by C M Weller
Mama gave him the stink-eye and Seventh-Papa growled a low warning. Darvan would only get one more before he caught more than trouble. And he knew it.
Mama would have to feed him a lot more gristle before he'd catch a hint.
And since he was all hot-puss over Sahra, she was going to get it from him, tonight.
While she had jobs to do, she had to stay in view of Mama or Seventh-Papa or Leyna or Karl. The only ones who had any power over him. And that meant trying to check four ways at once. And keeping an eye on her tasks for the night.
Darvan started his play off by complaining about how hungry he still was.
Mama ignored him. Seventh-Papa ignored him. Leyna and Karl pretended to be busy at their own work. Sahra only paid him attention enough to know where he was while she got on with things.
Darvan, as usual, tried to trip up everyone and making it look like it was never him. Sahra had learned early to stay out of his reach. For some reason, this only made him madder and more and more set on getting her hurt.
Stupid Duvi.
She got the babies tucked up and crawled in with them. They might smell, but Darvan wouldn't dare come after her to hurt her if she was in tight with them.
But Duvi had another plan. "Mamaaaaaa! Sahra's takin' the babies' pants off!"
"Sahra Johnston!"
Rats, bats and cats, he was clever, sometimes. Sahra wriggled out and started with a clear, "Was not!"
But Duvi had already struck.
Really struck. With his hand on the back of her head. "Crosswired spongebrain," he whispered, and swung again.
Sahra ducked, wishing she had a tiny eye in the back of her head like the Masters did. She bet no master ever had to deal with some sib swiping at the back of their head.
"Duvi lied," called Karl.
Sahra rubbed the back of her stinging head and stopped a grown-up pace away from Mama and Seventh-Papa. They stood together, arms in knots on their chests. Looking down on the two of them.
"Sahra, I have no idea what you keep doing to Darvan to make him do these things."
"Dint do nuffint," Sahra mumbled.
"She's on me alla time, Mama. She don't do nothing but callin' me 'Duvi' an' you know it means rude stuff in master talk."
"Darvan, half this family calls you 'Duvi' and you don't flinch," said Seventh-Papa. "What's so special about Sahra - who rarely talks at all - that has earned your special attention?"
"She's stupid. She don't deserve nuthin'. She aughta get throwed out for anyone'd want her. We don't need her."
"Sahra, put your hand down," said Mama.
Leyna gasped. "Oh God and his Angels..."
Sahra looked at her hand. It was red with blood.
Mama threw a howling fit and dragged Darvan out of their home by his ear. Leyna started shrieking in horror. The babies, drawn out by the noise, cried because everyone who mattered was suddenly way too loud. The littles screamed because everyone else was screaming.
Judi was squealing, "You killed her! Darvan, you useless mutt, you killed her!" over and over again.
Something warm was crawling down the back of her head. She knew she didn't have bugs in there because she scrubbed her hair thorough every end of shift. And one of her sisters made sure by picking her over once a week. She made to touch it, but Seventh-Papa had her wrist all of a sudden.
Everyone else was making noise, even Darvan in the hall outside.
Seventh-Papa gently dragged her into the bathroom. "There's a brave girl," he soothed. "Look at you, not a tear."
"Dunt hurt much," said Sahra. "Jus' stings a bit."
Seventh-Papa picked her up and put her on his knee. "Put your chin on your chest, now."
Sahra obeyed. All she could see was Seventh-Papa's knee and her legs. Papa poked around in her hair like one of her sisters after bugs.
It stung worse when he found it.
"OW!"
"Stay still, now. Almost... got... it..."
"Ayoooowwww!"
"OUT!"
"...ow..."
Wet stuff on the back of her head. Stinging stuff, too.
"You can move now."
Seventh-Papa had a long thin bit of metal with little tiny sharp bits in his palm.
"That were in my head?"
"Almost," said Seventh-Papa. "If it was in your head, you'd be in a lot worse trouble." He guided her back down to the floor. "And I noticed you had the sense to try and sort things out while everyone else was panicking."
Sahra shrugged. "It jus' dint feel like I was dying, is all."
He patted her on the head and let her out.
All the crying stopped when they saw her alive. Except for the babies, who were kind of set into crying by then.
"Darvan is sleeping in the hall, tonight," said Mama. Her voice was all mean and cruel. "Tod, you'll have to sleep in Darvan's bunk. Make sure he doesn't creep in during the night. Sahra will be spending the night with me."
Sahra looked up at Mama. Not understanding.
"He'd have to get through Leyna, Kara and Laura just to get to us, and then he has to dare to get through me."
"But he jus' gotta wait f'r day an' ge' me inna tunnels..."
"He'd hardly fit. Just head for the nearest narrows and you'll be fine."
Sahra murmured her doubts. Once Darvan was set on getting her, he could wait for ages. He came up with plans. And the longer he waited, the madder he got. The madder he got, the more it hurt. If she cried, he crowed until he got caught. If she didn't cry, he'd just keep on getting her until she did. And when he got caught, he blamed her for it.
If he'd just let her alone... He'd see that the one thing that caught him big trouble was hurting her. The rest of it was just everyday noise. Easily looked past.
And maybe that was his goal.
Get attention, any old way he could.
Sahra kept quiet all the way through washing up and tidying up and putting out lights. It was when she crawled across the older girls' bunks that she had to stare.
Mama's hide-away was so pretty. Every space, even the roof that was the floor of the older boys' bunks, had a picture on it. Pictures of family. Gempa, Gemma, all her sibs as babies. Sahra even picked out herself. Seven men. Different Papas. Some were made with black and smears. Some were made with dark brown. Some dark brown and black.
"It's so purty," Sahra whispered, not brave enough to touch them. She was scared she'd mess them up.
"My little waste of time," said Mama. "Always have some time with nothing to do when there's a new baby. I take a little time. Use it for this... uselessness."
"But it so purty. Why you neffer put it up for show?"
"Show is pride. Pride is a sin. Here... they remind me of who I must pray for. And the moments when they needed me the most. And the people who gave me a life to devote to the Lord."
Sahra snuggled down on the side by the wall. "There's more babies 'n folks in the fambly."
Mama's face went sad. "Yes. There are."
"Why's one got a pointy head?"
Mama's eyes got bright. "He flew to heaven before he was born."
Sahra counted. Six sibs in heaven ahead of her. This was why Mama sang soft, sad songs in the morning... She turned her back on the beautiful pictures and wrapped her thin arms around Mama's neck. She began humming. A lullaby she'd known since her first memory. Like all songs her people knew, it was also a hymn.
Mama hugged her back, eyes hot and wet, and joined in.
By and by, humming and hugging turned to sleep.
*
Sahra opened her eyes to dark. Something was wrong. She didn't move, because moving when something was wrong was a very bad idea. Mama was still beside her. Big and soft and heavy. No lights were on.
Listen.
The air had stopped. There was no always-hum of the air coming through their house.
She moved now, rolling over to shake Mama.
"Mrrh?"
"The air's stopped, Mama," Sahra whispered. W
e gotta get eff'ryone up."
Mama shifted, rolling over to shake awake the older girls. Quietly, because noise at night was bad.
Sahra wriggled out to get the babies. They were still alive. Good. But they didn't like being woken up in the night by anyone but themselves. Sahra did her best to hustle them into the hall.
Duvi was sleeping in a store-nook on the other side of the hall. Someone had lent him a blanket made of scraps.
Sahra nudged him awake, too.
"Wha-at," he complained.
"Air's stopped," said Sahra. She dodged back inside to flick the lights.
No lights.
No power to make the air go.
Everyone in her family was awake. Sahra dodged out again and woke the neighbours up the same way she woke Mama. Darvan up and decided to join in, big surprise.
Sahra learned something, that morning. There's one thing that wakes a whole house, it's the sound of someone moving things around in their kitchen. Or having a conversation. Or an argument.
Darvan did the explaining. Sahra did the noise. He did the bossing, she did the move-it gestures.
Then Sahra had a frightening thought. A spark in her head. A bright idea.
The next house they walked into, Sahra took a breath and hollered, "ULLYULLY UXINFREE!"
It worked much quicker than anything.
House by house, the human families woke up, spread the word, got out into the halls and towards the first check-in point.
Somebody's Gempa, almost too old to really be alive, took it on himself to go to the guard.
Sahra peeked around a corner, keeping low so she could stay invisible.
The guard was also asleep. Leaning so that it would look like he was focussed on his monitors.
He must have seen the Gempa coming through his back-eye, because he jerked up and turned, bringing his weapon up.
"Curfew! Explain yourself, old one."
Gempa had his hands open at his shoulders and his eyes looking at his own toes. "I apologize, master, but the air has stopped and we are frightened. We fear we are punished for something."
The guard's monitors were dark. Sahra watched as the guard poked at buttons and growled a curse. He sniffed the air and made a master's version of a stink-face. All the more frightening for all his sharp teeth.
The guard tried the comms. No power meant no comms.
Then he walked into the hall past the Gempa and gestured with his weapon. "All of you. Follow me."
Sahra found someone who would protect her and held onto their hand like it was her only hope. Only babies and littles got carried. There were too many children and never enough hands.
It was dark. The only light came from the guard's weapon. It shone on walls far away, vanished into doors, and got lost behind too many bodies.
Nobody said a word.
They stopped in a place with a soft floor and a funny smell. The guard got them to sit between wooden boxes that also smelled funny and took the light away with him.
The babies were crying, but very, very softly. Like they knew it was trouble to make noise, but couldn't stop.
It wasn't just her sibs. It was all the babies, all over.
She reached for the nearest one and patted their back. And started on the lullaby.
"Rock mah soul inna bosom of Abraham..." It only took seconds, but others all around her took up the song. She hadn't even reached the end of the first verse and the whole room was singing.
This must be what heaven was like. Only with light and angels.
She hoped Simy was okay.
*
The air had stopped. He noticed in the instant that the lights failed. The constant hum of the fans dwindled and died in eerie silence. Even the distant hum of the superior sections faded into nothing.
Silence in space was terrifying.
It meant that the air would no longer circulate. Bit by bit, everyone in the station would die. Slowly suffocating on their own waste air.
He was not strong enough to help. He was not strong enough to move very far. Nor, once he got anywhere, was he strong enough to do anything signifiant. He could metabolize the carbon dioxide into oxygen, keeping the carbon for himself, but he could not make it go anywhere. He couldn't even stretch himself into a balloon and blow it into the air vents.
Music filtered down to him in the darkness. Carried along by the bulkheads. Or perhaps the sheer volume caused by so many voices raised at once.
Human music.
They could lift their voices to do some amazing things, when the mood struck them. Their peculiar words made it all nonsense, but some famous Tu'atta composers had taken human melodies and created something magnificent out of them.
Stuck in the darkness, terrified they were dying or about to die, they sang. A simple hymn, or so he was told, about the fate of their souls. Or the souls they believed that they had. And then, like flicking a switch, it got complicated. One group sung the first verse. A second sung the second, and a third sung the refrain. All together.
It ran chills through him.
A fragment from a children's story rang through his mind. Look at them all through the darkness I'm bringing. They're not sad at all, they're actually singing...
All around them the station would be waking up. The Tu'atta overlords would be racing to find lights and sending maintenance people in their pyjamas down dark tunnels with only battery lights to guide them. Desperately fighting against their fate and trying everything they could think of to get the lights and the fans working again.
No power, no docking clamps. No airlocks. No medicine. No food nor water. And no fresh air.
And in the middle of this panic and flurry of activity, the humans were going to sing until they had no more air to breathe.
Sing to their trifurcated god.
Eon wondered which species was the more idiotic. The humans for accepting their ultimate fate with a song on their lips, or the Tu'atta for fighting it with curses on theirs.
Eon found himself worrying about Sahra. His little pale slave.
The smaller ones were often the first to succumb.
He began to wonder if he should plead with the deaf heavens for her life. And if he even could, what could he offer in return?
Be safe, little one. Breathe.
*
There were plants in the boxes. Sahra could feel leaves and sticks. Rough bark and sharp thorns. Plants made the air. Mama said. And the fans took it everywhere.
They were right next to plants.
But why did the air feel so hot and thick?
She was tired. It was the middle of the night. She should have been sleeping, all cuddled up with Mama. And the only thing to worry about was an incident with Darvan in the night.
Sahra didn't know the name of the other slave beside her, but they held her hand when she reached for theirs. She took a thick, hot breath and kept singing.
Her eyes, tired of the endless dark, put her in Mama's bed nook, with the pretty pictures hid away from everyone. The skived paper, some old news-sheets. Some bits off of wrecked books that the masters had tossed. Now she was in Simy's place. The wrecked mess of ore processing. Seeing Simy all alone.
He'd go to heaven all alone. Thinking she'd abandoned him.
And the masters would do what they did with every wrecked station where everyone died. Make it go away with their big fire. Plasma beams. Simy and the wrecked room. Mama's pictures. All the bodies human slaves and their masters alike, all burned up in one bright flash. Not even scrattle left behind.
But as long as there was song, there was hope.
Sahra tried to sing louder. Because it was getting hard.
*
The higher class fans went on first. Soundless, unless someone with the power to change their very body had altered their hearing to listen for the tiny, subsonic whine that they made. After that, a succession of lower-quality fans joined in the chorus until he was rewarded with the familiar hum of a fully-operational air recycling s
ystem.
Air! Real air. It stank of human sweat and bodily gasses, but it was real air.
She was going to live!
They were all going to live.
*
Sahra's ears popped painfully. She yawned and made chewing motions because popping ears meant the air had moved so fast it was squeezing stuff in or pulling stuff out, and yawning and chewing was what you were supposed to do.
And then a wonderful breeze came in. And sharp lights flicked on. And the whole room sighed as the breeze ate their sweat and made the air cool and thin again.
And on their next breath, without a word to decide, every last human sang out, "AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH-MMMEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNN!" in thanks. It made her whole chest rattle.
This was the biggest room she had ever been in. And she'd never seen this much green in one place. Big ones that touched the roof and little ones that looked like they were scared to stand up above their boxes. Some had bright colours on, like the spiky one she was next to. Some were all colours at once. The spiky plant had weird coloured bits made out of too many leaves. It looked almost like a toy.
No slave could touch it, though. She knew without asking. This was something for masters only.
All at once, everyone was standing up. Sahra stood with them. Everyone was going to their homes for whatever sleep they had left.
Sahra's heart was thumping fit to escape her ribs. It felt so good to have air. It had felt so good to have every human singing together, one mind in the dark. And now that feeling was slipping away.
Tomorrow, there would be fights. Over bed-mates, over food, over family. Over what someone said about someone else. Over who got more than they deserved. Over who got less. Over who got what they never deserved.
Over who was fashionable or who gained a scrap of praise or tiny prize from a master, and who was no longer 'in'.
It was all useless arguing.
She found Darvan in the crowd and held his hand. "Jus' tell me what 'm doin' wrong," she said, just loud enough for him to hear her. "I'll quit."
Duvi jerked away from her. "You're breathin'."
Sahra walked slower. Maybe it'd be better for her if she just stayed away from him. Out of range, out of sight. Out of his way.
How could her being alive make him so mad?
*
Graak surveyed the wreckage. Sometimes he wondered why his own people saw fit to let any humans run loose at all. This was clearly their work, and he didn't need to wait for the radio transmission to confirm it.
The human rebels somehow believed that the occasional explosion would make the mighty Tu'att empire frightened enough to go away and leave them alone.
