Chapter 12
Inside, the house is pretty much completely occupied by the Noise of the Sky.
He sits in the middle of it all, wearing the royal headpiece.
He’s small for the Land, certainly small for a king, but he’s just like them in all other respects.
The white grayness of the skin, the eyes high up, even the posture, every little thing about him saying “not human,” which is probably exactly how we look to him: “not Land.”
His Noise is sprawled out all over the sitting room and through the open wall into the dining room.
There’s a mountain on the floor by the shore of a lake, but not the mountain and lake that are behind this farm.
There are trees and clouds and a little village with little Land figures going to and fro, working their daily lives, fishing and building.
The detail is incredible. I have a moment to think, Why did we cure this?
It looks like a long time ago. The tools the Land are using aren’t nearly as modern as the ones they have now.
They’re amazing engineers, the Land, and almost everything they build is so chemically sophisticated our scientists haven’t even been able to figure out half of it in all the decades we’ve been here.
So this vision or memory or story or whatever could be hundreds of years ago, maybe even thousands. Who knows? And I wonder why we’re looking at it–
Then a god rises from the base of the mountain.
Max says a very bad word, but he’s so clearly scared Pop just puts a hand on his shoulder.
“It’s only Noise,” Pop says.
The god climbs up from the ground like it’s coming from down inside a hole, though we can’t see one.
It’s as skinless and burning as the god we saw, but its anatomy is recognizably Land: the longer limbs, the angle of the neck.
Only halfway out of the ground, it’s already bigger than our god, me and Max’s. Twice the height, easy.
We watch as it reaches out toward the shore of the lake and grabs the earth, raking its fingers across the mud of the lakeside. One of the little figures is caught under a hand and violently smashed.
“Oh, my God,” Mom whispers.
“Is this what you saw?” Pop asks, his Noise going a mile a minute.
“Ours was human,” Max says, “and it was–”
The god in the Noise screams. It’s a Land scream, but it rips through the vision like a tear in the world. It’s such an awful sound, I see even Mom flinch.
We watch as it rises fully up. It steps on two more little figures who are trying to run away, and reaches out for another, takes it in its hand, and raises it high in the air.
The Land god looks up into the sky and screams again.
“Maybe we should all go to the city,” Pop says.