Chapter 11
It’s our house and the Land live mostly outside, only using small mud-spun huts for things like births and whatever mysterious ceremonies they’ve got that we still know hardly anything about.
But the Sky is both king of the entire Land, more or less, and a guest, so we wait outside on the back stoop while he and Pop talk.
“Yeah,” Mom says, seeing me notice, and adding as if I don’t already know, “that’s how we all were treated in the bad old days. Women and Spackle alike.”
“Pop doesn’t like that word,” Max says, speaking up from where he’s lying on the back porch bench.
“Your father can get a little self-righteous about the Land, Max. You know how he is.”
The river rushes its way down a little hill from us.
The moons are both low and dark red, looking bigger than they are.
We can hear bats and night birds doing their Noise hunting in the dark, and Mom’s told us more than once that the names we’ve given them–bat, night bird, squirrel even–were taken from Old World animals that sort of looked like the ones here.
She thinks this is one of our problems. We’re trying to make a new world except we want it to look exactly like the old one, despite being on a planet that’s nothing like the old one.
Mom? I sign.
“Yeah, baby?”
Don’t call me baby. You’re spending an awful lot of time in the city.
“You will, too,” she says. “Soon. Next week if not sooner.”
“What about Pop?” Max asks.
She looks surprised. “What about him?”
But then the door opens.
“You’re all going to want to see this,” Pop says.