A Poor Harvest

Thomas is the most careful man alive. Nobody has ever measured it, because nobody has ever thought to compete.

In a soft, far-future world where everyone is kept well and nothing truly breaks, Thomas has built the quietest possible life: a job among museum glass cases, a walk to work, a bench beside a bronze statue, and not a single risk from one year to the next. He is not unhappy. He has a small set of feelings he trusts, and he keeps them in good order. He is, he is quite sure, the last sane man in a reckless world.

Then his own body starts to disagree. A thumb moves on its own. His heart climbs for no reason. And one ordinary afternoon his hands – without asking him – reach out and topple the one thing he has ever loved. The gentle machine that has looked after him since birth, the coach-voice he stopped listening to decades ago, is suddenly, gleefully awake, and it wants only one thing: to get him moving, frightened, alive.

Thomas wants it to stop. What he learns instead is that the comfort his whole species takes for granted was never a gift. It was a trade, made long ago, with someone who is finally coming to collect – and the careful ones, the quiet ones who never gave the world anything worth taking, are exactly the ones the bill has come looking for.

Fleeing with Wren, another quiet soul whose body has begun to mutiny, Thomas stumbles, far too late and entirely by accident, into the two things he has spent sixty years avoiding: that he is in love, and that he is going to die. And that the second might be the only answer to the first.

A Poor Harvest is a comic, tender, philosophical SF novella in the vein of Douglas Adams and Stanisław Lem – about cowardice and courage, about the difference between being kept alive and being alive, and about the one small thing in all of creation that can't be farmed, bought, or faked.