The Harvest

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Someone had paused long enough to dial 911. The fire engines arrived, not just promptly, but in eerie silence; the crew hooked up their hoses with an easy, economical motion. It was as if only a part of them was awake: the fraction necessary to do this job and do it efficiently. A man from the building next door—a stranger—offered Aggie a sofa to sleep on and a bedroll for her babies. Aggie accepted. “It’s an unusual night,” the man said, and Aggie nodded, mute with wonder. Before an hour had passed, the fire was extinguished and the occupants of the building had been dispersed to new locations, all in a strange and dignified silence. Safe and with her children safe beside her, Aggie began once more to dream.

  Apart from the telephone exchanges, local communications dwindled and international networks began to fail. Within hours, the Earth had dimmed appreciably in the radio and microwave frequencies. Night overtook the western cities of Lima, Los Angeles, and Anchorage, and began to darken the ocean, while Israelis watched their CNN satellite feed shutting down due to “unexpected staff shortages,” according to one weary Atlanta announcer; and then there was only a static logo, then only static—as overseas subscribers blinked at the horizon and guessed something was wrong, something must be seriously wrong, and it was odd how calm they felt, and later sleepy.

  * * *

  Some resisted longer than others. By some quirk of will or constitution, a few individuals were able to shake off their sedation, or at least postpone it a few moments, a few hours.

  A sales rep for the Benevolent Shoe Company of Abbotsford, Michigan, driving a rental Chrysler northbound on 87 from the Denver airport, pondered the miracle that had overtaken him in the darkness. He was due to check in at a Marriott in Fort Collins and face a convention of western footware retailers, beginning with a “reception buffet” at seven, for Christ’s sake, in the morning. The miracle was that some kind of formless disaster had spared him the necessity of scrambled eggs and bacon with a bunch of sleepy entrepreneurs wearing “Hello My Name Is” stickers.

  The miracle had seemed to commence sometime after sunset, when his flight landed at Stapleton. The airport was nearly empty despite the fact that its gates were crowded with motionless aircraft. At least half the passengers on his flight stayed aboard, curled up in their seats… flying on to some other destination, he supposed, but it struck him as peculiar nonetheless. The terminal itself was cavernous and weirdly silent; his luggage was a long time arriving and the woman at the Hertz booth was so spaced out he had trouble holding her attention long enough to arrange a rental. Driving north, he was startled by the emptiness of the highway… cars pulling over into the emergency lane until his was the last mobile vehicle on the road, humming along like a sleepy wraith, listening to a Eurythmics tune that seemed to rattle in his head like a loose pea. Then the Denver oldies station abruptly signed off, and when he tried to find something else there was only one other signal, a country-and-western station, which promptly faded. Not normal, he admitted to himself. No, more than that. This was way past not normal, and it should have been scarier than it was. He pulled into the emergency lane, like everybody else, and climbed out of the car. Then he climbed up on top of the car and sat on the roof with his heels kicking at the passenger door, because—well, why not? Because he understood, in a feverish flash, that the world was ending. Ending in some strange and unanticipated and curiously sedate fashion, but ending, and he was alive at the end of it, sitting on top of this dung-colored Chrysler in a cheap suit and hearing for the first time the quiet of an abandoned night, a night without human noises. His own scuffles on the car top seemed achingly loud, and the wind made a hushed sound coming over farmland through the grain, and the smell of growing things mixed with the hot-engine smell of his car and his own rank sweat, and a dog barked somewhere, and the stars were bright as sparks overhead… and it was all a single phenomenon, the quiet, he named it, and it was awesome, frightening. He thought of his wife, of his seven-year-old son. He knew—another sourceless “knowing”—that whatever this was, it had overtaken them, too. Which made it a little easier to cooperate with the inevitable. He felt suddenly light-headed, too much alone on this immense table of sleeping farmland, so he climbed down and scurried back inside the womb of the car, where the silence was even louder, and curled up on the upholstery and obeyed a sudden and belated urge to sleep.

  Among many other things, he dreamed that a mountain had begun to grow from the prairie not far from his car—a mountain as big as any mountain on the Earth, and as perfectly round as a pearl.

  * * *

  A thousand miles south, Maria Montoya, an expensive private escort, as she thought of herself—or whore, as her customers were occasionally unwise enough to whisper (or shout) in the transport of their passions—attempted to keep an appointment with a German businessman at one of the tourist hotels on Avenida Juarez in the Zocalo district of Mexico City.

  Keeping the appointment proved mysteriously difficult. For one thing, there were no taxis that evening. Which was, as the Americans would say, a bitch. She depended on taxis. She had an arrangement with one company, Taxi Metro: She took a 10 percent fare cut in exchange for leaving the company’s business card on her clients’ hotel bureaus. Tonight the taxis were absent, the dispatchers failed to answer their phones, and the streets, in any case, were full of traffic that had parked along the sidewalks like clotted blood in an aging artery. The whole city was in this stalled condition. As bad as an earthquake! Of course, there hadn’t been an earthquake or any other discernible disaster; the nature of this confusion was much more mysterious… but Maria didn’t care about the details. She felt feverish, dazed, uneasy. She fixed her attention entirely on the need to meet this client. An important man, a wealthy man. She tried phoning to say she’d be late; the phones seemed to work but the hotel switchboard refused to answer. At last, Maria cursed and went out from her rented room into the unpleasantly hot night, the air glutinous and stagnant, and walked ten long blocks to the hotel district past all these stalled cars… but not stalled, exactly, because the drivers had pulled to the side of the road, sometimes onto the sidewalk, leaving a neat lane down the middle of the street, and they had turned their engines off, and all the lights. The cars had become dark caverns, and through their windows, mostly open, Maria saw the slumped shapes of sleeping passengers. Not dead—that would have worried her—just sleeping. How did she know? It was impossible to say. But the knowledge was inside her.

  It was a harrowing journey. She almost fell asleep on her feet. She took a wrong turn and found herself wandering past the Palacio Nacional, its ugly tezontle masonry brooding over the motionless plaza and a hundred stalled cars. Her shoes clicked on the sidewalk, and an echo came rattling back.

  She arrived at the hotel an hour late and with a broken heel. Her determination had wavered during the long walk and she was sleepy herself.

  But she rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor, negotiated the pine-smelling and air-conditioned hallway to the room marked 1413, knocked and then opened the unlocked door when no one answered. Her client was inside—asleep, of course. A fat German snoring on the bedspread in his underwear, skin pale as eggshell and unpleasantly hairy. She felt a wave of contempt, an occupational hazard, and suppressed it. Obviously, she wasn’t needed here. Not a chance of waking this man, who had made such an issue of her promptness. She ought to go home… but the thought of the journey made her weary.

  Conscientious to the last, Maria placed a Taxi Metro card on the nightstand and lay down beside the sleeping German, a stranger, with whom she chastely slept, and with whom she dreamed.

  * * *

  Dreaming marched westward. Dreaming crossed the Aleutians from Alaska into Siberia. Dreaming descended on ancient Asian cities: on Hanoi, Hong Kong, Bangkok. Tokyo slept with such condensed uniformity that it seemed to Hiroshi Michio, the last traffic cop to close his eyes on the cloistered neon of the Akihabara, that so much sleep, like a fog, might rise up and obscure the stars.

  Slee
p followed night across the Russian steppes, across rusting collective farms and lightless arctic forests, across the Urals and the Caucasus, sleep like an army moving west until it crossed the Finnish border, marched into Ukraine and then Romania, then Poland, where it met no opposition but the cool night air.

  Sleep conquered China and rolled into Tibet, Pakistan, India, swept from Calcutta across two longitudes to Hyderabad.

  Sleep took Africa in a space of hours. It moved westward from the Gulf of Aden into the dry hinterlands, took the dying children in the refugee camps and suspended them in darkness; followed the equator through jungles and grasslands and consumed the stony deserts of Egypt, Libya, Algeria; took its final subject in a fish shop in Dakar.

  Dreaming unwound the cities of Europe, interrupting a river of human night noise that had run without surcease since the founding of Rome. Dreaming silenced Berlin and Leipzig; captured Naples and Milan; shut down the humming grids of Paris and Amsterdam; crossed the English Channel and conquered, finally, London, where a few frightened individuals had monitored the systematic dysfunction of the world with their shortwave radios, silent now, but who slept at last with everyone else, and with everyone else dreamed.

  * * *

  It was the same dream for everyone. The dream was complex, but the dream in its most fundamental form was a single thought, a question posed in six billion human skulls and more than three thousand languages.

  The question was: Do you want to live?

  Part Two

  One in Ten Thousand

  Chapter 8

  Buchanan Awake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes, Mary?”

  “You had the dream?”

  “We all did.” />
  His housekeeper confessed: “I told them—I told them yes.”

  “Yes, Mary. So did I.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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