Scarecrow

At five, the voice in the ceiling changed the order.

Revised schedule. The Director will address all cadets at the main hatch at 0600. Pod sealing will follow at 0700. Launch remains 0900.

Nobody said anything. Down the curve of the ring, forty people sat up in forty pods and looked at the ceiling, as if the voice might have something else to add. It didn’t.

”He’s coming early,” said Liam. He was sitting in the open door of his pod with his boots on the floor and his hair standing straight up. ”Why’s he coming early?”

”Because he wants to see us before we’re sealed,” said Luna. ”Not through a window.”

”Why?”

Luna didn’t answer. She was looking at me.

Breakfast was a bar.

A ration bar, in a gray wrapper, from a crate at the end of the ring. It tasted of oats and chalk and something that was supposed to be apple. Liam ate his in four bites and said it was the best thing he’d ever eaten and that he was going to miss it terribly, and then asked if anyone wanted theirs.

Toby gave him half of his. Toby always gave him half.

I didn’t eat mine. I sat in the door of my pod with it in my hand and the scarf round my neck and tried not to look at the panel across the corridor.

It looked exactly the same. Gray. Square. The marks running down in their rows. No mark where my hand had been. No mark where my blood had been. Nothing.

Under everything, the hum. Low. Even.

Risa came down the ring at half past five.

She didn’t usually come to anyone. Risa sat in places. She sat by the fern, and in the corner of the mess, and on the bench in the rain-mist, and people came to her or they didn’t. But she walked the whole curve of the ring from Squad Three’s pods to ours, in her suit, with her hair tied back, and a folded piece of paper in her hand, and sat down on the floor of the corridor in front of me.

”Halloway gave me this,” she said. ”Last night. Through the slot. She said to read it to you on the ship.”

”I’ve read it. She showed me.”

”I know.” Risa unfolded it. ”She said read it to you anyway. She said you’d want to hear it in a voice.”

So she read it. Out loud. Very quietly, in her flat careful voice that never went up or down, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Meridian at half past five in the morning.

”Dear Lucas. I sayd Mama on Tusday. She cryd. I didnt. Dr H says you sewd the vessel. Thank you for the vessel. Hana Osei. PS. Risa says you can see through walls. Please look at me sometimes.”

She folded it up again. Along the creases. And held it out to me.

”Keep it,” she said. ”It weighs nothing. I checked.”

I took it. Four grams, maybe. Five.

Ten left.

Risa didn’t get up.

She sat on the floor in front of my pod and looked at me. Not at my eyes. At my chest. Where my heart was. She’d always done that. It was the way other people looked at your face.

”Twenty-one minutes past three,” said Risa.

I didn’t say anything.

”Your heart went to a hundred and forty.” She said it the way she said everything. As a fact. Like a temperature. ”I was awake. I’m always awake. I could feel it from my pod. A hundred and forty, and staying there. Climbing.” A pause. ”And then it stopped.”

”It didn’t stop.”

”Not yours.” Risa looked at me. ”The other one. The big one. Under everything. I’ve been feeling it since we came aboard. Slow. Very slow. Four beats a minute.” She put her hand flat on the floor of the corridor, the way she’d had it on the wall of her white room, and on the inside of her pod. ”It’s been going since the gantry. I thought it was the engines. It isn’t the engines.” Her hand didn’t move. ”At twenty-one minutes past three, it missed one.”

The ring was very quiet.

”I’m not going to ask,” said Risa.

”Risa—”

”I’m not going to ask,” she said again. ”I just wanted you to know that somebody felt it. So you’re not carrying it on your own.” She stood up. Brushed off her suit. ”That’s all.”

And she walked back round the ring to Squad Three.

I sat with Hana’s letter in one hand and the ration bar in the other, and my heart going, I expect, quite fast.

He came up the gantry at six exactly.

We heard the cage lift first, grinding up the outside of the ship, two hundred meters, and then the hatch wheel turning, and the cold coming in from outside, the real cold, the ash-and-glass cold of the plain at dawn. And then the Director of the Avalon Program stepped through the main hatch of the Meridian in a long gray coat, with two aides behind him and a slate under his arm, and stood in the curve of the pod ring, and smiled.

”Good morning,” said Halvard Crane.

Forty cadets stood up. Nobody had told us to. We just did. The way you do, when somebody comes into a room who has decided where you’re going to live and whether you get to come back.

He spoke for four minutes.

I timed it. I always timed him. He didn’t use notes. He never did. He stood in the curve of the ring with his hands folded in front of him and talked, in that smooth even voice, the voice from the lecture hall and the gala and the stage on field one, and every word went exactly where he’d put it.

He told us we were the finest cadets the program had ever produced. He told us that the world under the dome would be watching. He told us that the first wave had gone before us, brave beyond measure, and had laid the foundations, and that we would build on them. He told us that the Meridian was the finest ship humanity had ever made.

I watched his heart the whole time.

Sixty beats a minute. Calm. Like a man reading the newspaper.

When he said the finest ship humanity had ever made, it didn’t change at all.

He finished. He thanked us. He wished us well. Forty cadets said, ”Thank you, Director,” the way we’d been taught, and some of them meant it, and I could see which.

And then Crane turned, very naturally, as if it had just occurred to him, and looked down the ring at me.

”Cadet Dask,” he said. ”A word. Outside, I think. The view’s very fine.”

The platform outside the main hatch was a steel grille, three meters square, with a rail round it and nothing underneath but two hundred meters of air.

The wind came across the black glass and hit us side-on. It was cold. Real cold. Morning cold, on the ash, the kind I’d grown up with and forgotten. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the sky in the east had gone from black to gray to a thin long line of gold, right along the edge of the world, and the whole plain of Site One lay under it like a sheet of dark water, catching the light.

And far away, on the horizon, the dome.

I hadn’t seen it from the outside since the morning Crane’s craft came over the ridge. It looked small. That was the strange thing. All the towers and the gardens and the Great Hall and the sixtieth floor, all of it, under a soap bubble on the edge of the world, catching the first gold. You could have covered it with your hand.

Crane’s aides stayed inside. He came out alone, and shut the hatch behind him, and stood at the rail beside me with his coat moving in the wind.

He didn’t say anything for a while. He looked at the dome.

”I come out here sometimes,” he said. ”When they’re working on her. I stand on this platform and look at the city, and think how small it is.” He smiled a little. ”It’s good for a man in my position to remember that. Now and then.”

I didn’t say anything.

His heart was going fast.

Not like a bird’s. Not frightened. I’d seen this before. Once. At my first scan under Regulation 40, when he’d stood behind the glass and looked at the pictures of my eyes.

The other kind of fast. The eager kind. The kind Garnet’s went the night before her birthday.

”At twenty-one minutes past three this morning,” said Crane, still looking at the dome, ”the Meridian logged an event.”

The wind blew across the platform.

”Every sensor on the spine,” said Crane. ”All at once. Three hundred meters of them. For a little under one second.” He took his slate out from under his arm and looked at it, though I don’t think he needed to. ”A pause. That’s the only word the engineers could find for it. As if she stopped, for a moment, to attend to something.” He put the slate away. ”She’s never done that. Not once. Not in thirty-two years. Not for the welders, or the engineers, or the crews who brought her down, or the men who cut her out of the ground on this plain when I was a very young man.” He turned his head and looked at me. ”Not for me. And I’ve put my hand on that spine more times than I can count.”

I didn’t say anything.

”The sensor nearest the event,” said Crane, ”is on Deck 4. The pod ring. Directly across the corridor from Priority One.”

He didn’t ask.

That was the thing. I’d been ready for him to ask. I’d had an answer ready. Not a lie. I didn’t do lies. Just a silence, very carefully held. And he didn’t ask. He looked at me, with his pleasant gray eyes and his heart going like a child’s on its birthday, and he smiled.

”You can’t change it,” he said. ”Can you.”

It wasn’t a question. It was the same voice Luna had used. It’s fog.

I didn’t answer.

”No,” said Crane. ”Of course you can’t. Nobody can.” He turned back to the rail. ”That’s why it’s still here. Everything else they brought, we took apart. Every ship. Every weapon. Your father turned a squadron of them into rain.” A pause. ”But not that. Never that. It came down on this plain and burned for three days, and when the fire went out, there it was. Without a mark on it.” He looked at the gold line on the edge of the world. ”We’ve spent thirty-two years trying to understand one thing it’s made of. Just one. We grew a little of it. We put a little of it in things. We built a ship around it and taught it, more or less, to go where we point it.” He was quiet. ”But we’ve never once made it notice us.”

His heart went on, fast and glad.

”Thank you, Cadet,” said Halvard Crane. ”That’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in thirty years.”

I’ve thought about that a great deal since.

That he thanked me. That he meant it. That he stood on a steel grille two hundred meters above the place where the war began, with his coat blowing, and was glad.

I’d been frightened. All night. Sitting in my pod with my knees up, looking at the panel, more frightened than I’d been of anything in years.

And the one person in the whole world I’d have chosen least to know had found out anyway, from a sensor, and wasn’t frightened at all.

He was delighted.

That’s when I understood something about Halvard Crane that I hadn’t understood before, in all the months of watching his calm heart across lecture halls and ballrooms. He wasn’t calm because he was a cold man. He was calm because nothing had interested him in thirty years.

And now something did.

”Your sisters,” said Crane.

He said it the way you’d change the subject at dinner. Pleasantly. Turning from the rail.

My hands closed on the cold steel.

”Miss Pell,” said Crane, ”is a very clumsy woman.” He let that sit for a moment in the wind. ”Three blood draws. A blunt needle. A crying child. A contaminated sample.” He smiled. ”She writes me the most beautiful letters of apology.”

I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.

”I’ve stopped asking,” said Crane.

I looked at him.

”For Garnet’s blood,” he said. ”I’ve withdrawn the request. As of last night.” He looked at me with his pleasant eyes. ”There’s no need, you see. Not now. Not while you’re doing so well.” His heart didn’t change. Not a beat. ”I find I’m much more interested in what you’ll do on Avalon than in what your little sister can do with a button.”

He reached into his coat and took out a folded sheet of paper and held it out to me.

I didn’t take it. He didn’t seem to mind. He opened it himself and held it up, in the dawn light, so I could read it.

Clinical Authorization. Patient: D. Dask. Stabilizer, 3 × daily. Duration: thirty-six months. Approved: H. Crane, Director.

The date was yesterday’s.

”Three years,” said Crane. ”Signed in advance. I did it last night, after the event.” He folded it again and put it back in his coat. ”Your mother will have every dose, delivered every Monday, for three years. Whatever the Council decides. Whatever the budget committee decides. Whatever Under-Secretary Marlowe decides about acceptable attrition.” He said the name with a faint distaste. ”It’s done. I wanted you to know before you went.”

I stared at him.

He held out his hand.

”Do well, Lucas,” said Halvard Crane. ”And your sisters will never want for anything.”

I want to be exact about this. Because people get it wrong, afterward, when they tell it. They make it a threat. They give him a cold voice and a thin smile. They put a knife in it.

There wasn’t a knife in it.

I looked at his heart while he said it. I looked at all of him. Every vessel. Every nerve. The way his hand was held out, steady, palm sideways, in the wind. He meant it. Every word. He wanted my sisters never to want for anything. He’d signed three years of my mother’s life in advance, before anyone asked him to, because he’d been pleased with me, and he wanted me to be pleased too.

That was what made it worse.

A threat, you can fight. A threat, you can stand in front of. Okafor taught me that. Mother taught me that. You see the knife and you put yourself between it and the people you love.

But Crane hadn’t shown me a knife. He’d shown me a gift. And the gift was real. And all it asked, in return, was that I go on being interesting.

Do well.

And the thing about do well is that he decides what it means.

I shook his hand.

I didn’t want to. I did it anyway. Because my mother’s next three years were folded in his coat pocket, and because my sisters were on the sixtieth floor of a soap bubble on the edge of the world that I could cover with my hand, and because there wasn’t anything else to do.

His hand was warm and dry. His grip was firm and brief, like a man who’d shaken a great many hands and knew exactly how long to hold each one.

”One question,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows.

”Is Juno Pell well?”

Crane’s heart didn’t change.

I watched it. I made myself watch it, the way Halloway had taught me to watch a monitor. Sixty. Then a little faster again, the glad kind. Not a skip. Not a stumble.

He looked at me for a long moment, with his head a little on one side.

”I don’t know,” he said.

I hadn’t expected that.

”Her base stopped calling in a long time ago,” said Crane. ”Somewhere in the north. We don’t know where. We don’t know why.” He looked out at the dome. ”I told Miss Pell what I needed her to believe. It kept her useful. It kept her comfortable. I don’t regret it.” He turned back to me. ”I’m telling you the truth because you’d have seen it if I lied. Wouldn’t you.”

”Yes.”

”Then I won’t.” He said it simply, as if it were a small courtesy, like holding a door. ”I’ve never been able to say that to anyone before. It’s rather restful.” He buttoned his coat. ”If you find her, Cadet, I’d very much like to know. So would Miss Pell. You might tell her first.”

He turned to the hatch. Stopped. Looked back at me, standing at the rail in my suit and Garnet’s scarf, with the wind pulling the long gray ends of it out sideways over two hundred meters of air.

”That’s a very ugly scarf,” said Crane.

”My sister made it.”

”Yes,” he said. ”I thought she must have.”

And he went in.

I stood on the platform until the cage lift took him down.

I watched it go. Down the side of the ship, two hundred meters, through the gray light, with the sun coming up now over the edge of the world, red, and then gold. I watched his heart the whole way. Fast. Glad. A man who’d found something interesting, after thirty years, going down to the ground to think about it.

At the bottom, his aides opened the door of a long gray car, and he got in, and the car went away across the black glass toward the dome, and I watched it until it was smaller than my thumbnail, and then gone.

The hatch opened behind me.

Luna. Of course.

She didn’t come out onto the platform. She stood in the hatchway with one hand on the frame and the cold coming off her into the morning cold, and looked at me.

”Well?” she said.

”He was kind,” I said.

Luna Windsor looked at me for a long time.

”That’s worse,” she said.

”Yes.”

”Come in,” said Luna. ”They’re sealing us in fifty minutes. And you haven’t eaten your bar.”

Day 277. 6:40 a.m.

Risa felt my heart at 3:21. And the other one. Four beats a minute. It missed one. She’s not going to ask.

Hana’s letter. Five grams. Ten left.

The ship logged it. Every sensor on the spine. ”A pause.” It’s never done that for anyone. Not in thirty-two years.

Crane knows. He didn’t ask. He was glad.

”The most interesting thing that’s happened to me in thirty years.”

He’s withdrawn the request for Garnet’s blood. ”Not while you’re doing so well.”

Three years of Mother’s doses. Signed in advance. In his coat.

”Do well, and your sisters will never want for anything.”

He meant it. That’s the worst part. He decides what ”well” means.

Juno’s base stopped calling in a long time ago. He doesn’t know where. He told me the truth because he knew I’d see if he didn’t.

I’m the only person he can’t lie to.

I don’t know yet if that’s a weapon or a leash.

He said the scarf was ugly.

It is.