Chapter 287 Along the Dark

Okafor sent for Keir on the third morning after she sat down.

Not me. Keir.

I only knew because I was in the workshop when the message came. Wren brought it, with her book under her arm, and stood in the doorway and said, "Major Okafor's compliments, and would Keir and Aster come to the map room when they've a moment," in exactly the voice Okafor would have used, which meant Wren had been told to say it exactly.

Keir looked up from the charging rack.

He'd been at the rack all week. He and Aster, and Dot when she wasn't on the porch, and Vell sometimes, rewiring the stores so the shelters would have light in them if the city's went out. Ordinary light. From ordinary power. That anybody could fix with ordinary tools, if I was somewhere else.

That was what Keir did. It was what he'd always done, since the first winter, since the morning he'd come to breakfast with a drawing on the back of a packing sheet and said I'd like to design one we can fly without you.

"Me?" he said.

"And Aster," said Wren.

Aster's lamps went from pale green to a slightly paler green, which Liam said was how you could tell she was alarmed.

"This unit," said Aster, "has not been sent for before."

"There's a first time," said Wren, "for everything," and went away up the street to write it down.

I went with them. Nobody told me not to.

Okafor was at the map table with Holt and Luna and the General. Luna had a drawing in front of her. Not of the canyon, or the plain, or the shelters, or anything on Avalon. Of a shape I'd never seen.

Long. Narrow at the front. Broad at the back. Like a seed, or a spearhead, or a fish.

Okafor didn't waste time.

"Keir," she said. "You built the transport."

"With Aster," said Keir. "And Lucas."

"The transport flies without Dask."

"That was the point."

"I know it was," said Okafor. "That's why you're here." She put her finger on Luna's drawing. "I want one of those. Bigger. Much bigger. One that can carry three squads, and their queens if they want to come, and a city's worth of whoever we find. One that can stand up to a Hand." She looked at him. "And one that can get there."

Keir looked at the drawing for a long time.

"Get where?" he said.

"Anywhere there's a collar," said Okafor.

Nobody said anything.

"You want a warship," said Keir at last.

"I want a ship," said Okafor. "That can fight if it has to. Most of what it'll do isn't fighting. It's opening holds. Carrying people out. Bringing queens home." She tapped the drawing. "But the first queen says there are more Hands than this world has stones. And sooner or later one of them is going to be in the way."

Keir didn't answer straight away.

He went round the end of the table and looked at the drawing from the other side. Then from above. He put one finger on the broad back end of it and followed the line forward to the point, slowly, the way he'd followed the cable routes in the transport before he'd let me close the skin.

"Who flies it?" he said.

"You do," said Okafor. "To start with. And then whoever you teach."

"Not Lucas?"

"Not Lucas," said Okafor. "Dask goes where he's needed. Some days he'll be on it. Some days he'll be on the other side of the plain holding a mountain up. I want a ship that doesn't stop when he gets off it." She looked at me. "No offence, Dask."

"None taken, ma'am."

"That's the transport rule," said Keir slowly. "The transport rule, but for a—" He looked at the drawing. "For that."

"Yes," said Okafor.

Keir looked at Aster.

Aster had come round the table too. She was standing at the very edge of it, on her narrow limbs, with her lamps turned down very low, looking at the drawing the way she looked at a door she hadn't checked yet.

"There is a problem," said Aster.

"Go on," said Okafor.

"It is eleven light-years to the human world," said Aster. "The Hand crossed it in eight days. This unit has checked the figures. There is no engine this unit knows of, or Keir knows of, or Dot has records of, that does that." A pause. "There is no engine that does that. There are only queens."

Of course there were.

I'd known it. We'd all known it, the way you know a thing you've never looked straight at. Two Hands had crossed eleven light-years in eight days, there and back. Nobody had built an engine. Nobody had fed a fire. The first queen had simply gone. Out of the sky over the plain. And eight days later, Luna's voice had come through the hello from over the dome on Earth, very surprised, very close.

"The queens carry the Hands," said Aster. "This unit does not know how. Nobody has asked." Her lamps went very slightly brighter. "This unit would like to ask. Before Keir draws anything."

Keir nodded slowly.

"She's right," he said. "I can build you something that flies. I can build you something that holds air, and carries people, and comes down slow when anyone has sense." He put his hand flat on the drawing. "But I can't build you something that gets eleven light-years in eight days. Nobody can. Unless somebody tells us how it's done."

Okafor looked at me.

"Dask," she said. "Ask them."

We asked at dusk.

All of us. On the red glass, with the hello open, so every queen could hear. Keir and Aster at the front, because it was their question. Okafor behind them. Me. Juno, to help with the words. Dory, on Mother's hip, because Dory was how the thread got to the far ones, and because Mother had said she'd like to hear the answer too.

Aster asked.

Very carefully. In her own words, which were very exact. Dot carried them, through Dory, through our queen, to the first queen at the bottom of ten thousand folds on the plain.

"This unit wishes to know," said Aster, "how a queen crosses eleven light-years in eight days. This unit has no engine that does it. This unit would like to understand. So that it can build something that does not need a queen to be held."

The first queen was quiet for a long time.

Nobody has asked me that, she said at last.

Not in all the time I have carried. The Sorn did not ask. They knew what I did. They did not need to know how. A pause. I will try to say it. It is not easy. You do not have words for it. Juno will help.

It took her most of the evening.

I'll set it down the way Juno put it together afterward, at our kitchen table, with Keir writing every word on the back of a packing sheet and Aster checking it twice.

The silver was the same everywhere.

The old one had told Genny that. In every queen on every world. In you, girl, now. And it was true. But it was more than the same. It was one. The way Dory's net was one thing, joined path to path. The silver in a queen on Avalon and the silver in a queen on a world nobody here had ever seen weren't two things that looked alike.

They were the same thing. In two places.

That is why the hello reaches, said the first queen. Eleven of your light-years. In a breath. It does not go across the dark. It goes along the silver. And the silver is already there. On both sides. It was always there.

So a queen does not cross the dark.

She sings. Toward silver, far away. Another queen. Or a piece of one, in a collar. Or the silver in a person who has it. She sings until the silver there answers. And when it answers—

The first queen stopped. Juno had her eyes shut, frowning, listening very hard.

"She says," said Juno slowly, "it's like a rope. Between two people on either side of a river. If you pull, you don't cross the river. You come to the other side. The river's still there. You just didn't have to swim it."

It is like that, said the first queen. Only the rope is the silver. And the river is the dark. And the queen pulls. And the Hand comes with her, because she is inside it, and cannot help it coming.

"Why eight days?" said Keir. "If it's a breath for the hello. Why not a breath for the Hand?"

Because a Hand is heavy, said the first queen. And I was alone. And very tired. And the Sorn made me carry it a little at a time, because they did not trust me to carry it all at once. A pause. They were right not to. If I had carried it all at once, I would have carried it somewhere they did not want.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

"So it needs a queen," said Keir at last. Very quietly. He'd stopped writing. "There's no getting round that. It needs a queen to sing."

Yes, said the first queen.

"And silver at the other end. To sing toward."

Yes. There is silver everywhere the Sorn have been. In every collar. In every queen they hold. In every world they took. A pause. There is no shortage of places to go.

"And the heavier the ship, the longer it takes."

Yes. And the more queens sing, the lighter it is.

Keir looked up.

"More queens?"

I carried the Hand alone, said the first queen. The Sorn made sure of that. One queen, in chains, at the bottom of everything, with nobody singing with her. A pause. But you do not have one queen. You have all of us. And when one of us sings toward somewhere far, the rest of us can sing with her. Along the hello. From here.

Then it is not heavy at all.

Keir sat down on the red glass.

He didn't mean to, I think. His knees just went, the way Mother's had in the kitchen the morning of the wedding. He sat there with the packing sheet on his knees and his pencil in his hand and stared at the first queen's Hand on the plain.

"A breath," he said.

Perhaps, said the first queen. I do not know. Nobody has tried. Nobody has ever sung a ship across the dark that wanted to go.

Aster hadn't moved.

She'd been standing at the very front of the glass the whole time, with her lamps turned low, listening. Now her lamps came up. Slowly. Pale green, and then brighter, and then a colour I'd never seen them go, almost white.

"There is still a problem," said Aster.

Everyone looked at her.

"A queen must be in the ship," said Aster. "To sing. To pull. The ship comes with her because she is inside it." Her narrow limbs had gone very still. "That is what a Hand is. A ship with a queen inside it, who cannot leave."

Nobody said anything.

"This unit was in a locked room," said Aster. "At the relay basin. With its power removed. It could not leave. It could hear people outside. It could not ask them to open the door." A pause. "This unit will not build a Hand."

Keir put his pencil down.

He didn't say anything. He just reached out and put his hand on Aster's nearest limb, the way he did sometimes when she'd gone quiet in the workshop. And left it there.

Okafor didn't say anything either.

It was the first queen who answered.

No, she said. Very slowly. You will not build a Hand.

A Hand is a cage built round a queen. With the door on the outside. So that the queen can be carried wherever the ones who hold the door want to go. A pause. You are not going to build a cage.

You are going to build a ship. With a room in it for a queen. And the door on the inside. So that she can leave whenever she likes.

Aster's lamps flickered.

"The door on the inside," she said.

Yes, said the first queen. The way your doors are. The ones you made for the transport. The ones the boy made in the rock. A plate a child can press. A pause. A queen who can leave whenever she likes is not carrying a ship.

She is choosing to go somewhere. And taking her friends.

"Who?" said Okafor.

She said it very quietly. To the glass. To all of them.

"Which queen? Who'd want to?" She looked out at the plain. At the Hands, and the Sef spire, and the Nivi mountain, and the pool where the Ulu queen drifted. "You've all been carried. Every one of you. For longer than any of us have been alive. Why would any of you want to go anywhere again?"

The hello was very quiet.

Then something small moved at the edge of the glass.

On Sesh's shoulder. Pale and feathered, with copper at the tips. The youngest of the Kethri. Who'd been sung back in our hollow, from her own silver in a collar, not very long ago. Who'd pecked a hole in the Overseer's bread. Who'd sat on Sesh's shoulder at every council since, very small, very quiet, listening to everything.

She hopped down.

Onto the red glass. Two small precise steps. And stood there, in front of all of us, about the size of one of Priya's hens.

And sang.

Juno had to put it into words. The youngest queen didn't have many yet.

"She says she wants to go home," said Juno.

Sesh had gone very still behind her.

"She says there were seven queens on her world. She's one. And there were pieces of the others in the collars the Kethri who came here used to wear. And there were more Kethri, when the Sorn came. Many more. On her world. In the high forests where the wind always moves." Juno's voice had gone very soft. "She says some of them are still there. She can feel them. Very far. Very faint. Along the silver. Still in collars. Still being made to fight for somebody who never asked."

The youngest queen fluffed her feathers.

"She says she'd like to go and ask them," said Juno, "if they want to come home too."

Nobody moved.

"And she says," said Juno, "she's small. She knows she's small. She knows she can't carry a ship on her own. She was only just sung back." A pause. "But she says she's not on her own. Is she."

Then the hello filled.

All of them. All at once. Our queen at the garden wall. The old one on her mountain. The first and second in their Hands. The spine-queen far overhead. The Hesk queen, very far now, on the eastern ranges, but there, slow and warm as a kiln. The Ulu in her pool. The Karst in the dark. The Sef on the rim, sending her beam once across the glass, onto the small feathered queen standing in front of us, so that she glowed. The Nivi on her mountain, every branch ringing.

And small, in the corner of our garden, water under moss.

No, said our queen. She is not on her own.

Okafor looked at the youngest queen for a long time.

Then she did something I'd never seen her do.

She knelt. On the red glass. In her plain dark coat. Level with a queen the size of a hen.

"Ma'am," said Okafor. "I'd be honoured."

The youngest queen looked at her. Then hopped forward, two precise steps. And pecked her once on the back of the hand. Very gently. A small neat mark.

Sesh made the long falling sound that Dot said meant quiet.

Only it didn't sound like quiet. Not this time. It sounded like yes.

The second question was what to build it out of.

Keir asked that at breakfast the next morning, at our kitchen table, with his packing sheet in front of him covered in Juno's words and his own notes and Aster's corrections in a very small square hand.

"It has to be strong," he said. "Stronger than anything we've got. If it's going to stand up to a Hand, it has to be made of what a Hand's made of." He looked at me. "There's only one thing on Avalon that's made of that."

The grey.

"The doors used up the collars," I said. "All ten thousand. There isn't any more grey on Avalon. Not loose. Not that isn't somebody's."

"The Hands," said Keir.

"The Hands are theirs," said Luna sharply. "The first queen and the second. You can't take a piece of somebody's—"

She stopped.

Because the first queen had heard. Of course she had. Dory was on Mother's lap at the end of the table, and Dory heard everything at breakfast, and sent it all to the wall.

And the first queen was laughing.

I'd never heard a queen laugh before.

It was very slow. Very deep. It came up along the hello like a bubble coming up from the bottom of a very dark sea.

The Hand is not mine, said the first queen.

It was built round me. It is not me. It is the Sorn's. It was a cage, and then it was a ship, and now it is a very big empty thing lying on a plain that I cannot get out of because I have been in it so long I have forgotten the way. A pause. My smallest finger is empty. The knuckle is empty. The others hold only the ones who still choose to sleep in them, and they can move. The palm is empty except for my daughter, who would like to come out too, one day, when she is brave.

Take what is empty.

Luna stared at the wall. At the window. At the plain beyond it, where the first queen's Hand lay with its three fingers folded.

And the second queen says, said the first queen, take hers too. She says she does not need a fourth finger with a pocket at the end where she kept somebody she did not know was there. She says she would like never to see it again.

So we took what was empty.

Not all at once. Not that week. Keir wouldn't let anyone hurry. He drew it first. He drew it for six days. On packing sheets, and then on the big sheets from the schoolroom, and then on the floor of the workshop in chalk when the sheets weren't big enough, with Aster checking every line and Dot checking Aster and Vell checking Dot, and Gareth coming in every afternoon to say the seats were too close together.

He was often right.

It wasn't like the transport. It wasn't like anything I'd ever built.

Long. Narrow at the front, broad at the back, like Luna's drawing, like a seed or a fish. Three decks. The top one for people. The middle one for squads, with room for each of the nine to stand together and find each other in the dark. The bottom one for whatever came out of the holds of whatever Hand we opened. Wide. Warm. With water that moved, and breathing walls like the shelters, and soft-walled rooms where the sound didn't carry.

Engines. Ordinary ones. Keir's. For flying in the sky and coming down slow. For moving round a Hand when we got there. For getting everyone home if everything else failed.

And at the very heart of it, in the middle of the middle deck, where it was safest, a room.

Small. Round. With a perch in it, grown out of the grey, at the height of Sesh's shoulder. And a window that looked out at the front, so she could see where she was going. And a door.

The door on the inside.

Aster designed that door herself. She wouldn't let anyone else touch it. A plate of grey at the height of a queen the size of a hen, so she could press it with her beak. And another at the height of a kit's smallest limb. And another at the height of a child's hand.

Nothing on the outside at all.

"Nobody opens this door," said Aster, "except the one inside."

Keir wrote that on the drawing. In big letters. Across the middle of the room.

On the seventh day, I started.

On the plain, in the first queen's shadow, with everyone watching. People always came to watch when something large was becoming something else. I'd stopped being embarrassed by that. Mostly.

I went to the first queen's Hand and put my hand on the outside of her smallest finger and listened.

The grey remembered being a Hand. It remembered being folded round holds full of things in collars. It remembered the weight of the Tharn and the Mirri and the light-benders. It remembered being carried across the dark a little at a time by a queen in chains who wasn't allowed to carry it all at once.

I asked it to forget the chains.

Not the carrying. The carrying was good. The carrying was what we needed. I asked it to remember being carried, and forget being made to be.

And I unfolded it.

It took all day.

Keir stood beside me with the drawings and said not yet whenever I started to close something he wanted to reach. Aster rolled along the growing keel on her narrow limbs, checking every joint, every seam, every place where one system spoke to another, so that no single failure could silence everything. Dot followed Aster. Gareth followed Dot and said the seats were too close together.

Liam brought tea. It didn't freeze this time. He looked disappointed.

At dusk, the keel lay on the plain. Long and grey and narrow at the front, broad at the back, the length of the square. Not a ship yet. The bones of one.

And the first queen's smallest finger was gone.

She didn't seem to miss it. I asked her. She said it felt like taking off a ring that had been too tight for a very long time.

Garnet came out at dark, with her drawing board.

She sat on the red glass beside the keel and drew it, the way she'd drawn the queens. Very fast, with her tongue between her teeth. Then she held it up. Not to me. To Keir.

He looked at it for a long time.

"It needs a name," said Garnet.

"It's not finished," said Keir.

"Things don't have to be finished to have names," said Garnet. "Dory wasn't finished when she got hers. Nor was I."

Keir didn't say anything.

"What would you call it?" said Garnet.

Keir looked at the keel. At the room at the heart of it, which wasn't a room yet, only a curve of grey where a room would be, with a perch and a window and a door on the inside.

"I don't know," he said. "Something that's not a Hand."

Garnet thought about this with great seriousness.

"I'll think," she said. "I'm good at names. I named the Overseer's bread."

"What did you name the Overseer's bread?"

"Bread," said Garnet, and went home.

The youngest queen came out last.

After everyone had gone. When it was just me on the plain, sitting with my back against the keel, too tired to stand, watching the Nivi mountain go white under the stars.

She came alone. Without Sesh. Hopping across the red glass in the dark, small and pale, with the copper on her feathers catching the starlight. And she went past me, and up the side of the keel, where the grey was still rough. Hop. Hop. Hop. To the curve in the middle where the room would be.

And sat there.

On the place where the perch would go. Looking forward. Toward the front of a ship that wasn't built yet. Toward the dark.

She didn't sing. She didn't need to. I could feel her, through the hello, very faint.

Not afraid.

Asking.

Somewhere very far away, past north, past anywhere Juno had ever felt, past where the first queen had first heard the others, something small and faint and feathered, in a collar, in the high forests where the wind always moves, heard her ask.

And didn't answer. Not yet. It couldn't.

But it listened.

Days 850–856. Along the dark.

Okafor sent for Keir and Aster, not me. Wren delivered it in Okafor's exact voice. Aster's lamps went paler: this unit has not been sent for before. There's a first time for everything. Keir had been at the charging racks all week, ordinary light for the shelters from ordinary power anyone can fix; the transport rule since the packing sheet: one we can fly without you.

Luna's drawing at the map table: long, narrow front, broad back, like a seed or a fish. Okafor: one that carries three squads and their queens and a city's worth of whoever we find, stands up to a Hand, and gets there. Where? Anywhere there's a collar. You want a warship. I want a ship that can fight; mostly it'll open holds and bring queens home. Who flies it? You, then whoever you teach. Not Dask; he goes where he's needed; it can't stop when he gets off. The transport rule, for that. Aster: a problem. Eleven light-years in eight days; no engine does it; there are only queens. Nobody has asked how. Ask before Keir draws anything.

Dusk on the glass, the hello open. Aster asked so that it could build something that does not need a queen to be held. The first queen: nobody has asked me; the Sorn knew what I did and didn't need how. Juno and Keir's packing sheet. The silver isn't alike everywhere; it's one thing in many places. That's why the hello reaches in a breath: not across the dark, along the silver, already on both sides. A queen sings toward far silver, a queen, a collar, a person, until it answers. Juno: a rope across a river; you don't swim it, you come to the other side. Eight days because a Hand is heavy, she was alone and tired, and the Sorn made her carry a little at a time; if she'd carried it all at once she'd have taken it somewhere they didn't want.

It needs a queen to sing and silver at the far end, and there is silver everywhere the Sorn have been, no shortage of places to go. The heavier, the longer; the more queens sing, the lighter. I carried alone in chains; you have all of us, and the rest can sing with her along the hello from here. Then it is not heavy at all. Keir sat down. A breath? Perhaps; nobody has ever sung a ship across the dark that wanted to go.

Aster's lamps went almost white. A queen must be inside; the ship comes because she is. That is what a Hand is: a ship with a queen who cannot leave. This unit was in a locked room with its power removed and could hear people outside and could not ask them to open the door. This unit will not build a Hand. Keir's hand on her limb. The first queen: a Hand is a cage with the door outside. You'll build a ship with a room for a queen and the door inside, like your transport doors, like the boy's doors in the rock, a plate a child can press. A queen who can leave whenever she likes is not carrying a ship. She is choosing to go somewhere and taking her friends.

Okafor: who? You've all been carried longer than we've been alive; why would any of you go anywhere again? The youngest of the Kethri hopped down off Sesh's shoulder, the size of one of Priya's hens. Juno: she wants to go home. Seven queens on her world; pieces of the others in the Kethri collars here; more Kethri still there in the high forests, still collared, still fighting for somebody who never asked. She'd like to go and ask if they want to come home. She knows she's small and only just sung back. But she's not on her own, is she. The hello filled: every queen, the Hesk far on the eastern ranges, the Sef's beam lighting her up, the Nivi ringing, water under moss. No, said our queen. Okafor knelt on the glass level with her: ma'am, I'd be honoured. A small neat peck on the back of her hand. Sesh's falling sound, meaning yes.

What to build it from: only grey stands up to a Hand; the collars went into the doors. Luna: the Hands are theirs, you can't. And the first queen laughed, slow and deep like a bubble from the bottom of a dark sea. The Hand isn't mine. It was built round me; a cage, then a ship, now a big empty thing I've forgotten the way out of. The smallest finger and the knuckle are empty, and the others only hold those who choose to sleep there; my daughter in the palm will come out one day when she's brave. Take what is empty. The second queen: take my fourth finger with the pocket where I kept somebody I didn't know was there; I'd like never to see it again.

Keir drew six days, sheets then the workshop floor in chalk, Aster checking every line, Dot checking Aster, Vell checking Dot, Gareth: the seats are too close together. Often right. Three decks: people on top; squads in the middle, room for each nine to find each other in the dark; the bottom for whatever comes out of whatever hold, warm, moving water, breathing walls, soft rooms. Keir's ordinary engines for the sky, for moving round a Hand, for getting everyone home if all else fails. At the heart, safest, a small round room, a perch at Sesh's shoulder height, a window forward so she can see where she's going. Aster's door: plates at a hen-sized queen's beak, a kit's smallest limb, a child's hand. Nothing outside. Nobody opens this door except the one inside. Keir wrote it in big letters across the room.

Seventh day, on the plain in the first queen's shadow. The grey of her smallest finger remembered holds and weight and being carried in chains a little at a time. I asked it to remember being carried and forget being made to be, and unfolded it. All day: Keir saying not yet, Aster checking every seam so no one failure silences everything, Dot after her, Gareth after Dot. Liam's tea didn't freeze; he looked disappointed. At dusk the keel lay on the plain the length of the square. The bones of a ship. The finger gone; she said it felt like taking off a ring that's been too tight a long time.

Garnet drew it and held it up to Keir. It needs a name. It isn't finished. Things don't have to be finished to have names; Dory wasn't, nor was I. Something that's not a Hand. I'll think; I'm good at names; I named the Overseer's bread. What? Bread.

Last, the youngest queen alone in the dark, up the rough side of the keel, hop, hop, hop, to the curve where the room will be, sitting where the perch will go, facing forward toward the dark. Not singing. Not afraid. Asking. Somewhere past north, in the high forests where the wind always moves, something small and feathered in a collar heard her ask. It couldn't answer yet. But it listened.