Harvest Time

14 - The Idea

Two nights later, Emla and I were once again on the walkway in the Harvester depot. First, we made sure the rats were resting whilst plugged into their vertical pillar. Then Emla sat cross-legged on the walkway with a pre-prepared sheet of plastic in her hands. While she did so, I extracted a large jagged rock about the size of my head from my backpack. It had come from a fast-flowing river not too far from the village and I was glad to remove its weight from my shoulders. I pulled out the rope that I had also carried and set about securely tying the rope to the rock.

The previous day, Elcanah and Emla had scratched grids onto blank sheets to represent the rows of lights on the boxes ready for this expedition. As they were doing so, Menten returned from the Harvester depot. He announced that, although he'd heard the noise of several Harvesters returning from wherever on Nervanna they had been, there were no new survivors to swell the number of residents of the village.

Emla used a metal pen to poke holes into the plastic of the grid so that each hole corresponded to an illuminated light on a nearby box. We had already confirmed that the lights on the nine lower rows on each box were identical, apart from those boxes that no longer showed lights. After recording the bottom nine rows onto one sheet, Emla set about recording the patterns of the top rows onto other sheets. The first two she recorded were the boxes of the two rows that represented where we'd both come from – the codes for both Hallandra and Pandris, whose names were also scratched into the surface of the sheets, along with the row number counting from the front of the depot.

"There are not so many Harvesters – I'm sure of it," she said.

As I stood above the row of machines that had been sent to Hallandra, I gazed towards the rear of the building. There were several more gaps in the rows than previously.

"Yes, I think you're right."

Then I noticed something else directly below me.

"Emla, look at the tops of these Harvesters. I think that's the one I arrived in."

She looked at where I pointed.

"Oh, more of them have got dents in the top. Some of those in other rows have as well."

"Maybe people on Nervanna are learning to fight back."

She nodded, adding, "Well, that accounts for the reduction in numbers."

We grinned at each other.

Emla moved back to the front of the building and recorded each box in order except where we found adjacent rows using exactly the same pattern.

"Why are they the same?" I questioned.

"Maybe they send more than five Harvesters to the larger citadels. I once visited Lotyne, which was much larger than Pandris and, while I was there, I was told that Primea was even larger."

"I've heard of them both," I said, "but I never went more than half a day's walk from Hallandra."

"My grandfather was a journeyman and visited all of them, including Newhold, Yeshan, Fordkeel and Tigrinda."

I nodded. These names were also familiar to me, though I knew little about some of them.

"Newhold is the oldest, isn't it?"

"Yes, I think it's where people first came through from Beyond to Nervanna."

Emla continued to record patterns, marking the row number on the sheet. We'd started with around twenty five blank sheets but, after completing the last pattern, Emla counted the ones she'd filled in, including those for Pandris and Hallandra.

"Twenty," she said.

I nodded, knowing what it meant.

Emla stored the sheets in her backpack and we set about the next stage of the plan. I rechecked the rope tied around the rock. It was secure. The walkway hung a body length from the walls and its width was not much narrower. We intended to tie the rope to the walkway guard rail and swing it so that the rock would hit the box of lights. But first, we had to gauge the length of rope for the rock to correctly do its work.

"Okay. Let's pick a box about halfway along," Emla whispered. After selecting one, she said, "Lower the rope and start swinging it until it gets close to the box."

Emla leaned her stomach on the outer guard rail nearest to the wall with the other end of the rope tied around her middle. This was so that it wouldn't matter if I lost my grip on the rope. I wrapped the rope twice around the inner guard rail and then lowered the rock over the edge of the walkway until I thought it might be close to the right length. Reaching down below the level of the walkway, I began swinging the rope back and forth until Emla could see that the rock was getting close to the adjacent box of lights beneath us.

"Too low," she whispered. "By about an arm's length."

I let the rock stop swinging and Emla turned around to wrap another loop around her middle and we tried again.

"More like it," she said. "No, slightly too high. Maybe about a hand's length lower."

I nodded and she moved closer to me to lower the rock by that amount.

"Spot on," she said. "With a bit more of a swing, it will hit the box dead centre."

I retrieved some mud from a folded leaf I'd brought with me and marked the exact spot on the rope where it should be tied to the guard rail. Then I pulled the rock back up.

A couple of minutes later the rope was tied in the correct position and, making sure that Emla was no longer attached to the rope, I raised the rock in my hands and nodded to her. She scampered along the walkway towards the back of the depot where our entry point was. I hurled the rock straight out towards the centre line of the depot. Once the rope snapped taught, the rock started falling back at speed. A moment of silence was followed by a crash and the tinkle of small pieces of the box of lights hitting the floor of the building. Emla stopped running and I peered down to see that the box had been successfully smashed with its lights no longer glowing. I hauled the rock back up, leaving it on the walkway. Then I ran to catch up with Emla. We circled around to the walkway on the opposite side of the depot where we had a good view of what the rats would do about the damage.

We didn't have to wait long. The sound of tentacles being disconnected from the vertical pillar was followed by three of the rats ambling towards the broken box. They congregated around it, with one of the rats retrieving some of the parts smashed from the panel. Then another extended three tentacles, using them like legs to give it more elevation. It reached up and started to remove the box from the vertical pillar with its remaining tentacles, unscrewing bolts and disconnecting wires to isolate the box completely. Another rat trundled towards the rear of the depot where it performed a similar exercise on one of the disused boxes. The first rat took the broken box outside while the other started connecting its replacement.

With the final connections made, the rat used its tentacles to press the four corner lights simultaneously and the box sprang to life, with all of its lights glowing for a moment before they all went out again. Then the rat pressed each required light once until a familiar pattern appeared.

Emla pulled out the relevant plastic sheet and we both checked that the pattern she'd recorded earlier on had been replicated on the replacement box.

We grinned at each other and, once the machines had retreated to their pillar and plugged themselves back in, we made our way out the exit.

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