Chapter 282 Many Worlds

Chapter 281: Many Worlds

Okafor called the council the morning after the wedding.

Not in the map room. Not in our kitchen. She called it on the red glass at the edge of the plain, where we stood every dawn, because she said a council about the queens ought to be held where the queens could hear it.

So they could.

Our queen at the garden wall, at her full height, with her head turned toward the glass. The old one on her thread from the mountain. The first queen in the Hand on the plain, with her daughter in the finger cradled in her palm. The second queen beside her. The spine-queen far overhead. And the youngest of the Kethri, small and pale and feathered, on Sesh's shoulder at the edge of the glass, with the other Kethri round her.

And people.

Okafor at the front, with her slate. Holt beside her, standing, with his arms folded. The General. Mother, with Dory on her hip, because Dory wasn't going to be anywhere else. Me. Luna with her notebook, because Okafor said somebody had to write it down and Luna wrote things down better than anyone. Sera and Risa. Genny and Garnet. Crane, a little way off, on his knees on the glass the way he always sat now. The Overseer at the mouth of the meeting passage, not close, holding its bread.

"I've fought two wars," said Okafor. "One on Earth and one on a plain eleven light-years from it. I've won both. I don't know what I was fighting in either of them."

Nobody said anything.

"I'd like to know," said Okafor. "Before the next one."

She looked up at the Hand on the plain.

"Tell me what the Sorn are."

The first queen told it.

Slowly. Every word right. In the words she'd learned from the hello, and from Dory, and from listening to us for longer now than she'd been held on Avalon. Some things she didn't have words for, and Juno helped, and Dory helped, and sometimes the old one on the mountain added something, slow and heavy, like a stone set down beside another stone.

It took most of the morning.

I'll set down what I can.

The Sorn were very old.

Older than the first queen, who was older than north. Older than anything she'd ever heard sing. When the first Hand was built round her, a very long time ago, the Sorn had already been building Hands for longer than she could imagine.

They do not make anything, said the first queen. They take.

They had no queens of their own. That was the thing she said most carefully. They had never had queens. They had come from somewhere that had none, a long way off, so long ago that even the Sorn had forgotten where, and they had found that other worlds did.

And they had found what queens could do.

A queen carries, said the first queen. Her brood. Her young. Her voice. Everything that is hers, she carries, the way the boy's friend carries a note. A pause. The Sorn learned to make her carry theirs.

They'd been doing it ever since.

World after world. Hand after Hand. Always at war. Never at peace with anyone, because peace meant stopping, and the Sorn had never once stopped. They came down over a world in a Hand, and they found its queens, and they held them, and they pushed the voice through them into their broods. And the broods turned on whoever else lived there. And when it was over, the Sorn cut the queens, and made collars, and put the collars on the young, and took them away in the fingers of the Hand to the next world.

To do it again.

Every collar is a world, said the first queen. Every sliver is a queen who sang once. Every one of the held in my fingers was taken from somewhere that was theirs.

Okafor didn't say anything for a long time.

Then: "How many worlds?"

The first queen was quiet.

I do not have a number, she said. I have carried them to more than I can count. And I am only one Hand.

"There were seven queens on Sesh's world," said Genny.

Everyone looked at her.

She was sitting on the glass beside Garnet, very straight, with her hands in her lap and the square silver lines on her arms bright in the morning. She'd been listening the whole time. The way she listened to stone.

"Seven," said Genny. "Sesh said. Very old. And the broods were small and quick and had feathers." She looked at the youngest queen on Sesh's shoulder. "And the youngest queen has feathers."

"Yes," I said.

"Our queen doesn't have feathers. She has plates." Genny looked at the garden wall. "The old one has plates. The first queen—" She stopped. "I don't know what the first queen has. I've only felt her."

I have no shape you would know, said the first queen. I am very old. I have been in the Hand a long time.

"But you had one once," said Genny. "Before the Hand."

A long pause.

Yes, said the first queen.

"Was it like ours?"

No.

"Was it like the youngest queen's?"

No.

Genny frowned. The small fierce frown, exactly like Father's when a page of chemistry didn't come out the way he'd expected.

"Then why are they all different?" she said. "If they're all queens. If the silver's all the same."

The old one answered that.

Slowly. Down her thread from the mountain, heavy as stone, the way she'd answered every question I'd ever asked her about what the silver was.

The silver is the same, she said. Everywhere. In every queen on every world. In you, girl, now. In your brother. In the child on your mother's hip.

But the silver listens.

Genny went very still.

When the silver comes to a world, said the old one, it does not make a queen at once. It listens first. To the stone. To the water. To the wind. To what lives there already, and what it eats, and how it moves, and what it is afraid of. A pause. And then it grows a queen who can live there. Who fits.

On this world, the stone is deep and the glass is red and the sun is hot. So the silver grew us plates. To keep the heat off. To hold the deep up.

On the tall ones' world, there were forests, very high, and wind always moving through them. So the silver grew feathers. So the queens could live in the wind, high in the trees, where the broods were.

It is the same silver. It listened to different worlds.

Genny didn't say anything.

She looked down at her own hands. At the square silver lines running from her shoulders to her fingertips, like a page of chemistry. At Garnet's arms beside her, covered in small wobbly silver drawings. At my arms. At Risa's, and Sera's, and Luna's.

"It listened to us," she said. Very quietly.

Yes, said the old one. It always does.

"Then the first queen," said Luna slowly. Writing. "Before the Hand. She'd have grown to fit wherever she came from."

Yes, said the old one.

Luna looked up. At the Hand on the plain.

"You said she was like the bottom of the sea," she said to me. "When you found her. At the bottom of ten thousand folds. You said she looked like rock that had been pressed for a million years."

"Yes."

"Then that's where she's from," said Luna. "The bottom of a sea. Somewhere very deep, where the pressure's so heavy nothing else could live." She looked back at her notebook. "The silver listened to the deep. And grew her for it."

The first queen was quiet for a very long time.

Then she said, very slowly:

Yes. There was a sea. It was very dark. It was very heavy. My young lived in the vents, where the warm came up. A pause. I had forgotten. Nobody had asked.

After that, it was Garnet who asked.

Of course it was. Garnet asked everything. She'd been sitting very still on the glass beside Genny for most of the morning, which was a very long time for Garnet, and now she couldn't.

"What did the others look like?" she said. "The queens. All of them. On all the worlds. If they were all different."

Okafor looked at her.

Garnet looked back. She didn't know you weren't supposed to interrupt Okafor at a council. Nobody had told her. Nobody was going to.

"I'd like to draw them," said Garnet. "All of them. So somebody remembers."

Okafor didn't say anything for a moment.

Then she put her slate down.

"So would I," she said.

The holds of the second Hand were the next thing.

The second queen asked. Through the first queen, in the old tongue, slowly. Her fingers were full. They had been full when she came round the moon, and nobody had looked in them yet. There'd been the battlefield, and the Hesk, and the moon, and the crossing. Nobody had had time.

She says the held in her fingers are very frightened, said the first queen. She says they heard the battle. They heard the Hesk lie down. They heard the moon. They do not know what any of it means. A pause. She says she would like them to know.

So we went in.

Not everyone. Okafor's list. Me. Dory, on Mother's hip, because Dory wouldn't go anywhere without Mother now and Mother wasn't going to let her go into a Hand without her. Genny, to ask. Garnet, to see. Toby, because Okafor said bring Marsh, there'll be things that only answer to sound. Hana and her father, because Okafor said some of them won't be from anywhere dry. And Rory, because the Hesk had asked for him.

Not asked. They didn't have words we knew. But when the second queen opened the palm of her Hand on the plain, ten thousand Hesk who'd been lying in the sun with their jaws on the ground all got up at once, and turned toward the palm, and then turned toward the city, toward Rory's house on the edge of the square.

And waited.

"They want me to come," said Rory. He'd come out onto his porch. He was looking at them, all ten thousand, standing very still on the red glass. "Don't they."

"I think so," I said.

Rory looked at them for a long time.

"I held my hand out to one of them," he said. "On the ridge. I didn't know what else to do." He rubbed his face. "Maura says I've adopted ten thousand beetles."

"Have you?"

"Apparently," said Rory, and went to get his coat.

The first finger of the second Hand was full of things I'd never seen.

Not like the first queen's holds. Those had been Tharn and Mirri and the tall ones the light bends round, things we'd learned to know. These were new. All of them.

Long dark shapes, coiled in tanks of water gone stale and thick, translucent, like jellyfish the size of a man, with lights moving slowly inside them. Ulu, Marlo said afterward, when the light-benders told him; he'd come with us at the last minute, on Toby's back, because he said the watchers would want to talk. They come from a world that's all sea. The tanks are drying out. The Sorn never cared if they lived, as long as there were enough.

Things in cages hung from the roof of the hold, small and quick and many-legged, with no eyes at all, that went still when Toby walked in and turned toward him all at once. Karst, said Marlo. Cave world. They see by sound. They heard him coming before he was through the door.

Things packed in sand. Glassy, angular, half buried, with edges that caught the light from Dot's hand. Sef. A desert. They don't move much. They don't need to.

And more. And more. Rows of them. All with collars.

All with slivers in them.

All of them waiting, in the dark, to be put down somewhere and told what to do.

We started with the Hesk.

Not because they were the most frightened. Because they were the ones already free, standing out on the red glass with their jaws lifted toward the palm. And because the second queen said, through the first, that their queen's slivers were in her holds.

All of them.

The Hesk have one queen, said the second queen. Had. The Sorn cut her into ten thousand pieces. One for every collar. When the young were freed on the battlefield, the collars came loose, and the pieces stayed in them, and the young carried the collars back into my palm in their jaws. A pause. They did not know what else to do. They could not leave her.

They'd carried them all the way.

Ten thousand empty collars. Ten thousand pieces of their queen. Through the crossing. Onto Avalon. Lying in the sun on the red glass with the collars held in their jaws, every one of them, the whole time.

Rory hadn't known. Nobody had. They'd looked like they were just resting their heads on the ground.

They'd been holding on to her.

It went the way the Mirri had gone.

That was what I'd expected, and it was. Ten thousand slivers of one queen, all waking together when Dory waited with them, all drawing back together, all wanting the same thing.

To be one again.

Only there was more to it this time. Because Genny asked them where they wanted to go, and they said together, and so she held out her hands the way she had for the Mirri, and the pieces came out of ten thousand collars in ten thousand jaws all over the red glass, like grey sparks rising, and flowed toward her across the plain—

And didn't fit.

Genny's hands were too small. Ten thousand pieces was too many for two cupped palms. They came to her and swirled round her in a cloud, round and round, and couldn't settle.

"Lucas," said Genny. Not frightened. Concentrating. "They need something bigger to come home to."

The queens sang her back.

All of them. The way they'd sung the youngest queen back in our hollow. Our queen and the old one and the first and the second and the spine-queen far overhead. And this time the youngest of the Kethri too, small and pale on Sesh's shoulder, who'd been sung back herself not long ago and knew exactly what it was like.

And as they sang, they gave. A little each. Their own silver. Remembering for her the parts she'd forgotten.

And the cloud of ten thousand pieces round Genny began to remember.

Not all at once. Slowly. The way the Hesk did everything. One piece turning toward another. Then a few more. Then many. Pulling together in the air over the red glass, over the heads of ten thousand Hesk standing very still with empty collars in their jaws.

A shape.

Now, said the old one.

I listened.

To the shape. To every piece of it. To what she'd been, before the Sorn came to her world. How big. What colour. How she'd moved. What the silver had listened to, on the Hesk world, and grown her to fit.

And I grew her.

She was enormous.

Bigger than our queen. Nearly as big as the old one on the mountain. Six legs, like her young, but thick as pillars. A shell over her back that wasn't smooth like theirs. It was built. Ridged and layered and patterned, like a wall made of a thousand smaller shells set one into another, each one a different shade of dark, from black to deep red to a brown like old wood. And between the layers, very faint, a warm orange light, the way a kiln glows through the cracks in its door.

Her head was low and broad, with a jaw like theirs. And on top of it, curving back over her shell, a crest. Not horn. Not plate. Woven. Thin strips of something hard and dark, plaited together the way you'd plait reeds into a basket.

I didn't understand what I was looking at.

Then Marlo did.

"They build with the shells of their dead," he said. Very quietly. From Toby's back. "The watchers said. So the dead are always part of something." He was looking at her shell. At the thousand smaller shells set into it. "The silver listened to that. It grew her a shell made of shells."

The Hesk queen stood on the red glass under the palm of the second Hand and looked at her young.

Ten thousand of them. Standing very still. With empty collars in their jaws.

And one by one, all over the plain, they put the collars down.

Rory was standing at the edge of the glass.

He hadn't moved. He'd come out in his coat because the Hesk wanted him there, and he'd stood at the edge of the glass the whole time, and watched ten thousand pieces of a queen become a queen.

She turned her head toward him.

Slowly. The whole broad head with its woven crest. Toward the big broad man in the coat, standing very still, with fire in him that he was holding so as not to frighten anything.

The Hesk who'd come up the ridge first, the one who'd put its jaw in his palm, was standing beside him. It had been beside him all morning. It was always beside him, now.

The queen looked at it.

Then at Rory.

Then she lowered her head, very slowly, until her great jaw was resting on the red glass at his feet.

The way her young had rested theirs. On the battlefield. On the plain in the sun. In his palm.

Rory looked down at her for a long time.

Then he knelt. And put his hand on her jaw. The way he'd held it out on the ridge, palm up, empty, no fire in it. Just a hand.

Maura, on the porch behind us, made the sound she'd made on the ridge.

Oh, love.

The others took longer.

All that day and into the night. The Ulu first, because their tanks were drying. Hana and her father stood at the edge of the hold and brought water up out of the deep under the plain, Kwame's river turning it, and filled every tank fresh and cold and moving. And the long dark translucent shapes in them uncoiled, very slowly, and the lights inside them brightened.

Their queen came back in the water.

That was the only way she could. The pieces of her were in their collars, and when Dory waited and the slivers drew back their threads, they wanted to go somewhere wet. So Hana made a pool. On the red glass under the palm. Deep. Clear. Cold. Kwame kept it moving, slow, the way a river moves.

And the queens sang.

And I grew her in the water.

She was like nothing I'd ever seen. Clear. Almost invisible. A great slow bell of something like glass, wider than our kitchen, drifting in Hana's pool, with long trailing threads below it like the strands of our queen's silver, only seen. Every one of them lit from inside with a slow cold blue light. When she moved, the light moved down them in waves.

Her world is all water, said the old one, very quietly. All of it. There is no stone. There is no land. There is only deep, and light that comes down from very far above.

The silver listened. It grew her to drift.

The Karst queen came back in the dark.

Toby asked for it. He said she'd want it. He said her young had gone still and turned toward him the moment he walked into the hold, because they saw by sound, and every sound in that hold had been the Sorn's for longer than they could remember.

So we went back down into the first finger of the second Hand with no light at all. Not Dot's hand. Not anything. Toby with his fiddle, and me, and Genny, and Dory on Mother's hip.

And Toby played.

Not a tune. A single note, very low, the way he played the first note of the old song at dawn. Into the dark. And the Karst in their cages heard it, and the note came back off every wall of the hold, every fold of the grey, every cage, and I understood that they could see it. All of it. The whole hold. Laid out in echoes, the way I'd seen it with Dot's light.

Their queen came back the same way.

When the queens had sung and I'd grown her, I couldn't see her. It was dark. But Toby played a note, and it came back off her, and I heard her shape. Long and low and many-legged, like her young. Covered in fine hairs, thousands of them, every one turned a little different way. Catching sound. And at the front, where a face would be, nothing. No eyes. Just a long smooth curve, very pale, that Toby said afterward felt like the inside of a shell when you hold it to your ear.

Her world has no light, said the old one. Not ever. It is all caves. The silver grew her to listen.

Toby played her a note.

And she sang it back.

And every Karst in every cage in the first finger of the second Hand turned toward her in the dark.

Garnet drew them all.

That night, on our porch, by lamplight, with her drawing board on her knees and her silver hair sticking out everywhere and Mother sitting beside her with Dory asleep across her lap. She'd been in every hold. She'd seen every queen come back. And she drew them, one after another, very fast, with her tongue between her teeth.

The Hesk queen with her shell of shells and her woven crest.

The Ulu queen, a bell of clear glass with blue light running down her threads.

The Karst queen, which Garnet couldn't see, so she drew her the way she drew the light-benders. The outside first. The shape the sound made. Then the middle.

The youngest of the Kethri, with her copper-tipped feathers.

Our queen, with her plates.

The first queen, who had no shape anyone would know any more. Garnet drew her anyway. As a sea. Dark and heavy and very deep, with warm light coming up from vents at the bottom, and something enormous and patient lying among them.

When she'd finished, she held the board up.

Not to me. To Mother.

Mother looked at it for a long time.

"They're all different," she said.

"The silver listens," said Garnet. "The old one said. It listens to the world first. And then it makes a queen who fits." She looked at the drawing. "Like it made Genny's lines. And my drawings. And Lucas's eyes."

Mother looked at her own arms. At the markings that had come up on them, the day I finished her through the hello. I hadn't seen them properly until she came down off the palm. Not lines. Not drawings. Small exact shapes, like the bowls and the flour and the eggs, every one held in place.

"I suppose it listened to me too," she said.

"Course it did," said Garnet. "It listens to everyone."

Okafor came up the porch steps after dark.

She didn't sit down. She stood at the top of the steps with her slate in one hand and the other behind her back, and looked at Garnet's drawing board on Mother's knee.

For a long time.

"How many worlds?" she said. Not to anyone. To the drawing.

Nobody answered. Nobody could.

"Seven queens on the Kethri world," said Okafor. "One on the Hesk world, cut into ten thousand. One on the Mirri world, cut into three thousand. How many on the Ulu world? The Karst? The Sef?" She looked at the dark beyond the porch. At the plain, where two Hands lay with their fingers folded and their holds still half full. "And how many Hands? The first queen doesn't have a number. She's only one."

"Ma'am," said Luna. From the porch rail. Very quietly.

Okafor looked at her.

"It isn't about Avalon," said Luna. "Is it."

"No," said Okafor.

"It isn't about Earth."

"No."

"It's about all of them."

Okafor didn't say anything for a long moment.

Then she looked at me.

"Dask."

"Ma'am."

"Your father asked the one behind the moon why he had to climb. For the rest of his life. And she told your sister: you don't. You ask."

"Yes."

"Then here's what I'm asking." Okafor put her slate down on the porch rail. "Every collar. On every world. In every Hand." She looked out at the plain. "Can it be done?"

I didn't answer straight away.

I looked at Garnet's drawing. At six queens who hadn't existed this morning. At the Hesk queen with her shell of shells, standing under the second Hand with ten thousand of her young lying round her with their jaws on the glass. At the Ulu queen in Hana's pool. At the Karst queen, singing back Toby's note in the dark.

At Dory, asleep on my mother's lap.

"I don't know," I said.

"Good," said Okafor. "Neither do I." She picked up her slate. "Then that's what we're fighting."

Days 824–826. Many worlds.

Okafor called the council on the red glass so the queens could hear: ours at the wall, the old one, the first and second in the Hands, the spine-queen, the youngest of the Kethri on Sesh's shoulder. I've fought two wars and won both and don't know what I was fighting in either. Tell me what the Sorn are.

The first queen, all morning, with Juno and Dory and the old one helping. Older than her, who is older than north. They make nothing; they take. They never had queens; they came from somewhere with none so long ago they've forgotten where, found worlds that did, and learned to make queens carry their voice. World after world, Hand after Hand, always at war, never stopping. Hold the queens, push the voice into the broods, turn them on whoever else lives there; then cut the queens, make collars, take the young to the next world. Every collar is a world. Every sliver a queen who sang once. How many worlds? More than she can count, and she is only one Hand.

Genny: seven queens on Sesh's world with feathered broods, and the youngest queen has feathers; ours has plates. If the silver's all the same, why are they different? The old one: the silver is the same everywhere, in every queen, in you now, in the child on your mother's hip. But it listens first: stone, water, wind, what lives there, what it eats and fears. Then it grows a queen who fits. Here deep stone, red glass, hot sun: plates. On the tall ones' world, high forests, always wind: feathers. Same silver, different worlds. Genny looked at her lines, Garnet's drawings, our arms: it listened to us. It always does.

Luna: then the first queen grew for wherever she came from; you said she looked like the bottom of the sea. The first queen, after a long quiet: there was a sea, very dark, very heavy; my young lived in the vents where the warm came up. I had forgotten. Nobody had asked.

Garnet: what did they all look like? I'd like to draw them so somebody remembers. Okafor put her slate down: so would I.

The second queen asked us to look in her holds; the held heard the battle and the moon and don't know what it means. Okafor's list: me, Dory on Mother's hip, Genny, Garnet, Toby for things that answer to sound, Hana and Kwame for things not from anywhere dry, Rory because ten thousand Hesk stood up and turned toward his house and waited. Maura says I've adopted ten thousand beetles. Apparently.

New things. Ulu: man-sized and translucent like jellyfish, lights inside, in tanks gone stale; an all-sea world; the Sorn never cared if they lived. Karst: small, many-legged, eyeless, caged, turning all at once toward Toby; a cave world; they see by sound. Sef: glassy, angular, in sand, from a desert. More. All collared.

The Hesk first. One queen, cut into ten thousand, a piece in every collar. When they were freed the pieces stayed in the collars and the young carried them back into the palm in their jaws, all through the crossing, lying in the sun holding on. Rory didn't know. Nobody did. Dory waited, they woke and drew back together and wanted to be one, rose from ten thousand jaws like grey sparks and swirled round Genny: too many for her hands. They need something bigger to come home to.

All the queens sang and gave, the youngest of the Kethri too, who knows exactly what it's like, and the cloud pulled together into a shape. I listened and grew her. Nearly as big as the old one, six legs thick as pillars, a shell built of a thousand smaller shells, black to deep red to old-wood brown, a kiln-glow between the layers, a crest plaited like reeds. Marlo: they build with the shells of their dead so the dead are always part of something; the silver listened and grew her a shell made of shells. Her young put down the collars one by one. She turned to Rory, the first Hesk beside him as always, and laid her great jaw on the glass at his feet. He knelt and put his empty hand on it. Maura: oh, love.

All day and night. Hana and Kwame brought his river up from under the plain and filled the Ulu tanks cold and moving; the long shapes uncoiled and brightened. Hana made a deep clear pool on the glass and the queens sang and I grew her in it: a great slow bell of clear glass wider than our kitchen, trailing threads lit cold blue, light moving down them when she moves. A world all water, no land, only deep and light from far above. The silver grew her to drift.

The Karst queen in the dark, no light at all. Toby played one low note and it came off every wall and cage and the Karst saw it all in echoes. When I grew her I couldn't see her, only hear her shape from his note: long, low, many-legged, covered in fine hairs each turned a different way to catch sound, and no face, a smooth pale curve like the inside of a shell held to your ear. A cave world with no light ever. The silver grew her to listen. Toby played her a note; she sang it back; every Karst in every cage turned toward her.

Garnet drew them all on the porch by lamplight: shell of shells; bell of glass; the Karst drawn outside-first from the shape the sound made; the youngest of the Kethri; our queen; the first queen as a dark heavy sea with warm vents and something enormous and patient among them. She held it up to Mother: the silver listens, then makes a queen who fits, like Genny's lines and my drawings and Lucas's eyes. Mother looked at her own markings, small exact shapes like bowls and flour and eggs, each held in place. I suppose it listened to me too. Course it did. It listens to everyone.

Okafor at the top of the steps after dark, looking at the drawing. Seven on the Kethri world, one in ten thousand, one in three thousand. How many on the Ulu world, the Karst, the Sef? How many Hands? Luna: it isn't about Avalon, or Earth; it's about all of them. Dask. Your father asked why he had to climb and she told your sister you ask. Here's what I'm asking. Every collar, on every world, in every Hand. Can it be done? I don't know. Good. Neither do I. Then that's what we're fighting.