Chapter 121 Maris

Luna's kit came over the north rim on the afternoon of Day 359.

Quietly. The way she'd told it to. Its core turned down so low that Dot didn't hear it until it was at the top of the path, and the fronds along the rim hadn't even turned toward it. Gray shell. Five arms. One of them hanging wrong, cracked at the elbow, where something had got a blade into it in the ice. Frost on its legs, still, even in the warm afternoon, the way there was frost on Luna's knees.

It stopped at the top of the path and looked down into the canyon. At the tower. At the town. At Dot, standing beside the dome, half again as big as it was, with seven arms and rivers in three colors.

Then it spoke.

"Squad leader," it said. "Report."

I knew the voice.

Everyone from the cave knew the voice. Deep, and dry, and very clipped, every word set down exactly where it was meant to go, like a man laying bricks. We'd heard it in the hall on the night of the gala. We'd heard it on the field, the one morning he'd come to watch. We'd heard it at dinner, through Luna, every time she came back from a Sunday at home with her face shut like a door.

General Windsor.

Luna, standing in the door of the dome, went completely still.

"Squad leader," said her kit again, in her father's voice. "This unit has arrived. This unit awaits instruction."

"It picked it," said Luna, very quietly, after a long time. "The first morning. Before I'd got the straps off. I didn't tell it to."

"Liam's picked his mum," I said. "It looked for whatever would make him get up."

"I know," said Luna. "That's what I'm afraid of."

She didn't say anything else. She walked across the red glass to the foot of the path, very straight, and stood in front of her kit and looked up at it.

"Unit," she said. "Come down. You're home."

"Acknowledged," said the General's voice. And then, after a pause, in exactly the same voice, very slightly lower: "Well done."

Luna's back went rigid.

Then she turned round and walked away very fast, round the side of the dome, where nobody could see her face.

Nobody followed her. Not even me.

Dot asked about it that night.

"Query," she said, in the doorway. "The fourth unit has asked to integrate."

I looked at Luna. She was sitting on the step of the dome, in the dark, with her knees drawn up.

"Ask her," I said. "It's hers."

Dot turned her grille toward the step.

"Query," said Dot. "Luna. The fourth unit has asked to integrate with this unit. This unit would like to know if Luna wishes it."

Luna didn't turn round.

"Will it still talk like him?" she said.

"This unit does not know," said Dot. "When this unit integrated with the second unit, this unit spoke in the second unit's voice for two days. Then this unit's own voice returned. This unit kept two words." A pause. "This unit cannot promise which words it would keep."

Luna was quiet for a long time.

"He said well done," she said at last. To nobody. To the dark. "My kit. In his voice. He's never said that to me. Not once. Not in my whole life." She swallowed. "The kit made it up. It looked in my head for whatever would make me get up, and it found that, and it said it." Her voice was very flat. "It's the worst thing that's ever happened to me on this planet, and I've been surrounded by the Teeming in the ice."

Nobody said anything.

"Do it," said Luna. "Integrate. I don't care what you keep." A pause. "But if you keep well done, Dot, you can say it to me sometimes. When I've earned it. In your own voice."

"Logged," said Dot, very quietly. "This unit would like that."

So that was four.

It took a night. Slow, the way the third one had. I sat in the doorway and watched the silver, four knots of it now, finding each other, joining, the lake getting bigger. In the morning Dot was taller again, and her eighth arm was long and pale and very cold to the touch, and when it moved, frost formed on the red glass under it in a fine white fern.

She didn't speak in the General's voice. Not once. Not for a second. When she spoke at dawn, it was her own, clear and level and not quite anybody's, with the deep note under it from Sera's ridge.

"Good morning," said Dot. "Please." A pause. "This unit has kept a word."

"Which one?" said Luna, from the step. She'd sat there all night.

"It is not the one Luna is afraid of," said Dot. "It is 'steady.'"

Luna put her face in her hands.

The skiff took eleven days.

I won't write all of it. Mostly it was the same thing, over and over, in the long low workshop the hands built against the north wall of the canyon, where the titanium seam came down to the floor: Sera with her bare pink palms over the white fire, holding the metal at exactly the heat it wanted, soft and pale and willing; and me beside her, asking it, grain by grain, to be the shape we'd drawn on the floor in charcoal.

Long. Twelve meters. Shallow, like a leaf. Six seats in two rows of three, with a low back to each, facing in. A rim you could see over sitting up. And down the middle, between the rows, from bow to stern, a floor.

Smooth. Pale. Polished. No seams in it anywhere. One piece.

That was the hard part.

"Why does it have to be one piece?" said Liam, on the fourth day, from the door of the workshop, where he was allowed to stand as long as he didn't touch anything.

"Because I have to see it," I said. "All of it. At once. Sitting in the middle seat. If there's a seam, my eyes catch on it. I see two pieces. And then I have to hold two pieces, not one, and that's twice as hard." I looked at the long pale floor, half-finished, glowing on its bed of hot rock. "A spoon is one thing. That's why I can lift it."

"So the skiff has to be one thing."

"The skiff has to be the biggest spoon anyone's ever made," I said.

Liam thought about that.

"I'm going to call it the Big Spoon," he said.

"You're not," said Sera, without looking up from the fire.

Luna came every evening.

She didn't come in. She stood in the door of the workshop, where Liam stood, with her arms folded, and watched us work. Sera, with her hands over the fire. Me, with my eyes on the metal. For an hour, sometimes two. She didn't say anything.

On the sixth evening, she said:

"You need to practice."

I looked up.

"Lifting," said Luna. "Something that size. All at once. You've never done it. You said so. You've lifted a spoon with two people in it and you've held Liam's foot in a cave." She unfolded her arms. "You can't find out on the day whether you can lift six people twelve meters long. You'll drop us on a mountain."

"There isn't anything that size to practice on."

"There is now," said Luna.

She walked out into the middle of the canyon floor, onto the red glass, in the last of the light. She put her hands out, palms down, the way Sera did over the forge.

And the air in front of her went white.

Not snow. Not frost. Ice. Clear, solid, coming out of nothing, out of the water in the air, laying itself down on the red glass in front of her in a long smooth sheet, a hand's thickness, a meter wide, two, five, ten, twelve.

Twelve meters long. Shallow at the edges. A long pale leaf of ice, the same shape as the charcoal lines on the workshop floor, lying on the red glass in the dusk.

Luna stepped back and looked at it, and then at me.

"One piece," she said. "No seams. I checked." She folded her arms again. "Practice."

I practiced.

Every night, after the workshop. On the canyon floor, in the dark, with Luna's ice. The first night I sat in the middle of it, cross-legged, on the cold, and looked down at the whole long sheet of it round me, and tried to see it all at once, the way I saw the spoon.

I couldn't.

It was too long. My eyes went down it, bow to stern, like reading a line of writing, and by the time they got to the end they'd forgotten the beginning. I held the near end and the far end dropped. I held the far end and the near end cracked. I lifted the whole thing, once, for a second, a finger's width, and my nose went and the ice came down and split in three.

Luna made another one.

The second night, the same.

The third night, Risa came and sat on the edge of the canyon with her eyes shut, and after an hour, said, without opening them:

"You're reading it."

"What?"

"Your heart. It goes fast at the beginning, and slow in the middle, and fast at the end. Like you're reading a sentence and getting excited at the end of it." She opened her eyes. "You don't read a spoon. You just look at it. You don't start at one end."

I sat in the middle of the ice and thought about that.

You don't start at one end.

"How do you look at something without starting at one end?" I said.

"I don't know," said Risa. "I'm not the one with the eyes." She shut hers again. "But I've heard you look at the twins. On the screen, on the calls. Your heart doesn't read them. It just goes still. All at once."

I thought about that for a long time.

Then I closed my eyes. The ordinary ones.

And let the other sight, the one that found lighthouses, go out round me. Not down the ice, bow to stern. Out. All at once. In every direction. The way it went out to find the snowflake and the fork and the clasp. Not looking at the ice. Feeling where it was. The whole shape of it, round me, the way you feel the shape of a room you're standing in with the lights off.

And then I opened my eyes, and looked down, and it was all there.

Not a line. Not a sentence. A shape. One thing.

I held it.

And the long pale leaf of Luna's ice lifted off the red glass, all of it, at once, bow and stern and middle, a hand's width, two, smooth and level, with me sitting in the middle of it, in the dark, in the canyon, with my nose not bleeding at all.

Behind me, on the edge of the canyon, I heard Luna let out a breath.

"There," she said.

The skiff was finished on the evening of Day 369.

We came out of the workshop at dusk, Sera and I, both of us black to the elbows and swaying on our feet, and the hands came out behind us carrying it. Eight of them, four a side, very carefully, the way they'd carried Liam on the frame. They set it down on the red glass in the middle of the canyon, where Luna's ice had been every night for a week, and backed away.

Everybody came out to look.

It was beautiful. I'm allowed to say that. I didn't make it on my own.

Twelve meters long, and pale, and shallow, like a leaf floating on dark water. The titanium had a sheen on it from Sera's fire, very faint, the color of the inside of a shell, and when the last of the light came over the western rim it went pink and gold all along the rim. Six seats, in two rows of three, facing in. And down the middle, from bow to stern, the floor. One piece. No seams. Polished so smooth you could see the green sky in it.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Holt, leaning on his stick at the back, said, "Well. I've flown in worse."

"You've never flown in anything," said Wren.

"I flew in a drop pod, girl. Into a war. That was worse."

"It needs a name," said Liam.

"It's not the Big Spoon," said Sera.

"I wasn't going to say the Big Spoon."

"You were."

"I was going to say Rule," said Liam, with dignity. "Because of the rule. Something to drink. All five of us. And we're going to go and get the fifth."

"That's actually quite good," said Risa, surprised.

"Thank you."

"It is not a beverage," said Dot.

Everybody looked at Luna. She was standing a little apart, the way she did, with her arms folded, looking at the skiff. She didn't say anything.

Then she looked at me.

"It's yours," she said. "And Calder's. You name it."

I looked at Sera. She looked back at me, with her black arms and her pink palms and her hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. She shrugged, very slightly. You.

So I thought about it.

I thought about the cave. About the field at six in the morning, with frost on the white paint and forty of us in our lines. About a woman with half a jaw made of a bridge rail, and a slate under her arm, saying Count. Every night. Wherever you are. Who'd held a bridge up with nothing but what was in her, while my father held the line, and twenty died anyway. Who'd trained thirty-four and watched them go, and trained forty and watched us go, and given me her chevron and her handkerchief and sealed my pod herself.

Who'd never once, in all the time I knew her, let any of us call her by her first name.

I only knew it from Father's margin. A line in pencil, at the bottom of a page. Sorry, Maris. I only knew the front of it.

"Maris," I said.

Holt took his hand off his stick.

He stood there in the dusk looking at the skiff. At the word I'd said, hanging in the air over it.

"Maris," he said. Very quietly. "She'd hate that."

"I know."

"She'd absolutely hate it. She'd go red right up to the steel." He wiped his face with the back of his big still hand. "Do it."

Sera put her pink palm flat on the bow, where the rim came up to a point, and held it there. When she took it away, there was a word there, written into the titanium in fine dark letters, as if the metal had grown them. Not carved. Not burned. Just there.

MARIS

We flew it that night.

Not far. Just up. Luna's order. "If you're going to drop us, you'll drop us from ten meters onto red glass in our own canyon. Not from a thousand onto a mountain."

So we got in. All six. Luna in the bow seat on the left, where she could see forward. Sera opposite her. Liam and Risa in the stern pair. Holt in the right middle seat, with his stick across his knees and his new knee out straight.

And me in the left middle seat. In the middle. With the whole long pale floor of it laid out in front of me and behind me and all round, every centimeter of it, one piece.

Wren and Tamsin and Corr stood on the red glass and watched. Dot stood behind them with her eight arms folded and her rivers running very fast.

I closed my eyes. The ordinary ones.

Let the other sight go out. Round me. All at once. Not down the skiff, bow to stern. Out. The whole shape of it. Six people. Twelve meters of titanium that Sera had held and I had asked. Water in the racks. Holt's stick. Liam's boot with the buckle in it, which he'd brought because he always did now.

One thing.

I opened my eyes and looked down, and it was all there.

And I held it.

Maris lifted.

All of it. At once. Bow and stern and middle, level, smooth, like a leaf taken up off still water by a wind you couldn't see. A meter. Two. Five. Up past the dome's roof. Up past the first terrace, and the second, and the third, where Luna's room was at the end with its coldest wall.

Somebody in the stern made a sound. Liam. A long high sound, like a kettle, the one he'd made when he drank his own beverage.

"Don't," said Luna, from the bow, without turning round. "Don't distract him."

"I'm not distracting him, I'm flying—"

"Calder."

Liam shut his mouth.

Ten meters. Twenty.

I could feel the weight. Of course I could. Six people and the skiff and the water, much more than the spoon, much more than anything. The bucket behind my eyes was full, very full, heavier than it had ever been.

But it wasn't worse.

That was the thing I hadn't known. It wasn't twice as hard as the spoon. It wasn't three times. It was more weight, but it was the same holding. Because it was one thing. Because I was looking at all of it, at once, and not reading it, and when you hold one thing it doesn't matter, very much, how big the one thing is.

You're just a heavier spoon.

Mother had known. Mother had always known. She'd held a kitchen. She'd held a ship.

I'd only ever held spoons, because I'd only ever looked at spoons.

Forty meters. Fifty. Level with the lower struts of the tower. Above the rim of the canyon.

The whole country spread out round us in the last of the dusk. The rolling red rock to the south. The green to the north, going away silver at the tops, all the way to the edge of the world, and the faint white line of the mountains.

Nobody said anything. Not even Liam.

Then Holt, in the seat beside me, said very quietly, "Take her round the tower, boy."

I took her round the tower.

Slowly. One long circle, four hundred and eight meters of iron lattice going up beside us into the first stars, the copper mast at the top catching the very last of the light. And on the platform at the top, where she'd gone up while we were getting in, very small, Wren. With her mirror. Flashing, as we went past, in the very last of the sun.

H. E. R. E.

We came down after twenty minutes.

Gently. Onto the red glass, exactly where we'd started, so softly that the skiff didn't make a sound when it touched. I let the bucket go, and it drained out from behind my eyes like water, and my nose bled, a little, just a little, and I wiped it on my sleeve.

Nobody moved.

Then Luna stood up in the bow, and turned round, and looked down the length of the skiff at me.

She didn't say anything for a long moment.

"Well done," said Luna Windsor.

Behind her, on the red glass, Dot made a sound I'd never heard her make. Very soft. Very deep. Like the note under her voice, the one she'd kept from Sera's ridge, all on its own.

"Logged," said Dot, after a moment, in her own voice. "Steady."

We left at dawn on Day 371.

Everyone came to the red glass to see us go. Wren and Tamsin and Corr in a line. Dot behind them, with her eight arms and her rivers in four colors now, the fourth very pale, almost white, the color of Luna's ice.

"Count every dawn," said Dot. "So this unit knows."

"We will," said Luna.

"Please," said Dot. "All of them."

"All of them," said Luna. "That's what I'm for."

I sat down in the middle seat, and looked at the whole long pale shape of Maris round me, and held it.

And we went north.

Day 359–371.

Luna's kit came Day 359. It speaks in the General's voice. It said "well done." "He's never said that to me. Not once."

Integrated with Dot. Four cores. Eight arms. One cold. Dot kept "steady."

The skiff: eleven days. Twelve meters, six seats, one floor. No seams. One piece. "The biggest spoon anyone's ever made."

Luna made me twelve meters of ice to practice on. Every night. I couldn't. I was reading it.

Risa: "You don't read a spoon. You don't start at one end." "When you look at the twins your heart doesn't read them. It just goes still."

Let the other sight go out round it. All at once. Not a line. A shape. One thing. It lifted. No nosebleed.

It's not about the weight. It's about the seeing. Mother held a kitchen and a ship. I only ever held spoons, because I only ever looked at spoons.

Named it MARIS. Holt: "She'd hate that. Do it." Sera wrote it into the bow with her hand.

Six aboard. Fifty meters. Round the tower. Wren on top: HERE.

Luna: "Well done."

Dot: "Steady."

North at dawn, Day 371.