Chapter 465 Where I’m From

We tried to enjoy the thirty days.

Mother said we should. On the morning after Ister, at the count, after the names. She stood on the red glass with the pot and looked at all of us, the whole family, with our figures and our comics and our bags, and said:

“Twenty-four days left. Nobody’s going to spend them waiting.”

So we didn’t.

It was Sorrel who asked.

At dinner. At the long table, which isn’t long enough, which Rory still hasn’t done anything about. She was sitting next to Dory, the way she always sits, with her green ears very dark from the day before, and Lucas Dask with light-up eyes standing on the table beside her plate.

“Where are you from?” said Sorrel.

To me.

The table went quiet.

“Here,” I said. “Avalon.”

“No,” said Sorrel. “Before. In the comic. Before the first page. There’s a picture.” She pointed at volume nine, which Elin had brought to dinner and was reading under the table. “A house. With a field. And a man made of sticks.”

I looked at Elin.

Elin held it up. The inside of the front cover. Somebody on Ister had drawn it, very small, from Imre Oshan’s book. A house at the edge of a field. Wheat in rows. A filter-machine on the roof. And in the middle of the field, a scarecrow, with a scarf round its neck.

“That’s Earth,” I said.

“Is it real?” said Fen. Very quietly. He doesn’t say much.

“Yes.”

“Is it still there?”

I looked at Mother.

Mother was very still at the end of the table. With her cup in both hands.

“Yes,” said Mother. “It’s still there.”

The children all started asking at once then. Teo with his four arms folded. Linnet with her scales gone very pale. Kesh, Lio, Oona. Thessaly and Vessa. Corin, who’d never once asked in his life, because Corin doesn’t ask things, he hums and then finds out.

What was it like. Was it big. Was there a queen. Why did you leave. Why didn’t you go back. Is the man made of sticks still there.

I answered what I could.

Then Kesh, under her cloud, said:

“Can we see it?”

I didn’t answer straight away.

Nobody’s been back. Not since the last crossing. Not since Garnet went and fetched Mother’s scarf, years ago, to tie on the scarecrow I built again at the end of our street, with Father’s coat on it. Earth’s empty. The domes run on timers with nobody under the glass. The fields outside them are what they’ve always been. Poison and dust.

I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. I hadn’t let myself.

“Do you want to?” I said.

Every child at the table said yes.

Then Mother put her cup down.

“So do I,” said Mother.

I went to the queens.

There’s a rope between Avalon and Earth. There always has been, since the crossings. A rope of song, very long, very thin now, the way a path goes thin across a field when nobody’s walked it for a while. The queens who brought everyone home sang it. The ships with queens in their hearts went along it, singing, with every deck full.

The marsh queen sang it the most. In the Long Legs. She’s tall and grey-blue on her long legs, and very quiet, and stands on one leg when she’s waiting. She took more people home from Earth than any ship except the Ground.

I found her on the north field. Standing on one leg at the foot of the Long Legs, in the evening light, with her eyes half shut.

“Would you mind,” I said, “singing us along the rope? To Earth? Just for a visit.”

She opened her eyes. Very slowly.

She looked at me for a long time.

Yes, said the marsh queen. I would like that. I have not sung that rope since the last crossing. She put her other leg down. It will want singing. Ropes forget, if nobody walks them.

The heavy queen heard.

Of course she did. She hears everything said on the north field; she’s under it half the time, and when she isn’t, she’s in the Ground, and the Ground sits on the north field like a hill.

I will come, said the heavy queen. Through the ground. To both of us. I carried the most of them. I would like to see the place they came from with nobody frightened in it.

And the Drenn queen came.

I didn’t ask her. Nobody did. She came across the north field from the Scarecrow at dusk, very tall and glossy, blue-black, on her four arms, with her blades folded flat along them. She doesn’t come out of her ship much. She doesn’t say much. They tried to make her a keeper once, a long time ago, and she was too much of her world and fought them every day, so they made her a queen instead and pushed the voice through her into her own young.

She’s been free of the voice longer now than she was under it. She still doesn’t talk much.

She stopped in front of me. And folded her four arms. And bowed level with me, the way she bowed to Anja once.

I was there, said the Drenn queen. At the end. When the voice was pushed through me. My young were sent to that world. Her many eyes looked at me. I have never seen it. Only through them. Only what the voice wanted them to see.

“You want to go.”

I want to see it, said the Drenn queen, without the voice.

So three queens.

The marsh queen in the Long Legs. The heavy queen in the Ground. The Drenn queen in the Scarecrow.

And then everyone else.

I asked at the count. The next morning. After the names, after the cups. I stood on the step beside Wren and asked everyone on the red glass who’d come from Earth if they’d like to go and see it again. Just for a few days. Not to stay.

I thought maybe fifty.

Wren counted.

She stopped counting at four thousand and told Konrad to start a new sheet.

I’ll write who. Not all of them. There were too many. But the ones from the porch.

Mother. In her long brown coat, which Nan Vey pressed specially.

Maura and Rory. Maura said she wanted to see the fair under the dome where Rory won her the red ribbon she still has. Rory said the fair was long gone. Maura said she knew that; she wanted to see where it had been.

Okafor. Who said she’d come for one day and stayed for all of them.

Crane. Who’d been in the house once, years ago. Who remembered the scarecrow.

Bell, with her stick. Halloway, with her bag, in case.

Miss Pell. Who’d been the last of us to see it.

Konrad and Ingrid. From Ward Nine. Ingrid said she wanted to see the ward with the lights on, just once, before anyone else lived in it.

My sisters. Genny with small Holt on her hip, shouting at the ship. Garnet with Pell and her board, to draw it.

And every one of my wives, because they’d never seen it, and Aune, because Aune said if she was going to be Ister-famous for marrying me, she’d better know where I’d started.

And Dory.

And every child.

We went on the third morning.

Three ships. Every deck full. Like the crossings, only the other way. Everyone very quiet on the north field in the dawn, standing at the foot of the ramps with bags and children and Nan Vey pressing collars as fast as she could.

The marsh queen sang first.

I’d forgotten what it sounded like.

The rope. When a queen sings it. It’s not a sound you hear, exactly; it’s a sound you feel go out from under your feet and away, very long, very thin, into the dark, toward a place you can’t see. And then the ship goes along it. Not fast. Not slow. The way a boat goes along a river when someone very strong is rowing.

The heavy queen sang under her. Low. The way she always sings. Holding the bottom of the song up so it didn’t sag.

And then the Drenn queen sang.

I’d never heard her sing. I don’t think anyone on Avalon had. She has a high voice. Very high, very clear, very strange, like wind across the top of a bottle. She sang over the other two. Along the top of the rope. And the rope, which had gone thin, the way paths do, went bright.

It took a day and a night.

The children slept in the fingers of the Ground the way the children from Earth slept on the last crossing. Teo sat up all night by a window with his four arms folded, watching the dark. Fen slept on Hana. Sorrel slept on Dory. Linnet sat with Luna, both of them awake, not saying anything.

Mother sat in the forward deck of the Long Legs with her cup. All night. Looking out.

I sat with her.

“I don’t know what I’ll feel,” said Mother. Very late.

“I know.”

“I was happy there,” said Mother. “That’s the strange thing. Everyone thinks it must have been terrible. Outside the dome. In the poison. With the filter on the roof and your father mending it every week.” She turned her cup round. “It was the happiest I’ve ever been. Until now.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m frightened I’ll go back and it won’t have been,” said Mother. “Happy. I’m frightened I’ll look at it and see what everyone else sees.”

We came out over Earth at dawn.

I’ll describe it once.

It was grey.

From the sky. The whole of the side of it we’d lived on. The north. Not the grey of the making; the grey of a thing that’s been dead a long time and forgotten it was ever alive. Grey land, going on, very flat. Grey seas, low and still and thick. Grey sky over it, the air brown at the edges, the way it’s always been, the way it was when I was a boy and thought all skies were that colour.

And the domes.

Little points of light on the grey. Very small, very far apart. Each one lit. All of them on timers, the way Crane set them before the last crossing, so the gardens inside wouldn’t die. Nobody under the glass. Just the lights coming on and going off on their own, every day, for nobody.

Nobody on the ships said anything.

Then Mother stood up.

In the forward deck. With her cup. She looked down at it, all of it, the grey and the domes and the brown air, and then she put the cup down on the sill, very carefully, the way you put down something you’re about to need both hands for.

“There,” said Mother.

She was pointing.

Eighty miles out from the central dome. Very small. In the middle of all that grey.

Green.

A thumbprint of it. One field. With a house at the edge.

We came down beside it.

All three ships. On the grey, just past the edge of the field behind the house, where the green stopped. The marsh queen put the Long Legs down so gently the dust didn’t move. The heavy queen put the Ground down at the far edge like a hill. The Drenn queen put the Scarecrow down beside the house, very close, with her four fins folded, as if she wanted to look in at the windows.

I came down the ramp first. With Mother on my arm.

It was smaller than I remembered.

That’s what everyone says. It was true. The house Father built. Grey boards. A porch with one step. The windows dark. The door shut.

And the filter-machine on the roof. Turning.

After all these years. With nobody to mend it. The fans going round, slowly, the way they always did, keeping one field alive in the middle of half a world of grey.

The wheat had gone wild. Long, tangled, gold and green, past the rows Father planted. But it was there.

And in the middle of it, a man made of sticks.

Just sticks. No coat. No scarf. They’re on Avalon, at the end of our street, on the one I built again.

Mother stopped at the bottom of the ramp.

She didn’t move for a long time. She stood on the grey dust in her long brown coat, which Nan Vey had pressed, with her hand on my arm, and looked at the scarecrow. Bare sticks. Arms out. In the wild wheat.

“Garnet tied my scarf on him,” said Mother. Very quietly. “In her nightdress. She was four. She said he’d be cold.”

Garnet was behind us on the ramp. With Pell on her hip and her board under her arm.

She didn’t say anything. She put Pell down. And took off her own scarf. Green, Maura knitted it. And gave it to Pell.

Pell is three. She walked across the field with it, through the wild wheat, which was taller than her, very slowly, the way Mother walks. And stood in front of the scarecrow. And held the scarf up as high as she could reach.

Garnet came and lifted her. And Pell wound it round the sticks where his neck would be. Twice. Very carefully. With her tongue between her teeth.

“So he’s not cold,” said Pell.

I’m going to write what Mother said next, because it’s the thing I came all that way to hear.

She looked at the house. The grey boards. The porch with one step. The filter on the roof that Father mended every week. The kitchen window, dark.

“Oh,” said Mother.

And her face did something I’d never seen it do.

“It was,” said Mother. “It was happy. Look at it.”

We went in.

I’ll write it short. Because it was long. Everyone went in, a few at a time, all morning. My wives. My children. Okafor, who stood in the doorway for a long time and didn’t come in. Crane, who did, and sat down at the kitchen table, in the chair he’d sat in once, years ago, when he came to the house, and put his hands flat on the wood.

I went into the kitchen last.

The wall behind the stove was bare.

Just plaster. Pale, in the shape of a door, where something had been taken out and the rest left round it.

The children all looked at it. They’d come in expecting it. Imre Oshan’s book has a whole chapter on it.

“Where is it?” said Kesh.

“I took it,” I said. “The night before Genny and I left the field. I turned the plaster into glass and kept every stroke of the paint inside it, and we carried it to the city.” I looked at the pale shape on the wall. “It’s in the penthouse. On the sixtieth floor. Under the central dome. Where we left it, the last crossing. In the kitchen.”

“Can we see it?”

Mother looked at me.

“Yes,” said Mother. “I’d like to see it too.”

We went that afternoon. On the train Crane turned back on. Eighty miles to the central dome, empty, the gardens under the glass grown wild on their timers. The ring street. Thorne & Daughter, with its shutters down. Up sixty floors in a lift that still worked, to the penthouse, to the kitchen.

It was there.

A pane of glass the size of a door. Standing where we’d stood it, against the wall. With the afternoon light coming through it from the big windows and throwing the faded grey and blue and orange across the pale wood floor.

A hundred and eighteen boxes. Every one. Father’s letters, floating inside the glass, exactly where his brush had put them. Everything alive, in his small writing. Respect this one. And on uranium, No.

And across the noble gases, a dark smear, where Garnet once threw oatmeal at Genny and missed.

Garnet saw it and put her hand over her mouth.

“I was six,” said Garnet.

“You were seven,” said Genny. “And you meant to hit me.”

Dory stood in front of it for a long time.

She’d seen the one on Avalon. The one I painted from memory behind our stove, with Lio’s knot in the empty square at the end. She’d learned from that one. Every child in the house had.

She’d never seen this one.

“It’s his writing,” said Dory. Very quietly.

“Yes.”

“His hands.”

“Yes.”

She put her hand out. Flat. On the glass. On hydrogen. The way Mother puts her hand on a forehead.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. I could see her eyes, black, going down into the glass. Into the paint inside it. Into the marks his brush had made, nearly forty years ago, on a wall in a house at the edge of a field, for a boy of four who’d done something too big.

“Grandad,” said Dory.

Mother stood in the penthouse kitchen doorway. With all the children behind her. Sorrel. Fen. Linnet. Teo. Kesh and Lio and Oona. Corin and Tiri. Everyone.

“That’s where you learned it,” said Mother. To them. “All of you. Hydrogen and all the rest. Your father learned it from that. From his. When it was still a wall.”

Teo looked at the glass for a long time. With his four arms folded.

“Can we keep it?” said Teo.

I didn’t know what to say.

Mother did.

“Yes,” said Mother. “It’s coming home. It should have come years ago.” She put her fingertips on the glass, over carbon, where his brush had been. “He held his breath on the straight lines.”

She looked out of the big penthouse windows. At the grey, going on, all the way to the edge of the sky. And far off, very small, one green thumbprint.

“And that,” said Mother. “It’d like to be looked at too. By someone. Every day.” A pause. “Not like this.”

I carried the glass down sixty floors myself. Sigmund offered to lift it. I said no. Some things you carry.

It’s on Avalon now. In the kitchen of the house on the rise. In the window over the sink, where the morning light comes in, so the colours go across the floor at breakfast. Mother stops in front of it every morning on the way to the stove, and puts her fingertips on carbon.

The oatmeal’s still on the noble gases. Nobody will ever clean it.

That was later. On the porch of the old house that evening, Dory looked at me.

I looked at Dory.

She’d had the same thought. I could see it. She always has the same thought, a breath after me or a breath before.

“Dad,” said Dory.

“I know.”

“Could we?”

I went out onto the porch. The one step. Where Father used to sit in the evenings with his notebooks.

I looked at it. All of it. The grey field. The grey land going on, very flat, to the edge of the sky. The domes with their lights on for nobody. The brown air. The low thick seas. The whole of the half of the world we’d lived on. Dead so long it had forgotten.

I looked down into it.

With my eyes black. All the way. The way Father taught me on the kitchen wall. Every atom. Every square.

And I saw how it was held.

It wasn’t dead.

That’s what I saw. I want that written down, for anyone who ever thinks of Earth as dead. It wasn’t. It was held wrong. Every grain of the grey dust was something that had been soil once, with the poison bound into it so tight it couldn’t let go. Every drop of the thick seas was water, with the war still in it. The brown air was air, holding things it shouldn’t, that nobody had ever asked it to put down.

It was all still there. Under the grey. All of it. Waiting for someone to ask.

“Yes,” I said. “We could.”

I asked the heavy queen first. And the Drenn queen. And the marsh queen, standing on one leg at the foot of the Long Legs.

“Would you sing,” I said, “while we do it? So it knows it’s not alone?”

Earth has no queen, said the heavy queen. Not any more. Not one that would wake.

“I know.”

Then we will be its queens, said the heavy queen. For as long as it takes.

The Drenn queen unfolded her four arms. All the way. And stood very tall on the grey, with her blades out flat, catching the brown light.

My young were sent here to end it, she said. I would like to sing it back.

So they sang.

All three. From the field behind the house. The marsh queen high and thin. The heavy queen low, holding the bottom up. The Drenn queen over the top of both of them like wind across a bottle.

And Dory and I asked.

I’ll write it the way it was. Because Imre Oshan will want it right, and Mother will read it, and so will everyone who was standing in that field.

We started at the edge of the field.

Where Father’s green stopped and the grey began. The line he’d held with a filter on a roof, every day, for years, and that the filter had kept on holding without him. The ground just past it. The poison bound into every grain of the grey, very tight, for forty years.

I asked it to let go.

It didn’t want to, at first. It had held so long it didn’t remember how. Dory said it was like asking someone to open a fist they’d been clenching so long their fingers had set.

So we didn’t ask it to let go all at once. We asked one grain. And the next. And the next. The way Father taught me the wall. One square at a time.

And the first grain let go.

And it was soil.

Brown. Dark. Wet, a little. Soil, with nothing in it but what should be. Just past the last of Father’s wheat.

Garnet saw it first. She was standing at the edge of the field with Pell. She looked down.

“Lucas,” she said.

And then the next grain. And the next.

It went out from Father’s field like a ripple goes out on a pond.

Faster than I’ve ever done anything. Faster than the body over Root. Because it wasn’t fighting me. It wanted it. Every grain, once the one beside it had let go, let go too, the way one person putting down a heavy bag makes the next person in the line put theirs down.

Brown. Then dark. Then out past the field, out across the flat grey land, toward the dome and past it, going on to the edge of the sky. All of it. Turning.

And then green.

That was Dory.

She’d gone to the edge of the field. She’d knelt down in the new brown soil just past the wheat, beside Garnet and Pell, and put both her hands flat in it. And asked.

Not the soil. What was in it. What had been in it, forty years ago, before the war, before the poison, before Father built a filter on a roof. The seeds. They were still there. Under everything. Every one. Asleep the way the queen on the dead world was asleep, very deep, waiting for somebody to want them.

Dory wanted them.

And the land past Father’s field went green.

Grass first. Then wheat, gone wild, the way Father’s had, spreading out from his field in every direction as if it had been waiting forty years to be let out. So fast you could see it move, the way the Lenn’s grass moved in the wind. Gold at the tips by noon.

Mother sat down on the step.

We did the air next.

That was harder. Air’s big. Air’s everywhere. But Risa helped, and Hana. Risa called a wind. A big one, from the west, the way she calls storms at sea, and Hana breathed into it, and every breath of the brown air that came across the field on that wind, I asked to put down what it was holding.

It put it down. As dust. Very fine. On the new green.

And the dust was soil too, by the time it landed.

And the air behind it was clear.

The sky over the house went blue.

For the first time in my life. I’d never once seen it blue there. I thought all skies were brown when I was a boy. I didn’t know until Avalon.

Blue. Very pale at the edges. Very deep overhead. With clouds in it. White ones.

Sorrel looked up at it with her ears gone almost black.

“Oh,” said Sorrel. “It’s like home.”

Then the seas.

Luna did those. With me. She went out over the nearest one on her ice roads, very high, and put her hands down, and the water came up to her. All the thick still grey of it. And she asked the cold in it to move, the way she does, and the war in it went to the bottom and stayed there, and I asked it to be stone, and it was.

And the water above it was blue. And then it moved. Waves. Small ones. For the first time in forty years.

Fen stood on the shore with Hana and watched the waves come in for an hour. He’d never seen waves. He kept putting his hand in them and taking it out again.

“It keeps coming back,” said Fen.

“It does that,” said Hana.

It took six days.

The whole of the north. The half of the world we’d lived on. From the house to the sea, and across the sea, and on. Mountains, under the grey, that nobody had seen for forty years, coming up green. Rivers that had been dry beds running again. Forests, out of seeds Dory found asleep under everything, coming up so fast the Drenn queen had to stop singing for a moment, the first afternoon, because she’d never seen a tree before and wanted to look at one.

Sera warmed the ground where it was too cold to wake. Andraste cut the old dead things that wouldn’t let go, very gently, with Holdfast, the way Corin made it to. Aune flew the whole of it, every day, in her fighter, high, and came down every evening and told us where we’d missed. Hana breathed into every wind Risa called. Luna did the seas.

Everyone helped. Every one of the four thousand. Planting. Clearing. Carrying. The Standing who’d come, building, the way they build. Crane, going round the domes, one at a time, turning off the timers.

And every evening, at the turn, on the porch with one step, Mother lifted the house a finger’s width. Just for a moment.

Oona lifted the step.

Ingrid went to Ward Nine on the fourth day.

With Konrad. On the train that still ran on its timer between the domes, empty, every hour, for nobody. Crane turned it back on for them. They rode it on their own, the two of them, all the way to the old ward at the edge of the north dome, where Ingrid’s band came from after the Act.

She told me about it after. On the porch with one step.

“I wanted to see it with the lights on,” said Ingrid. “Just once.” She turned the ribbon on her wrist. “When I was there, they were always off. To save power. My band lived in the dark for years. I used to think if I ever saw it lit, I’d know it was over.”

“Was it?”

Ingrid didn’t answer straight away.

“Konrad turned every light on,” she said. “Every one. In every room. It took him an hour. He wouldn’t let me help.” She smiled. Very slightly. “And then we stood in the middle of it, in the light, and it was just a room. A very small room. With nothing in it.”

“And?”

“And I didn’t need to see it any more,” said Ingrid. “So we turned them off again, and came home.”

Konrad, on the step below her, with the sheet on his knee, didn’t look up. But he wrote something. Ingrid showed me later.

Ward Nine. Lights on. Then off. Nobody left inside.

Maura and Rory found where the fair had been.

Under the south dome. On the fifth day. There was nothing there. A flat place in the gardens, gone wild, with a fountain that didn’t run. Maura stood in the middle of it for a long time with the red ribbon in her hand. The one Rory won her when they were young, at a stall that wasn’t there any more.

Rory didn’t say anything. He went and looked at the fountain. And fixed it. Rory fixes things; it’s what he does. It took him the afternoon.

At dusk it ran again.

Maura tied the red ribbon round the spout. And left it there.

“So it’s got something,” said Maura. “When it starts again.”

On the sixth evening, we stopped.

Not because it was finished. It’s never finished. But because it didn’t need us any more. Dory said so. She put her hands flat on the soil in the field behind the house and listened for a long time and said: it’s got it now. It knows what it is again.

So we stopped.

I stood on the porch at dusk with Mother.

The field was gold. Father’s wheat, and all the wheat that had come out of it, all the way to the hills. The scarecrow in the middle with Pell’s green scarf, wound twice round his neck.

Past the field, green. All the way to the hills. And past the hills, the sea, very blue, catching the last of the sun.

Clear air. Clean air. You could see for miles.

“Your father,” said Mother.

“I know.”

“He’d have—” She stopped.

“I know.”

“He’d have painted it,” said Mother. “All of it. On a wall somewhere. So he’d remember.”

Dory came up the step behind us. With a pot of paint. Where she got it I don’t know; Ash, probably.

She went into the kitchen.

I heard her start at the top. Hydrogen. On the bare plaster behind the stove, in the pale door-shaped space where Father’s had been. From memory. The way I did ours. Very carefully. The way you’d put a path back across a field, so other people could find it.

All the children went in after her. Every one. With brushes.

Mother didn’t go in. She stayed on the porch with me. With her cup. Looking at the field.

“It’s a fresh start,” said Mother. “For it. Isn’t it.”

“Yes.”

“Will anyone come?”

“Maybe,” I said. “One day. When they’re ready. When the thirty days are done.” I looked at the domes, glass now, empty, the gardens going over the walls. “It’s here if they want it.”

Mother nodded.

“Then someone should leave the door open,” said Mother.

We left it open.

The door of the house Father built. On the morning of the seventh day. With a new table on the kitchen wall, every square, all the way to the end, in Dory’s hand and every child’s. And in the empty square at the end, where Lio drew a knot in ours, Lio drew one in this one too. In green.

And on the table, a cup. Full.

For whoever comes.

We came home along the rope on the eighth morning. The marsh queen sang it, and the heavy queen held the bottom up, and the Drenn queen sang over the top of both of them, higher and clearer than on the way out.

She’d seen a tree.

Okafor went to the slate when we came in. Under 30 days. Or war. She crossed out a number she’d been keeping in the corner, small, every morning, and wrote a new one.

16.

Then, under it, smaller:

Earth: green.

She stood and looked at that for a long time.

“Well,” said Mother. From the stove. “That’s one good thing on the slate.”

“It’s two,” said Okafor. She pointed at Before the light goes out and the number beside it. 900,412. “And that’s three.” She pointed at Wren’s Said the other thing. “Four.”

Mother poured her a cup.

“Keep counting,” said Mother.

Days 8919–8927. Where I’m From.

Mother: twenty-four days left; nobody’s going to spend them waiting. Sorrel: where are you from, before the first page? The picture inside volume nine: a house, a field, a man made of sticks. Is it still there? Mother: yes. Can we see it? So do I. The marsh queen: ropes forget if nobody walks them. The heavy queen: I’d like to see the place with nobody frightened in it. The Drenn queen, unasked: my young were sent there; I want to see it without the voice. Four thousand from Earth, a new sheet. The marsh queen high, the heavy queen holding up the bottom, the Drenn queen like wind across a bottle; the rope went bright. Mother all night: I was happy there; I’m frightened it won’t have been. Earth grey, the domes lit for nobody, and Mother: there; one green thumbprint, the filter still turning after all these years. Smaller than I remembered. The scarecrow bare, his coat and scarf on Avalon; Pell, three, wound Garnet’s green scarf round him twice: so he’s not cold. Oh. It was. It was happy. Look at it. Crane at the kitchen table, hands flat. The wall behind the stove bare where I took it. The penthouse on the sixtieth floor: the glass, everything alive, respect this one, no, and the oatmeal across the noble gases; I was six; you were seven and meant to hit me. Dory: his writing; Grandad. Teo: can we keep it? Mother: yes, it’s coming home; he held his breath on the straight lines. I carried it down sixty floors; it’s in the window over our sink now. And that; it’d like to be looked at too; not like this. Dory: could we? It wasn’t dead; it was held wrong; waiting for someone to ask. Earth has no queen; then we will be its queens. My young were sent to end it; I’d like to sing it back. One grain past the edge of Father’s field, and the next; Dory woke the seeds and the wheat went out of his field in every direction. Risa’s wind, Hana’s breath, the air put down what it held; blue for the first time in my life; Sorrel: it’s like home. Luna’s seas; Fen: it keeps coming back. Six days; the Drenn queen stopped to look at her first tree. It knows what it is again. Mother: he’d have painted it. Dory painted a new table on the bare plaster, every square, with all the children; Lio’s green knot in the last square. Someone should leave the door open. A full cup on the table, for whoever comes. Ingrid turned every light on in Ward Nine and then didn’t need to see it any more. Maura tied the red ribbon on the fountain Rory fixed. The Drenn queen sang higher on the way home; she’d seen a tree. Slate: 16; Earth: green. Mother: keep counting.