Scarecrow

Genny came to the map room on the ninth day after the ring and put volume sixteen down on the long table in front of me.

Open. To a page I hadn’t seen.

A list. In her small neat hand. Very long.

”What is it?” I said.

”Names,” said Genny. ”Children. From the ring.” She turned the page. And the next. ”The ones Halloway’s been seeing. On the long ward. In the town. In the houses on every world that took them in.” She turned another page. ”The ones who’ve stopped being grey.”

I looked at the list.

”That’s good,” I said. ”That’s—Genny, that’s a great many.”

”Yes,” said Genny. ”It’s eleven thousand and four.” She put her finger at the top of the first page. ”And now they’ve stopped being grey, they don’t know what to do.”

She sat down across from me.

”They came out of the note,” she said. ”And the grandmothers put shirts on them. And they came through the arch, and Nan Vey ironed, and they went down the long road to a house with a door, and someone gave them bread.” She looked at the list. ”And they ate it. And slept. And woke up. And stopped being grey.” She looked at me. ”And then they sat in the doorways of the houses. All day. And didn’t do anything.”

”They’re frightened.”

”No,” said Genny. ”Halloway says they’re not frightened. Not most of them. Not any more.” She closed the book. ”They don’t know how to play, Lucas. Nobody ever showed them. They were in the towers since they were born, some of them. Or in the white rooms. Or tied to posts on the terraces while the tower sang.” She swallowed. ”Tally came to the long ward yesterday with three of them. From the cluster. And she gave them a ball. One of Pip’s, from the bakery, the ones she makes out of bread dough that’s gone too hard to eat.” Genny looked at her hands. ”And they held it. All three. Very carefully. And looked at Tally. And waited for her to tell them what it was for.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

”The park,” I said. ”The one we made. With the carousel and the wheel—”

”Is full,” said Genny. ”Every day. From dawn. With children from the white rooms and the Cradle and the reef and Caddoc and Ammaru.” She looked at me. ”There’s a queue for the carousel. A queue, Lucas. Garnet counted. It’s four hundred long. Some of them wait all day and don’t get on, and they go home, and come back the next morning and stand in it again.” She was quiet for a moment. ”Halloway says that’s good. She says standing in a queue for something you want is the first step. She says the ones from the ring haven’t got that far yet. They don’t know they’re allowed to want to get on.”

”So what do you want?” I said.

Genny looked at me for a long time.

Then she opened volume sixteen again. To the back. Where she keeps the things that aren’t brood but that she can’t bear not to write down.

There was a drawing.

Not Garnet’s. Genny’s. Genny doesn’t draw; she says that’s Garnet’s and she’d only do it wrong. But she’d drawn this. Very carefully. Badly. With her tongue between her teeth, I’d have bet anything.

A great curving line. Going up very high and coming down very fast and looping round.

”What is it?”

”A roller coaster,” said Genny. ”Callum told me. They had one on Earth. Before the domes. In the old pictures. He said Nan Vey went on one when she was a girl, in a place called a fair, before the Accord, before the domes closed.” She put her finger on the line. ”He said you sat in a little car and it went up very slowly and then down very fast and you screamed. And everyone screamed. And it wasn’t because you were frightened. It was because you weren’t.”

She turned the page.

”And swings,” she said. ”Big ones. That go out over the water. And a wheel, but bigger than ours, so big you can see the whole of Avalon from the top. And boats on a lake. And little cars that bump into each other on purpose.” She turned another page. ”And places to sit. In the evening. With lamps in the trees. Where you can go with someone and not have to be anywhere else for an hour.”

I looked at her.

”That last one isn’t for the children,” I said.

Genny went pink.

”No,” she said. ”It isn’t.” She closed the book. ”Callum and I have been courting for a hundred and forty days, Lucas. Do you know where we go? The long ward. To read to the trays. Or the porch, with forty people on it. Or the bakery, with Taveth.” She looked at the table. ”Garnet and Rowan go to the edge of the interceptor field and she draws and he sharpens pencils. Brock and Saska go to the north field at dawn and hit each other.” She looked up. ”There’s nowhere to go. Nowhere that’s just for that. On the whole of Avalon. With three hundred thousand people and forty-two worlds through the arches.”

She put both hands flat on the cover of volume sixteen.

”So I want a place,” she said. ”For the children who don’t know how to play. And for the people who don’t have anywhere to go. Both. The same place.” She looked at me. ”Can you make that?”

I didn’t answer straight away.

Then Voss spoke.

I hadn’t known she was in the map room. She often is, at the end of the long table where the clerk’s desk is, with her pen, writing down everything the long table decides. She’d been there the whole time. Writing.

She’d stopped.

”Dask,” she said.

She doesn’t call me that often. Voss is very careful with names. She sent her niece up the thread with her own signature, before; she says that taught her names are the only thing you can’t take back.

”Ma’am.”

”Can you make bicycles?”

I looked at her.

So did Genny.

Voss put her pen down. Very carefully. Square to the edge of the desk.

”My brother made them,” she said. ”When we were children. On Earth. Before the domes closed. In a shed behind our house, out of whatever he could find. Old frames. Wheels from things that weren’t meant to be wheels.” She looked at her hands. ”He made me one when I was seven. Red. The paint came off on my hands every time I rode it. He taught me on the road outside the house. He ran behind me holding the seat, all the way down to the end, and I didn’t know he’d let go until I turned round and he was a long way back, waving.”

Nobody in the map room said anything.

”The domes closed when I was older,” said Voss. ”There weren’t any roads inside. Not like that. Not for bicycles, but I kept it for the memories.” She picked up her pen again. Put it down again. ”He went to Halden. The eighth dome. To fix the pumps and the lifts and anything else that had wheels, because he said Halden had more things that needed mending than anywhere else under glass.” She didn’t look up. ”I went into the Senate. We wrote. Not often enough.”

She was quiet for a long time.

”He was in Halden when the doors opened,” she said. ”I watched it. On the screens. In the Council chamber. I was one of the nine.” Her hands were very still on the desk. ”I looked for him. On the screens. In the streets. The whole time. I never found him.” A pause. ”I’ve thought about that bicycle every day since.”

She looked at me.

”There are roads on Avalon,” she said. ”Long ones. Flat. With nothing on them most of the day. And a hundred and thirty-nine thousand children who don’t know how to play.” She folded her hands. ”I’d like to see someone run behind one of them. Holding the seat. And let go.”

So that’s what we built.

Not me. I want to write that first. Genny says I always write myself into the middle of things, and this one wasn’t mine. It was everyone’s.

Keir and Aster drew it. On the long table in the map room, over three nights, with Garnet beside them redrawing everything they drew so it would look like something a child would want to go into. Doctor Bell did the sums for the roller coaster. Twice. Then Kyria did them a third time, because the Hyrrani have been building things that move very fast on very high tracks for a thousand years, and Kyria said Doctor Bell’s sums were very good for a woman who’d never been on one.

”Have you?” said Doctor Bell.

”Every First Blade rides the wall-rail on her seventh birthday,” said Kyria. ”From the top of the highest ridge to the sea. In the dark.” She looked at the drawing. ”This is very small. But it will do for children.”

And Enna checked it.

I’ll write that down, because it’s the first time. Dot sent the drawings across the relay, line by line, to a room with a long table and a window over a field. And two days later the answer came back.

Show me the load path.

And then, after Keir had shown her, every one, all night:

Put a release on every car. So if it stops at the top, nobody has to be carried down.

And then:

Good.

Miss Pell walked the ground.

She does that, now, before I build anything. Ever since she told me my houses were too perfect and made people uncomfortable. She walks the whole of wherever it’s going to be, slowly, with her stick, and tells me what’s wrong with it before I’ve done anything.

She walked the plain east of the seventh lake for a whole day. Where the land goes down in long slow folds toward the river, with the Kethri trees on one side and the marsh on the other, and nothing on it but grass.

At the end of the day she came back to the porch and sat down.

”Don’t make it neat,” she said.

”I wasn’t going to.”

”You were,” said Miss Pell. ”You always are. You’ll want the paths straight and the rides in rows and everything the right distance apart.” She looked at me. ”Children don’t want that. Children want to come round a corner and find something they didn’t know was there.”

”And the dates?”

Miss Pell looked at me for a long time over her spectacles.

”People on dates,” she said, ”want exactly the same thing.”

So I didn’t make it neat.

I’m going to write what’s there. Not all of it. It took forty days, and two thousand people, and every builder on Avalon and half of Hyrran, and I can’t write all of it. But some.

The roller coaster first. Because Genny asked for it first.

It comes up out of the Kethri trees at the north end. Very high. Higher than the house on the rise. Red-grey Hyrrani iron for the frame, because Kyria wouldn’t let it be anything else, and Avalon timber for the track, because Rory said wood sings when things go over it fast and iron just shouts. It goes up very slowly, the way Callum said, so slowly you can see the whole of the seventh lake from the top. And then it goes down.

Very fast.

Through the Kethri trees. Over the marsh. Round the edge of the lake, so low you could put your hand in the water if you dared. And up again, and round, in a loop that Doctor Bell said was impossible and Kyria said was only impossible for people who’d never ridden the wall-rail.

Every car has a release.

The swings.

Out over the lake. From a great curved arm of iron, very tall, with chains of Hyrrani steel and seats of Avalon wood. Two hundred of them. You swing out over the water so far you think you’re going to fall in, and then you swing back over the grass, and then out again.

Hana asked for them to go over the water. She said if anyone fell in, she’d catch them.

Nobody’s fallen in.

Several people have jumped in on purpose. Hana caught all of them.

The wheel.

Not the old one, with the clouds. A new one. So big that the top is higher than the roller coaster. With little houses on it instead of seats; Garnet drew them. Small wooden rooms, each one painted a different colour, with windows on every side and a bench inside for two. Or four. Or one grandmother and six children, which is how it’s mostly used in the mornings.

It goes round very slowly. It takes most of an hour to go round once.

At the top you can see all of Avalon.

The house on the rise. The red glass. The town under the garden wall with all its windows. The seventh lake and the marsh and the Kethri trees and the plain going all the way to the mountains. And the arches. Nineteen of them, now forty, glowing very faintly when anyone’s going through.

Garnet said it was the first time anyone had been able to see the whole of it at once.

She drew it from the top. It took her three goes round.

Boats.

Small ones. On a long slow channel that winds through the whole of it, under bridges and through the trees and past the swings and round the bottom of the roller coaster, so you can watch people screaming on it from very close without having to go on it yourself. Hana made the channel. The water in it is always exactly warm enough to trail your fingers in.

And little cars that bump into each other on purpose, on a floor of polished iron, because Pip said if there were going to be cars that bumped into each other she wanted to drive one, and Rory made her one, and then she wanted six more for her friends, and Rory made those too.

And lamps.

In every tree. Sera made them. Not fire. Not quite. Something that glows warm and gold and doesn’t burn anything, that she says is what fire would be like if it were patient. Thousands of them. From one end to the other. So that when it gets dark, the whole of the place glows.

And the broods.

I asked them. Every queen. In the hall under the house on the rise. What their young would want.

The heavy queen said sand. Deep sand. Somewhere her young could dig down and down and come up somewhere else, the way they do on their own world. So there’s a hill of sand at the south end, very high, with tunnels all through it that the heavy young dug themselves in a single afternoon, and that the Hessan children go into now, blind and soft and small, and come out of somewhere else laughing.

The coral queen said water that moved. So the channel where the boats go has a place, at the bottom of the swings, where it goes over a little fall and round in a slow wide circle, very deep, and her young go round and round in it. The Lir children go in with them. The Lir children are better at it.

The Kethri queen said wind. So there’s a tower. Very tall. Very thin. With a top that opens to the sky. And when the Kethri young go up it, the wind that comes down off the mountains catches them at the top and throws them out over the whole of the place, and they glide back down in long slow circles, and land on the grass, and go up again. All day.

And the Scarecrow queen said nothing.

She just came. On the first night. And lay down on the grass in the middle of it, under the lamps, by the wheel, where she could see everything.

And her young came and lay down round her.

And the children came and lay down round them.

Voss’s bicycles were last.

I made them myself. I’ll write that, because it’s true, and because I wanted to.

I asked her what her brother’s was like. The red one. And she told me. Very carefully. Every part. The shape of the frame. The handlebars, which were wrong, she said, too wide, because he’d made them from a pipe he found and couldn’t bend it right. The seat, which was too hard. The paint that came off on her hands.

I made it exactly.

Too-wide handlebars. Too-hard seat. Red paint that comes off on your hands. Every atom. The way she said.

And then I made two thousand more. Not the same. Better. Right handlebars and soft seats and paint that stays on. In every colour Garnet could think of. For the long flat road that goes round the outside of the whole place, all the way round, two miles, with nothing on it but grass on both sides and the lamps in the trees.

Voss came on the fortieth day.

Early. Before anyone. Before it opened. With her pen in her coat and her hair very neat.

I was on the road. With the red one.

She stopped when she saw it.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. She stood on the road in the grey light before dawn with her hands at her sides and looked at a red bicycle with handlebars too wide and a seat too hard.

Then she came and put her hand on the paint.

It came off on her fingers.

”I’m an old woman,” she said. Very quietly. ”I haven’t ridden one since I was nine.”

”I know.”

”I’ll fall off.”

”Probably.”

Voss looked at me.

”Hold the seat,” she said.

So I held the seat.

And ran behind her. Down the long flat road. In the grey before dawn. With the lamps in the trees going out one by one as the light came.

She wobbled. A great deal. She said several things that the Chancellor of the Senate on Earth should never have said in public, and I’ve never repeated them. Her pen fell out of her coat and I left it on the road.

And then she stopped wobbling.

And I let go.

She didn’t know.

She went on down the road. Straight. Steady. With her hair coming loose and her hands red with paint. Not looking back.

And then, at the end, at the bend where the road goes round the bottom of the roller coaster, she turned round.

And I was a long way back. Waving.

She didn’t fall off.

She stopped. At the bend. And put her feet down. And stood there, very still, with the red bicycle between her knees, looking back up the road at me.

Then she put her face in her hands.

I didn’t go to her. I picked up her pen from the road and waited.

After a while she rode back.

Slowly. Wobbling a little. Not much.

She stopped in front of me. And held out her hand for the pen.

”Thank you,” she said. Her voice was very steady. Her face wasn’t.

”You’re welcome.”

”Don’t tell anyone I cried.”

”I won’t.”

”You will,” said Voss. ”You write everything down. I’ve read the long table minutes.” She took the pen. Put it in her coat. ”Write that I didn’t fall off.”

She didn’t fall off.

It opened that morning.

I’m not going to write all of it. I’ll write that the children from the ring came. All of them who could walk, and some who couldn’t, carried. Eleven thousand and four of them, and then more, from every world through every arch. And stood at the edge. Where the grass started and the lamps were still glowing in the trees in the dawn.

And didn’t go in.

They didn’t know how.

Tally went first.

With Moon. With three children from the cluster, the ones who’d held the ball. She took them by the hands. And walked them across the grass. To the swings.

And sat down on one.

And pushed off.

And went out over the lake.

The three children watched her.

She came back over the grass. And went out again. Over the water. Very high. With her hair going back and her mouth open.

Laughing.

And one of the three, a very small boy from the cluster in a shirt that had been ironed on the red glass, let go of Moon’s hand.

And walked to the swing beside Tally’s.

And sat down.

And looked at Tally.

And waited for her to tell him what it was for.

Tally didn’t tell him.

She just went out over the lake again. And came back. And went out.

And after a long time, very carefully, the boy pushed off.

He went about a foot.

Then he came back.

Then he pushed again. Harder.

And went out over the edge of the grass. Over the water. Not far. Not high.

And came back.

And Genny, standing at the edge of the grass beside me with volume sixteen held against her chest, made a sound I’d never heard her make.

By noon there were children everywhere.

And at dusk, when the lamps came on, the others came.

Genny and Callum went on the roller coaster. Genny had asked for it; Genny had drawn it; Genny got to the top of the first slow climb and looked down at the whole of the seventh lake and said, very calmly, ”I’ve changed my mind.” And then it went down. And she screamed all the way round. Both loops. Callum, beside her, laughed last, the way he always does, and held her hand so tight Halloway checked it afterward.

Genny got off and went straight back to the end of the queue.

Garnet and Rowan went on the wheel. Three times round. She didn’t draw anything. Rowan said afterward it was the first time he’d ever seen her without a pencil, and that he didn’t know what to do with his hands.

Brock and Saska went on the little cars. Saska saw every bump a heartbeat ahead and avoided all of them. Brock drove straight into every car on the floor, on purpose, iron to the elbows, and didn’t move when they hit him back. Pip said it wasn’t how the cars were supposed to work. Saska said it was exactly how Brock was supposed to work. They stayed until Rory closed the floor.

And Okafor.

Ruth had told her she could walk, a little, and sit, a great deal, and do nothing at all that involved holding anything heavy or light. So Okafor sat on a bench at the edge of the swings with Ruth beside her, and watched the children go out over the lake.

After an hour, she got up.

And sat down on a swing.

Ruth said several things. Okafor didn’t listen. She pushed off, very gently, not high, not far, out over the edge of the grass and back.

And didn’t make it heavy. And didn’t make it light.

Just let it be what it was.

”First time,” she said. When Ruth came to stand in front of her with her arms folded. ”Since I was small.” She swung back. ”I’d forgotten you don’t have to hold anything.”

Then the wives.

They came to me at dusk. On the long porch of the house on the rise. All five. At once. In a row.

I’d been in the new place all day. Since dawn. Watching. Fixing things. Building a second wheel, because the queue for the first one was a mile long. I came up the road with grass on my coat and oil on my hands and sat down on the top step.

And they were standing there.

Luna. Sera. Risa. Hana. Andraste.

Looking at me.

”What?” I said.

”You built a place for people to go on dates,” said Risa.

”Genny asked.”

”You built it,” said Risa. ”In forty days. With swings over the water and a wheel with little houses on it and lamps in every tree that Sera made.” She folded her arms. ”And you haven’t taken any of us.”

”I was building it.”

”It’s built,” said Risa.

I looked at the five of them.

”All of you?” I said. ”At once?”

”No,” said Luna. Very firmly. From the end of the row. With Elin on her hip, frosting her collar. ”That’s the point.” She shifted Elin. ”We’ve been married to you for years. We’ve been in the same bed. We’ve been on the porch with forty people every night. We’ve been on the ring.” She looked at me. ”We’ve never once been on a date, Lucas. Not one. Not since the first year. Not since before.”

”Not one,” said Sera.

”Not one,” said Hana. Very gently. ”I counted.”

Andraste, at the end, said nothing at all. She just looked at me. Crooked. With the scar.

”On Hyrran,” she said, eventually, ”a First Blade who neglects his wives is challenged to single combat by all of them at once.” She considered. ”On the ridge. In the snow.”

”That’s not true.”

”It is now,” said Andraste.

So they told me.

Not together. One at a time. In the order they’d decided, which was apparently the order they married me, which was apparently a thing they’d agreed on at the kitchen table without telling me, along with the rest of it.

”Five nights,” said Risa. ”One each. Starting tomorrow.” She held up her hand and counted on her fingers. ”Luna. Sera. Me. Hana. Andraste.”

”What about the children?”

”The grandfathers have them,” said Sera. ”Already. We asked. Konrad’s very excited. He says he’s going to teach them chess.”

”They’re babies.”

”He says it’s never too early,” said Sera.

”And what do you want?” I said. ”On the dates.”

The five of them looked at each other.

And then Luna said: ”That’s for us to know.”

And Risa said: ”And you to find out.”

And Hana said: ”Wear something clean.”

And Sera said: ”Not the coat.”

And Andraste said: ”Bring a blade.”

They went inside.

All five. Without saying anything else. Leaving me on the top step of the long porch, at dusk, with grass on my coat and oil on my hands.

Mother, in Father’s chair at the end of the porch, had heard all of it.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she said: ”Your father took me to a fair once.”

I looked at her.

”In the war,” she said. ”On leave. There was one in a town behind the lines. Very small. A wheel and some swings and a man selling something on sticks that was supposed to be sugar.” She looked out at the plain. Toward the new place. Where the lamps were coming on in the trees, thousands of them, gold, all the way to the lake. ”He won me a ribbon. At a stall where you threw things at other things. He was very bad at it. He spent all his leave pay.” She smiled. ”I kept the ribbon. It was in my hair at our wedding.”

”I didn’t know that.”

”You never asked,” said Mother. She stood up. Slowly. And came and put her hand on my head. The way she did when I was small. ”Wear something clean, love. And go and get them each a ribbon.”

Luna’s was the next night.

I wore something clean. Not the coat. I’d been to see Pip at dawn, at the stall she’d set up at the bottom of the wheel, where you throw bread-dough balls that have gone too hard to eat at a row of tin cups Rory made, and if you knock three down you win a ribbon. Pip said nobody had won one yet. Pip said the cups were weighted. Rory said they weren’t. Pip said that was what someone who’d weighted them would say.

I knocked down three on my eleventh try.

Pip gave me a blue ribbon and looked at me very suspiciously.

”Did you ask the cups?” she said.

”No.”

”Swear.”

”I swear,” I said. ”Mother said Father was very bad at it too.”

Pip considered this. Then she gave me four more ribbons out of the box under the counter, one of each colour, and said I could have them on credit, because she wasn’t standing there all night watching me miss.

Luna was waiting at the bottom of the wheel at dusk.

Without Elin. Without her notebook. Luna always has her notebook. She had nothing in her hands at all. She was standing very straight, the way she does when she’s decided something and isn’t sure about it, in a dress I’d never seen, pale blue, the colour of the first frost.

”You’re early,” she said.

”So are you.”

”I’m always early,” said Luna. ”You’re never early.” She looked at me. ”You’re wearing something clean.”

”Hana said.”

”Hana was right.” She looked at the wheel. At the little painted houses going round, very slowly, in the dusk, with the lamps in the trees coming on below them. ”I want to go to the top.”

”All right.”

”And I don’t want to plan anything,” said Luna. ”When we get there.” She took a breath. ”I’ve planned everything. Since I was small. Every day. The arrivals list. Every crossing. Every slate Okafor’s ever written, I’ve checked.” She looked at her empty hands. ”I want to go to the top of the wheel and not know what happens next.”

So we went to the top of the wheel.

In a little green house with windows on every side and a bench inside for two. It took most of half an hour to get there. Neither of us said anything for most of it. Luna sat with her hands in her lap and watched Avalon get smaller underneath us, the lamps and the lake and the swings and the long road, and I watched her.

At the top, the wheel stopped.

It does that. Keir made it. At the top, every little house stops for one minute, so you can look.

Luna looked.

All of it. The house on the rise. The red glass. The town under the garden wall. The arches, forty of them now, glowing very faintly. The plain going all the way to the mountains in the dark. And the stars.

”I can’t see the ring from here,” she said.

”No.”

”Good,” said Luna.

And then she put her cold hand on my face, and the window beside her went white with frost, all at once, in a pattern like ferns. And she didn’t plan anything at all.

When we came down, I gave her the blue ribbon.

She looked at it for a long time.

”Pip’s stall?” she said.

”Eleventh try.”

”Did you ask the cups?”

”No,” I said. ”Everyone keeps asking me that.”

Luna tied it in her hair.

She hasn’t taken it out since.

Mother saw it at breakfast the next morning. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at the blue ribbon in Luna’s hair for a long time, and then at me, and then went back to her tea with an expression I’ve only ever seen on her face when she’s thinking about Father.

Days 4175–4225. Somewhere to Go.

Genny: eleven thousand children from the ring have stopped being grey, and don’t know how to play. And there’s nowhere to go on a date. Voss: can you make bicycles? Her brother made her a red one; he ran behind holding the seat. Keir and Aster drew it; Kyria did the sums a third time; Enna said put a release on every car. Miss Pell: don’t make it neat. Forty days: a roller coaster out of the Kethri trees, swings over the lake, a wheel with little houses, boats, lamps Sera made, sand for the heavy young, a whirlpool for the coral, a wind tower for the Kethri. I made Voss’s red one exactly. I held the seat and let go. She didn’t fall off. Tally went on the swings first; a boy from the cluster went a foot, then further. The wives: five nights, one each. Bring a blade. Mother: get them each a ribbon. Pip’s stall, eleventh try. Luna wanted the top of the wheel and nothing planned; the window frosted; she tied the blue ribbon in her hair.