Chapter 127 What Holt Saw

Nobody slept in Scarecrow that night.

I don't mean that the way people say it. I mean I walked the length of the canyon at two in the morning, on my stick, from the dome to the forge and back, and there was a light in every room. Wren up on the tower, flashing nothing to nobody, just to have her hands busy. Juno sitting on the north path with her arm out, pointing, and pointing, and lowering it, and pointing again. Toby in the workshop with his notebook, drawing the same curve over and over. Teo in the garden under the dome lamp, on his knees in the dirt, not planting anything.

And Dot, on the red glass, very still, with her arms folded and her rivers running slow.

I sat down on the glass beside her.

"Operator," she said.

"Tell me again. About the voyage."

So she told me again.

How she'd been folded in my seed. Not awake, the way she was now. Not anybody yet. A kit, packed tight, with its core turned down low, in a compartment no bigger than a cupboard beside the one I was sleeping in. In the ring of the ship, with forty seeds in a circle round the spine.

"This unit did not think," said Dot. "This unit did not have anything to think with. But this unit heard. The core heard. All the way. Three weeks." The rivers ran. "A pattern. From the middle. Very long. Very slow. Over and over. Like a heart through a wall."

"And it's the same."

"It is the same. Every small thing in its place." A pause. "This unit did not know it was a name. This unit did not know what a name was. This unit knows now."

I sat there for a long time.

I thought about the Meridian. Standing on the black plain at dawn, with its nose in the cloud. The spine down the middle of it, gray and pitted, three hundred meters long, as thick as a house, with the human steel clamped to it on every side like scaffolding round a tree. Old. As if it had been out in weather for a very long time.

Fog, when I looked into it. Nothing to take hold of. The same as the kits' cores. The same as the silver in Priya's nerves, that slid away from me when I tried to wake it.

And the ship rising off the plain in perfect silence, carried on the breath of the thing in its spine.

I'd written that. In my notebook. Three hundred and eighty-odd days ago. I'd thought it was a nice sentence.

"Dot," I said. "The spine. Is it alive?"

"This unit does not know."

"Is the thing under the mountain alive?"

"This unit does not know that either." The rivers slowed. "This unit knows that they have the same name. And that the thing under the mountain heard this unit's name and said it back, correctly. And that it has been following the operator since the day the operator's seed came down." A pause. "Out of the ship. Away from the spine."

I didn't say anything.

"Operator," said Dot. "This unit has a question. This unit would like to ask it carefully."

"Ask."

"Is it following the operator," said Dot, "or is it following the ship?"

I didn't have an answer.

But I knew who might.

"No," said Luna, at dawn.

"Luna—"

"I didn't say you couldn't go. You're going. Holt and Risa have been on that ridge four days and Holt's not young and Risa can't sleep when the Teeming go past." She was standing at the foot of the north path with the slate in her hand, the way she always stood. "I'm saying I'm not coming."

I stopped.

"Somebody has to be here," said Luna. "Fifteen people. A robot who's just told a thing the size of a mountain her name. A dawn line to six bases. And whatever comes over that rim next." She looked up at the green on the rim, still turned toward me, every frond. "If it's following you, it'll follow you to Holt's ridge. I want to be here if it's following the ship."

"You think it's the ship."

"I think I don't know," said Luna. "So I'm going to stand where I can see both."

So it was Sera, and Liam, and me.

Three, in Maris, with the second hull left behind on the red glass, so that she was just herself again. Twelve meters. Six seats. Light as a leaf. I lifted her off the glass at sunrise and I could have laughed. I didn't. But I could have. After twelve people and a bucket full to the trembling edge, three was nothing. Three was a spoon.

"Fly fast," said Luna, from the glass, with her arms folded.

"How fast?"

"Fast enough that I don't have to count you on the dawn line more than once."

I flew fast.

Faster than I'd ever flown. Not six hours a day; eight, nine, because I wasn't holding anything, really, and the bucket was barely a quarter full. The green went by underneath us like water. Liam lay on his back in the stern with his hands behind his head and watched the sky go past and didn't talk at all, for once, for hours, and then said, very quietly, "I could do this forever."

Sera sat in the bow, where Luna sat. Not navigating. Just sitting, with the wind in her face and her hair coming loose, warming the air round us without being asked.

And under us, the whole way, the green turned.

Every frond. All of it. Toward me.

Halfway through the second afternoon, Liam sat up.

"Lucas."

"What?"

"Look behind us."

I couldn't. That's the trouble with my eyes. They go forward, in a wedge, and they go into things, but they don't go round. So Liam looked for me. He knelt up in the stern with his hand on the rim and stared back the way we'd come, and his face changed.

"It's going back," he said.

"What is?"

"The green." He was staring. "When we've gone past. It turns to watch us come, all the way, and then we go over it, and it—" He stopped. "It doesn't keep looking at us. It goes back. It turns round again. South. All of it." He looked at me. "It's not following you, Lucas. Not all of it. It's watching you go past, and then it's turning back to look at the canyon."

Sera turned round in the bow.

"At Dot," she said.

We came over the ridge at F-thirty at dusk on Day 386.

Two figures on the flat rock in front of the shelter of black plates. One big and gray, sitting down, with a stick across his knees. One small and fair, standing up, with her hand out flat toward the green.

Risa heard us before she saw us. She turned round with her eyes still shut and her face cracked wide open.

"Three hearts," she shouted. "I've been counting you since noon. Three!"

I put Maris down on the rock beside them so softly it didn't make a sound.

Holt didn't get up. He sat there on the rock with his still hands on his stick and looked at me, and his face did something I'd never seen it do. It went very soft. All at once. Like a field when the wind drops.

"You came back, boy."

"I said I would."

"You said two days. It's been five." He held out a hand. I took it. It was warm and dry and absolutely still. "I'm going to tell Luna Windsor you were late."

"She knows. She counted."

"Course she did," said Holt.

We ate on the rock, the five of us, round a fire Sera lit with one finger. The last of Benedikt's paste, and something green and stringy Risa had picked from the slope below the ridge, and Liam's flask, which had about a mouthful left in it for each of us.

Risa told it while we ate. She told it the way she told everything, with her eyes shut, as if she were listening to it again.

"The river came past again," she said. "Two nights ago. Going north. Thousands. You couldn't count them. Thum, thum, thum, all of them together, like the sea." She swallowed. "And then one of them stopped."

Liam put his flask down.

"One?" he said.

"One. Out of all of them." Risa's hands were in her lap, very still. "It came out of the river. Up the slope. Right up to the edge of the rock. There." She pointed without opening her eyes, at a place about ten meters away, where the ridge dropped off into the dark. "And it stood there."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing," said Holt. "Sat here. Held my stick." He turned his still hands over in the firelight. "Didn't seem to want anything. Just stood. Looking at us. Head on one side. Like a dog does when you say a word it nearly knows."

"Its hearts," said Risa. "All three. They weren't doing the beat. Not the big one, with the others. They were doing something on their own." She lifted one hand, very slowly, and drew it in the air. Up. And a long way up. And hold. And down. "That."

"The hello," I said.

"The hello. In its hearts. Three times." She opened her eyes. "And then it went back down the slope. And joined the river. And went north with the rest."

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Polite," said Holt at last. "I'll give it that. Came up, said good evening, went home." He looked at the fire. "Never had one of them say good evening before."

"Did it hurt you?" said Sera.

"No, girl."

"Did it try?"

"No." Holt was quiet for a moment. "My hands went funny. While it stood there. Not shaking. The other way. Like they were—" He stopped. Looked down at them. "Listening."

I waited until Liam had gone to sleep.

It didn't take long. He'd been awake in the stern half the night before, too excited to close his eyes, and as soon as the flask was empty he lay down on the rock with his head on his coat and went out like a lamp. Risa curled up beside him. Sera sat on the other side of the fire with her knees drawn up and her eyes open, looking at nothing, the way she did when she was listening to something she didn't want to admit she was listening to.

"Holt," I said. "The ship. The one Mother tore."

He didn't look up from the fire.

"What about it?"

"You told me you saw it. From the ground. When she opened the hull." I put my hands flat on my knees. "What happened to it after?"

Holt didn't answer for a long time.

The fire burned down. Sera put her hand out toward it, without looking, and it came up again, steady, even. Down the slope, in the dark, the green turned and turned, and somewhere very far off, the clicking of the Teeming, going north.

"I knew you'd ask," said Holt at last. "One day. I've known since the cave." He breathed out. "I just thought I'd be dead first."

"It fell in the Orme," he said. "You know that. Where the bridge had been. Came apart like knitting, all the way down, and what was left went in the river. And the war stopped. And everybody went home and had a drink." He turned his stick in his hands. "Except they didn't leave it in the river."

"Who didn't?"

"Command. The Council. Whoever." He shrugged. "They wanted it. Course they did. A thing like that, that no gun could touch, that came down out of the sky without a sound. They wanted to know what it was made of. So they made a battalion, and they sent us down the Orme with cranes and hooks and divers, and we dragged it out. Two years, that took. Bit by bit."

"You were there."

"I was there. Salvage. After the river, and the bridge, and my knee. Wasn't fit for anything else." He looked at his hands. "Most of it was nothing. You'd hook a piece up out of the mud and it would come apart in the air. Unravel. Like it had done in the sky. Gray threads, blowing away. Dust. The divers used to come up covered in it." A pause. "But not the middle."

I didn't breathe.

"Down the middle of it," said Holt, "there was a thing that didn't come apart. Everything else did. Not that. We found it in the second spring. Lying on the bottom of the Orme, under all the rest. Long. Gray. As thick as a house." He was looking into the fire. "Three hundred meters, near enough. Pitted all over. Old. Like it had been out in weather a very long time."

"The spine," I said.

"I didn't call it that. Nobody called it anything. We called it the bone." His mouth twisted. "Took eight cranes to lift it. Took it north, on a train, under a sheet, to the mountain. Where your cave was. Where the program was."

He looked at me.

"Where the needles came from, boy. The ones they put in your mum. And your dad. And me." He turned his still hands over. "They had a room in the mountain where they shaved bits off it. Very small bits. And put them in us."

The fire hissed.

On the other side of it, Sera had gone completely still. Her hand, held out toward the flames, had stopped.

"Things inside them could be put inside us," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. "Mother said that. That's what they told her. In the orphan hall. That the invaders' machines could be studied, and the things inside them—"

"Put inside us," said Holt. "Aye. That's what they told all of us."

"And then they built a ship round it."

"And then they built a ship round it." Holt nodded slowly. "I didn't know that. Not till the plain. Not till they marched us out to the black glass and I looked up at that great silver thing with its nose in the cloud, and saw what was down the middle of it." His jaw worked. "Twenty-odd years. I knew it the second I saw it. Same pits. Same gray. I'd had my hands on it every day for two years, in the mud."

"Why didn't you say?"

"Who to?" said Holt. "Crane?"

Nobody said anything.

"Your dad came to see it," said Holt, after a while. "Once. In the yard, when we'd got it up on the bank, before the train. He wasn't meant to. He'd been told to keep away, after the medal and the list and all that. He came anyway. Middle of the night. Stood in front of it with those black eyes of his, for an hour, not saying anything. Couldn't see into it. Fog, he said. Same as the hull. Same as the inside, before your mum opened the door."

"He went inside," I said. "Eleven minutes. Okafor said. He never told anyone what he saw."

"No," said Holt. "He never did."

He was quiet for so long I thought that was all.

Then he said: "He said one thing. That night. In the yard. I was on watch, and he didn't know I was there, I think. He was talking to it. Or to himself. Very quiet."

"What did he say?"

Holt looked up from the fire. Straight at me. The firelight was in his eyes, and his face was very old.

"It's not a ship," said Holt. "That's what he said. It's not a ship, and it never was. It's a seed. And somebody's going to want to plant it."

The green turned, down the slope, in the dark.

I thought about the seeds. Forty of them, round the spine of the Meridian. Tall and smooth and gray, standing in their cradles. I'd thought they were called that because of their shape.

I thought about the thing under the mountain. Asleep, for two months, under Juno's feet. Waking on the day our seeds came down. The day the Meridian came into the sky over Avalon, with a gray pitted bone down the middle of it, singing its name through the walls to a kit folded in the dark.

Is it following the operator, or is it following the ship?

"It woke up when we came," I said. "Not when I came. When we came. When the ship came." I looked at Holt. "It heard its name. From the spine. Coming down out of the sky. After however long."

"Aye," said Holt.

"And then the ship went away again. And the only things left on the ground that had any of the bone in them—"

I stopped.

The kits' cores. That the Teeming had scraped out of every kit that fell, on the first night, and carried away. As if they were lost, and it was taking them home.

And the forty of us. With our needles. With the bits of the bone that had been shaved off in a room under a mountain and put in our parents, and in some of us. And in me, who'd been born of two of them.

"It's not following me because I'm me," I said slowly. "Is it."

Holt didn't answer.

"It's following the loudest one," I said. "The one with the most of it in him. The one who sounds most like home."

Sera made a sound. Very small. On the other side of the fire.

"I don't know, boy," said Holt. "I'm a salvage man with a bad knee. I don't know what it's doing." He put his still hands flat on his stick. "But I know what they did. I've known for two years, sitting in the green. I just didn't have the words." He looked at me across the fire. "They didn't send forty children to settle a world. Nobody sends children to settle anything."

"Then what?"

"They found the bone in the river," said Holt, "and they worked out where it came from. And they built a ship round it, and they sent it home." He looked out at the green, turning in the dark. "And they sent you lot along with it. To see what it did when it got there."

Day 384–386.

Nobody slept. Dot, on the glass: it heard the name all through the voyage, from the middle of the ship. Her question: "Is it following the operator, or is it following the ship?"

Luna stayed. "I'm going to stand where I can see both."

Three in Maris. Light as a spoon. Liam: "I could do this forever."

Liam, looking back: the green turns to watch me come, and then turns back to the canyon. To Dot.

F-30, Day 386, dusk. Risa: "Three hearts!" Holt: "You came back, boy. I'm going to tell Luna you were late."

Two nights ago one Teeming left the river and stood at the edge of the rock. Its three hearts did the hello. Three times. Holt's hands: "Listening."

Holt. The salvage battalion. Two years dragging the quiet ones' ship out of the Orme. It all unravelled except the middle. The bone. Three hundred meters. Pitted. Old.

They took it to the mountain. Shaved bits off it. Put them in Mother. In Father. In Holt.

Then they built the Meridian round it.

Father, in the yard, at night, to the bone: "It's not a ship, and it never was. It's a seed. And somebody's going to want to plant it."

The thing under the mountain woke when the ship came. It heard its name from the sky.

The cores. The needles. Mother, Father. Me.

It's following the loudest one.

Holt: "They didn't send forty children to settle a world. They found the bone in the river, and they sent it home. And they sent you along to see what it did when it got there."