Chapter 108 Flight

"Fifty-one kilograms," said Dot.

"That's all?"

"The operator has lost six kilograms since landing. This unit has logged it daily. This unit did not report it, because the operator's mass is not output." A pause. "This unit would like to report it now."

"Thank you," I said. "Logged."

The little rivers ran, and I think she was pleased.

Fifty-one kilograms. Plus the suit, which was nine. Plus water, because Liam had two days of it and one of them was already gone. Plus Halloway's notes, and splints, and the paste. Plus whatever I was going to sit in.

I worked it out on the back of the optics notes, by lamplight, at one in the morning, with my leg up on the sandstone block. Then I worked it out again, because the first answer frightened me.

About eighty kilograms.

The heaviest thing I'd ever lifted without touching it, in the cave, with Okafor watching and her slate under her arm, was a bucket of sand. Half full. For about four seconds. I'd come down with a nosebleed and she'd written small mass and gone on to the next thing.

Eighty kilograms. Eighty kilometers.

I put the pencil down.

"Dot," I said. "Can you bring me a spoon?"

She brought me nine. Iron, small, very neat, laid out on the floor of the dome in a row, because she didn't know which kind I meant and had decided, sensibly, to make every kind.

I looked at the first one.

Not into it. Not the way I looked into rock, all the way down to the bricks. At it. The way Mother did, at the kitchen table, with that faint cross-eyed look and her hands folded.

It lifted.

A finger's width. Turned over, slowly, in the lamplight. Settled again.

"Query," said Dot. "How?"

"I don't know," I said. "My mother does it. She always has. Father couldn't, and he used to watch her the way you watch weather." I looked at the spoon. "I think I got a little of it. From her."

That was the first thing I learned, that night, with nine spoons. It wasn't like the other thing. The other thing went into a spoon and asked it to be something else, and the spoon said yes, and then it was copper, and I could let go.

This didn't let go.

When I lifted the spoon, I was holding it. Not with my hands. With something behind my eyes, the same place, but further back, and heavier. And as long as I held it, it stayed up, and as soon as I stopped thinking about it, it fell. It was like carrying a bucket. It got heavier the longer you held it.

Mother had held a whole kitchen like that. The flour and the eggs and three bowls in a row, like ducks. Every morning. For years.

I'd never thought about how tired she must have been.

By three in the morning I could hold all nine spoons at once, a hand's width up, for a minute. By four, a block of sandstone the size of my head, for thirty seconds, before my nose started. By five I'd tried the iron stick, and the chair, and the leg of the bed, and I'd learned the second thing.

I could only lift what I could see.

Not see the way the other thing saw. Just see. The way Mother saw a spoon, with ordinary eyes. If I looked away, it fell. If I blinked too long, it wobbled. The chair came down on my good foot twice.

"Query," said Dot. "The operator cannot see himself."

I looked at her.

"The operator's eyes face outward," said Dot. "The operator can see his legs. His arms. Not the whole of his own mass. Query. How did the operator's mother lift the operator?"

"She was looking at me," I said slowly.

"Yes."

"I can't look at me."

"No," said Dot. "Query. Can the operator look at something the operator is sitting in?"

The little rivers ran for a long time after that. Hers and mine.

You're just a heavier spoon.

I didn't need to lift myself.

I needed a spoon big enough to sit in.

She made it by dawn.

I'd asked for it light, and strong, and open, so I could see every part of it from where I sat. She made it out of something I'd never asked for before, from a seam in the canyon wall that she'd been saving: a pale gray metal, lighter than iron by half, that didn't rust and didn't bend. I looked into it and the bricks were small and neat and tightly packed and I didn't know their name.

"Titanium," said Dot. "This unit has been making a small quantity. For the wings. This unit thought the operator would not mind."

It was a shallow bowl. Long. Rounded at both ends, about the length of a bed, with a low back to lean on, and straps, and a rack underneath for water. Six kilograms.

It looked exactly like a spoon.

I don't know if Dot did that on purpose. I asked her, later, and she said "The shape is efficient," and the little rivers ran, and I've never been sure.

I sat in it on the red glass outside the dome with the sun coming up green over the eastern rim. I strapped my leg straight out in front of me. I looked down, into the pale gray bowl round me, at all of it at once, the rim and the floor and the curve of the back.

And held it.

Not asked. Held. The bucket feeling, behind my eyes, further back than the other thing.

The bowl lifted.

Ten centimeters. That was all. Ten centimeters off the red glass, wobbling, with me in it, for about four seconds.

Then my nose went, and the bowl came down with a clang that echoed off both walls of the canyon, and Dot's hands came running from three directions.

I sat in the spoon on the red glass with the blood running onto my lip and laughed, again, the way I had with the mirror.

"Query," said Dot. "Is the operator laughing?"

"Yes."

"This unit is beginning to recognize it," said Dot. "It sounds similar to the other sound."

"I know," I said. "That's how you know it's real."

At dawn, I'd heard the click.

I want that written down too, because it was the first thing I did that morning before the spoon, and I'll never forget it. I sat in the hut with the box on, listening only, not transmitting, with my hand flat on the dial and my eyes shut. Five o'clock. Ten past. Quarter past.

Click.

One. Very faint, in all that hiss.

I put my head down on the box again.

I trained all of Day 323.

Every hour. Up, ten centimeters. Down. Rest. Up, twenty. Down. Dot fed me sap and salt between, and I ate it without complaining, which she logged. By noon I could hold the spoon a meter off the glass for a minute. By three, two meters, for five minutes, if I didn't try to do anything else.

Then I tried to do something else.

Up is one thing. Forward is another. You hold the bucket, and then you have to carry it somewhere, and the carrying is a second weight on top of the first. I went forward three meters, and sideways four, and came down hard on the edge of the terraces and bent the rim.

Dot fixed the rim.

I went again.

By dusk I could go up ten meters and forward a hundred, slowly, at about the speed of a person walking. The spoon wobbled the whole time. My nose bled every half hour. I had to look down into the bowl, nearly all the time, at the pale gray floor between my knees, and every time I looked up to see where I was going, the spoon dropped, a meter, two, until I looked down again and caught it.

"Query," said Dot. "How will the operator navigate, if the operator cannot look forward?"

"The buckle," I said.

I didn't need my eyes for that. I'd been finding it with my eyes shut for fourteen days. A grain of iron in the back of a cave, eighty kilometers north-northeast. All I had to do was keep it in front of me.

"And behind?"

I thought about the ring of three hundred and eighty. About the forge floor coming up under my feet. The enemy goes where my eyes don't.

"Give me a wing," I said. "One. It can fly behind me, and if anything follows, it can tell me."

"This unit can give the operator two," said Dot.

"One. You need the rest. You're keeping the lighthouse."

The little rivers ran.

"Yes," said Dot. "This unit is keeping the lighthouse."

I left on the morning of Day 324.

Five o'clock, in the hut, with the box on, listening. Ten past. Quarter past. Twenty past.

Click.

Late. But there.

I turned the box off and went out to the spoon.

Dot had loaded it in the night. Water, twelve liters, in the rack underneath. Paste, a week of it, which she had tried again with and which now tasted very faintly of salt, which she said was an improvement and which was. Halloway's notes in the thigh pocket of my suit, with Father's anatomy book. A roll of splints, titanium, light. Clean wrappings. A little receiver, the size of my palm, that could hear the dawn click and couldn't say anything back.

The mirror, in a frame on my wrist.

And a flask.

"This unit has attempted a beverage," said Dot. "Per the operator's request. For the purposes of Rule. This unit does not know what Rule is."

"Liam's rule," I said. "Something to drink. All five of us. Together."

"There are not five."

"Not yet."

The little rivers ran.

"This unit fermented the sap of the green plants," said Dot. "With salt. And heat. And a great deal of careful asking." A pause. "This unit does not know if it is acceptable. This unit does not drink."

I opened it and smelled it. It smelled like the bottom of a compost bin and a little like pears.

"It's perfect," I said.

"The operator's face suggests it is not perfect."

"It's for Liam," I said. "He'll love it."

I strapped in. Leg out straight. Scarf twice round, the third loop tucked in, the lumpy bits on the left where Garnet had done them.

Dot stood in front of the spoon. Her grille at the level of my face. All five arms folded, very neatly, under her.

"Query," said Dot.

"Yes?"

"The operator will return."

It wasn't a question. Not quite. She'd said query and then forgotten to ask it.

"Yes," I said. "With Liam. In three days. Maybe four. Keep the lighthouse lit. Don't let anybody in. If Command asks where I am—"

"This unit will answer accurately," said Dot. "The operator is not output."

I looked at her for a long moment.

"You're very good at that," I said.

"This unit has been practicing," said Dot.

I looked down into the spoon.

And held it.

Up is the easy part. I'd learned that on Day 323. The spoon came off the red glass smoothly, a meter, five, ten, with the bucket weight settling in behind my eyes, and the wing going up beside me with its high soft mosquito whine. Up past the terraces. Up past the rim.

Then I was above the rim, and there was nothing round me but the sky.

I'd never been that high without a wall. Not in the dome, not on the Meridian, not on the roof at home. The rim fell away under me, red and gold, and beyond it the green went on and on to the north, rolling, silver at the tops, all the way to the edge of the world. The wind came over the rim and hit the spoon from the side and turned it, a quarter turn, slow, like a leaf on a pond.

I looked up. I couldn't help it.

The spoon dropped.

Four meters. Fast. My stomach went up into my throat, and the rim came up at me, and I looked down, down, into the pale gray bowl between my knees, and held—

And it caught. A meter above the rock. Swinging.

I sat there with my heart going like a hare and my hands white on the straps.

And then, because there was nobody to see me, I said, out loud, "Garnet would love this."

She would have. She'd have been screaming. She'd have had her arms in the air. She'd have asked to go again before we'd landed.

I went up again. Slower.

And this time I didn't look up. I looked down into the spoon, and let the other sight, the one that finds lighthouses, go looking for the buckle.

North-northeast. Eighty kilometers. A grain of iron with one flaw in it, very faint.

I put it in front of me.

And went.

I'm not going to pretend it was fast.

A person walking. A little faster, when the wind was behind me. Much slower when it wasn't. Twenty meters up, over the green, because any lower and the tops of the fronds brushed the bottom of the spoon, and any higher and the wind took me. Looking down, always, into the bowl between my knees. Glancing up for one second, two, to see what was coming, and catching the drop every time.

Every half hour my nose bled.

Every hour I came down. On rock, never on the green. There were tors, all over that country, little knobs of gray stone sticking up out of the silver-green like islands, and I hopped from one to the next, the way you cross a stream on stepping stones. I'd land, and unstrap, and lie on my back on the warm rock with my eyes shut and the bucket weight draining slowly out from behind them, and drink, and eat a little salty paste, and look at the wing's feed on the small screen on my wrist.

Behind me. All behind me. Twenty kilometers of green, rolling away south.

Nothing following.

Yet.

The plants turned.

I noticed it on the second hop. I was twenty meters up over the green, and I glanced down past the edge of the spoon, and the fronds under me were turning. All of them. Not with the wind. Against it. Silver-green, the tops of them, tipping toward me as I passed, the way they'd turned toward Dot's core in the dome, the way the ones by the canyon had turned toward the warmth. A long ripple, following the spoon across the country, like a wake behind a boat.

It wasn't the Teeming. I looked. All the way down. Roots and stems and soil and the silver in them, awake, tiny threads of it, threaded through every leaf.

Awake. And turning.

Toward me.

Familiar. That was what Dot had said, the first time the plants turned toward her core. I thought about the silver in my own optic nerves, woven in, not fighting. I thought about the silver in Mother's nerves, and Maura's, asleep, and their bodies fighting it every day.

The plants weren't fighting anything. They were saying hello.

I didn't know what that meant yet. I wrote it down at the next tor, in very bad handwriting, with my hands shaking from the hold.

The silver here knows the silver in me. It turns toward it. Why? What does it hear?

If I could make Mother's hear it too—

I didn't finish it. I didn't know how.

But I underlined it twice.

By dusk I'd done forty kilometers.

Half. I came down on the biggest tor I'd seen all day, a long gray whaleback of granite with a split in the top like a cradle, and I didn't unstrap, because I didn't have anything left to unstrap with. I just lay in the spoon in the split in the rock and let the bucket go.

It was like putting down something I'd been carrying all day up a hill. It was exactly like that. My whole head felt light and empty and sore.

I thought about Mother at the kitchen table. Every morning. Three bowls in a line.

I'd ask her, when I got home. How she'd done it. How long it took before it stopped hurting.

I'd ask her a lot of things.

The wing woke me at two.

Not with an alarm. Dot had built it with one, but I'd asked her to turn it off, because sound carries. It woke me with the screen on my wrist, lighting up, pressing a small buzz against the inside of my wrist.

Behind me. South. Seven kilometers.

The green was moving.

Not turning toward me, the way the plants turned. Parting. A line in it, coming north. And another beside it. Fourteen meters apart, more or less. I didn't need to measure.

Nine of them.

Following the wake.

I lay very still in the spoon.

They hear the radio. I hadn't used the radio. The receiver couldn't send. The wing didn't talk to anything but me.

But I'd come across the green all day like a boat across water. And the plants had turned and turned behind me, and the silver in them was awake, and the Teeming were awake silver too. One organism, passing signals body to body.

Maybe they didn't need a radio.

Maybe they'd just followed the ripple.

I didn't have anything to fight them with. Not nine. Not at night, on a tor, with my head empty.

But they were seven kilometers off, and walking.

And I could fly.

I strapped in. I looked down into the spoon. My head screamed when I picked up the bucket again, a sound I could almost hear, and my nose started before I'd even left the rock.

I went up anyway. Higher this time. Fifty meters. Up above the wind, where the stars were very bright and the big gold moon was down and the small one was crossing, and the green below me was a dark sea with a silver shine on it.

And I flew north in the dark, by the buckle, with nine of them walking behind me, slower than me, but not stopping.

Dawn on Day 325, I came down on a tor with my hands shaking so badly I couldn't undo the straps, and held the receiver up to my ear.

Five o'clock. Hiss.

Ten past. Hiss.

Quarter past. Twenty past.

Half past.

Hiss.

I didn't wait for it.

I couldn't. I sat in the spoon on the rock and looked down into it and lifted, with blood on my lip and nothing at all left behind my eyes, and I flew. Toward the buckle. Fast as I'd gone. Faster. I stopped glancing up. I stopped looking at the screen. I looked into the bottom of the spoon and held it and felt for one grain of iron with one flaw in it, and it got brighter, and brighter, and closer.

Trees on the horizon. Huge. Taller than the tower. Bark like iron. I didn't look at them.

At ten to six, the receiver on my wrist clicked.

Once. Very weak. Very late.

I said something I'm not going to write down.

I saw the ravine at seven.

Not the ravine. The smoke. A thin gray line going straight up out of the green into the still morning air, from a crack in the land I'd never have seen, full to the brim with fronds. And round the crack, on the rocks, on both sides, dark shapes. Standing very still. Fourteen meters apart.

Twelve.

And, coming out of the green behind me, seven kilometers back, my nine.

Twenty-one.

The buckle was right under me. In the bottom of the ravine. In a cave, under the smoke, in a hand that was holding on to it the way I'd told it to.

I didn't think about it. I'd thought about everything else for two days. I didn't think about this.

I let go of the bucket.

Not all of it. Most of it. The spoon dropped, fast, down through the smoke and the fronds and the cold air in the ravine, with the walls going past, granite, glittering, and at the last second I held, everything I had, and the spoon hit the rocks in front of the cave mouth hard enough to bend it and skidded and stopped, sideways, with me in it, between the fire and the dark shapes on the rocks.

The fire was low. Red embers in a ring across the mouth of the cave. And behind the fire, sitting against the cave wall with his leg out straight in a splint made of half a kit and a boot clutched in both arms to his chest like a baby, red-eyed, gray-faced, thinner than I'd ever seen him, Liam Calder.

He stared at me.

I stared at him.

I had blood all down my front and my leg strapped out straight and the scarf over one eye. The spoon was bent. The flask had come out of the rack and was rolling slowly across the rock toward him.

It stopped against his good foot.

He looked down at it. Then at me. Then up, at the smoke, at the gap in the fronds where I'd come through. Then back at me.

"You flew," said Liam.

"I brought something to drink," I said.

Day 323–325.

51 kg. Plus suit, water, everything: about 80.

Mother's thing. The old thing. Lift what you can see. I can't see myself.

Dot: "Can the operator look at something the operator is sitting in?"

A spoon. Titanium. Six kilograms. "The shape is efficient."

Garnet would love this.

80 km in two days. 20 m up. Tor to tor. Nosebleed every half hour.

The plants turned toward me the whole way. Awake silver. Not fighting. Saying hello.

The silver here knows the silver in me. If I could make Mother's hear it too—

Nine followed the ripple. No radio. They didn't need one.

Dawn click: late. Very late.

Liam. Alive. Holding the boot.

"You flew."