Prologue #2
So wait, maybe I was actually right both times.
It’s pounding water that smashes you against a rock, because it seems like it’s a rock that’s caused all this, right?
Maybe that’s why it feels that way. Some rock out in space coming toward us for who knows why, getting closer every day.
They’ve started calling it the Glyph, because I guess it looks like an alien letter, though how would anybody know?
Burly’s not buying all that, by the way.
He says it’s just a rock. Nothing to be worried about.
He’s saying the scientists are “maybe overreacting.” He “understands their caution,” but a link between the rock out there and the dream outbreak “seems implausible” and it’s more likely caused by some kind of disease or contagion, most likely caught from the Spackle (Burly does not call them the Land), and he says his own medical team supports him on the disease idea, though I know Mom doesn’t think much at all of his medical team, which somehow still includes Margery Wingard, whose little church I pass on my walk.
Though the first thing I notice is that it’s not so little as it used to be.
She’s taken over the unit next to it, too, and there’s pews across the whole inside space.
I can see it because she always keeps the doors open so you have to hear her go on and on about sin and saving humanity even if you’re not a churchgoer.
I tell you, some people are noisy without any Noise at all.
It’s not a Sunday, and it’s not a normal time for a church service, but there are some people inside anyway, and Margery Wingard is preaching, of course.
“Sin walks among us,” she says, and for a second, I think she’s talking about me–Margery Wingard’s no fan of mine, that’s for sure–but she’s just talking about the Land, like she usually is. The woman is obsessed, so much that people have always ignored her, and with good reason.
But there she is, in two units now. Hmm.
She’s a good speaker, I’ll give her that, and she’s got answers, even if they’re wrong, which I guess is what people want when things are uncertain–and we live in a world of complete uncertainty, so fair enough.
Mom and Pop had a really bad experience with a preacher growing up, so we’ve never gone to any church, much less Margery Wingard’s, and when I ask him about it, Pop just says, “History always repeats” and his Noise goes all angry.
I keep walking. I realize I’m heading to the Land trading market.
I sometimes go there, because they feel familiar to me in a way the city definitely doesn’t.
Despite not speaking, Ben’s always been the one who likes being with other people.
I’m kinda with Pop. I’d rather be on my own or with just one or two others.
I like being out in the woods. I like living near the Land.
It’s peaceful, though I’ve wandered off into tangentville again, haven’t I?
Anyway. The market. The Land bring in fruits and wild veg they harvest and trade them for hard materials like steel and chemicals, lots of chemicals.
Ben says their whole engineering approach is chemical and it’s pretty amazing.
They’ve got weapons like the humans here have never seen–though they don’t sell those, no sir.
Mom says because we saw them hunting and fishing when humans first arrived, we compared them to our civilization and found it not as good.
Turns out that was a pretty big mistake.
You can hunt and fish and be “behind” us in one way, and then you can have weapons and hunting tools and harvesting tools that are about a thousand years ahead of us, and you can have a communication system so complicated and world-sweeping it’s impossible to say if it’s ahead or behind and/or a couple miles to the side and maybe that’s why we’ve never gotten along much.
Humans and the Land, I mean. I get along with them just fine.
“Hey,” I wave at the lady selling fruits as I head inside.
She waves back. I’ve asked her name a bunch of times, but names work differently with them.
It’s more of an image or a feeling and I’m never going to get it properly since I had the cure.
Some of the Land who deal with humans take a human name to make it easier, but she hasn’t and what are you going to do but respect that?
Like Pop says, it’s a fundamental right to choose what to call yourself.
I tap my card to buy a blue melon and I smile at her as I take it. She nods back. And that’s when the trouble starts for your humble narrator.
A boy called Taper Wingard enters, son of guess who, and even in a town of ten thousand or so, he stands out as the real prick of being fifteen.
Ben and me had to take about a third of our schooling in town, so I grew up with Taper.
Just your run-of-the-mill dickhead, the kinda guy you wouldn’t trust to bring you a drink at a party, and he’s got four or five of his dickhead friends, all of whom are in the upper school with Ben (another good reason not to go), but I wouldn’t expect to see him with them, and I don’t.
And since the Spackle Market–sorry, the Land Market, but nobody in the city calls it that–isn’t the biggest place in the world, just a square lot, really, with stalls along each side, and a tarp roof stretched over the whole thing to keep out the sun and the rain, someone like Taper, walking into that space at the front of a bunch of similar boys and girls is very, very noticeable.
The Land sure notice. Every head goes up, and some Noise conversation gets passed around the stalls at lightning speed. They apparently know Taper, too.
“Oh, hey, now,” Taper says, face falsely bright as he sees the Noise pass. “None of that. I thought everyone was welcome in the spack market.”
If it’s sort of mildly not good to call them Spackle, then it’s very not good to say spack.
Ugly word, ugly meaning. So the Land here are wary.
The only other human who was here left as Taper was walking in with his little gang, so suddenly I’m aware that I’m it as far as someone to intervene goes.
If the Land even want or need that, which I doubt they do.
An older Land arranges his Noise into words, Everyone with money to buy or goods to trade is welcome. And even in the accent, even in the assemblage of words from human voices that have spoken them now rearranged as his own, you can’t mistake the very much lack of welcome there.
“Don’t mind us, old man,” Taper says, that irritating smile still there. “We’re just having a look around.”
“Window shopping,” says a girl behind him. Tara, his sister. She’s pretty and she’s mean. I wish that wasn’t true, but it is. The others all laugh at her really unfunny two words.
Then they see me.
“Look who it is,” Tara says, seeming genuinely surprised.
“The freak from the farm,” says Taper.
I’m truthful when I say here I’m not bothered by people like Taper saying something like this.
It may seem kind of holy or saintly of me and I don’t mean it like that, but when Taper calls me a freak, he’s telling the world nothing about me but a whole lot about himself, you hear?
Doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve a good thwacking, though.
“Didn’t your house burn down?” Taper asks with fake sympathy. “Didn’t it get burned down by a giant flaming spack?”
All of his henchmen laugh.
“Didn’t your mom get arrested for attempted genocide?” I say, taking a casual bite of my blue melon.
That shuts them up. Taper and Tara, like me, were born during the tough times after the new settlers landed, right into the aftermath of a huge, huge war that Pop’s showed us in his Noise.
The new settlers brought a lot of medicine and fresh technology.
They also brought their fair share of bad apples and terrible notions.
One of those apples was none other than Margery Wingard, and one of those notions was that the Land were the cause of the Noise, so if we got rid of the Land, we got rid of the Noise.
This got shouted down as the insanely immoral and suicidal idea it obviously was, but Margery Wingard was a doctor and quite good at making poisons, don’t you know, and after some pretty bad incidents with lots of mysterious Land deaths from “rotten crops,” she spent time locked up, and when she got out, she said she’d found her faith and now preaches her joyless, gray religion in her joyless, gray, now one unit bigger church.
She’s not a doctor anymore, obviously, but that doesn’t stop her from using her sermons to lobby Burly about how the Land are an infection waiting to happen, and now here we have the Noise dreams, I guess, so what is he gonna do about it already?
She says she’s not genocidal anymore, of course, and that now she’s just a scientist “following the facts.”
Yep. People are fun.
“You don’t talk about our mom,” Tara says.
“Everyone talks about your mom,” I say, taking another bite of the melon. “That horse has bolted.”
Taper makes a big few big steps toward me, like he’s going to make a fuss–
And every member of the Land at every stall around the square rises slightly, instinctively, like they’re the ones who are going to intervene between me and this annoying little gang, rather than the other way around.
Huh. That’s a surprise.
Taper stops when he sees this, unsure now. He tries his best to get his sneer back. “You’re gonna protect this little freak?” he says to the Land, who are all looking square at him now. “Well, let me tell you something about your little friend Max here–”
“What’s this?” says a deep, rich, friendly voice at the entrance to the market. Every member of the Land suddenly looks very interested in the things they’ve been selling.
Burly.