Yes.”

“Same as me? I mean… nobody told you, you just know it, right?”

“Right.”

“They’re inside us. But dormant. Not doing anything. Until…”

“You can say it,” Matt told her. There was a potent magic in saying things out loud.

“Until we die,” Beth said. “And then they’ll give us another chance to say yes. To go with them.” He nodded.

“Like heaven,” she said. “A little like.”

“And not just us. Everybody in that town on the river, that town in Ohio.”

Everybody in Eden, Matt thought.

They did some night driving.

It was Kindle who pointed out the line of division that had appeared on the orbiting Artifact, a dark equator on that bright circle.

“It’s dividing,” said Kindle, who had been talking on the radio again. “That’s what Ohio tells me. It’ll be two Artifacts, not one. One to go roving among the stars. One to stay here.”

“Like a custodian,” Matt said.

“Or a local god.” He gave Matt a long look. “You don’t seem surprised.”

He admitted, “I’m not.”

“You knew about it?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

He shrugged.

Kindle turned away. He watched the road pass. He said, “You’re not what you used to be.”

“Not entirely.”

“God damn,” Kindle said. It was not a particular lament. It wasn’t aimed at Matt. It was just a sad curse to rattle away in the chilly night air. “God damn.”