Piper at the gates of du.., p.7
Piper at the Gates of Dusk, page 7
“Oh, you can lie in your Noise,” Pop says. “Trust me.”
You’re not saying Wilf lied, though. And yes, Burly’s done things that aren’t great–
“The way he talked about my husband,” Jane says, eyes bright and angry. “That man should be drawn and quartered.”
“No, he shouldn’t,” Wilf says. “He’s just a man, like any other. Full o’ wisdom and foolishness like the rest of us. I was a mayor, tryin’ to do my best. I’m sure that’s what Burly’s doin’, too.”
And that, it seems, is the end of that discussion.
5
‘We sleep in Lee and Bessie Jaye’s guest room, in two little single beds they made for us when we were kids. Max is still not speaking to me much, so I don’t notice when he falls asleep. I just know I’m awake and listening with every bit of ears I’ve got for the screaming of any new gods coming out of the trees outside.
But all I can hear is the nightbirds singing to each other through the open window. Tick, tick, they say. I learned in a zoology module it’s because the T sound and the CK sound they learned from humans are best for an echo back from the little bugs they eat. All our nightbirds here use echolocation. That’s why there are none in the city. Too loud, too many metal shapes. The night sky over it is empty of everything but light and all the bugs nightbirds aren’t killing.
I know there are other animals out there, not least the rine we saw running from the god. But they’re quiet tonight. So quiet I can’t sleep after hearing the bustle of the city through my walls for the last week. I sit up and look out of the window and into the sky.
So many stars. So many you wouldn’t believe. All those suns out there. All those planets. Most of them just rocks or gas, I know, or too freezing or too boiling to have life. But not all of them. Professor Kilfoyle’s lessons give us all the science and all the numbers, and though there’s no one who can prove it, those numbers say there have to be more places like this one out there.
Of course, there’s Old World, where we came from, though even the second set of settlers have been here so long, more than half of us were born here. Older people don’t talk much about Old World, just that it was awful and polluted and violent and didn’t have much of a future, though even the ones who remember it first-hand were in cryo-sleep for the sixty-seven-year journey, so who even knows what’s left of it these days? Probably nothing anyone here would recognize.
But if there’s here and there’s Old World, there must be other places where some kind of plants grow and some kind of animals live and maybe some kind of people who talk to each other. Or things we can’t even imagine and that we’ll never know exist.
That’s the hard part, isn’t it? All those wonders out there. All that incredible stuff we’ll never see and never know enough to even guess at. How do people live like that? How do you live knowing that your world is the tiniest sliver of everything out there? That it was only an accident that made you born here? That out there, somewhere, might be some place where you fit in perfectly?
Max mutters in his sleep. Then he gets louder, and then he’s sitting up in his blankets with a short yell and blinking like he doesn’t know where he is.
It’s dark, so I grab my comm from the side of my bed. Bad dream? I type.
“Amazing guess,” he slurs. “No wonder you’re in upper school.”
All right, eff off then.
He takes a breath. “It was the Noise dream.”
Bad?
I hear him swallow in the dark. “So bad you can’t even believe it, Ben. Just … makes you feel worse than you ever thought you could.”
Is it really every night? I type. Why didn’t you ever say?
There’s only silence in the darkness at this.
Because if I don’t have them, I wouldn’t understand?
More silence, so I know it means I’m right.
I’m just left out of this, then?
“Be thankful,” he says. “You wouldn’t want this.”
And I think to myself, You don’t know what I want. But I don’t type it.
6
“We’re asking that all young people now keep a safe distance from the Spackle,” Burly says over another vid beamed directly to everyone in the city, which we’ve come back to after Mom pointed out she wasn’t having me skip school. So here I sit in class, our lesson with Professor Kilfoyle interrupted by another of Burly’s announcements. “And only deal with them when absolutely necessary.”
“So they’ve proven the bacteria thing is dangerous?” Arrow asks. “Should I be worried? I deal with the Land all the time.”
“Should probably stop then,” Taper says.
“It’s how I make half of our family’s trades,” Arrow says.
“It’s just a guideline for now,” Professor Kilfoyle says, reluctantly. “Though I gather there is some proof now that there really is an infection that’s contagious to humans.”
There’s no proof it causes the dreams, I type in my comm as he turns back to the board. Or any harm to us at all.
“That we know of yet,” Taper says, frowning at me.
“If we’re already having the dreams,” Tara says, “then what’s the point of being careful now?”
Which is … actually a good point.
Yeah, I type, but people are already talking over me.
“Yeah,” Arrow says, “has anyone who’s not been in contact with the Spackle–”
Land, I type, but the moment’s already passed.
“–stopped having the dreams?” Arrow finishes.
The class all look at each other. No one says they’re not having them. I don’t type anything and let them believe what they want–
Even though I realize I might be proof that the infection doesn’t cause the dreams.
Or maybe just proof I’m different enough that I’m immune.
“Let’s get back to our lessons,” Professor Kilfoyle says.
“Think they’ll close the Spackle Market?” a girl called Gillian says from the back row.
“Adults aren’t being told to stay away,” Tara says.
“Even though they should,” Taper says.
“Yeah, but if people think there’s this infection,” Arrow says.
Then they’ll all stay away, I type, but Gillian says, “Adults are going to stay away, too, and not risk it,” before I finish.
I type really fast, like I said, but even that isn’t as fast as speech. There are hardly any people in the city who speak sign language, basically just me, my family, and one older deaf couple who refused hearing implants and who are the ones who taught me and my folks to sign.
“Burly should just toss them all out,” Taper says.
“And what would that get us?” Arrow says. “There’s billions of them on the planet.”
A million and a half, I type, but no one hears it. I slam my hand on my desk out of frustration. It makes a much louder sound than I intended.
I’ve got everyone’s attention now.
I killed a bug, I type into the comm.
“Weirdo,” Taper says.
“I feel like this is supposed to be a distraction,” Tara says.
Nobody says anything, including me. I’m too surprised.
“Distraction from what?” Professor Kilfoyle asks.
“The Glyph, obviously,” Tara says. “The gods.”
“No such thing as gods,” Taper says. “Just the one God who watches over us, and he doesn’t walk around tearing up cities.”
“I just feel like Burly’s wanting us to talk about infections to keep us from talking about other, more dangerous things,” Tara says.
Another big silence. It allows me time to type–
But I’m still not fast enough.
“Is Burly that smart?” Arrow says.
“He’s smarter than you think,” Tara says, though she doesn’t sound happy about it.
He’s smart enough, I type, and it hits at a moment where there’s silence. Everyone turns to look at me. I’m not saying I’m a fan, but he’s definitely smart enough. In fact, he told me–
“No,” Professor Kilfoyle says, irritably. “I’ve heard enough about Burly’s intelligence. You want to keep talking about this, do it after physics.”
And that’s the end of that.
7
“Ben, hold on,” Tara says to me after class, as we’re all heading back to town. She stops for a second so I have to wait for her, making it just the two of us. “What did Burly say to you?” she asks, when no one else can hear.
That he’s doing exactly what you guessed, I type. Using the infection thing as a distraction.
“I knew it,” she says.
The infection is probably just made up.
“No, there’s really an infection,” Tara says. “I’ve seen the proof.”
From your mom? I type, making a sceptical face.
“Hey,” she snaps, quietly, “I was agreeing with you. Don’t be a dick. Apart from everything else, she actually is a doctor, after all.”
One who’d be pretty invested in blaming the Land for everything, I type.
“And there you go,” she says, “being a dick.”
Off she walks, angrily.
By the time I’ve typed Wait on the comm, she pretends she’s too far away to hear it.
8
When I get home, the Sky is outside our unit. Along with a whole lot of other people.
There’s a big space around him, and not just because his guards have formed a protective circle. There’s another space around those guys, made by townspeople, giving the Land lots of room.
I also see that some of those townspeople have rifles.
The Sky must have only just arrived, because Pop is coming out of our unit to greet him. “What are you doing here?” Pop asks the Sky, and I can hear the fear in his voice. Not for himself, not even for us, but for the Sky. The Sky never comes to the city. Never. He didn’t come for Wilf’s or Burly’s inaugurations, he doesn’t come on our holidays, and Pop says he didn’t come to welcome the new settlers way back when they first landed either.
He regards us as killers. Killers he has to tolerate. Killers he has to make peace with, because the only other option is killing all of us himself.
Pop’s Noise goes into that fast whir and mixes with the Sky’s Noise. The townspeople’s faces take on a kind of horrified shock. They’ve all heard about this, I’m sure; there are all kinds of rumours about my pop, some of them even true, but I don’t think any of them have ever seen this, not between a human and a Land anyway.
Not that they would use the word Land.
The Noise exchange stops. “Come inside,” my pop says immediately.
“What’s going on here?” Burly’s voice pipes up from outside the circle, somewhere behind me. He probably knew about the Sky arriving before Pop did. He probably thought the Sky was coming to see him. Unlike everyone else, Burly steps into the space just outside the Land guards, but I don’t think even Burly would try to cross into where the Sky is standing without permission, so instead he comes around and stands next to Pop. He gives Pop a look, like howdy, neighbour. Pop does not give the same look back.
“It’s an honour to have you here, sir,” Burly says to the Sky.
The Sky says nothing back, not even in his Noise. I think he’s shocked at being addressed. Then he gives a long, pointed look to the townspeople who make a circle around his circle. He looks at their rifles.
“Let’s everyone show the proper respect to the Sky,” Burly says, raising his voice. “This is the leader of the entire planet, folks. The planet on which we are making a life for our own selves.”
Amazingly, every rifle is lowered – see what I mean when I don’t get all the hatred from my folks about Burly? He’s kind of a plonker, but he’s hardly the devil. So they lower their rifles, but the people stay, maybe less hostile than curious. Because this is, as I said, a hell of a curious thing.
“If we’d known you were coming,” Burly says to the Sky directly, “we’d have prepared an official welcome. A dinner. A public display of the peace and amity between our two peoples.”
The Land don’t have eyebrows. And even if they did, who’s to say they’d raise them like humans do? But let’s just say the look on the Sky’s face is like one big, giant raised eyebrow.
Burly seems to realize he’s made an error but maybe doesn’t know exactly what that error is. He tries to recover. “How can we help you?”
The Sky musters his Noise into our language. I will speak, he says, to the Knife.
This means Pop. Long story.
There’s a silence at this, as Burly tries to guess how embarrassing this is for him, to be dismissed so bluntly in front of so many people. “Ah, yes,” he finally says, with a smile, “I know you two are old friends.” He turns to Pop. “From the bad times.”
“And these are the good times, are they?” Pop says.
“Perhaps you don’t know our protocols,” Burly says, back to the Sky. “What seems like a personal visit to you, may seem like something else to us. As leader of the humans on this planet–”
“Not all of us,” Pop says.
“As leader of the humans,” Burly says a little louder, “I’d suggest that perhaps my presence at your meeting with Mr Hewitt would be a good idea. Politically, don’t you know? For both of us.”
And he’s smiling. And he seems like he’s being friendly.
The Sky looks from Pop to Burly, back to Pop.
Then he looks Burly full in the eye, musters his Noise again, and says, No.
9
Inside our unit, the Sky and Pop talk, sitting very close to each other, almost forehead to forehead, their Noise zipping back and forth fast as a flickering light. It’s also got sound, but there’s nothing in it anyone without Noise – like me, Max and Mom, all of us here, too – could catch. It’s a conversation so secret, they might as well be having it in space.
“Burly’s still outside,” Max says, looking out the window of our unit. I push in next to him and look, too. Burly’s standing away from our front door. The Sky’s guards now circle our entire house, so he looks for all the world like a smiling inspector. The townspeople are still out there, too, keeping their distance.
“He’s going to need to do something,” Max says, meaning Burly, and I’m always so amazed at how bad my brother is at school when he’s this smart. “To show he’s still in charge, isn’t he?”
I nod. This feels right.
“Oh, shit,” Max says, as we see Margery Wingard sidle up next to Burly. They start having a conversation as private as the one Pop and the Sky are having.
“None of this feels good,” Max says. “Not one bit.”
“Okay,” we hear Pop say. We turn around. The Sky stands, and without another word, not even a goodbye, he leaves our unit.
Outside, we hear Burly say, “Good meeting? Now that you’re here, we’d love to–”
But the Sky walks right past him, directly towards the line of townspeople, as if he doesn’t even see them. His guards are around him quick as anything, and if the townspeople might not have moved for the Sky – though of course they would have, right? – they definitely move for the Sky’s guards and the weapons they’re carrying.
Just like that, they’re all gone into the night.
We look back to Pop. “What did he tell you?” Max asks.
“Hold on,” he says, standing. “I need to get Burly.”
“Burly?” Mom says, as surprised as we are.
“As much as he may not like it, he needs to hear this.”
“Needs to hear what?” Burly says, already at our door, Margery Wingard right behind him.
“Is it about the infection they brought us?” she asks.
“Oh, would you just shut it with the infection?” Mom snaps.
“I’ll thank you not to talk to me that way, Viola,” Mrs Wingard says, ice in her voice.
“Only my friends call me Viola.” Mom smiles. “You can call me Dr Eade.”
“Shut the door,” Pop says to me. I do, but then, without anyone seeing but me, he stays my hand right at the last second, leaving it unlatched.
“What’s this all about, Todd?” Burly asks. “And what does the leader of the Spackle have to say to you that he couldn’t say to me?”
“Nothing,” Pop says. “I’m going to tell you everything he said.”
“Why didn’t he tell me himself?”
“You got no Noise,” Pop says. “It would have taken forever. Plus, he doesn’t like you. I thought that was pretty obvious. He’s met humans like you before, and that didn’t go very well for him.”
“Humans like me? What’s that supposed–”
“Do you want to hear it or not?” Pop says. “Because honestly, it makes no difference to me, though you probably should, if you want to protect this city like you say.”
Burly isn’t happy with this. Margery Wingard is staring daggers at Mom. “I don’t think Margery needs to be in on this conversation, right?” Mom says.
“Yes,” Pop says. “If I tell Margery direct, then I’ll know for a fact any lies she says in her sermons are of her own creayshun and not because it was second-hand.”
“How dare you!” Margery says.
“Both of you be quiet and sit down,” Pop says. “I’m going to tell you a story.”
We sit. Pop opens up his Noise, letting it fall in the room all around us. And with pictures and words and feelings, in a voice his own but not quite, cleaned up of all his bad grammar and mispronunciations I find so embarrassing, he tells us everything the Sky told him.
The Tale of the Piper
A young boy of the Land was born with a twisted leg, so gnarled he learned to walk much later than usual and doing so caused him so much pain that his parents, in consultation with the doctor that tended to their town–
(“Town?” Margery interrupts, as we see the pictures of the story happening all around us. “They don’t live in towns. They barely live in villages. And ‘doctor’ is stretching it. It’s too generous to even call them healers.”
