Scarecrow

For a month nobody fought anything.

Okafor said so. On the first morning home, at the foot of the steps of Scarecrow, after the count. She stood there with her slate under her arm and looked at all of us. The ones who’d gone under the ring. Grey under the eyes. Sitting on the steps. Wren with her head on Toby’s shoulder and the stone in her hand. Hana asleep against Risa. Sigmund with his top button undone for the first time anyone could remember.

”A month,” said Okafor. ”Nobody goes anywhere. Nobody crosses anything. Nobody stands in front of anything.” She looked at me. ”Nobody folds anything, Dask.”

”Yes, Major.”

”I mean it.”

”I know.”

She looked at all of us for a long time.

”There are fifty-eight thousand, three hundred and twelve children on Avalon,” she said, ”who were on benches under a ring a season ago. Every one of them is going to need someone.” She tucked the slate under her arm. ”For a month, that’s your job. All of you. Being someone.”

So we were.

They didn’t fit anywhere. That was the first thing. Not the beds. They’d learned to lie down, mostly, by the end of the first week, the way the four thousand from the ash had learned. Not the bread. Meg’s daughter’s bakers had worked out that if you sat down beside a child and ate first, the child would eat, and they’d spread it to every bakery on Avalon.

The places didn’t fit.

Every one of them came from somewhere. Some world. Some brood. Some queen, singing on a ship or in a pillar or in pieces on a white cloth or nowhere. And the ones whose queens had sung on the ash and under the ring had gone to their queens. To the Kethri forest. To the cold hill. To the marsh at the edge of the park and the dark grove and the Drenn round the school. They were the lucky ones.

The rest were just children.

From worlds nobody had a name for. With nobody singing.

Forty thousand of them.

Pell put them in schools.

Not to be taught. Pell was very clear about that. She stood at the long table under the silver tree, in her best coat, the first evening the table sat after the ring, and said it so that Voss could write it down exactly.

”Not taught,” she said. ”They’ve had nothing but teaching. Every day of their lives. They know how to sit and listen and do what they’re told better than any child who ever lived.” She put both hands on the table. ”What they don’t know is how to do anything else. How to play. How to want something. How to be bored.” She looked round the table. ”I’d like the schools for that. For being bored in. With other children. With somebody grown-up in the corner who doesn’t tell them anything unless they ask.”

”And if they ask?” said the seat from Carver.

”Then we answer,” said Pell. ”Every question. However many.” She sat down. ”Voss had forty-one in one night, once. I’d like a great many more people in a great many more corners ready for forty-one.”

Kwame, at the head, said, ”Your turn,” to the next seat. And Voss wrote it down.

The people came.

The way they’d come to sit in Ruth’s empty chairs on the ward. Without being asked. From every town. Carver’s farmers, in the evenings, after the fields. Ashby’s miners, up from their tunnels. Stillwater’s fishermen. Old women from the Reach who’d come out on the plains trains to look at the horses and stayed to sit in a corner of a school and wait for a child to ask them something.

And the children asked.

Slowly. Not at first. For a week, the schools were very quiet. Forty thousand children sitting in rooms with their hands in their laps, very straight, looking at the corner where an old woman from the Reach sat knitting and not saying anything.

Then one of them asked what she was doing.

That was all it took. Mother said it, afterward. Mother had been in a corner too. In the school on the green, by the silver tree, every morning, with her hands in her lap.

”One child asks one question,” she said. ”And the others watch what happens. And nothing bad happens. The old woman just answers. Knitting. It’s a scarf. For my grandson.” Mother almost smiled. ”And then the next one asks what a grandson is. And then the next one asks why it has to be warm. And by the end of the morning, there are thirty children round the old woman from the Reach, and she’s teaching six of them to cast on, and she hasn’t been asked to, and they haven’t been told to.”

”Did they learn?”

”Two of them did,” said Mother. ”The rest made knots.” She looked out at the green. ”Garnet made knots for a year before she could do a row. Her scarf for you’s still lumpy where she started.”

I touched it. Round my neck. I’d worn it under the ring. I wore it everywhere.

”Yes,” I said. ”It is.”

Genny didn’t come out of the long room for the first week.

Nobody worried. That was where Genny went when she’d found something. Garnet brought her plates of food at noon and at dusk and took the empty ones away. Ruth looked in twice a day and said nothing. Neve looked in once and came out and said she’s drawing on the wall again and went back to the ward.

On the eighth day she came and found me.

In the forge. Where I was making nothing. Just sitting on the anvil, the way I’d sat the night they brought me the iron for Hana’s ring.

”Come and see,” said Genny.

The wall of the long room was covered.

Not just the spokes. Garnet’s chalk wheel, forty-one lines going out from a dot, with the slivers on their white cloths underneath. That was still there. Bigger now. The THE FIRST NOTE line was gone, rubbed out, with a small drawing of a reed in its place, because Tally’s queen was home and standing in green water on the park with her two young beside her every evening.

But round the wheel, more.

Names. Hundreds of them. In Genny’s square letters, and Garnet’s wobbly ones, and some in a hand I didn’t know, very careful and very new. Written on the wall in chalk, in every colour, all round the spokes. And from every name, a line. Going to one of the spokes. To one of the forty-one lines of slivers on the floor.

”The children,” said Genny. ”From under the ring. The ones with nobody singing.”

I looked at it.

At the names. At the lines.

”Tally’s queen was in pieces,” said Genny. ”On the floor. Sixty-one. And her young were under the ring. Tally and Reed. And when they put their hands on her pieces, she knew them. And they knew her.” She looked at the wall. ”So I asked. Every child in the schools who’d come in on the ships without a queen singing. I asked them if they’d like to come to the long room and put their hand on the floor. Next to the slivers. And see if anything hummed.”

”And?”

Genny didn’t answer at once.

She walked to the wall. To one of the spokes. A short line, not many slivers on it. Four. On their white cloths, under the chalk. And from that line, going out, eleven names.

Eleven children.

”Four pieces,” said Genny. Very quietly. ”Of one queen. And eleven of her young. In the schools. Who came home from under the ring with nobody singing.” She put her finger on the chalk line. ”Because she couldn’t sing. She was in four pieces in the backs of four people on the human world. Doing what she was told.”

There were nineteen.

Nineteen lines on the wall, out of forty-one, with names going to them. Nineteen queens in pieces on the floor of the long room, whose young had come home from under the ring.

”Some of them have a lot of pieces,” said Genny. ”Some have only one or two. Some have dozens of young and some have three.” She looked at the wall. ”I don’t know if all of them can come back. Tally’s queen had sixty-one pieces and two young who remembered her note. Some of these have four pieces and eleven young who don’t remember anything.”

”But some of them could.”

”Some of them could,” said Genny. She turned round. Her eyes were very bright. ”And the ones who come back, Lucas—they’ll point. Like the nine did. Home. Every one of them. Toward wherever their world is. Wherever the Sorn took them from.” She put her hand flat on the wall. On the chalk. ”Nineteen worlds. That we don’t know about. That aren’t on Garnet’s map.”

We brought the first one back on the twelfth day.

Not Tally’s queen’s way, all night in green water. A different way. Her world, the children said, the eleven, when Genny asked them and Juno listened under the words, had been dry. Hot. Stone. With deep cracks in the ground where the young lived, and the queen sat over the cracks at the top of a tall red rock, and sang down into them.

So we brought her back at the canyon.

On the old grey-black rock at the bottom, where Genny said everything had held the weight of everything for a very long time. Four pieces. On four flat stones, in the dark at the bottom of the canyon, with the eleven children sitting round them in a ring. Holding hands. Because that was how they knew to sit.

Dory held. Genny asked. Every queen sang.

And I grew her.

She took all night.

Four pieces aren’t much. She’d forgotten nearly everything. Genny asked and asked, and the eleven children didn’t know, they’d been taken too small, they didn’t remember the cracks or the red rock or the heat. They only remembered one thing. The thing every child remembers, Genny said, even when it’s forgotten everything else.

Being sung down to.

In the dark. From above. A sound coming down into the crack where they lay. Warm. Steady. Every night.

So I didn’t grow her from what she was. Nobody knew what she was. I grew her from that. From eleven children’s memory of being sung down to in the dark.

At dawn she was there.

Not tall. Not like Tally’s queen. Low. Wide. Red, like the rock she’d sat on. With a long curved neck, and at the end of it, where a head would be, an opening. Like a mouth. Like the opening of a crack in a rock.

She looked down at the eleven children in their ring.

And sang.

Down. Into the dark at the bottom of the canyon. Warm and steady. The way she’d sung into the cracks.

And the eleven children, one by one, let go of each other’s hands.

And lay down on the grey-black rock. On their backs. In the dark. With their faces turned up toward the sound.

The grey came off every one of them before the sun reached the bottom of the canyon.

She pointed home that evening.

Through Genny. Through Juno. Not strongly. Four pieces aren’t much. But she pointed. And Garnet, sitting on a stone at the bottom of the canyon with her drawing board and the old brown dog, drew a line.

Not on her old map. On a new one. A fresh sheet. She’d been carrying it for a week, Genny said, folded in her coat. Waiting.

She drew a dot in the middle. That was Avalon.

And one line, going out.

And at the end of it, a circle.

”One,” she said.

The second came back on the cold hill.

The blue one. Her young had told Genny about ice. About dark water under it, very deep, very still, where the young swam and the queen lay on the ice above with her face pressed down to it, singing through it, so the young could hear her through a mile of frozen water.

Nine young. Five pieces.

The General laid the hill. All night again, the way he had for the furred young. Frost so deep and even it went white and then blue and then clear, like glass, like the ice the children described. And Hana brought water up under it. Dark and cold and very still. And the nine children lay on the ice, on their fronts, with their faces pressed to it, looking down into the dark water underneath, the way they’d done when they were very small.

I grew her under the ice. In the water. From the five pieces and the memory of nine children of a face pressed down to the ice above them, singing.

At dawn she came up through it.

Long. Pale. Blue at the edges. With fins, or something like fins, and a wide flat face. She rose through the clear ice as if it wasn’t there, and lay on it, among her nine young, with her face pressed down to the surface.

And sang down through it.

To nothing. There was nothing under the ice but water. Her young were on top of it, all round her.

They didn’t mind. They lay on the ice beside her with their faces pressed down, listening, the way they’d listened when they were very small, to the sound coming through the ice.

The General stood at the top of the hill with frost on his coat and didn’t say anything at all.

Selwyn asked Voss for a job on the fifteenth day.

He’d been on Avalon since the last crossing from New Halcyon. In a room at the end of the arrivals hall. Not the complaints room. The one next to it. Voss had given it to him. Very small. A bed and a table and a window onto the plain. He’d been sitting at the window for most of a season. Not doing anything. Not talking to anyone. Wren said he went to the scarecrow field every morning, after Voss, and stood at the back while she read her one name, and then went home.

He asked her at the field. After the name.

”Renata,” he said.

Voss looked at him.

”I’d like to do something,” said Selwyn. ”I don’t know what. I’ve never done anything. I signed things. For twenty years. I’ve been sitting at a window for a season and I’ve realized I don’t know how to do anything else.” He looked at the field. At the posts. At the names. ”I’d like to learn.”

Voss looked at him for a long time.

”There are fifty-eight thousand children on Avalon,” she said, ”who came home without names. Or with names they don’t know they have. Or with names nobody can say, like Reed’s.” She folded her hands. ”When they find one, someone needs to write it down. Exactly. Right. In a book. So it’s there. So it’s said.” She looked at him. ”Every one.”

Selwyn didn’t say anything.

”It’s slow,” said Voss. ”You’ll sit in a school for a month and nobody will ask you anything. And then one morning a child will come up to your table and tell you its name, and you’ll have to write it so that it’s exactly right. Even if it’s a curve. Even if it’s a sound like water over stones.” She paused. ”You’ll get it wrong. You’ll have to ask again. And again. Until it’s right.”

”I’ve never asked anyone anything,” said Selwyn.

”I know,” said Voss. ”Neither had I.”

He sat in the school on the green.

At a small table. In the corner. With a book Voss gave him, and a pencil, and nothing else. Every morning. For two weeks. Nobody came to his table. The children walked past him in their lines, and looked at him, and didn’t ask him anything, and he sat there with his pencil and his empty book and didn’t ask them anything either.

Mother watched him, from her corner. She didn’t say anything.

On the fifteenth morning, the small child from Reed’s bench came to his table.

She’d been on Avalon a month. She lived on the porch, mostly. With Reed and Tally, who’d taken a room at the end of the crooked house that Luna had drawn for nobody yet and said was for them now. She followed Reed everywhere. With one finger on the back of Reed’s hand.

She didn’t follow Reed to Selwyn’s table.

She came on her own. Very small. Smaller than Dory. With the grey gone from her face now, all of it, and her face very thin and pale and solemn. And large dark eyes, like Reed’s. Like Tally’s.

She stood in front of his table.

Selwyn looked at her.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say. He’d never asked anyone anything.

She looked at the book. At the pencil. At him.

Then she put one finger on the open page.

”Name,” she said.

Selwyn’s hand was shaking. Mother said so afterward. She said she’d never seen a man’s hand shake like that over a pencil.

”Yes,” he said. ”If you’d like. What—” He stopped. Started again. Slower. ”What would you like it to be?”

The small child thought about it for a very long time.

Then she said: ”Moon.”

Selwyn looked at her.

”The small one,” said the child. ”He said. On the bench. When I didn’t know if I could stand up. He said there’s two moons and one of them is very small.” She looked out the window of the school. At the sky. Pale blue. With the small moon in it, very faint in the daylight, the one Garnet said had fish on it. ”I saw it. When I came up. It was the first thing I saw.” She looked back at Selwyn. ”It was very small. And it was there anyway.”

Selwyn didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then he wrote it. In the book. Very slowly. Very carefully. With his hand shaking.

MOON.

And beside it, a very small circle.

He turned the book round to show her.

”Is that right?” he said.

Moon looked at it.

”Yes,” she said. And then, because she’d learned it from Tally, who’d learned it from Voss: ”Thank you.”

Selwyn came to the field the next morning.

He stood at the back, the way he always did, while Voss read her one name. And when she’d finished, and turned to go, he didn’t go home.

He went to the front. To the post where she’d read. And stood beside her.

”Renata,” he said.

”Harlan.”

”I asked someone something,” said Selwyn. ”Yesterday. A child. What she’d like her name to be.” His voice was very rough. ”I’ve never done that. In my whole life. I didn’t know it would feel like that.”

Voss looked at him.

”Like what?” she said.

Selwyn looked at the posts. At all the names.

”Like being counted,” he said.

Jory taught at the school by the water-works.

Not taught. Pell wouldn’t have let him call it that. He sat in a corner. The corner nearest the door, in a long low room Bram had built next to the first cistern, where the pipes ran overhead and the water could be heard going through them, very faintly, all day. His mother sat in the opposite corner, mending. She’d worked the pumps on Forty-one her whole life. She said she couldn’t sit still without something in her hands.

The children in that room were the ones who’d had housings.

Not the children from under the ring. The others. The ones from Earth. From the Program floors and the outer domes and Selwyn’s barracks. Grown, most of them. Some very young. People who’d had a piece of a queen in their back for months, or years, pushing. Who’d had the housing taken off, two a day, six a day, by the twins. Who were on Avalon now, with their names back, mostly.

Who didn’t know what to do with their hands.

Jory knew. He sat in his corner with a pencil in his fingers, turning it over and over, and when one of them looked at him, he held it up.

That was all. He didn’t explain it. He didn’t need to.

By the end of the month every one of them had a pencil. Most of them didn’t write anything with it. They just held it. Turned it over. The way Jory did.

”It’s something to do,” he told me. When I asked. ”With your hands. That nobody told you to.” He turned his pencil. ”When the sliver was in, my hands always knew what to do, because it told them. When it came out, they didn’t know anything. I used to sit with them in my lap for hours. Like on the benches.” He looked at it. ”Tally gave me this. And I found out my hands could just hold something. For no reason. Because they wanted to.”

His mother, in the opposite corner, didn’t look up from her mending.

”He used to do that when he was small,” she said. ”Turn a spoon over and over at the table. I used to tell him to stop fidgeting.” She bit off a thread. ”I don’t tell him now.”

Ruth started another book.

Not grey. Not blue or green, like the brood books. White. Very thick. With nothing on the cover at all.

”For them,” she said. In the records room. When I asked. She put her hand flat on it. ”Fifty-eight thousand children from worlds nobody knows. Every one with a body nobody’s ever seen inside. Hearts that beat in different rhythms. Bones nobody can name. Lungs that breathed grey for years.” She opened it. The first page was very full. In her small upright writing. ”I can’t make a book for each brood. Most of them don’t have a brood. Not yet. So I’m making one for them. All of them. And when their queens come back, I’ll take their pages out and give them their own books.”

”How many pages?”

Ruth looked at the book for a long time.

”I don’t know,” she said. ”I’ll keep adding them.” She turned to the last page. Which was already written on. In Ruth’s hand. One line, at the top.

What we don’t know yet.

And under it, nothing. Pages and pages of nothing. Waiting.

”That’s the longest one,” said Ruth. ”It always will be.”

We forgot Dory’s birthday.

That’s the truth. I’d like it written down, so Ruth can read it every year with the rest. She turned five somewhere in the weeks before the Hands came. On a morning when Okafor was writing heavier on her slate and the ships were going every day and Luna was drawing the halls and everybody was looking at the sky.

Nobody remembered.

Not me. Not Risa. Not Mother, who never forgets anything. Not Edda, who’d written her into the green book on the day she was born.

Dory remembered.

She didn’t say anything. Not for a whole season. Not through the Hands, or the ring, or the month after. She told me about it on the porch, at the end of the month, very calmly, with Pebble asleep against her legs.

”I was five,” she said. ”On the day Okafor wrote the fourth heavier. I knew. I didn’t say.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

”I didn’t mind,” said Dory. Very seriously. ”Everybody was busy. And I was holding. I liked holding.” She considered. ”I just thought you’d like to know. So it’s counted.”

Risa went white. Then red. Then there was thunder over the house out of a clear sky, and every dog in the street barked.

Mother put her hand over her mouth.

Sera set fire to the dishcloth again. Luna wrote DORY—5 on the kitchen wall in very large letters, in ink, so that nobody in the house would ever be able to not see it. Hana went out of the house without a word and came back an hour later with Meg’s daughter and a cake the size of a cartwheel, with five candles on it and a sixth, very small, beside them. For Pebble.

The square was full by dark.

Nobody told anyone. They just came. The Teeming along the rim. The children from the porch, in a line, holding hands. The Kethri on the wind. Tally and Reed and Moon. Okafor, with her slate under her arm. Ruth and Neve, from the ward. Odell, with suit three over his shoulder, because he said he took it everywhere now. Selwyn, at the back. Voss, beside him.

Toby played. Harriet sang the counter-note.

And forty thousand children who’d never seen a birthday stood round the edge of the square and watched a five-year-old who looked about ten blow out five candles and then, very solemnly, a sixth, on behalf of Pebble, who sniffed the smoke and sneezed.

One of them asked.

A child from the porch. Very small. With feathers along its arms. The one who’d moved Mother’s bowl the width of a hair.

It came out of the line. Across the square. To where Dory was standing, with cake on her chin. And stopped in front of her.

”What is this?” it said.

Dory looked at it.

”It’s my birthday,” she said. ”It’s the day I was born. Every year, everyone counts it. So you know how many you’ve had.”

The feathered child thought about that for a long time.

”I do not know my day,” it said.

Dory looked at it for a long time. With the frost-lattice bright round her eyes.

Then she put her hand out. Flat. On its chest. The way she put her hand flat on everything.

She shut her eyes.

”You’re about four,” she said. After a long time. Very confidently. ”And a half.” She opened her eyes. ”You can have today. If you like. We can share it.”

The feathered child looked at her hand on its chest.

Then it looked at the cake.

Then it put one finger out. Very carefully. Into the icing.

And ate it.

Forty thousand children had birthdays that night.

Not because anyone told them. Because the feathered child went back to the line with icing on its finger and told the one next to it. And that one told the next. And the next. Down the line. Round the square. Out into the streets. Like a wave going down a row of grass.

Meg’s daughter’s bakers didn’t sleep for three days.

Selwyn sat at his table in the school on the green and wrote every one down. In the book. The day each child decided was theirs. Most of them chose that day. Dory’s. A few chose the day they’d come up out of the halls, and saw the sky. One chose the day the dog first leaned on it.

He wrote that one down very carefully.

At the end of the month, Okafor called the map room.

Everyone. The way she always did. With the big map on the wall, all of Avalon, with every town and every rail line going out from the city like the spokes of a wheel. And beside it, the slate that said Every one.

And on the table, Garnet’s new map.

Three circles on it now. Three lines going out from the dot. Three queens brought back from pieces on the floor of the long room, and pointing home. The red one from the canyon. A blue one, from a world of ice and dark water, whose nine young had lain on the cold hill with the furred queen every night until she came back. And a small green one, very small, only two pieces, whose young had been the round child who stood up in the hall because the one beside it did, and four others.

Three new worlds. That the Sorn held. That nobody had known about.

Sixteen more lines on the wall of the long room, waiting.

And twenty-two more after that, with pieces on the floor and no young at all. Queens whose young had never come home. Who were somewhere else. Or nowhere.

Okafor looked at Garnet’s map for a long time.

”Nine worlds,” she said. ”That’s what we had. When we started. On the first map. Nine lines and a dot.” She put her finger on the dot. ”Eight circles crossed out. And the ninth. The long one. That goes nearly off the edge.”

Nobody said anything.

”Now there are three more,” said Okafor. ”And sixteen on the wall waiting. And twenty-two that don’t know where their young went.” She looked up. At all of us. ”And fifty-eight thousand children who came from somewhere. Every one of them from a world the Sorn took them from. Every one of those worlds still held.”

She picked up her stylus.

”I said twenty years,” she said. ”At the start. When Keir and Aster built the first warship. I said the war would take twenty years.” She turned the slate over. To the back. Where she’d written Selwyn once and drawn a line under it. And under that, Now. And under that, nothing.

She wrote a number.

”Four,” she said. ”Since the first circle. It’s been four.”

Then she looked at Garnet’s map again. At the three new circles. At the wall of the long room, through the window, across the square.

”I might have been wrong,” said Okafor. ”About the twenty.”

”Longer?” said the General.

Okafor didn’t answer at once.

”Shorter,” she said. ”Maybe.” She put the stylus down. ”Every world we free has a queen. Every queen who comes home sings under every ship. Every child who comes home grows up whole and stronger than its parents.” She looked at me. ”We were forty in a canyon, Dask. Now we’re three and a half million. And sixty thousand children who’ve just found out they’re allowed to ask questions.”

She almost smiled.

”I’d like to see what they ask,” she said.

That night Moon fell asleep on the porch.

On the end of the rail. Where Tally always sat. With her head on Reed’s knee, and her finger on Reed’s hand, and Reed’s other hand on Tally’s palm. The three of them in a row on the rail, with their large dark eyes all shut.

The small moon was up. Very faint. Over the canyon rim.

Dory came out with Pebble. She looked at the three of them on the rail for a long time. Then she sat down on the top step, below them, and put her hand flat on the wood.

”What are you holding?” I said.

”Nothing,” said Dory. ”Just checking.” She looked up at Moon, asleep. ”She’s the smallest one I’ve ever checked. Smaller than Ash was.” She considered. ”She’s all right. She’s very tired. She’s dreaming.”

”What about?”

Dory tilted her head.

”Water,” she said. ”Green. Shallow. And something tall.” She looked at Reed. ”And a hand.”

Days 2602–2635. The wall.

Okafor gave us a month of being someone. Forty thousand of the children came home with nobody singing; Pell put them in schools for being bored in, with grown-ups in the corners who answer only if asked. Nothing happened for a week, then one child asked an old woman from the Reach what she was knitting. Genny took the queenless children to the long room to put their hands by the slivers: nineteen queens in pieces whose young came home. We brought back a red one at the bottom of the canyon, grown from eleven children’s memory of being sung down to in the dark; she pointed home, and Garnet started a new map. Three circles now; sixteen more lines waiting. Selwyn asked Voss for something to do and she gave him the names. For two weeks nobody came to his table; then Reed’s small bench-child put her finger on the page and chose Moon, because I’d told her on the bench that one moon is very small, and it was there anyway. He told Voss asking felt like being counted. Okafor wrote four on the slate: four years since the first circle. She said she might have been wrong about twenty. Shorter, maybe.