Scarecrow

The Open Hand went again the next night.

And the night after that. And the night after that. The youngest queen said she’d been practising, and she had. Eight minutes. Seven. On the fifth night, six minutes and forty seconds, and Aster said it twice to be sure and then wrote it on the wall of the forward compartment in very small square figures where nobody but Keir would see it.

Every night the light-benders folded the light round her. Every night she came down over the old battlefield east of the dome like heat over a stove. Every night Voss opened the east locks, and the inner door stuck, and somebody asked it politely to move, and it did.

And every night, they walked through.

Two thousand one hundred and six, the first night. One thousand eight hundred, the second. Two thousand four hundred, the third, because word had gone round the lower floors that it was real, and Pell’s people had more people than even Pell had known.

By the end of the second week there were eleven thousand.

Eleven thousand people.

Scarecrow had been a hundred and seventy-seven people on Wren’s roster, once, not so very long ago. Before that, fewer. Before that, a handful of us and a robot in a shelter in the rain.

Now there were eleven thousand people from Earth sleeping in the empty fingers of two Hands on the plain, on blankets, in rows. Because that was the only place there was room. Because the grey kept the wind off, and Hana and her father had brought water into the fingers, and Priya and Thorne and Meg were baking round the clock in Priya’s kitchen and the green-doored shop on the square and still not keeping up.

It couldn’t go on.

Okafor said so. On the fourteenth morning, at the map table, very plainly.

”Dask,” she said. ”They need somewhere to live.”

I knew that.

I’d known it since the first night. I’d walked through the first queen’s second finger after the second crossing, with Dot’s lamp, past rows and rows of people asleep on blankets on the grey floor, and I’d known it. They’d come eleven light-years because they’d rather be a fault than live under a tithe. And we’d put them in a Hand.

In rows.

”I’ll build it,” I said.

”I know you will,” said Okafor. ”That’s not what I’m asking.” She put her slate on the table. Square with the edge. ”I’m asking you to sit down first. With the rest of us. And design it.”

She looked round the table.

Holt, at the window. The General. Luna, with her notebook open. Wren, with her book. Keir and Gareth, who’d come because Okafor had sent for them, and who were sitting very slightly too close together and pretending they weren’t. Mother, in the corner, with Dory on her lap and Ash asleep in a sling against her chest.

And Miss Pell.

”Because I’ve seen what you build when you don’t sit down first,” said Okafor. ”It’s very good. It goes up in an afternoon. And then everybody spends a year working out how to live in it.”

So we sat down.

It took three days. I didn’t understand most of it, the first day. Where the water would come from and where it would go. Which way the wind blew in winter. Where the shelters would be, deep in the rock, the way Ines had opened them under Scarecrow. How far a child could walk to school before it got tired. How far an old man could walk to a doctor.

Luna drew it. Over and over. On the big sheets from the schoolroom, and then on the floor of the map room in chalk when the sheets weren’t big enough.

The plain north of the Hands. Between the canyon and the General’s mountain. Wide and flat and red, with nothing on it but glass and the Sef’s sand at the edge and the long dark path where the Hesk had gone east.

”Here,” said Luna. ”There’s room. There’s water under it; Kwame says. The wind comes off the mountain cold in winter, but the canyon breaks it.” She put her chalk down. ”Room for twenty thousand. Thirty, if we’re careful.”

”We’ll need it,” said Okafor.

On the fourth day I built the first street.

I didn’t wait for the rest of the design. I couldn’t. There were children sleeping on the floor of a Hand, and an old man with a cough that Edda didn’t like, and a baby born on the third night in the second finger with nothing round her but grey. I couldn’t sit at a table another day while that was true.

So I went out onto the plain at dawn, after the hello, and I built a street.

Forty houses. Twenty on each side. Grown out of the red glass the way I’d grown the houses in Scarecrow, from the ground up, all at once. Two rooms each. A kitchen. Warm floors, the way the four of us had built ours. Water that came when you turned the tap. Windows that faced the morning. A small square porch at the front of each, with a step.

It took me until noon.

When it was finished I stood at the end of the street and looked at it.

It was perfect.

Every house the same. Every wall smooth. Every window the same size, at the same height, facing the same way. Every porch with its step, exactly the same depth. Every door hung exactly true. The glass of the street swept clean and level, with a gutter down each side so the rain would go where it ought to.

I was very pleased with it.

Nobody moved in.

I didn’t understand it. I’d walked back to the Hands at noon and told them. Pell had told them. Wren had made a list, house by house, families with children first, old people next, everyone else after. They’d thanked me. Some of them had cried. They’d picked up their blankets and their bundles and walked out across the plain to the new street.

And then they’d stood there.

At the end of it. Looking at it. Forty perfect houses in two perfect rows.

A few went in. They came out again. They sat on the porches. On the steps. Not inside. On the step, with their bundles on their knees, looking out at the plain.

By dusk, most of them had gone back to the Hands.

Pell found me at the end of the street.

I was sitting on the last step of the last house, in the dark, trying to understand. She came across the glass from the Hands with her hands folded, the way she always walked, very straight, in her grey, and stopped in front of me.

She looked at the street for a long time.

”They’re very good houses, Lucas,” she said.

”Then why won’t they live in them?”

Pell didn’t answer straight away. She went to the nearest porch. Put her hand on the wall beside the door. Smooth. Perfectly smooth. Warm from the day’s sun. She ran her hand along it, all the way to the corner, and there wasn’t a seam, or a bump, or a single grain out of place.

”Agnes went into this one,” she said. ”This afternoon. With her bag. She stood in the kitchen for a long time. Then she came out and sat on the step.” Pell took her hand off the wall. ”I asked her why.”

”What did she say?”

”She said it felt like the halls.”

I didn’t say anything.

”The orphan halls,” said Pell. Very quietly. ”On the forty-first floor. Where I grew up. Where your mother grew up, and Agnes, and every child the program ever took.” She looked down the street. At the two perfect rows. ”Every bed the same. Every locker the same. Every window the same size, at the same height, facing the same way. Everything clean. Everything level. Everything perfect.” A pause. ”And none of it ours. Not one thing. You couldn’t put a nail in the wall. You couldn’t hang a picture. You couldn’t move your bed six inches to the left to see out of the window better. They’d come in the night and move it back.”

I looked at the street.

At the houses I’d been so pleased with.

”I didn’t mean—”

”I know you didn’t,” said Pell. ”You meant to give them somewhere warm. And you did. These are the warmest, best-made houses anyone from Earth has ever been offered.” She sat down on the step beside me. Very carefully, the way she did everything. ”That’s the trouble, Lucas. They’re too good. They’re perfect. And nobody who’s lived under glass, under a tithe, under somebody else’s paper, can bear to walk into something perfect that somebody else made for them.”

”Why not?”

”Because perfect means it isn’t theirs,” said Pell. ”Perfect means somebody else decided. Every inch of it. And they’ve had enough of that to last them the rest of their lives.”

We sat on the step for a long time.

Out on the plain, the Nivi mountain was ringing very faintly in the evening wind. The Sef spire had caught the last of the sun and let it go. In the Hands, eleven thousand people were lying down on blankets in rows, because the rows were at least rows they’d chosen to lie down in.

”Then what do I do?” I said.

Pell looked at me sideways. The look she’d given me on the ring street, the morning I left for intake, when she’d said I didn’t report this, by the way.

”Stop doing everything,” she said.

”You do the things only you can do,” said Pell. ”The water. The ground. The bits that have to be right or people die. The shelters. The drains, so the rain goes where it ought to. The foundations, so nothing falls down.” She ticked them off on her fingers. ”And then you stop.”

”And then?”

”And then you give them the stone,” said Pell. ”And the wood. And the glass. And the iron. As much as they want. More than they want. And you let them build their own.” She looked at the street. ”Crooked, if they like. Ugly, if they like. With the windows in the wrong place and the doors that stick and a nail in the wall where they want to hang something. Let them make it. Let them make mistakes in it. Let it be theirs.”

”It’ll take months.”

”Yes.”

”Years.”

”Yes,” said Pell. ”And it’ll be slower, and uglier, and full of arguments about whose fence is on whose side.” She stood up. Brushed off her grey. ”And it’ll be alive. Which this isn’t.”

She looked down at me.

”You grew up in a house your father made,” she said. ”From the ground up. With his own hands. Over years. In a field he changed a few yards a day. Did it have a single straight wall in it?”

I thought about the house in the dead field.

”No,” I said. ”Not one.”

”Did you love it?”

”Yes.”

”There you are,” said Pell. And went back across the glass to the Hands.

So I took the street down.

Not all of it. Pell said to leave the foundations. And the water, and the drains, and the warm floors, because she said nobody had ever been unhappy about a warm floor. But the walls, and the roofs, and the perfect porches with their perfect steps, I asked them very gently to go back into the glass.

They went.

And in the morning, where the street had been, there were forty squares of warm smooth floor on the red glass, with water coming up through a pipe at the corner of each one, and a drain at the other corner, and nothing else.

And beside them, in great heaps, stone. And wood, grown from nothing. And sheets of glass. And iron, from the forge. And nails. A great many nails.

Gareth stood in front of the nails with his spanner in his hand and looked at them for a long time.

”Right,” he said. ”Who wants to learn to hang a door?”

Everybody did.

That was what I hadn’t understood. That was the thing Pell had seen and I hadn’t. They didn’t want houses. They wanted to make houses.

They came out of the Hands that morning in their hundreds. Then their thousands. And Gareth stood on a heap of stone and showed them how to hang a door, very loudly, with his spanner, and Keir stood beside him and showed them how to check it was true, and Rory stood on the other side and showed them how to make it not true on purpose, because he said a door that hung a bit crooked swung shut on its own and that was a feature.

Thorne came out from the bakery at noon with bread. Meg came with him.

Agnes, the old nurse, came out of the Hands with her bag and walked to the forty squares of warm floor and stood on one for a long time.

Then she picked up a nail.

She’d never held one. She told Pell afterward. Not once in her whole life. In the halls you weren’t allowed. In the dispensary you didn’t need to. She held it up to the light. Then she picked up a hammer, and a piece of wood, and hit the nail.

It went in crooked.

She looked at it.

Then she laughed. Out loud. On the red glass, an old woman with a crooked nail in a piece of wood, laughing until she had to sit down.

”Mine,” she said.

It wasn’t just houses.

That’s what I want to set down. Because once Pell had said it, and once I’d seen Agnes with her crooked nail, I understood it. And I understood that it wasn’t only the people from Earth.

We’d sat at the map table for three days and designed a city for humans. For eleven thousand people from under glass. With streets and schools and a doctor’s and a bakery.

But Avalon wasn’t only humans any more.

I went back to the map room that night.

Luna was there. She was always there. She looked up when I came in.

”You took the street down,” she said.

”Pell said.”

”I know. I heard.” She put her chalk down. ”She’s right.”

”I know she’s right.” I sat down across the table from her. Looked at the chalk drawing on the floor. The plain north of the Hands, between the canyon and the mountain. Streets. Houses. Shelters. A school. ”It’s not enough.”

Luna waited.

”It’s a city for us,” I said. ”For people. For humans.” I put my finger on the drawing. On the empty space between the streets and the mountain. ”But they’re not the only ones who need somewhere. The Sef are lying on sand at the edge of the plain. The Ulu are in a pool Hana dug. The Karst are in the dark at the mouth of a Hand. The Nivi are on a mountain your father made in a day. The Kethri sleep wherever Sesh lies down. The Tharn and the Mirri are still in the first queen’s third finger, because nobody’s asked them where they’d rather be.” I looked up. ”And the broods. Every brood on Avalon. Their young have never had anywhere to play. Not ever. They’ve had courts and nurseries and holds.”

Luna didn’t say anything for a long moment.

Then she picked up her chalk.

”Show me,” she said.

It took us all night.

Luna drew. I talked. Then she talked and I drew. Then Garnet turned up at three in the morning in her nightgown, because she’d woken and found the bed empty and known exactly where I’d be, and she sat down on the floor of the map room and looked at the drawing and said where are the swings, and took the chalk off both of us.

By dawn, there was a park.

I built it over a month.

Not all at once. Pell said not to. She said if I built the whole thing in a day, nobody would ever believe it was real, and they’d tiptoe through it the way they’d tiptoed through the perfect street. So I built it a piece at a time. A piece every few days. And let people watch. And let them help, where they could.

And I didn’t make any of it perfect.

It started at the edge of the new city. Where the last streets ended, and the plain began to rise toward the General’s mountain.

And it went on for miles.

The children’s part was first. Garnet’s.

She’d drawn it all on the map room floor. Swings. A slide that went down the side of a hill I made out of the red glass, so long and so steep that Edda came and looked at it and said absolutely not and then had a go herself and came down screaming with her green book clutched to her chest.

A wheel. A great tall wheel, like the one Garnet said she’d seen in a book in the library in the dome, with seats that went round and round and up and over, so high at the top you could see the whole plain. I made it of iron, from the forge, and Liam and Kellan made the seats, and Keir checked every pin, twice, with the red marks showing so everyone could see they were in.

A carousel. Garnet insisted. With animals on it. Real ones. From here. So I made it, and Garnet painted the animals. A Teeming young, plated and wide-eyed. A Kethri with copper wing-tips. A Hesk, with a woven crest. A Sef, all glass. A Nivi, all frost. She painted a light-bender too, very carefully, the outside first and then the middle, and when it was finished you could only see it if you looked at it sideways.

And a scarecrow. In the middle of the carousel, on the central pole. Arms out. Going round and round with all the others.

The broods’ part was next.

Our queen’s idea. She’d heard about the park the morning after the map room, from Dory, very loudly, and she’d said: the young have never played.

Not ever. Not once. When there was a war, they were soldiers. When there was no war, they were in the nurseries. When the voice came, they were weapons. A pause. They do not know what playing is.

So I made them a place.

Not like the children’s part. They didn’t need swings. They needed room. Open ground, red and gold and rough, with hills to climb and ditches to jump and long low walls of stone to run along. Hollows to hide in. Rocks to stand on top of and look out from, the way Pebble stood on his step. Water to splash through, from Kwame’s river, in a shallow channel that ran right through the middle.

The first morning, nobody came.

The second morning, Pebble came. On his own. He walked to the edge of it and stood there for a long time, very still, looking.

Then Dory went.

She walked out across the plain from our house on her own two feet, with Mother a few steps behind, and went straight past Pebble into the middle of the broods’ ground, and sat down in the shallow channel of water, and splashed.

Pebble looked at her.

Then he went in after her.

By noon there were two hundred Teeming young in the broods’ ground. Chasing each other up the hills. Jumping the ditches. Running along the stone walls and falling off and running along them again. Splashing in the channel with Dory in the middle of them, soaked to the skin, laughing so hard she couldn’t stand up.

The queens watched from the garden wall and the mountain and the Hands.

So that is playing, said our queen. Very quietly.

Then everyone else.

That was the part that took the longest. Because you couldn’t just build it. You had to ask.

So I asked. Every one of them. Every queen. Through the hello, at dawn, with Juno beside me to put it into words. What did your world have? What did your young love? What would make them feel at home?

And I listened.

The Sef said sun.

So at the edge of the park, on the side that faced the morning, I raised a terrace. Wide and pale and gold, covered in fine warm sand, tilted to catch the light from dawn to dusk. And I asked the Sef queen on her spire if she’d like to send her beam there.

She did. All day. Down off the rim, across the plain, onto the terrace. The Sef came off their old sand at the edge of the plain one by one, very slowly, the way they did everything, and lay down on the new sand in the beam, and turned toward it.

And the human children came and lay down beside them. Because it was warm. And because when the beam came through the Sef, it broke into colours and lay all over everything, and you could lie on your back in the sand and be inside a rainbow.

The Nivi said wind.

So on the slope of the General’s mountain, where the park ran up to meet it, I made a garden of cold. White stone. Blue ice that the General kept frozen, a little every morning, on his way to the drills. And standing in it, tall and thin, things like the Nivi themselves. Pillars of glass, hollow, with holes in them at every height, so that when the wind came off the top of the mountain it went through them.

And sang.

Not as well as the Nivi. But nearly. And when the Nivi came down off their mountain to see what it was, they stood among the glass pillars, tall and white and branched, and let the wind play all of them together. And you could hear it from the middle of the new city.

The children called it the Singing Garden. Nobody told them to.

The Ulu said water.

So Hana and her father made them lakes. Not one. Seven. Strung out across the park like beads on a thread, deep and clear and cold, with Kwame’s river running from one to the next so the water was never still. And channels between them, so the Ulu could drift from lake to lake without ever leaving the water.

Their queen moved from Hana’s pool to the biggest of them. A great clear bell of glass, drifting very slowly in the middle, with her blue light running down her threads. At night you could see her from anywhere in the park. Glowing.

The human children learned to swim in the shallow end of the third lake. With Ulu young drifting round them, translucent, with lights inside, like jellyfish the size of a man.

Hana taught them. Little fish, her father called her. She said it was about time she lived up to it.

The Karst said dark.

So under the park, I made caves.

Long ones. Deep ones. Winding back into the rock, with no light at all, and walls I shaped very carefully so that sound would go round them the way the Karst liked it. Every curve, every hollow, every drip of water, so that if you made a sound at the mouth of the caves it would come back to you from every direction, and you could see the whole of it, the way the Karst saw.

Toby helped. He stood in the dark and played one note, over and over, and told me which walls to move. That one. Left. No, back. There. Until the note came back exactly right.

The Karst came in from the mouth of the second Hand that night, with their queen. Long and low and many-legged, with fine hairs all over them turned every way to catch sound. They went into the caves. And their queen sang one note. And it came back to her off every wall.

And every Karst in the caves went still. The way they’d gone still in the hold when Toby walked in.

Only this time it wasn’t fear.

The Kethri said trees.

High ones. With the wind moving through them always. Like the high forests of their world, where the youngest queen said some of her people were still waiting, still in collars.

I’d never made a tree that tall. These had to be taller than the Nivi mountain’s foothills.

The gardener made them.

The last one. The one curled round its queen in the corner of our garden, with the green spread along the whole of the wall now and halfway up it. I asked. I didn’t know if it would understand. But Mother carried its queen out to the park in her two hands, the small white flower that smelled of rain, and set her down on the bare red ground at the edge of the Kethri’s part.

And the last one followed her. Slowly. All the way across the plain, the green of it spreading behind it like a trail.

And where it stopped, beside its queen, it began to grow.

Trees. Not quickly. Over weeks. Up out of the red ground, slender and very tall and pale silver-green, with leaves that moved in every wind. Taller than our house. Taller than the tree in the square. Taller than the Sef spire on the rim.

The Kethri went up into them. All of them. Sesh first, with the youngest queen on her shoulder, and then every winged Kethri after her, until the tops of the gardener’s trees were full of copper-tipped feathers and the long falling sound that Dot said meant quiet.

Only it didn’t mean quiet, up there. Juno said so.

It meant home.

The Tharn said stone. I gave them hills of it, rough and dark, with hollows they could curl up in and turn things over in their great slow hands. The Mirri said together, and I gave them a meadow, wide and open, where three thousand bodies that were one thing could move like a cloud of grey sparks over the grass. The light-benders said nothing at all. Marlo said they’d like somewhere nobody would look at them. So I made them a garden of tall glass, half-mirrored, so that light bent round everything in it and you couldn’t see anything clearly, and nobody would ever stare.

Garnet went in once. She came out and said it was the most beautiful place in the park, and she couldn’t draw it, and she wasn’t going to try.

And in the middle of all of it, where every part of the park met every other, there was a green.

Just grass. Ordinary grass, grown by the gardener, very soft. Wide and round and open. With paths coming into it from every direction. From the children’s part and the broods’ ground and the Sef terrace and the Singing Garden and the seven lakes and the caves and the Kethri’s trees and the Tharn’s hills and the Mirri’s meadow and the light-benders’ glass.

And from the city.

In the middle of the green, I planted a tree.

From a seed. Slowly. Not all at once. It would take years. It was a sapling, the day I put it in, no taller than Garnet.

Okafor came and looked at it.

”That’s not much of a tree,” she said.

”It will be.”

”When?”

”When the war’s over,” I said. ”Maybe.”

Okafor looked at it for a long time. Then she nodded. And wrote something on her slate.

The schools were last.

Pell did those. Not me. Pell said I wasn’t allowed. She said I’d make them too perfect and the children would hate them. She was right.

So the people from Earth built them. The teachers. The ones who’d come first, the first night, through the east locks with children by the hand, counting. They built six. All different. One long and low, with big windows. One round, with a garden in the middle. One with a tower, because the teacher who built it said every school should have a tower to be sent up to when you were naughty, so you could see how big the world was. One with a door so crooked it had to be opened by two children at once.

And one with no walls at all. Just a roof, and pillars, on the edge of the green in the middle of the park. Where anyone could come. Human children. Teeming young. Kethri, in the trees above. Karst, from the caves below.

Dory went there every morning.

She didn’t learn anything, Edda said. Not from the teachers. She was too young. She just sat in the middle of it, with her silver turned all the way out, and checked everyone who came. Human and Teeming and Kethri and Karst.

There you are. There you are. There you are.

And somehow, after she’d been there a while, they understood each other a little better.

Agnes’s house was finished in the third month.

It was the ugliest house in the new city. Everybody said so, including Agnes. The walls leaned. The roof was patched. The door was painted three different colours, because she’d changed her mind twice. One window was much bigger than the other, because she’d wanted to see the Nivi mountain from her bed and Gareth had told her she’d need a bigger window for that and she’d said then make it bigger.

There was a nail in the wall by the door. Crooked. The first one she ever hit.

She’d hung her bag on it.

Pell went to see it. I went with her. We stood on Agnes’s step, which wasn’t level, and Agnes opened her three-coloured door and looked at us both with enormous satisfaction.

”Well?” she said.

Pell looked at the house for a long time. At the leaning walls, and the patched roof, and the big window and the small one, and the crooked nail with the bag on it.

”It’s perfect,” said Pell.

Agnes laughed until she had to sit down on her uneven step.

Days 882–970. Crooked nails.

The Open Hand every night: eight minutes, seven, six-forty on the fifth night; Aster wrote it in small square figures where only Keir would see. Light-benders, the east locks, the inner door asked politely to move. 2,106, then 1,800, then 2,400 as word went round the lower floors. Eleven thousand by the end of the second week, on blankets in rows in the empty fingers of two Hands; Hana and Kwame bringing water in, Priya, Thorne and Meg baking round the clock and not keeping up. Okafor: they need somewhere to live. I’ll build it. Sit down first and design it; I’ve seen what you build when you don’t: up in an afternoon, then a year working out how to live in it.

Three days at the map table. Luna’s chalk: the plain north of the Hands between the canyon and the General’s mountain, water under it, wind off the mountain broken by the canyon; twenty thousand, thirty if careful. On the fourth day I couldn’t sit any longer and built a street before noon: forty houses, two rooms, warm floors, taps, morning windows, square porches with a step. Perfect, every one the same. I was very pleased. Nobody moved in. They sat on the steps with their bundles. By dusk most had gone back to the Hands.

Pell on the last step: Agnes went in, stood in the kitchen, came out: it felt like the halls. The forty-first floor: every bed, locker and window the same, clean, level, perfect, none of it yours; no nail in the wall, no picture; move your bed six inches and they moved it back in the night. They’re too good. Perfect means somebody else decided every inch, and they’ve had enough of that for a lifetime. Stop doing everything. Do what only you can, water, ground, shelters, drains, foundations, then give them stone, wood, glass, iron, more than they want, and let them build crooked and ugly with the doors that stick. Slower, uglier, arguments about fences, and alive. Your father’s house: a single straight wall? No. Did you love it? Yes. There you are.

I took the street down but left foundations, water, drains and the warm floors, because nobody was ever unhappy about a warm floor. Heaps of stone, grown wood, glass, iron, a great many nails. Gareth: right, who wants to learn to hang a door? Everybody. Keir showing them how to check it’s true; Rory how to make it not true on purpose, so it swings shut. Agnes had never held a nail in her life; it went in crooked; she laughed till she sat down: mine.

That night in the map room: it’s a city for humans; but the Sef are on sand at the edge, the Ulu in Hana’s pool, the Karst in a Hand’s mouth, the Nivi on a mountain built in a day, the Kethri wherever Sesh lies down, the Tharn and Mirri still in a finger because nobody asked; and the broods’ young have never had anywhere to play. Luna: show me. Garnet at three in the morning in her nightgown: where are the swings? and took the chalk. By dawn, a park. I built it a piece every few days over a month so people would believe it was real, and made none of it perfect.

Garnet’s part: swings; a slide down a glass hill Edda said absolutely not to and then came down screaming with her green book; a tall iron wheel from a book in the dome’s library, Keir checking every pin with the red marks showing; a carousel of Avalon’s animals Garnet painted, a Teeming young, a Kethri, a Hesk, a Sef, a Nivi, a light-bender you can only see sideways, and a scarecrow on the central pole.

The queen: the young have never played; soldiers, nurseries, weapons. Open rough ground, hills, ditches, stone walls, hollows, lookout rocks, a shallow channel of Kwame’s river. First morning nobody. Second, Pebble at the edge a long time. Then Dory walked straight past him and sat in the channel and splashed, and he went in after her. Two hundred young by noon, falling off walls and getting back on, Dory soaked and laughing in the middle. So that is playing.

I asked every queen what their world had. Sef: sun; a gold sand terrace facing morning, her beam on it all day; children lie beside them inside a rainbow. Nivi: wind; a cold garden of white stone and the General’s ice, hollow glass pillars that sing in the mountain wind; the Nivi came down and stood among them; the children named it the Singing Garden. Ulu: water; seven lakes strung on Kwame’s river, channels between; their queen glows in the largest at night; Hana teaches children to swim among Ulu young; about time she lived up to little fish. Karst: dark; caves under the park, Toby playing one note and telling me which walls to move till it came back right; their queen sang and every Karst went still, and it wasn’t fear. Kethri: trees, high, always wind. I’d never made one that tall. Mother carried the gardener’s queen to the edge of their part and the last one followed across the plain leaving green, and grew them over weeks, silver-green, taller than the Sef spire. The Kethri filled the tops; their falling sound up there means home. Tharn: stone hills to curl in. Mirri: together, a meadow for three thousand bodies like a cloud. Light-benders: somewhere nobody would look; a garden of half-mirrored glass. Garnet said it was the most beautiful place in the park and she wouldn’t try to draw it.

At the middle, where every part meets, a round green of the gardener’s grass, and a tree from a seed, a sapling no taller than Garnet. Okafor: not much of a tree. It will be. When? When the war’s over, maybe. She wrote something down.

Pell did the schools; I wasn’t allowed. The teachers who came first built six, all different: long and low with big windows; round with a garden; one with a tower to be sent up when you’re naughty to see how big the world is; one with a door two children have to open together; and one with no walls on the edge of the green, for anyone: children, Teeming young, Kethri above, Karst below. Dory goes every morning and learns nothing, Edda says, just checks everyone. There you are. And after she’s been there a while they understand each other a little better.

Agnes’s house, third month: the ugliest in the city, everyone says, Agnes too. Leaning walls, patched roof, a door in three colours, one window much bigger so she can see the Nivi mountain from bed. By the door the first crooked nail she ever hit, her bag on it. Pell looked a long time: it’s perfect. Agnes laughed till she sat on her uneven step.