Scarecrow

We didn’t move the lander.

We couldn’t, at first. Nobody wanted to touch it. It lay on the red glass in the middle of the canyon all that first day, gray and gutted, with its legs standing round it frozen and soft and its hatch still open, and people walked round it in a wide circle the way you’d walk round a dead animal that might not be dead.

By the second day, Sera had started calling it the bathtub.

By the third, Toby was living in it.

”It’s a clinic,” he said, when I found him there on the morning of Day 394, sitting cross-legged on the retrieval bed with the straps cut off and a tray of instruments in his lap. ”Lucas. Look at this. Look at this.” He held up something long and thin and silver. ”A proper scalpel. Not a kit’s blade. A scalpel. And sutures, real ones, in packets. And a heart monitor. And bandages, and splints, and a thing that measures blood pressure.” He held it up like a trophy. ”And drugs, Lucas. Painkillers. Antibiotics. The ones in the book. The ones I’ve been reading about for two years and never had.”

”They brought that to collect you.”

”Then it’s mine,” said Toby. ”They can’t have it back.”

I sat down on the end of the bed.

It was strange, sitting in it. The bed they’d sent to take him. The straps. A white light in the ceiling that still came on when you touched the wall. A cabinet of instruments, and a cabinet of drugs, and a small screen in the wall, black, with a blinking light in the corner.

”Has anyone looked at that?” I said.

Toby glanced at it. ”Dot did. Yesterday. She went very quiet afterward.” He put the scalpel down. ”She said she’d tell you when you’d slept.”

Dot was on the red glass, very still, the way she was when she was thinking about something she didn’t like.

”Operator,” she said. ”This unit read the lander’s memory. Most of it was gone. The Teeming took the middle, and the middle held most of it.” A pause. ”But not all.”

”What was left?”

”Instructions. Navigation. The retrieval plan, for Toby Marsh.” The rivers ran slowly. ”And one list. In a file called Phase Two.”

I waited.

”It is a list of names,” said Dot. ”Thirty-one of them. In the city.”

I knew before she said it. I think I’d known since the comms window. Since Crane said give your mother my regards.

”Read them,” I said.

So she read them. In her level, careful voice, standing on the red glass in the morning sun, while Toby came out of the lander and stood beside me, and Liam came down from the terraces, and then Sera, and then Luna.

”Calder, Maura.”

Liam made a sound.

”Dask, Dorothy.”

I didn’t make any sound at all.

Thirty-one names. All of them. Everyone in the city on the stabilizer. Everyone they’d ever put the bone in who’d come home and started to shake. Some of the names I knew from Genny’s notebook, the clinic invoices, the deliveries every Monday.

And at the bottom, after the thirty-one, a gap.

And then one more.

”Crane, Halvard,” said Dot. ”Director’s residence.”

Nobody said anything for a very long time.

”He’s on it,” said Luna at last. Very flat. ”He’s on the stabilizer.”

”The file does not say so,” said Dot. ”It says only that he is on the list. Thirty-one, and then a gap, and then one.”

”Second intake,” said Holt.

We all turned round. He’d come down the north path behind us, on his stick, and none of us had heard him.

”Halvard Crane,” said Holt. ”I didn’t know the name. Not till the cave, when they put it on everything. I never put the two together.” He looked at the lander. ”There was a boy in the second intake. Thin. Clever. Never ran the course; they kept him in the hall, doing sums. The needles went wrong in him, the way they went wrong in half of us. Took him a year to walk straight. They gave him a desk after, and he never left it.” He shifted on his stick. ”Hal, we called him. Hal with the shakes. He used to hold his pen with both hands.”

”He holds the microphone close,” I said slowly. ”Every time. Very close. As if he’s afraid of dropping it.”

”Aye,” said Holt. ”That’d be Hal.”

I thought about that voice. Soft and careful and tired. A man used to being listened to. A man who’d heard the bone answer, and moved a ship to hear it every night, and sent a lander with a piece of itself, to see if it would be taken home gently.

A man who’d put himself at the bottom of the list. After everyone else. After a gap.

”He wants it,” I said. ”The hello. The cure. For thirty-one people.” I swallowed. ”And for himself.”

”Then why didn’t he ask?” said Liam. His voice cracked. ”Why send a bed with straps? Why not just ask? We’d have told him. We’d have sung it to everyone—”

”Because he doesn’t ask,” said Luna. ”He never has. He takes. He finds a thing in a river and he shaves bits off it and puts them in orphans. He finds a boy in a valley and puts him in a seed.” She was looking at the lander. ”He didn’t ask because it never occurred to him that you could.”

Nobody had an answer to that.

So we did what you do, when nobody has an answer. We went back to work.

It was a strange week.

Every night, at two hours past midnight, the relay came over. Every night the green lifted all round the rim, fifty kilometers of silver faces turning up to the sky, and Holt’s hands came up off his stick, and Juno stood on the north path with her arm out, following the ship across the dark. And every night, at half past one, Toby picked up his fork and his blanket and went up the north hill to the gray room at the end of the seam, with Risa beside him.

”Bedtime,” Liam called it. ”Toby’s bedtime.” He said it every night, very loudly, and every night Toby said, ”Shut up, Calder,” without turning round, and every night Risa laughed.

It was the only time I ever heard Risa laugh that week.

The thing under the ground didn’t move.

Juno checked every morning. Shut her eyes on the north path, and pointed. North. A little east. A hundred and fifty kilometers, she thought, maybe a little more. Still. Not coming. Not going.

”Waiting,” said Juno. ”Every night it looks up when the ship goes over. Every day it just sits there.” She lowered her arm. ”Like someone sitting by a phone.”

And the rest of us lived.

That’s what I remember most, about that week. That with all of it, the ship and the list and the thing in the deep, seventeen people in a canyon just lived. Teo planted the wheat Wren had carried from F-eleven, in the lowest terrace, on his knees in the red soil, and talked to it under his breath. Dov sat at the door of the dome and carved a bird for everybody, and wrote their name on the bottom of it with the point of his knife. Ade and Priya took over the cooking, and fought about it, loudly, every day. Holt and Ilse sat on the terrace in the evenings, two old soldiers, saying almost nothing, which seemed to be what they both wanted.

And Wren and Juno rebuilt the dawn line.

They did it on the tower, the two of them, with every mirror in the canyon. Every morning they flashed north, to F-twenty-two and F-eight and F-twenty, to the two at F-twenty-six and the one at F-thirty-one. Every morning the answers came back. And every morning Juno sent the same thing at the end, the thing she’d sent from the peak for forty days, with the sun coming up behind her.

Not where is he.

HE IS HERE. HOLD. WE ARE COMING FOR YOU.

On the fifth evening, Sera finished the scarf.

I didn’t know she had. I was sitting on the low wall of the third terrace at dusk with the notebook on my knee, writing down Juno’s bearing for the day, and she came along the terrace from the forge and stopped beside me, and dropped something in my lap.

Gray. Soft. Long. Holt’s wool.

It wasn’t even. That was the first thing I noticed. Holt had taught her, on the long evenings at Scarecrow before the north, and she’d knitted the way she did everything, hard and fast and certain, and every so often a row went tight where she’d been angry about something and pulled it, and then loose again where she’d stopped. You could read it, if you knew her. Like rings in a tree.

”It’s not very good,” said Sera.

”It’s good.”

”It’s lumpy.”

”It’s good,” I said. ”Sera. It’s good.”

She stood there with her arms folded and didn’t sit down.

”You’re already wearing one,” she said.

I looked down. Garnet’s scarf. I’d worn it every day since she’d put it on me in the dome. Mother’s six inches at the start, smooth and flat and even, from before her hands stopped. Then Garnet’s part, with its four holes.

”I know,” I said.

”So you don’t need—”

I took Garnet’s off. Folded it, carefully, and put it inside my coat, against my chest, where I’d always know it was there. Then I put Sera’s on. It went round twice and still hung down to my knees. It smelled of the forge and of Holt’s pack and very faintly of her.

”There,” I said.

Sera looked at me for a long moment.

Then she sat down on the wall beside me, not very close, and looked out at the canyon, and didn’t say anything at all, and neither did I.

Liam saw it at dinner, of course.

”Two scarves,” he said. Very loudly. ”Two. Lucas Dask is wearing two scarves, one of which is on the outside, and one of which is on the inside, and the one on the outside is gray and lumpy and smells of my sister—”

”Calder,” said Sera, without looking up from her bowl.

”—and I would just like everyone to note—”

His bowl caught fire. Very small. Very neat. Just the rim. He put it out with his thumb, and grinned, and kept eating, and didn’t say anything else.

But I saw Luna, at the end of the table, look at the scarf. And then down at her slate. And make a mark on it, very small, the way she made marks on things she was counting.

She found me later. On the north path, near midnight, where I’d gone to sit with Juno’s bearing and the stars.

She sat down beside me. Not close. About the distance she always sat.

”You turned nineteen,” said Luna, ”and I didn’t give you anything.”

”You counted it. That’s something.”

”That’s not a present. That’s arithmetic.” She was looking straight ahead, at the dark shape of the lander on the red glass below. ”I don’t know how to give people things. Nobody ever gave me anything I wanted. Father gave me things he thought I ought to have.” She was quiet. ”I don’t want to do that.”

”You don’t have to give me anything.”

”I know I don’t have to.” She turned the slate over in her hands. Then she held it out to me.

I took it.

It was her slate. The one she’d carried since the cave. Scratched gray stone in a frame of titanium, with the edges worn smooth from her hands. I’d seen her write on it ten thousand times. I’d never looked at what she wrote.

I looked now.

Days. Numbers. Bearings, heights, distances. Names. Columns of names. And at the top of every column, at the head of every list she’d ever made on it, every night since Day 1, the same five names. In the same order. In her very small, very precise hand.

Liam. Seraphina. Toby. Lucas.

Luna.

At the bottom of each column, a number. One. Two. Then three, for a long time. Then four. Then, after the frozen waterfall, five.

And every night, after the five, in smaller letters, the rest of us. The seventeen. Dot. Holt and Risa on their ridge. The six on the dawn line.

Every night.

”It’s not a present,” said Luna. ”It’s the slate. You can’t keep it. I need it.” She took it back, very carefully. ”I just wanted you to see. That I count you. First. Every night. In the same place.” She stood up. ”That’s all. That’s the only thing I know how to give anybody.”

She walked back down the path in the dark, very straight.

I sat there for a long time afterward, with Sera’s scarf round my neck and Garnet’s inside my coat, and didn’t write anything down in the notebook at all.

Toby spent the week making the song slower.

Sing it slower next time, Genny had said. I’m writing it down. So every afternoon he sat in the lander, on the retrieval bed, with his notebook and his fork, and sang the old song to himself at half the speed, and then a quarter, with the hello under it, very low, so that I felt it in the floor. Over and over. Writing down where every swell came. Where the up began, and the long way up, and the hold, and the down. Against every note of the song.

”So she can find it,” he said, when I asked. ”Genny. She’s got the song. Everybody in the city knows the old song. If I tell her exactly where the hello sits under each note, she can teach someone to hum it. Anyone. Her. Garnet. The woman in the clinic.” He looked up. ”Thirty-one people, Lucas. And thirty-one families. If they can all hum it.”

”And one more,” I said.

Toby looked at me for a long moment.

”And one more,” he said quietly. ”If he asks.”

On the night of Day 397, the night before the window, I didn’t go to sleep at all.

Neither did anybody else. We sat out on the red glass round the lander, all seventeen, with Dot standing over us and the stars coming out. At half past one, Toby picked up his fork and his blanket.

”Bedtime,” said Liam. Quietly, for once.

”Shut up, Calder,” said Toby. But he squeezed Liam’s shoulder as he went past.

He went up the north path with Risa. Into the hill. Two hundred meters to the gray room. I watched the air at the mouth of the seam go strange, very faintly, the way air goes over a hot road.

The wall was up.

Two hours past midnight.

The green lifted, all round the rim. Holt’s hands came up off his stick. Juno, on the path, pointed at the western rim, and followed the ship across the sky.

And Dot, standing over us, went very still.

”Operator,” she said.

Her voice was wrong.

”The relay is not singing its name tonight.”

I stood up.

”What, then?”

Dot’s rivers were going white. One color, and then the next. Her long cold arm came up, slowly, pointing at the sky.

”The relay is singing the hello,” said Dot. ”Down. To the ground. Very loud. Louder than the spine.” A pause. ”Not in the spine’s voice.”

”Whose?”

The rivers went white all the way.

”Toby Marsh’s,” said Dot. ”From the ninth window. The old song. With the hello under it.” Her voice had gone very quiet. ”He recorded it, operator. Every note. And now he is playing it down to the whole world.”

All round the rim, fifty kilometers of silver faces, lifted to the sky.

And then, on the north path, Juno made a sound.

Her arm had swung. Away from the sky. Away from the ship. North. A little east. A hundred and fifty kilometers away.

And it was moving.

”It’s coming,” said Juno Pell. ”It heard him. It heard Toby.” Her voice cracked. ”It’s coming here. Fast. Faster than it’s ever moved.”

She opened her eyes and looked at me across the dark.

”Dask. It thinks he’s calling it.”

Day 392–397.

The lander. Sera calls it the bathtub. Toby calls it his clinic. A scalpel. Sutures. Antibiotics. ”They can’t have it back.”

Dot read what was left of its memory. A file called Phase Two. Thirty-one names. Calder, Maura. Dask, Dorothy. Everyone on the stabilizer.

Then a gap. Then one more. Crane, Halvard.

Holt: ”Hal with the shakes. He used to hold his pen with both hands.” He holds the microphone close. Every time.

Luna: ”He didn’t ask because it never occurred to him that you could.”

Every night: Toby’s bedtime. ”Shut up, Calder.” Risa laughed.

The deep thing sits a hundred and fifty kilometers north. ”Like someone sitting by a phone.”

Teo planted the wheat. Dov carved a bird for everyone with their name on the bottom. Ade and Priya fight over the cooking. Holt and Ilse say nothing on the terrace.

Juno, every dawn: HE IS HERE. HOLD. WE ARE COMING FOR YOU.

Sera finished the scarf. Lumpy. You can read it like rings in a tree. I put Garnet’s inside my coat and wore hers. Liam: ”Two scarves.” His bowl caught fire.

Luna showed me her slate. Every night since Day 1. The same five names at the top. Mine fourth. Hers last. ”That’s the only thing I know how to give anybody.”

Toby made the song slower. For Genny. So thirty-one families can hum it. ”And one more. If he asks.”

Day 397, two past midnight. The relay didn’t sing its name. It sang the hello. In Toby’s voice. From the ninth window. Crane recorded it.

The deep thing is moving. Fast. Toward the canyon.

Juno: ”It thinks he’s calling it.”