#4
He takes a fire-lighting box out of his bag and goes on the hunt for some kindling.
I’m left with Granddad again. And in the quiet of that moment, Noise starts rising from the river.
It’s like what Ben said he saw in the lake by our farm.
Voices and words and images and feelings, but even though I can’t make it out clearly enough to read anything specific, I can tell by the shape of it that it’s Land Noise, not human.
It rises like a cloud, dispersing like one, too, shimmering through the leaves of the trees above the river and then disappearing, gone like the mystery of everything else around here.
I’m watching it go when the Sky steps out of the woods.
···
He looks at me for a long moment in silence, not even his Noise showing. Then he looks down at Granddad and makes a little bow. Members of his guard come out of the trees around him. I hear the human words he puts together, just for me. May we?
“May you what?” I ask.
He gestures toward Granddad. His Noise shows me a picture of a shrouded body. I see that one of the guards is holding a long, lichen-woven cloth. I nod, and the guards go to Granddad and, with as much gentleness as me and Pop used, they begin to wrap him in the cloth.
The Sky shows me a picture of Pop in his Noise, along with a feeling like a question.
“He’s close by,” I say.
The Sky opens his Noise wider, sending it out into the world. He pauses for a moment, listening. He will return, he says. In a moment.
He looks me in the eyes again, and his Noise fills with images of Granddad.
With feelings, too, and I realize he’s offering me condolences for Granddad dying but also expressing his own sorrow.
His Noise suggests–and I’m not quite sure how I know this, but it’s clearly there–that the Land regarded Granddad not as one of them, because that would be ignoring all the obvious, but as a kind of treasured oddity, a constantly unexpected link to humans, but also not quite human either.
They’d saved him–and this was before the Sky had ascended to being the Sky, so it wasn’t anything to do with him–out of what seemed nothing more than expediency during the war, and then he’d surprised them, they’d surprised themselves, that their healing of him had not only made his Noise join the Conversation, but that he willingly went into it.
He could’ve been like Pop, one foot always in the human world, but Granddad gave himself over completely, not only with appreciation, but with awe and genuine curiosity.
He found a home there, that’s what the Sky is telling me now.
The Sky is not a fan of humans. At all. But even he had a grudging respect for Granddad.
“Thank you,” I say, and he nods at me again.
Will you tell us what you saw? he asks. We only heard fragments from the dying in the Conversation.
“I’ll try,” I say, and I do, but I keep it short, because it’s words, not Noise, and I’m surprised he wants to hear from me at all. “Is this what you meant by invasion?” I ask when I’m finished.
I believe so.
“You’re not sure?”
You are an unusual human, he says out of nowhere.
“Thanks?”
His face looks like he’s considering telling me something. I see him decide in the affirmative.
There is something in the sky, he says.
“Yes,” Pop says, coming back through the trees, kindling under his arm. “Yes, there is.”
Over a fire, eating food the Sky and his guards brought, with Granddad shrouded respectfully, the Sky tells us what he discovered.
Well, he tells Pop, who tells me.
“The story was right,” Pop says. “There was something in the sky last time this happened. Their astronomers saw it like ours did, but this was maybe a thousand years ago, their technology wasn’t as advanced as it is now. But they saw it, and they could tell it was coming closer.”
“The same as the Glyph?”
“No way to confirm, but all signs point to it being the same.”
“An invasion.”
Pop cocks his head like the Sky did. “Kind of. That’s what they can’t get their heads around. All the stories and memories tell of the disappearance of their young people–”
“It took Ess,” I say. “He was young.”
“And an invasion of something.”
“Like the fable he showed us.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t what they think of as an invasion.”
“What do they think of as an invasion?”
Pop glances at me. “Us, Max. We were an invasion.”
“Oh. But this is different?”
“It’s the one fact of the stories they can’t reconcile. It all talks about invasion, but nothing about anything actually setting foot on the planet.”
“How can you invade without actually coming here?”
“Beats me. And they haven’t found the answer yet either.”
“The Conversation is supposed to have everything.”
“That’s part of the problem. Sorting out history from memory, story from truth, and this happened so long ago, almost nothing remains of it except fables.”
“Does it mean that the gods aren’t from here?”
Both Pop and the Sky look at me.
“I mean,” I say, “obviously they’re not usually seen around here, but if they’re alien, why do they look like human skeletons and Land skeletons? And why do they disappear? And why do they leave Noise behind?”
“Max–”
“And what happens to them when they go into water? And what happened to Ess? And for that matter where does the hole in the rock face lead to? And what happened to the girl who got dragged inside?”
The Sky’s Noise perks up at this. He asks my father a bunch of fast Noise questions, which Pop answers.
“What’s he saying?” I ask, though I feel like I already know.
“He wants to see for himself,” Pop says. “In the morning.”
“Of course he does.”
I fall asleep, even though I wasn’t planning on it, but after this terrible day, you might, too.
The Noise dream comes, but it’s different this time.
It’s still loud, it’s still everywhere, but this time it’s not so .
. . aggressive. It’s almost welcoming. Like a warm bath, rather than a freezing river.
This isn’t the usual Noise dream, not by a long shot.
I see the Sky and I see Pop, and I realize: I’m in their Noise.
I don’t know how this is happening exactly, but I feel like they’re the ones doing it and they’re doing it on purpose and for a moment, just a moment, in my sleep, in my dreams, I can glimpse what living inside the Conversation is like.
“Try to just listen,” dream Pop says, “or you’ll wake up.”
“Why am I here?” I ask.
He puts a finger to his lips, like shhh, but it’s not harsh or making me feel like a baby.
He and the Sky are both sitting cross-legged on the ground, and it seems to be in the place by the river where we stopped, except the sun is out and the sky (not the Sky) is blue and this place we’re in is like paradise, with streams of sunshine through the trees, flower blossoms falling, the whole kit and caboodle that tells you, yep, this is a dream.
There is no such thing as someone who is chosen, the Sky says, and I haven’t the slightest idea what he’s talking about.
“Okay,” I say.
“Shh,” Pop says, “just listen.”
There is only circumstance, the Sky continues, and what we do with it. Your father is not special.
“He is, too,” I say, almost automatically, then realize I believe it. There’s no one like Pop.
I mean that he is not special because of some . . . He pauses, looks at Pop. What is your word?
“Fate,” Pop says. “Destiny.”
He is not special because fate or destiny have made him so. He is special because of what he chose to do in circumstance.
This feels a little better. I still don’t know what they’re talking about, though.
Let me show you.
And suddenly I’m in a story I can barely believe, even though I already know the rough facts of it.
It’s Pop, but so much younger, and he’s in a town where everything is terrible except his dog and his own two pops, Granddad and Cillian, and he has to run from this town, all of a sudden, when he finds Mom, who also looks ridiculously small and young.
They cross the world together, but the town comes after them.
Then it all gets so much worse, and I feel the fear of my pop.
I feel the anger and injustice that the Sky feels and felt.
I feel, too, the pain of Mom as she goes through terrible, terrible things, like when she got that scar on her arm and why, and then the world ends, the town is destroyed by fire and flood.
So many people die, human and Land, and still there’s more.
Pop racing to the ocean, the Sky hot on his heels, after the man who started this all, a man who ultimately gives himself up to the ocean and oblivion, but not fast enough to stop the Sky from shooting Pop, which I knew about, too, which I always knew about, it was the first thing he told us about the Sky, but I never felt it before.
I swear I can feel the acid fire hitting me, I can feel my heart stopping, I can feel the grief from Mom as she picks up the body of Pop, who died, who died on a beach, and was brought back from just over the edge by the Land.
He was not special, says the Sky, except by his choices.
“Only a pretty goddamned special person would choose those things, though,” I say.
And the Sky–I don’t know how to describe this since their faces are so different from ours, so it’s not what you’d usually think of in the word–but the Sky–
Well, the Sky . . .
Smiles.
I wake up, but it’s not the usual waking up. It’s like I stepped from one place to another without moving, like I went from day to night in a blink, but it doesn’t feel unnatural.
“What was all that about?” I ask.
Pop and the Sky are sitting there at the campfire. They’re both watching me, waiting for my reaction. The smile is gone from the Sky’s face, so maybe he only does that in dreams.
“What do you think it was about?” Pop asks, and it seems like genuine curiosity.
“It was about you,” I say. “Pretty obviously.”
“What about me?”
“You had choices to make. You made hard ones. But you made good ones.”
“Did I?”