Scarecrow

The Overseer asked for the map room.

Not asked. Requested. Through the band on Crane’s collar, at dawn, while the count was still going. The voice came out of Crane’s throat across the red glass, flat and even, and every head on the glass turned.

The Overseer requests the use of the planning room beneath the map. The Director will brief the leadership of Primary Base. Attendance is recommended.

Dot didn’t stop counting.

She said every name, all the way to the end, the way she did every morning. The thirty-one, on Earth, waking for eleven seconds. Mother, for fourteen. All names.

Then she turned her lamps toward the guest house and said, very clearly, so the whole glass could hear:

”This unit will attend.”

Holt’s map room had never been so full.

Holt. Luna. Sera. Me. Wren with her book. Liam and Toby and Sigmund. Juno, at the end of the table, with her head turned east. Odile Marr, from Port Ash, because Holt said the newest arrivals should hear it too. Kemi Ade. Dane, at the back, with Keir beside him.

Risa wasn’t there.

She was still in her chair at the bottom of the garden stairs. She’d slept in it. Dory was behind her, in the quiet room, in the dark, held by fourteen queens so that nothing could feel her. Including me.

It was the second day I hadn’t felt my daughter.

I hadn’t known I’d notice it this much.

The Overseer came in last.

It had to stoop through the door. Its mirror scraped the lintel, and the sound was like a blade on glass, and everyone in the room flinched. Then it straightened, and stood at the end of the table, under the edge of Holt’s map, and didn’t sit.

It didn’t need to. Nothing about it looked as though it ever sat.

Crane sat.

At the head of the table. In Holt’s chair, which Holt had given up without a word. With his hands flat on the wood and the band on his collar dark.

He looked round the room.

At Holt. At Luna, who looked straight back. At me.

Then he looked up. At the map above his head. The red line of the ring. The fourteen queens. The hundreds of small dots. The three black marks.

He looked at it for a long time.

”This is very good work,” he said.

His own voice. Not the flat even thing. His. Hoarse and tired and, for a moment, almost warm.

”Who made it?”

”I did,” said Holt. ”With Luna. And the queens.”

Crane nodded slowly.

”The queens,” he said.

Then he looked down at the table, and put his hands together, and began.

He talked for two hours.

I’d heard him talk before. In the dome. At the Gala, at the Friday assemblies, at the launch. He’d always been good at it. He’d had a way of making things sound reasonable. Of laying them out one after another, each one following from the last, so that by the time he got to the part you should have objected to, you’d already agreed with everything that led there.

This was like that.

It was like a grant proposal. Luna said that afterward, and she was right. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. It had numbers. It had a problem and a solution and a timeline.

The problem was the Sorn.

”When the Sorn arrived in our system,” Crane said, ”they told us what they wanted us to know. You know the version in the schoolrooms. The war. The burning plains. The surrender. The Accord.” He looked round the table. ”The schoolrooms leave out what the surrender was.”

Nobody spoke.

”The Sorn don’t want Earth,” said Crane. ”They never did. Earth is poisoned. It’s small. It’s a long way from anything they care about. They came because they’re at war, and they needed something we have.”

”Which is?” said Luna.

”Us,” said Crane.

He laid it out.

The Sorn had been fighting for a very long time. Longer than humans had had cities. Across a hundred worlds, more, in a war so large Crane said he’d stopped trying to picture it. And they were losing. Slowly. One world at a time.

”The enemy,” Crane said, ”doesn’t fight the way the Sorn do. The Sorn fight with ships. With weapons. With things they build.” He looked up at the map. ”The enemy fights with those.”

He pointed. At the red line. At the fourteen queens.

The room went very cold.

”The Teeming,” Crane said, ”are weapons. Biological weapons. Designed, millions of years ago, by whatever the enemy was before it was the enemy. Self-replicating. Self-organising. Seeded on a thousand worlds, waiting.” He looked at me. ”You’ve seen what they can do. You’ve seen what a brood does to a base. What it did to the first wave. What it did to the kits.”

”I’ve seen what they do when the voice drives them,” I said.

Crane’s mouth tightened.

”The voice,” he said, ”is the only thing that stops them. The Sorn learned that a long time ago. You can’t fight a brood. You can only direct it. Point it somewhere else. Make it fight for you instead of against you.” He spread his hands on the table. ”That’s what the spine is. That’s what the mountain was. Amplifiers. So that the Sorn can take a world the enemy has seeded and turn its weapons round.”

”And us?” said Luna.

”We’re the soldiers,” Crane said simply.

Nobody moved.

”The Sorn can’t hold a world,” Crane said. ”Not on their own. They’re too few. They can direct the broods, but directing isn’t holding. Someone has to stand on the ground. Build the bases. Run the kits. Plant the stones and the relays and the amplifiers. Fight what the voice can’t reach.” He looked round the table. ”They needed a species that could do that. That could live on a hundred worlds. That could be changed.”

”Modified,” said Holt.

”Modified,” said Crane. ”Your father understood that before anyone, Lucas. He saw what the silver could do. He saw that a modified human could live anywhere, survive anything, take a world that would kill an ordinary one.” His voice dropped. ”The surrender wasn’t a surrender. It was a contract. Earth provides soldiers. The Sorn provide the technology to make them. And in return, the Sorn don’t burn the rest of us.”

”And Avalon?” said Sera.

”Avalon is the test,” said Crane. ”The first world. The proving ground. If modified humans can take Avalon, they can take the next one. And the one after that.” He looked up at the map again, at the red line, and something moved in his face. ”And they have. You have. You’ve done more in two years than the Sorn thought possible in twenty.”

”Not the way you mean,” I said.

Crane looked at me.

”No,” he said quietly. ”Not the way they mean.”

That was the moment I understood he half-believed it.

Not all of it. Not the part about the queens. I watched his face when he said weapons, and I watched it again when he looked up at the map, at the fourteen small circles in Luna’s careful hand, and they weren’t the same face.

He believed the Sorn were at war. He believed they were losing. He believed that the surrender had been a contract and that the contract was the only thing keeping Earth alive.

And he’d believed the Teeming were weapons.

For years. For his whole career. He’d built the Project on it.

And now he was sitting in a room under a map that showed fourteen queens talking to each other, signing a treaty a girl from the dome had written in eleven lines, with a clause at the bottom that said anyone who leaves may come back.

Weapons don’t write that.

He knew it.

I watched him know it.

And I watched him look at the Overseer, standing at the end of the table under the edge of the map, with its mirror turned toward him. And I watched him decide not to.

”So that’s it,” said Luna.

Her voice was very level. She had her notebook open and she’d been writing the whole time, in neat columns, the way she wrote everything.

”That’s the explanation. The Sorn are losing a war. We’re the soldiers. The Teeming are weapons. Avalon is the test.” She looked up. ”And the nine cadets you signed for. Pim Arden. The Quints. Where do they fit?”

Crane didn’t answer.

”And the queen in the station,” said Luna. ”The one you’re pushing the voice through. The one that hums the hollow-song under it, every pass, to anyone who can hear.” She didn’t look away. ”Where does she fit, in a war against weapons?”

Crane’s hands, flat on the table, curled.

”The Director,” said a voice, ”has completed the briefing.”

It came from Crane’s throat.

The band on his collar had lit. Faint and pale. And Crane’s face had shut, the way it had shut on the bench, like a door. His hands went flat. His eyes went wide and fixed.

The Overseer stepped forward.

One step. It didn’t need more. Its mirror filled the end of the room. I saw all of us in it. The whole table, curved and tiny. Holt’s map above us, upside down.

The Overseer will now address the asset, said the voice in Crane’s throat.

It turned its mirror toward me.

The asset has been informed of the purpose of the Project. The asset understands that the Project’s purpose is the survival of the human species. The asset understands that its own value to that purpose is very great.

I didn’t answer.

The asset has displayed reluctance, said the voice. The Overseer anticipated this. The Overseer has prepared a demonstration of the stakes.

It raised one arm.

Too long. The joints bending in the wrong places. And at the end of it, where a hand should have been, the mirror opened. Just slightly. A seam, like the lid of an eye.

Light came out of it.

And on the wall of the map room, above Holt’s table, under the edge of the map, a picture appeared.

A room.

A bedroom. Large. Larger than any room in the dome I’d grown up in. Soft carpet. Tall windows, with the lights of a city beyond them, and above the city, the curve of a dome. Not ours. Not the one I’d grown up under. The great central dome, the one with the gold lift and the Founders’ Hall on Level 140. I’d only been there once, for the Gala.

A penthouse.

Two beds.

In each bed, a girl. Asleep.

One with dark hair spread across the pillow and her fist curled under her chin. One with lighter hair, tangled, half out from under the covers, one bare foot hanging off the edge of the bed.

Genny.

Garnet.

I didn’t breathe.

They were bigger. Of course they were. Two years. Genny would be twelve now. Garnet too. They were longer in the bed than I remembered. Genny’s face had changed, sharpened, the way Father’s had in the old pictures. Garnet still slept the way she always had, sprawled, as if she’d fallen asleep in the middle of running.

And between the beds, in a chair, a woman.

Awake.

Sitting very upright, the way she always sat, with a blanket over her knees and her hands folded in her lap.

Her hands were shaking.

Not much. Not the way they shook on bad days. A small, steady tremor, the kind you’d only see if you’d spent your whole life watching for it.

I’d spent my whole life watching for it.

Mother.

She was looking at something off to one side.

Not at the camera. At something past it. A window, maybe. Or a door. She had the look she got when she was listening for something. When she was waiting.

Her face was thinner.

Her hair, which had been dark when I left, had a streak of grey at the front. She was wearing a dressing gown I didn’t recognise, blue silk, expensive. Her mother’s ring was on her hand. The ring she never took off. I could see it catch the light every time her hand trembled.

I looked at her bones.

I couldn’t help it. I’d never been able to help it, not with her. Even through a picture on a wall, eleven light-years away, my sight went to her the way my sight went to Dory.

It didn’t work. It was only light. Only a picture. I couldn’t see through it.

But I could see her hands.

And I could see, on the table beside her chair, a small glass dish with a silver spoon in it. Empty.

And on the wall above her chair, in the corner of the picture, a calendar. With a date circled in red.

The asset’s mother, said the voice in Crane’s throat, receives her stabilizer on a regular schedule, in accordance with the Retention Act. The stabilizer is the property of the Project. Its continued provision is at the Project’s discretion.

The picture didn’t change. Genny slept. Garnet’s foot hung off the bed. Mother sat in her chair with her hands trembling in her lap.

The next dose, said the voice, is in nine days.

The calendar. The red circle.

The asset’s sisters, said the voice, are in excellent health. They receive the finest education and care available on Earth. Their abilities are being developed under the supervision of the Project. Their welfare is assured.

A pause.

For as long as the Project’s interests are served.

I could have done it.

I want to write that down plainly, because it’s true, and because I’ve thought about it every day since.

I could have done it.

The Overseer was eight feet from me. I couldn’t see into it. I couldn’t change the mirror. But I could change everything around it. The floor under its feet. The air in its lungs, if it had lungs. The stone of the walls, the iron of the ceiling hooks, the glass of the lamp. I could have opened the ground under it and closed it again with the Overseer inside, and filled the space with molten rock, and let it cool.

The shuttle on the apron was the same. I couldn’t see into it. But I could see everything it stood on.

And Crane.

Crane I could see all the way through.

His bones. His blood. The band on his collar, grey and blind, sitting against the skin of his throat. And under the skin, threading into his spine, very fine, so fine I’d almost missed it, a filament of the same grey material running from the band all the way down to the base of his skull.

I could have taken the filament out. I could have taken the band off. I could have taken Crane apart, cell by cell, from where I sat, and he’d never have felt it.

I could have done all of it. In the time it took to breathe in.

And the picture on the wall would have gone dark.

And somewhere eleven light-years away, in a penthouse under the central dome, someone would have been watching that picture too. Someone with a finger on something. Someone who’d know, the moment it went dark, exactly what that meant.

And in nine days, there’d be no spoon in the dish.

I held still.

I don’t know how. Sera says I didn’t move at all. Not my hands, not my face, not my eyes. She says I sat at the table with the picture on the wall and the Overseer’s mirror turned toward me and went completely, perfectly still, like a stone, and the only way she knew I was alive was that the silver around my eyes had gone so bright she couldn’t look at it.

I remember thinking about Mother.

Not the picture. The real Mother. In the kitchen of the house Father built, with the tea in half-full cups and her hands shaking on the table. Telling me something. A long time ago. Before Avalon. Before the dome. When I was small and I’d done something to Garnet, I don’t remember what, changed her toy into something she didn’t want, because I thought she’d like it better.

Never choose for them, Mother had said. Not without asking. Not ever. Not even when you’re sure.

I’d thought she meant toys.

She hadn’t.

If I’d moved, in that room, I’d have chosen. For Genny. For Garnet. For Mother. I’d have decided, on their behalf, from eleven light-years away, that they’d rather take the risk than stay in that penthouse.

Maybe they would.

But I hadn’t asked them.

So I held still.

The picture stayed on the wall for a long time.

Long enough that I saw Garnet turn over in her sleep and pull her foot back under the covers. Long enough that I saw Genny’s fist uncurl from under her chin. Long enough that I saw Mother, in her chair between the beds, lift her head.

And look straight at the camera.

She couldn’t have known it was there. Or maybe she could. Mother always knew more than she said.

She looked at it, straight into it, for a long moment.

Her hands stopped shaking.

Not for long. A second. Two. But they stopped. She held them still in her lap, perfectly still, the way she used to hold them when she wanted me to know she was all right.

Then the picture went out.

Nobody in the map room said anything at all.

The Overseer lowered its arm. The seam in its mirror closed. It stood at the end of the table, under the map, and looked at me.

The asset will consider, said the voice in Crane’s throat, what has been shown.

It turned. It stooped through the door. Its mirror scraped the lintel. And it was gone, back along the street toward the guest house, with the twelve soldiers falling in behind it in a line.

The band on Crane’s collar went dark.

Crane didn’t move.

He sat at the head of the table with his hands flat on the wood and his eyes on the place on the wall where the picture had been. His face was grey. His lips were pressed together so hard they’d gone white.

Holt was the first to move.

He got up from the bench by the wall, slowly, and came round the table, and put his hand on Crane’s shoulder.

Crane flinched.

Then he didn’t.

”I didn’t know,” Crane said. His own voice. Barely a whisper. ”I didn’t know it would show you that. I didn’t know it could.”

”I know, son,” said Holt.

”I would have.” Crane closed his eyes. ”Two years ago. I would have shown you myself. I’d have thought it was the right thing to do. Leverage.” His mouth twisted. ”I’d have called it leverage.”

”And now?”

Crane didn’t answer.

He sat there with Holt’s hand on his shoulder and his eyes closed and his hands flat on the table, and after a long time, very quietly, so quietly I only just heard it, he said:

”Her hands stopped.”

I went to the quiet room.

I didn’t decide to. I just found myself on the garden stairs, and then at the bottom of them, and Risa was there in her chair, and she took one look at my face and stood up.

”What happened?”

I couldn’t tell her. Not yet. I didn’t have the words.

I went past her into the faceted dark and knelt down beside the basket.

Dory was awake.

She was lying on her back with her fists up by her ears and her eyes open, looking at nothing. At the dark. The way she’d looked at Risa yesterday. Like an ordinary baby. Like she didn’t know how to do anything else.

I couldn’t feel her.

But I could see her. With my eyes. Just my eyes. Her small face, and her dark curling hair, and the silver around her eyes, faint and bright like frost.

She looked at me.

And her face changed.

Just slightly. The way faces change when they see something they know. Her mouth opened. Her fists came down. One of them reached, slowly, in my direction.

I put my finger in it.

She held on.

She couldn’t check. The queens were holding everything too still for that. She couldn’t say there you are. She couldn’t reach into me the way she’d reached into everyone she’d ever met.

But she held my finger.

And I knelt in the dark with my daughter holding onto me, and I thought about my mother’s hands going still in her lap, eleven light-years away, for one second, two, so I’d know she was all right.

And I understood, finally, what she’d been telling me.

Not I’m all right.

Hold still. I’m holding still too.

Sera came down an hour later.

She didn’t say anything. She sat on the stone floor beside me, cross-legged, close enough that her knee touched mine, and looked at Dory holding my finger in the dark.

After a long time, she said, ”If it had been my mother.”

”I know.”

”I’d have burned the room down.” She said it very quietly. Not angry. Just true. ”The table. The map. The mirror. Crane. I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself. I’d have burned it all and then sat in the ash and found out afterward what it cost.”

”I know.”

”You didn’t.”

”No.”

Sera turned her head and looked at me. In the dark of the quiet room her eyes were the only light, faint and red at the edges, the way they went when the fire was close.

”How?” she said.

I told her. About the kitchen in the house Father built. About Garnet’s toy. Never choose for them.

Sera listened. When I’d finished, she was quiet for a long time.

”I’m glad it wasn’t me,” she said at last. ”In that chair. With that on the wall.” She swallowed. ”I’m glad it was you. I hate that I’m glad. But I am.”

She reached over and took my free hand. The one Dory wasn’t holding.

And put it, the way she had on the porch, flat on her stomach. Low down. Below her belt.

I didn’t look. I didn’t need to. I could feel it, faintly, under my palm: the small warm spark, the single thread of silver. Whole.

”There’s another one now,” Sera said. ”To hold still for.” Her voice cracked, just slightly. ”So you’d better be good at it.”

”I’m learning.”

”Learn faster,” said Sera. ”You’ve got nine days. And then a lot of years after that.”

She leaned against my shoulder. And the three of us sat there in the faceted dark, me and Sera and Dory, with Dory holding one of my hands and Sera holding the other, and nobody moved at all.

Day 688. The feed.

The Overseer requested the map room through Crane at dawn. Dot finished the count first, every name, and Mother answered for fourteen seconds. Then: ”This unit will attend.”

It stooped through Holt’s door and scraped the lintel. Crane sat in Holt’s chair. He looked up at the map a long time. ”This is very good work.” Holt: ”With Luna. And the queens.” Crane: ”The queens.”

Two hours, laid out like a grant proposal. The schoolroom version of the surrender leaves things out. They don’t want Earth. They’re at war across a hundred worlds and losing. The enemy fights with the Teeming, which Crane calls biological weapons, seeded on a thousand worlds. The voice is the only thing that stops them: you can’t fight a brood, only point it. The spine and the mountain are amplifiers. The Sorn can’t hold a world themselves. They needed a species that could be changed. The surrender was a contract: Earth provides soldiers, the Sorn don’t burn the rest. Avalon is the test, and we have passed it beyond anything they thought possible.

He half believes it. He looked up at fourteen queens who signed a treaty with ”anyone who leaves may come back,” and he knew weapons don’t write that. Then he looked at the Overseer, and decided not to know.

Luna: where do the nine fit? Where does the queen in the station fit, humming the hollow-song under the voice? His hands curled. The band lit.

”The Overseer has prepared a demonstration of the stakes.” A seam opened in its mirror and threw light on the wall. A penthouse under the central dome. Genny, twelve, fist under her chin. Garnet, sprawled, one foot off the bed. Between them, in a chair, Mother. Awake. Blue silk dressing gown. Grey streak in her hair. Her mother’s ring. Hands trembling. An empty dish with a silver spoon. A calendar, a date circled in red.

”The next dose is in nine days.” Their welfare is assured, ”for as long as the Project’s interests are served.”

I could have done all of it, in the time it takes to breathe in. Opened the ground under the mirror. Everything the shuttle stood on. Crane, too: a grey filament from the band runs into his spine. And the picture would have gone dark, and someone eleven light-years away would know what that meant, and in nine days there’d be no spoon in the dish.

Mother, when I was small: never choose for them. Not without asking. Not even when you’re sure. I thought she meant toys. I held still. Sera says the silver round my eyes was too bright to look at.

Then Mother lifted her head and looked straight at the camera. Her hands stopped shaking. One second. Two. Then the picture went out.

Crane, his own voice: ”I didn’t know it could show you that. Two years ago I’d have shown you myself. I’d have called it leverage.” Holt’s hand on his shoulder. Then, barely audible: ”Her hands stopped.”

In the quiet room Dory couldn’t check. But she saw me with her eyes, and reached, and held my finger.

Sera came down: if it had been her mother, she’d have burned the room and found out afterward what it cost. She’s glad it was me in that chair, and hates that she’s glad. She put my other hand on her stomach. ”There’s another one now. To hold still for. So you’d better be good at it.”

Mother wasn’t saying ”I’m all right.”

She was saying: hold still. I’m holding still too.

Nine days.