Scarecrow

The call was Crane’s idea.

Or it was the Overseer’s, and Crane carried it. I never found out which. Nobody did. On the morning of Day 718, at the dawn count, the band on his collar lit and the flat even voice came out across the red glass, and every head turned.

Under the provisions of the Retention Act, the immediate family of a designated asset is entitled to one welfare communication per quarter. The asset has received none since landfall. The Overseer has authorised a communication. It will take place at noon. It will be monitored.

The band went dark.

Crane sat on his bench with his hands on his knees and his eyes on me across the glass.

He didn’t nod. He didn’t do anything.

But his hands, on his knees, were perfectly still.

”It’s a trap,” said Sera.

”Probably,” said Holt.

”It’s a test,” said Luna.

”Certainly,” said Holt.

”It’s my mother,” I said.

They all looked at me.

We were in the kitchen. All four of us, and Holt, and Dot at the door. Dory was on Luna’s lap, chewing on the corner of Luna’s notebook, which Luna had given up trying to stop. She was thirteen weeks old. Edda’s green book said impossible next to teething.

”It’s my mother,” I said again. ”And Genny. And Garnet. On a screen. For the first time in two years.” I looked at the table. ”I don’t care if it’s a trap.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Risa reached across and took my hand.

”Then we’ll be there,” she said. ”All of us. In the room. And if it’s a trap, we’ll walk into it together.”

Sera put her hand on top of Risa’s. Luna, with Dory’s fist in her hair, put hers on top of Sera’s.

”Together,” said Luna.

Dory, on her lap, let go of the notebook, reached out, and slapped her small wet hand on top of the pile.

Everyone laughed.

Even me.

It was in the map room.

Of course it was. Under Holt’s map, with the fourteen queens and the red line and the three black marks overhead. The Overseer had asked for it. The communication will take place in the planning room. I think it wanted the map in the background, the way it had wanted it for the feed.

I didn’t care.

Dot set up the screen. Not the Overseer’s seam. A proper screen, from the third wave’s salvage, hung on the wall where the feed had been. With a lens on top of it, so they could see us too.

The Overseer stood in the corner. Under the edge of the map. It didn’t speak. Crane sat beside Holt at the head of the table, with the band lit.

The rest of us stood.

Me in front. Sera and Luna and Risa behind me. Risa with Dory.

At the last minute, before noon, Risa looked at the lens on top of the screen. Then at the Overseer in the corner. Then at me.

”Not her,” she said quietly.

I knew what she meant.

The Overseer knew Dory was here. Item three. But the Overseer reported to the Hand. Not to the Project. Not to Central Allocation. And Dot’s reports to Command, for five hundred and forty days, had described a city of two hundred and eleven people with marginal food and poor morale and no babies at all.

This call was monitored. By the Project. By whoever sat on two unlisted floors of the Senate Annex, under Crane’s signature and Senator Friese’s.

Risa’s father’s signature.

”Not her,” I said.

Risa nodded. She kissed Dory’s head and handed her to Sera, and Sera took her out of the room and down the corridor, to Holt’s back room, where there was no lens and no screen, and stayed with her there.

Risa stood behind me with her hand on my back.

At noon, the screen lit.

They were in the penthouse.

The same room. I knew it from the feed. The tall windows, the lights of the city, the curve of the central dome. But it was daylight there now, or what passes for daylight under a dome. The filtered grey that comes through the glass in the middle of the cycle.

Three of them. On a sofa. In a row.

Genny on the left.

She was taller. Two years taller. She sat very straight, the way she always had, with her hands folded in her lap, and her dark hair cut short at the jaw, and her face had sharpened so much that for a moment I didn’t recognise it. Then I did. It was Father’s. His jaw. His mouth. His way of looking at a thing as if she were taking it apart in her head.

Garnet on the right.

She was not sitting straight. She was sitting sideways, with her legs tucked under her and a drawing board on her knees and a pencil in her hand, and her hair, lighter than Genny’s, was tangled the way it had always been tangled, as if she’d been out in the wind, which under a dome she couldn’t have been.

She looked up.

And her face did what it had always done. All at once. Like a lamp coming on.

”Lucas!”

And in the middle—

Mother.

In the blue silk dressing gown. With the grey streak at the front of her hair. With her mother’s ring on her hand, catching the dome-light.

Her hands were in her lap. Folded. Trembling. The small steady tremor I’d watched for my whole life.

She looked at me.

She didn’t say anything. Not at first. She just looked. The way she’d looked at me across the kitchen table in the house Father built, when I came in from the field. Taking inventory. Arms, legs, face. Eyes.

Her gaze stopped on my eyes.

On the silver round them. Bright. Whole.

Her hands went still.

”Oh,” she said quietly. ”Oh, Lucas. You finished it.”

I don’t remember what I said.

Risa says I didn’t say anything for a long time. She says I stood there with her hand on my back and Luna beside me and the Overseer in the corner, and I looked at the screen, and my mouth opened and closed, and nothing came out.

Garnet filled the silence. Garnet always filled silences.

”You’re taller,” she said. ”Are you taller? You look taller. Genny’s taller. I’m taller too but Genny says it doesn’t count because I’m still shorter than her. Is that a map? Is that Avalon? Miss Pell showed us a map of Avalon but it was mostly blank and that one’s got colours. Have you met any aliens? You said you’d met aliens. In your letter. Are they nice? Do they eat people? Genny says they probably don’t eat people because you’d have said.”

”Garnet,” said Genny.

”What? I’m asking.”

”You’re asking eleven things at once.”

”Twelve,” said Garnet, ”if you count are you taller.”

And I laughed.

I couldn’t help it. It came out of me like something breaking, and I put my hand over my mouth, and Risa’s hand pressed harder on my back.

”Yes,” I said, when I could. ”I’m taller. Yes, that’s Avalon. Yes, I’ve met aliens. They’re called the Teeming. They’re nice. They don’t eat people.” I took a breath. ”One of them brings stones to my porch.”

Garnet’s eyes went enormous.

”Stones?”

”Smooth round ones. From his hollow. It’s a present.”

”Can I have one?”

”Maybe,” I said. ”One day.”

Genny didn’t ask anything.

Not at first. She sat very straight with her hands folded and watched me talk to Garnet, and watched Mother watch me, and every so often her eyes went to the corner of the screen, the corner where the lens would show the edge of the room, the corner where the Overseer stood.

She knew.

She’d always known more than she said. Like Mother.

When Garnet finally paused for breath, Genny said:

”I’ve been doing chemistry.”

”Miss Pell said.”

”Father’s notebooks.” She didn’t blink. ”I read all seven. Before they took them.” A tiny pause. ”I have a problem I can’t solve. Will you help me with it?”

”Of course.”

Genny unfolded her hands. She had a slate in her lap. She held it up to the lens.

It was a list.

Thirteen elements, in Genny’s small square handwriting. One per line. No numbers. No symbols. Just names.

Dysprosium.Iodine.Dubnium.Fluorine.Argon.Thulium.Hydrogen.Erbium.Radon.Krypton.Nitrogen.Oxygen.Tungsten.

”I’m supposed to put them in order of atomic weight,” Genny said. ”From lightest to heaviest. And then say which ones Father could have made from lead in a single step.” She lowered the slate. ”But I keep getting it wrong. I think there’s something about the list I’m not seeing.”

I looked at it.

It was a nonsense problem. Father couldn’t make anything from lead in a single step; nobody could, not by climbing. And the list was in no order at all. Dysprosium, sixty-six. Iodine, fifty-three. Dubnium, a hundred and five, which barely exists. Fluorine, nine. Argon, eighteen.

It was nonsense.

On purpose.

I looked at the first letters.

D. I. D.

F. A. T. H. E. R.

K. N. O.

And tungsten. Which every schoolchild in the dome learned as tungsten, and which every chemist knew by its other name. The old one. The one Father always used, because he said it sounded like a wolf.

Wolfram.

W.

DID FATHER KNOW.

I didn’t move.

Genny watched me.

She’d done it in front of the lens. In front of whoever was listening on two unlisted floors of the Senate Annex. In front of the Overseer, in the corner, under the map. She’d held it up and asked me to help with her homework.

Did Father know?

About the Sorn. About the queens. About the silver, and where it came from, and what the Project was for. About the surrender that wasn’t a surrender. About all of it.

I thought about notebook four. Page two hundred and twelve. Why must I climb? There must be a shorter way. Underlined twice.

I thought about the night Father turned Crane’s bodyguard into vapour in our doorway, when I was six. About the door the government gave him, after the medal. About the house he’d built in the wasteland, where nobody would find it. About him teaching me that lead into gold was easy and sand into bread was hard, and never telling me why it mattered.

I thought about the scarecrow in the field.

Something left standing in a dead field to frighten off what’s out there.

”I think you’ve got the wrong list,” I said slowly.

Genny’s face didn’t change.

”Try this one,” I said. ”It’s simpler. It’ll help you see the pattern.”

I picked up Luna’s pen. Luna, without a word, held out her notebook, open to a blank page. I wrote. Big letters. Element names. One per line. And held it up to the lens.

Yttrium.Erbium.Sulfur.

Then, underneath, a gap. And more.

Iodine.

Tellurium.Hydrogen.Iridium.Nitrogen.Krypton.

Holmium.Erbium.

Dysprosium.Iridium.Dubnium.

”Put those in order,” I said. ”Same rule. Lightest to heaviest.”

Genny looked at the list.

I watched her read it. I watched her eyes go down the first letters. I watched her mouth move, very slightly, the way Luna’s moved when she counted.

YES. I THINK HE DID.

Genny didn’t say anything.

She looked at the list for a long time. Then she looked at me. And her face, which had been so straight and so still and so much like Father’s, did something I hadn’t seen it do since she was ten and had given me a diamond she’d made within one foot of her body, for Avalon.

It crumpled.

Just for a moment.

Then she put it back.

”Thank you,” she said. Very steadily. ”That helps.”

Mother hadn’t moved.

She’d watched all of it. Genny’s slate, my list, Genny’s face. She’d sat between her daughters with her hands folded in her lap, and she’d watched, and she hadn’t said a word.

Now she looked at me.

”Lucas,” she said. ”Your letters said.”

She stopped.

She glanced, very briefly, at the corner of the screen. At the lens. At whatever she could see of the room. At the edge of the corner where the mirror stood.

Then back at me.

”Your letters said you were going to be a father,” she said.

Behind me, I felt Risa go still.

”Yes,” I said.

”Is the baby well?”

”Yes.”

Mother looked at me for a long moment. At my face. At the silver round my eyes. At Risa’s hand, which she could probably see, on my back. At Luna, beside me. At whatever else she could read in the room that I couldn’t see from where I stood.

Then she said, very quietly:

”Don’t show me.”

Nobody in the map room breathed.

”Not today,” Mother said. ”Not on this.” She looked at the lens. Not at me. At the lens. At whoever was behind it. ”I don’t need to see her. I’d like to. More than anything. But I don’t need to.” Her hands, in her lap, were perfectly still. ”Just tell me her name.”

I couldn’t speak.

Risa spoke for me.

She stepped forward, beside me, where the lens could see her. Risa Friese. Senator Friese’s daughter. On a screen that Senator Friese’s office was watching. With her chin up and her storm-grey eyes very steady.

”Mrs. Dask,” she said. ”I’m Risa.”

”I know who you are,” said Mother gently. ”Lucas wrote. A great deal.”

Risa’s mouth twitched. Then steadied.

”Her name’s Dorothy,” she said. ”We call her Dory. So Dot doesn’t get confused.”

Mother didn’t move.

Her hands, in her lap, stayed perfectly still. Her face stayed perfectly composed. She sat on the sofa between her daughters, in the blue silk dressing gown, with her mother’s ring catching the light, and didn’t move at all.

Then a tear ran down her face.

Just one. From the corner of her left eye. Down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away.

”Dorothy,” she said.

”She chose it,” I said. My voice had come back, a little. ”Herself. She found you. The morning she was born. At dawn. She reached out and found you, and you answered for forty-one seconds, and she asked me who you were.” I swallowed. ”And I told her. And she took it.”

Mother closed her eyes.

”Forty-one seconds,” she said. ”I remember. I didn’t know what it was. Something bright. Very small. Very far away. Like a hand on my face.” She opened her eyes. ”I thought I was dreaming.”

”You weren’t.”

”No,” said Mother. ”I suppose not.”

Garnet had gone quiet.

That was how I knew something had changed. Garnet never went quiet. She’d stopped asking questions halfway through Genny’s chemistry problem and bent over her drawing board, and she’d been drawing ever since, very fast, with her tongue between her teeth.

Now she held it up.

”I made you a picture,” she said. ”For the baby. For Dory.”

It was the field.

Our field. The one Father had made out of dead earth, in the wasteland, behind the house. With the wheat in rows, and the house at the edge, and the filter-machine on the roof.

And in the middle, the scarecrow.

The one Father built. With its arms out and its old coat flapping. And round its neck, drawn very carefully in blue pencil, a scarf.

Mother’s blue scarf.

I’d forgotten. Or I hadn’t forgotten; I’d just put it away, somewhere I didn’t look. The night Garnet had gone out in the dark and tied Mother’s blue scarf round the scarecrow’s neck so it wouldn’t be cold.

”It’s still there,” Garnet said. ”I asked Miss Pell. She went and looked. On a weekend. She said the scarecrow’s still standing and the scarf’s still on it.” She held the drawing closer to the lens. ”So Dory can see it. Where you’re from.”

I looked at the drawing.

At the field. The wheat. The house. The scarecrow with its blue scarf.

And at the horizon.

Garnet had drawn the horizon as a line. A long straight pencil line, right across the page, behind the field. The way children draw horizons.

But it wasn’t a line.

It was letters.

Very small. So small you’d never see them unless you were looking. Unless you’d grown up with someone who wrote secret things in the margins of every drawing she ever made, because she thought grown-ups never looked at margins.

I was looking.

We’re okay. Come get us when you can.

I ended the call.

I didn’t mean to. I just reached out and touched the edge of the screen, the way Dot had shown me, and the picture went dark.

I couldn’t do it.

I could hold still. I’d held still for the feed. I’d held still with the Overseer in the forge and the canister in the kitchen and the mountain queen telling me what had eaten her for four hundred years.

I couldn’t hold still for that.

Come get us when you can.

Garnet had written it in the horizon of a picture of our field, with our scarecrow and our mother’s scarf, in front of a lens and a mirror and two unlisted floors of the Senate Annex, so small that nobody but me would ever see it.

And she’d held it up and smiled.

I stood in front of the dark screen with my hand still on the edge of it.

Behind me, Risa’s arms came round me. From the back. Tight. Her face against my shoulder.

Then Luna’s. From the side.

And down the corridor, from Holt’s back room, a door opening, and Sera’s quick feet, and Sera’s arms. And between Sera and me, pressed in the middle of all of us, warm and wriggling and furious at being squashed—

Dory.

Her check came round.

All four of us. At once. All touching.

And then she did something she’d never done before.

She checked further. Not past the garden. Not past the hollow. The queens wouldn’t have let her. But past me. Into me. Along the place in me where the call had just been, where Mother’s face and Genny’s slate and Garnet’s horizon were still bright and raw. As if she were following a thread I didn’t know I’d left open.

She found it.

I don’t know what she found. A shape. A memory. Three faces on a sofa, eleven light-years away.

And she said, very small, into the middle of all of us:

There you are.

The Overseer left the map room without a word.

I didn’t see it go. I was in the middle of the four of them, with my face in Sera’s hair and Dory’s fist in my collar. Holt told me afterward. It stood in the corner under the map for a long time after the screen went dark, watching us. Then it turned and stooped through the door.

It didn’t scrape the lintel.

Crane stayed.

He sat at the head of the table beside Holt with the band on his collar dark, and he looked at the blank screen, and at us, and at the map above us. And after a while, very quietly, he said:

”Dorothy Dask answered for forty-one seconds.”

Holt looked at him.

”I heard it,” Crane said. ”Through the band. That morning. The longest anyone’s ever answered.” His voice was barely there. ”I didn’t know why.”

”Now you do,” said Holt.

”Now I do.”

He sat there for a long time.

Then he got up, slowly, like an old man, and went to the door. He stopped in it. He didn’t look back.

”The little one,” he said. ”Garnet. The horizon.” A pause. ”I didn’t see it.”

He went out.

Holt told me that much. He said Crane hadn’t seen it. He said Crane said so out loud, on purpose, in a room where the band could hear.

Holt said he thought that was Crane telling us that nobody else had seen it either.

That night we didn’t go to bed.

We sat on the porch, the four of us, with the lamp turned low and the garden dark and the queen’s great head on the wall at the end of it. Dory asleep in the basket at our feet. The swift feather in her fist, the nursery stone tucked into the blanket beside her.

Nobody said very much.

Risa was in Gareth’s chair with her feet in Luna’s lap. Luna was on the top step with her back against the post, rubbing Risa’s ankle absently with one thumb while she wrote in her notebook with the other hand. Sera was beside me on the boards with her head on my shoulder.

After a long time, I told them about the scarf.

About the night Mother was so ill we thought she wouldn’t see morning. About Garnet, who was seven, going out in the dark in her nightdress and tying Mother’s blue scarf round the scarecrow’s neck. Because it was cold. Because she didn’t want it to be cold.

About Father building the scarecrow in the first place, in a field he’d made out of dead earth, in a wasteland nobody wanted, so that anything out there would see it standing and think twice.

”Scarecrow,” Sera said quietly. ”That’s where it comes from.”

”The cadets threw it at me,” I said. ”In the dome. As an insult. Because Father lived out past the dome and built things nobody understood.” I looked at the dark garden. ”I let them. I never told them where it came from.”

Luna’s pen had stopped.

She turned the notebook round and held it to the lamp so I could see.

At the top of a fresh page, in her small exact hand:

Earth.

Underneath, nothing yet. Just the word.

”Not yet,” she said. ”Not for a long time, maybe. But she asked. Garnet asked. Come get us when you can.” She tapped the page. ”So I’m starting the list.”

Risa, in the chair, reached down without opening her eyes and found Luna’s hand on her ankle and held it.

”Put Pell on it,” she said. ”And the twins. And your mother, Lucas. And Maura Calder.”

”And Toby’s mother,” said Sera, into my shoulder. ”And the thirty-one.”

”And my father,” said Luna. ”If he wants to come.”

”And mine?” said Risa.

Nobody answered.

Risa opened her eyes and looked at the dark.

”No,” she said. ”Not mine.” Then, after a moment, more quietly: ”Put Sigmund’s name down, though. In case he wants to go and say something to him.”

Luna wrote it.

Sera lifted her head off my shoulder, leaned across, and kissed Luna. Slowly, this time. Not in passing. Then sat back and put her head down again, as if nothing had happened, and Luna went pink and went back to writing.

Risa smiled with her eyes closed.

At our feet, Dory’s check came round.

All four of us. The queen. Dot at the wall.

And then, faintly, so faintly I almost missed it, a little further. Along the thread she’d found in me that afternoon. Out, past everything, toward three faces on a sofa, eleven light-years away.

She couldn’t reach them. Not really. Not past the queens’ hollow.

But she tried.

Days 718–719. Lead into gold.

The band announced it at dawn: the Retention Act allows the asset’s family one welfare communication per quarter, and I have had none since landfall. The Overseer authorised one at noon, monitored. Sera: a trap. Luna: a test. Holt: probably, and certainly. Me: it’s my mother. Hands on hands round the table; Dory slapped hers on top.

In the map room. Not Dory. The Overseer knows, but it reports to the Hand. This call was monitored by the Project, by the floors with Friese’s signature on them. Dot’s reports say there are no babies. Sera took Dory to Holt’s back room.

The penthouse in daylight. Genny, taller, straight-backed, Father’s jaw. Garnet sideways with a drawing board, face lighting up. ”Lucas!” Mother between them. She looked at my eyes and her hands went still. ”Oh, Lucas. You finished it.”

Garnet asked twelve questions. ”Twelve, if you count are you taller.” I laughed. Yes, yes, yes, they don’t eat people, one brings stones to my porch. ”Can I have one?” Maybe. One day.

Genny had a chemistry problem: put these elements in order of weight. Dysprosium, Iodine, Dubnium. Fluorine, Argon, Thulium, Hydrogen, Erbium, Radon. Krypton, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and tungsten, which Father always called wolfram because it sounded like a wolf. DID FATHER KNOW.

I wrote back in Luna’s notebook. Yttrium, Erbium, Sulfur. Iodine. Tellurium, Hydrogen, Iridium, Nitrogen, Krypton. Holmium, Erbium. Dysprosium, Iridium, Dubnium. YES. I THINK HE DID. Genny’s face crumpled for a moment, then she put it back. ”Thank you. That helps.”

Mother: your letters said you were going to be a father. Is the baby well? Then, looking at the lens and not at me: ”Don’t show me. Not today. Not on this. Just tell me her name.”

Risa stepped into the lens. Senator Friese’s daughter, on a screen Senator Friese’s office was watching. ”Mrs. Dask, I’m Risa.” ”I know who you are. Lucas wrote. A great deal.” ”Her name’s Dorothy. We call her Dory.” One tear. ”Dorothy.” Forty-one seconds: she remembers it. Something bright and very small, like a hand on her face. She thought she was dreaming.

Garnet’s picture: our field, the wheat, the house, Father’s scarecrow, and Mother’s blue scarf round its neck. Still there; Miss Pell went and looked. ”So Dory can see where you’re from.” The horizon wasn’t a line. It was letters. We’re okay. Come get us when you can.

I ended the call. I could hold still for the feed. I couldn’t hold still for that.

Risa, Luna, then Sera with Dory pressed between all of us. Dory checked all four at once, then went further, into me, along the thread where the call had been. Three faces on a sofa. There you are.

Crane stayed after the Overseer left. ”Dorothy Dask answered for forty-one seconds. I heard it through the band. I didn’t know why.” At the door: ”Garnet. The horizon. I didn’t see it.” Out loud, where the band could hear. Holt thinks he was telling us nobody else saw it either.

On the porch, the four of us. I told them about the scarf: Garnet, seven, in her nightdress, tying it on so the scarecrow wouldn’t be cold. About Father building it so anything out there would think twice. The cadets threw the name at me as an insult; I never told them where it came from. Luna started a new page: Earth. Pell, the twins, Mother, Maura, Toby’s mother, the thirty-one, the General if he wants. Risa: not my father. Put Sigmund down, in case he wants to go and say something to him. Sera kissed Luna, slowly. Dory’s check tried to go further, toward three faces on a sofa.

Come get us when you can.

I will.