Chapter 1 #4
Granddad switches back to Noise. We’re heading to a place where we can find out for sure. That’s the path you’ve been following. We’ll take you there. We’ll find out together.
“What place?” Pop asks.
The story the Sky showed you? Granddad says. It may be more literally true than we first thought.
“The giant gods are going to eat me?” I’m half-joking when I say it, but only half. I really want someone to tell me I’m all the way joking, please.
That’s what we’re going to find out, Granddad says, which isn’t exactly the encouragement I was after.
We start walking again the next day, after I’ve called Mom and assured her nine thousand times that I’m actually all right.
It’s weird, though, carrying on with life as normal the day after you’ve been attacked by a rine.
I’m already mostly healed up, like I told Mom, just aches and pains and some still-healing scratches on my chest where the rine first hit me–Land bones are similar enough to ours for the medicine to be the same, but Land skin sure isn’t–but the attack still happened.
If I had Noise, that’s all the Noise would be about, the attack happening over and over again, so what I’ve got is my brain telling me something awful happened, and my body’s going, maybe not. It makes for a wobbly hike.
“Keep up, Max,” Pop says quietly. We’re both hovering near the back of the line as it makes its way through the trees.
“Aren’t you even a little shaky?” I ask him.
He smiles. “Medicine a little too fast for your brain to catch up?”
“Yeah.”
“Same.”
“Where are we going anyway?”
“Ben hasn’t been super clear on that,” Pop says, “but I think it’s where the story happened.”
“The actual place where everyone got eaten?”
“As much as it’s a historical place at all. I’m sure there was really a town. And I’m sure something happened there. But I still don’t quite believe anyone was eaten by gods.”
“That’s super reassuring, Pop, thanks.”
“You think I’m going to let anything hurt you?”
“I’m not a kid anymore.”
“You’re my kid until the end. We’re both going to be very old men and you’re still going to be my kid.”
“Pop–”
“No,” he says, smiling again. “Exit line.” And heads up deeper into the line of walkers.
I turn my head, still smiling myself, and I catch the young Land looking at me again, and that’s just about enough of that, so I say, “Why are you always looking at me?”
His Noise immediately goes another color. I’m pretty sure it’s embarrassment. I can see him start lining up human words to say, but from his Noise, I’m surprised to find I’ve already got a pretty good idea.
“I’m the first young human you’ve ever seen in person?” I ask.
Yes, he says, clearly surprised that I got it right.
“I don’t really like being stared at,” I say. “Nobody does.”
I know, he says, and I can feel more embarrassment. I get chastised for it all the time.
He’s so serious, I can’t do anything but laugh. “My name’s Max,” I say.
Yes, he says. I am named . . . and his Noise churns again and again, trying to figure out how to say his name in a human way, and I’m about to tell him he doesn’t have to, when he just says, Ess.
“Ess?”
Ess. Is my name.
“Just the letter s?”
He thinks again. Almost.
“Okay,” I say. “Ess, it is.”
We walk a few more steps in silence, his Noise rolling a mile a minute. “Anything you want to ask the first young human you’ve ever met, Ess?” I say.
And I’m expecting some question about human culture or where we’re going or if he’s heard of the dreams human kids are having or where I stand on all the endless crimes my species has committed against his.
But instead, he looks at the top of my head and asks, What is hair like?
And I laugh out loud, and he laughs, too. Then, as we walk, I tell him what having hair is like.
The weather turns colder the farther we go, and I swear it seems like we’re heading down into some kind of micro climate.
The trees grow much closer, and every leaf and bramble and flower is wet, even though it’s not raining.
It’s like a cloud fell down, and we’re walking through it. It’s quiet, too.
“Where are all the animals?” I ask Granddad. I’m up walking next to him by this point.
“They’re here,” he says. He points to a pocket monkey up on a branch. “They’re just keeping their Noise quiet.”
This is weird. “All of them? I can’t hear any birds either, and birds never usually shut up.”
You are not wrong about that, Granddad says.
“Why do you flip between your Noise and speaking?” I ask, though I can immediately guess. “You don’t use your voicebox much anymore, do you?”
“Not really, no.” He nods to Ess, who’s in front of us now, and then to the Land behind us.
“These are . . .” He stops himself. “I was going to say ‘my people now,’ but it’s incredibly presumptuous to assume they even think of me as one of them.
So let’s just say, this is where I feel most at home now. ”
“In the Conversation?”
He nods. “I’m not consciously talking to the Land that are here, but our Noises are linked.
And we’re all looking at the world and we’re all processing it and what I see is a part of that, but I also see the whole at the same time.
We’re all thinking about it, too, and reacting to it and analyzing it and when I pull myself out of that . . .”
“Feels like you’re cutting off one of your senses?” I say.
“Almost exactly that. Clever Max.”
I grin, pleased with the praise, even though I feel like I’m too old for that kind of stuff anymore, though maybe no one ever is.
“Let me show you something,” he says, and his Noise opens up in front of us.
A man appears, dirty blond hair, rough and handsome, about Pop’s age.
It’s Grandpa Cillian. I recognize him from the memories in Pop’s Noise.
Cillian gave his life to save his son, my pop.
I’ve never met him, of course, but both Pop and Granddad love him so much, it’s almost like I have.
I keep coming back to him, Granddad says, and I know it’s not exactly healthy, but how can I not? In the Conversation, he’s alive and always with me. The past is with me every second. It’s like I’m living my entire life again and again every day.
“It sounds awful.”
“But it feels extraordinary,” he says out loud, “and it gets harder and harder to leave.” He shakes his head.
“I didn’t plan on living like this. I was just as alien from the Land as everyone else.
More so. I come from Prentisstown, after all.
But they saved my life, for whatever reasons they may have had, and it was like all the walls of my brain just fell away, and I became the horizon, instead of a room. ”
“So you think the cure was a mistake, too, then?”
“I’m not sure calling it a mistake helps. Your father even thought it was the right thing to do at the time, and he’s the smartest, best man I know. But I can also see why he regrets it now. The harder path may yet turn out to be the longer one.”
“Or super short, if humans have anything to do with it.”
But the question is, Max. He turns to me, a twinkle in his eyes. Are we still human?
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Humans are from Old World, but where were you born?”
“I said this same thing to Pop. We were both born here.”
“So why couldn’t you be something more?”
“Because the cure’s already happened, and there’s no taking it back.”
He’s about to say something. I can see his mouth open and close, and I can see in his Noise a whole lot of information just about to come clear and then vanish as he changes his mind.
“What?” I demand. “What were you going to say?”
He doesn’t answer, though I can see he’s looking for one.
I stop completely. “What are you not telling me, Granddad? Because there’s something.”
He looks over my head back into the line of approaching people where Pop is now looking at us.
“There’s a cure for the cure, isn’t there?” I say.
“Max–” Granddad starts.
“Max,” Pop says, coming up to us.
“Am I right?” I say, looking at both of them. Their Noise goes a thousand miles a second between them, which is sort of answer enough. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“It’s not what you think,” Pop says.
“The Land can reverse the cure,” I say. “You’re out here talking about how you wish there could be one, and the Land already have it. That’s why they analyzed our cure and made their own.” My eyes widen. “Does Mom know about this? Is that why you two broke up?”
Granddad looks at Pop. “You broke up? You didn’t say it had gone that far–”
“It hasn’t, Ben–”
“Don’t lie,” I say. “She stopped living at the farm before the god destroyed it. And this is why, isn’t it? She doesn’t want you to offer it to us!”
“Like I said, Max,” Pop says, “it’s not what you think.”
“I don’t care what it is. Just give it to Mom and she can research it all she wants and you two can get back together.”
“Max–”
“What is all this secrecy?” I pretty much yell.
“The only way to take away the cure is to walk the path that me and your granddad have,” Pop says.
“Which means what?”
It means you’d have to be near death for it to work. Granddad looks at Pop. Which can be safely managed with certain medicines–
“Absolutely not,” Pop says. “Not a chance I’m letting anything like that happen to my boys.”
“We’re old enough to make our own decisions!” I yell. All the Land around us have long stopped by this point. To watch the humans argue, I guess. Ess seems particularly interested.
“You don’t even want the cure!” Pop says. “Never once have you said to us, oh, great, I’d love to have everyone know my every secret thought.”
I shake my head. “You can’t do that. You can’t tell me you regret us being cured, then tell me how awful having Noise is. You can’t do both.”