The Harvest

Epilogue

As wise as they were, the Travellers had come to the Earth with their own assumptions and for their own reasons. They were benevolent but clumsy giants; and the human polis, alone in orbit, began to tinker with certain changes the Travellers had made.

In the oceans, the population of Traveller phytoplankton dropped to a fraction of its earlier numbers. The work continued—there was still much excess C0₂ to be bound into the sea—but it needn’t be done in a season, and it needn’t inject so much violent energy into the atmosphere.

Nor was it necessary to maintain power and water in every city on the Earth. That had been the Travellers’ fumbling reaction to the phenomenon of human obstinacy: the puzzling willingness of so many people to accept their own mortality.

The human polis fashioned better and more compact alternatives: in Ohio, in Ukraine, in Hunan and Kenya and a dozen other places.

And outside those boundaries was simply the wild Earth, for those who wanted it.

Home divided itself into two entities: one to journey outward into an awakening galaxy; one to cherish its own past, its birthplace and its parent species.

After a harsh and stormy winter, the spring of the year was mild—oceans calm, skies blue.

Kindle stopped at the Iowa border and refused to go any farther.

He was away from camp for a day and when he came back he was riding a gaunt saddle horse that had survived the winter but was not entirely wild. Over the course of a dry season, Kindle said, most of the gas might evaporate from all these abandoned automobiles, or the hoses rot or the oil thicken or the pistons seize—or some damn thing. A good riding horse was a better bet, over the long run.

“You going west?” Matt asked.

Kindle said he was.

“Wind River? Whiskey Mountain?”

Somewhere through there, Kindle said.

Beth, watching the two men shake hands, thought there was something similar in the way they looked at each other. Something more than friendship, more than sadness.

Each one seemed to look at the other and see what he might have been—what he could have been or maybe should have been—but would never be.

Two roads parted here, and they would not run together again; both men seemed to know it.

Kindle rode off down the ragged highway in the hot part of the afternoon.

Matt stood a long time watching.

She was with him that night when the Artifact passed overhead.

It was almost two things now, a massive figure eight on the verge of separation: two parts of humanity.

She warmed her hands at a fire that seemed lonely without Tom Kindle. She hadn’t wanted him to go. But things change whether you want them to or not.

“Things change,” she said, needing to communicate the thought but daunted by the lonely sound the words made on this vacant plain. Wasn’t that what everyone was afraid of? Things change. The past drifts off until it’s irrecoverable and strange. And the future is a mystery. And nothing stands still. Not for us, not for those people in the sky. Nothing is solid. Not even trees or mountains or planets or stars. Look long enough and they all boil away, boil away. She had seen it as long ago as Contact. She had seen it in her mind’s eye. “It’s a dance,” she said. You can’t cling to what you love because it’s all a dance, love and friendship and men and molecules, all dancing in a brief light.

She looked helplessly at Matt. Did he understand?

But he seemed to. She thought perhaps he had known it all along.

She looked east, where the stars were rising in a dark sky. “It’s been getting greener as we go,” Beth said. “And warmer.”

These nights weren’t as cold as they had been. Matt said, “Maybe it’ll be a gentle summer.”

Gentler in Ohio? Greener, warmer?

“I think so,” Matt said.

“I would like that,” Beth said, wanting to cry for no particular reason. “I think that would be good.”