Scarecrow

The note was on my bed when I came back from laps.

A small white card. Folded once. Lying exactly in the middle of my pillow, as if somebody had measured.

Laboratory One. Two o’clock. I would be very grateful. — C.

The handwriting was small and neat and leaned slightly forward, like somebody walking into a wind. I’d seen it before. On the bottom of Mother’s medical forms. On the order that moved us to the sixtieth floor.

Liam read it over my shoulder.

”Very grateful,” he said. ”Nobody’s ever been very grateful to me. Not once. I’ve been told I’m adequate.”

”You’re more than adequate.”

”I know,” said Liam. ”But nobody writes it on a card.”

Toby didn’t read it. He looked at it from his bed, and then at me, and then went back to oiling his boots. But he’d stopped humming.

I showed it to Okafor.

I hadn’t meant to. I’d meant to just go. But I passed her office on the way to the mess, and her door was open, and she was at her desk with the lamp off, writing, and I stopped. And she looked up. And I held out the card.

She read it. She didn’t say anything for a while.

”You can refuse,” she said.

”Can I?”

”Regulation forty. A cadet may decline any procedure not required for operational readiness.” She put the card down on her desk, very flat, with one finger on it. ”He’ll say it’s required. It isn’t. He scanned you on day one hundred and twelve. He’s got everything he needs for the Meridian. Anything else is for him.”

”What does he want?”

Okafor looked at the card for a long time.

”He was nineteen,” she said, ”when your father’s eyes went. A junior on the program. Holding the clipboard. Writing it all down for somebody more important.” She took her finger off the card. ”And your father wouldn’t let him near. Not once. Not after. He’d talk to Crane. He’d be polite. He’d say thank you after every test, the way he did with Halloway. But the day his eyes went black, he stopped letting anybody scan them.” She looked at me. ”Crane’s been waiting twenty-six years to see the inside of what your father saw.”

”And now he’s got me.”

”And now he’s got you,” said Okafor.

She gave me back the card.

”Regulation forty,” she said. ”Remember the number.”

Laboratory One hadn’t changed.

The long white room. The white benches. The glass and the wire and the dials. The white chair at the far end. And Fenwick at his bench by the wall with his slate, who didn’t look up when I came in, exactly the way he hadn’t looked up the first time.

But Crane had changed.

He was standing up. That was the first thing. He was always sitting, in my memory, in the white chair, with his long hands folded on the handle of his cane. Today the cane was leaning against the bench, on its own. And he was standing at the long white table, in his shirt sleeves. His gray jacket was over the back of the chair. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow.

I’d never seen his arms before. They were very thin. Very pale. With a faint white scar on the left one, inside the elbow, a neat little circle, like the mark a needle leaves if it goes in the same place for years.

He was moving things on the table. Rearranging them. A slate. A row of glass slides. A thing like a helmet made of wire. He kept picking them up and putting them down again a little to the left.

And on the wall behind him, on a screen, very large, was a picture of my face.

Not my face. My eyes. A still from the gallery camera. Me in the training hall, in the middle of the floor, with my visor up and my eyes wide open, in the second before I went down. Black. Already black. All the way.

Crane turned round.

”Lucas,” he said.

And he smiled. And it wasn’t the smile I knew. The careful one. The one that stopped at the edges of his mouth.

This one went all the way up.

”Sit, sit,” said Crane. ”Please. Not that one. That one. It’s more comfortable. I had it brought up.”

There was a new chair. Leather. With arms. Beside the long table. I sat in it.

Crane didn’t sit. He walked. Up and down the end of the room, in his shirt sleeves, past the screen with my eyes on it and back again. He walked without the cane. He limped, very slightly, on the left side. I’d never seen that either.

”I want to say first,” said Crane, ”how very glad I am that you’re well. Truly. Dr. Halloway tells me there’s no lasting damage. Quite the opposite.” He turned at the end of the room. ”She tells me you can see more.”

”Yes, sir.”

”All at once. Without the—what did you call it? The falling.”

”Yes, sir.”

”How far down?”

I didn’t answer.

Crane stopped walking.

”How far down, Lucas?” he said. Quite gently. ”All the way? To the bottom? To whatever is at the bottom?”

I could see his heart. I didn’t want to. But it was a page, and he was standing ten feet away in his shirt sleeves, and it was right there.

It was going fast.

Not like a bird’s. Not frightened. I’d learned the difference, that week, from two hundred cadets in a mess hall. This was the other kind of fast. The kind Liam’s went before a run. The kind Garnet’s went the night before her birthday, when she couldn’t sleep and came and sat on the end of my bed and asked me what time it was every four minutes.

Crane was excited.

”Far enough,” I said.

He laughed.

Out loud. A real laugh, short and surprised, the way you laugh at something a child says that’s cleverer than you expected. Fenwick, at his bench, looked up. For the first time ever. And then looked down again very quickly.

”Far enough,” said Crane. ”Oh, that’s very good. That’s very like him. That’s almost exactly what he said to me.” He came back to the table. He put both hands flat on it and leaned on them. ”Do you know, I was in the room? When it happened to him. The day his eyes went. I was nineteen. I was holding the clipboard. I wrote down the time.” He looked at the screen. At my eyes, enormous on the wall. ”Fourteen minutes past three. On a Thursday. And then he looked at me. With them. For the first time. And I dropped the clipboard.”

He was quiet for a moment.

”I’ve thought about that every day for twenty-six years,” said Crane. ”What he could see. In that moment. Looking at me. What I looked like, from inside.”

I didn’t say anything.

”He wouldn’t tell me,” said Crane. ”He was always polite. Always. He’d say thank you, Doctor. But he never let me near his eyes again. Never. Not one scan. Not one sample. Not in the war. Not after. And then he went to his valley, and his field, and his wife, and I never saw him again.” He picked up the wire helmet from the table. Turned it over in his long pale hands. ”He took it with him. Whatever he saw. He took it into the ground.”

He held out the helmet.

”I’d like to see it, Lucas,” said Dr. Crane. ”That’s all. I’d just like to see.”

He explained it.

He was very clear. He was always clear. A full neural map. Six hours in the ring, the big white machine at the end of the corridor that I’d heard humming through the wall on day one hundred and twelve. The helmet, to read the signals, while I looked at things. A sample of fluid from each eye. A small needle. Local anesthetic. Dr. Halloway would do it, of course. Nothing that would hurt.

”And then once a week,” said Crane. ”Until the Meridian. A short session. An hour. To watch it develop.” He put the helmet down. ”I’ve had the ring recalibrated. Specifically. For you. It’s taken Fenwick a fortnight.”

Fenwick didn’t look up.

”You’re going to Avalon,” said Crane, ”in a little under ninety days. You may be the most important person on that ship. On that world. And I would very much like to know, before you go, what you are.” He smiled the new smile again. ”Purely for your own safety, of course.”

I looked at the helmet on the table.

I looked at my eyes on the wall.

I thought about Father, at sixteen. On an infirmary step. With a lamp, and a pair of spectacles, making dusk out of soot. So nobody would have to look. So nobody could see in.

He never let me near his eyes again.

”No, thank you, Director,” I said.

It was very quiet in Laboratory One.

Fenwick had stopped writing. I heard it. The little scratch of his stylus on the slate, which had been going under everything since I came in, like a clock. It stopped.

Crane didn’t move.

He stood at the long white table with his hands flat on it and his sleeves rolled up, and looked at me. And the new smile stayed exactly where it was. It didn’t go. It didn’t change. It just stopped being attached to anything, the way a coat on a hook stops looking like a person.

”Regulation forty,” I said. ”A cadet may decline any procedure not required for operational readiness.”

”You’ve been reading.”

”Sergeant Okafor told me the number.”

”Of course she did.” Crane straightened up. He took his hands off the table. ”Of course she did. Ada always knows the number.” He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair, and put it on, slowly, one arm and then the other. And rolled his sleeves down underneath it. And did up the cuffs. And by the time he’d finished, he was the Crane I knew. Gray and narrow and buttoned. He picked up his cane.

He sat down. In the white chair. And folded his hands on the handle.

”You’re quite right,” he said. ”Regulation forty. It’s a good regulation. I helped write it.” He smiled. The old smile. The careful one. ”I wouldn’t dream of insisting.”

I waited.

I knew there was something else. I didn’t need to look at his heart. It was in the way he’d put the jacket on. The way you put a coat on before you go out into the weather.

”How is your mother?” said Crane.

”Better, sir. Thank you.”

”I’m so glad. I read Miss Pell’s reports, you know. Every week. Personally.” He tilted his head. ”Forty-three meters without the frame, in the spring. And now, I’m told, she walks to the lift and back every morning. And the marker’s been going down. Six weeks running. Dr. Halloway is cautiously delighted. So am I.”

”Thank you, sir.”

”And the girls.” His voice was very warm. ”Garnet has a lemon tree. In the bath, I gather, which Miss Pell has views about. And Genny has a chemistry set. Did you know? Miss Pell put in a request for it last month. Quite an expensive one. Glassware. Burners.” He smiled. ”I approved it personally. I thought, a Dask with a chemistry set. What could possibly be more appropriate.”

I didn’t say anything.

”They’re very comfortable,” said Crane. ”Aren’t they? On the sixtieth floor. Good food. A good school. A good doctor, just down the corridor. The vials, every Monday, regular as the tide.” He looked at the screen on the wall. At my eyes. ”I do think about them, you know. Your sisters. When you’re on Avalon. They’ll be so far away from you. So far. And they’ll need people here who are thinking about them. Who care how comfortable they are.”

The lamp over the long table hummed.

”I’d so hate,” said Dr. Crane, very gently, ”for anything to become uncomfortable.”

I looked at his heart.

I want that on the record. I’d decided I wasn’t going to, in this room. I’d decided on the way up. But I did. I looked right into him, all the way down, the way I’d looked at the mist in the training hall.

It was going slow. Even. Calm. Sixty beats. Seventy at most.

The Senator’s heart had been going like a bird’s, in the little side room, when he talked about leashes. He’d been terrified of me. He’d come anyway, but he’d been terrified.

Crane wasn’t frightened of me at all.

Not at all. Not even a little. He sat in his white chair, with a boy in front of him who’d turned a hall full of fuel into dust, who could see the iron in his blood and the bricks it was made of and the little bright points under that, who could have reached into him and changed any of it, and his heart went sixty beats a minute, like a man reading a newspaper.

Okafor’s heart didn’t skip, because she’d known Father.

The Chancellor’s heart didn’t skip, because, I think, she’d decided a long time ago what she thought about everything and didn’t need to be frightened anymore.

Crane’s heart didn’t skip because he knew I wouldn’t.

He knew I’d never touch him. Not with Mother on the sixtieth floor. Not with Garnet’s lemon tree and Genny’s glassware. Not with the vials, every Monday.

He was the only person in the dome who wasn’t frightened of me.

That was the most frightening thing in the room.

”Six hours,” I said.

Crane didn’t smile. He was too clever to smile.

”Thank you, Lucas,” he said. ”That’s very kind.”

”Sergeant Okafor sits in.”

”Of course. I’d like her to.”

”And Dr. Halloway does the needle. Not anybody else.”

”I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

”And not once a week,” I said. ”Once. Today. That’s all.”

He looked at me for a long time.

”Once a month,” he said.

”Once.”

”Lucas.” Very gently. ”Once a month. Until the Meridian. Three sessions. An hour each.” He folded his hands. ”I think, if you think about it, that’s very reasonable. Given everything. Given how comfortable everyone is.”

I thought about Genny. On the screen. Not on the screen.

”Once a month,” I said.

”Thank you,” said Dr. Crane. ”Fenwick. Consent obtained.”

Fenwick wrote it down.

The ring was a white tunnel in a white room. You lay on a narrow bed and it slid you in, slowly, until there was white all round you, a hand’s breadth from your face, humming.

Halloway did the needle first. In the next room. With the light turned down and Okafor standing by the door with her arms folded. She was quick. It stung, and then it didn’t, and then it was over, and there were two little glass tubes in a rack on her tray with something clear in them, and she labeled them in her own handwriting, and didn’t give them to anybody. She put them in her silver case and shut it.

”Mine,” she said, to nobody in particular. ”Until I’ve looked.”

Okafor said nothing. But I saw her look at the case, and then at Halloway, and something passed between them that I didn’t have a word for yet.

Then the ring.

It was six hours. I lay in the white and looked at whatever they told me to. A leaf, on a screen. A crystal, on a stand by my feet. A glass of water. My own hand. Fenwick’s voice through a speaker, very dry, saying now look at the crystal, now look away, now look at the crystal again, all the way down please. And the wire helmet on my head, ticking, and the ring humming.

I did what they asked.

But I didn’t only do what they asked.

There was a window.

At the end of the ring, by my feet, through the white, there was a small glass panel. And through the panel, if you were lying very still, you could see into the control room. Fenwick’s bench. Crane’s chair. And the screens on the wall behind them.

I couldn’t have read them. Not before. Not from inside a machine, through a panel, at that angle, upside down.

But it was a page now. Everything was.

So in the fourth hour, when Fenwick was saying look at the water, all the way down, please, and Crane had gone out to take a call, I looked at the water. All the way down. Like he asked. And let the rest be there, faint, the way I’d learned. Like stars in the daytime.

And I read the screen on the wall behind Crane’s empty chair.

It wasn’t about me. It was a table. Rows and columns. Small white numbers on a dark ground. And down the left side, names I knew. Names I’d last seen scratched into the back of a steel locker in the dark.

Callsigns.

Nine of them that were still lit. And twenty-five gray.

It was the call-in log. The real one. Not Okafor’s slate with its little ticks. Crane’s. With all the numbers. Oxygen. Soil. Temperature. Plant output. Water. Every base, every cycle, every nine days, right back to the first landing.

My eyes went to the third line down before I could stop them.

WREN.

Her numbers were the best. Okafor had said so. Everyone said so. Oxygen higher than anyone’s. Soil better. Plant output twice the next base down. A long clean column, cycle after cycle, never a gap.

I read them. All of them. All at once. Sixty-odd cycles. Right back to the beginning.

And I’d been reading things all my life. Soil. Water. Wheat. I knew what real numbers looked like. Real numbers wobbled. Real soil got better and worse. Real oxygen went up when the plant was running well and down when a filter clogged. Real weather came and went. Our field at home had never had the same numbers two weeks running. Not once in fifteen years.

Wren’s numbers wobbled too.

But they wobbled the same.

Cycle one, cycle nine, cycle seventeen, cycle twenty-five. The same oxygen. To the second decimal place. The same soil. The same water. The same plant output. Cycle two, cycle ten, cycle eighteen, cycle twenty-six. The same again. A different set. But the same as each other.

Every eight cycles. Round and round.

Like a song somebody had recorded, and was playing over and over, and hoping nobody would notice it was the same song.

Nothing is the same every time, I thought, very clearly, lying in the white ring with the helmet ticking on my head. Not wheat. Not weather. Not even Luna’s heart.

Somebody was sending Wren’s numbers.

And it wasn’t Wren.

”Lucas,” said Fenwick’s voice through the speaker. Very dry. ”Your readings have changed. Considerably. Are you still looking at the water?”

I looked at the water.

I held my face still. The way Luna did. The way I’d watched her do it for six months, the cold kind and the other kind, until I knew how. I held it so still that if Crane had come back in that second and looked through the panel, he’d have seen a boy in a machine looking at a glass of water and nothing else.

”Yes,” I said. ”Sorry. I was thinking about home.”

”Please don’t,” said Fenwick. ”It interferes.”

They let me out at eight.

Crane shook my hand in the corridor. He was very warm. He said thank you three times, and remarkable twice, and that he’d see me in a month. He said it had been the most useful afternoon he’d had in twenty-six years.

I said thank you, Director. Because Father always had.

Okafor walked me back to the barracks. She didn’t say anything until we were halfway there, in the long gray corridor past the training halls, where there were no cameras because the wiring was old.

”You saw something,” she said. Not a question.

”Yes.”

”In there. In the fourth hour. Fenwick’s face went the color of milk.”

”Yes.”

Okafor didn’t look at me. She kept walking.

”Not here,” she said. ”Not tonight. Write it down somewhere nobody reads.” A pause. ”And Dask.”

”Sergeant?”

”Whatever it is.” Her voice was very low. ”Don’t tell the Chancellor.”

I stopped walking.

Okafor didn’t. She went on, three steps, four, and then stopped too, and stood there in the corridor with her back to me.

”She’s told,” said Okafor, ”every nine days. By the Director’s office. That her niece is well.” She was quiet. ”So I’m told. That’s what she said to you at the gala. Isn’t it.”

”Yes.”

”Then she’s already wondering,” said Okafor. ”And a woman like that, wondering, is dangerous enough. Don’t give her a reason.” She started walking again. ”Not until you’ve got the rest of it.”

I wrote it down that night. Not in notebook fifteen. In the margin of Father’s anatomy book, very small, in pencil, on the page about the eye. Where nobody would read it but me.

Day 191. Crane.

He’s not frightened of me. He’s the only one.

Regulation 40. Once a month.

Wren’s numbers come round every eight cycles. The same. To the decimal.

Somebody is sending them.

And under it, smaller still, the thing I’d worked out lying in the ring, with the water in front of me and the helmet ticking:

The loop starts at cycle one.

I’d read sixty-odd cycles in one look, and the song started at the very beginning. Which meant either Wren had never sent a real number in her life, or someone had been sending them for her since the first day.

Or her base had gone quiet almost at once.

And somebody had wanted very much for nobody to notice.

I lay in the dark and thought about the scratches on the back of the locker. MARA VOSS. WREN. 11/34. Back for the wheat.

Okafor had said she was fast at deciding.

I thought: If you were fast at deciding, and your base went quiet, and you were still alive. What would you decide?

I didn’t know.

But I wrote one more line. At the very bottom of the page about the eye. Before I put the book away.

Back for the wheat.

So go and get her.