Scarecrow

The summons came on Thursday, on a slip of yellow card, in the middle of breakfast.

A corporal brought it down the long room and put it next to my porridge without a word. Liam leaned over to read it before I could. Toby put his spoon down.

Cadet 41 (Dask, L.) to report to Laboratory One, Level 2, at 0800. Duration: approx. four hours. By order of the Director.

”Laboratory One,” said Liam. ”What’s Laboratory One?”

Nobody at the Calders’ table knew. Across the room, at the end of the Windsors’ table, Luna had looked up from her porridge. She was looking at the yellow card in my hand. Then at me.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

Okafor was at the door of the mess when I went out. She stood aside to let me pass, and as I went by, without turning her head, she said, very quietly:

”Watch what he measures, forty-one. You’ll learn more from that than from anything he says.”

Level 2 was above the barracks. I’d never been. You went up a stair past the instructors’ offices, through a door with a guard on it, and into a corridor that was nothing like the rest of the cave. Not rock. White. White walls, white floor, white lights set flat into a white ceiling, so there were no shadows anywhere. It smelled of nothing. Like the rain on the gallery.

Laboratory One was at the end of it.

It was a long, white room. White benches down both sides, covered in instruments I didn’t know. Glass, and wire, and dials. A long white table in the middle, with things laid out on it in a row, each one under a white cloth. A white chair at the far end.

Crane was sitting in it.

He was in his gray suit, with his cane across his knees. Halloway was standing beside him with her silver case. And at a bench by the wall there was a thin man in a white coat with a slate, who didn’t look up when I came in, and didn’t look up once in the next four hours.

”Lucas,” said Crane. He smiled. ”Thank you for coming. Sit down.”

There was a white stool in front of the long table. I sat on it.

”I’m going to ask you to do some things today,” said Crane. ”None of them will hurt. Dr. Halloway is here in case anything does. Mr. Fenwick is going to write everything down.” He nodded at the thin man, who didn’t nod back. ”I want to understand what you can do. Properly. Not from reports. Not from Sergeant Okafor’s notes, which are excellent, but brief.” He folded his long hands on the handle of his cane. ”You’re going to be first down, Lucas. First out of the Meridian. With the largest kit we’ve ever built. Somewhere nobody’s been.” He looked at me with his pale, almost colorless eyes. ”I’d like to know what I’m sending.”

I thought about Odell. Learn why.

I thought about Okafor at the door. Watch what he measures.

”All right,” I said.

He measured how far.

There was a nail on the table. An ordinary iron nail, under the first cloth. Halloway carried it to the far end of the room, and then out of the room, and then down the corridor, and then through a door I couldn’t see, and the thin man named Fenwick said distances into his slate as she went. Ten meters. Twenty. Forty, through one wall. Sixty, through two.

At each one, Crane said, ”Copper, please,” and I turned the nail to copper. Then back to iron. Then copper again.

It wasn’t hard. I could see the nail the whole time. Through the white walls, through the rock behind them, through the next wall. A small dark line of iron, moving away from me in Halloway’s hand.

At two hundred meters, through nine walls and a stairwell, I lost her. Not because it was too far. Because there were too many people between us, on Level 1, in the instructors’ offices, and they were all moving, and the walls were full of pipes and wires, and it was like looking for one particular grain of sand on a beach while the tide came in.

”I can’t find it,” I said.

”Can you see her?” said Crane.

”Not anymore. There’s too much in the way. Not too far. Too much.”

Crane looked at me for a long moment.

”Fenwick,” he said. ”Range limited by complexity, not distance.” And then, more quietly, to himself, the way you’d say something you already knew: ”He could only change what he could see into.”

I didn’t know who he was.

I thought I probably did.

He measured how fast.

Twenty small steel balls, on a tray, under the second cloth. Each the size of a marble. ”Sand,” said Crane. ”All of them. As fast as you can.”

I did them one at a time. That’s the only way I know how to do anything. Into the first one, all the way down, see it whole, turn it. Then the second. Then the third. Pick one thing.

Fourteen seconds, said Fenwick.

”Can you do them all at once?” said Crane.

I looked at the next tray. Twenty more.

”I could,” I said. ”In the Town I did a whole street at once. But I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I couldn’t see all of it properly. I just pushed.” I looked at the balls. ”If I push, I might do something I didn’t mean to. To something next to them.”

”Next to them is a steel tray, a white table, and a floor,” said Crane gently.

”And you,” I said. ”And Dr. Halloway. And Mr. Fenwick.”

Crane didn’t say anything.

”Fourteen seconds,” I said. ”One at a time. I’d rather.”

Crane looked at me for a long time. Then he smiled. Not his usual smile. Smaller. Almost sad.

”Your father said exactly that to me once,” he said. ”In almost those words.” He turned his head. ”Fenwick. Very thorough. Very slow. He doesn’t skip.”

He measured how much.

Under the third cloth there was a cube of steel the size of a fist. Under the fourth, the size of a head. Under the fifth, which took two engineers to bring in on a trolley, a slab of steel as big as a door, as thick as my hand.

”As much as you can,” said Crane. ”Turn it to glass. Stop when it hurts.”

The fist was easy. The head was easy. The slab—

I went into the slab. All the way. All of it. Every grain of it, every little brick. It was a lot. It was more than the steel ball on field one, more than the walls in the Town. It was heavy in my head, the way carrying something is heavy in your arms. And it went on and on, all the way to the edges, and I held it, and I started to turn it, and it began to go clear from the middle outward, like ice forming on a pond in reverse.

And the hot thing under the boards woke up.

It liked the slab. It liked how much there was. It wanted more. It wanted the trolley under the slab, and the floor under the trolley, and the rock under the floor, and it pushed at me, eager, more, more, there’s so much more, let me—

I stopped.

I stopped with the slab half glass and half steel, clear in the middle, gray at the edges, and sat on the white stool with my hands flat on my knees and breathed until the hot thing settled.

My nose was bleeding. Only a little.

Halloway was beside me with gauze before I’d noticed she’d moved.

Crane hadn’t moved at all. He was sitting in the white chair, leaning forward a little, both hands on his cane, watching me. Watching the slab. Watching me stop.

He had a look on his face like a man watching milk come up to the boil, waiting to see whether it would go over.

It hadn’t.

He sat back.

”Fenwick,” he said. ”Stopped voluntarily. At capacity.” A pause. ”Underline voluntarily.”

He measured how long.

The glass slab, and the copper nail, and the sand from the steel balls, all went into a sealed white cabinet against the wall. ”We’ll check them in a week,” said Crane. ”And a month. And a year.” He looked at me. ”Do your changes ever go back?”

”No. Never. Father’s never did either. The field’s been the field since before the twins were born.”

”Fenwick. Permanent.”

He asked about living things.

He didn’t have anything under a cloth for that. He just asked. Gently, the way he’d asked everything. Whether I’d ever changed something alive. A plant. An animal. A person.

”No,” I said.

”Never?”

”I gave the fern water. I didn’t change it.” I thought about the dead cell in the reading room, on the slide under the lamp. ”I changed a dead cell once. To see what it was made of. It was already dead.”

”And a living one?”

”No.”

”Why not?”

”Because I don’t know enough,” I said. ”I don’t know what all the pieces do. Not yet. If I change one thing in a living cell and I’ve got it wrong, I can’t take it back.” I looked at him. ”Father never did either. He used to say I’m a farmer, not a god.”

Crane was quiet for a long time.

”I remember,” he said.

He didn’t ask anything else about living things. He didn’t tell Fenwick to write anything down. I watched him not tell Fenwick, and I wrote that down later, in my head, before anything else.

Then he reached out with his cane toward the last cloth on the table.

The last object on the white table was a box.

It was small. About the size of a loaf of bread. Black. Not shiny black, like the suit when I’d ruined it. Matte. Dull. Like soot. It had no lid that I could see, and no seams, and no markings. It sat on the white table under the white light at the end of the row, and it didn’t cast a shadow, because nothing in Laboratory One did.

Crane didn’t have the cloth taken off it. He reached out with the end of his cane, and hooked the corner of the cloth, and drew it off himself. Slowly.

”Inside this box,” he said, ”there is a ball of steel. The same as the little ones. Exactly the same.” He set the tip of his cane down on the white floor and folded both hands over the handle. ”I’d like you to turn it into sand.”

I looked at the box.

And the room went very quiet.

I looked at the box, and I couldn’t see into it.

Not a bit. Not the outside, even. Not properly. I could see the shape of it. The black. The dull, sooty, shadowless surface of it sitting on the table. But when I tried to go in, the way I went into everything, the way I’d gone into the nail and the slab and the steel balls and the nine walls between me and Halloway, there was nothing to go into.

Fog.

The same fog. Gray. Soft. Shapeless. Smooth all the way through. The fog in the middle of the kit, under field four. The fog that everything slid off. The fog without a reason.

I pushed.

The hot thing under the boards woke up and pushed with me, hard, harder than it had pushed at the core, because I’d let it. Because I wanted to know.

It slid off. Like water off glass.

I felt my nose start to bleed again, and kept pushing.

”Lucas,” said Halloway, sharply.

”I can’t,” I said.

My voice came out strange. Small.

”I can’t see it,” I said. ”I can’t see into it. It’s—there’s nothing. I can’t.”

Crane breathed out.

That’s all it was. A breath. I don’t think anybody else in the room would have noticed it. Halloway was looking at my nose. The thin man was looking at his slate. But I was looking at Crane, the way I’d learned to look at Okafor in her office, and at Luna across the reading room table, and at Sigmund in the corridor by the fern. The way you look when you’ve spent three months learning what a person’s face does just before they say something true.

And Crane, in his white chair, with his long hands folded on his cane, breathed out. Long. Slow. All the way down. The way Toby breathed out when the machines on the range stopped firing.

His shoulders came down.

His hands, on the handle of the cane, loosened. Just a little.

And for half a second, before he caught it, before his long tired face went back to what it always was, something went across it that I’d never seen there before. Not grief, the way it had been looking at the faces of the first wave. Not the careful stillness from the steel slab.

Relief.

He was relieved.

”Thank you, Lucas,” said Crane. His voice was perfectly even. ”That’s very useful. That’s all for today.” He reached out with his cane and hooked the cloth back over the black box, slowly, the way he’d taken it off. ”Dr. Halloway, would you see to his nose? And then lunch, I think. You’ve earned it.”

He stood up, leaning on the cane. He smiled at me.

He’d never been more pleased with me in his life. I could tell.

That was the worst part.

I didn’t go to lunch.

I went to the fern. I sat on the floor in the corridor with my back against the wall and a wad of Halloway’s gauze held to my nose and looked at the fern. At its nine fronds now. At the new one uncurling at the bottom of the pot, pale green, the size of my thumbnail.

I could see into the fern. All of it. Every cell. Every little river of water running up the stems, every sparkle in the leaves where the light got caught and turned into sugar. I could see it so clearly it almost hurt.

I couldn’t see into the box.

Risa came round the corner with her tray, and stopped, and looked at me. At the gauze. And then she sat down against the metal stand without saying anything, and ate, and didn’t ask. After a while, she reached out and put her hand flat on the floor next to mine. Not touching. Just next to.

”Your heart’s at a hundred and twenty,” she said, eventually. ”It’s been at a hundred and twenty since you sat down.”

”I know.”

”What happened?”

I took the gauze away from my nose. It had stopped.

”He was pleased,” I said.

Risa looked at me.

”There was something I couldn’t do,” I said. ”He asked me to do it. And I couldn’t. And he was pleased.” I looked at the fern. ”Not pleased like when I helped Odell. Not pleased like the steel ball. He was relieved. Like a man who’s been carrying something heavy for a long time and finds out he doesn’t have to anymore.”

Risa was quiet for a long time.

”Father’s like that,” she said finally. ”When he’s worried about something and it turns out all right. His heart doesn’t speed up. It slows down. All at once. It’s the only time it ever does anything interesting.” She picked at her tray. ”You only get relieved about things you were frightened of.”

Luna was in the reading room that night before me, and she’d already opened notebook fifteen to a clean page, and she didn’t say hello. She just held out the pen.

”Everything,” she said. ”In order. What he measured.”

I wrote it down.

Day 112. Laboratory One. Crane. Halloway. A thin man with a slate who never looked up.

1. How far. Through walls, through rock. As far as I can see INTO. Crane said it: ”He could only change what he could see into.”

2. How fast. Twenty steel balls, fourteen seconds. ”Very thorough. Very slow. He doesn’t skip.”

3. How much. I stopped at the steel slab. The hot thing wanted more. Crane watched me stop. He looked like a man watching milk boil.

4. How long. Permanent. Same as Father.

5. Living things. I said no. Father said no too. ”I’m a farmer, not a god.”

6. The black box. Fog. I couldn’t.

He was relieved.

Luna read it upside down. Then she turned the notebook round and read it again the right way up. Then she sat back.

”Okafor told you to watch what he measures,” she said.

”Yes.”

”So what did he measure?”

I looked at the list.

”What I can do,” I said slowly. ”How far. How fast. How much. All of it. He wanted to know how big I am.” I put my finger on number six. ”And this. What I can’t do. Whether there’s something I can’t get into.”

”And there was.”

”And he was relieved.”

Luna was quiet for a moment.

”You don’t build a box you can’t see into,” she said, ”unless you’re frightened of what you’ll do if you can.” She looked at me. ”And you don’t put the same fog in the middle of every kit. In the middle of the thing that talks to you through your skull. Every day. On another world.” A pause. ”Unless you want to be sure there’s one thing down there you can’t change.”

The lamp hummed.

”Odell built the housing eleven years ago,” I said.

”Yes.”

I thought about something Crane had said. Months ago. In the field, on the day he came, standing on our porch in the gray light, with his scarred face very white. When I was still a boy in a gray world with a scarecrow and a dying mother and no idea what a cave was.

I have had a satellite on this house for eleven years.

I hadn’t thought about the number since. I’d had other things to think about.

”Eleven years ago,” I said, ”I was four.”

Luna looked at me.

”That’s when I did the moon,” I said. ”The water. The white spot. Liam’s dad showed it to him. Everybody’s dad showed it to them. The whole world looked up one night and there was a white spot on the moon that hadn’t been there before.” I swallowed. ”And somebody looked down at a valley nobody had any reason to look at. And put a satellite on it.”

Luna Windsor didn’t say anything at all.

The water in the glass by her elbow froze solid, all at once, with a sound like a knuckle cracking. And the glass split down one side, very neatly, from the rim to the base.

I didn’t sleep much.

I lay in the dark between Liam and Toby and thought about a black box on a white table that I couldn’t see into. And a ball of fog in the middle of seventy-four machines. And a man in a white chair, breathing out.

I’d like to know what I’m sending.

I’d thought, the whole morning, that he was measuring how big I was.

He wasn’t. Not really. Or not only.

He was measuring whether his box still worked.

Eleven years. Since I was four. Since the moon.

He’d been building the walls of a room I’d never seen, for a boy he’d never met, since before I’d even known what I was.

And today, in a white room, he’d found out the walls would hold.

I reached up in the dark for notebook fifteen, and turned to the back, to the list, and found number five. What I can’t see. And why.

Under it, by feel, I wrote:

Because he made it that way. For me.