第79章 The Leaving, Backwards

Earth held its first joint harvest-in on the last fine day, because crops keep calendars older than councils, and nobody aboard the Song was fool enough to argue with a field. They planted first. The seedlings from the case named EARTH — the grasses and mosses that had ridden in Ivo's tray from the rim of the sky and down the well — went into the Ford's terraces in soil their kind had grown in before there were words, and Ivo pressed each one home with two enormous fingers and made no speech at all until the last one was in, and then only four sentences: "Some promises go out. Some come home to be kept in the original ground. This one just did. Mind your feet." The Ford's children watered them with the evening irrigation, in meter, without being told. The harvest-in itself ran three days, because the Ford did nothing by halves that could be done by wholes. There were races on the frozen millpond for the youngest children and a stone-throw won, to nobody's surprise and everybody's delight, by Bren, who accepted the prize — a knitted cap in aggressive orange — with the gravity of a treaty. The tally-houses of four villages brought their books and read the year's counts aloud in relay, births before deaths, seed before grief, and when the Ford's reader reached the sky-tally line — *this season: five ships' worth of strangers, one beacon lit, one gardener traveling* — the hall made a sound Sira had never heard a room make, somewhere between laughter and a wave striking rock. On the second evening Ashe stood up with a loaf dark as riverstone, baked from the first black-grain cut of the joined fields, and broke it, and gave the first piece not to her own elders but to Sira, saying words old before the shelters were drilled: "From the harvest to the traveler, so the road remembers this table." Sira carried that loaf aboard herself, wrapped in cloth, and put it in the archive's reliquary drawer beside the pressed flower from the first Garden's first harvest and the wafer-wrapper that had held the first page, because some drawers were becoming, entry by entry, the pantry of the whole species' hope. The Walker went up to the ship two days later, walking most of the way beside the cargo sled as if seeing its own cradle off, and the whole Ford walked with it, four hundred people in the row-glow of dusk, and no one sang the Leaving; they sang the planting song instead, the one Bren had carried from the frozen sea across the galaxy, and the Walker kept time for them with its irrigation channels so the fields themselves could be said to have attended. In the hold it took its cradle beside the garden bay, near Ivo's trays, on grounds the botanist stated before the engineers finished measuring: "It's spent forty-one years sleeping inside hills and working nights among green things. It'll heal faster within smell of a garden. That goes for everyone, but we can't all fit." Cass came aboard the same afternoon, carrying one bag, a copy-sheet, and the tactlessness of the very young. "Your ship is short an apprentice," she informed Sira at the foot of the ramp. "Everyone knows the fleet trains them young. I'm fifteen, I've kept tally since I was eight, and I found the seventh Walker while your own trained boy was still learning which shelf holds what." She thrust the sheet at her Chief Archivist with the stiffness of a person doing the correct frightening thing for the first recorded time. "Also, my mother says I'm to come back with stories, so you'll want to plan accordingly." Sira gave her the informal screening, the way she had been taught to give it: no forms, one pattern problem, spoken aloud. "The Ford's tally-house records run six generations. Tell me something about them that isn't in any summary." Cass didn't hesitate, which ruined her as a diplomat and completed her as an archivist. "The ink changes weight before bad winters. Heavier hand in the hungry years — the tallies breathe like everything else on this world, and anybody who rounded them off threw the count away." Sira looked at her for a long moment across eighty years and one identical interview. "Pack your bag properly," she said. "Say goodbye to everyone — you'll be gone years. And Cass: the archive's first loyalty is to the reader who hasn't been born. Everyone else gets honesty. The unborn get completeness." Liftoff came at dawn under a sky rinsed clean by night rain. The Ford stood on the old runway in a crowd with Ashe at its head, and plates had been set — literally set, long tables down the frost-heaved concrete groaning under harvest loaves, because where the Ford came from, when the far ones went back up into the dark, somebody set a plate against their return. The Walker's cradle rode amidships with its band flickering through slow dream-colors, watching Earth recede through a viewport Ivo had angled for it. And as the Song rose through the cloud deck, the night side behind them did its farewell: sector by sector, watershed by watershed, the lamps of the great plain dimmed and relit in sequence, one long wave rolling westward across a continent of breathing fields — the Walker's final remote command, sent ahead of the ship's shadow — and the lattice rendered it smiling, if engines may be said to smile: *Go well.* The climb-out gave everyone their own private version of the same minute. Rhee flew the ascent by hand, the way Elani had once flown a slingshot out of respect, and logged the burn afterward as *nominal,* which was technically true and emotionally useless. Cass spent it strapped into the gallery with her eyes enormous and her copy-sheet crushed in her fist, and was heard to say, to the viewport, in the accent of the Ford: "So that's what the tally meant by sky." Tam stood beside her without speaking, because some entries are better kept in the body than on the page, and archivists know. And down in the garden bay, Ivo sat on an upturned crate beside the cradle with the Earth tray green on his knees and read aloud from the maintenance manual, at length, about load tolerances, to a machine that could not hear him, until its band steadied — which he chose, correctly, to interpret as applause. Below, growing smaller, the new beacon counted nine seconds into the dark, Earth's first light on the road in two hundred years. Sira stood the last watch of the departure alone at the viewport and wrote the entry standing up, the way watch-standers stand: *We came to ask a question of a bed. We leave carrying the gardener who answered it, an apprentice from the original ground, and a question of our own marked TENDING somewhere among the moons. Course: outward, to the hill that keeps the door. Margin: thin but kind. The Leaving ran twelve ships out of this sky. Note for whoever files this: the Returning is going to need a bigger ledger.* ---