Scarecrow

Dr. Halloway didn’t sleep the first night.

I know because Edda told me. Edda had given her the room at the back of the medical building, the one with the window onto the square and the silver tree, and a bed, and a lamp, and the green book. All of it. Every page. From the first one, in the canyon, before the dome was finished, when it was just Edda and a box of bandages and a list Holt had given her with three names on it.

”I said she could read it in the morning,” said Edda. ”She said she’d rather read it now. I went to bed at eleven. I got up at five. She was still in the chair. Same coat. Still buttoned wrong.” Edda’s mouth did the thing it did, the line that meant she hadn’t decided yet whether she was cross. ”She’d got to page two hundred and something. She’d written notes on a separate sheet so she didn’t mark mine. She asked me if I’d mind her asking some questions.”

”Did you mind?”

”I don’t know yet,” said Edda. ”There were forty-one of them.”

She came to find me in the middle of the morning.

Not at the house. On the green, where I was helping Keir with the frame for a new school, because the third crossing had brought more children than the first two put together and there weren’t enough rooms to put them in. She walked across the grass in the same coat, buttoned right now, with a sheet of paper in her hand. Not the green book. Her own sheet. Folded once.

She stopped in front of me and looked up.

She was a small woman. I’d forgotten that. A long time ago, in a hospital doorway, she’d seemed tall. She’d put her hand flat on my chest and I’d stopped. Now the top of her head came about to my shoulder.

”Lucas,” she said.

”Dr. Halloway.”

”Ruth. I’m not your doctor any more. I’m not anyone’s doctor any more.” She held out the sheet. ”I’d like that to change. This is what I’ll need.”

I unfolded it.

It was a list. Of course it was a list. In very small, very upright writing, in two columns, all the way down to the bottom of the page and over onto the back.

Theatre. One, then two. Lamps. A table that tilts. Steel: knives, clamps, retractors, needle holders, everything in Father’s book and a good deal that isn’t. A way to boil steel clean at more than boiling. A cold room. A warm room for early babies, more than one. Glass: slides, tubes, a microscope with good lenses. Something to spin blood. Something to see inside without opening. Beds that lift. Splints in every size. Splints for wings.

I looked up at that one.

”Splints for wings,” I said.

”Edda’s page one hundred and ninety-four,” said Ruth Halloway. ”A Kethri child flew into the side of the new school on the second day it was up. Edda splinted it with two spoons and a strip of her own shirt.” She looked across the green at the frame Keir and I were building. ”I’d like her to have something better than spoons. I’d like to have something better than spoons. I don’t know how a wing goes together. Nobody here does. That’s not a reason not to splint it properly.”

I turned the sheet over.

The back was shorter. And underlined.

Records. Every person. Every species. Kept somewhere that is not one woman’s head.

”That’s the important one,” she said.

”Edda’s book’s very good,” I said.

”Edda’s book is the best clinical record I’ve read in thirty years,” said Ruth. And she meant it. You could hear she meant it. ”It’s also the only one. One book. One woman. Writing in pencil, at night, after a delivery, in a building that’s warm because you made the walls want to be warm.” She took the sheet back from me and folded it again along its crease. ”Everything in that building works because you’re standing in it, Lucas. Or near it. Or a day’s flight away from it. I read all two hundred and something pages. Every time it went badly, you came. And it stopped going badly.”

”That’s good,” I said.

”It’s very good,” she said. ”It’s the best medicine I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve seen you hold a spoon in your hand and give it back to a woman whose hands shook so badly she couldn’t lift it.” She looked over the square. At the crooked roofs. At the park, where the wheel Keir had built was going round slowly, full of children, Teeming young running underneath it in the dust. ”And you’re going to be on a ship. For a long time. Somewhere I can’t see. And forty or fifty babies are going to come this year, Edda says, and some of them are going to come wrong way round. And some little boy is going to fall off that wheel. And tens of thousands of people came through your doors last week who’ve never been finished, and some of them are going to have an appendix, and you’re going to be eleven light-years away.”

I didn’t say anything.

”I’m not asking you to stop,” said Ruth. ”I’m asking you to build me something that works when you’re not in it.”

So I did.

It took most of a season.

Not because it was hard to make. Some of it was. Most of it wasn’t. Steel’s easy. Steel’s always been easy, since the forge, since Father. I could stand in the yard with a block of it and ask it to be a clamp, and it would be a clamp, with the teeth exactly the right size and the hinge exactly the right stiffness, before Ruth had finished drawing it.

That was the problem. The first time, she held it up to the light and turned it over and over and frowned.

”What’s wrong with it?”

”Nothing’s wrong with it,” she said. ”That’s what’s wrong with it.” She put it down on the table. ”Make me another one. Exactly the same.”

I made another one.

She put them side by side. Then she got out the little gauge she’d brought in one of her cases, a steel thing with a dial on it, and measured them both, very carefully, in six places each, and wrote the numbers down.

They were the same. Exactly. To the last mark on the dial.

”Good,” she said. ”That’s what I need. Not one perfect clamp. Two hundred identical ones. So when a nurse picks one up in the dark with blood on her hands, it’s the one she’s always picked up.” She looked at me. ”Miss Pell told me about the houses.”

”The houses were too perfect,” I said.

”For houses,” said Ruth. ”People need to put their own nails in a house. Nobody wants to put their own nails in an operating table.” She picked up the clamp again. ”This is the one building on Avalon that ought to be perfect. Every one the same. Every drawer in the same place in every room. So that anybody can walk in from anywhere and find the gauze with their eyes shut.”

So that’s how we did it. Ruth drew. I made one. She checked it. I made the rest.

Knives, clamps, needle holders, all the steel things, took about a week.

The lamps took longer. Ruth wanted light with no shadow, from above, so that a surgeon’s own hands didn’t get in the way of what she was looking at. I didn’t understand what she meant till she stood under the first lamp I made and held her hand out over the table, and there was a black hand-shaped shadow on the cloth exactly where she’d want to cut.

In the end it was Luna who worked it out, at the kitchen table, with the arrivals list turned over and a diagram on the back. Lots of small lights, in a ring, all pointing at the same place from different sides. So each one filled in the others’ shadows. I made it in an afternoon once she’d drawn it. Ruth stood under it and held her hand out and there was nothing on the cloth at all.

She stood there for quite a long time, with her hand out.

”We had one of these,” she said at last. ”In the dome. Before. It broke when I was a junior. They never found the parts.” She took her hand back. ”I did twenty years of surgery under a lamp with a shadow in it.”

The warm rooms for early babies were Sera’s. Not the making. The heat. She came down with Ash on her hip and put her free hand on the wall of the first one, and listened to it the way she listened to the forge, and told me where it was going to be cold at night. Then I made the wall want to stay warm there, the way the walls of the quiet room wanted to keep sound in. Ruth tested them with a thermometer every hour for three days and nights. Edda said she didn’t sleep for that either.

The cold room I did by myself. Deep, under the building, in the old grey-black rock Genny said had held the weight of everything above it for a very long time. Cold rock doesn’t mind staying cold. You just have to ask it not to share.

The beds that lifted, Keir did. He came in the third week, rubbing his hands, and looked at the beds I’d made and said, ”Those are just beds,” and went away, and came back two days later with a crank and a set of gears he’d cut himself. Not by asking. By hand. With a file. They weren’t perfect. One tooth on the third gear was a little wide.

”Leave it,” said Ruth, when I went to fix it. ”If it slips, we’ll know which bed it was.”

The glass was the hard part.

Not making glass. Avalon’s mostly glass, the red glass of the plain, and I’d made windows and walls and the coral pool out of it. Glass is easy. Clear glass is easy.

But a lens isn’t just glass. A lens is a shape. A very particular curve, ground so that the light bends exactly the right amount and comes out at exactly the right point, and if it’s wrong by a hair, a blood cell looks like a smear.

I made her a lens. She looked through it. She said, ”No.”

I made her another. ”No.”

The tenth time, I looked at what she was looking at. Not through the lens. Through her. The way Halloway’s own eye bent the light. The little cloudy place at the back of the left one, that she’d had for a very long time, that she’d never mentioned to anyone because she’d learned to look round it.

”I can fix that,” I said.

”Fix what?”

”Your left eye. There’s a—”

”I know what there is,” said Ruth Halloway. ”I’ve had it longer than you’ve been alive.” She took her eye away from the eyepiece. ”Fix the lens, Lucas. Not me. When I’m dead someone else is going to look down this, and they won’t have you either.”

So I fixed the lens.

It took me two more days. In the end I did it the way Halloway had taught me to read a brain, through the glass of Quarantine Block C, nine o’clock every night, for nine nights. Read slowly. You will get it wrong the first time. I made the curve, and looked at the light coming through it, and asked the glass to move a little, then a little more, then back, until the light came out of it the way water comes out of a jug: all together. In one place. Without a single thread of it going anywhere else.

She looked down it at a drop of her own blood.

Then she sat back on her stool and didn’t say anything for a while.

”Come here,” she said.

I looked. Down the tube, through the lens I’d made, at a drop of blood on a slide.

I’d seen blood before. More closely than anyone. I’d seen into every vessel in Mother’s body. I’d seen the program silver threaded through Sera’s heart and the Retention cuts in Holt’s spine. But I’d always seen it with my eyes. With the thing the program put in me, that went straight to it.

This was different. It was through glass. Through something anyone could look through. A small round field of light, and in it, pale discs, hundreds, drifting very slowly. And one bigger thing, with a dark knot in the middle, pushing its way between them.

”That’s a white cell,” said Ruth. ”That’s what fights. That’s the first thing I ever saw down a microscope, when I was eighteen. I thought it looked like it knew where it was going.” She looked at me. ”Now anybody on Avalon can see it.”

The machine I didn’t want to make was the ring.

She knew I didn’t. She waited. She did everything else first. Steel and lamps and glass and warm rooms and cold and the blood spinner, which was a wheel inside a case going faster than I’d ever made anything go, and a boiler for the steel that Sera heated past boiling till the needle on Keir’s gauge stopped moving and Ruth said good, that, every time. And beds and splints, including splints for wings, which we made from the light grey wood that grew at the edge of the park, in six sizes, after Sesh let Ruth put her hands on her wing and fold it and unfold it, very slowly, for an hour, in the garden, with Edda drawing.

Then, one evening, when the rest of it was done, she said it.

”I need to see inside without opening.”

”I know,” I said.

”You know what I mean.”

”The ring,” I said. ”The big white machine. At the end of the corridor.”

She nodded.

I’d heard it humming through the wall on Day 112. Crane had wanted me in it. A full neural map. Six hours in the ring with a helmet on my head, while his thin man said distances into his slate. A sample of fluid from each eye. A small needle. Halloway would do it, of course. Nothing that would hurt.

”I didn’t want any of that,” said Ruth Halloway. Quietly. In the empty theatre, under the ring of lamps. ”Not for you. I’d like you to know that. I agreed to be the one because if I didn’t, Crane would have found someone who’d do it worse.” She put her hands in her coat pockets. ”That machine isn’t Crane. It was never Crane. It’s a machine that lets you see inside someone without cutting them open. Before the war it was in every hospital on Earth. It saved more lives than I could count.” She looked up at me. ”I’d like to save some here.”

I thought about it for a long time.

Then I went home and asked Genny.

Genny was doing chemistry at the end of the kitchen table, the way she’d done it every evening since we came home from the ninth world. She had a row of small glass jars I’d made her and a balance she’d made herself, out of two spoons and a thread, that was more accurate than it had any right to be. She was weighing something white.

”She’s right,” said Genny. Without looking up.

”I know she’s right.”

”Then why are you asking me?”

”Because it was Crane’s.”

Genny put down her spoon. And looked at me. Really looked, the way she’d looked at me on the roof stairs, when I’d promised.

”I know,” she said. ”You told me. The humming through the wall. The thin man. Six hours.” She turned her jar round, so the label faced her. ”I wrote it down.” She picked the spoon up again. ”If somebody I loved was bleeding inside and nobody could see where, I’d want the machine. I’d want it a lot more than I’d mind who’d used it before.”

I didn’t say anything.

”You can make it so it doesn’t hum,” Genny said. ”If you like. So nobody lies in it hearing what you heard.”

So I made it so it didn’t hum.

I built it from Ruth’s cases.

She’d brought a handheld reader in the second one, wrapped in an old sweater. A little grey box, the kind every ward in the dome had. Battered at the corners. It showed the inside of whatever you held it against, for about the width of your hand, if you were patient and the battery was good. It was the same kind of reader Edda had. The same kind Toby had used to see Risa’s baby before the shuttle. The ring was just that, Ruth said. The same thing, made big enough to go round a whole person.

So I looked into it. The reader.

I hadn’t before. Not properly. I’d always been able to see inside people without it, so I’d never needed to know how it saw. But now I did. I looked at every piece of it, every coil and wire and tiny crystal, the way I’d looked at the spine of the Meridian in the launch site with the fog in its panels. I looked until I knew it. Then I asked the steel and the glass and the copper in the yard to be that, but larger. Then larger again. A ring tall enough for a Kethri to stand in with her wings folded. Long enough for Dot to lie in, if Dot ever needed to, which Dot said she never would.

Keir did the power. Aster came and looked at it with her lamps on and asked her question, who carries it, and can she leave, and Ruth looked at her very seriously and said, ”Anybody who needs it. And yes. Any time she likes. You press this.” And showed her the big red handle on the inside of the ring, at hand height, that anyone lying in it could pull. That stopped everything and opened it.

That was Ruth’s idea. Not mine. I’d have liked it to be mine.

Aster’s lamps went soft.

She tested it on herself first.

She lay down on the bed in the middle of the ring, with her coat folded under her head, and said, ”Go on,” and Keir pulled the lever. And the ring moved round her, slowly, not humming, and the wall beside it lit up with what was inside her. Ribs. Lungs. Heart. All of it, in grey and white, like frost on a window.

Edda stood beside me with her green book open, not writing anything.

”Well,” said Ruth’s voice, from inside the ring, quite calm. ”I’ve got a shadow on my left kidney I didn’t know about.” A pause. ”Small. Old. Calcium, I should think. Doesn’t matter.” Another pause. ”That’s why you test it on yourself first.”

Then she got out and looked at the wall, at herself, for a long time.

”Now you,” she said. To me.

I lay down.

I’d thought it would feel like the humming through the wall on Day 112. It didn’t. It was quiet. No helmet. No thin man. No sample from each eye. Just the ring going round very slowly, and the light, and Ruth’s voice somewhere outside it saying hold still the way she’d said it then, exactly the same, as if no time had passed at all.

It took about four minutes.

When it was done I got up and went round to the wall to look.

Ruth was standing in front of it. Very still. With her hands in her coat pockets. Edda beside her. Genny had come in from somewhere and was standing at the back with her notebook against her chest.

On the wall was my head. From the inside.

I’d never looked at it like that. I’d looked inside myself plenty, the way I looked inside everyone. But never from outside. Never all at once, as a picture.

It wasn’t a brain like the ones in Father’s anatomy book. It was, mostly. Everything was where it should be. But through all of it, round all of it, in and out of every fold, was the silver. Not the fine branching frost that grew in Jessa and Holt and the people Edda had finished. Something else. Thick and smooth and whole, like roots grown all through the ground under a tree, the tree and the roots one thing. Running down into my neck. Out into the dark where the ring hadn’t reached.

And round the eyes on the wall, the rings. Whole. Bright as wire.

Ruth Halloway looked at it for a very long time.

”Do you remember,” she said at last, ”the night before the launch? In quarantine? Through the glass?”

”You gave me your notes,” I said. ”Copied small. Fourteen grams left over.”

”I said something to you.”

”Bring me back a brain I’ve never seen.”

She nodded slowly.

”Well,” said Ruth. ”You did.”

Behind us, Genny wrote something down.

The medical building had been a medical building. Now it was a hospital.

Ruth said it the first morning the theatre was finished. She stood in the door of it, with Edda, and looked down the long main corridor I’d stretched out from the old building toward the park, with the doors in the same place on both sides all the way down and the drawers in every room in the same place as every other room.

”Hospital,” she said. ”Not medical building. Medical building is where you go to get a bandage. Hospital is where you go when it’s bad.” She looked at Edda. ”We’re going to need somewhere people can come when it’s bad.”

”It’s mine,” said Edda. Quite sharply. ”I’d like you to know that. I was here first. I delivered Dory in a room with the walls still wet.”

”I know,” said Ruth. ”I read about it. Page sixty.” She held out her hand. ”I’d like to be your partner. Not your director. I’ve been a director. I didn’t care for it.” A pause. ”I’ll do the cutting. You do the babies. We both do the books. Each of us checks the other’s. Every night.”

Edda looked at the hand for a while.

Then she took it. Once. Firmly. The way you’d shake hands over a fence with someone you’d been arguing with about a boundary for twenty years and had just decided to share a gate with.

”You’re still buttoning your coat wrong,” said Edda.

”I know,” said Ruth. ”I’ve always done it. It’s the only thing in my life I’ve never fixed.”

Mother came in the second week.

Not because she needed to. Because Ruth asked her to. I flew her down from the house. She walked down the long corridor in her dark coat, with Father’s ring on her hand and the grey streak in her hair, very straight. Ruth met her at the door of the first examining room.

”Dorothy.”

”Ruth.”

”Sit down. I’d like to look at you properly. Once. Not because I don’t believe him. Because I’d like it in the record.”

Mother sat on the bed. And Ruth looked at her properly. Eyes. Ears. Throat. Heart, with a stethoscope I’d made, the same as the old ones. Reflexes, with a little rubber hammer, which made Mother’s knee jump and made Mother laugh, which made Ruth stop and look at her.

”I’ve never heard you laugh,” said Ruth. ”In all those years. Not once.”

”There wasn’t much to laugh at,” said Mother.

Then the ring. Four minutes. Ruth stood in front of the wall with Mother’s insides on it. With the silver, Mother’s silver, fine and finished now, branching clean all through her like frost on glass. No grey. No knots. Nothing where the stabilizer used to sit.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she went to the desk in the corner. And took out a sheet. And wrote on it, in her small upright writing. And signed it. And handed it to Mother.

Mother read it.

Then she folded it once and put it in her coat. Over her chest. Next to where the scarf had been.

She didn’t tell me what it said. I didn’t look. I could have. I didn’t.

Garnet told me, later. Mother had showed it to her at bedtime, and Garnet couldn’t keep anything in for more than a day, and she’d tried for two.

Discharged.

Then the classes started.

She didn’t ask anybody’s permission. She wrote a notice in her small upright writing and pinned it to the silver tree in the middle of the square, low down, where the children could read it. And on the doors of the schools. And she gave one to Juno, who sent it down the hello, so the queens heard it, and the young, and anyone who listened with silver.

Anatomy. Evenings, after the music. The long room at the end of the hospital. Anyone. Any age. Any species, if I can find a way to show you what’s inside you. Bring something to write on. — R. Halloway.

The first evening, the long room was full. More than full. People standing at the back. People sitting on the floor. Third-crossing people from Earth who’d never been allowed above the lower floors in their lives, sitting next to Kethri with their wings tight against their backs, so they wouldn’t knock anyone. Two of the Karst young in the corner, flat on the floor, their fine hairs all turned toward the front. Hana, with Risa. Liam, who lasted twenty minutes and then Ruth said the word bowel and he went outside to look at the stars.

I was at the back.

Ruth stood at the front with a chalkboard I’d made, and a skeleton I’d made, from the bone-pale stone at the bottom of the canyon, every piece the right shape. And a jar with a heart in it, a sheep’s heart, from the flock the last crossing had brought. And she talked.

She was good at it. I’d known she was good at it. I’d had nine nights of it through the glass of Quarantine Block C. But I’d been the only one then. Now I watched her do it to a room of two hundred, of six species, and it was the same. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t make jokes. She just told you how a thing worked, slowly, one piece after another, until you could see it. And then she’d say something like certainty is a symptom, and stop, and let you think about it. And go on.

The second week there were a hundred.

The fourth week there were forty.

By the end of that season, there were about fifteen. People who wanted to be nurses, mostly. A few of the third crossing who’d been orderlies in the dome. Priya, who’d helped Edda since the canyon. Two Kethri, who wanted to learn about wings, which Ruth was learning about too, so she taught them what she’d learned that week and asked them to teach her what they knew, and wrote it all down.

And in the front row, every single night, three.

Toby was first.

I wasn’t surprised. Nobody was. Toby had confirmed Risa’s baby with the reader in the medical building before anyone else had touched it. He’d stood in the corner of the delivery room with Edda’s list in his head. He’d heard Harriet before she was born, before anyone, it’s humming my note.

He could hear hearts.

Not with the stethoscope. With himself. The thing in him that heard everything, every sound on Avalon, the queens, the walls, the stones, the dawn count coming back off everyone so Wren could hear their shape. He’d always been able to hear hearts. He just didn’t know what he was hearing.

Ruth taught him.

She brought people in. People who’d volunteered from the third crossing, who hadn’t been finished yet, with things wrong in their chests. She’d put the stethoscope on them. And then she’d tell Toby, listen. And he’d listen. Not with the stethoscope. And he’d tell her what he heard.

”There’s a sort of—” He’d stop. Frown. Hands in his pockets. ”A swish. After the second one. Like water going past a stone.”

”That’s a valve that doesn’t close properly,” Ruth would say. ”That’s blood going back the wrong way. That’s a murmur. Good. Which side?”

”Left,” said Toby. ”Low.”

”Mitral,” said Ruth. And wrote it down. And then she’d turn the wall on and put the person in the ring, and there it would be. Exactly where Toby had said.

After a few weeks he could tell her what was wrong with a heart from the other side of a room. After a season he could tell her from the other side of the hospital. Ruth stopped needing the ring for hearts. She’d just ask Toby.

He was very embarrassed about it.

”I’m not a doctor,” he said to me, one night, walking home, with Harriet asleep in her sling. ”I’m a fiddle player. I can’t even read half the words in her books.”

”You can hear a valve from the other end of the building,” I said.

”Anyone could.”

”Nobody could.”

He walked for a while.

”It’s like the stones,” he said at last. ”The songs. Every heart’s a song. Most of them are the same song. And then there’s one with a note that’s slightly wrong.” He looked down at Harriet. ”I used to just think that one’s a bit off. Now I know what’s off. And she tells me how to fix it.” A pause. ”It’s the first thing I’ve ever been good at that wasn’t music.”

”It is music,” I said.

He thought about that.

”Yeah,” said Toby. ”I suppose it is.”

Sigmund was the second.

I hadn’t expected that. I don’t think anyone had. Sigmund had always been the careful one. Risa’s brother. Quiet. Tidy. A Friese, with all the weight that carried. He’d held lightning still in the middle of the dark, alone, in a perfect circle, so that it didn’t touch anybody. He’d built a fence round the palm. He did everything as if he was afraid that if he let go of himself, even slightly, something would burn.

Jessa brought him. The first night. She’d wanted to come because Ruth was Ruth. Ruth had taken her blood twice a week since she was eleven. Ruth’s blood work had said the closest, on Crane’s sheets, long before Jessa knew what it meant. Ruth had sat with her in rooms nobody else would sit in.

Jessa came in and sat in the front row. Sigmund sat next to her because she’d sat there. And by the third night, Jessa was still coming, and Sigmund was coming early, to get the seats.

The fifth night, Ruth talked about nerves.

How they worked. How a thought went from your head to your hand. How the muscles moved because something went down the nerve that wasn’t water and wasn’t blood.

”It’s electrical,” said Ruth. ”Very small. Very quick. Your whole body’s running on it. Your heart has its own. A little spark, right at the top, here.” She touched the sheep’s heart in its jar, at the top, on the right. ”It fires about seventy times a minute. It’s been firing since before you were born. And when it stops, or goes wrong, or fires too fast and doesn’t pump, you die. In about four minutes.”

Sigmund didn’t say anything.

But at the end of the class, when everyone else had gone, he stayed. Sitting very straight. Hands on his knees. Jessa beside him, waiting.

”How much,” he said.

Ruth looked at him.

”How much what, Mr. Friese?”

”If it stops. How much. To start it again.” He looked at his hands. ”I can do very small. I can do smaller than you’d think. I’ve had to. All my life. I’ve been trying not to do anything at all, all my life.”

Ruth sat down on the edge of the table.

”That,” she said, ”is a very good question. And if you’re asking it, I’d like to answer it properly. Which means you’ll need to know a great deal more than you know now. Can you come in the mornings, too?”

It took him the rest of the season. Mornings and evenings both. Ruth had me make a heart. Not a real one. A model, out of something soft, with wires in it where the nerves would be, that she could make go wrong. She’d make it go wrong in different ways. Too fast. Too slow. Not at all. Fluttering, like a bird in a box. And Sigmund would put two fingers on it and try.

The first time, he blew it in half.

He stood there with smoke coming off his fingers and his face gone completely white. Ruth looked at the two halves of the heart on the table. Then she looked at him.

”Good,” she said.

”Good?”

”Now you know what too much feels like,” said Ruth. ”That’s the most useful thing you’ll ever learn. Lucas, another one, please.”

I made another one.

By the third week he could start it. By the sixth he could start it every time. By the end of the season he could do it with his eyes shut, and Toby standing beside him listening, and saying now at exactly the right moment.

”It’s the same as the fence,” Sigmund told me. We were on the porch of the hospital, in the evening, waiting for Jessa. ”When I built the fence round the palm. It wasn’t about how strong. It was about where. Holding it exactly where it needs to be, and nowhere else.” He looked at his hand. A very small blue spark ran round the tips of his fingers and went out. ”I spent my whole life being afraid of this. Father used to say it was the only thing about me that wasn’t polite.”

”And now?”

He thought about it.

”Now it’s the thing that starts the heart,” said Sigmund Friese. And went in to find Jessa. Not looking at me. But I saw his face, and he was smiling.

And Genny.

Genny was the third. Genny was in the front row before anyone, every single night, with her notebook already open and the date written at the top. Genny had been the first person in the long room the first evening. Ruth had come in to set up and found her sitting there with her pen.

”You’re young,” said Ruth. Doubtfully.

”I’m a twin,” said Genny. ”I’m the older one. By eleven minutes. I’ve been taking notes since I was four. Notebook sixteen’s got a promise in it, witnessed. I’m on notebook forty-one.” She held it up. ”I’d like to do this one properly.”

Ruth looked at her for a moment.

”Why?” she said.

Genny didn’t answer at once. That was unusual. Genny almost always answered at once.

”Lucas fixes things,” she said at last. ”He’s very good at it. He’s the best at it there’s ever been. He looks inside you and he sees what’s wrong and he asks it to be right.” She turned her pen over in her fingers. ”But he doesn’t always know why it went wrong. He just knows that it did. And when he goes away on the ship, and somebody’s hand starts shaking, I’d like to know why. Not just that it is.” A pause. ”And I’d like to know what to do if he doesn’t come back for a while.”

Ruth Halloway sat down in the chair at the front of the long room. Across from Genny. At the same height.

”That,” she said, ”is why I became a doctor.”

”I know,” said Genny. ”Mother told me. You were eighteen and you saw a white cell and you thought it looked like it knew where it was going.”

Ruth looked at her for a long moment.

Then she reached across and took Genny’s notebook. And turned to the first clean page. And wrote, at the top, in her small upright writing: Week one. The cell.

And gave it back.

Genny didn’t just take notes. Genny asked.

Every class. Every night. Not stupid questions. Never stupid. The kind of question that made Ruth stop in the middle of a sentence and put down her chalk and think. And then answer, very carefully, the way she’d answered me through the glass.

Why does the stabilizer slow the rejection but not stop it? (Because it was holding a door half shut that wanted to be open. Holding is not the same as fixing.)

Why does the silver grow differently in the Kethri than in the Karst? (Ruth didn’t know. She wrote it on the board, in a corner, under a heading that said Don’t know yet. By the end of the season there were nineteen things under that heading. Genny copied every one.)

If Dory and Ash and Trevor grow faster, does their heart beat faster? (Yes. Toby had heard it. About a third faster. Ruth had measured it with the ring. Nobody knew if that would change as they got older. That went under Don’t know yet too.)

And Genny did the chemistry.

That was what made Ruth stop calling her young.

Because a hospital needs medicines. And Avalon hadn’t had any. Not really. Edda had had what Pell’s people had smuggled through the locks over two years, a box of this, a crate of that. And it was running out. And I could fix almost anything, but I couldn’t be everywhere, and some things you don’t want fixed by someone looking inside you, some things you just want a pill for and to go to sleep.

But the last crossing had brought the ark. Seeds. Orchards. Everything Pell had been able to get through. Ruth had gone through the list the first week. And underlined things on it that nobody else had underlined. Willow. Foxglove. Poppy. Feverfew. A dozen more.

”Half of what we used on Earth started in a field,” said Ruth. ”Before anyone built a factory. Somebody looked at a plant and asked what was in it.”

So Genny asked.

She took the plants Ruth wanted from the orchards and the new fields. She dried them and ground them and soaked them in the small glass jars at the end of our kitchen table. She weighed what came out on her balance made of two spoons and a thread. She wrote it all down. And when she didn’t know what something was, she sang to it. Very quietly. The way she sang to the queens. And sometimes something answered, faintly, and she’d write down what it had said.

She brought the first one to Ruth at the end of the season. A small white powder in a jar with a label in her very square handwriting. From the willow.

Ruth tested it. Every way she knew. In the long room. With Edda watching. With the microscope I’d made, and the balance, and the blood spinner, and two days.

Then she put it down.

”That’s the cleanest I’ve ever seen,” she said. ”Cleaner than the factory.” She looked at Genny. ”How did you do it?”

”I asked it,” said Genny. ”What it wanted to be. Then I took away everything that wasn’t that.”

Ruth looked at her for a long, long time.

Then she looked at me. Standing at the back.

”That’s what he does,” she said.

”I know,” said Genny. ”I’ve been watching him do it for as long as I can remember.” She put the jar on the shelf. In its place. In the same place it would be on every shelf in every room. ”I just do it slower. So I can write it down.”

Then the orchard keeper’s heart stopped.

It was late in the season. Early evening. The light going gold across the plain. I was in the yard behind the hospital, making the last of the splints for wings, the smallest size, for the Kethri young who’d started trying to fly off the school roof.

I felt it before I heard it. Not the hello. Something else. Toby, three streets away, stopping dead in the middle of a song.

Then Toby, shouting.

”Lucas. The orchard. Her heart’s—”

I was there before he finished.

She was on the ground under the apple trees. The old orchard keeper from the gallery. The one with soil under her nails, who’d clapped first, slowly, at the back of the Senate hall, when nobody else would. She’d come through the doors in the glass with a bag of graftings and nothing else. She’d been in the orchards every day since, from first light. She was on her back in the grass with an apple still in her hand. Her lips were grey.

I looked inside her. Of course I did.

The big vessel on the front of her heart, the one that feeds the muscle, was closed. Completely. Something had broken off the wall of it and lodged there, like a stone in a pipe. And below it the heart had stopped pumping and started to shiver. Fast. Useless. Like a bird in a box.

I could fix it. I could open the vessel and move the stone and ask the muscle to be what it was. I’d done harder. I’d done it in seconds.

I knelt down.

And someone put a hand flat on my chest.

Ruth.

She was out of breath. She’d run from the long room. Her coat was buttoned wrong again. Behind her, running too, Toby, and Sigmund, and Genny with her notebook already open.

”Wait,” said Ruth.

”She’s dying.”

”She has about three minutes before she’s dying,” said Ruth. ”Toby?”

Toby dropped to his knees on the other side. He didn’t touch her. He just listened. His face went very still.

”Shivering,” he said. ”Not beating. Fast. All over the place.”

”Sigmund.”

Sigmund knelt down beside her. His hands were shaking. I’d never seen Sigmund’s hands shake. Not at the palm. Not in the dark with the lightning.

”Genny, the time.”

”Fifty seconds since Toby stopped singing,” said Genny. Writing.

”Lucas,” said Ruth. Very quietly. Her hand still on my chest. ”I know you can. I know you can do it faster than any of us. I know. But you’re going away on the ship in a few weeks. And when you do, this is what’s going to be here.” She looked at Sigmund. At Toby. At Genny. ”Let them.”

I looked down at the orchard keeper. At her grey lips.

Then I sat back on my heels.

Sigmund put two fingers on her chest. Exactly where Ruth had shown him, on the model, a hundred times. He shut his eyes.

”Toby,” he said.

Toby listened.

”Wait,” said Toby. ”Wait. It’s—now.”

There was a sound like a stick snapping. Very small. A tiny blue spark between Sigmund’s fingers and her chest. Her whole body jumped once on the grass. The apple rolled out of her hand.

Toby listened.

Nobody breathed.

”No,” said Toby. ”Still shivering.”

”Again,” said Ruth. Perfectly calm. ”Same. Not more. You don’t need more.”

Sigmund’s face was white. His lips were moving. Counting, I think. Holding it exactly where it needed to be, and nowhere else.

”Now,” said Toby.

The snap. The spark. The jump.

Silence.

Toby’s head went on one side, the way Wren’s did on the north wall.

”One,” he said. Very quietly. And then: ”Two. Three. Four.” He looked up at Ruth. His eyes were wet. ”It’s beating. It’s slow. But it’s beating. It’s in time.”

”One minute fifty,” said Genny. Writing. ”Two shocks.”

The orchard keeper breathed in. A long, ragged, rattling breath. And her lips went from grey to blue to the faintest pink.

Ruth took her hand off my chest.

”Now,” she said. ”Now you can fix her. Now she’s alive to be fixed.”

So I did. I opened the vessel and moved the stone and found three more, smaller, further down, waiting to do the same thing on another evening, and I moved those too. It took about a minute.

When I looked up, Sigmund was sitting on the grass with his head between his knees. Jessa had come from somewhere and was kneeling beside him with her arm round his shoulders. Toby was crying and pretending not to. Genny was still writing.

And Ruth Halloway was standing over all of us, under the apple trees, with the gold light on her face, and her coat buttoned wrong, and her hands in her pockets.

”Proper order,” she said. To nobody. To herself. ”That’s proper order.”

The orchard keeper’s name was Hester Fenn.

She was in the hospital for four days. Ruth wouldn’t let her out sooner. On the first day she sat up in one of Keir’s beds, the one with the slightly wide tooth on the third gear, and demanded her graftings. On the second she demanded to know who’d knocked her apple out of her hand. On the third Sigmund came to see her, and stood at the end of the bed, very straight, very awkward, with his hands behind his back.

”It was me,” he said. ”I’m sorry about the apple.”

Hester Fenn looked at him for a long time.

Then she held out her hand. Her old, brown, cracked orchard hand, with soil still under the nails because she’d made Priya bring her a pot with a cutting in it.

Sigmund didn’t move.

”I won’t break,” said Hester Fenn. ”You’ve already done the worst you can do to me, young man. You started my heart.”

Sigmund took her hand.

Nothing happened. No spark. Nothing at all. Just a young man with lightning in him holding an old woman’s hand very carefully, the way you’d carry water.

When she went home on the fourth day, she gave him a sapling. A little apple, in a pot. A grafting from a tree she said had been on Earth for a hundred and fifty years before the war, in an orchard on the lower floors, where nobody was supposed to know it was.

He planted it outside the hospital door. Where everyone would see it, coming in.

Ruth wrote it all down that night.

Not in Edda’s book. In the new one. The records, kept somewhere that wasn’t one woman’s head. I’d made it the way she’d asked: a room at the heart of the hospital, cool and dry, with shelves to the ceiling, and on the shelves, files. One for every person on Avalon. Every species. In the same order. With the same sheets in them. So that anybody could walk in from anywhere and find anybody, with their eyes shut.

There were a great many of them already. Edda had sat up with her every night for a season, copying the green book out, page by page, onto the new sheets. Neither of them would let anyone else do it.

The green book was on a shelf of its own. At the end. Where you could see it from the door.

”I’m not putting it in a file,” Edda had said. ”It’s the first one. It stays where it is.”

Ruth had agreed. At once. Without argument. It was the only thing she’d ever agreed to without an argument, Edda said.

Under Hester Fenn’s name, Ruth wrote it out. Every minute. Genny’s notes. Toby’s shivering. Sigmund’s two shocks, same, not more. And at the bottom, after the part where I’d fixed the vessel, a line I read over her shoulder.

The patient was alive to be fixed because three people on Avalon knew what to do without him. That is the first time it has been true.

She signed it.

Then she sat back in her chair, in the records room, under the lamp, and looked at the shelves.

”Thirty years,” she said. Quietly. Not to me. ”Thirty years of files on people I couldn’t help. In a case. Under my bed.” She looked at the two old cases, standing by the door, where she’d put them the first day. ”I’d like to put them on a shelf. Here. With the others.”

”Why?”

”So someone reads them,” said Ruth Halloway. ”So Genny reads them. And Toby. And Sigmund Friese. And whoever comes after. So they know what it was like before.” She stood up. And did up her coat. Wrong. ”So they know it doesn’t have to be.”

Days 1851–1900. Proper order.

Halloway didn’t sleep the first night; read Edda’s green book in the back room in her coat, two hundred-odd pages, forty-one questions on a separate sheet so she didn’t mark it. Then her list for me, two columns and over the back: theatre, lamps, a table that tilts, steel, a way to boil it past boiling, a cold room, warm rooms for early babies, glass, a microscope, something to spin blood, something to see inside without opening, beds that lift, splints, splints for wings (Edda’s page one hundred and ninety-four: two spoons and a strip of her shirt). On the back, underlined: records, every person, every species, somewhere that isn’t one woman’s head. Everything in that building works because you’re standing in it. Build me something that works when you’re not in it.

Most of a season. Not one perfect clamp; two hundred identical ones, so a nurse finds it in the dark. Pell told me about the houses; nobody wants to put their own nails in an operating table; the one building on Avalon that ought to be perfect. Luna’s ring of small lamps, no shadow; twenty years under a lamp with a shadow in it. Sera’s heat for the warm rooms. The cold room in the old grey-black rock. Keir’s beds by hand with one wide tooth: leave it, we’ll know which bed. The lens: ten no’s; the cloud in her left eye: fix the lens, not me; when I’m dead someone else looks down this. Read slowly. A white cell, that looked like it knew where it was going, and now anybody on Avalon can see it. Splints for wings in six sizes from the grey wood after an hour with Sesh in the garden.

The ring last. I didn’t want any of that for you; if I didn’t agree to be the one, Crane would have found someone worse; it was never Crane. Genny at the table weighing something white on two spoons and a thread: if someone I loved was bleeding inside, I’d want the machine; you can make it so it doesn’t hum. So it doesn’t hum. Built from the reader in her second case, wrapped in a sweater; big enough for a Kethri with her wings folded. Aster’s question; anybody who needs it, and yes, any time she likes, pull this: a red handle inside. Ruth went first: a small old shadow on her kidney; that’s why you test it on yourself. Then me: the silver all through, like roots, the tree and the roots one thing. Bring me back a brain I’ve never seen. You did.

Hospital, not medical building. Edda: it’s mine; I delivered Dory with the walls still wet. Partners, not director; you do the babies, I do the cutting, each checks the other’s book every night. You’re still buttoning your coat wrong. Mother: eyes, heart, the little hammer that made her laugh, which Ruth had never heard; four minutes in the ring; one word on a sheet, folded into her coat over her chest. Garnet held it in two days. Discharged.

The notice on the silver tree: anatomy, any age, any species. Two hundred; Liam lasted till bowel. A hundred; forty; fifteen. And in the front row every night, three. Toby, who can hear hearts: a swish like water past a stone; mitral; every heart’s a song, and now he knows what’s off; the first thing he’s been good at that wasn’t music. It is music. Sigmund, with Jessa, who’s given Ruth her blood since she was eleven: how much, to start it again; I’ve been trying not to do anything at all, all my life. A model heart blown in half; good, now you know what too much feels like. Like the fence: not how strong, where. The thing about him that wasn’t polite is the thing that starts the heart. Genny, first in the room, notebook forty-one, older by eleven minutes: Lucas fixes things; I’d like to know why. Week one: the cell. Nineteen things under Don’t know yet. Willow, foxglove, poppy, feverfew from the ark; she sang to them and took away everything that wasn’t what they wanted to be. That’s what he does. I just do it slower, so I can write it down.

Late in the season, gold light, Toby stopped in the middle of a song. Hester Fenn, the orchard keeper who clapped first in the gallery, on her back under the apple trees, lips grey, heart shivering like a bird in a box. Ruth’s hand flat on my chest, as in the doorway long ago. You’re going away on the ship; this is what’s going to be here; let them. I sat back on my heels. Toby: now. A small snap, a blue spark; still shivering. Again, same, not more. Now. One, two, three, four; it’s in time. Genny: one minute fifty, two shocks. Now you can fix her; now she’s alive to be fixed. Three more stones further down, for another evening; I moved those too. Proper order.

She held out her hand to Sigmund: you’ve already done the worst you can do to me; you started my heart. No spark. A sapling from a tree a hundred and fifty years old, grafted on the lower floors where nobody was supposed to know; he planted it by the hospital door. The records room: every person, every species, the same sheets, the green book on its own shelf at the end where you can see it from the door. Alive to be fixed because three people knew what to do without him; the first time it has been true. Her two old cases on a shelf with the rest, so someone reads them. So they know what it was like before. So they know it doesn’t have to be.