Standalone
Somebody's Home
Before
On the morning the sentence is finally going to end, a girl walks through a crowd of four hundred thousand people carrying a notebook worth more than any object on Earth, and nobody stops her, because nobody knows, because her grandmother wrapped it in a plastic bag from a fish market that closed a hundred years ago.
The girl is ten. Her name is Noor. The plastic bag says KORLE LAGOON FRESH in letters the color of a faded sun, and it has been protecting this notebook from rain, sisters, house fires, customs inspections, one shipwreck, and the reverent hands of seven museums for two and a half centuries, and her grandmother maintains, loudly, including to museum directors, that this is because a fish bag, unlike a museum, was designed to keep something precious through weather.
Around her, the crowd covers the plain in every direction, facing the Array the way sunflowers face what they face. There are flags she doesn’t recognize and food smells she does. There is a man weeping into a phone in a language she half knows, saying no, it’s tonight, it’s actually tonight, put Mama on. There are people wearing shirts with one word on them, all different words, and she has learned to read a person’s whole heart from which of the seven they chose.
Two hundred and forty-six years, four months, and eleven days ago, the universe cleared its throat and began, very slowly, to say something to her family.
Tonight, at last, humanity says something back: and because every schoolchild on nine worlds now writes essays about the choosing of those words, everyone assumes the answer was composed by the great: the parliaments, the philosophers, the machine minds that hold the libraries now.
Noor knows better. It is in the bag.
Her grandmother, who is a hundred and one and walks the way lighthouses stand, takes her hand at the security cordon, and bends down, joints reporting like old rigging, until they are eye to eye. Behind them the crowd hushes, section by section, continent by continent, as the lights on the Array go amber.
“Now then,” her grandmother says. “Before we go up there and finish this, you’ll want to know how it started. Not the version from school. Ours.”
“The true one?”
“The kept one.” Her grandmother straightens, and looks out over four hundred thousand upturned faces, at the fields beyond them, at the sky assembling its evening over the whole impatient species; and she smiles, and taps the fish bag once, the way you’d knock softly on the door of everyone you have ever loved, and says the sentence the family has said at bedtimes and gravesides for two and a half centuries, the sentence it all hangs from:
“It starts with a woman falling asleep.”