Harvest time had come again, and now that his tenth birthday had come and gone, Martin could join his father for the Offering. It was a chilly morning, the first hints of autumn were in the air—vibrant colors on the leaves of every tree around the estate, mechanics changing the combines in the garage to less viscous oil, winds that screamed from the northwest at night—and Martin and his father bundled up tight before clambering into his car. It was a dusty old thing, but it still drove, and that was all that mattered.

“Always change the oil on time and rotate the tires, Marty,” His father said for the hundredth time, “And she’ll run forever. Treat the machine right, and the machine will treat you right.”

The suspension needed repairs, however, and their red automobile bounced along the road hard enough to set the father’s head bumping into the ceiling of the cab every now and again. Soon enough the dirt roads gave way to asphalt and the ride was smoother. They found their place in the long procession of cars and trucks that rolled east at a steady forty miles an hour, toward the three hills where the Offering would happen. In most of the other vehicles, the same sight: fathers with sons. Here and there a matriarch with her eldest daughter.

Ahead, the three biggest hills for a hundred miles rose sharply, on the other side of a bend in the river where they were to park. Great green lumps blanketed in trees that never lost their leaves. When the turnoff appeared, Martin half-expected a vast expanse of concrete, a pad like the parking space at the estate, but he found the thousand-odd vehicles were dispersing over trimmed grass, a landscape that went up and down in gentle slopes. Martin’s father stopped the car near the sharp drop-off into the river, grinning.

“Here we are, Marty. The best seat in the house.”

“What house, pa?”

“It’s a saying. Someday I’ll take you to the theater where your mother and I met. A million years ago, feels like it was now. Then I’ll show you the real ‘best seats in the house.’”

Martin gave his father a cockeyed look.

“Never mind. Let’s get our seats and say our hellos.”

From the trunk of the car they removed their lawn chairs and unfolded them, and Martin’s father got the cooler which he had packed with beers for himself and sodas for the boy. Other fathers from other estates, houses, farms, and even villages all came by and left their greetings and their small talk. Though he could not put words to the feeling himself, Martin felt the ritual atmosphere, a microcosm of religious fervor in the way the adults spoke to one another after meeting for perhaps the first time since the last Offering.

He started to wander off, walking among the cars and trucks and gaggles of people, and took note that some fathers and mothers had brought more than just their eldest kids with them. Here and there some set up small cookfires and fried ham and eggs and sausages, filling the air with a sweet smell, and elsewhere old widowers drank amber liquor and smoked acrid cigars. He bumped into a girl and spent much of the day with her and her mother, as if to see if they were as different from one another as he felt from his father. Martin found they didn’t seem to be—their conversations were as natural and full of short, genuine laughter as his talks with his own mom.

The day grew warmer until playing with the other few children Martin and the girl collected became too exhausting, and he made his way back to his father and the drop-off. There he had another soda and slumped in his chair, just in time for the sun to begin its descent toward the horizon. The time of the Offering was coming—it always happened just as the sky turned blue in the west. His father was more than a few beers in, so Martin decided not to tell him about the girl and the matriarch. Instead, he stayed quiet and kept an eye on the sky.

When the moment of the Offering came, it was a powerful sight. An enormous, gleaming gold vessel, ornate and baroque and miles long, descended from the stars. In many places along its sleek hull were gently pulsing lights in pink, green, blue, and white. It came on fast at first, and then slowed down, finally halting at a point above and centered with the three hills. A powerful hush descended with it on everyone in the crowd. At the base of the vessel, a huge gate sluiced open and pouring from it was a ray of red light, eerie and commanding.

All of the produce, all of the livestock, all of the thousands of tons of sugar and potatoes and chicken eggs that had been placed throughout the forests on the three hills’ slopes began to drift up out of the foliage. A herd of cows, terrified into stunned silence, five hundred crates of corn, tractor trailers filled with live ducks, a hundred liquor stores’ worth of booze in steel containers, all of it drifted from the ground, pulled inexorably inside of the ship’s hull. The labor of every farm and distillery in the state was gobbled up by the ship in a matter of minutes, orderly and graceful, organized far in advance.

The gateway slid closed. Broad strips of multicolored light zipped up the length of the gold vessel, and a moment later it began the most spectacular fireworks show Martin could have ever conceived of. He cheered and jumped out of his chair, as did everyone else, even the elderly, even the hard-nosed, the men who looked like they went everywhere looking for a fight. All were bathed in the sparkling glow of the fireworks, laughing, dancing, screaming for joy.

It was all over in about an hour, and the ship left far more quickly than it had arrived, disappearing into the tapestry of stars above. Musicians began playing, singers began singing, dancers began dancing. The aura of religious buzz had become a palpable force, and all the people—the elders, the matriarchs and patriarchs, the noble pastors and politicians, began to party like people who had seen the face of God and lived to tell about it. Although he was tired, Martin forced himself to stay awake as long as he could, wandering through the celebration feeling as drunk as the adults. At the heart of the festivities, he found a dozen men and women jumping around and hollering on top of a flatbed truck, and when the music abated for a moment a well-dressed man about half his father’s age raised a glass to everyone around.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have done it for yet another year. We’ve played our part to keep a whole world safe, to feed the trillion families in glass and steel towers light years away, and they’ve kept their promise to keep our way of life simple, happy, and sane. I raise a toast to them, those poor devils from another star, a toast for those people of Earth!”

Everyone clinked their glasses and bottles together, some of them even deigned to touch Martin’s can of pop with their rum or beer, and they raised their cry up, up, up into the night, safe for another year from whatever terror the people of Earth might bring them, should they fail in their Offering next year.