Scarecrow

Fifteen thousand, two hundred and twenty-five children came off the ships onto the red glass.

Tally counted. Moon counted. Wren counted from the corner of the map room with her eyes shut. They all got the same number, which Wren said had never happened before with anything, and which Tally said meant it was right.

Fifteen thousand, two hundred and twenty-five.

From a hundred worlds. More. Nobody knew how many. Small. Grey. Very still. Sung.

And they stood on the red glass under a blue sky, where Okafor had let go of them, and didn’t move.

They didn’t move for two days.

Not because they couldn’t. Halloway said their bodies were fine. Thin. Tired. Cold in the hands and feet the way everyone was cold who’d been in the white rooms. But fine. Neve went down the rows with her lit fingers and felt every heart and every one was beating. Slow. Steady. All at the same speed, the way the Hathri in the hollows had been, as if fifteen thousand hearts had been taught to be one heart.

They could move. They didn’t know they were allowed to.

Nobody had told them.

”We have to tell them,” said Luna.

At the kitchen table. At midnight. On the first night. With the slate.

”We have told them,” said Halloway. She’d come up the hill because she said there was nothing more she could do on the glass until morning and she couldn’t sleep. ”Every language Dot has. Every way we know. You can sit. You can walk. You can go wherever you like.” She put her hands round her cup. ”They hear us. They look at us. They don’t move.”

”Because we’re telling them,” said Tally.

Everyone looked at her.

She was at the end of the table. With her notebook. With the page that said SEVEN-THREE-K, and under it, one line, from the red glass that afternoon. First child. No name yet. Put out her hand.

”Telling is what the note does,” said Tally. ”Be still. Hold. Keep. Everything they’ve ever heard is someone telling them.” She looked at the page. ”If we tell them you can move, it’s just another thing they’ve been told. They’ll wait to be told what to do next.”

”Then what?”

Tally didn’t answer at once.

”Somebody asked me,” she said. ”On the grass. At the garden wall. Lucas asked me why I’d stopped asking.” She looked at me. ”He didn’t tell me I could. He asked me something. And I found out I could answer.”

So we asked.

Not all at once. You can’t ask fifteen thousand children anything all at once. It isn’t asking. It’s telling with a question mark.

One at a time.

Everyone came. Everyone on Avalon who’d ever been asked something and found out they could answer.

The children from the halls, who’d come out of the voice’s rooms under the ring a long time ago and sat on the porch rail and learned to choose. The fifty-eight thousand from the benches, who’d stood up on the plain the day of the great singing because the one next to them did. The keepers, walking very slowly down from the red glass beside the heavy queen, eleven of them, with the ash keeper at the end with its scarf. Jory. Reed. Moon. The feathered child, standing on the top step of the porch with its head on one side.

They went out onto the red glass.

And knelt down in front of a child. One each.

And asked.

Not what’s your name. That was too big. Tally said so. Tally said the first thing anyone ever asked her was why she’d stopped asking, and she didn’t know the answer, and it took her three days to find it, and that was all right.

They asked small things.

Are you cold?

Would you like to sit down?

Have you ever seen a sky that colour?

I watched Moon do it.

She knelt down in front of a boy. Very small. Smaller than her. From a world nobody had a name for. With his hands together and his eyes very large and his face grey. She knelt in front of him on the red glass for a long time and didn’t say anything at all.

Then she pointed up.

At the sky.

”Window,” she said.

The boy looked at her finger. Then, very slowly, he looked up.

At the sky. Blue. Enormous. With one small cloud in it, because Risa was on the porch and couldn’t help herself.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked back at Moon.

And unfolded his hands.

It took nine days.

Not for all of them. For the first thousand. The rest came slower. Some came faster. A girl from a world of ice who’d been in the white rooms only a month stood up on the second day and walked across the red glass to the edge of the grass and knelt down and put both hands in it and laughed. A boy from a world of salt didn’t move for twenty days, and then, on the twenty-first, when the salt queen came down from the west base and lay down on the glass beside him and hummed, he put his head on her side and slept for two days and woke up crying, which Halloway said was the best thing she’d seen all month.

The keepers were best at it.

Nobody expected that. They’d been taught one thing their whole lives. They’d stood at the foot of towers looking up. They’d knelt when the voice stopped and listened, because it was the only thing they’d ever heard a keeper do that wasn’t being told.

They knew what it was like.

The ash keeper went down the rows every day with its scarf. And knelt in front of a child who hadn’t moved. And put its long grey hand flat on the glass between them. And waited.

Didn’t ask anything. Didn’t say anything.

Waited.

And after a while, sometimes, the child would put its hand flat on the glass too.

Next to the keeper’s.

Halloway wrote it down. In a new folder. Not the Long Count. Something else.

She called it Unsinging.

I built them a town.

Okafor asked. Not told. She came to the porch on the third night and sat on the top step and said, ”They can’t stay on the glass,” and I said, ”No,” and she said, ”Will you?” and I said yes before she’d finished.

Not near the landing field. Not near the long ward, where the white walls were. Up the hill. Under the garden wall. Where our queen lay at the top in the light, gold and silver, with her young round her on the terraces. Where she could hear them.

I asked Tally what it should be like.

Tally thought about it for a long time.

”No benches,” she said.

”No benches.”

”No white.” She looked at her hands. ”Nothing white. Not one wall. Not one floor.” A pause. ”And no corners you can’t see round.”

I asked Reed.

”Somewhere you can hear the ground,” said Reed. Once. And put her ear to the porch boards.

I asked Moon.

Moon didn’t answer for a long time.

Then she put her finger on the corner of Tally’s notebook. Where she’d drawn two moons. The first thing she’d ever drawn.

”Windows,” she said.

So I built them windows.

Every house. Every room. Every wall that faced outward had a window in it, and some that didn’t. Big ones. Low ones, at a child’s height, so you could see out sitting on the floor. Round ones, at the top, for the sky. I made them out of glass I asked the sand by the river to be, clear and thick and very slightly warm, and I put them everywhere.

The houses I made out of wood. The east block carpenters came and showed me how, because they said if I was going to build a town for children who’d been in white rooms, it had better be built the way people built things, by hand, and not just asked out of the ground.

So I learned to build a house by hand.

It took a long time. Longer than asking. The carpenters were very patient. Halvard Ostrand came up from the forge and showed me how a joint should sit. Hettie Crale brought a cow and tied it to the fence at the edge of the town because she said children should see something alive and slow and not frightening, first thing in the morning.

The floors were wood. Brown. Warm. The walls were painted. Garnet chose the colours. Orange, mostly. With stripes.

Nothing was white.

Konrad carried glass.

Nobody asked him to. He came up the hill on the fourth day of the building with his cane and his dark coat and stood at the edge of the town where the carpenters were working, and watched. For a long time. The way he’d watched from the bottom of the long road when Ingrid came down out of the sky.

Then he put the cane down against a fence post. And took his coat off. And folded it, very precisely, and put it on top of the cane.

And went to the cart where the window glass was stacked, the glass I’d asked the river sand to be, clear and thick and slightly warm. And picked up a pane. With both hands. Very carefully.

And carried it to the nearest house.

The carpenter there looked at him. A big man from the old east block, with sawdust in his beard. He’d been under the dome all his life. He knew who Konrad was. Everyone from Earth knew who Konrad was.

”Senator,” he said.

”No,” said Konrad. ”Just glass.” He held out the pane. ”Where would you like it?”

The carpenter looked at him for a long time.

Then he pointed. Low. At a child’s height. Where you could see out sitting on the floor.

He carried glass every day for three weeks.

He didn’t talk to anyone. He didn’t ask anyone for anything. He came up the hill at dawn and took his coat off and carried panes of glass from the cart to wherever the carpenters pointed, and held them while they were fitted, and went back for the next one. His hands blistered. Maura came up on the fifth day and looked at them and warmed them without asking and told him to wear gloves. He wore gloves after that.

Ingrid came up on the ninth day.

She stood at the edge of the town with the green scarf round her shoulders and watched him carry a round pane up a ladder to the top of a house, very slowly, with both hands, for a skylight. For the sky.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t go closer.

But that night, on the porch, she said, to nobody in particular: ”He’s afraid of ladders. He always has been.” A pause. ”He went up that one four times.”

The children moved up from the red glass on the twentieth day.

Walking. Every one who could. Up the long road from the landing field, very slowly, past the forge and Thorne’s green door and the square, up the hill. With the keepers walking beside the slowest. With the children from the halls walking beside the rest.

They came to the edge of the town under the garden wall.

And stopped.

And looked at the windows.

Our queen lifted her head.

At the top of the garden wall. Gold and silver in the morning light. She looked down at fifteen thousand children standing at the edge of a town made of wood and windows. She’d been listening to them for twenty days. On the glass. Every heart. Slow. All the same.

She sang.

Not the note. Not not still. Not the great singing.

The hum. The one she hummed to her own young, on the terraces, when they were tired. The one Dory had heard the day she was born.

Fifteen thousand children heard it.

And walked into the town.

Halloway forbade Dory to hold anything for a week.

Not the door. Not anything. She came up to the house the morning after we came back from seven-three-K and sat on the edge of Dory’s bed while Dory slept, with her fingers on Dory’s wrist, for an hour. And then she came out onto the porch and said to Risa, very quietly, ”Eleven hours. She’s seven.”

”Nearly,” said Risa.

”Nearly seven,” said Halloway. ”Eleven hours. Holding a thread open from here to the middle and past it, for a whole fleet.” She put her hands round the cup Mother gave her. ”Her silver’s fine. More than fine. It’s getting more, like the queens’. Neve’s right.” A pause. ”But she’s a child, Calder. And she’s tired the way children shouldn’t be tired. A week. Nothing. Not the door. Not anyone’s hands. Not a cup of water held still.”

Risa looked at her for a long time.

”You tell her,” she said.

Halloway told her.

Dory listened to all of it. Sitting up in bed. With Pebble at her feet. Very seriously.

Then she said, ”What if somebody needs holding?”

”Then somebody else holds them,” said Halloway.

Dory considered this.

”Who?”

Halloway didn’t have an answer.

So Dory spent the week in the town under the garden wall instead. Not holding anything. Sitting. On the floor of the small wooden house with the orange walls, beside Rain, who was the same height as her, though Dory was nearly seven and looked twelve and Rain was nobody knew how old and looked six.

They didn’t talk. They didn’t have a language.

They sat under the round window at the top and looked at the sky.

On the fifth day, Rain put her hand out. Flat. On the floor between them.

Dory put hers next to it.

Not holding. Just there.

Halloway wrote that down too. In the folder called Unsinging. Under Dory’s name.

Didn’t hold anything. Sat. Rain put out her hand.

The cow was the first thing that made one of them laugh.

Hettie Crale’s cow. The one she’d tied to the fence at the edge of the town, because she said children should see something alive and slow and not frightening first thing in the morning. A big brown cow with a white face, who stood at the fence every day and chewed and looked at the windows with great patience.

On the twenty-third day, a boy from a world of stone came out of his house in the morning and walked to the fence. On his own. Nobody had asked him. He stood in front of the cow and looked at it for a long time.

The cow looked back.

Then it put its great white face over the fence and breathed on him. A long warm breath, smelling of grass.

The boy laughed.

Just once. Very short. Startled. As if the sound had come out of him before he knew it was there.

Every child within hearing turned round.

They’d never heard it. Not in the white rooms. Not on the glass. A laugh. They looked at the boy and the cow for a long time. And then, one at a time, very slowly, they came out of their houses and walked to the fence.

By noon there were two hundred of them. Standing at the fence. Taking turns to be breathed on.

Hettie came up the hill at dusk to take the cow home and found them still there. She stood at the edge of the town with her hands on her hips and looked at them for a long time.

”Well,” she said. ”I’ll need to bring more cows.”

She brought eleven the next day.

Maura fed them.

Of course she did. Every morning. Up the hill from the Calder kitchen with a handcart, and then two handcarts, and then Sera and Liam and Pip and Rory pulling a handcart each. Bread. Warm. Every morning. One loaf to every house.

She didn’t make them eat it. She put it on the windowsill. The low window. At a child’s height.

And went away.

”They’ll eat it when they’re ready,” she said, when Halloway asked. ”You don’t make a frightened thing eat. You put it where it can see it. Warm. And you come back tomorrow with another.” She put her sleeves down. ”Most of them were eating by the tenth day. The rest by the twentieth.” A pause. ”There’s one little girl who still won’t. She just holds it. All day. Until it’s cold. Then she puts it back on the sill for me to take.” Maura smiled. ”That’s all right. Holding it’s a start.”

The sorting queen stayed on the red glass.

Beside the heavy queen. She’d chosen it. The forest queen had offered her the warm south, or the lakes, or the coast. She’d said no. She’d said she’d like to stay where she could hear the ships come in.

I counted for longer than anyone remembers, she said. Through Dot. To Okafor, who’d asked her what she’d like to do. I do not know how to stop. A pause. But I would like to count the right things.

So she counts the ships.

Every one that comes out of the rope over the red glass, she feels. And counts what’s on it. Queen, young, other. Not to sort. To know. And when the last one’s down, and everyone who went is home, she says the brood-word.

Everyone home.

Dot tells Okafor. Okafor writes it on the slate. Every time.

Genny didn’t stop listening to the second tray.

Bell. The warm water, with lights in it. The second of the nine queens Tally had found in the voice. The houses had taken her back into the teaching, on the night we went through the middle, and her tray on the long ward had stopped humming.

Genny sat with it every night.

She didn’t sing to it. She didn’t ask it anything. She sat beside it on the floor of the long ward with her hand flat on the tray, the way the ash keeper sat with the children on the glass.

On the eighteenth night, the tray hummed.

Once. Very faint. Very short. Like someone turning over in their sleep.

Genny didn’t move her hand.

”Broken isn’t dead,” she said. To the tray. Twice. Very quietly. ”Taken isn’t gone either.”

She found another one on the twenty-third night.

Not Bell. Bell was still in the teaching, Tally said, still taken, humming once a night in her sleep. Another queen. In another tray. One of the four hundred and six, from Sera’s sacks from Earth.

Tally was listening up the thread. To the voice. The way she did every night now, because she’d promised. Holding her hand out. Flat. Up. With Dory beside her, holding the door.

And Genny was listening down. To the trays.

And Tally said, very suddenly: ”There.”

And Genny put her hand on the tray in front of her.

The same note.

A queen of rain. Not storms. Not Risa’s weather. Rain. Soft and steady and warm, on a world that had been all forest and all rain and all green, a very long time ago, before the houses.

Her pieces had been in a box on a shelf on Level Sixty-two for thirty years. Given to the Council as a token. And the rest of her, a little piece, was in the voice. Very far down. Under the teaching.

The queens sang her shape that night.

Through Tally. Up the thread. Into the voice.

Oh, said the voice.

Rain, it said. A long time after. When Tally asked it what it was like. Very soft. Very warm. Everywhere. Falling on everything at once. A pause. They cannot find it. It is too new. It is too small. Another pause. They took Bell. But there is rain now. Where Bell was.

”Eight,” said Tally.

Eight, said the voice. And Bell, asleep. A pause. The girl said more places. She did not say how fast.

”I’ll find more,” said Tally. ”Every night.”

I know, said the voice. I can hear you looking.

The Overseer went back to the middle.

Not on a ship. Not up the thread. It couldn’t scatter. It asked Tally instead. On the long ward, on the twelfth night, standing in the doorway with the dog while Tally held her hand up toward the thread and Genny sat with Bell’s tray.

The teachers, it said. At the sorting place. When we left. A pause. They were standing. With their mouths open. Not singing.

Tally asked the voice.

The voice was quiet for a long time.

They are still there, it said. Standing. Where the sorting queen was. Where the rooms were. A pause. They have not sung the note since the thing with the dog sang them the children’s song. With the third part wrong.

They are trying to sing it, said the voice. The children’s song. I can hear them. They cannot get the third part.

The Overseer stood in the doorway for a long time.

They are trying to get it wrong, it said. The way the children do. A pause. They cannot. They were taught too well.

Then it sat down. On the floor of the long ward. In the doorway. With the dog against its legs. And put back its long grey head.

And sang the children’s note.

Up the thread. Through the door Dory wasn’t holding, because Halloway had forbidden it, so Tally held it instead, as best she could, with her hand flat on the boards and her face going white.

With the third part wrong.

Over and over.

Until the voice said, very far off, very faint:

One of them has it.

The first child named herself on the thirty-first day.

The one Tally had knelt in front of on the red glass, the first afternoon. Very small. Smaller than Moon. Who’d looked at the notebook and the pencil and the page and not said anything, and put out her hand.

Tally had asked her every day.

Every day. In the town under the garden wall. At the window of the house she’d been put in, a small wooden house with orange walls and a round window at the top for the sky, where she sat on the floor every morning and looked out.

Tally knelt down beside her on the thirty-first morning and held out the notebook.

”Name?” she said.

The child looked out of the window.

It was raining.

Not hard. Soft. Steady. Warm. Risa said afterward it wasn’t her. She said it just came, off the coast, the way rain does on Avalon sometimes, when nobody’s asking it to.

The child watched it for a long time.

Then she put her finger on the page.

And said a word. In a language nobody on Avalon had ever heard. Not Dot. Not the queens. Very soft.

Dot translated it after. Through the wood of the window frame.

Rain, said Dot.

Tally wrote it down.

In her small square marks. On the page that said SEVEN-THREE-K. Under First child. No name yet. Put out her hand.

Rain.

And the child looked at the page. At the marks. At her own name, written down by someone else, for the first time.

And smiled.

Then the calls started.

Not from the threads. From the queens. From the freed worlds. From the queens on four hundred and twenty worlds who listened every night now, to every thread, for anyone else who’d heard the song.

They’d heard something.

”Tithe worlds,” said Okafor.

At the great table. With the slate. With Wren in the corner, very white, counting.

”Worlds that pay,” said Okafor. ”Every world the person lines came from. Every world that sent children up the thick thread to seven-three-K.” She put her finger on Garnet’s sheet. On Konrad’s codes, laid over the threads. On the ten red depots, and the routes going into them. ”The houses have sent word down every thread. To every world that pays.”

”Saying what?”

Okafor didn’t answer at once.

”Double,” she said.

Nobody in the map room said anything.

”Twice as many,” said Okafor. Very flat. ”Twice as many children. Every world. Every tithe. To replace the ones we took.” She looked at the slate. ”And faster. Not every six years. Every two.” A pause. ”And if a world doesn’t pay—”

She didn’t finish.

She didn’t have to.

Wren opened her eyes.

”Rain’s world,” she said.

Okafor looked at her.

”The first child,” said Wren. ”The one who named herself this morning. Tally told me where she came from. Dot worked it out. From the language.” She looked at the sheet. At a small circle near the edge, on a line far from the ninth. ”It’s one of them. A tithe world. On the list.” She swallowed. ”Rain has sisters, Tally says. She told her this morning. In her own language. After she named herself. She said she has three sisters still on her world. Younger than her.”

Okafor didn’t move.

”The houses want double,” said Wren. ”From Rain’s world. In two years.”

Okafor stood at the great table for a long time.

Then she turned the slate over. To the page that said Hollow. Where she’d written that one word, on the porch, the night we came home from seven-three-K.

Under it she wrote:

Not yet.

And under that:

Every world that pays. First.

Konrad was in the map room within the hour.

Okafor had sent for him. Not through Dot. She’d gone to the guest house herself and knocked on the door, the way he’d knocked on hers.

He stood at the great table with his gloves on, because his hands were still healing from the glass, and looked at Garnet’s sheet. At his codes, laid over the threads. At the ten red depots and the routes going into them.

”Every world that pays,” said Okafor. ”How many?”

Konrad didn’t need to look.

”Sixty-four,” he said. ”That I signed for. There may be more. Worlds that paid through other depots, other signers. Other species’ councils.” He put one gloved finger on the sheet. ”But sixty-four came through the station on Avalon’s routes. I read every manifest.”

”When do they pay?”

”Every six years,” said Konrad. ”Staggered. Not all at once. The houses spread them out, so the depots are never empty.” He moved his finger along a route. ”Some of them were due this year. Some next. Some in five years.” He looked up. ”Double, now. Every two years. The schedule’s broken. I don’t know the new one. Nobody does.”

”Then we don’t wait for it,” said Okafor.

She turned the slate over. To Every world that pays. First.

”Sixty-four worlds,” she said. ”Each one with a queen. In a tower, or a pillar, or a Hand, or a room. Each one with a council of whoever lives there, that signed a paper with the houses a very long time ago, the way ours did.” She looked at Konrad. ”Each one with a Konrad. Somewhere. Signing first.”

Konrad didn’t say anything.

”I want to know what they’re like,” said Okafor. ”Every world. Before we go. The people who sign. What they’re afraid of. What the houses promised them.” She put her pencil down. Very straight. ”You know what it’s like to sign first. Nobody else on Avalon does.”

”You want me to guess,” said Konrad. ”What sixty-four councils on sixty-four worlds I’ve never seen are thinking.”

”I want you to tell me what you’d have needed to hear,” said Okafor. ”Thirty years ago. To stop.”

Konrad stood at the great table for a long time.

”Nothing,” he said at last. ”Nothing anyone could have said. I’d have heard it as a threat.” He looked at the sheet. ”I’d have needed to see it. Somebody who’d stopped. Standing in front of me. Alive.” A pause. ”And not punished.”

Okafor looked at him.

”Then that’s what we send,” she said. ”To every one of the sixty-four. Before the task forces. Before the ships.” She picked up the pencil. ”Somebody who signed. And stopped. And is standing in front of them. Alive.”

”Me,” said Konrad.

”You. And Voss. And Selwyn.” Okafor wrote it down. ”Through the queens. Through the threads. Through whatever their queen can carry.” She looked up. ”Not to go. To speak. You don’t go near a thread. That hasn’t changed.”

Konrad looked at the slate for a long time.

”They won’t believe it,” he said.

”Some won’t,” said Okafor. ”Some will. Rain’s sisters are on one of those worlds.” She put the pencil down. ”I’d like to find out which councils believe it before I have to find out which ones don’t.”

I said it that night. On the porch.

Everyone. In order.

And then I walked up the hill. To the town under the garden wall. To the small wooden house with the orange walls and the round window at the top.

Rain was asleep. On the floor. Under the window. With the rain still falling, very soft, on the glass above her.

Tally was sitting beside her. With the notebook.

She looked up when I came to the door.

”Her sisters,” she said.

”I know.”

”Three. Younger than her.” Tally looked at the page. At Rain, in her own small square marks. ”She asked me if they’d come too. When I asked her name. After.” She swallowed. ”I said I’d ask you.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then I knelt down beside Rain. Asleep. Under a window. In a room with no white in it.

And said it. Very quietly. So I wouldn’t wake her.

And then I said, to Tally, so I wouldn’t wake her either:

”Yes.”

Days 3485–3520. Windows.

Fifteen thousand two hundred and twenty-five children stood on the red glass and didn’t move, because nobody had told them they were allowed; telling is what the note does. So we asked, one at a time, small things. Moon pointed at the sky: window. The keepers were best; they knelt and put a hand on the glass and waited. Halloway calls it Unsinging. I built a town under the garden wall by hand, with the east block carpenters: no benches, nothing white, windows everywhere, orange walls with stripes. Our queen hummed them in. The sorting queen counts the ships home. Bell hums once a night in her sleep; Genny found the rain queen in a tray and the voice has eight again. The first child named herself Rain, watching rain. The houses want double from every tithe world, every two years. Rain has three sisters. Konrad carried glass up ladders he’s afraid of; now sixty-four tithe worlds will hear from someone who signed and stopped. One of the teachers got the third part wrong. I said yes.