Scarecrow

Sixty-one thousand, four hundred and eight people came off the Ground.

Wren counted them. Standing at the foot of the ramp with Harriet in her sling singing the note, and the stone in her pocket, and her head tilted. One at a time. All afternoon and into the night. And at the top of the ramp, the whole time, Meg’s daughter and her three hundred bakers, handing every single one of them a piece of bread as they stepped off the iron onto the red glass.

Most of them stopped.

That’s what I remember. Not the number. Not the bread. That they stopped. Every one of them, or nearly. They came down the ramp in the line, holding their bags and their children and their dogs, and they stepped off onto the red glass, and they stopped. And looked up.

At the sky.

Some of them had never seen it. Not once. Born under the dome, lived under the dome, and the sky was a picture on a wall in a school, or a thing the old people talked about. Some of them had seen it once, a long time ago, before the war, and had spent thirty years trying to remember what colour it was.

It was blue. With two moons in it, one very small, going pale in the afternoon.

A woman from the Program floors, in her gown, with Neve Ashworth holding her arm, stood on the red glass with her bread in her hand and looked up at it for so long that the line had to go round her.

”I didn’t think it would be so big,” she said. To nobody.

Neve didn’t say anything. She was looking up too.

Bram Okonedo was at the foot of the ramp.

He’d come for the water. To see how many. To do the sums for the cisterns and the drains. He stood there with his list and his pencil and watched them come off, and after a while he stopped writing, and just watched.

Then he saw Jory.

Jory came down the Scarecrow’s ramp, not the Ground’s, with the other thirty and Tally and Ruth. Slowly. On his own legs. Holding Tally’s notebook for her, because she’d asked, and he’d heard. And at the bottom of the ramp, where the red glass started, he stopped like everyone else, and looked up.

And Bram, thirty yards away, dropped his pencil.

”Hale,” he said.

Jory looked round.

He didn’t know him at first. You could see it. He looked at the big broad man with the list and the pencil on the ground and the face that had been working pipes for thirty-one years, and nothing happened on his face at all.

Then something did.

”Mister Okonedo,” said Jory. Very slowly. As if he was reading it off something a long way off. ”From the waterworks. Forty-one. You—” He stopped. ”You gave my mother a job. On the pumps. When my father died.”

Bram walked across the glass to him. He didn’t hurry. He walked the way he walked round the cisterns, checking. And stopped in front of Jory. And looked at him. At the thin face and the badly cut hair and the red mark round his neck where the housing had been.

”I heard you went to the Program floors,” said Bram. ”For the ration card. Your mother told me. Before I left.” His voice was very rough. ”She said you’d come back with a room on Sixty and she’d have a window.”

Jory’s face did something.

”She’s still there,” he said. ”Isn’t she.”

”Forty-one,” said Bram. ”On the pumps. Last I knew.”

”I don’t remember,” said Jory. ”After. I don’t remember anything after the halls.” He looked down at the notebook in his hands. At the page that said TALLY, in his own crooked writing, with one mark. ”I didn’t send her anything. I didn’t get her a window.”

Bram put one big hand on his shoulder.

”There’s a crossing next week,” he said. ”To New Halcyon again. And the week after. Thirty of them.” He squeezed. ”I’ll find her. I know every pump on Forty-one. I’ll give Odell her name and he’ll get it up the band.” He looked at the sky. ”And when she comes, she’ll have a window. She’ll have a whole sky.”

Ruth’s ward filled in a night.

All hundred beds. Then the corridor outside. Then the Karst hall, because Toby said the Karst young wouldn’t mind, and they didn’t; they came up from under the floor and lay along the walls and hummed, very low, and the people from the Program floors who were still going grey in their fog lay in the beds between them and listened.

Not the thirty-one. Ruth put the thirty-one at the far end. In a row, in the quiet. With a chair beside every bed.

And every chair was full.

I didn’t know where they’d all come from. Ruth hadn’t asked. Voss hadn’t put up a notice. They’d just come, the way they’d come all month to sit in empty chairs and see what it felt like. Pell. Priya. Hester Fenn. Gareth, at the end, very upright. The lower-floors teacher who’d been answering forty-one questions a night since she was twenty. Two of the orchard keepers. A Kethri, folded up very small on a chair much too narrow for her. One of the Hesk, lying across the foot of three beds with its jaw on the blanket, warm.

And Mother.

She took the bed next to Jory’s.

Not his. Ruth had said Tally would sit with Jory, because he’d asked for her, and that was the first thing he’d asked anyone for, and Ruth wasn’t going to put anyone else in that chair. So Mother took the next one. A woman. Older. Grey-haired. From the outer domes, Odell thought, sent in on a Program transport. She’d been one of the nine. The ones who hadn’t heard Tally. The ones Odell had told to walk.

She lay on her back in the bed with her eyes open and her hands at her sides and the housing round her neck, and didn’t move. Didn’t look at anything. Waited to be told.

Mother sat down beside her.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. She just sat. In her dark coat, with her hands perfectly still in her lap, and Father’s ring, and the grey streak in her hair. In the chair beside the bed. The way Ruth had sat beside Mother’s bed for all those years when Mother was the one lying still.

”I was in the Program,” said Mother. At last. Very quietly. ”The first one. Thirty years ago. Cinder.” She looked at the woman’s hands, flat on the blanket. ”I woke up in a room with a girl holding my hand who was twenty-three. And I couldn’t move. For a long time. And I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to.”

The woman didn’t move.

”I had three children,” said Mother. ”I had a son who could see through stone, and two girls who could fly, though I didn’t know it then. And for most of their lives I couldn’t button my own coat.” She was quiet. ”Somebody fixed it. It took a long time. It took a door a morning. Out from the heart.” She looked at the woman’s face. ”Somebody’s going to do that for you. My girls. A root at a time. Two a day, Ruth says, or they’ll fall over. You’re on the list. Not first. But on it.”

Nothing.

”I’m going to sit here,” said Mother. ”Every evening. Until it’s your turn. I’m not going to tell you to do anything. I’ve had enough of people being told. I’m just going to sit.” She folded her hands. ”And if you want to ask me something, you can. Whenever you like. You don’t have to. But you can.”

She sat there every evening for nine days.

The woman didn’t ask anything. Not on the first day. Not on the fifth. She lay with her eyes open and her hands flat and waited to be told, and Mother sat beside her and didn’t tell her, and the housing pushed. Do what you’re told. Do what you’re told.

On the ninth evening, the woman’s hand moved.

Not much. Off the blanket. An inch. Toward Mother’s chair.

Mother didn’t move at all. She just looked at the hand.

And after a long time, the woman’s voice. Very hoarse. Very faint. As if it was coming up from the bottom of a well.

”Did you get better?”

Mother’s face didn’t change. But her eyes did.

”Yes,” she said. ”I did.”

”Will I?”

”Yes,” said Mother. ”You will.”

And she put her hand out. Not on the woman’s hand. Just near it. On the blanket. An inch away. The way Wren put her hand out to something she hadn’t counted yet.

The woman’s hand moved the inch.

The twins did two a day.

That was Ruth’s rule. Two a day, no more, and not on the eighth day, the eighth day was for sleeping. She’d watched Garnet go grey in the fitting room behind the suit bay and Genny’s hands shake so badly she couldn’t hold her notebook, and she’d sat down on the floor of the corridor with them afterward the way she had after the Kethri wing, and said: two.

”There are thirty,” said Garnet. ”That’s fifteen days.”

”Sixteen,” said Genny. ”With the eighth.”

”It’s too long,” said Garnet. ”They’re lying there. With the slivers pushing. Every day. Lucas could do all of them in an afternoon.”

”Lucas,” said Ruth, ”is going back to Earth in four days. And then again a week after that. And then again. Thirty times.” She looked at Garnet. ”There are thirty housings in my ward. Odell says there are hundreds more in the outer domes. Maybe thousands, by the time we get there. Lucas will be on a ship. You’ll be here.” She was quiet. ”So you’ll do two a day, and you’ll get better at it, and faster, and safer. And by the time the hundreds come, you’ll be able to do them.”

Garnet looked at her for a long time.

”Two,” she said.

”Two,” said Ruth.

They did Jory’s mother’s neighbour on the first day. A man from Forty-one, who Jory knew, who’d come to the Program floors the same week for the same ration card. It took them thirty-five minutes. Five less than Jory. Forty-one roots.

They did a girl from the outer domes on the first afternoon. Seventeen. Small. Forty-four roots. One of them went in further than the others, down near the bottom of the spine, and Genny said wait, very sharply, and Garnet stopped dead, and Ruth said what, and Genny said it’s wrapped round something, it’s wrapped round the nerve, if we pull it it’ll—

And they didn’t pull it.

They sat there. Garnet with her silver in through Odell’s hole, holding perfectly still. Genny with her hand flat on the housing and her eyes shut. For twenty minutes. Not moving. While Genny asked the root, very quietly, over and over, how it had got there, and which way it had gone round, and which way it would have to come back.

And then it told her.

And Garnet unwound it. One turn at a time. The way you’d unwind a thread from round a finger.

When the housing came off the girl opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling of the long dim ward and said, very clearly, ”Oh. It’s stopped.” And went to sleep. And slept for two days.

Ruth wrote it in the book. On the page for housings, which was a new book, grey-covered, that Genny had started the night we came home. Root wrapped round the nerve, low. Don’t pull. Ask which way it went round. Wait for the answer. And under it, two signatures. Square, and wobbly, with a small drawing of a thread.

G. Dask. G. Dask.

I saw them on the sixth day.

I didn’t mean to. I’d come to the hospital for Ruth, about the second crossing, and the long room door was open, and I stopped in it.

They were doing the eleventh. A man. Big. Older. From Ashby, Odell thought. He was lying on his side on the bed in the long room with his back to them and the housing curving down under his shirt.

Garnet’s silver was in. Genny’s hand was flat. Ruth was at the head with her hand on the man’s wrist. Sigmund at his chest with two fingers. And Tally, at the foot of the bed, with the notebook.

They weren’t saying anything out loud.

I stood in the door and listened, and there was nothing. No top, left, near the neck. No twice. Nothing. Genny with her eyes shut, Garnet with her eyes on Genny’s face. And the roots coming out. One after another. Smoothly. Quickly. Without a word.

The thing went between them. The one that had always gone between them, since they were born, that nobody else ever caught but Mother.

Ruth looked up and saw me in the door. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me over the top of her glasses. And then back at the twins.

Twenty-two minutes. Forty-two roots.

When the housing came off, Garnet sat back. Genny opened her eyes.

”You didn’t say it,” said Ruth. ”Out loud. Twice. I told you to say it twice.”

”We did,” said Genny.

”I didn’t hear you.”

”No,” said Garnet. Very tired. Very pleased. ”You wouldn’t.”

Ruth looked at them for a long time.

Then she wrote it in the grey book. And under it, very small, in her own hand, a note to herself that I read upside down:

They’ve stopped needing to say it. I don’t know how. I’m not going to ask them to start again.

The second crossing went to Carver.

Not New Halcyon. Okafor said New Halcyon would be watching now. The Council had had a week. They’d have locked the Program floors and put soldiers on the east locks and done whatever frightened people do when they’ve finally worked out what’s happened. Odell agreed.

”Carver first,” he said. On the screen, at midnight, from his bench in the long room at the hospital, where Ruth had put him, because he’d asked to be near the thirty-one. ”Carver’s furthest. Six hundred miles. The Council’s band barely reaches. They’ve got their own Council, Carver, small, old men, and half of them are on my list.” He looked at his burned hands. ”And they’ve got housings. Forty, they say. Sent out from the Program a month ago. For their pumps.”

”Forty,” said Ruth. From the door.

”That they know of,” said Odell.

So the second crossing went to Carver.

The Ground, and the Harness, and the Long Legs. Three iron ships, and the Scarecrow over the top with her arms out. And Carver came out to meet us.

That was what I hadn’t expected. I’d expected locked doors. Frightened faces at windows. Old men in a small Council deciding nothing.

Carver came out.

All of it. A hundred and ninety thousand people. They’d been ready for a week. Since Odell got word up the band that New Halcyon was done. They’d been sleeping in their coats with their bags packed by the door. When the Scarecrow came over the top of their dome at dawn and opened her arms, they were already walking. Toward the locks. The old men of the Carver council at the front, in their best coats, holding the doors open themselves.

The oldest of them stopped at the foot of the Ground’s ramp. Very old. Very thin. With a cane, and a face like a dried apple.

He looked up at me. At the top of the ramp. At the silver round my eyes.

”Dask,” he said.

”Yes.”

”I knew your father,” said the old man. ”In the war. He came through Carver once. On the way to the north rim. He fixed our filter.” He leaned on his cane. ”It’s still running. Thirty-one years. Never once broken.” He looked up at the sky. The real one, over the dome, very grey here, very brown, poisoned. ”Is it true there’s a sky? A real one?”

”Yes,” I said.

The old man nodded slowly.

”Then I’d like to see it before I die,” he said. ”Which won’t be long.” He started up the ramp. Very slowly. With his cane. At the top he stopped, and turned, and looked back at Carver. At the dome. At the filter he couldn’t see, somewhere under the floor, that Father had fixed thirty-one years ago and never broken.

”Leave it running,” he said. ”In case anyone comes back.”

The forty housings were at the pumps.

Forty men and women, at the great old pumps of Carver, under the floor, very straight, with their hands on the levers, working. Not stopping. Not looking up. Because they’d been told to pump, and nobody had told them to stop.

I went down. With Tally. Just Tally. Ruth was on the Ground with Sigmund and the twins and the first of Carver’s sick, and Okafor had said take the girl.

Tally walked down the line of pumps. Forty of them. And at every one, she stopped, and knelt, and held up the notebook. A new page. CARVER. Forty marks.

”This is you,” she said. ”Someone knows you are here. Will you come with me?”

Eleven heard. The first time down the line.

She went down again.

Nineteen.

”The others will not hear,” she said to me. Very quietly. At the end of the second line. ”Not today. The slivers are older than Jory’s. They have been pushing longer.” She looked at the ones still at the pumps. Pumping. ”I do not want to tell them.”

”Neither do I.”

”But if we leave them they will pump until they fall down.” She looked up at me. ”Odell said that is the last thing he will tell anyone. I would like it to be the first and last thing I tell anyone.”

She went to the first one who hadn’t heard. A woman. Middle-aged. Pumping very steadily, very straight.

Tally knelt in front of her.

”Stop,” she said. Very quietly. ”Please.”

And the woman stopped.

Tally looked at her for a long time. Then she put her finger on the woman’s mark in the notebook.

”I am sorry,” she said. ”That was telling. I will not do it again.” She stood up. ”Come with me. Please.” A pause. ”That was asking. You do not have to.”

The woman didn’t move.

Then, very slowly, she turned her head.

Toward Tally.

Twenty-one stopped because Tally asked them to stop. The rest she told.

She cried, afterward, on the ramp of the Ground. The first time I’d ever seen her cry. She sat on the iron at the top of the ramp, with the notebook open on her knees to the page that said CARVER, and forty marks, and the woman’s mark with a small circle round it, and cried without making any sound. The way the child in the line under the ring had cried.

Nobody turned round to look at her and then turned back.

Jory sat down beside her.

He’d come on the second crossing. Ruth hadn’t wanted him to. He’d asked. Very carefully. Every word. I would like to help bring them. Please. And Ruth had looked at him for a long time and said is there a medical reason you can’t, Mr. Hale? and then answered herself, no, damn it, and let him.

He sat beside Tally on the ramp. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t say anything.

He took the pencil out of her hand.

And turned to his own page. TALLY. With one mark.

And made another.

The message came on the third night after we got home from Carver.

Not on the old band. Not from Odell. On the Council band. The one the Meridian’s relay had been built to hear. Official. Encrypted, and then, a moment later, not, as if whoever sent it had decided they wanted everyone to hear.

Ruan put it on the big screen in the map room. Okafor. The General. Holt. Luna. Voss by the door. Crane on his bench. Odell, who’d asked to come, standing at the back with his hands in his pockets.

A man’s face. Fifties. Well fed. In a dark coat with the Council crest on it. Sitting in a chair I recognized. The Chancellor’s chair. In the Senate Annex. Where Voss had sat, and then the small polite one, and now him.

”To the authority on Avalon,” he said. ”Whoever that is now.”

Voss, by the door, went very still.

”Harlan Selwyn,” she said. Very quietly. ”Deputy Chair of the Health Committee. Level Sixty-two.” She closed her eyes. ”He ran the pharmaceutical works. He signed for the vials. Every Monday. For twenty years.”

”You have removed eleven thousand Project assets from the Program floors of New Halcyon,” said Selwyn. ”And sixty thousand citizens. And now a hundred and ninety thousand from Carver, which is under Council authority whether Carver’s council likes it or not. You have removed forty Project assets from Carver’s pumps. You have removed a medical officer of the Program floors, and five of her colleagues.”

He leaned forward.

”This will stop.”

Nobody in the map room said anything.

”The Accord stands,” said Selwyn. ”Whatever the former Chancellor told the human world. The human world is in the tithe. The Sorn will come to collect it. They always have. And when they come, they will ask why the observer in the Chancellor’s chair is gone, and why the Program floors are empty, and why three million people have walked out of their domes.”

A pause.

”They will ask us,” said Selwyn. ”And we will tell them.”

”We know where Avalon is,” said Selwyn. ”Project AVALON was ours before it was yours. We have the coordinates. We have the reports. We have every file Director Crane ever sent home.” He didn’t look at the camera. He looked past it. At someone off-screen. ”We have the names of every child born on Avalon to a modified parent. The former Chancellor’s niece sent them home herself, in her count reports, for two years, without knowing what she was sending.”

By the door, Wren, who’d come in behind Voss, made a sound.

”Stop the crossings,” said Selwyn. ”Return the Project assets. Return the medical staff. Return Carver to Council authority. And Avalon will remain where it is. Unmentioned.” He sat back in the Chancellor’s chair. ”Continue, and the next time the Sorn come to collect the tithe, they will be told exactly where they went.”

The screen went grey.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Wren, very quietly, by the door.

”I sent them,” she said. ”The counts. Every week. To Crane’s office. For two years. Everyone on Avalon. Names. Ages. Who was—” She stopped. ”Who was expecting.”

”You didn’t know,” said Voss.

”I counted them,” said Wren. ”I counted them. And I sent the numbers to people who wanted to—”

She stopped.

Toby wasn’t there. Toby was at home with Harriet. Wren stood by the door of the map room with her hands at her sides and her face perfectly white, and nobody moved, because nobody knew what to say.

Then Tally got up. From where she’d been sitting. By the door, where Voss always sat.

She went to Wren. And stood beside her. And put one finger out. Very lightly. On Wren’s hand.

”You counted me,” she said. ”Six hundred and fourteen.” She looked up. ”That was not sending. That was counting.”

Wren looked down at her for a long time.

Then she put her hand round Tally’s finger. And held it.

Okafor stood up.

She went to the slate on the wall. The big one, with The children. Every one. at the top, and the list going all the way down and onto the back. Every child born on Avalon to a finished parent. Dory. Ash. Harriet. Rory the second. Trevor. And forty or fifty more from last year, and more this year, and Sigmund Dask at the bottom, written three days after he was born.

She looked at it for a long time.

”Crane,” she said.

Crane looked up from his bench.

”Is it true? Do they have the coordinates?”

Crane didn’t answer at once. He looked at his hands.

”Yes,” he said. ”I sent them. Every quarter. For years. Before the Accord broke.” He looked up. ”And the names. Wren’s counts went to my office and my office sent them home. I don’t know what they kept.” He was quiet. ”Selwyn kept everything. He was the kind who kept everything.”

”Would he do it?” said Okafor. ”Tell them we took them?”

”He signed for the vials every Monday for twenty years,” said Voss. From the door. ”Knowing what they were. Knowing what they did. Knowing they’d never make anyone well.” She looked at the grey screen. ”Yes. He’d do it. He’d tell himself it was the price of the human race surviving. I did.”

Okafor stood in front of the slate for a long time.

Then she took the stylus. And underneath The children. Every one., at the very bottom, under Sigmund Dask, she wrote one more line. Small. Neat.

Selwyn.

And drew a line under it.

”Dask,” she said. Not turning round.

”Major.”

”How long before the Sorn come to collect the tithe?”

I didn’t know. Nobody knew. The Sorn came when they came. The keeper had said: longer than you will like. Shorter than you will need.

”I don’t know,” I said.

”Odell.”

Odell, at the back, took his hands out of his pockets.

”The tithe ship comes every six years,” he said. ”Has done since the Accord. I’ve seen it. I fitted housings on the escort.” He looked at his burned hands. ”The last one was four years ago.”

Okafor nodded slowly.

”Two years,” she said. ”Thirty crossings. Three million people. And whatever Selwyn decides to do with a map.” She turned round. And looked at all of us. At Wren with Tally’s finger in her hand. At Voss by the door. At Crane on his bench. At me. ”Then we’ll be quick.”

”And Selwyn?” said the General.

Okafor looked at the grey screen for a long moment.

”Selwyn,” she said, ”is frightened. And frightened men with maps make bad decisions in a hurry.” She put the stylus down. ”So we’re not going to give him a hurry. We’re not going to answer him. We’re going to keep crossing. Every week. Quietly. Dome after dome. Until there’s nobody left on the human world who wants to leave.” She looked at me. ”And then, Dask, when there’s nobody left for him to hold over us, you and I are going to go and see Harlan Selwyn. In person. In the Chancellor’s chair.”

”And do what?”

Okafor almost smiled.

”Ask him a question,” she said.

Days 2137–2164. Two a day.

Sixty-one thousand four hundred and eight off the Ground; Wren counted all afternoon into the night, Harriet singing, Meg’s daughter and three hundred bakers handing bread at the top of the ramp. Nearly every one stepped onto the red glass and stopped and looked up. Some had never seen it; some had spent thirty years trying to remember its colour. Blue, with two moons going pale. A woman from the Program floors in her gown on Neve’s arm, so long the line went round her: I didn’t think it would be so big.

Bram at the foot of the ramp with his list stopped writing, then dropped his pencil: Hale. Mister Okonedo, from Forty-one; you gave my mother a job on the pumps when my father died. She said you’d come back with a room on Sixty and she’d have a window. She’s still there? On the pumps, last I knew. I don’t remember after; I didn’t get her a window. A big hand on his shoulder: there’s a crossing next week and thirty after; I know every pump on Forty-one; I’ll give Odell her name; she’ll have a window; she’ll have a whole sky.

Ruth’s ward full in a night, then the corridor, then the Karst hall, the Karst young up through the floor humming along the walls. The thirty-one in a row at the far end, every chair full: Pell, Priya, Hester Fenn, Gareth very upright, the teacher, orchard keepers, a Kethri folded on a chair too narrow, a Hesk across three beds with its jaw on the blanket, warm. And Mother, beside one of the nine who didn’t hear, from the outer domes, eyes open, waiting to be told. I was in the Program, the first; I woke with a girl of twenty-three holding my hand and couldn’t move for a long time. Three children, a son who sees through stone, two girls who fly, and I couldn’t button my coat. Somebody fixed it a door a morning. My girls will, a root at a time; you’re on the list. I’m not going to tell you anything; I’m going to sit. You can ask me something whenever you like. Nine evenings. On the ninth the hand moved an inch toward her chair. Did you get better? Yes. Will I? Yes. Mother’s hand on the blanket an inch away, the way Wren reaches for something she hasn’t counted yet. The hand moved the inch.

Ruth’s rule: two a day, none on the eighth. Thirty is fifteen days. Sixteen, with the eighth. Too long; Lucas could do them all in an afternoon. Lucas is going back to Earth in four days, and again, thirty times; Odell says hundreds more in the outer domes, maybe thousands; he’ll be on a ship; you’ll be here; get better and faster and safer by the time they come. Two. Two.

Jory’s neighbour from Forty-one, thirty-five minutes, forty-one roots. A girl of seventeen from the outer domes: one root wrapped round the nerve low on the spine; Genny: wait; if we pull it. Twenty minutes holding still while Genny asked it how it got there and which way it would have to come back; it told her; Garnet unwound it a turn at a time like thread off a finger. Oh. It’s stopped. Slept two days. In the new grey book of housings: don’t pull; ask which way it went round; wait for the answer. G. Dask, G. Dask, and a small drawing of a thread.

The sixth day, the long room door open: the eleventh, a big older man from Ashby on his side, Ruth at his wrist, Sigmund at his chest, Tally at the foot. Nothing said out loud. Genny’s eyes shut, Garnet’s on Genny’s face, roots coming out one after another without a word: the thing between them since they were born that nobody but Mother catches. Twenty-two minutes, forty-two roots. You didn’t say it twice. We did. I didn’t hear. No; you wouldn’t. Upside down in Ruth’s hand: they’ve stopped needing to say it; I don’t know how; I’m not going to ask them to start again.

The second crossing to Carver: New Halcyon will be watching now. Odell at midnight from a bench in the long room by the thirty-one, where he asked to be: Carver’s furthest, six hundred miles, the Council’s band barely reaches; their own small council of old men, half on my list; forty housings, sent a month ago for their pumps. That they know of. The Ground, the Harness, the Long Legs, the Scarecrow over the top. Carver came out: a hundred and ninety thousand, sleeping in their coats a week with bags by the door, already walking when the arms opened, the old council at the front in their best coats holding the locks open. The oldest, cane, face like a dried apple: I knew your father; he came through once on the way to the north rim and fixed our filter; thirty-one years, never broken. Is it true there’s a real sky? Then I’d like to see it before I die, which won’t be long. At the top of the ramp: leave it running, in case anyone comes back.

Forty at the great old pumps under Carver, hands on the levers, told to pump, never told to stop. Just Tally and me. CARVER, forty marks. Eleven heard the first time; nineteen the second. The slivers are older than Jory’s. I don’t want to tell them; but they’ll pump till they fall. Odell said that’s the last thing he’ll tell anyone; I’d like it to be the first and last thing I tell anyone. To a woman pumping steadily: stop. Please. She stopped. I am sorry; that was telling; I won’t again. Come with me, please; that was asking; you don’t have to. Her head turned toward her. Twenty-one stopped because she asked. The rest she told. On the Ground’s ramp, the woman’s mark circled, she cried without a sound, the first time I’ve seen it. Jory, who asked to come, Ruth answering herself: no, damn it; sat beside her, didn’t touch her, took the pencil, and on TALLY made a second mark.

The third night home, on the Council band, encrypted then not, as if they wanted everyone to hear: a well-fed man in his fifties with the crest, in the Chancellor’s chair. To the authority on Avalon, whoever that is now. Voss very still: Harlan Selwyn, Deputy Chair of Health, Level Sixty-two; the pharmaceutical works; he signed for the vials every Monday for twenty years. Eleven thousand Project assets, sixty thousand citizens, a hundred and ninety thousand from Carver, forty from its pumps, a medical officer of the Program floors and five colleagues. This will stop. The Accord stands; the human world is in the tithe; when they come they’ll ask why the observer’s gone, why the floors are empty, why three million walked onto a world they’ve never been told about; they’ll ask us and we’ll tell them. We know where Avalon is; Project AVALON was ours; coordinates, reports, every file Crane sent home; the names of every child born on Avalon to a modified parent; the former Chancellor’s niece sent them herself in her counts for two years without knowing. Stop; return the assets, the doctors, Carver; and Avalon stays unmentioned. Continue, and the next time the Sorn collect the tithe they’ll be told.

Wren by the door, white: I sent them every week to Crane’s office for two years, names, ages, who was expecting. You didn’t know. I counted them and sent the numbers to people who wanted to. Tally, one finger on Wren’s hand: you counted me, six hundred and fourteen; that wasn’t sending; that was counting. Wren held the finger.

Okafor at the big slate, The children. Every one., down and onto the back, Sigmund Dask at the bottom. Crane: yes, I sent the coordinates every quarter for years, and the counts went home through my office; Selwyn kept everything. Voss: he signed for the vials knowing they’d never make anyone well; yes, he’d do it; he’d call it the price of the human race; I did. Okafor wrote Selwyn at the very bottom and drew a line under it. How long before they collect? I don’t know. Odell: the tithe ship comes every six years since the Accord; I fitted housings on the escort; the last was four years ago. Two years, thirty crossings, three million, and whatever Selwyn does with a map. Then we’ll be quick. Selwyn is frightened, and frightened men with maps make bad decisions in a hurry, so we won’t give him one: no answer; keep crossing every week, quietly, dome after dome, till nobody’s left who wants to leave. Then you and I go and see Harlan Selwyn in the Chancellor’s chair. And do what? Ask him a question.