Scarecrow

Nobody slept.

Not in our house. Not on Crane’s bench. Not anywhere near the red glass.

I sat at the kitchen table with my hands flat on the wood and the new six-sided mark in the silver on my palm and the words going round and round in my head the way the voice used to go round the sky.

Suspended. Pending review.

”How long?” I said.

Nobody answered.

Then Miss Pell, from the bench under the window, where she’d been sitting since dusk with her back very straight and her hands folded, said:

”Four days.”

Everyone turned.

”Her last spoon was on the first,” said Pell. ”I gave it to her myself. I’ve given it to her every time since you left. Crane’s people deliver it to the door and I carry it in and hold the dish while she takes it.” Her voice was perfectly steady. ”Lately she’s been holding the spoon herself. She’s very proud of that.”

”I know,” I said. ”She told me.”

Pell’s mouth moved. Very slightly.

”The stabilizer lasts nine days,” she said. ”Ten, if she’s resting. After that, the shaking gets worse. Then her hands stop working. Then her legs.” She paused. ”Halloway says three days after that. Perhaps four.”

”And the next dose was due—”

”On the tenth,” said Pell. ”In four days.”

Four days, and then nine days of running down, and then three or four of something worse.

Sixteen days.

Eleven light-years.

I sat at the kitchen table and did the arithmetic again, and again, the way Luna did when she was frightened, and it came out the same every time.

There was no transport. The one that had brought the twins was sitting on the apron, and it belonged to the Project, and the Project took its orders from Central Allocation, and Central Allocation was Crane and Friese. And Crane’s band was lit half the time now, and Friese was asleep in the guest compound behind the ring of soldiers and the Kethri.

The Meridian couldn’t jump. I’d closed the channel myself.

The Hand could jump. The Hand could do anything.

The Hand had sent the order.

”The egg,” said Keir.

He was in the doorway. I hadn’t heard him come. He’d been at the hangar, he said, and then at Father’s house, and then he’d come here, because he didn’t know where else to go.

”The egg can go up,” he said. ”You took it four hundred miles. Can it go eleven light-years?”

I thought about it.

”No,” I said. ”Up is just leaning. Eleven light-years isn’t up. It’s—” I stopped. ”It’s something else. I don’t know what. I closed the jump channel because I didn’t understand it.”

”Then learn,” said Keir.

”In sixteen days?”

Keir didn’t answer.

Nobody did.

Genny came down at three in the morning.

She’d been asleep, in the room Luna and Sera had made up, with Garnet curled against her back. I don’t know what woke her. Maybe nothing. Maybe she’d never really been asleep.

She stood in the kitchen doorway in a nightdress Hana had lent her, too big, with her hair sticking up at the back, and looked at all of us.

”It’s Mother,” she said.

Not a question.

Nobody answered.

Genny looked at me.

”Tell me,” she said.

So I told her.

She didn’t cry. She stood in the doorway and listened to every word, with her hands at her sides and her chin up. When I’d finished, she didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she said, ”Crane told you not to look.”

I stared at her.

”On the porch,” said Genny. ”Luna told me. Before bed. About Halloway’s sheet. And Crane saying no. You’ll see how to fix it and then you’ll want to.” She came into the kitchen and sat down at the table across from me, very straight. ”So he thinks you could fix it. If you looked.”

”He thinks I’d want to.”

”That’s not what he said.” Genny’s voice was very level. Father’s voice. ”He said you’d see how. He said that’s what the offer was for. They wanted you to see how and not be able to reach her.” She put her hands flat on the table, the way I had mine. ”So the only thing stopping you is reaching her.”

”She’s eleven light-years away, Genny.”

”Every morning,” said Genny, ”someone says her name.”

The kitchen went very quiet.

”At dawn,” said Genny. ”She told you. On the disc. Someone at dawn says my name. And her hands got steadier.” She looked at me across the table. ”That’s not eleven light-years, Lucas. That’s every morning. That’s here.”

I didn’t move.

”The hello,” said Luna slowly, from the end of the table.

”The hello,” said Genny.

”It goes up from the deep,” said Luna. ”Through the spine. To the thirty-one. On Earth.” She was looking at the table. ”Eleven seconds. Every morning. Mother for longer. She was forty-one, the morning Dory was born.”

”And the spine-queen was held,” said Genny. ”Then. Wasn’t she? With all those channels.” She looked at me. ”She’s not held now.”

I sat at the table and didn’t breathe.

The thirty-one.

Thirty-one fragments of the spine-queen’s bone. In thirty-one people on Earth who’d been kept alive on the stabilizer since the Retention Act. I’d followed the hello up to them the morning Toby first held my wrist. I’d felt them all. I’d known one of them before I reached her.

Fragments of her bone.

Of the queen I’d just freed.

”The stabilizer,” I said. ”Pell. What’s in it?”

Miss Pell looked at me.

”I don’t know,” she said. ”It’s a powder. Silver. In a dish. Very fine.” She paused. ”I asked Halloway once. She said it was processed.”

Processed.

Silver grains packed into the sheaths of her nerves.

I’d seen that. The first time I ever looked at Mother’s bones properly. I hadn’t known what it was. I’d only known it was there.

Queen silver.

Processed. Harvested. Drawn down out of a queen in the sky through narrow channels, a little every day, for eight years. Some of it for the air and the power. Some of it for the voice. Some of it for the paste in the Overseer’s canister.

And some of it, ground very fine, sent to Earth in a dish.

For thirty-one families.

So that the fragments of her bone in their bodies wouldn’t starve without her.

”She’s been feeding them,” I said.

Everyone looked at me.

”The spine-queen,” I said. ”The thirty-one. They’ve got her bone in them. Pieces of her. And the bone needs her silver to live, or it dies, and when it dies it takes them with it.” My hands were shaking on the table. ”So the Sorn drew her silver out, and processed it, and sent it to Earth. In a spoon. And called it stabilizer. And made it Project property. And held it over us.”

”The leash,” said Risa.

She was at the bottom of the garden stairs, in the doorway to the quiet room, with Dory asleep against her shoulder. I hadn’t heard her come up.

”Your mother’s the leash,” she said. ”I said that. On the porch. When Luna wrote the ask.” She came into the kitchen. ”But the leash was never theirs. Was it. It was hers.”

”And she’s free now,” said Genny.

Dawn was in two hours.

I went to the garden wall.

The queen had her head on the stones. She lifted it when I came.

You know, she said.

I think so.

Tell me.

I told her. The thirty-one. The bone. The stabilizer. Mother’s sixteen days.

The queen was quiet for a long time.

The one in the sky is not held, she said at last. But she is not strong. Eight years of being drawn down. She is very tired. She has six hundred of your people living in her house and she has said they may stay.

Can she reach them? The thirty-one?

She has reached them every dawn since the deep woke, said the queen. When the deep sends the hello, she passes it on. That is what the hello is. The deep calls her, and she calls her pieces, and her pieces answer. Eleven of your seconds. A pause. That is all she could spare. With the channels on her.

And now?

Now there are no channels, said the queen.

Could she feed them? I said. Herself? Without the spoon?

The queen didn’t answer at once. I felt her go away, down the thread under the world, to the mountain. To the old one on her terrace.

When she came back, her voice was careful.

The old one says: perhaps. If the pieces were close. If they were here, on Avalon, where the deep could carry her silver to them the way it carries the hello.

They’re not close.

No, said the queen. They are eleven of your light-years away. The hello reaches them for eleven seconds because the deep and the sky-queen together can hold the thread that long. To send silver down it, not just a call, but silver, enough to feed a fragment— She stopped. The old one says the sky-queen alone could not hold it. Not tired as she is. Not that far.

And with help?

The queen looked at me.

With whose help?

I thought about it.

The deep under the canyon, which sent the hello up every dawn. The sky-queen, free and singing, passing it on. Twenty-three queens in the ring, who’d sung to her yesterday until she could hear them over everything.

Toby, who could carry a note without changing it.

Jessa, whose path reached up past the station to the Hand.

And Dory.

Who’d found Mother in her first second of life. Who’d reached out along the hello and touched her for forty-one seconds and asked me who?

Who’d been checking on her every night since, along the thread she’d found in me on the day of the call.

Everyone’s, I said.

We went to the red glass an hour before dawn.

All of us.

Not the city. Not yet. Just the ones it needed.

Dot, to count. Toby, with his fiddle, to carry. Jessa, with her hand on her chest over the path I’d opened, to reach. Juno, with her arm in a sling, to feel where everything was.

Risa, with Dory.

Sera and Luna on either side of me.

Holt, because Holt was always there.

And Genny.

She’d asked. At the kitchen table, at four in the morning, with her chin up. She’s my mother too. And I’d looked at her silver, unfinished, narrow in places, bright as light against a door, and thought about how she’d done chemistry problems in code and read all Father’s notebooks and been taught the dome’s systems by Miss Pell.

She has her father’s hands, Pell had written.

So Genny came.

Garnet stayed asleep. Hana stayed with her.

At the bench outside the guest house, as we passed, Crane looked up.

The band was dark.

He stood up.

Nobody had asked him. He followed us onto the glass anyway, and stood at the very edge, where he’d stood the morning he said hello.

At the mouth of the meeting passage, the Overseer was still crouched.

It hadn’t moved all night. Wren said so. Pebble had gone back down into the courts at midnight, and the young with him, and the Overseer had stayed. Folded on the paving stones at the edge of the passage with its mirror turned toward the dark.

The handler hadn’t come for it.

Not yet.

Dawn.

The hello came up from the deep.

The way it always did. Up through the rock under the canyon. Up through the red glass, under my feet, where I stood with Toby’s hand on my wrist and Sera’s hand in mine and Luna’s on my shoulder.

Up through the sky.

To her.

And she was there.

Not faint. Not under anything. Not squeezed out round the edges of a voice that wasn’t hers. Right there, at the top of the hello, vast and tired and free, catching it the way you’d catch a ball someone had been throwing at you for eight years while your hands were tied.

And passing it on.

I felt it go.

Out. Away from Avalon. Down a thread so long it didn’t feel like a thread, it felt like a direction. Eleven light-years. Compressed into something I didn’t understand, the way the Meridian had compressed it in four seconds on the voyage out.

To the thirty-one.

The warm one first. Like an oven door opening. Maura. Sera’s hand tightened in mine so hard it hurt.

Then the others. One by one. Hana’s father, with the shake. Toby’s mother, singing his name. Twenty-eight more.

And in the middle, careful, the way she’d always been careful—

Mother.

She was fainter than yesterday.

I’d felt her every morning for months. I knew her thread the way I knew Dory’s. Steady, lately. Steadier every day since the birthday. I’m holding it myself now.

This morning she was steady still. But fainter. As if someone had turned down a lamp.

Four days since her last spoon.

She didn’t know. Not yet. Nobody would have told her. She’d be sitting in her chair in the penthouse with the calendar on the wall and the date circled in red, waiting for a dish that wasn’t coming.

I reached.

Along the thread. The way I’d reached the morning Toby held my wrist. Up to the spine-queen, and through her, and out, down the long direction to the thirty-one, to the careful one in the middle—

And I looked.

Crane had been right.

I saw how.

The moment I looked at her silver, the way I’d looked at Jessa’s, and Holt’s, and Juno’s, and thirty-four other people’s in the medical building, I saw it. All of it. The old Retention pattern, narrow and rough. The fragment of bone, small and pale, near her heart, where they’d put it. Its threads running into her own silver like roots into soil.

And round every thread, packed into the sheaths of her nerves, the stabilizer. Fine grains of processed queen silver, feeding the fragment. Running low. Four days low.

And under all of it, the narrow places.

The stops. The places where her own silver had been cut short by the Retention modification, so that she could never finish, never heal, never stand on her own without the fragment and the spoon.

I could see every one.

I could see exactly how to open them.

Crane had said I’d want to. More than anything.

He was right about that too.

But I couldn’t reach.

That was the other half. The part Crane had known. The part the offer was built on.

I could see. Down a thread eleven light-years long, through a queen four hundred miles up, for eleven seconds a morning.

I couldn’t touch.

The hello was a call. A voice. Not a hand. It could carry a name. It could carry there you are. It could make her hands steadier, a little, every morning, the way a voice in the dark makes you braver.

It couldn’t carry me.

I felt the eleven seconds running out. The thirty-one beginning to settle. The thread beginning to slacken, the way it always did, as the spine-queen let go.

Mother, in the middle, careful, holding on longer than the others. Twelve seconds. Thirteen.

I couldn’t reach her.

Then the spine-queen didn’t let go.

I felt her decide.

Four hundred miles up. Vast and tired and free. With six hundred people in her house and eight years of being drawn down behind her. With twenty-three queens below who’d sung to her yesterday until she could hear them.

She didn’t let go of the thread.

She held it.

Fourteen seconds. Fifteen. Twenty.

I felt what it cost her. Felt her strain, the way the Kethri strained against their collars. Felt her silver, which had only just started coming back to her from seven places at once, pour out of her and down the thread toward the thirty-one.

Not a call.

Silver.

Her own. Unprocessed. Unground. Not in a dish. Straight from her to her pieces, the way it was always meant to go, before anyone built a housing.

Thirty seconds.

It wasn’t enough. I could feel it wasn’t enough. She was too tired. The thread was too long. Her silver was thinning out down the length of it like water poured into sand, and by the time it reached the thirty-one it was barely more than the hello.

She was going to have to let go.

Then the deep pushed.

Under my feet. Under the red glass. Under the canyon. The great slow ancient thing that had sent the hello up every dawn for months without anyone asking it to.

It pushed up.

Not a hello. Not a call. Itself. The deep’s own strength, pouring up the thread from below, into the spine-queen, under her, holding her up the way you’d hold up someone who was falling.

And then our queen.

At the garden wall. At her full height. Singing.

And through her, the mountain queen. On her terrace. With a piece of herself back after four hundred years.

And through her, the ring. Lantern, and the Hollow, and First Garden, and the Spire. The Bowl Queen. The delta queen. The white mountains. The Northern Hollow. All twenty-three. Not singing, this time. Giving. A little each. Up through the deep and into the spine-queen and down the long thread to the thirty-one.

Forty seconds.

And Toby.

His hand on my wrist. His other hand on his fiddle, which he’d brought out without anyone telling him, and tucked under his chin, and was playing. One note. Low. Carrying. Holding twenty-four queens and the deep together and not changing them. Not even to make it better.

Fifty seconds.

And then Dory.

I felt her wake.

In Risa’s arms, on the red glass, beside me. She’d been asleep. She woke all at once, the way she’d woken the morning she was born, and her check went round—

Me. Risa. Sera. Luna. The queen. Dot. Genny.

And then out. Along the thread she’d found in me on the day of the call. The thread she’d checked along every night since. The one she’d reached down at four in the morning, the day before, to find two sparks on a ship.

Up. Through the deep, through the ring, through the spine-queen, down the long direction, to the thirty-one.

To the careful one in the middle.

To her grandmother.

There you are, said Dory.

And she didn’t let go.

She was woven.

That was what the queen had said, the day she was born. She is not stronger. Strength is the wrong word. A tree is strong. A net holds.

She held.

Not the thread. Not the silver. Not the spine-queen or the deep or the ring.

She held me.

I felt her do it. Felt her woven silver, every thread joined to every other, reach into me the way it reached into everyone she checked. And find the place where I was looking down the long thread at Mother’s narrow places and couldn’t reach.

And join.

The way her own silver joined. Every path to every other. Not a tree. A net.

And through the net, through Dory, through the woven lattice that ran from her small warm body in Risa’s arms, up through the deep and the ring and the spine-queen, down eleven light-years—

I could reach.

Sixty seconds.

I didn’t have long. I knew that. Everything was pouring into the thread at once: the deep, the ring, the spine-queen’s own silver, Toby’s note, Dory’s net. It couldn’t hold. Not for long.

So I didn’t try to finish her.

I couldn’t. Not from here. Not in a minute. Mother’s narrow places were old and deep and many, forty years of the Retention modification cutting her short. Finishing her would take an hour, in the medical building, with Toby’s hand on her heart.

But I could open one.

The one that mattered.

Near her heart. Where the fragment was. Where its threads ran into her silver like roots. Where her own silver had been cut short, so that she could never feed the fragment herself, so that she would always need the spoon.

I opened it.

Gently. The way I’d opened Jessa’s closed path, near her heart, the one that reached for Marlo. From her heart outward. Asking the tissue to make room.

And her silver, her own, which had been stopped at that place for forty years, ran forward.

Into the fragment.

Into the roots.

And the fragment, which had been starving, four days from its last spoon, drank.

Seventy seconds.

I felt her feel it.

Eleven light-years away, in a chair in a penthouse, with a calendar on the wall and a dish with no spoon in it. I felt my mother feel something open, very small, near her heart. Something that had been closed for forty years.

And her hands—

Stopped shaking.

Not the way they’d stopped on the wall, for one second, two, on purpose, so I’d know she was all right.

Stopped.

All the way.

The way hands stop when there’s nothing making them shake any more.

The thread let go.

It had to. The spine-queen had nothing left. The deep sank back. The ring went quiet. Toby’s note faded. Dory’s net slipped out of me, slowly, the way the young slip off their mother’s plates when they’re tired.

Seventy-three seconds.

Dot said it. Very quietly. On the red glass.

”Seventy-three,” she said. ”Fragment thirty. Dask, Dorothy. Seventy-three seconds.”

A pause.

”The longest anyone has ever answered.”

I was on my knees.

I didn’t remember kneeling. I’d gone down without noticing, the way you sit when you’ve been holding your breath for a very long time and finally let it out. Sera was holding one arm and Luna the other. The six-sided mark on my palm was bright.

Genny was in front of me.

She was kneeling too. On the red glass. Very straight. With her face wet and her chin up and her hands, both of them, held out in front of her.

Looking at them.

”I felt it,” she said.

I looked at her.

”Through you,” said Genny. ”Through Dory. When she joined.” Her voice was shaking. ”I felt Mother’s hands stop.” She looked up at me. ”I felt it, Lucas. Eleven light-years. Her hands stopped and I felt it.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t.

Genny put her arms round my neck. Very straight. Very hard.

”Father’s hands,” she said into my shoulder. ”Pell said I have Father’s hands.” She was crying. ”But I didn’t have that. I couldn’t do that.”

”Neither could I,” I said. ”Not alone.”

Crane was at the edge of the glass.

On his knees. Like me.

The band on his collar was dark. His hands were flat on the red glass in front of him.

Perfectly steady.

He was looking at the sky.

”She held it,” he whispered. ”The one in the sky. She held the thread. For seventy-three seconds.” His voice cracked. ”I heard it. Through the band. I heard her pour herself down it.” He closed his eyes. ”Eight years I pushed the voice through her. And she poured herself down the thread for a woman she’s never met.”

Holt was beside him.

He didn’t say anything. He put his hand on Crane’s shoulder.

And at the end of the hello, very faint, at the place after the gap where the one used to be—

Something answered.

Not a name. A word.

Dot heard it. Her lamps went very bright.

”This unit counts the one,” she said.

Then, quieter:

”The one said: thank you.”

At the mouth of the meeting passage, the Overseer had stood up.

It was looking at the red glass.

At me, on my knees. At Genny, holding on to me. At Dory, in Risa’s arms, asleep again already, exhausted, with her fist in Risa’s collar.

At Crane, on his knees, with his steady hands.

It looked at us for a long time.

Then it turned its mirror up. Toward the sky. Toward the Meridian, on the far side of the world now. Toward the place above it where the stars stopped.

Toward the Hand.

And I understood that it was waiting.

Days 759–760. Pending review.

Nobody slept. Miss Pell: Mother’s last spoon was on the first; Pell held the dish; lately Mother holds the spoon herself and is very proud. The stabilizer lasts nine days, ten if resting, then her hands, her legs, and Halloway says three or four days after that. The next dose was due in four. Sixteen days. Eleven light-years. No transport. The Meridian can’t jump; I closed it myself. Keir: can the egg go eleven light-years? Up is just leaning. That isn’t up.

Genny came down at three in a nightdress too big for her. Tell me. Crane said you’d see how to fix it. ”So the only thing stopping you is reaching her.” Eleven light-years. ”Every morning, someone says her name. That’s not eleven light-years. That’s here.” Luna: the hello. Genny: and the spine-queen was held then. She isn’t now.

Pell: the stabilizer is a fine silver powder. Halloway called it processed. Silver grains in the sheaths of her nerves. Queen silver. Drawn down out of the spine-queen, ground fine, sent to Earth in a dish, so the fragments of her bone in thirty-one people wouldn’t starve without her. Called stabilizer. Made Project property. Held over us. Risa: the leash was never theirs. It was hers. Genny: and she’s free now.

The queen at the wall: the sky-queen has reached them every dawn since the deep woke; that’s what the hello is. Eleven seconds is all she could spare with the channels on her. Could she feed them silver, not just call? The old one: perhaps, if they were close. Alone, tired, that far, no. With whose help? Everyone’s.

An hour before dawn on the red glass: Dot to count, Toby to carry, Jessa to reach, Juno to feel. Risa with Dory. Sera, Luna, Holt. Genny: she’s my mother too. She has her father’s hands. Crane followed us unasked. The Overseer was still crouched at the passage mouth; it hadn’t moved all night. The handler hadn’t come.

Dawn. The hello went up and she was there, not under anything, catching it like a ball thrown for eight years at tied hands, and passing it on. Maura first; Sera’s hand hurt mine. Hana’s father. Toby’s mother. Mother in the middle, fainter, like a lamp turned down.

I looked. Crane was right: I saw how. The fragment near her heart, its threads like roots. The stabilizer grains running low. The narrow places where Retention cut her short so she could never feed the fragment herself. But I couldn’t reach. The hello is a voice, not a hand.

Then the spine-queen didn’t let go. Twenty seconds. Thirty. She poured her own silver down the thread, unground, the way it was meant to go before anyone built a housing. Not enough; too tired, too far, water into sand. Then the deep pushed up under her. Then our queen, the mountain, the whole ring, giving a little each. Toby with his fiddle, one note, carrying all of it unchanged. Fifty seconds.

Then Dory woke and checked, and went out along the thread from the day of the call, to her grandmother. There you are. And didn’t let go. She is woven. A tree is strong; a net holds. She held me. Joined me, every path to every other, and through her net I could reach.

Sixty seconds. I couldn’t finish Mother from there; forty years of narrow places would take an hour with Toby’s hand on her heart. I opened one. Near her heart, where her own silver had been cut short so she’d always need the spoon. From her heart outward, the way I did Jessa’s. Her silver ran forward into the roots, and the fragment, four days starving, drank.

Her hands stopped shaking. Not on purpose, not for a second so I’d know. Stopped, because nothing was making them shake any more.

Dot: seventy-three seconds. Fragment thirty. The longest anyone has ever answered.

Genny on her knees in front of me, looking at her hands: she felt it, through me, through Dory’s net. Mother’s hands stopped, and she felt it. Pell says she has Father’s hands, but she couldn’t do that. Neither could I. Not alone.

Crane on his knees, steady hands flat on the glass. ”Eight years I pushed the voice through her. And she poured herself down the thread for a woman she’s never met.” Holt’s hand on his shoulder. After the gap, the one answered. Dot: ”The one said: thank you.”

The Overseer stood up at the passage mouth and looked at all of us, then up at the sky, toward the Hand.

It’s waiting.