Chapter 4
Our pop still has Noise, but that’s rare nowadays.
It’s another reason we live out in the sticks.
He can’t stand all the silence in the city.
Which I guess is a different thing than the silence out here half a day’s walk downriver.
When he goes to town–which he never does–he looks at the faces of all those silent men and women, and they look at his very much not silent face, and well, maybe you’d move, too.
But when the first settlers landed here and for many, many terrible years after, every man had Noise and no woman ever did.
Nobody has ever said much about anyone who might have fallen betwixt those two; they were probably too busy trying not to die like everyone else.
Just that, for a long time, every thought and feeling and memory of every human man on this planet was right there for all to see all the time, whether you wanted it to or not.
There was no privacy, just your whole ugly self, on show, even the parts that needed to be secret.
This caused conflict, to say the least. Different places handled it different ways, some good, most bad.
The worst was Prentisstown, the cautionary tale we all get taught at school.
They killed every woman there, because the men couldn’t stand being known that nakedly.
It was a crime so awful they were cut off from the rest of the humans who’d settled here, not that there were all that many then.
But those men didn’t rest. Their leader, Mayor David Prentiss, made an army and they marched and did terrible, terrible things.
He eventually ruled every human settlement here.
They found a cure back then, too, made from plants and native chemicals, but how to make it got lost in the war that followed.
The only big human city left, called Haven, was destroyed in a flood by the local species who everyone had treated pretty badly since we got here but who the Mayor’d managed to treat even worse in his short time as conquering leader.
That probably would have been it for the human race on New World if new settlers hadn’t shown up right about then in their thousands.
That caused a whole new set of problems, but it all kind of settled down over the years into what it is now.
They made a new cure, a genetic one way more effective than the first one.
Once you took it, there was no going back, though there were side effects for some of us that . . .
Well, never mind that for now. Let’s just say the new cure helped, or so people say, and we’ve kind of had peace with the locals and with each other for at least my lifetime.
Pop says most of the folks here now either don’t know the whole truth of what happened before or are pretending they don’t and that’s yet another reason we live out here in the sticks.
My pop is from Prentisstown. He knows exactly how bad things can get.
So when I see the Noise above the lake, stirring there like a roiling cloud, I know what I’m talking about.
It’s different from animal Noise. Animals aren’t stupid, they’re just direct and focused.
Humans are a mess, and so is their Noise.
Living in it must have been a nightmare.
It’s hard enough with one person in your house having it.
If this is what the world was like, no wonder people kept trying to burn it down before the cure came.
So why is human Noise rising from a lake where a god fell? Are they prayers? Are they what make a god? And if you’re asking why I keep calling it a god rather than anything else, all that shows is that you didn’t see it.
“Ben!” I hear in the distance behind me through the trees, my name over the hoofbeats of a horse.
Pop is coming.