Scarecrow

Dot was reading my chemistry notes when I woke.

Not the book. My notes. The loose pages with the bad drawings and the places where I’d written ask Halloway, then crossed it out because she was very far away.

One of Dot’s hands held a page flat against a board. Another turned the next sheet without disturbing the first.

It was the morning of Day 435. The fire hadn’t been lit yet. Beyond the shelter, someone was carrying the first water vessel down the path.

I sat up.

“Did I ask you to check those?”

“No.”

“Is something wrong?”

Dot turned her grille toward me.

“This unit does not know yet.”

I looked at the page.

It was the one about crystal structure. Three drawings, two of them crossed out. A question about why the same ingredients could make something clear or cloudy depending on how I’d arranged them.

“What are you looking for?”

“The answer.”

I got up and sat beside her.

The ground was cold enough that I wished I’d brought the blanket. Dot lowered the board so I could see without leaning.

“I never finished that part,” I said.

“This unit noticed.”

There was a little mark beside one of the drawings.

Not mine.

“Did you add that?”

“On a separate sheet.”

I looked more closely. Thin paper laid over the original, the mark aligned with the place she meant.

A question.

I read it twice.

It was a better question than the one I’d written.

“When did you learn this?”

“This unit has been reading.”

“For the mirrors?”

“Initially.”

“And now?”

The rivers in her shell moved slowly.

“This unit would like to know.”

I nearly told her there were more useful things in the other notebook.

Medicine. Water. The repairs to the field channels. Things that mattered to people who were waiting for me to understand them.

Then I looked at her question again.

She hadn’t asked which notebook would be most useful to me.

“Keep reading,” I said.

“This unit intends to.”

I smiled.

She turned the page.

The dawn window interrupted us.

It interrupted everything, briefly, every morning. Bowls set down. Voices lowering. Toby inside his wall, with Risa near enough to watch without making him the center of the whole camp.

Dot recorded the names.

Mother. Maura. The others, carried through the eleven seconds in the pattern we’d learned to recognize. The gap before Crane.

We had stayed with the last exchange for several mornings, making certain we could repeat it instead of piling something new on top of something uncertain.

Today, Wren had helped prepare the next letter.

C.

A small thing to be waiting for with your hands cold and your heart making too much of itself.

Dot sent the pattern.

The window closed.

No answer afterward that we could distinguish from the fading noise.

I looked at her.

“Tomorrow?”

“This unit will compare the records first.”

I nodded.

She had the unfinished chemistry question waiting beside her.

Now she had this too.

After breakfast, everyone needed Dot.

Teo wanted the lower pool checked. Luna needed the contact recording from yesterday. Ellis had found another difficult number in the old messages. Wren wanted a copy of the last three dawn exchanges. I asked whether one of the hands could hold a mirror while I looked at Anja’s ankle.

All sensible things.

All small, if you only counted the one you’d asked for.

Dot stood at the edge of the shelter with four arms occupied and two of her hands waiting beneath the others.

“Operator,” she said.

I looked up from Anja’s support.

“Yes?”

“This unit cannot do all of these now.”

The camp didn’t go silent.

That would have made it easier to notice how much she’d said.

Someone was still asking where the clean bowls had gone. Liam was laughing at something near the fire. A vessel knocked against another one beside the path.

I heard her anyway.

“What needs doing first?” I asked.

Dot’s grille remained toward me.

“This unit has been asked that six times.”

I put down the support.

Anja looked between us, then leaned back against her blanket.

“My ankle can wait while you finish that conversation.”

“I don’t want to keep you waiting.”

“I’ve heard.”

That was all she said.

I went outside with Dot.

She had made a list.

Not on one of our slates. In her records. She read it aloud, and by the time she reached the end I understood why the hands had been standing still beneath her.

The water. The dawn. The field measurements. The old signal records. The new ones. The path for Ellis’s board. Checking the skiff. Watching the upper opening. Carrying messages between people who were close enough to call to one another if they remembered to.

And my notes.

At the bottom.

“Those can wait,” I started.

Dot lowered the board with the chemistry pages on it.

“This unit knows.”

I stopped.

“That’s what happens to them every time,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Because nobody’s waiting for the answer.”

“This unit is waiting.”

The words were level. No accusation. She could make her voice sharper when she wanted to now, but she hadn’t.

I thought that made it worse.

Then I stopped making her request into something she had to comfort me about.

“What would you like?”

“Time to finish the question.”

“How long?”

“This unit does not know until the question is finished.”

I looked at the pages.

I knew exactly what that felt like.

Luna came over while we were talking.

Dot repeated the list for her. Once. Luna listened to the whole thing without adding a task at the end.

Then she went to the water slate and crossed out Dot’s name beside the surface check.

“Corr and I can read the marks,” she said. “That’s why we put them there.”

Risa came out of the shelter with the dawn notes.

“I can compare these.”

“You need to rest between the other work,” I said.

“So does she, apparently.”

Dot turned toward Risa.

“This unit is not requesting sleep.”

“No,” Risa said. “I heard what you requested.”

I sat down on the low wall and let them finish without explaining it for her.

We didn’t solve it by making Dot tell us no more loudly.

We put the jobs where everyone could see them.

Some still needed her. A hand and a lamp could go places a person couldn’t safely reach. Her records held things none of us could remember exactly. The dawn equipment needed attention.

Others needed somebody to walk twenty paces and ask a question.

Liam went to fetch the bowls himself.

He came back carrying too many, dropped one onto the grass, and picked it up before anyone could offer a hand.

Dot watched.

Said nothing.

I suspected she was enjoying that a little.

She moved to the shade with the chemistry notes.

Not far away. She didn’t need to disappear for us to leave her alone.

One hand held the pages. Another steadied a little tray of clear fragments I’d made while testing the mirrors. Cloudy glass. Clear glass. A piece with a narrow flaw through its center that I’d kept to remind myself what hurrying looked like.

“This unit would like these labeled,” she said.

“With what?”

“What you changed between them.”

I sat beside her and tried to remember.

For two of them, I couldn’t.

Dot waited while I looked embarrassed.

Then she made a place in the record for not recorded.

“That isn’t very flattering,” I said.

“This unit is not conducting that experiment.”

From the fire, Sera laughed.

I went back to Anja afterward.

Liam held the mirror. He complained once that his arm was getting tired, which was useful information because it made me change where he sat.

We worked for less time than I wanted and exactly as long as Anja had agreed to.

When I stopped, Toby checked the new support against her skin.

No one had asked Dot to hold anything.

Across the camp, she was still reading.

I found that unexpectedly difficult.

Every few minutes, I looked over as though I ought to give her the next instruction.

Sera caught me doing it.

“She hasn’t got lost,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then stop trying to find her.”

I looked back at Anja’s blanket and folded the clean cloth properly.

The water check came back good.

Luna and Corr had gone to the upper shelf with a hand Dot had already assigned to the chamber. They checked the glass trough from the same position as before, took the picture, and returned without asking Dot to talk them through every step.

Above, Teo’s mark stayed wet.

Below, the nursery pool kept overflowing into the next channel.

The guide brought the two model cups to the shelf, then put them back beneath their channels when Luna showed it the water vessel.

No new arrangement. No new request we could identify.

Things continuing to work.

I was learning that this could be worth recording too.

Old Son came to Dot near noon.

He stopped beside her tray and looked at the fragments.

I was close enough to hear because I was mending a loose fastening on the skiff. I kept working rather than going over to explain what she was doing.

“Query,” he said. “Is this material damaged?”

“Some of it,” Dot answered.

“Does it require replacement?”

“Not at present.”

He remained still.

Dot moved the flawed piece into the light.

“This unit is examining why the damage occurred.”

Old Son lowered his grille toward it.

A long pause.

Then, “May this unit examine it also?”

“Yes.”

He went to make his noon flash when the time came.

Returned afterward.

Dot had left the fragment where he could reach it.

I watched him position it between two arms, turning it until the light found the flaw. His movements were slower than hers. Careful in a different way.

Neither asked me what to do with it.

That was the part I wrote down later.

Ellis found the difficult date in the afternoon.

Not the answer to it. The reason it had been difficult.

He called Wren first, then me. Dot stayed in the shade until he asked whether she would like to look when she was ready.

She came after finishing the line she was reading.

I saw her mark the place.

Ellis held up two strips of writing.

“I didn’t change the number at dawn,” he said. “Not then.”

“What did you do?” Wren asked.

“The old recorder changed it while I was asleep. I used that number when I copied these. Later, when the recorder stopped, I began counting mornings myself.”

Wren put the strips beside each other.

The same message appeared twice, copied on either side of his change. Two different dates. The same words.

A small error to make beside a river with nobody else keeping time.

A large one when you were trying to decide which light had disappeared first.

Dot compared the copies.

She didn’t declare a corrected date immediately. Asked Ellis about two marks. Asked Wren which mornings she’d had clear sky from her old ridge. Asked whether the second copy might have been a repeated message instead of a repeated record.

Ellis thought for a long time.

“I don’t know.”

Dot left the uncertainty where it was.

But the two possible dates put one of his later observations in a different order than we’d thought.

Three brief flashes on a ridge beyond his usual line.

No complete number.

No reply he could make out afterward.

“I wrote reflection beside it,” he said.

“Was it?” I asked.

“Might have been.”

Wren leaned closer.

“Show me where.”

He marked the place on her rough map.

Not a new base. Not a person found.

A direction, a ridge, a little uncertainty we hadn’t been able to place before.

I felt the old urge immediately. Lift the skiff. Go while there was still light. Look until looking became an answer.

Then I looked at Ellis, tired from sorting his own handwriting, and at Wren checking the distances with her finger.

“Can we see it from the high path?” I asked.

“Not the lower slope,” she said. “A wing might, from the southern shoulder.”

I turned toward Dot.

Stopped before the request became an order by habit.

“When would you want to look?”

She considered it.

“Tomorrow. After the dawn exchange and the water check.”

“All right.”

The ridge had been there this long.

We could make a proper plan to look at it.

That evening, Dot went to the name board.

I followed because she asked me to bring the pencil, not because I’d noticed something wrong.

She stood beneath the scarecrow’s arm, reading the list.

Twenty-two human names.

A note at the bottom about the two kits.

I’d put it there myself.

I remembered doing it. Remembered thinking it was accurate, which it was, and therefore finished, which it wasn’t.

“This unit has a name,” Dot said.

“I know.”

“This unit would like it on the board.”

I looked at the pencil in my hand.

Not an argument about whether she was alive. Not a question I had the power to settle for her.

A place on the board headed HERE.

“Yes,” I said.

Then, “Would you like to write it?”

She took the pencil carefully.

The point was small for the grip she used, but she adjusted once and made the letters with a steadiness I envied.

DOT.

Not a designation with a name beside it.

Her name.

She looked at the space beneath.

“This unit will ask Old Son.”

I nodded.

She went to find him.

I stayed beside the board, holding nothing, while the shirt above me moved in the evening wind.

Old Son came after his dusk signal.

Dot explained what she’d asked for. He looked at the list for a long time, then at Rafe Dunmore’s separate board.

“Operator Dunmore is recorded there.”

“Yes,” I said.

“This unit is here.”

“Yes.”

Another pause.

“Then here is correct.”

Dot offered the pencil.

He did not take it.

“This unit would like you to write it.”

She did.

OLD SON.

Two words. A little lower than her own, leaving room between them so neither had to be squeezed in.

He examined the letters.

Then touched the edge of the board with one arm.

I didn’t ask him what he felt.

I could see what he’d chosen.

Wren read the new list before supper.

“Twenty-four names,” she said.

Liam looked up.

“Twenty-two humans,” she added, before he could start counting beds. “Two kits. Twenty-four here.”

Dot’s rivers moved faster.

Teo, passing with an empty bowl, stopped to look.

“Does that mean I can put her on the carrying list?” he asked.

“Ask her,” Luna said.

He turned to Dot.

She considered the bowl.

“This unit has finished reading for today.”

She took it from him.

It looked exactly like all the times she’d carried things for us before.

It wasn’t exactly the same.

After the bowls were put away, Dot asked whether the contact record could be included with her notes.

“The water model?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What are you looking for in it?”

“The gate.”

I remembered the silver strand pushing from the wrong side, stopping, then trying again.

Dot held the chemistry page beside the dark screen.

“This unit initially assumed the cloudy material had been made from different ingredients. The operator’s answer was different. This unit changed the question.”

“And the queen changed how it pushed.”

“Yes.”

I sat with that for a moment.

“Do you think it’s the same thing?”

“This unit does not yet have enough observations.”

I smiled.

“That sounds like something you’ve heard a lot lately.”

“This unit has found it useful.”

She put the record beside the notes, not inside them. Two things to compare, without making one explain the other before she was ready.

I watched her arrange the pages and realized I hadn’t once asked whether any of this would help us tomorrow.

Perhaps it would.

Perhaps she would simply know more than she had this morning.

That was allowed to be enough.

Later, she asked about Mother.

We were beside the low fire. I had the notebook on my knees. Sera was repairing the edge of a blanket nearby, making small, annoyed sounds each time the thread refused to go where she wanted.

“Would Dorothy Dask understand the distinction?” Dot asked.

“Which one?”

“Between a task this unit can perform and a task this unit chooses.”

I looked at the fire.

Mother had spent so much of her life being useful to people who rarely asked what it cost her. Feeding us. Holding us together. Finding enough money, enough medicine, enough warmth.

I thought of her hands around the speaker when Toby had sung.

“I think she’d understand why it matters,” I said.

Dot waited.

“She’d probably give you somewhere at the table and ask what you were reading.”

Sera pulled the thread through at last.

“She would,” she said.

Dot turned toward her.

“Did you meet her?”

“Yes.”

Sera’s expression softened.

“She’d have wanted to know whether anyone had explained the difficult parts properly. Then she’d have asked Lucas why he hadn’t.”

“I don’t know all the difficult parts.”

“That would become clear quite quickly.”

Dot made a small sound through her grille.

Not one of her ordinary words.

I looked up.

She looked at me.

“This unit has encountered several gaps in the notes.”

Sera laughed so hard she lost the thread again.

I decided there were worse things to be outnumbered about.

On Day 436, the letter came back.

C.

Not a word. Not Mother’s voice. Not permission to turn one clear pattern into all the things I wanted to hear.

Dot compared it with what we’d sent. Risa checked the intervals against the previous mornings. Wren checked the old table.

All three agreed.

I sat with the confirmation slate in my hands.

Yesterday, no answer we’d been certain of.

Today, the same little pattern returned across a distance I still couldn’t properly imagine.

Somebody had kept it.

Somebody had tried again.

I put the slate beside my unfinished letter to Mother.

We would try the next small thing when we were ready.

After the water check, Dot sent a wing toward the southern shoulder.

She told us where it was going and how long she expected the search to take. Wren and Ellis sat with the screen. I stayed beside them for the first part, then went to help Nessa test the new grip on her crutch.

It was difficult to stop watching.

I did it anyway.

When Dot called me back, she didn’t say she’d found someone.

“This unit has found the ridge in the record.”

I sat beside Wren.

On the screen, the far slope rose out of the silver-green. A bare strip of stone near its crest caught the morning light.

The wing turned.

A bright glint appeared.

Then vanished.

“Reflection,” Ellis said quietly.

“Possibly,” Wren answered.

Dot took the wing through the same turn again.

The glint returned at the same angle.

Stayed while the camera held that position.

No pattern. No number. Nothing moving it toward us.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

Then Dot brought the picture closer.

There was something fitted into a cleft near the top of the rock.

Straight-edged. Too regular to be part of the broken surface around it.

A piece of reflective material, fixed where sunrise would find it.

Not proof of anyone alive.

Proof that someone had put something there.

“We mark it,” Luna said when we showed her.

“Search?” I asked.

“Yes. Prepared. With the route checked and room to bring someone back.”

I nodded.

Ellis looked at the screen for a long time.

“I nearly threw that strip away.”

Wren rested her hand beside his.

“You didn’t.”

Dot saved the image with the old record and the uncertain dates intact.

Then she brought the wing home.

There was still enough daylight for other things.

I found her in the shade afterward.

The chemistry pages were open to the question she’d begun yesterday. Old Son stood nearby with the flawed piece of glass resting in two arms.

“Did you find the answer?” I asked.

“Part of it.”

“Will you show me?”

Dot lowered the board.

“Yes.”

I sat down.

For the next little while, she explained what she’d learned and I listened.

She corrected one of my drawings.

Then I corrected one of her assumptions about what I’d done to the glass, because the notes hadn’t said enough for her to know.

We made a new page together.

Neither of us called it a report.

Day 435–436. Dot grows up.

She was reading because she wanted the answer.

Too many jobs, all called first. Put them where everyone could see. Share the ones that don’t need her.

Her own question belongs on the list too.

Water above and below still running. No new changes. Record that.

Ellis changed how he counted days when the recorder failed. Keep both possible dates. Don’t make the uncertainty disappear just because a map is easier without it.

Dot asked for her name on HERE. Wrote it herself. Asked Old Son. He chose here too.

Twenty-four names. Twenty-two humans. Two kits.

Mother would have made room at the table.

Day 436. C returned. Three checks. Keep it with the others.

Wing found the ridge from Ellis’s note. Fixed reflection. No answering pattern. Something placed in the cleft. Marked for a proper search.

Dot came back to the chemistry.

She showed me what she’d learned.