Chapter 277 Behind the Moon

The Kethri told me her name.

Not that night. Not on the ridge, with the General on one knee on his ice and the others round her with their necks touching and the youngest queen singing something very old. That night none of them said anything to anyone who wasn't Kethri. They stayed on the ridge until the light went, in a ring round her, and Okafor told everyone else to leave them be.

They told me the next morning.

Through Dot. Through the net. Sesh did it, from the top of Ines Tarrow's ridge, eleven light-years away, with the others behind her. I was on the glass. I hadn't left it. Okafor had said stay on the glass, and nobody had said I could go.

"She says," said Dot, very quietly, "the Kethri do not tell their names to anyone but the Kethri."

"I know."

"She says the one who fell asked for her wings to be grey to the tips. Like her mother's." A pause. "She says the one who fell would want the one who made her wings to know what to call her."

I waited.

Sesh clicked. Long. Slow. A sound I'd never heard her make before. Low, and then rising, and then falling away again, like wind going over a ridge.

"That," said Dot, "is her name."

"I can't say it."

"No," said Dot. "She says you are not meant to say it. You are meant to know it."

I sat on the glass for a long time after that.

The Hesk were still lying down.

Ten thousand of them. All over the old battlefield. On the mud Kwame Osei had brought up out of the dark, and on the black ash, and against the foot of Ines Tarrow's ridge. Legs folded under them. Shells low. Jaws on the ground. Not moving. Not screaming any more.

Their collars were quiet.

The second queen had stopped carrying the voice, and without the voice, the slivers in the collars had gone still, the way the Kethri slivers had gone still in our square the morning the first queen let go. But they were still there. Round every neck. Under the edge of every shell.

And the Hesk wouldn't get up.

They do not know they are allowed, said the first queen. From over the dome. Slowly. Every word right. They have been told when to stand, for longer than they can count. No one has told them.

Then tell them.

I cannot, said the first queen. They are not mine. They do not know my voice. They know only the one that pushed them. A pause. They are afraid of every voice now.

I looked down at my hands on the glass.

Then I looked over my shoulder. At Risa. At Dory in her lap. Awake, very bright. Holding. She'd been holding the net since the dawn before, and she hadn't let go, and she showed no sign of being tired.

"Dory," I said.

Dory looked at me.

"There are a lot of people on the ash," I said. "A very long way away. They're frightened. They think if they get up, someone will make them do something terrible." I swallowed. "Can you wait with them?"

Dory looked at me for a long time.

Then she turned her head. Not up. Out. Along the net. Eleven light-years. To the old battlefield.

And waited.

It took all day.

Not with one Hesk. With all of them. Dory's silver went out along the net to the ash and the mud and found ten thousand of them lying there, and put itself against every one. Not checking. Not asking. There. The way she'd sat with the Tharn in the first finger. The way the old one had sat in the light on her terrace while our queen grew.

And the slivers in the collars stirred.

Slowly. All of them. Pieces of Hesk queens, cut and folded into grey bands and put round the necks of their own young. They felt Dory's silver. They felt it not push. They felt it wait.

And somewhere in the afternoon, Earth's afternoon, eleven light-years away, the first one answered.

There you are.

And drew its threads back.

It was Rory who saw it first.

He was on the ridge, with Liam and Maura. He'd been on the ridge since the battle. Okafor had told him to rest, and he'd said he'd rest when the Hesk stopped looking at him, and Okafor had let it go.

That one, he said. Through Liam. Through the net. At the bottom of the ridge. It's moving.

A Hesk. One of the ones Kwame's river had taken to the shell. Lying half sunk in the mud at the foot of Ines Tarrow's wall, with its jaw on the ground.

It lifted its head.

Slowly. The way the Tharn had opened its eyes in the hold. The collar round its neck had gone loose. Empty. The sliver inside it drawn back into itself, the threads all gone, holding nothing.

The Hesk looked at the ridge.

At the ice on top of it. At the big broad man standing on the ice, with fire in him that he'd held all day so as not to frighten anything.

And it made a sound.

I don't know what it was. Nobody did. Marlo said afterward the light-benders didn't know either. It was low and hollow, like wind blowing across the mouth of a jar.

Rory Calder looked down at it for a long time.

Then he did something I'd never have thought of.

He knelt down on the ice. And held out his hand. Palm up. Empty. No fire in it. Just a hand. The way you'd hold your hand out to a dog you didn't know, or a frightened horse, or a child.

The Hesk looked at the hand.

Then, very slowly, it pulled itself out of the mud. Six legs. A shell. A jaw. It came up the foot of Ines Tarrow's ridge, the way the youngest queen had hopped across the floor of the hollow to Sesh. One leg at a time.

And it put its jaw against Rory's palm.

Oh, said Maura. Very softly. Through the net. Oh, love.

By dark there were a thousand of them standing.

By the next dawn, every one.

I don't know how many slivers Dory waited with. I don't know how many answered. Ten thousand Hesk, and every one of them wearing a piece of a queen. Dory waited with all of them, and none of them was in a hurry, and neither was she.

When the last collar came loose, she stopped.

She turned her head back from the net. Back from eleven light-years. Back to Risa's lap on the red glass at the edge of our plain.

And she yawned.

Enormously. With her whole face. The way Garnet yawned when she'd been up too late.

Then she put her head on Risa's chest and went to sleep.

Still holding the net.

Risa looked down at her for a long time.

"She's never been tired like this," she said. "Not once. Not even the morning she held the thread for your mother." Her voice wasn't steady. "Lucas. She's tired."

"Ten thousand," I said.

"I know."

"She's allowed."

Risa bent her head and put her cheek on top of Dory's head, and didn't say anything else.

Genny was on my other side.

She'd been there all day too. All night. With her hand flat on the glass beside mine. I'd thought she was listening the way she listened to stone. Asking. Learning.

She wasn't.

She was waiting.

"Now," she said, when Dory went to sleep. Very quietly. "Now it's the moon."

I looked at her.

At my sister, twelve, with a silver streak in her hair where Mother's grey one was and square silver lines down her arms like a page of chemistry. Who'd stood on the porch the night after Sesh told her story and said she's been waiting for him to ask again.

"Now it's the moon," I said.

Okafor gave the order at the next dawn.

Through Mother. Through the net, which Dory was still holding in her sleep. Plain words. No decoration.

Both Hands. Behind the moon.

The second queen had asked to come. She'd asked through the first queen, slowly, in the old tongue that only the queens and Juno and Dory understood. Her young were safe. Her collars were quiet. Her handlers were gone; the twelve at the door of the wrist had come apart when I opened it, and the rest had gone onto the ash and not come back.

She wanted to see the one behind the moon.

She came for her, said the first queen. That is why she was behind the moon when I came. The handlers sent her. To guard the finger. To guard the cutting. A pause. She says she has heard the young one singing in the cold for a long time. She says she could not go to her. She says she could only sit and listen, and carry the voice, and hear her own young cry behind a door.

And now?

Now she would like to go to her, said the first queen. With me.

A long pause.

She is my youngest, said the first queen. The one behind the moon. They took her when they built the finger. They put her in it because she was small, and the finger was small. They sent the finger to your mother's world. And your mother tore it open. Another pause. And the cold came in. And she has been singing to keep warm ever since.

I'd known. Genny had told me, on the porch. But I hadn't known.

Your daughter, I said.

My daughter, said the first queen.

They went behind the moon together.

Both Hands. Our Hand, with three hundred and six people sealed in the first finger and two thousand light-benders in the second and the third finger empty. And the second Hand, bigger, with a hundred young safe in its wrist and its holds still full of things nobody had looked at yet.

I went with them.

Not my body. I was still on the glass. But through Mother, who stood at the top of Luna's stair in the palm of our Hand. And through Jessa, who could feel up, further than anyone. And through Luna, who had her notebook open on her knee and her father beside her and was writing down everything she saw, in small exact letters, so that I'd have it afterward.

The dome fell away.

The old battlefield, and Ines Tarrow's ridge, and the ice on top of it, and the river, and ten thousand Hesk standing on the ash looking up. Four million people under glass, looking up.

And then the moon.

Grey. Bigger and bigger. Pitted and old and very cold.

And round it, to the far side, where nobody on Earth could ever see.

The station was there.

Small. Ugly. The Project's. Grey prefabricated modules bolted together on the dark side of the moon, with lights in the windows and cables running out across the dust. Cranes. Cutting rigs. Long arms of steel with blades on the end.

And in the middle of them, half sunk in the dust, the finger.

It was small. Smaller than any finger on our Hand. The size of a house. Grey, the Sorn grey, folded and folded. And in its side, a hole.

A big hole. Jagged. Torn. The edges of it bent outward, every fold ripped through, the way you'd tear a sheet of paper with your hands. Thirty years old.

Mother's.

And round the hole, round the whole finger, everywhere, the marks of the cutting. Long straight scars in the grey where the rigs had taken pieces off it. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Neat. Precise. Every one a collar, or a band, or a seed, or a tool for Level 62.

Under all of it, very faint, singing.

Mother didn't say anything.

I felt her see it. Through the net. Standing at the top of the ice stair in the palm of our Hand, with her hands at her sides and her silver whole and her grey streak bright. Looking down at the hole she'd torn when she was young, in the second bombardment, so that my father could go in.

She'd never seen it from outside.

She'd been on the ground. Under it. On the northern front, with the finger coming down over the line and the bombardment falling, and she'd reached up and torn it open because it was the only thing she could think of to do.

She hadn't known there was anyone in it.

Neither had Father. Not until he went in. Dot. There's someone in there.

Lucas, said Mother. Very quietly.

I'm here.

I did that.

I know.

She's been cold for thirty years, said Mother. Because of me.

I didn't say anything.

There wasn't anything to say.

The station saw us coming.

Of course it did. Two Hands, coming round the edge of the moon, filling the dark sky over the far side. The lights in the windows went out. Then came back on. Then a voice, on every channel at once, very frightened and very young.

This is Far Station. This is Far Station. Identify. Identify. We are a Project facility under Senate authority. We have—

Far Station, said a voice.

Not Okafor. Not the General.

Voss.

Through the seed. Okafor had given it back to her, for this. A sliver of a dead queen, on a chain, that Voss had worn for twenty years and thought was jewellery. She'd put it back on in Okafor's flat that morning, and Okafor had said say it the way you said it on the screens, and Voss had said badly, and Okafor had said yes.

Far Station. This is the Chancellor.

The voice on the channel stopped.

You'll stop cutting, said Voss. Now. All of you. Put the rigs down. Turn the blades off. A pause. Her voice wasn't steady. And then you'll come home. There's a transport coming for you. You won't be charged with anything. Most of you didn't know what you were cutting. I didn't either. Another pause. I signed for every piece. That's on me. Not you.

Silence on the channel.

Then the young voice said: Chancellor. There's something in there. We've always— We hear it. At night. Some of us. We thought it was the machinery.

It isn't, said Voss. It's a child.

The rigs stopped.

I felt them stop. Through Mother. Through the net. Every blade on every arm on every crane round the finger, going still. The cables going slack. The lights in the windows of Far Station very bright and very still.

And in the silence where the cutting had been, the singing got louder.

Not much. A little. The way a child sings a little louder when she thinks someone might be listening.

Genny, I said.

On the glass beside me, eleven light-years away, my sister went very still.

"Yes," she said. Out loud.

She can hear you. Through me. Through Dory. Through Mother. I swallowed. You wanted to tell her.

Genny didn't say anything for a long moment.

Then she put her other hand flat on the glass. Both hands. With Father's silver-lined fingers spread wide.

And she listened.

The way the queen taught her. The way she'd listened to the paving stone, and the slivers, and the Tharn, and the iron of Brock's back at the bottom of the river. Listened first. To where the young queen was. What she was. What she'd been trying to become, all this time, in the cold.

And then she said it.

Not in words. Genny didn't have words for queens. Nobody did. She said it the way Dory said things. With her whole self. Through the net. Down eleven light-years and round the far side of a moon, to the child singing in the cold.

He was my father.

He asked you every day. Why must I climb. He didn't know who you were. He didn't know what you were. He just knew someone was there.

He didn't stop asking because you did anything wrong.

He stopped because he died.

The singing stopped.

For a long moment, nothing.

Then something came back down the net. Not singing. Small. Very small. So faint I almost didn't feel it.

A question.

Not who. Not there you are.

The young queen behind the moon had heard a man ask her the same question every day, for years, and never understood it. And then he'd stopped. And she'd sat in the cold for thirty years and turned it over and over, the way the Tharn had turned over the thought of its mother for a year in the hold. Trying to understand. Trying to find the answer.

She'd found one.

Why must I climb?

And the young queen behind the moon answered my father's question.

You do not, she said. You ask.

Genny took her hands off the glass.

She sat back on her heels on the red glass at the edge of our plain, with the silver lines on her arms very bright and her face doing the thing it did, crumpling, and then not putting it back. Not this time. Just crumpling. All the way.

"You ask," she said. Out loud. Through her tears. "That's it. That's what the queen said. Listen first. Ask the stone. Ask." She put her face in her hands. "He was so close. He was so close, Lucas. He was asking her, and she didn't know how to answer, and all she had to tell him was ask."

I put my arm round her.

She let me.

"He'd have laughed," she said into my shoulder. "He'd have laughed so much."

"I know," I said.

"He'd have written it in the notebook. Underlined twice."

"I know."

Garnet floated down off the air beside Pell and landed on the glass and put her arms round Genny from the other side. She didn't say anything. For once in her life, Garnet didn't say anything at all.

Mother closed the hole.

Not alone. With me. Through the net, the way we'd opened the handlers' shells at the north end of the ridge. She held. I changed.

She held the torn edges of the finger. Every fold. Every bent and ripped piece of grey, thirty years old, the way she held three bowls and the flour and the eggs. Exactly. Not pulling. Not pushing. Holding them where they were.

And I reached through her and read them.

Every fold. Where it had been before it tore. What shape the finger had been, before a young woman on the northern front reached up into the bombardment and ripped it open because she couldn't think of anything else to do.

I didn't change it back to what it had been.

That was the Sorn's shape. A finger. A housing. A thing to hold a young queen in the dark.

I listened.

And then I asked the young queen inside it what she wanted it to be.

She wanted to be warm.

That was all. Through the net. Through Mother and me and Genny and Dory in her sleep. Not a shape. Not a door. Just warm. After thirty years of the cold coming in through the hole, she wanted it to stop.

So I closed the hole.

Not the way it had been. Not folded shut. Grown shut. The way the queens grew the walls of the quiet room, every face turned a little away from every other, so that nothing outside could get in. Not the cold. Not the cutting. Not anything.

The second kind of door.

The kind that keeps something safe inside.

When it was finished, I felt her settle. The way the young settle in the hollow when their queen comes close. The way Dory settles on Risa's chest.

And then, very faintly, through the closed grey of the finger, she started to sing again.

Not to keep warm.

Just to sing.

The first queen came down.

All of our Hand. Three fingers and a palm. Down out of the black sky over the far side of the moon until the palm was just above the finger. Gently. The way she'd set the knuckle down on our plain, so gently the glass didn't crack.

She didn't touch it.

She didn't have to.

I felt her reach. Not with the Hand. With her. From the bottom of ten thousand folds, through the grey of her own housing, through the grey of the finger, to the young queen inside it.

There you are, said the first queen.

I'd never heard her say it before. It was Dory's. She'd learned it from the hello, the way she'd learned thank you.

There you are, said the young queen.

They took the finger with them.

The first queen held it in her palm. The way you'd hold an egg. Gently. Exactly. The second Hand beside her, with its hundred young in its wrist, close enough that the two queens could hear each other without the hello.

Far Station watched them go.

The rigs were down. The lights were on. A transport was coming from the dome to take the crew home, Voss had said, and nobody would be charged, and most of them hadn't known.

One of them, the young voice from the channel, said one more thing as the Hands turned away from the moon.

Chancellor. What was she singing? At night. When we heard it.

Voss was quiet for a long moment. Through the seed. Through everything.

I don't know, she said. I think she was asking for someone to come.

Did someone?

Yes, said Voss. Eventually.

They left that evening.

Both Hands. Our Hand with the families and the finger in its palm. The second Hand with its young, and its holds, and ten thousand Hesk who'd climbed up out of the mud and the ash and into its palm on their own six legs, one at a time, because Rory Calder had knelt on the ice and held out his hand.

Okafor had decided.

We don't leave anyone in irons, she'd said, through Mother. And we don't leave anyone on a battlefield who doesn't want to be there. A pause. Ask the old one if she's got room.

The old one had room.

There is deep country under the eastern ranges, she'd said. Empty since before I was held. The stone there is old and patient. The Tharn are going north. The Hesk may go east. A pause. They were builders, the watchers say.

They were, said Marlo, through the net.

Then they may build, said the old one.

Mother was the last to leave the stair.

I felt her stand at the top of it. In the palm of our Hand. Looking down at the dome as the Hand rose. At the old battlefield. At Ines Tarrow's ridge, and the ice, and the river that had come back out of the dark. At four million people under glass, looking up.

At a small figure on the black ash, by the rail tunnel mouth, in a plain grey coat, very straight, with one hand lifted.

Voss.

She'd come out to see them go. On her own. No guards.

Mother lifted her hand back.

And then the Hand rose, and the dome got smaller, and the old battlefield got smaller, and Earth got smaller, a small blue world under glass, and then it was a light among other lights, and then it was gone.

Lucas, said Mother.

I'm here.

How long?

I don't know, I said. She's never gone anywhere she wanted to go before. Now she's going home.

Home, said Mother. Very quietly. As if she were trying the word out.

Then, after a long time:

Tell Dory I'm coming.

I looked over my shoulder. At Risa, on the glass behind me, with her cheek on top of Dory's head. At Dory, asleep, still holding the net. Still holding all of it.

"She knows," I said.

Days 809–810. Behind the moon.

The Kethri tell their names only to each other. Next morning Sesh told me hers through Dot: the one who fell asked for grey to the tips like her mother's, and would want the one who made her wings to know what to call her. A long low click rising and falling away like wind over a ridge. I can't say it. You are not meant to say it. You are meant to know it.

Ten thousand Hesk still lying on the ash and the mud, collars quiet, slivers still round every neck. They don't know they're allowed to get up. The first queen can't tell them; they don't know her voice; they're afraid of every voice now. I asked Dory if she could wait with them. She turned out along the net and put herself against every one, not checking, there, like the old one on her terrace. All day. In Earth's afternoon the first sliver said there you are and drew its threads back.

Rory saw it first: one at the foot of the ridge, half sunk, lifting its head, its collar empty. A sound like wind across a jar. He knelt on the ice and held out an empty palm, no fire, the way you hold out a hand to a strange dog or a frightened horse or a child. It pulled itself out of the mud one leg at a time and put its jaw against his palm. Maura: oh, love. A thousand standing by dark, every one by dawn. When the last collar came loose Dory yawned with her whole face and slept on Risa's chest, still holding the net. Risa: she's never been tired like this, not even the morning she held the thread for Mother. Ten thousand. She's allowed.

Genny had been waiting all day and all night with her hand on the glass. Now it's the moon.

Okafor: both Hands, behind the moon. The second queen asked to come: the handlers sent her to guard the finger and the cutting; she sat and listened to the young one singing in the cold and could not go, only carry the voice and hear her own young cry. The first queen: she is my youngest. They put her in the finger because she was small, and sent it to your mother's world, and your mother tore it open. My daughter.

Through Mother, Jessa, and Luna's notebook: the dome falling away, ten thousand Hesk looking up, the moon, round to the far side. Far Station: grey modules, cranes, cutting rigs on steel arms. The finger half sunk in the dust, the size of a house, a jagged hole torn outward, thirty years old. Mother's. Scars of cutting everywhere, thousands, each a collar or band or seed or tool. Under it, faint singing. Mother had never seen it from outside. She was under it on the northern front and tore it because she couldn't think of anything else. "I did that. She's been cold thirty years because of me." There was nothing to say.

Far Station, frightened: identify. Voss through the seed Okafor gave back to her for this; say it the way you said it on the screens; badly; yes. Stop cutting. Put the rigs down. Come home. Nobody charged; most of you didn't know; I signed for every piece; that's on me. The young voice: we hear something at night, we thought it was the machinery. It isn't. It's a child. The rigs stopped and the singing got a little louder, the way a child sings when she thinks someone might be listening.

Genny put both hands flat on the glass, Father's silver-lined fingers wide, and listened first, then said it with her whole self down eleven light-years and round a moon: He was my father. He asked you every day. He didn't know who you were. He didn't stop because you did anything wrong. He stopped because he died. The singing stopped. Then a small question came back. Thirty years of turning it over like the Tharn turned over its mother. Why must I climb? You do not. You ask.

Genny's face crumpled and she didn't put it back: listen first, ask the stone, ask. He was so close; all she had to tell him was ask. He'd have laughed so much. He'd have underlined it twice. Garnet landed and held her from the other side and for once said nothing.

Mother held every torn fold exactly; I read them through her. I didn't put back the Sorn's shape, a housing to hold a young queen in the dark. I asked her what she wanted. Warm. So I grew the hole shut like the quiet room's walls, every face turned from every other: the second kind of door, the kind that keeps something safe inside. She settled, and sang again, not to keep warm, just to sing.

The first queen lowered our whole Hand over the finger without touching it and reached through the grey: There you are. Dory's words, learned from the hello. There you are, said her daughter. She carried the finger away in her palm like an egg, the second Hand close beside so the two queens could hear each other.

The young voice: what was she singing at night? Voss: I think she was asking for someone to come. Did someone? Yes. Eventually.

That evening both Hands left: ours with the families and the finger; the second with its hundred young, its unlooked-at holds, and ten thousand Hesk who climbed into its palm on their own six legs because Rory knelt on the ice. Okafor: we don't leave anyone in irons, or anyone on a battlefield who doesn't want to be there. Ask the old one if she's got room. Deep country under the eastern ranges, empty since before she was held; the Tharn go north, the Hesk may go east. They were builders. Then they may build.

Mother last on the stair. Voss alone on the ash by the tunnel mouth in her grey coat, one hand lifted. Mother lifted hers. Earth a light among lights, then gone. How long? I don't know; she's never gone anywhere she wanted before. Now she's going home. Home, Mother said, trying it out. Tell Dory I'm coming. She knows.