Scarecrow

Toby said his name to his mother on the morning of Day 607.

I was there this time. I’d told him I would be, if he wanted, and he’d said he did, as long as I didn’t try anything myself.

”Just sit,” he said. ”Just be there. Don’t follow it.”

”I won’t.”

”Promise.”

”I promise.”

So I sat on the low wall at the edge of the red glass with Holt on one side and Wren on the other, and Toby knelt on the glass beside Dot, and the sky went grey.

He’d built a wall around himself. Not a large one. Just a curve of solid sound, close in, the way he’d built it the very first time he answered the deep, back when the spine had been a voice from the sky that nearly stopped his heart. He didn’t need the wall any more. His silver was complete. He could hear the whole world and choose which part to listen to.

He built it anyway.

”Habit,” he’d said, when I asked. ”And so I don’t hear anything else. I only want to hear her.”

The deep breathed.

The hello came up through the glass.

”Thirty-one,” Dot said.

Toby’s eyes were closed. His hands were flat on the glass.

”And a gap,” Dot said. ”And one.”

And then, very faint, almost nothing, the new one. Small and whole. Not who this time. Something else. A brief bright pulse I’d felt against Risa’s skin a hundred times in the last week. Something like I’m here.

Then it was gone.

Toby opened a hole in his wall.

And sang.

Not the hello. Not the old song. Just his name. The way he’d sung it the night the deep first came under the canyon and asked who. Low and careful and his.

I felt it go down into the glass. Down into the deep. Up into the spine. Out along the thinnest of the thirty-one threads, toward the twenty-ninth.

The quiet one, Dot had called her. Listening for something.

Toby closed the hole.

He held very still.

Dot’s lamps flickered.

And then, just before the eleven seconds ended, Dot said, ”Oh.”

Toby’s eyes snapped open.

”What? What is it?”

”The twenty-ninth,” Dot said. Her voice had gone very careful. ”She has answered. Not the hello. Not her own name.”

She paused.

”Yours,” Dot said. ”She said your name back to you.”

Toby didn’t move.

Then his wall came down all at once, and he bent forward over the glass with his forehead on his hands, and Wren was off the wall and across to him before I could stand up.

He told me later, sitting on our porch step with Wren beside him and his eyes still red, that it was the first time his mother had said his name since he was fourteen.

”She stopped talking,” he said. ”A bit. After Dad. After the first dose. Her hands shook too much to write, and she got embarrassed about her voice shaking, so she stopped using it except when she had to.” He wiped his face. ”She used to sing. Before. She stopped that too.”

”She sang your name this morning,” Wren said.

”She didn’t sing it.”

”Dot says she did.”

Toby looked at her.

Wren had her hand flat on his knee.

”Dot says the pattern rose and fell,” Wren said. ”Like a tune. Dot says it was a song.”

Toby put his face in his hands and laughed and cried at the same time, and Wren put her arms around him and rested her chin on his shoulder, and I went inside and left them on the step.

The General wrote his answer to Crane’s office at the long table in the receiving room, with Luna sitting opposite him.

He’d asked her to sit there.

”I want you to read it before it goes,” he’d said. ”Every word.”

Luna had looked at him for a long moment.

”Why?”

”Because it’s a lie,” he’d said. ”And I’ve told a great many lies in my life without anyone reading them first. I’d like this one to have a witness.”

So she sat there, and he wrote.

It wasn’t long. I read it afterwards, because Luna showed me.

To the Project Office, Meridian.

Re: query of Day 606 concerning surface activity near Primary Base.

I have been on the surface at Primary Base since Day 598 conducting a review of the facilities described in my standing authority. I am not aware of any personnel in contact with the drive core during that period. I have observed no unusual activity relevant to your query.

I would remind your office that all queries regarding personnel on the Avalon front are to be routed through Avalon Command, not issued directly to individual officers.

Windsor.

Luna read it twice.

Then she put it down.

”That last line,” she said.

”Yes.”

”You’ve never said anything like that to Crane’s office.”

”No.”

”They’ll notice.”

”Yes,” the General said. ”That’s why I wrote it.”

Luna looked at him for a long time.

Then she picked up the pen beside his hand and, without asking, wrote a single word at the bottom of the page in her own small precise handwriting, below his signature.

Witnessed.

The General looked at it.

He didn’t say anything.

He folded the page and gave it to his aide, and the aide took it out to the shuttle to send.

Risa went to the courts every morning that week.

She couldn’t stay away. Neither could the baby. Every morning, after breakfast, Risa would stand up from the table with one hand on her back and one on her stomach and say, ”She wants to go out,” and Sera would get the cushion and Luna would get the blanket and I’d walk beside her.

And every morning, the young were waiting.

Not by accident. The attendants told Dot, and Dot told us, that the young had started gathering at the wall nearest the broad passage before the sun was over the canyon rim. Waiting. Watching the path from our house.

When Risa came round the corner, they chirred.

All of them. At once. A sound like a field full of crickets.

And inside her, the baby’s silver lit, and pulsed, and called back. Come and play.

The first morning, they came cautiously. One or two at a time, the way they had the first day, climbing the wall and pressing their heads against Risa’s stomach and waiting for the kick.

By the third morning, there was a queue.

The attendants had organised it. I didn’t know how. I only knew that when we arrived on Day 609 the young were sitting in a rough line along the base of the wall, chirring and tapping, and an attendant was standing at the end of it with her forelimbs tucked, and when one young had had a turn pressing its head against Risa’s stomach the attendant tapped it on the shoulder and it climbed down and went to the back.

Sera laughed so hard she had to sit on the ground.

”They’re taking turns,” she said.

”Of course they’re taking turns,” Luna said. ”They’re well brought up.”

”They’re taking turns to play with a baby who isn’t born.”

”She doesn’t seem to mind,” Risa said.

She didn’t.

Every time a new young pressed its head against Risa’s stomach, the baby’s silver brightened, and she kicked, and the young chirred, and the whole line chirred with it. And the baby answered each one differently. Not just come and play. Small variations I was only beginning to understand.

A pulse that rose at the end, for the smallest ones. A pulse that held steady, for the larger ones. A brief bright flicker, like laughter, every time one of them did something unexpected.

”She knows them,” I said quietly, on the third morning.

Risa looked down at me.

”What?”

”She knows them. Each one. She’s not saying the same thing to all of them. She’s saying something different to each one.”

Risa looked at the line of young along the wall.

”How?”

”She’s been listening to the brood through the queen’s voice for weeks. She knows their patterns. She knows which one’s which.” I watched the small one with the pale mark on its foreplate climb up for its turn. The baby’s silver flared bright, brighter than for any of the others. ”And that one’s her favourite.”

Risa laughed.

”Of course it is,” she said. ”It came first.”

Nessa named it.

The small one with the pale mark. She’d been watching from the schoolroom window every morning, and on the fourth morning she came out and stood at the end of the line of young with her arms folded and her chin out, the way she stood when she was about to say something important.

”It needs a name,” she said.

”It has a name,” I said. ”Its mother gave it one. A pattern.”

”A human name. So we can talk about it.”

I looked at Risa.

Risa looked at the young one, which was currently pressed against her stomach with its eyes half closed, chirring.

”What would you call it?” Risa asked.

Nessa considered the young one with great seriousness.

”Pebble,” she said.

”Why Pebble?”

”Because it’s small and grey and it was first,” Nessa said. ”And because it always comes back. Like when you throw a pebble in the pond and it doesn’t come back. Only this one does.” She frowned. ”That doesn’t make sense.”

”It makes sense,” Risa said. ”Pebble.”

The young one lifted its head and looked at Nessa.

Nessa tapped the wall. Once. Twice. I see you. She’d learned it from the young themselves, practising at the schoolroom window.

Pebble tapped back.

And inside Risa, the baby’s silver flared, and pulsed something I hadn’t heard before.

Dot, standing beside us, went very still.

”That,” Dot said, ”was a name.”

”What name?”

”The young one’s own name. Its brood-pattern. And then the sound the girl just made.” Dot’s lamps flickered. ”She has joined them. She is calling it both.”

Nessa stared at Risa’s stomach.

”She’s saying Pebble?”

”In her own way,” Dot said.

Nessa went very pink.

Then she turned and ran back to the schoolroom, and I heard her shouting through the window to everyone inside that the baby had said the name she’d chosen, the one she’d chosen, and that was the best thing that had ever happened in the whole history of Avalon.

On the fifth morning, the baby did something new.

It was Pebble’s turn again. It had climbed the wall and was pressing its head against Risa’s stomach, chirring, and the baby was kicking, and everything was the way it had been every morning.

Then one of the other young, a larger one, waiting at the base of the wall, got impatient.

It tried to climb up beside Pebble.

The wall was narrow there. There wasn’t room. The larger young lost its footing halfway up, scrabbled, and started to slide backward toward the stone path below.

It wasn’t a long fall. Barely a body length. A young Teeming could fall that far a dozen times a day in the courts without noticing.

But the baby’s silver flared.

Not come and play. Something sharper. Quicker. A pattern I’d heard the attendants use when one of the young was about to do something foolish near the water.

Careful.

And the larger young, mid-slide, stopped.

Caught itself on the wall’s edge with one forelimb. Hung there. Looked up at Risa’s stomach.

Then climbed carefully back down and went to the end of the line.

The attendant at the end of the line had gone completely still.

She turned her head and looked at Risa. At Risa’s stomach.

Then she tapped something to Dot. Long and slow.

Dot’s lamps went bright.

”She says,” Dot said, ”that the young one spoke as an older sister speaks. To keep the small ones safe.” A pause. ”She says the young one is not yet born and already behaves as brood.”

Risa put both hands over her stomach.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she said, very quietly, ”She looked after it.”

”Yes.”

”She’s not even born and she looked after it.”

”Yes.”

Risa started crying again.

She’d been crying a great deal that week. Toby said it was hormones and the baby’s growth and the speed of everything. Risa said it was nothing of the kind, and that she was simply surrounded by more things worth crying about than she’d ever been in her life.

I thought they were both right.

Holt and the General had their talk on the fourth evening.

I didn’t see the start of it. I came out of the house to find them sitting together on the bench under the tree in the square, with a fair amount of space between them, both looking straight ahead at the kitchen doors.

I almost turned back.

Holt saw me.

”Sit down, Dask,” he said. ”You’ll want to hear this, and I’m not saying it twice.”

I sat down on the edge of the low wall nearby.

The General didn’t look at me. He was looking at the kitchen doors.

”I asked him about Hal,” Holt said. ”In the room. The day of the signing.”

The General nodded slowly.

”I asked whether his hands were shaking,” Holt said.

”They were,” the General said. ”Badly. He held the pen in both hands. Like a child holds a cup.”

”He always held it like that,” Holt said. ”From the first week in the mountain. Couldn’t hold anything still. They made him sit at a desk and do sums because he was useless at the course.”

”I didn’t know that.”

”No reason you would.” Holt’s jaw was set. ”He was kind, back then. Hal. Before. He used to save his bread ration for the youngest ones. He used to read to them at night, when they couldn’t sleep after the needles.”

The General didn’t say anything.

”I want to know,” Holt said, ”what happened to him. Between the mountain and that room. I want to know how a boy who saved his bread for the little ones ended up holding the pen.”

The General was quiet for a long time.

”I don’t know,” he said at last. ”I didn’t know him before. I only knew him after. He was already in charge of the Project when I met him. Already Crane.” He paused. ”But I’ll tell you one thing I saw. That I’ve never told anyone.”

Holt waited.

”After the signing,” the General said. ”After we’d all signed and the Chancellor had taken the pages away. Everyone left. I was the last one out, because I’d stopped by the window. And I looked back from the door.” He stopped. ”Crane was still sitting at the table. With the pen in both hands. And he was crying.”

Holt went very still.

”Not loudly,” the General said. ”Just sitting there with his hands shaking and tears running down his face. He didn’t see me. I went out and closed the door.”

The square was very quiet.

Somewhere in the kitchen, Priya was singing.

Holt let out a long breath.

”Stupid clever boy,” he said.

His voice cracked on the last word.

The General didn’t say anything. He sat on the bench beside Holt and looked at the kitchen doors, and after a while he reached into his breast pocket and took out the maintenance plate from the mountain and turned it over in his hands, and didn’t put it back.

The General came to the courts on the fifth morning.

He didn’t come close. He stood at the mouth of the broad passage, where he’d stood the first day, with his hands behind his back, and watched the line of young along the wall.

Nessa found him there.

I saw it from where I sat at Risa’s feet. Nessa marched across the court with her chin out, the way she marched toward anything she’d decided needed explaining, and stopped in front of him and looked up.

”You have to wait at the end,” she said.

The General looked down at her.

”I beg your pardon?”

”If you want a turn. You have to wait at the end of the line. The attendant does it. She taps you on the shoulder when it’s your go.” Nessa considered him. ”I don’t think you’d fit on the wall, though.”

”I wasn’t going to ask for a turn.”

”Everybody asks for a turn,” Nessa said. ”Liam asked yesterday. The attendant made him wait behind Pebble.”

”Who is Pebble?”

Nessa pointed.

Pebble was at the front of the line, pressed against Risa’s stomach, chirring.

The General looked at it for a long moment.

”You named it.”

”Somebody had to,” said Nessa, who had clearly been spending time with Maeve. ”Its real name’s a pattern. You can’t say it. So I named it Pebble, and then the baby said it back, so it’s official.”

”The baby said it.”

”In her way. Dot heard.”

The General looked from Nessa to Pebble to Risa, and then back to Nessa.

”Thank you for explaining,” he said gravely.

”You’re welcome.” Nessa paused. ”Did you really bring the oranges?”

”Yes.”

”From Earth?”

”From a greenhouse in the outer ring. A woman keeps three trees there under a lamp.”

Nessa absorbed this.

”Can you bring more?” she said. ”When you come back. For the young, too. Pebble wants to know what one is. I told it about them and it didn’t believe me.”

The General opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Then, very slowly, he crouched down until he was at Nessa’s height, the way I’d seen him kneel at the edge of the mountain queen’s hollow.

”I’ll bring as many as she’ll sell me,” he said. ”For everyone. Young included.”

Nessa nodded, satisfied, and marched back to the schoolroom.

The General stayed crouched for a moment.

Pebble had finished its turn. It climbed down from the wall and, instead of going to the back of the line, came across the court toward the passage mouth. Toward him.

The attendant tapped something sharp. Pebble ignored her.

It stopped a body length from the General’s boots.

Tapped the stone. Once. Twice.

I see you.

The General looked at it.

Then he put one hand flat on the stone, and tapped twice, the way he’d learned at the mountain.

Pebble chirred.

And inside Risa, across the court, the baby’s silver flared, and pulsed toward him. Brief and bright. Not come and play. Not careful. Something I didn’t know yet.

Dot told me afterwards. A greeting for an elder of another brood.

The General didn’t know what it meant.

But he stayed crouched there, with his hand on the stone, until Pebble went back to the line.

Edda Saye examined Risa on the sixth morning.

Toby had asked her. He’d been measuring Risa every evening and writing the numbers in the book, and the numbers kept climbing, and he said he wanted someone who’d actually delivered a baby to look before they climbed any higher.

Edda came to the house with a bag that clinked and a face like a closed door.

She’d been a mender in the second wave. Clothes, tents, harnesses, anything that tore. Before that, on Earth, before the Project, she’d been a midwife’s assistant in the outer ring of the dome. She’d delivered three babies in her second-wave base before it fell, she’d told Holt. All three had lived. Their mothers hadn’t.

She didn’t talk about that.

She asked Risa a great many questions, very briskly, and wrote nothing down. She asked to put her hands on Risa’s stomach and Risa said yes. She felt for a long time, her eyes half closed, her fingers moving slowly over the curve.

Then she stopped.

”Head down,” she said.

Toby looked up from the book.

”Already?”

”Already.” Edda took her hands away. ”She’s turned. She’s in position. Most babies don’t do that until the last month. Some don’t do it at all.”

”She’s not in the last month,” Toby said. ”She’s thirty-four weeks by size and thirteen by date.”

Edda looked at him.

Then at Risa.

Then at me, sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed.

”I heard about the silver,” she said. ”Whole. Building herself.”

”Yes.”

”I heard about the courts. The young queueing up.”

”Yes.”

Edda was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, ”I’ve been doing this a long time. Not as long as some. Long enough.” She folded her hands in her lap. ”I’ve never seen a baby get herself ready like this. Not one. They don’t plan. They just come when they come.”

”She’s planning?” Risa said.

”She’s turned herself head down at thirty-four weeks by size,” Edda said. ”She’s sitting exactly where she needs to sit. She’s not pressing on anything she shouldn’t. Your blood’s good, your heart’s good, your body’s doing what it should and not a thing more than it can.” She looked at Risa. ”I’d call that planning.”

Risa laughed. It came out a little shaky.

”Is that bad?”

”No.” Edda’s mouth moved, very slightly. It might have been the beginning of a smile. ”It’s the best-arranged baby I’ve ever put my hands on. I just don’t know what she’s arranging herself for yet.”

The station’s reply came on the seventh day.

The General’s aide brought it to the receiving room at midday, and the General read it, and then handed it to Luna without a word.

She read it aloud.

To General Windsor, Avalon Command.

Acknowledged. No further action required.

Project Office, Meridian.

That was all.

Luna put it down on the table.

”That’s it?” Sera said.

”That’s it.”

”They asked you whether anyone touched the spine. You said no. And they said acknowledged.”

”Yes.”

”And nothing else.”

”No.”

Holt, at the far end of the table, had his arms folded.

”I don’t like it,” he said.

”Neither do I,” said the General.

”They’d have checked. Hal would have checked. He’d have had three people go through the logs before he answered.” Holt leaned forward. ”You don’t send acknowledged, no further action when your instruments have just picked up two things touching the core, and one of them whole. You send that when you’ve already decided what to do and don’t want anyone asking.”

The General didn’t argue.

He picked up the reply again and read it a second time. Then he folded it and put it in his pocket, beside his own letter, beside the plate.

”I leave in three days,” he said.

Luna went still.

”The courier window,” the General said. ”I came down on the transit schedule. If I’m not on the shuttle when it goes up, the station will want to know why.” He looked at his daughter. ”And if Holt is right, I’d rather be in my office on Earth when whatever they’ve decided to do arrives. Than here, where I can’t see it coming.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Luna said, ”Three days.”

”Three days.”

”That’s before the baby.”

”Yes.”

Luna looked down at the table.

Then she looked up.

”Then you’ll have to come back,” she said. ”To meet her.”

The General held his daughter’s gaze for a long time.

”Yes,” he said. ”I suppose I will.”

That evening the young came to the house.

Not all of them. Five. Pebble, and four others, and an attendant behind them, walking very carefully along the agreed path from the courts to our porch.

They’d never done that before.

The attendant stopped at the bottom of the porch steps. The young stopped with her.

Pebble was carrying something.

It came up the steps on its own, slowly, the way it climbed the wall in the courts, and stopped in front of Risa, who was sitting in Gareth’s chair with her feet up on the porch rail.

It put the thing it was carrying down on the boards by her feet.

A stone.

Small and smooth and grey, the size of a hen’s egg. Perfectly round, as if it had been worn by water for a very long time.

Pebble tapped it once with a forelimb.

Then it pressed its head against Risa’s stomach, chirred, felt the baby kick, and climbed back down the steps to its attendant.

Dot, who had been standing at the end of the porch, went very still.

”That,” Dot said, ”is a nursery stone.”

”A what?”

”The young carry them to new hatchlings,” Dot said. ”Stones from their own hollows. So the new one will have something from the brood when she wakes.” Her lamps flickered. ”This unit has read of it in the queen’s teaching. This unit has never seen it done.”

Risa bent down, slowly, carefully, around the curve of her stomach, and picked up the stone.

It fit in her palm.

She held it there for a long time.

Then she put it against her stomach, right where Pebble’s head had been.

The baby’s silver flared.

And pulsed something I’d never heard before, not from her and not from the young and not from the queen.

Dot heard it.

”That,” Dot said, very softly, ”is the word for thank you.”

Days 607–613. A week in Scarecrow.

Toby sang his name into the hello on Day 607. His mother, the twenty-ninth, sang it back. First time she has said his name since he was fourteen. Wren says Dot says it rose and fell like a tune.

The General wrote his answer to Crane’s office with Luna as witness: aware of no personnel in contact with the drive core; all queries to go through Avalon Command. She wrote ”Witnessed” under his signature.

Risa took the baby to the courts every morning. By the third day, the young queued along the wall and an attendant kept the line. The baby answers each young differently. She knows which one is which from listening to the brood through the queen’s voice.

Nessa named the small one with the pale mark Pebble. The baby called it by its brood-pattern and by ”Pebble” together. Nessa says it was the best thing that has ever happened on Avalon.

When a larger young lost its footing on the wall, the baby pulsed ”careful,” and it caught itself. The attendant says the baby spoke as an older sister speaks, to keep the small ones safe. Not born, and already behaving as brood.

Holt asked the General about Hal in the Accord room. His hands were shaking; he held the pen in both. After everyone signed and left, the General looked back from the door and saw Crane still at the table, crying. He has never told anyone. Holt: ”Stupid clever boy.” His voice broke.

Edda examined Risa. Head down already, at thirty-four weeks by size. Best-arranged baby she has ever put her hands on. She doesn’t know what the baby is arranging herself for yet.

The station replied: ”Acknowledged. No further action required.” Holt says Hal would have had three people check the logs, and you only send that when you’ve already decided what to do. The General leaves in three days on the courier transit. Luna: then you’ll have to come back to meet her. He said yes.

Tonight Pebble brought a nursery stone to the porch: a smooth round grey stone from its own hollow, carried to a new hatchling so she will have something from the brood when she wakes. Risa held it to her stomach. The baby said thank you in a pattern none of us had heard her use before.

Baby: thirty-four and a half weeks by size. Head down. Turned herself.

She’s got a stone from her brother’s hollow now.

I suppose that’s what Pebble is.