Scarecrow

The first thing I learned about the crossing was that there was nothing to see.

I’d thought there would be. I’d thought, lying in the dark on the first night with the hum all around me, that I’d look out through the hull the way I looked through everything, and see space. Stars. The Earth going away behind us. The moon. Something.

I looked.

There was the pod. Padded, pale blue, every stitch in the lining. There was the ring, and the forty pods in it, and the forty people, and their hearts, and the little hard shapes of the things they’d brought: Toby’s tuning fork, Luna’s snowflake clip, Liam’s spare socks, which he’d smuggled in against regulations in the leg of his suit. There were the decks, and the fuel, and the air, and the kits in their cradles, folded up tight like seeds.

There was the spine. Fog.

And then there was the hull. And past the hull—

Nothing.

Not dark. Dark is a thing. Dark has a shape, if you look into it: the shape of a room, or a cave, or a field at night. This had no shape. I looked out through the skin of the Meridian, and there wasn’t anything for my eyes to take hold of. No rock, no air, no dust. Nothing to see the inside of. A page with nothing written on it, going on and on in every direction, forever.

I stopped looking after about a minute.

I didn’t look out again for nineteen days.

Day 277. Night. Nothing outside. Nothing at all. I didn’t know nothing could be that big.

The pods were built for it.

That was the second thing I learned. Okafor had walked us through it in the cave, a hundred times, and I’d nodded and memorized it and not really believed it. Now I believed it.

There was a tube by my left cheek for water. A tube by my right cheek for food, which was paste, which tasted of the ration bar, which tasted of oats and chalk. There was a system for the other thing, which I’m not going to describe, and which Liam described on the squad channel on the first morning in such detail that Luna muted him for an hour.

There was a little lamp over my head, on a stalk, that you could turn on and off. There was a screen on my wrist, on the suit, that told you the day and the time and your heart rate and how much water you’d had. There was a strap you could pull to tilt the seat back, so you could lie almost flat. There was nothing else.

Three weeks.

”It’s like being posted somewhere,” said Liam, on the second day, when Luna unmuted him. ”In an envelope. A very small envelope. With paste.”

”You’re not in an envelope,” said Seraphina.

”I am spiritually in an envelope, Sera.”

The link opened on the hour. Every hour, for ten minutes, the squad channel came on in our ears, and we could talk. The rest of the time, it was off. To save power, they said. Or to save us from each other.

We talked a great deal in those ten minutes. About nothing. About the paste, and whether Toby’s tasted different from Liam’s, which it didn’t, though Liam swore it did. About what Okafor was doing right now, this minute, back in the cave. About whether Pip had got to keep the button Garnet sent. About Biscuit.

And then the ten minutes would end, and the click would come, and the room in my ear with five people in it would close, and it would be just me, and the pale blue, and the hum.

Day 278. Liam has started counting regulations. Out loud. He’s at nine.

Day 279. Liam’s at nineteen.

Day 280. Liam got to thirty-one and stopped and thought about it for the whole ten minutes. Didn’t say anything. First time in his life.

I read.

That was what I did, mostly. In the hours between the ten minutes. I turned on the little lamp on its stalk, and I took Halloway’s parcel out of my thigh pocket, and I opened it.

It was thin paper. Very thin. Almost transparent, like onion skin, and covered on both sides in her small sharp handwriting, so close together that the lines nearly touched. No pictures. No diagrams. She’d drawn some in the margins, here and there, very small, with a fine pen. A nerve. A vessel. A cross-section of a spinal cord, labeled in letters so tiny I had to hold the page almost against my nose.

At the top of the first page, in her ordinary handwriting, she’d written:

For L. D. Read slowly. Read it again. You will get it wrong the first time. That is not a reason to stop.

R. H.

I read it slowly.

I read the vagus nerve, properly, every branch, three times. I read the brainstem, properly, until I could see it with my eyes shut. I read the cases she’d got wrong, which were the most interesting part, because she’d written down not just what she’d done, but what she’d thought while she was doing it, and where the thinking had gone wrong. I was certain. Certainty is a symptom. Look for what you’re not seeing.

And I read Hana.

All of it. Every minute. The pressure, the pocket, the vessel. My hands, which weren’t my hands. Her voice, saying seam it. Written up the night after, in that small sharp writing, as calmly as if it had happened to somebody else. Until the very last line, which was in a different ink, as if she’d come back to it later.

He asked whether it was enough. It was. I did not tell him that at the time. I am telling him now.

I turned off the lamp, after that one, and lay in the dark for a while.

Day 283. Halloway’s notes, page 41. ”Certainty is a symptom.”

Toby sang.

Not at first. For the first few days, he hummed, the way he had on the first night, very low, under his breath, when the link was open and when it wasn’t. I could hear it through the walls of the pods. I could see it, too, if I looked: the little waves of it going out from his pod through the steel, the way his gift always made sound go further than it should.

On the sixth day, he started to sing.

The old song. With the words. Very quietly. Miss Pell’s song, from the orphan hall. Mother’s song, from the field. And the four hidden notes at the end that Garnet had taught him on families’ day, which nobody else in the program knew except the two of us and Garnet and Mother and Miss Pell.

And on the seventh day, the ship sang back.

I didn’t believe it at first. I thought I’d imagined it. I was lying in the dark, with the lamp off, listening to Toby through the wall. He got to the end of the song. The four hidden notes. Low, and then lower, and then up, and then down.

And under everything, the hum changed.

Not much. Not loud. It just moved. The way a voice moves when it’s trying to find a note it’s heard. Low, and then lower, and then up, and then down.

Four notes.

Then it went back to what it had been. Even. Steady. Breathing.

The link was open. It was the ten minutes.

”Toby,” I said.

”I know,” said Toby. Very quietly. ”I heard it.”

”What did you hear?” said Liam. ”What? What did he hear? Sera, did you hear anything?”

”No,” said Seraphina.

”It sang it back,” said Toby. ”The ending. The four notes.” A pause. ”It got the third one a bit wrong. But it was trying.”

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Risa, on the open channel, from Squad Three, very flat: ”It went to thirty-six. For the four notes. Then back to thirty.”

”Toby,” said Luna. Very calm. ”Don’t stop.”

”I wasn’t going to,” said Toby.

Day 284. Toby sang the song. The ship sang the end back. Four notes. Got the third one wrong.

It’s listening. Father said. Okafor said.

It’s not just listening. It’s learning.

Luna asked the number every day.

At noon. When the link opened. Not on the squad channel. On the open one, the all-cadets one, which went, they’d told us, to every pod and to the crew in the nose of the ship and, through the crew, to Command.

”This is Cadet Windsor, Squad Eight,” she’d say. Very clear. Very calm. ”How many are you expecting to bring back?”

Then she’d wait. The whole ten minutes.

Nobody answered.

Nobody ever answered. Not the crew, whom none of us had ever seen. Not Command. Not the flat recorded voice that had counted us down. Day after day, at noon, Luna asked, and the channel hissed, and nothing came back.

She asked anyway.

By the second week, other people had started saying it with her. Not loud. Not all of them. A cadet in Squad One. Two in Squad Five. Risa, very flat. Liam, of course. And then more. So that by the fifteenth day, at noon, when Luna said how many are you expecting to bring back, there were twenty voices on the open channel, saying it with her, all at once, very quietly. Like a congregation.

Nobody answered that either.

Day 292. Twenty-three voices at noon. No answer.

There was a second line in the pods. Okafor had told us about it in the cave and none of us had paid much attention. A pair line. Every pod was wired to one other, for buddy checks, so that if one cadet’s suit went quiet, the other could call in. She’d assigned the pairs herself, on the last day, without saying why.

Mine was Seraphina.

We hadn’t used it. There hadn’t been any need. The suits had all stayed loud.

On the twelfth night, at a little after three in the morning, it clicked.

I was awake. I was always awake at three. It was the hour I’d had coffee for months, and my body hadn’t stopped expecting it.

”Are you awake?” said Seraphina.

Her voice was very close. In my ear. Not on the squad channel, with its little hiss of four other people listening. Just her. As if she were lying beside me in the dark.

”Yes,” I said.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear her breathing. I could see her, if I looked, two pods down the ring, lying on her back with her seat tilted all the way flat and her hands folded on her stomach, and the pale blue of her pod gone golden with warmth.

I didn’t look. It seemed like the kind of thing you shouldn’t look at.

”Okafor said I’m allowed to want things,” said Seraphina.

”Yes.”

”I’ve been thinking about it. For twelve days.” A pause. ”She said I’d have three weeks.”

”Yes.”

Another long silence.

”I want you to tell me about the field,” said Seraphina. Very fast. All in one breath. As if she had to get it out before she changed her mind. ”Your field. At home. Where you grew up. Just talk about it. Until I’m asleep.” She stopped. ”That’s all. That’s the thing. I want that.”

So I told her.

I told her about the filter. The way it purred in the walls of the house, all night, every night, so that I’d never in my life fallen asleep without it until I came to the cave. I told her about the wheat. Gold in summer, and green before that, and the way it moved when the wind came over the ridge, all at once, like something very big turning over in its sleep.

I told her about Father’s honey. Made from nothing. Better than real honey. Mother said so.

I told her about Genny getting up before everyone, every morning of her life, and going out to scowl at the wheat, as if it might have grown wrong in the night and needed telling. I told her about Garnet coming out barefoot after, singing, and turning a pebble into a strawberry for breakfast, and the strawberry being a little bit pebble in the middle, always, and everybody eating it anyway.

I told her about the stone under the tree with Father’s name on it in letters that leaned.

I told her about the scarecrow.

The patched coat. The charcoal face I’d drawn when I was small, that had come out looking faintly disappointed at the sky. The way the wind pulled the coat crooked every night, and I fixed it every morning, my whole life. The way Garnet hugged it, sometimes, because she said it got lonely. Mother’s blue scarf, that Garnet tied round its neck at a quarter to five on the morning we left.

Somewhere around the scarf, Seraphina’s breathing changed.

Slower. Longer. The way Toby’s went.

I kept talking for a while after that. Quietly. About the porch, and the pump with the handle worn smooth, and the light coming over the ridge in the morning. I don’t know who I was talking to by then. Maybe her. Maybe me.

Then I stopped.

The pair line hissed softly in my ear, with her breathing in it, for a long time. I didn’t close it. Neither did she.

In the morning, at nine, when the squad channel opened, Seraphina said, ”Calder. Present,” in exactly the same flat voice she always used.

And never mentioned it.

Day 289. 3 a.m. Seraphina asked for something. The first thing.

The field. Until she was asleep.

She hasn’t mentioned it.

I’m not going to either.

Luna asked me on the eighteenth day.

Not at noon. At nine in the evening, on the squad channel, in the ten minutes, in front of everyone. Which was how I knew she’d thought about it for a long time, and decided that if she asked in front of everyone, I’d have to answer in front of everyone, and that would be fairer.

”Lucas,” she said. ”Is there anything you haven’t told me?”

The channel went very quiet.

I could have said no. It would have been easy. One word. And nobody would ever have known, except me, and the panel across the corridor, and Okafor, and a man in a gray coat who’d found it the most interesting thing in thirty years.

I’d promised Genny I’d never lie to her. I hadn’t promised Luna.

I thought about that for a long time. Long enough that Liam said, ”Lucas? Are you there? Has he gone? Sera, has he—”

”Yes,” I said.

The channel was silent.

”Yes, there’s something,” I said. ”I haven’t told anyone. I’m going to. When we land. Not before.”

Luna didn’t say anything for a while.

”Is it dangerous?” she said.

”I don’t know.”

”Is it about the ship?”

”Yes.”

Another pause.

”When we land,” said Luna. ”First night. After we’ve counted.” A pause. ”That’s an order.”

”Yes, Luna.”

”Fine,” said Luna Windsor.

And that was all. She didn’t ask again. Neither did anyone else. Not even Liam. Though I could hear him, through the steel, two pods down, not asking very loudly for the rest of the ten minutes.

Day 295. Luna asked. I said yes, there’s something. When we land.

That’s not a lie. It’s a date.

It happened on the twentieth day.

Risa was the first to know. Of course she was. It was the middle of the afternoon, between the ten minutes, and the open channel should have been off. It clicked on anyway. All forty pods. And Risa’s voice came into my ear, flat, the way it always was, except that it wasn’t.

”Forty,” said Risa. ”Fifty. Sixty.” A pause. ”It’s going up. It’s going up fast. Eighty.”

Under everything, the hum was changing.

Not deeper. Not louder. Faster. The slow breathing of the thing in the spine, the breathing I’d been lying inside for twenty days, getting quicker and quicker, the way a heart does when you start to run.

”A hundred,” said Risa. ”A hundred and twenty.”

”Squad Eight,” said Luna, on the squad channel, very calm. ”Strap in. Seats up. Hands on your knees.”

We did.

”A hundred and sixty,” said Risa.

And for the first time in nineteen days, I looked out.

Nothing.

The same nothing. The page with nothing on it, going on forever in every direction. No shape. No grain. Nothing to take hold of.

And then something.

It came from the spine. I couldn’t see the spine; it was fog. But I could see the edge of the fog, where it met the human steel, and I could see the human steel going taut. Every weld. Every bolt. Odell’s little curls at the ends of his seams, all straining at once, the way a rope strains when something on the other end of it starts to pull.

And past the hull, out in the nothing, a line.

A thin bright line in the dark. Not light. I didn’t see it with my eyes. I saw it the way I saw everything else, the way I saw the inside of steel, and the edges of stone, and the grain of the world. A line in the nothing, where there had never been a line. Like a seam. Like the edge of a page.

And the page turned.

I’ve tried to write it down. In notebook seventeen, and eighteen, and a great many after that. I’ve never got it right.

For four seconds I could see everything.

Not everything near me. Everything. Every grain of every star. Every page of every world. All of it, at once, all the way to the bottom, stacked on top of each other like the pages of a book closed in somebody’s hand. The Earth was one of them. I could see it. Small and gray, with a drop of water on it. And the field, a green thumbprint. And in the drop of water, a tower, and a window, and a chair beside it.

And then the book opened somewhere else.

The hum went quiet.

Not silent. Quiet. Slow. Four beats a minute. Tired, the way something is tired after it’s run very fast. Breathing.

”Thirty,” said Risa. ”Twenty. Ten.” A pause. ”Four.” A longer pause. ”It’s resting.”

Nobody on the channel said anything.

My wrist screen had lit up. A line of text, small and green, in the dark.

NAV UPDATE. DISPLACEMENT: 11.2 LY. ELAPSED: 4.06 S.

I looked at it for a long time.

Eleven light-years. Four seconds.

I thought about Father’s notebooks. About physics. About everything I’d ever read in the reading room and the cave and at the kitchen table. About light, and how fast it goes, and how nothing goes faster, because that’s the rule, that’s the shape of the world, that’s the floor everything stands on.

I thought about Genny, on the weekly call, with her questions. Nothing comes from nothing.

Eleven light-years in four seconds.

Nothing we’d ever built could do that. Nothing we’d ever understood could do that. Nothing anybody on Earth had ever written down in any book anywhere said that it could be done.

The thing in the spine had done it, and then lain down to rest.

”Liam,” said Toby, very quietly, on the squad channel. ”Are you all right?”

”No,” said Liam. ”I’m counting.”

The shutters opened an hour later.

Without warning. The little round port in the nose of my pod, the size of a coin, that had been dark for twenty days, went gray at the edges, and then pale, and then the shutter folded back like an eye opening.

And in it, a world.

Green.

Not gray. Not the color of ash, or of a fire that went out thirty years ago. Green. Green and blue and white, the white of clouds, very bright, in long curling bands across the face of it. A huge curved edge of green, turning slowly in the dark, with the light of a sun I’d never seen coming across it from one side. A warmer sun than ours. Gold, going on orange.

And over the edge of it, rising, two moons.

One big. Pale. Pitted, like ours.

One very small.

I lay in my pod with my face as close to the little round port as the straps would let me, and looked at it, and didn’t count anything, and didn’t think anything, for a long time.

”Cadets,” said the flat recorded voice, on every channel. ”Orbit achieved. Pod release in nine hours. Prepare for descent.”

On the squad channel, nobody said anything.

Then Liam, very softly: ”It’s green.”

”Yes,” said Luna.

”It’s really green. Look at it. Sera, look at it.”

”I’m looking,” said Seraphina.

”Two moons,” said Toby.

”One’s very small,” I said.

”Garnet’s going to want fish on it,” said Liam.

And for some reason that was the thing that did it. I don’t know why. Of all the things. But I lay there in my pod above a green world, eleven light-years and four seconds from everyone I’d ever loved, and laughed, and couldn’t stop, and on the squad channel all four of them were laughing too, even Luna, even Seraphina, for a long time, until the ten minutes ran out and the link clicked off.

Day 297.

The ship opened something. A line in the nothing. A seam. The page turned.

Four seconds. I saw everything. I can’t write it.

11.2 light-years. 4.06 seconds.

Nothing we’ve built can do that. Nothing we know says it can be done.

Then it rested. Four beats a minute.

Avalon. Green. Two moons. One small.

Liam says Garnet will want fish on it.

Nine hours.

Luna. Liam. Seraphina. Toby. Okafor.

Mother. Genny. Garnet. Miss Pell.

I still have one gram.