Scarecrow

The old ones on the four hundred and twenty-ninth world told Mother about the lamp.

It was a cold world. High plains, very dry, with a wind that never stopped and grass that grew sideways because of it. The young had been taken off it like everywhere else. The old had stayed in their round stone houses with the doors facing away from the wind, and when Mother came through the arch with the teapot they were sitting in a ring outside the biggest house, in the lee of it, looking at the sky.

It was evening. Mother says that’s what they did every evening. Sat in the lee of the big house and looked at the same place in the sky.

There was nothing there.

Mother sat down in the ring. The way she does. And poured. And when the old woman next to her had poured the first cup out on the grass and drunk the second, Mother asked, very gently, through Dot, what they were looking at.

”She says,” said Dot, ”the lamp.”

Mother looked up. At the empty place.

”She says it was there every night,” said Dot. ”All her life. All her mother’s. A light in the sky, brighter than any star, that didn’t move with the others. Steady. Warm-coloured. They called it the lamp.” A pause. ”She says it was a world. Everyone knew. A world with people on it, so bright at night you could see it from here, because they lit their whole sky.”

”What happened to it?”

The old woman said something.

”She says it went out,” said Dot. ”Eleven years ago. Not slowly. One night it was there and the next it wasn’t.” A pause. ”She says the Sorn came the year after that and started the lines. She says the old people on this world have always believed the lamp went out because it saw the Sorn coming.”

Mother told me that night, on the porch.

I wouldn’t have thought much about it. Old people on a cold world with a story about a light in the sky. We’d heard a hundred stories like it on a hundred worlds.

But Dory was on the step, with her hand on the boards, and when Mother said it didn’t go out slowly, it just wasn’t there, Dory sat up.

”Gran,” said Dory. ”Which part of the sky?”

It took a week.

Mother asked the old woman, through the arch, before we brought them home, and the old woman pointed, and Mother marked it as well as she could. Tiamat put it on the wall. Ilka listened. And Dory sat at the long table every evening with her hand flat and the net out, very far, past the cold world, toward where the old woman had pointed.

There was nothing there. A star with no worlds round it any more. Just dust where something had been.

”It moved,” said Dory, on the third night.

”What did?”

”The world,” said Dory. ”The lamp. It isn’t gone. There’s a—” She frowned. ”There’s a shape in the dark where it was. Like when you take a cup off a table and there’s a ring.” She opened her eyes. ”Something very big was there for a very long time, and then it wasn’t. All at once. It didn’t go anywhere I can follow.”

”Then where?”

Dory shut her eyes again.

On the seventh night she found it.

”Inside,” said Dory.

She was very white.

”Inside the body,” she said. ”The Hungry. Out past where the grey ships are fighting it. There’s a place where the body’s gone all the way round something. Like a hand round an egg.” She swallowed. ”And in the middle of it, a world. Very bright. Lit up. Steady.”

She looked at me.

”They’re still there,” said Dory. ”Millions of them. And they’re very, very frightened. And they’ve got nowhere to go.”

Okafor didn’t send the Standing.

She sent Holt first, because nobody stops Holt any more, and Crane moved him out on the board. Then Dory to hold the way. Then me. Then Keir and Enna, because Okafor said if there was a world inside the Hungry that could light its own sky, she wanted someone with us who’d understand what we were looking at. Then Tiamat, for the same reason, from Hearth’s side.

And Andraste, with Holdfast. In case.

Kyria cut to the net. It took longer than any arch she’s ever cut. The body’s very thick, Dory said, and the net had to go all the way through it, and Kyria had to cut all the way along the net, and the whole time Halloway was counting at Dory’s wrist and Dory’s nose started to bleed.

She’d never had a nosebleed. She’s mine. It was bound to happen.

She didn’t stop.

The arch opened.

Light.

That’s all I could see at first. We came through onto the edge of a great flat paved square in the middle of a city, at night, and it was brighter than noon. Not from a sun. From everywhere. The air was lit. The towers were lit. The paving under our feet glowed very faintly in patterns, and the sky overhead was a deep warm gold, all the way to the edges, the colour of a lamp through a curtain.

They’d lit their whole sky. The old woman on the cold world was right.

And past the gold, very faint, at the very top of the sky where the light thinned: something moving. Brown and black. Everywhere. All the way round.

The body.

They were waiting for us.

Not with weapons. They’d seen the arch begin to open in their square, Speaker Halvane told me later, and they’d had eleven years of watching for something to come through a hole in their sky and kill them. So when something came, they didn’t shoot. They sent the old.

There were nine of them standing at the edge of the square when Holt came through. Very tall. Thin. Long faces, long hands, very pale skin with a faint shimmer in it like the inside of a shell. Robes. Grey hair, every one, worn short.

And behind them, very high up, so high you’d almost miss them in the gold, ships. Hundreds. Silver and sharp and absolutely still.

Watching.

Holt stopped.

He looked up at the ships. Then at the nine old ones. Then he took his cap off. The way he does. And held it against his chest.

”Captain Ezra Holt,” said Holt. ”Of Avalon. We heard you were in trouble.”

The nine looked at him for a long time.

Then the one in the middle stepped forward. An old man, the tallest, with a long grey face and very kind eyes.

He spoke our language.

Not well. Carefully. As if he’d learned it from a book. But ours.

”Speaker Halvane,” he said. ”Of the Aldri. Of Ister.” He looked at the arch behind us, still open, with the red glass on the other side of it and Kyria standing with her blade raised. ”We have heard of Avalon.”

”How?”

”Your radio,” said Halvane. ”For the last six years. A woman’s voice, every morning, saying a number.” He almost smiled. ”We learned your language from it. We did not believe the number was real. It only ever went up.”

I’ll write what they told us. In the square. Standing up, because the Aldri don’t sit for important things, Halvane said, and this was the most important thing that had happened to them in eleven years.

The Aldri are old. Older than the Sorn, Halvane said. Not as old as the houses. They’d been on Ister a very long time, and in all that time they’d done one thing: built.

Everything. Their towers that lit the air. Ships that could cross between stars in a breath. Stations in their sky with guns that could break a swarm of the Hungry into nothing in a single shot. Fighters that could stand against a Hand, or an Ashen ship, one for one, and win. Medicine that could mend almost anything. Machines that grew food out of the air.

And, at the very centre of the world, under the deepest city: an engine that could move Ister.

The whole world. Its moons. Its stations. From one star to another, in a moment.

”Eleven years ago,” said Halvane, ”the Sorn came to our sky.” He looked up at the gold. ”We had been watching them come for a long time. We had a list of places to go if they did. Stars with no one round them. Safe.” He folded his long hands. ”We went.”

That was the night the lamp went out on the cold world.

”The Sorn followed,” said Halvane. ”Not quickly. It took them two years to find us. So we moved again.” He was quiet. ”And then the Ashen. And then the Hungry. Seven times in eleven years we have moved Ister. Every time they have found us. Every time we went to the next place on the list.”

He looked at me.

”There are no places left on the list,” said Halvane.

The last time, two years ago, they’d moved to a star at the very edge of their list, far out, with nothing round it. And the body of the Hungry had found them there within the year.

It hadn’t attacked. Not straight away.

It had gone round them.

”All the way,” said Halvane. ”A sphere. Around our sun. Around Ister. Around all of it.” He looked up at the moving brown at the top of the gold. ”We cannot move through it. The engine needs a clear line to where we are going, and there is no clear line. Everywhere we look, it is there.”

”Can’t you fight it?” said Andraste.

Halvane looked at her. At Holdfast.

”We do,” he said. ”Every day. Our stations break a swarm with every shot. Our fighters kill ten thousand of them every hour.” He looked up. ”There are always more. It is a body. You do not kill a body by cutting its fingers.”

”And the coordinates on your list,” said Tiamat. Very level. She’d been listening with her head on one side, the way she does when she’s measuring something.

”Gone,” said Halvane. ”Every one. We sent a small ship to each, through the gaps, before they closed. Every star on our list has been visited by the Sorn, or the Ashen, or the Hungry, since we made it.” He looked at her. ”There is nowhere we know of that is safe.”

Nobody said anything.

Then he looked at me. And at Dory, with the blood on her lip and her arm still out, holding the arch.

”Except,” said Halvane, ”the place the number comes from.”

He asked.

Very formally. In the square, standing, with the eight other old ones behind him and the silver ships watching from the gold.

”We would like to come to Avalon,” said Halvane. ”Not to the world. Near it. Ister would go round your sun, if your sun would allow it. We would not take anything. We would not ask for anything but the line to get there.”

He paused.

”And in return,” said Halvane, ”everything we have.”

He meant it. I could feel it in him. Every atom.

”Our stations,” he said. ”Our fighters. The engine, if you want to learn it. The towers that light the air, the machines that grow food, the medicine. Everything we have built in all our time on Ister.” He looked at Holt. ”Your soldiers. The ones who stand on the field every morning; we hear them on your radio. We could give them what our fighters have. What our stations have.” He looked at me. ”We could give your people lives that are easier than any life you have imagined.”

”Why?” said Holt.

Halvane looked at him.

”Because we have been alone for eleven years,” he said, ”and we are very tired of it. And because you came through a hole in our sky, and the first thing you said was that you heard we were in trouble.”

Then he looked at me again. Differently. With his head on one side, like Tiamat’s.

”And because of what you are,” said Halvane.

I didn’t understand at first.

There was a stanchion at the edge of the square. Silver. A post, one of a row, holding up a kind of light-rope that ran round the paving. One of the Hungry’s fliers had got through the gold at some point, Halvane told me later, and torn it, and it was bent nearly double and burned black down one side.

I hadn’t meant to fix it. I don’t think about it any more. I’d been standing next to it all through the talking, and some part of me had been feeling every atom of it, the way I feel everything, and while Halvane was talking about the list, my hand had gone out and rested on it. And asked.

It was straight. Silver. Whole. As if it had never been touched.

Halvane was looking at it.

All nine of them were.

”How?” said Halvane.

”I asked it,” I said.

The old man walked across the square to the stanchion. Very slowly. And put his long hand on it. And then took a small flat thing out of his robe and held it to the post, and looked at what it said, and went very still.

”It is the same metal,” he said. ”To the last part. It is not a new post. It is the old post, mended. Every piece where it was before the flier.” He looked at me. ”We have machines that could make a new post in a day. We have nothing that could do this.”

He turned. And looked at Dory.

”And the child?” he said. ”Holding the door? She does it too?”

”Better than me,” I said.

Dory didn’t say anything. She was holding the arch with blood on her lip. But she took her other hand and put it flat on the glowing paving at her feet, where it was cracked, a long crack, from something heavy falling. And shut her eyes.

The crack closed.

Not filled. Closed. The two sides of it remembering they’d been one piece, and going back.

Halvane looked at the paving. He knelt, very slowly, the way the very tall do, and put his long hand flat on the place where the crack had been.

Then he said something to the eight behind him, in their own language. Long. Very fast.

Dot didn’t translate it. She said afterward she couldn’t. She said there weren’t any words in ours for some of it. She said the nearest she could get was something like we have spent our whole history building machines to do what the child just did with her hand.

Okafor came through the arch at that point.

She doesn’t go through arches. Not any more. She runs the war from the long table. But she’d been listening through Dory, and Dot, and the silver, and she came through onto the glowing paving in her coat with the chalk still in her hand and walked straight up to Halvane.

She looked up at him. A long way up.

”Maris Okafor,” she said. ”I’m a sergeant that retired and was a made a major. Then I came here and was made into the marshal.”

Halvane looked down at her.

”We have heard of you too,” he said. ”You’re the one who says yes.”

She didn’t say yes. Not then.

She asked questions. A great many. In the square, standing, for most of an hour. How the engine worked. What it needed. Whether moving Ister would bring the body after it, to Avalon. How long they had before the body stopped going round them and started coming in.

Halvane answered every one.

The engine needed a clear line to a place, and someone at the other end of the line who could hold it still while Ister came through. The body couldn’t follow the line; nothing could follow it; it wasn’t a path, it was a jump, and when it closed it was gone. And the body had stopped going round three days ago.

It had started coming in.

Okafor looked up at the gold. At the brown at the top of it, moving.

”Clear line,” she said. ”Through that.”

”Yes.”

”Someone holding the other end.”

”Yes.”

Okafor looked at Dory.

Dory took her hand off the paving. She still had the arch. She still had the blood on her lip.

”The net goes through it,” said Dory. ”It went through it to get here.” She looked at Halvane. ”If your engine can follow the net, I can hold the other end. On Avalon. From the red glass.”

Halvane looked at her for a long time.

”The other end of the line,” he said, ”has to hold a world.”

”I’ve held a lot of things,” said Dory.

Okafor said yes on the red glass, that night. At the long table, with everyone there. With Halvane standing at the end of it, very tall, in his robe, because he’d come through the arch to hear her say it.

Not everyone agreed.

Andraste said a world inside the body was a world the body would come looking for, and bringing it next to Avalon was bringing the body next to Avalon. Varra agreed with her. Kyria said nothing, which with Kyria means she agrees but wants to hear the rest.

Tiamat said Halvane was right about the line. She said Hearth had known about jumps like that and never built one, and if the Aldri said nothing could follow, she believed them.

Konrad said the number only ever went up. He said they’d heard it. He said that was the point.

And Mother said what Mother says.

”They asked,” said Mother. From the stove. ”That’s all. They asked. We’ve never once said no to anyone who asked.”

Okafor looked down the long table. At all of us.

Then at Halvane.

”Yes,” she said.

It took nine days to get ready. I’ll put it short.

Keir and Enna went to Ister with Tiamat’s engineers and spent the whole nine days under the deepest city with the engine, with their mouths open, asking questions. Keir came back every night and sat at the long table and drew on the wood with his finger and didn’t make any sense to anyone but Enna.

I went with Dory to the red glass and we asked Avalon’s sun, very gently, where a world could go. Not by atoms. Not even by feel, really. Dory says it’s like asking a big old dog to move over on the bed. You don’t push. You ask, and you wait, and eventually it shifts.

There’s a place, a long way round from us in our sun’s path. Far enough that Ister won’t pull on our tides. Close enough to see. Halvane’s people said it was perfect.

The queens sang it ready. Every queen on Avalon, for nine days, toward that place. The eldest too, from Root, her new low song.

On the ninth night, Dory stood on the red glass and put her arm out.

Halloway was at her wrist. I was beside her with my hand flat on the ground. Every one of my wives. All the grandmothers. Mother, with Oona holding her coat. Okafor at the long table, which she’d had carried down to the glass, with the chalk. Konrad with the sheet.

And Dory reached.

Out. Past the Watch. Past the four hundred calls. Through the body, the way she went through it to find them, all the way to the gold sky and the world inside it. And found the engine under the deepest city, and Halvane’s people standing at it.

And held.

I felt it go.

Not the jump. Nobody can feel the jump; Halvane says it isn’t a thing that happens in any place you could feel. I felt Dory. Her net, stretched through the whole dark between us and Ister, so thin and so bright I could see it with my eyes shut. Holding. With a world at the other end of it.

She didn’t make a sound.

Her nose bled. Her hands shook. Halloway counted.

Then the net went loose.

There was a new light in the sky.

Low. In the east. Where nothing had been the night before. Steady. Warm-coloured. Brighter than any star, and not moving with the others.

A lamp.

Everyone on the red glass looked up.

Then everyone on the north field. Then the Standing’s line, and the four hundred and sixty in their tents, swaying. Then, Wren said afterward, every city on the train lines. Every end-room step. The whole of Avalon, more or less, turning its head at once to look at a new light in the east.

Dory sat down on the glass.

Mother sat down beside her and put her arm round her, and Oona sat down on Dory’s other side and held the hem of Dory’s coat, which she’s never done before.

”Did it work?” said Dory. Very quietly. Her eyes were shut.

”Look,” said Mother.

Dory opened her eyes.

Not everyone came.

I want to write that. The Aldri had stations in their sky, outside Ister’s air, and fighters, and three moons. The engine took the moons, and the stations close in. It didn’t take the ones furthest out, where the body had already come in close in the last three days. Two stations. Nine thousand people. Halvane knew before the jump. He said they’d known for a day. They stayed at their guns till the line closed, and broke swarms, and kept the body off the rest.

Halvane says their names every night now. On Ister. On a balcony looking at Avalon.

Mother asked him for them. She says them too.

The Aldri came down the next week.

Through Kyria’s arches, from Ister to the red glass. Very tall, very pale, shimmering a little, in robes. Halvane first. They walked out onto the red glass and stood looking at the interceptors, and the north field, and the house on the rise, and the town, and the old wooden porch with an old woman on it and a small girl in a long brown coat beside her, both holding teapots.

Then they looked at me.

I didn’t know what to say. I never do.

Halvane walked up to me, with the eight old ones behind him, and stopped.

”We would like to begin,” he said.

”Begin what?”

”Giving,” said Halvane. ”As we promised. Your soldiers. Your cities. Your sick.” He looked round the red glass. ”Your Standing has rifles and iron and Hearth’s silver and very brave people. In a year, with our help, it will have stations and fighters and a great deal more.” He looked at the end rooms on the hill. ”Your old people have steps. In a year they will have machines that carry them up the steps, if they want them, and medicine that mends their knees, and light in their houses that never goes out.”

He paused.

”And in return,” said Halvane, ”we would like to learn.”

”Learn what?”

Halvane looked past me. At the courtyard.

Corin was in the courtyard.

With a machine. One of the Aldri’s small ones, a thing like a silver bird that flies by itself and carries messages; one of the Aldri children had brought it down through the arch and it had flown into the courtyard wall and broken. A wing was off. Something inside was cracked.

Corin was looking at it.

The way he does. Weight on one leg. Hand on the back of his neck. A long time.

Then he put his hand on it.

And fixed it. All at once. The wing back on, and the crack gone, and the inside where it had been, every piece. And he handed it back to the Aldri child, who was much taller than him, and stood there very solemnly while she looked at it.

He was humming. Two notes. Low.

Halvane watched.

”That,” he said. ”We would like to learn that.”

He looked at me.

”We have spent our whole history building machines to change one thing into another,” said Halvane. ”Slowly. With power. With great engines.” He looked at Corin. ”Your son is five. He did it humming.” He turned to me. ”We don’t understand it. I don’t think we ever will. But we’d like to try. If you’ll teach us.”

”I can’t teach it,” I said. ”It’s not learned. It’s the silver. And the queens.”

”Then we’ll watch,” said Halvane. ”For a long time. That’s what we’re good at.”

He smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him smile.

”We’ve been watching your radio for six years,” he said. ”We can watch your children fix things.”

Mother came down off the porch.

With the teapot. Oona beside her, with hers. She walked across the red glass to where Halvane was standing, very tall, in his robe, and looked up at him.

And held out a cup.

Halvane looked at it. Then at her.

He’d seen it on the cold world. He knew.

He took the cup. And held it. And then, slowly, tipped it out. On the red glass. For nine thousand people at two stations who’d stayed at their guns.

Mother poured the second.

He drank it.

”Thank you,” said Halvane.

”There you are, love,” said Oona.

It started within the month.

I’ll put down some of it. Not all. Keir has a notebook now that’s thicker than Konrad’s sheets, and he says he’s still on the first page.

The Standing first.

Halvane’s people brought a fighter down to the north field on the twelfth day. One. Silver and sharp, very small, about the size of an interceptor, and it sat on the grass at the end of the drill line without touching it, a hand’s width up, the way the Tallis float their houses.

Risa walked round it three times. Rowan and Callum walked round it nine. Varra stood in front of it with her rope tied round her waist and didn’t walk round it at all.

”She says,” said Dot, ”what does it do.”

The Aldri pilot showed her.

It went up off the north field without a sound. Straight up. Faster than Risa. Then it stopped, very high, so still it might have been painted on the sky. Then it came down and stopped a hand’s width off the grass where it had started, as if it had never moved.

Varra looked at it. Then at the sky. Then at it again.

Then she said something short.

”She says,” said Dot, ”how many.”

”As many as she has people to fly them,” said Halvane.

Okafor wrote a new word on the slate that night. Under STANDING. Small.

Wings.

Risa’s teaching them. Rowan and Callum are learning. Varra isn’t; she says the Kasrai stand on the ground, and she’s far too old to start flying now. But she’s given the Aldri forty of her best, and Andraste says she watches them go up off the north field every morning with her arms folded and her face doing the thing.

Then the long ward.

Halloway didn’t want it. She said so. She’s had her ward the way she wants it for years and she wasn’t going to have a lot of very tall people in robes moving her beds about.

The Aldri doctor didn’t move her beds. She was a very old woman, very tall, with grey hair cut very short and a small silver box on a cord round her neck. She came in on the first morning and stood at the end of the ward and asked Halloway, very politely, if there was anyone on it that Halloway couldn’t help.

Halloway took her to the end bed. An old man from the turf-roof world, with lungs the Hungry’s smoke had got into. Halloway had been trying for a year.

The Aldri doctor put the box on his chest.

By the end of the week he was walking to the waiting step on his own.

Halloway stood at the end of his bed and watched him go out of the ward. Then she went and found the Aldri doctor and asked if she’d like tea.

They have tea every morning now. Halloway says it’s to discuss the patients. Dot says they mostly argue.

Then the end rooms.

The Aldri offered machines. Small ones, to carry old people up steps, and lights that don’t go out, and boxes that warm the floor without anyone having to dig.

Kwame Osei looked at the warming box for a long time. Then he gave it back, very politely.

”An old man needs somewhere warm to put his feet,” he told the Aldri engineer. ”A hole in the ground does that better than a box. And somebody had to dig it, so he knows someone was thinking of him.”

The Aldri engineer thought about that. Then she wrote it down.

Nan Vey was offered a machine iron. She looked at it. She ironed one shirt with it. Then she ironed the same shirt again with her own, to show it how.

The Aldri gave her nine more, for the old ones on the waiting step who wanted to help. Nan Vey says they’re coming along.

And Dory.

The Aldri watch her. All the time. When she builds with me, there are always three or four of them at the edge of the ground, very tall, with their little silver boxes out, very quiet, taking down everything. They don’t get in the way. They don’t ask questions while she’s working. They wait until she’s finished and then ask a great many.

Dory answers all of them. Patiently. She says they’re the first people who’ve ever wanted to know how it feels instead of what it does.

Hana checks her face every evening now, the way she checks mine.

Dory’s nose hasn’t bled again. Hana says it will. Hana says that’s what happens when you hold a world on the end of a thread. Hana says the trick isn’t stopping it, it’s having someone who looks at your face every evening.

Dory let her.

The lamp’s in the east every night now. Low, steady, warm-coloured. Ister, going round our sun a long way off, with its sky lit gold.

The old woman from the cold world came up to the waiting step the first night it was there. She sat on the step and looked at it for a long time.

Then she said something to Mother.

”She says,” said Dot, ”it didn’t go out.”

”No,” said Mother.

”She says it just went somewhere safe,” said Dot. ”And then it came here.”

Days 5891–5963. The Lamp.

The old on the four hundred and twenty-ninth world sat every evening looking at an empty place in the sky: the lamp, a lit world that went out eleven years ago. Dory found the ring where it had been, and then the world itself, inside the body of the Hungry, which had gone all the way round it like a hand round an egg. Kyria cut through the body to the net; Dory’s first nosebleed. A gold sky; Speaker Halvane of the Aldri, of Ister, who learned our language from Wren’s number. They can move a world. Seven times in eleven years; no places left on the list. Stations that break a swarm in one shot; fighters a match for Hands; everything. They asked to come near Avalon and offered all of it. I mended a post without meaning to; Dory closed a crack; Halvane: we spent our history building machines to do that. Okafor: I’m a sergeant, major, marshal. You’re the one who says yes. Mother: we’ve never said no to anyone who asked. Dory held the line from the red glass and a world came through it. Two stations stayed at their guns; nine thousand. A new light in the east. Corin fixed a silver bird humming. Fighters for the Standing: Okafor wrote Wings. The Aldri doctor and Halloway have tea and argue. Kwame gave back the warming box; Nan Vey taught the machine iron. Halvane poured out the first cup. It didn’t go out. It went somewhere safe and then it came here.