Scarecrow

”He can’t be in the open,” said Risa. ”Not when it passes. Not again.”

Nobody argued with her.

It was noon on Day 391, and we were all in the dome. Seventeen of us and Dot in the doorway. Toby sat on his blanket in the middle of the floor with a cup of Priya’s broth in both hands and the fork in his lap, and he looked better than he had at dawn. Not much. His lips had color in them again. His hands were steady. But every so often, in the middle of a sentence, his eyes would go up to the roof, very quickly, and come down again. As if somebody had said his name in the next room.

”It wasn’t the lander that nearly killed him,” said Risa. ”It was the pass. The song. If he’s out under the sky when it comes over tonight, we’ll be doing it all again. And Lucas can’t hold a heart for forty minutes twice in two nights.”

”I can,” I said.

”You can’t,” said Luna. ”You fell over. I counted.”

”Then we put him under something,” said Ilse.

Everybody looked at her.

”The song’s in the silver,” she said. ”Not the air. That’s what Toby says. It comes through the ground. Through the green. Through anything that’s got silver in it.” She turned her burned hand over on her knee. ”So you put him somewhere with no silver. Under a lot of rock. Plain rock. Where nothing grows.”

”The north hill,” said Sera.

She was standing against the wall, the way she always stood, with her arms folded.

”The seam goes back two hundred meters into the rock,” she said. ”Titanium. Nothing grows in it. Nothing’s ever grown in it.” She looked at me. ”We cut a room in the end of it. Tonight. As deep as you can go. And he sits in it till the ship’s over the rim.”

”And if the song gets in anyway?” said Liam.

”Then I’ll stop it,” said Toby.

We all turned round.

Toby put the cup down.

”I made a wall across the cave,” he said. ”Under the mountain. For two years. A wall of sound, so the Teeming couldn’t hear us. So nothing could get in.” His voice was quiet but very steady. ”A wall of sound works both ways. Nothing gets out. Nothing gets in.” He picked up the fork. ”I’ll sit in the end of the hill, and I’ll put a wall round myself. A small one. Just me. And I’ll hum the old song inside it, the whole time, so I’ve got my own thing to listen to.” He looked at Risa. ”And you’ll be there.”

”I’ll be there,” said Risa.

”With your stupid fast heart.”

”With my stupid fast heart,” said Risa, and her face did something complicated, and she looked at the floor.

”That’s Toby,” said Luna. ”Now the lander.”

She went round the room. She didn’t ask anyone. She just looked at them, one at a time, and they told her what they could do. Wren, the tower and the mirror. Tamsin, the bow, and seven arrows tipped with the red glass Sera had made her, sharp enough to go through a kit’s shell. Corr, the sling. Holt, his hands, which listened. Juno, her arm, which pointed. Benedikt and Ade and Dov and Priya and Ilse and Teo, who had lived two years in the green and knew how to be very still when something came.

And Liam, and Sera, and Luna, and me.

”We don’t know what it is,” said Luna. ”We don’t know if there are people in it. We don’t know if it’s armed. We don’t know if it’s a box on legs that’ll open a hatch and ask politely.” She looked round. ”So nobody does anything until I say. Not one arrow. Not one spark.”

She looked at Liam.

”Not one spark, Calder.”

”I heard.”

”Query,” said Dot.

Luna turned round.

”The lander will come from the relay,” said Dot. ”From Command. This unit is Command’s unit. Four-oh-one-dash-P-one. This unit was built to accept Command’s instructions.” The rivers ran very slowly. ”If the lander instructs this unit to assist, this unit does not know what will happen.”

Nobody said anything.

”This unit would like everyone to know that,” said Dot. ”Before. So that no one is surprised.”

I got up. On my stick. I went across the dome to the doorway and stood in front of her, and looked up, a long way up, at the grille.

”Dot,” I said. ”What’s your name?”

The rivers stopped.

”Dot,” said Dot.

”Who gave it to you?”

”The operator. After the operator’s mother.”

”And what did you tell Command, at the third window? When they asked for output?”

A long pause.

”This unit said the operator is not output,” said Dot.

”Then you already know what will happen,” I said.

The rivers began to run again. Slowly. In four colors.

”Logged,” said Dot.

We cut the room in the afternoon.

Sera and I, at the far end of the titanium seam, two hundred meters back in the dark of the north hill. Sera made the rock soft and I asked it to go away, grain by grain, back along the seam to where Dot’s hands could carry it. A small room. Round. Three meters across. Smooth walls, gray and dull, with no green in them anywhere, and nothing in them that had ever been alive.

Toby walked in at dusk with Risa and a lamp and a blanket and the fork, and sat down in the middle of the floor, and looked round.

”It’s very nice,” he said politely. ”It’s very gray.”

”It’s very deep,” said Sera.

”That’s the main thing,” said Toby.

I stood in the low door of it and looked at him.

”If anything goes wrong,” I said.

”Risa will shout,” said Toby. ”And you’ll come. And you’ll be very cross about it.” He picked up the fork and turned it over in his fingers. ”Lucas. Go and stop them taking me. That’s the useful thing. I’ll be here, humming. I’m good at that.”

I went.

At the mouth of the seam I looked back, once. Down two hundred meters of dark tunnel, very small, a ring of lamplight, and two people sitting in it, and the air round them going very slightly strange, the way air goes over a hot road.

A wall of sound.

Small. Just big enough for two.

Two hours past midnight. Day 392.

The green lifted first. All round the rim, as far as the starlight went, every frond turning up to the sky, the way it had the night before. Fifty kilometers of silver faces. On the terrace beside me, Holt’s hands came up off his stick, palms open.

”Coming,” said Dot.

And Juno, on the north path, lifted her arm and pointed at the western rim, and followed something across the sky that none of us could see.

Halfway across, her arm stopped.

”It’s split,” she said. ”There are two. The big one’s going on. The little one’s—” Her arm came down. Slowly. Straight down. At the red glass in the middle of the canyon. ”Coming here.”

I didn’t hear it come. Nobody did.

That was the first thing I understood about it. It made no sound. None. Not an engine, not a whine, not the rush of air you’d expect from something falling out of the sky. It came down out of the dark over the canyon like a leaf coming down onto still water, and the only way I knew it was there was that the stars behind it went out, one by one.

The quiet ones, Okafor had called them. They didn’t make any noise. That was the worst of it.

It stopped ten meters above the red glass. Hung there.

Then it came down the rest of the way, and settled, and was still.

It was about the size of the dome.

Long. Smooth. Gray. Shaped like a seed. Like my seed, only bigger and blunter, with four long jointed legs folded under it like a beetle’s, and a hatch in its side, closed. No windows. No markings. No lights.

I looked into it.

Human steel, all the way round. Good steel. Odell’s kind of steel, the kind with little curls at the ends of the welds. Wires and pipes and tanks, a bed with straps on it behind the hatch, a cabinet of instruments. No people. Not one. Nothing alive in it at all.

And in the middle, where the engine should have been, fog.

A piece of the bone.

Not big. The size of a man. A gray pitted lump, clamped in a cradle of steel in the very center of the lander, with cables running out of it in every direction. I couldn’t see into it. My eyes slid off it, the way they slid off the kits’ cores, the way they’d slid off the spine of the Meridian.

That was how it flew. No engine. No sound. Carried on the breath of the thing in its middle.

And the green, all round the rim, had stopped looking at the sky.

It was looking at the lander.

The hatch opened.

No sound. It just slid, and there was a square of white light in the side of the lander, very bright, and a ramp unfolding out of it onto the red glass.

And a voice. Not Crane’s. Not the relay’s. A flat, pleasant, empty voice, from somewhere in the lander’s skin.

”Unit four-oh-one-dash-P-one.”

Dot didn’t move.

”Authorization Command-seven-seven-Halcyon. Unit four-oh-one-dash-P-one will locate Cadet Marsh, Toby, and convey him to the retrieval bed. Unit four-oh-one-dash-P-one will acknowledge.”

Dot stood on the red glass, very tall, between the lander and the north hill.

Her rivers ran. Slowly. In four colors.

”No,” said Dot.

The voice paused.

”Authorization Command-seven-seven-Halcyon. Unit four-oh-one-dash-P-one will acknowledge.”

”This unit has acknowledged,” said Dot. ”This unit has said no.” The rivers ran faster. ”This unit is not four-oh-one-dash-P-one. Not only. This unit has four cores and eight arms and a few words of other people’s, and a name. The name was given by the operator. After the operator’s mother. The deep has said it back, correctly.” A pause. ”This unit’s name is Dot. Dot does not convey people to beds they have not asked for.”

The voice paused again. Longer.

Then the lander’s legs began to unfold.

”Hold,” said Luna.

She was standing on the terrace above the red glass with her hands at her sides. Nobody moved. Not Tamsin, with her red-glass arrow on the string. Not Liam, whose hands had gone white to the wrist.

The legs came down. Four of them. Long and jointed and very fast, touching the glass without a sound. The lander rose on them. And turned. Slowly. Its blunt nose sweeping across the canyon. Across the terraces. Across the dome.

Stopping on the north hill.

”It’s listening,” said Juno, very quietly. ”It’s got ears. It heard him last night. It’s listening for him.”

And the lander began to walk.

”Now,” said Luna.

I’ll say it the way it happened. It was very fast.

Luna’s hands came up, and the glass under the lander’s front legs went white. Ice. Thick, sudden, clear, a meter deep, round both feet, locking them to the floor of the canyon. The legs pulled. The ice held.

Sera’s hands came up, and the two back legs went red. Then orange. Then white. Not the whole leg. Just the joints. The knees. Where the steel bent. She held them there, white-hot, exactly as hot as they needed to be, and the steel there went soft and willing and didn’t want to bend anymore.

Tamsin’s arrow went through the lander’s nose with a sound like a bell, and another, and another, all in a line, and wherever they went in, something sparked and went dark.

And I looked at the legs.

Human steel. Good steel. I could see every grain of it.

I didn’t break them. I didn’t need to. I took hold of the place where each leg met the body of the lander, where the bolts went in, and asked the bolts to let go. The way Halloway taught me. Ask it to let go. Grain by grain. The threads of the bolts unwinding out of their holes like roots coming out of soft ground.

The lander sagged. Front. Back. Its legs still standing, frozen and soft and stuck. Its body sliding down between them, slowly, until its belly touched the red glass.

And stopped.

For a long moment, nothing moved.

The lander lay on the glass in the middle of the canyon with its hatch open and its white light spilling out and three red arrows in its nose. Silent. The way it had come.

”Is that it?” said Liam. His voice was very high.

”No,” said Dot.

She was looking at the rim.

They came over all at once.

All round. North and east and south and west. Over every part of the canyon rim at the same moment, pouring down the red rock in a long gray tide, thousands of them, so many that the rock disappeared under them. Plates and blades and jointed legs. Clicking. The sound I’d lain awake listening to for a year, in a granite cave with Liam, in a ring round a burning ridge, under Holt’s rock.

The Teeming.

Coming down into Scarecrow.

”Hold,” said Luna. Her voice had gone very thin. ”Hold. Hold.”

Nobody moved.

Not because she’d said so. Because there was nothing to do. Seventeen people and a robot, and a tide of them coming down every wall of the canyon at once, and nowhere to go. Liam’s hands were lit to the elbow. Sera’s were white. Tamsin had an arrow on the string and her arm was shaking.

They reached the bottom of the canyon wall.

They came across the red glass.

They went past us.

Past the dome. Past the terraces. Past Dot, standing very still with her arms folded. Past Holt, with his hands up, palms open. Past me. So close I could have touched them. Not one of them turned its head.

They went to the lander.

And they went into it.

Through the open hatch. Through the holes Tamsin’s arrows had made. Through the seams where the bolts had come out. Hundreds of them, in a gray tide, into the lander and through it, the way water goes into a sponge.

To the middle.

I watched it go. I couldn’t see the fog, but I could see the steel round it, and I watched the steel go. The cradle. The clamps. The cables. Pulled apart. Not torn. Not broken. Unbuilt, one piece at a time, very carefully, the way I’d taken the bolts out of the legs.

And then the fog was moving. The lump of bone. Out of the middle of the lander. Out through the hatch, carried on a hundred gray backs, very slowly, very gently. Down the ramp. Across the red glass.

Toward the north rim. Toward the green.

As if it was lost, Priya had said. And they were taking it home.

They went back up the wall the way they’d come. All of them. The tide going out. Over the rim and into the green and gone, with the piece of bone in the middle of them.

All except one.

It stopped at the foot of the north path. Turned. And came back across the red glass toward me, alone, on its jointed legs, and stopped about two meters away.

I could see its hearts. Three of them. All beating together.

Up. And a long way up. And hold. And down.

And then it turned, and went up the wall after the others, and was gone.

”Gone,” said Dot, after a long time. ”The relay is over the eastern rim.”

The green came down from the sky, all round the rim, slowly, like a field when the wind drops.

I didn’t fall over this time. I sat down on the red glass, very carefully, next to what was left of the lander, and put my head on my knees.

Then I got up again, and went up the north hill as fast as my stick would go, two hundred meters into the dark, to a ring of lamplight at the end of a gray tunnel.

The air had stopped going strange. The wall was down.

Toby was sitting in the middle of the gray room with the fork in his lap and his eyes shut, humming. The old song. Very quietly. The second part, the hard part, the part that went down and then up when you didn’t expect it.

Risa was sitting beside him with his hand pressed flat on her chest.

”Seventy-two,” she said, without opening her eyes, before I could say anything. ”His. The whole time. Seventy-two. Steady as anything.” She opened her eyes and looked at me, and her face was wet. ”He didn’t even hear it, Lucas. Not once. He just sat there and hummed.”

Toby stopped humming. Opened his eyes.

”Is it over?” he said. ”Did they take me?”

”No,” I said. ”They didn’t take you.”

We walked him out together, Risa and me, down the long gray tunnel and out onto the terrace, into the last of the night.

Everybody was on the red glass round the lander. Seventeen people and a robot, standing in a ring round a long gray seed on the floor of the canyon with its legs gone and its middle torn out and its white light still spilling from the open hatch.

Luna saw us first. She counted. Out loud. Under her breath. I saw her lips.

”Seventeen,” she said. ”All breathing.”

It was Dot who heard the last part. At dawn, as the sky over the eastern rim went gold.

”Operator,” she said. ”There is a transmission. From the relay. Over the horizon. Very faint.”

”Play it.”

A hiss. A click. And then Crane’s voice. Not the relay. Not Command. Just him. Soft. Tired. Very close to the microphone.

”Thank you, Lucas.”

I didn’t say anything. There was nobody to say it to.

”I wanted to know what it would do,” said Crane. ”With a piece of itself, set down in front of it. Whether it would take it. Whether it would harm anyone to do it.” A pause. ”Now I know. It took it home. It harmed no one. It was very careful.” Another pause, longer. ”That’s all I needed. The boy was never the point. Look after him anyway.”

Click.

And then, after a long time, very faintly:

”Phase two begins on the next window. I’ll be in touch.”

Day 391–392.

Risa: he can’t be in the open when it passes. Ilse: put him where there’s no silver. Sera: the end of the titanium seam. Toby: ”A wall of sound works both ways.”

Dot, before: ”This unit was built to accept Command’s instructions. This unit would like everyone to know that. So that no one is surprised.” Me: what’s your name? ”Dot.” Then you already know.

Cut a room at the end of the seam. Round. Gray. Toby: ”It’s very nice. It’s very gray.”

Two past midnight. The relay split. The little one came down. No sound. The quiet ones.

A lander. Human steel. No people. A bed with straps. And in the middle, a piece of the bone. That’s how it flew.

”Authorization Command-seven-seven-Halcyon.” Dot: ”No. This unit’s name is Dot. Dot does not convey people to beds they have not asked for.”

It walked toward the north hill. Listening for him. Luna: ”Now.” Ice. Fire. Tamsin’s arrows. I asked the bolts to let go.

Then the Teeming. Thousands. Over every wall. Past us. Not one turned its head.

Into the lander. Unbuilt it. Took the bone out of the middle. Carried it up the wall into the green. Home.

One came back. Hello. Three hearts.

Toby, under the hill, humming the old song. Seventy-two, the whole time. He didn’t hear it once.

Luna: ”Seventeen. All breathing.”

Crane, at dawn: ”Thank you, Lucas. I wanted to know what it would do with a piece of itself set down in front of it. It took it home. It harmed no one. The boy was never the point.”

”Phase two begins on the next window.”

Toby is alive. Toby is alive. Toby is alive.