Scarecrow

The kits lived under field four.

I hadn’t known there was an under. Field four was the cold field, flat white rock with vents in it, at the very bottom of the cave. I’d thought it was the bottom. But on the Monday after the suits, Okafor took Squad Eight to the far corner of it, where there was a square of floor painted with yellow and black stripes, and stood us on it, and spoke into a box on the wall.

And the floor went down.

All of it. The whole square, with the five of us standing on it, and Okafor, sinking into the rock with a deep slow grinding hum, past layer after layer of pale brown stone, past pipes and cables and lamps set into the walls, for a long time. Longer than the stair to the gallery. I counted. When we stopped, I’d got to two hundred and six, and the air was warmer, and it smelled of oil and hot metal and rock dust, and something else. Something like the air on field one after the steel ball. Sharp. Charged.

The doors in front of us opened.

It was a hangar.

That’s the only word for it. A long, high, echoing space, cut out of the rock, bigger than the mess, bigger than all four fields put together. Lit from above by rows of white lamps so bright they hurt. And down the middle of it, on a long track set into the floor, in a line, there were forty shapes.

Long gray cylinders. Like the one on the screen in the lecture. Like seeds. Taller than three men, standing on end, each one held upright by a steel cradle. Fins at one end. A heavy, blunt nose at the other.

Pods.

And beside each pod, on the floor, under a gray sheet, something about the size of a car.

”Your kits,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”Don’t touch them.”

Nobody touched them. Nobody said anything at all. Toby had his tuning fork out of his pocket and was holding it in both hands, not tapping it. Liam was staring up at the nearest pod with his mouth open. Seraphina had folded her arms very tightly.

Luna was looking down the line of pods, counting. I watched her lips move. When she got to the end, she stopped, and looked at me.

Forty.

The engineer who showed us was called Pryce.

She was young. Younger than Halloway. Maybe twenty. With round spectacles and short dark hair and ink on her fingers and a slate under her arm that she kept nearly dropping. And she was so excited about the kits that she kept forgetting to breathe between sentences.

”Right,” she said. ”Right. So. This is a—well, you’ve seen the pictures. Everyone’s seen the pictures. But the pictures don’t—it’s much better in person. Come and look. Don’t touch. But look.”

She pulled the gray sheet off the nearest kit.

It was smaller than I’d expected. The size of a cart, maybe. A low, squat, rounded shape, gray like the suits, with no seams that I could see and no windows and no doors. Just a smooth curved shell, like a stone from a riverbed, sitting on the floor of the hangar. It could have been anything.

”It doesn’t look like much,” said Pryce happily. ”That’s the point. It’s folded. Everything’s folded. You could drop this off a cliff and it’d be fine. You probably will drop it off a cliff, some of you, the way the pods come down.” She patted the shell. ”But when it lands, and it opens, and you feed it—”

She looked over her shoulder at Okafor.

Okafor nodded once.

Pryce grinned, and spoke into her slate.

The shell opened.

Not like a door. Like a flower. Like the fern’s frond, unrolling. It split along lines I hadn’t been able to see, a dozen of them at once, and the pieces curled back and down and out, and under them there were more pieces, folded, and they unfolded too. Legs. Six of them. Jointed, like an insect’s. They pushed down into the floor of the hangar and lifted the whole kit up off the ground until it stood taller than me.

Then arms. Four, from the sides, long and thin, with something at the end of each like a hand and a shovel at the same time.

Then a mouth.

That’s what it looked like. At the front, low down, a wide dark opening, lined with something that turned and ground.

”Feed,” said Pryce, to the slate.

A cart came along the track from the far end of the hangar, pushed by two engineers in white, piled high with broken gray rock. They tipped it out in front of the kit. And the four arms reached down and gathered up the rock and fed it into the mouth, steadily, armful after armful, like someone eating bread, and the mouth ground it, with a deep slow crunching hum I could feel through my boots.

And at the back of the kit, something began to come out.

Not rock. Something smooth. Gray. Pouring out of a slot in the back of the machine in a thin flat ribbon, and laying itself down on the floor of the hangar, and hardening as it went. Then another ribbon on top of that one. And another. Layer on layer. Rising.

A wall.

In ten minutes, it was as high as my waist. In twenty, as high as my head. A smooth curved gray wall, standing on the floor of the hangar, made out of a cart of broken rock.

”That’s at test speed,” said Pryce. She’d gone pink. ”Down there, with a full feed and room to work, it’ll do a shelter in a day. A building in a week. And it learns. It gets faster. It grows more arms. It builds more of itself.” She looked at the wall, and then at us, and her eyes were shining behind her spectacles. ”Give it a year, and a mountain to eat, and it’ll give you a fortress.”

Liam said a word that Okafor would have written down if she hadn’t been too busy watching me.

Because I was looking.

Of course I was. I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried. The moment the shell opened, I was inside it.

It was beautiful.

I want to say that properly, because of what happened after. It was the most beautiful machine I’d ever seen. More than the clock in the kitchen that Father took apart for me when I was six and put back together, piece by piece, so I could watch. More than the suits. More than anything.

The legs were simple. Motors and joints and springs. Odell’s kind of metal, full of careful holes. I understood the legs. The arms were a little harder. There was a chemistry in the hands that I had to stop and look at twice, something that tasted the rock as it picked it up and decided what it was. But I understood it. Father had taught me what rock was made of when I was five.

The mouth. The grinders. And behind them, the gut. That was the clever part. A long coiled chamber, hot, full of things that broke the rock down into what it was made of, the little bricks, and sorted them, and sent them on. Iron one way. Silicon another. The things that make glass. The things that make steel. Little rivers of them, running through the machine like blood through a body.

I followed them. All of them. I did what Odell had taught me, all week. Why. Why this pipe here. Why this chamber that shape. Why the heat at this end and not that one. Every piece, every bolt, every river.

I took it apart in my head.

All of it.

And they all ran to the middle.

Every pipe. Every wire. Every one of the little rivers. They all went to one place, in the center of the kit, behind the gut, where it was hottest and the hum was deepest. A sphere. About the size of a man’s head. Smooth. Sealed.

The core.

I looked into it.

And I couldn’t see anything.

It wasn’t dark. It wasn’t empty. It wasn’t like looking at a wall.

It was fog.

The same fog as the mud in the red jungle. Gray and soft and shapeless. I pushed into it, the way I push into everything, and it was like pushing into wet wool. Like pushing into a dream. There was nothing to take hold of. Nothing to pick. Nothing that was one thing and not another.

I pushed harder.

The hot thing under the boards woke up and pushed with me.

And the fog didn’t move. It didn’t get thinner. It didn’t push back. It just was, smooth and gray and complete, and everything I sent into it slid off like water off glass.

I felt something warm on my lip.

I put my hand up. It came away red.

”Lucas,” said Toby, very quietly, beside me.

I didn’t answer. I was still looking. Still pushing. At a ball of fog the size of a man’s head, in the middle of the most beautiful machine I’d ever seen, that every single part of the machine was built to serve.

And I couldn’t see what it was.

For the first time since I was five years old, standing in the wheat with Father, I’d looked at something made by human hands and couldn’t see inside it.

If it had been made by human hands.

I didn’t know where that thought came from. It came up out of the fog on its own, and sat there, and wouldn’t go away.

”Who designed the core?”

Pryce stopped talking.

She’d been in the middle of a sentence about material throughput. She stopped in the middle of it, with her mouth still open, and looked at me. At the blood on my chin. At my eyes.

”The—sorry?”

”The middle,” I said. ”The sphere. Where everything goes. Who designed it?”

Behind me, Toby had gone very quiet. Liam had stopped fidgeting. Seraphina had moved, very slightly, so she was standing a little in front of Toby.

Pryce looked at her slate. Then at the machine. Then back at me.

”That’s—” She pushed her spectacles up her nose with one inky finger. ”That’s not really my department. I’m systems. Arms, feed, fabrication. The core’s—” She stopped again. ”The core comes from the Director’s office. Sealed. We fit the rest of the kit round it.”

”Who designs it?”

”I don’t know.”

”Who builds it?”

”I don’t know,” said Pryce. And I believed her. She said it the way Okafor had said no about the cut in the film strip. As though she’d asked herself the same question, more than once, and wished she had a better answer. ”Honestly. Nobody down here knows. It comes in a crate with the Director’s seal on it, and we unpack it, and we fit it, and we don’t open it. Those are the instructions. Do not open.” She tried to smile. ”I asked, my first month. My supervisor told me it was proprietary. I asked what that meant. He said it meant don’t ask.”

”What does it do?”

”Everything,” said Pryce simply. ”It’s the brain. The intelligence. It runs the whole machine. It’s what you’ll talk to, through the link in your suit, when you’re down there. It learns.” She looked at the humming machine, and something in her face had gone a little less bright. ”It’s the best thing in the kit. Everybody says so. It just works.”

”Has anyone ever opened one?”

Pryce didn’t answer.

From the corner of the hangar, from the bench where he’d been pretending not to watch, Odell said: ”No.”

He came over slowly. Short and wide, wiping his burned hands on his leather apron. He stopped beside Pryce and looked at the machine. At the place in the middle of it where the sphere was, which he couldn’t see. Then he looked at me.

”Nobody’s ever opened one,” said Odell. ”Not down here. I asked too. Eleven years ago. When they first brought me in to build the housing round it.” He jerked his chin at the kit. ”They gave me its size, and its weight, and where the connections go, and how hot it runs. And they told me to build a machine round it. So I did.” A pause. ”I’ve built seventy-four of them now. And I’ve never once seen inside the thing I was building them round.”

”I can’t either,” I said.

Odell went very still.

So did Pryce. So did everyone. The machine hummed on behind us, eating its rock, making its wall.

”You can’t,” said Odell.

”I tried. I can see everything else. Every inch. I took it apart in my head.” I wiped my nose on the back of my hand. It came away red. ”But the middle’s fog. Like mud. I push and it slides off. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything to see.”

Odell looked at me for a long time with his small pale eyes.

Then he looked at the kit.

Then back at me.

”Clean your face, Dask,” he said quietly. ”Then go back up with your squad. And don’t say that to anyone else.” He turned away. ”Pryce. Shut her down. We’re done.”

That evening, I didn’t go to the suit bay. Odell had told me not to. We’re done with metal, Dask. Go and read something.

So I went to the reading room.

Luna was there already. Of course she was. She was sitting at our table, in the corner, with the lamp pulled close, and she didn’t have the cell biology book open. She didn’t have any book open. She had notebook fifteen, which I’d left on the table that morning, and she was looking at a page near the back.

The page from Day 64. The sim.

Mud is fog to me past a meter. I can only change what I can see.

She looked up when I sat down.

”Tell me exactly,” she said. ”Not what you told Odell. Exactly.”

I told her.

The arms. The mouth. The gut. The wall, laid down grain by grain. All the cables and pipes and little rivers running to the middle. And the sphere. And the fog. And the hot thing, sliding off.

She listened without moving. When I’d finished, she was quiet for a long time.

”In the sim,” she said finally. ”The mud. Why was it fog?”

”Because there’s too much of it. It’s not one thing. It’s everything, mixed, all the way down. A meter in, I can’t pick anything out.”

”And the core?”

”It’s the size of a head.”

”So it’s not too much,” said Luna. ”It’s not mixed. It’s not deep.” She turned notebook fifteen round to face me, and put her finger on the line. Mud is fog to me past a meter. ”It’s fog without a reason.”

I looked at the line for a long time.

”Something’s making it fog,” said Luna Windsor. Very quietly. ”On purpose.”

Neither of us said anything for a while. The lamp hummed. The water in the glass by her elbow had started, very slowly, to frost.

”Odell said they gave him its size and weight,” I said. ”Eleven years ago. And how hot it runs.”

”Yes.”

”Eleven years ago, nobody had been to Avalon.”

Luna’s finger stopped moving on the page.

”The surveys were two years ago,” I said. ”Crane said so. In the lecture. Our surveys have covered the planet from orbit for two years.” I looked at her. ”But they were building the core eleven years ago. Before anybody knew there was a green world. Before there was anywhere to send it.”

”So the core wasn’t designed for Avalon,” said Luna slowly.

”Or somebody knew about Avalon,” I said, ”nine years before they told anyone.”

The frost on the glass by her elbow went all the way up to the rim.

I lay awake for a long time that night.

Not like the night after Mother read Miss Pell’s letter. That had been a heavy kind of awake, like lying under a wet blanket. This was the other kind. The kind where your mind won’t sit still, and keeps getting up and walking round the same room, and opening the same doors, and finding them all locked.

I thought about Father, at the kitchen table, when I was six, with the old clock in pieces on a cloth between us. Every spring, every gear, every tiny screw, laid out in rows.

You don’t know how something works until you can put it back together, Lucas. Taking it apart is easy. Any fool with a hammer can take something apart.

I’d taken the kit apart. In my head. Every piece of it.

And I couldn’t put it back together. Because I didn’t know what was in the middle. And everything ran to the middle.

In six months, a machine like that was going to come down out of the Meridian in a pod with me inside it, first out, somewhere nobody had been. And it was going to unfold, and open its mouth, and start to eat, and build me a room, and a shelter, and a building, and a fort. And something in the middle of it, something I couldn’t see, was going to tell it what to do.

And it was going to talk to me. Through the cold coin at the base of my skull. Every day. In a calm, quiet, polite voice.

Some of you will be very good at feeding it.

I reached up in the dark for notebook fifteen, and found the pen, and wrote by feel.

Day 109. The kit.

Took it apart. Can’t put it back.

The core is fog. Not like mud. Fog without a reason.

Odell built the housing eleven years ago. Surveys: two years ago.

Who knew?

And then, at the back, on the list. Number five.

5. What I can’t see. And why.