Scarecrow

I hadn’t meant to learn to see the grey.

I want that written down, because afterward people asked, and I didn’t always answer well. Luna asked. Holt asked. The Overseer asked, in its own way. And every time, I wanted to say: I didn’t try. I promised Sera I wouldn’t bite. I didn’t fold. I didn’t put my hands back on the glass.

But you can’t unsee a thing once you’ve seen it.

That night in the forge, when I’d looked at an atom of silicon for an hour and suddenly seen the rope instead of the knot, something had shifted. Not in the glass. In me. In the way my sight worked.

I didn’t notice at first.

Then, on the morning of Day 702, at the dawn count, I looked across the red glass at the guest house, the way I’d looked at it every morning since the shuttle came down. At the mirror in the window, watching the count.

And my sight didn’t slide off.

It didn’t go in, either. Not properly. Not the way it went into stone, or iron, or Sera, or the deep.

But it didn’t slide.

For the first time since I’d touched a panel on the ship before launch, in the pod ring, with Luna’s cold coffee in my other hand, the grey didn’t feel like glass under my sight. It felt like cloth. Like something woven, very tight, so tight you couldn’t see through it. But woven. With threads. With a pattern.

A fold.

The same rope. Folded differently. Into a shape I didn’t recognise, so dense and so strange that my sight had always mistaken it for a wall.

It wasn’t a wall.

It was just a word I hadn’t learned yet.

I didn’t tell anyone that day.

I should have. Holt’s rule. Nobody carries anything alone. But I didn’t know what I was carrying yet. I only knew that I could stand on the red glass and look at the Overseer in its window and see, very faintly, the weave of its shell.

So I looked.

I looked at the dawn count, and at noon when it walked to the forge to watch me work, and in the evening when it stood at its window again. I looked at the shuttle crates on the apron, the grey bolts that held them. At the discs behind the soldiers’ ears. At the band on Crane’s collar.

Every day, a little more.

Like reading a language you’ve only just started learning. The first day, nothing but shapes. The second day, a few words. The third day, I could follow a sentence if it was short and simple and I didn’t try to hurry.

On the fourth day, the Overseer noticed.

It was in the forge.

It came every afternoon now. Since the courts. It had stopped asking through Crane at the dawn count; it simply walked down the street at two o’clock and stooped through the door, and scraped its mirror on the lintel, and stood in the same place, six feet from the anvil, and watched me climb.

It didn’t speak much. Not since the courts. It had asked one or two questions about the delivery, about the second shipment, about the quantities. It hadn’t said fold again. It hadn’t mentioned Father’s notebooks.

It stood. It watched.

And I watched it back.

I was working on cobalt that afternoon. Not hard. Silicon to cobalt is a short climb, twenty-seven, nearly next door to iron. My hands knew it so well they could do it while I thought about something else.

I was thinking about the shell.

I’d been looking at one spot all afternoon. Low on the left side, where an arm would join the body if it had a body. The weave was different there. Looser. As if something underneath pressed against it from the inside, and the shell had grown round the pressure.

I’d almost seen through.

Almost.

Why, said the Overseer, do you look at the shell for so long?

The forge went quiet.

Kellan’s fire dropped. Tessa, at the bench, put down the stone she was tuning. Holt, on his stool in the corner, didn’t move at all.

I took my hands off the cobalt.

I could have lied.

I could have said I’m curious or it catches the light or I’ve never seen anything like it. All true. All not the answer.

But Holt had said it in the square. Tell it the truth or tell it you won’t answer. Either one. But you don’t pretend.

”Because I can read it now,” I said.

The mirror didn’t move.

”Not all of it,” I said. ”Not well. But I couldn’t see into it at all before. My sight used to slide off. Like water on glass.” I looked at the place low on the left side. ”It doesn’t any more.”

Silence.

”It’s a fold,” I said. ”Isn’t it? The grey. It’s the same thing everything else is made of. Just folded differently. Very tight. Very small. A shape I didn’t know, so I thought it was a wall.” I took a breath. ”Since you told me about the fold, I’ve been learning the shape.”

The Overseer stood very still.

Then it took a step back.

I’d never seen it move backward.

Not on the apron. Not in the map room. Not in the courts, with Pebble tapping at it. It had moved forward and it had turned and it had walked away. It had never stepped back.

One step. Away from the anvil. Away from me.

Its mirror was turned toward me. I could see myself in it. My face, curved and small, with the silver around my eyes.

And behind the mirror, for the first time, I could see something else.

Not much. A shape. Pressed against the inside of the shell, low on the left, where the weave was loose. Something soft. Something living. Curled tight against the curve of the mirror, the way Dory curled against Risa’s chest.

Very small.

Much smaller than the shell.

And it was shaking.

The asset should not be able to read the shell, said the Overseer.

Its voice was different. The sand-on-glass sound had gone thin. Fast. Every word still clear, still slightly wrong, but coming out too quickly, one on top of the other.

”I know,” I said.

The shell is not readable. By any human instrument. By any human modification.

”I know.”

Only the planetary queens.

I didn’t say anything.

The Overseer stood in the forge with its mirror turned toward me and the small soft shape inside it shaking against the curve of the shell. Then, very slowly, it turned.

Not toward the door. Toward Holt.

You told it, it said.

Holt looked up from his stool.

”I didn’t tell him anything,” he said. ”You did. In this forge. Ten days ago. Why do you not fold.” He tapped his stick on the floor. ”You taught him. You just didn’t think he’d learn the wrong lesson.”

The Overseer was silent.

Then it turned again, and stooped through the door, and was gone.

It didn’t scrape the lintel.

For the first time, it ducked low enough not to.

The band on Crane’s collar lit ten minutes later.

I was on the porch. Crane was on his bench outside the guest house, the way he always was. I saw his head come up. Saw his back go straight. Saw his face shut like a door, and his hands go flat on his knees.

He didn’t speak. Not out loud.

But I could see the band now. I could see into it, a little. Not the way I could see into the Overseer’s shell, but enough. The grey weave. The fine filament running from the band, down under the skin, into Crane’s spine.

And along the filament, light. Moving. Fast. Up, out of Crane, into the band. And out of the band, up, toward the sky.

Toward the station.

Toward the place above the station where the stars stopped.

”It’s reporting,” I said.

Sera, beside me on the porch, didn’t ask what. She’d been in the forge doorway. She’d seen the step back.

”To the Hand,” she said.

”To the Hand.”

She was quiet for a moment.

”Then it’s frightened,” she said.

”Yes.”

”Of you.”

I didn’t answer. I watched the light run up the filament out of Crane’s spine and into the sky.

”Good,” said Sera.

Toby came to find me that night.

He was at the door of the house at midnight, in his coat, with his fiddle case on his back and his face very pale, and he didn’t knock. He just stood there until I felt him and came out.

”The listening room,” he said. ”Now. Bring Dot.”

The spine-queen was singing.

Not the hollow-song. Not the five notes, here, I’m here, that she’d hummed under the voice every pass for eight years. Something else.

Toby had been in the listening room since the station came up over the horizon at eleven. He’d been there every night since the Overseer landed. He said he wanted to know if the voice changed. If the Overseer being on the ground made any difference to what the station sent down.

It hadn’t. The voice was the same. Move. North. Together. The quiet stones in every hollow on Avalon caught it and flattened it, and it slid off the broods like rain off a roof.

But tonight, under it, the spine-queen had changed her song.

”Listen,” Toby said.

He played it on the fiddle. Very softly.

Four notes. Rising, in a curve. Then a pause. Then one note, in the middle. Higher than the others.

Then again.

Four in a curve. One in the middle.

Dot’s lamps went very bright.

”That,” she said, ”is this unit’s shape.”

Nobody said anything.

Toby played it again. Four in a curve. One in the middle.

”She started at eleven,” he said. ”When the station came over. I almost missed it. I thought it was the hollow-song, the way she always does. But it wasn’t. It was this.” He lowered the fiddle. ”Over and over. Under the voice. The whole pass.”

”The material,” I said.

”The material,” said Dot. Her lamps were trembling. ”The first delivery. It went up to the Meridian on Day 701. The cargo shuttle docked at the cargo spine.” A pause. ”The cargo spine runs along her. Through her. She is the station’s spine. Everything that moves through the Meridian moves along her body.”

”She felt it,” said Toby.

”She felt the shape,” said Dot. ”Four hundred atoms, in every block, in this unit’s shape. She has never seen this unit. She cannot know what it is. But the little one taught the shape to the queens. To ours. To the mountain. Through the ring.” Her lamps flickered. ”And the spine-queen has been listening to the ring every time she hums. Every time the broods sing back.”

”She knows it’s ours,” I said.

”She knows it came from the ring,” Dot said. ”And she is singing it back to us. To tell us she felt it.”

”There’s more,” said Toby.

He put the fiddle down. He looked very tired.

”She sang it for the first half of the pass,” he said. ”Four in a curve, one in the middle. Over and over. Strong. Like she was holding it.” He swallowed. ”Then, about halfway, she changed. She started singing it moving. The notes going up. Every time she sang it, a little higher. A little fainter. Like something going away from her. Up.”

”Up where?”

”Up,” said Toby. ”Off the station. Away from her. Higher and higher, until I could barely hear it.” He looked at the flat south wall. ”And then, right at the end of the pass, just before the station went over the horizon, she sang it one more time. Very high. Very faint. And then she stopped. And sang the hollow-song instead.”

Dot’s lamps went very still.

”The Hand,” she said.

Dot had the station’s shuttle logs.

Not the real ones. The real ones were in the courier office, which the Overseer had taken. But Dot had been watching the station with every lens she owned for months, and she’d been logging every shuttle that left the cargo spine. Every one. Time, direction, burn.

She put them on the wall.

Day 701. The cargo shuttle comes down to Scarecrow. Takes on the delivery. Goes back up. Docks at the cargo spine at four in the afternoon.

Day 704. Eleven at night. A different shuttle. Grey. One of the Sorn tender’s. Undocks from the cargo spine.

And goes up.

Not round. Not down. Up. Out of the Meridian’s orbit, in a long slow burn, higher and higher, toward the place above the station where the stars stopped.

”This unit logged it,” Dot said quietly. ”This unit did not know what it carried.”

”Now you do.”

”Now this unit does.”

Four in a curve, one in the middle, going away. Up. Fainter. Into the Hand.

”It’s not going to Earth,” Luna said.

She was in the doorway. I hadn’t heard her come. She had her coat on over her nightdress and her notebook under her arm, and her face in Dot’s lamplight was very white.

”The material,” Luna said. ”Crane said it was for the domes. The Project’s always said it was for Earth. For the air plants and the walls.” She looked at the shuttle log on the wall. At the long slow burn going up into the dark. ”It never went near Earth. It went straight from the cargo spine to the Hand.”

”It went to the Hand,” said Dot. ”Where it went after that, this unit cannot see.”

”But she can,” said Toby.

We all looked at him.

”The spine-queen,” Toby said. ”She sang it going up. Fainter and fainter. And then she sang it one more time. At the end. Very high.” He picked up the fiddle and played it. Four in a curve, one in the middle. Very high. Very faint. ”That wasn’t the Hand. The Hand’s not that far. That was further. Much further.”

He lowered the bow.

”She was telling us where it went after,” he said. ”As far as she could feel it. And then it went somewhere she couldn’t.”

We took it to Crane in the morning.

All of us. Me, Luna, Toby, Dot, Holt. We stood in front of his bench in the grey early light, with the band on his collar dark and the Overseer’s window empty. It hadn’t stood at the window for the dawn count. For the first time since it landed, the window was empty.

Luna held out Dot’s shuttle log. Printed. The long slow burn, up into the dark.

”Where does the material go?” she said.

Crane looked at it.

He didn’t ask what it was. He knew. I watched him know. I watched him look at the burn line, going up, and close his eyes.

”Not to Earth,” he said.

”No.”

”I told you Earth. In the map room. I told you it was for the domes.” His voice was very quiet. ”I believed it. When the Project started. When I wrote the first allocation requests. Material from Avalon for the domes.” He opened his eyes. ”And then the allocations stopped coming through my office. Three years ago. They went to Central Allocation instead. A new office. I wasn’t told who ran it. And I didn’t ask.”

”Where does it go?” said Luna again.

Crane looked at the burn line for a long time.

”There’s a world,” he said. ”AV-9. The Sorn designation’s longer. It’s eleven jumps further out than Avalon. The enemy seeded it a very long time ago. It has broods. Queens. The way this one does.” He swallowed. ”The Sorn want it next. They’ve wanted it for a long time. They couldn’t take it without soldiers. They didn’t have soldiers until us.”

”And the material?”

”Weapons,” said Crane. ”Ships. Amplifiers. The grey. Everything you’d need to arm an invasion. The Sorn can make the grey but they can’t make it fast. They need feedstock. Tungsten. Iridium. Rhodium. Things that are rare on their worlds and rare on ours.” He looked at me. ”And easy for you.”

Nobody said anything.

”You’re not building the domes,” Crane said. ”You’re building the war. The next one. On AV-9. With modified human soldiers, when the Project has enough of them.” His voice cracked. ”And amplifiers for the broods there. So the voice can drive them. The way it drove the old queen’s brood south of the river.”

”And Substrate S-1?” said Toby.

Crane closed his eyes.

”The grey,” he said. ”Raw. Unfolded. They want you to make the grey itself. Because then they wouldn’t have to make it. You’d make it for them. As much as they want.” He opened his eyes. ”And then there’d be no limit.”

The band lit.

Of course it did. It had been dark too long. Crane’s face shut. His hands went flat.

But the voice didn’t come.

The band lit, and stayed lit, and Crane sat on his bench with his face closed and his eyes wide, and nothing came out of his throat at all.

Across the street, the guest house door opened.

The Overseer stood in it.

It didn’t come out. It stood in the doorway, in the grey early light, with its mirror turned toward the bench. Toward Crane. Toward Luna holding the shuttle log. Toward me.

I looked at it.

At the shell. At the weave. At the place low on the left side, where the loose threads pressed outward.

The small soft shape inside was still there.

It wasn’t shaking any more.

It was very, very still. The way Mother’s hands had been still on the wall. The way Crane’s hand had been still above the paper before he wrote Witnessed.

The way something is still when it’s decided to wait and see.

The Overseer looked at me looking at it.

Then the door closed.

The band on Crane’s collar went dark.

And Crane put his face in his hands.

I went to the wall that afternoon.

Sera had said ask them, not it. I’d been putting it off. I think I was afraid of what they’d say. That I’d gone too far. That learning to read the grey from the thing that wore it was exactly the hook Holt had warned about, and I’d swallowed it whole.

The queen lowered her head when I came out.

You saw inside it, she said. Not a question.

A little.

The little one felt you see. Through the hollow. She felt your sight change. A pause. She was not frightened. She was curious. She wishes to know what you saw.

Something small, I said. Inside. Much smaller than the shell. Shaking.

The queen was quiet for a long time.

The old one has told me, she said at last, what the grey ones are. Under the mirrors. She saw them, in the mountain, for four hundred years. When they came to adjust the plates on her young. Her voice was very low. They are not large. They are not strong. The shells are large and strong. The shells are what they make, to stand in. Without them, they are very small, and they live a very short time.

Then why are they afraid of me?

Because the shells are folded, said the queen. And only a planetary queen could ever unfold them. She shifted her head on the stones. That is why they kept the old one in chains. Not because she was dangerous to their ships. Because she was dangerous to their skins.

I sat with that.

Should I learn it? I said. The fold. Properly. Not from it.

Yes, said the queen. But not yet. And not alone. Her frost-lines caught the light. The old one will teach you. When the mirror has gone. On her terrace, in the light, the way she taught me to grow. A pause. She says you have already learned the first thing, which is that a wall is only a word you do not know yet.

And the second thing?

That every word, said the queen, can be unsaid.

I didn’t answer.

You will not unsay the shell, said the queen gently. Not while it stands in your city under your terms. Not while your mother’s hands are on its wall.

No.

Good, said the queen. Then it is right that it is afraid. Fear that is not used is only knowledge. She lowered her head back onto the stones. Let it know.

Luna wrote to her father that night.

There was still no courier case. There hadn’t been one since the cases stopped coming, more than five weeks ago. Ruan had said they were held at the dock, unopened. Luna wrote anyway. Every few days, a page of numbers, folded into quarters, kept in her notebook with the others.

This one was longer.

Central Allocation. Who runs it.

AV-9. Eleven jumps out.

Material from Avalon goes to the Hand, not Earth.

Crane: ”I wasn’t told, and I didn’t ask.”

Ask.

She folded it and put it with the rest. Eleven pages now. A stack the width of my thumb.

”He’ll get them,” she said, when she saw me looking. ”One day. All at once. And he’ll read them in order, and he’ll know everything we knew, the day we knew it.” She smoothed the top page. ”Expected back.”

Dory said her first word that evening.

Not in the brood-speech. Not silver to silver. Out loud. With her mouth.

She was eleven weeks old. Edda said it was impossible. Edda had been saying that about most things since the birth and had started writing impossible in the green book next to the measurements, as a sort of unit.

But she said it.

She was on the porch, in Risa’s arms, inside the garden wall. Dot was at the bottom of the steps, the way she always was in the evenings, on watch, with her lamps turned low.

Dory looked at her.

Then she reached out with one hand, the way she reached for everything, and her mouth opened, and she said:

”Dot.”

Very clearly. One syllable. Exactly right.

Dot’s lamps went out.

All of them. At once. For a full second, nothing. Then they came back on, all together, very bright.

”Dask,” said Dot. Her voice was strange. ”Dask, this unit believes the little one has said this unit’s name.”

”She has.”

”Out loud.”

”Out loud.”

Dot’s lamps flickered. Then they went into a shape. Not deliberately. I don’t think she knew she was doing it.

Four in a curve. One in the middle.

Dory laughed.

And from the garden wall, the queen lifted her head and hummed. And from somewhere very far above, beyond the sky, beyond the reach of the small hollow the queens had left round our house, so faint I’d have missed it if I hadn’t spent the whole day listening for it—

A voice. Singing.

Four in a curve. One in the middle.

Days 702–710. Where it goes.

I didn’t try to learn the grey. I promised Sera. But on Day 702 my sight didn’t slide off the mirror at the window. It isn’t glass. It’s woven, tight as cloth. A fold: the same rope, folded into a shape I didn’t know, so I thought it was a wall. Every day I read a little more.

Day 706, in the forge: ”Why do you look at the shell for so long?” Holt’s rule: no pretending. ”Because I can read it now.” It’s a fold. Since you told me about the fold, I’ve been learning the shape.

It stepped back. It has never stepped back. Behind the mirror, low on the left, something small and soft and living, curled against the inside of the shell, much smaller than the shell. Shaking.

”The asset should not be able to read the shell. Only the planetary queens.” To Holt: ”You told it.” Holt: ”You did. You taught him. You just didn’t think he’d learn the wrong lesson.” It ducked low enough not to scrape the lintel. Ten minutes later the band lit and I watched light run up the filament out of Crane’s spine to the Hand. Sera: then it’s frightened. Of you. Good.

Toby, at midnight, in the listening room: under the voice, the spine-queen changed her song. Four notes rising in a curve, then one in the middle. Dot’s lamps. Dot’s shape. The material moved along her body through the cargo spine, and she knew the shape from the ring.

Halfway through the pass she sang it moving up, fainter and fainter. Dot’s log: Day 704, a grey tender shuttle undocked from the cargo spine and burned up into the Hand. At the very end she sang it once more, very high, much further than the Hand. As far as she could feel it.

Luna to Crane: where does the material go? Not to Earth. Three years ago the allocations stopped going through his office and went to Central Allocation; he wasn’t told who runs it, and didn’t ask. AV-9, eleven jumps beyond Avalon, seeded long ago, broods and queens. The Sorn want it next and had no soldiers until us. The material is the war: ships, amplifiers, the grey. S-1 is the grey itself, raw, and then there’d be no limit.

The band lit and no voice came. The Overseer stood in its doorway and looked at me looking at it. The soft thing inside wasn’t shaking any more. Very still. The way something is still when it’s decided to wait and see. The door closed. Crane put his face in his hands.

Asked the queen, not it. The grey ones are very small without their shells, and live a very short time. The shells are folded, and only a planetary queen could ever unfold them. That’s why they kept the old one in chains: dangerous to their skins. The mountain queen will teach me the fold when the mirror has gone. First lesson, already learned: a wall is only a word you don’t know yet. Second: every word can be unsaid. I won’t, not while Mother is on its wall. ”Fear that is not used is only knowledge. Let it know.”

Luna’s eleventh unsendable page to her father: Central Allocation, who runs it. AV-9. The Hand, not Earth. ”Ask.” Expected back.

Dory’s first word, out loud, at eleven weeks: ”Dot.” Edda now writes ”impossible” in the green book as a unit. Dot’s lamps went out for a second, then came back in her own shape without her meaning to. Dory laughed.

And from far above, past the sky, the spine-queen sang it back.

Four in a curve. One in the middle.