Scarecrow

The first comms window opened on the eleventh day.

Okafor had drilled it into us in the cave until we said it in our sleep. Every nine days, the Meridian opens the squad channels. Ten minutes. Squad leaders coordinate. Everyone else listens. Ten minutes, and then nine days of nothing, so don’t waste them. We’d landed on Day 297. The first window was Day 306, but the pods had come down late and scattered, and the relay had needed time to find everyone, and so it was Day 308, at noon, when Dot said:

”Comms window opening. Squad channel available.”

I was standing on the canyon floor with my hand on a patch of red glass, turning it into iron.

I took my hand off it so fast the iron came out half done, gray at one end and still red at the other.

”Put it through,” I said. ”Squad Eight. All of them.”

”Routing,” said Dot.

A click. A hiss. The sound I hadn’t heard since thirty-eight kilometers above the ground, with Luna’s voice breaking up in my ear. Everybody walks.

The squad channel. Open.

Empty.

”Squad Eight,” I said. ”This is Scarecrow. Check in.”

Hiss.

”Squad Eight. This is Scarecrow. Luna. Liam. Seraphina. Toby. Check in.”

Hiss.

Nothing.

”Dot. Are they on?”

”The squad channel is open,” said Dot. ”This unit is transmitting. This unit is not receiving.” A pause. ”Query: are the other units’ channels open?”

”You tell me.”

”This unit does not have access to other units’ status. Routing is via the Meridian relay. The relay is above the horizon. The relay is accepting this unit’s transmission.” A longer pause. ”The relay is not passing it on.”

I stood very still on the red glass.

”Not passing it on.”

”The transmission reaches the relay. It does not leave the relay.” The little rivers ran. ”It is being held.”

I tried for the whole ten minutes.

I said their names. I said where I was. I said the canyon, the red glass, the dome, there’s a town, there are rooms, come here. I said Liam, if you can hear me, I can see you, you’re fifty miles north-northeast, you’ve stopped, what’s wrong. I said Sera, you’re sixty miles east, you’ve been still for a week. I said Luna, you’re walking north, what’s in the way. I said Toby.

I said Toby a lot.

Hiss.

At ten past twelve, the channel closed.

”Comms window closed,” said Dot. ”Next window: nine days.”

I sat down on the half-turned slab of iron, red at one end and gray at the other, and put my head in my hands.

The message came with the next pass. An hour and a half later. Dot read it to me in her clear level voice, in the doorway of the dome, while I stood in front of her with my arms folded so tightly my shoulders hurt.

”To Unit four-oh-one-dash-P-one. Operator’s attempted squad transmission noted. Operator is advised that all Squad Eight pods are accounted for. Squad-level communication is suspended pending Command assessment of landing dispersal. Operator will be notified when squad communication resumes. Report.”

”Accounted for,” I said.

”That is the phrase.”

”Ask them where.”

”Query. Is the operator instructing this unit to ask Command for the locations of the other Squad Eight pods?”

”Yes.”

The little rivers ran.

”Transmitting at next pass,” said Dot.

I knew where they were.

That was the thing. That was what made it so much worse. I didn’t need Command to tell me where Luna was. I could close my eyes and find her snowflake, a hundred and ten miles north and west, walking. I could find Seraphina’s clasp, sixty miles east, sitting. Liam’s buckle, fifty miles north-northeast, still. Toby’s fork, high in the mountains, still.

I knew exactly where they were.

What I didn’t know was anything else.

Whether Liam was hurt. Whether Seraphina was watching something, or waiting for something, or had simply sat down and decided, the way she sometimes did, that she’d gone far enough. What Luna was walking along the edge of. Whether Toby’s fork was in Toby’s pocket.

A grain of iron tells you where it is.

It doesn’t tell you anything else.

I’d needed the link to tell me the rest. Ten minutes every nine days. Their voices. Luna saying report. Liam saying something stupid. Toby saying I’m all right in the voice that meant he wasn’t, and Seraphina saying nothing at all, and me knowing from the way she said nothing that she was fine.

And Command had the link. And Command was holding it.

The answer came on the pass after that. Three hours after the window had closed.

”To Unit four-oh-one-dash-P-one. Location data for Squad Eight units is restricted pending assessment. Operator is instructed to continue phase two construction. Report.”

Instructed.

After a week of grateful, and welcome, and if the operator is willing. After most grateful, and with thanks.

Instructed.

I stood in the doorway of the dome for a long time.

”Query,” said Dot. ”The operator’s heart rate is one hundred and forty-one.”

”I know what it is.”

”The operator’s hands are closed.”

I looked down. They were. Both of them. Tight. I hadn’t noticed.

I opened them.

”Query,” said Dot, more quietly. ”Is the operator angry?”

”Yes.”

”At this unit?”

”No,” I said. ”Not at you.”

”At Command?”

I didn’t answer straight away.

I was thinking about Seraphina’s theory. The night the squads locked, after the General had shown us the map of AV-7, with the forty blue dots and the thirty-four gray. Her voice, very level, looking at her hands. To find out what happened to them. That’s why. They don’t know. Or they do, and they want to know more. So they put forty of us next to thirty-four empty bases and see what happens to us.

See what happens to us.

Pending assessment.

”Yes,” I said. ”At Command.”

That night, I took Father’s radio notebook out of the thigh pocket.

It wasn’t a notebook, exactly. It was eleven pages at the back of his anatomy book, the one Okafor had given me, the one he’d carried across the river. After the nerves and the bones and the long careful drawings of the inside of an eye, there were eleven pages that had nothing to do with anatomy at all. Pencil. Small. Diagrams of coils and wires and a long thin mast, with numbers beside it.

I’d read them a hundred times in the cave and never understood why they were there.

At the top of the first one, he’d written: For listening. When there’s nobody to ask.

I’d thought it was about the filter. About the dome’s broadcasts. He’d built a receiver, at the house in the field, out of salvage from the highway, so that he and Mother could hear the news from New Halcyon on the nights it came through. I’d assumed the pages were for that.

I read them again, in the doorway of the dome, by the light of the big gold moon.

They weren’t for listening to the dome.

They were for listening to somebody very far away, very quietly, with a very small voice. Somebody with nothing but a suit radio, or a field set, or a box made out of a dead car. The numbers beside the mast went up and up. Height, and wire, and the shape of the coil. Higher than you think. Then higher again. The earth curves. The voice goes straight. Get above the curve.

Under the last diagram, very small:

Unit Seven, across the Orme. We had no relay. We had this.

”Dot,” I said.

”Yes.”

”I need to build something tall.”

”The operator said that,” said Dot, ”on Day 307.”

”I know. I need to build it now.”

”Query. How tall?”

I looked at Father’s numbers. Fifty miles to Liam. Sixty to Seraphina. A hundred and ten to Luna. Two hundred and sixty to Toby, high in the mountains, where the curve of the world was against me and the rock was in the way. I did the arithmetic three times, the way Genny would have, and didn’t like the answer any of the three times.

”Four hundred meters,” I said.

The little rivers ran.

”This unit has not built anything taller than the canyon wall.”

”Neither have I.”

”Query. Is the tower output?”

I looked at her.

”If the tower is output,” said Dot, ”this unit will report it at the next pass. Command will see it. Command will instruct.” A pause. ”This unit estimates Command will instruct the operator to stop.”

”Yes,” I said. ”I expect so.”

”And this unit,” said Dot, ”estimates that at the pass after that, Command will instruct this unit not to assist.”

I hadn’t thought of that.

I should have. I’d been so busy being angry at Command that I hadn’t thought about the fact that Dot answered to them too. That she had instructions I couldn’t see. That any pass, any ninety-one minutes, a message could come down from orbit and she’d stand very still, and say logged, and stop.

”How long between those two?” I said. ”Between them telling me to stop and them telling you?”

”This unit cannot know. This unit estimates: one pass. Possibly two.”

Ninety-one minutes. Maybe three hours.

”Then we’d better be fast,” I said.

We built through the night.

I don’t remember all of it. I remember the moonlight, gold, and then the small fast moon crossing it, and then the gold again. I remember standing on the north rim of the canyon, where the ground was highest, with my hands flat on the red glass, turning it into iron as fast as the old weight behind my eyes would let me, and then a little faster than that. I remember Dot’s twenty hands coming up the canyon wall in a long line, like ants, each one carrying a girder, and fitting it, and going down for the next.

I remember the tower going up.

Iron lattice. Four legs, at first, splayed wide on the rim, bolted into the rock. Then narrowing as it climbed, the way the drawing in Father’s book narrowed. The hands climbing it as it grew, fitting each new section on top of the last, so that by midnight it was taller than the canyon was deep, and by two in the morning I had to lean back to see the top of it against the stars.

At two, I stopped.

Not because I’d finished. Because it was two o’clock, and two o’clock was coffee. And there wasn’t any coffee, and there wasn’t anyone to bring it, cold, across the table with the book turned round between us. And I stood on the rim with my hands on the iron and couldn’t, for a minute, do anything at all.

Then I went on.

The next pass came at twenty past three.

”Transmitting production log,” said Dot, from the foot of the tower. ”Construction: lattice structure, iron, one hundred and ninety meters, incomplete. Purpose: unspecified.”

I didn’t say anything.

At ten to five, the reply came.

”To Unit four-oh-one-dash-P-one,” read Dot. ”Construction of unauthorized transmission infrastructure is not permitted under program regulations. Operator is instructed to cease construction immediately. Operator is instructed to dismantle existing structure. Report.”

The hands kept climbing.

”Dot,” I said. ”Did they instruct you?”

”No,” said Dot. ”The message is addressed to the operator. It instructs the operator to cease. It does not instruct this unit.” A pause. ”This unit is not the operator.”

I looked at her, at the foot of the tower, in the gray light before dawn, with her grille turned up toward me and her twenty hands strung out up the lattice above her like beads on a wire.

”Is that accurate?” I said.

”It is very accurate,” said Dot.

The tower was finished at a quarter to seven.

Four hundred and eight meters. Iron, the color of the canyon floor under the paving, with a long thin copper mast on the top of it, catching the sun as it came up over the eastern rim, so that for a moment the very tip of it caught fire before anything else in the canyon did. The way the dome caught the light at home, at the edge of the world, first thing in the morning.

At the bottom of it, in a little hut of fused sandstone that the hands had built against its north leg, a box. Coils and wires and a dial. Exactly the shape of the drawing on the eleventh page of the back of Father’s anatomy book.

For listening. When there’s nobody to ask.

I sat down in front of it.

”Next pass in four minutes,” said Dot, in the doorway of the hut. ”This unit estimates the second instruction will arrive at that pass.”

”I know.”

”Query. Does the operator wish to transmit before it arrives?”

I put my hand on the dial.

I’d thought about this all night. What to say. Something that would carry. Something they’d know, if they heard it, even half of it, through the static, fifty miles off with a suit radio turned down low to save the battery.

I thought about the cave. About the sim, on the first day, with the red jungle and the mud. About Liam on the barracks roof beside the Haddon car, with Maura’s puddings. Take the name. Make it your callsign. About Luna, at the bottom of the drainpipe. It might as well be the one you picked.

I turned the dial. And keyed the transmitter. And spoke.

”Squad Eight,” I said. ”Squad Eight. This is Scarecrow.”

The tower took my voice and threw it at the sky.

I felt it go. I could see it, almost, if I looked, which I did: the long copper mast at the top shivering very slightly, every atom of it doing the same small thing at once, over and over, and the air round it carrying it away. North. East. West. Over the rim, and over the green, and out across the curve of the world.

”I’m in a canyon,” I said. ”Red glass. South of the green, where it ends. There’s a tower. You’ll see it. It’s the tallest thing for a hundred miles.” I swallowed. ”There’s a town. There are rooms. Seventy-four of them. There’s water. There’s air. There’s a forge, Sera.”

Hiss.

”Liam. You’re fifty miles north-northeast of me. You stopped two days ago, at two in the afternoon. You haven’t moved. If you can hear me, say something. Anything. Say something stupid.”

Hiss.

”Seraphina. You’re sixty miles east. You’ve been sitting in one place for a week. I don’t know why. If you can hear me, tell me why.”

Hiss.

”Luna. You’re a hundred and ten miles northwest, and you’re walking north, and I don’t know what you’re walking along. I’ve written it down. What I owe you. It’s in the notebook. It’s waiting.”

Hiss.

”Toby.”

I stopped.

I didn’t know what to say to Toby. I didn’t know where he was, except high, and still, and two hundred and sixty miles away with the mountains between us. I didn’t know if any of this could reach him. I didn’t know if there was anyone with his fork to hear it.

”Toby,” I said. ”I’m counting you. Every night. I haven’t stopped.”

Hiss.

”Pass,” said Dot, behind me. ”Message received.”

I didn’t turn round.

”To Unit four-oh-one-dash-P-one,” said Dot. Her voice was exactly the same as always. Clear. Level. Not quite anybody’s. ”Unit four-oh-one-dash-P-one is instructed not to operate, power, or assist in the operation of unauthorized transmission infrastructure. Report.”

The little rivers ran.

”Logged,” said Dot.

The box in front of me went quiet.

Not dead. I could see the current in it, still, running in the coils. But fainter. The power had come from her. A long cable, down the leg of the tower, across the canyon floor, into the side of her where the core was.

She’d stopped it.

I sat with my hand on the dial.

”This unit has been instructed not to power the tower,” said Dot. ”This unit has complied.”

”I know,” I said. ”It’s all right.”

”Query.”

”Yes?”

”The tower is iron and copper,” said Dot. ”The operator made the iron and copper. The operator could make other things. A source of current. A cell. The operator does not require this unit to power the tower.”

I turned round and looked at her.

She stood in the doorway of the hut on her six legs, in the early sun, with her grille turned toward me and her fifth arm a little forward of the others.

”This unit has been instructed not to power the tower,” said Dot again, carefully. ”This unit has not been instructed not to tell the operator how the tower might be powered without it.”

I laughed.

I couldn’t help it. I sat in a little hut at the foot of a four-hundred-meter tower on a world eleven light-years from home, with Command holding every voice I wanted to hear, and laughed so hard I had to put my head down on the cold metal top of Father’s radio.

”Query,” said Dot. ”Is the operator angry?”

”No,” I said. ”No. The operator is not angry.”

”Logged.”

”Dot.”

”Yes.”

”Have they instructed you not to listen?”

The little rivers ran for a long time.

”No,” said Dot. ”This unit has been instructed not to operate, power, or assist in the operation of the tower.” A pause. ”Listening is not operating. Listening is not output.”

”So if something came in. If somebody answered. On the tower. You’d hear it.”

”This unit would hear it.”

”And you’d tell me.”

”This unit would tell the operator immediately,” said Dot. ”That is accurate.”

I made a cell that afternoon.

Copper and zinc and an acid I asked the red glass to give up from somewhere deep in its structure, in a long row of fused sandstone jars along the north leg of the tower. It took six hours. It was ugly and slow and not as strong as Dot’s core, not by a long way.

But it was mine.

And at dusk, I sat down in front of the box again, with the current from my own ugly cells running in the coils, and keyed the transmitter, and said it again.

”Squad Eight. This is Scarecrow.”

Hiss.

I said it every hour that night. On the hour. Every hour. The way Luna had asked the number at noon, every day, on the Meridian, when nobody ever answered.

Nobody answered.

Dot sat outside the hut, on the red glass, all night, with her grille turned toward the tower. Listening.

At about three in the morning, between broadcasts, I went outside to stretch my legs.

The two moons were down. Only the stars. I stood on the rim beside the north leg of the tower and looked out at the green, rolling away north in the dark, silver where the starlight caught the tops of the fronds.

There was a wind from the south. Light. Steady. Moving the green the way it always did, in long slow ripples, going north.

And at the very edge of what I could see, a long way off, where the green went over a low hill and down, one of the ripples was going the other way.

South.

Toward us.

Against the wind.

I watched it for a long time. It was too far to see into. Just a ripple in the green, a line of fronds bending the wrong way, very faint, very slow, coming toward the red glass, and then stopping. Just at the edge. Where the green stopped and the glass began.

And staying there.

”Query,” said Dot, softly, behind me. ”The operator’s heart rate is one hundred and six.”

”Did you see that?”

”This unit’s sensors do not extend that far.”

I watched the edge of the green for a long time. Nothing moved. The wind blew from the south. The ripples went north.

”It’s nothing,” I said. ”Probably.”

”Logged,” said Dot. ”Probably.”

I went back inside. At four o’clock, I keyed the transmitter.

”Squad Eight,” I said. ”This is Scarecrow.”

Day 308. First comms window. I said their names for ten minutes. The relay took it and held it.

Command: ”All Squad Eight pods accounted for. Squad-level communication suspended pending assessment.”

Location data restricted. ”Operator is instructed to continue.”

Instructed. Again.

Sera’s theory: put us next to the empty bases and see what happens.

Father’s radio. Eleven pages at the back of the anatomy book. ”For listening. When there’s nobody to ask.” ”Unit Seven, across the Orme. We had no relay. We had this.”

Day 309. Tower. 408 meters. Iron, copper mast. Built in one night.

Command: cease and dismantle. Addressed to the operator. Dot: ”This unit is not the operator.”

Next pass: Dot instructed not to power it. She complied. Then: ”This unit has not been instructed not to tell the operator how the tower might be powered without it.”

She hasn’t been instructed not to listen.

Made my own cells. Ugly. Mine.

Squad Eight, this is Scarecrow. Every hour.

Nobody answers.

3 a.m.: a ripple in the green going against the wind. Toward us. Stopped at the edge of the glass.

Probably nothing.

Dot logged it ”probably.”