The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song)

by Brenda Cooper

  “Something I found,” Onor said. “Something about an old story you told me once.”

  Really? She settled back.

  The recording opened up with a woman’s round face looking serious and filling the screen, her green eyes flecked with gold and her hair so red it looked more drawn than real. The camera backed up, showing the woman standing. She had an air of authority that was only partly because of her red uniform. A red woman with red hair. Ruby’s lips parted and a name fell from them. “Lila Red the Releaser.”

  She’d never seen Lila on video. She’d seen a sketch, once, on a teacher’s wall. A few days later, she’d found a photo of Lila’s face on her journal, but she had never been able to find it again.

  On screen, Lila moved with confidence, stepping back, taking Ruby along as if she walked beside the woman. Other people crowded Lila from time to time, offering handshakes and hugs or just reaching out a hand to trail fingers along her uniform. Lila gave them back gracious nods and small touches, but she didn’t slow at all. She was in one of the parks, although neither of the ones Ruby knew. She spoke at the camera, “This is our last night of gathering. This is the last time I’ll talk to you this way, for tomorrow we’re going to change the way things are. And I hope you’re going to help.”

  Lila walked away from the camera, heading for a bench that had been draped with white so that when she stood on it dressed in red, with black boots and green eyes and hair as red as Ruby’s, she stood out from the landscape like a feral flower.

  The sounds of a crowd settled away; the hundreds of people who had come to hear Lila had gone largely quiet, with only an occasional whisper disturbing the pregnant moment.

  Lila stood and spoke. “We have almost a third of the ship so far, from every level. Mostly from here, from gray, from where the real work happens, from you. You are the magic that will matter as we shine light on change.”

  She waited, and the crowd reacted, hooting and calling and clapping.

  Lila Red the Releaser continued. “There are too many of us for the traditionals to move against us anymore. I have been in lockup and I am free, and you have been in lockup, all of you, all of us together. Tomorrow we will be free.

  “Tell your friends and your family, tell anyone who is not yet with us. Tell them that we will win and we will become free. We will lock up the leaders and make new ones who represent us all, including grays.”

  In the pause after her words a murmuring started and slowly grew louder.

  Just as Ruby felt the need to urge Lila to stand taller and raise her arms, she did, and a great rush of applause filled the video speakers.

  Lila lowered her arms and the sound subsided.

  “When we finish this, we will feast, and then we will work together as equals, side by side with all our brethren. We will take off our colors. Blue shirts will work the reclamation plants and greens the crèche, and side by side we will all carry water and bring food and design new games and read star charts. Women will not be raped anymore. Young men will not die for fighting or for feeling their oats or back talking another young man in a different color shirt.

  “We will all be free together!”

  Lila extended her arms toward the crowd, palms up.

  The crowd repeated, “We will all be free together.”

  “We will all be free together,” she called to them.

  They replied again, louder, “We will all be free together.”

  And then Lila lifted her hands and called for the crowd to say it again and they did, the sound from the vid filling the room.

  Ruby felt complete awe. So brave, so strong. And shame, because she wanted to be that brave but wasn’t.

  The Jackman said, “That was her last speech.”

  The words were hammers, taking the breath from Ruby. The woman on the screen had been so alive. Marcelle gave Ruby a white-faced look, and Onor looked sick to his stomach.

  Ruby stared at The Jackman. “Tell me about her.”

  The Jackman took another cookie and a water bulb. “I used to think she was a legend, something made up by someone who wanted hope. It’s not just Lila—she may not have even been the leader. She was just the one everybody knew, the face of the Freers. That’s the name of the revolution. The Freers. The formal story is that Lila Red betrayed her own, a whole level, and then the captain himself killed her. That’s all part of the legend around why no one’s lived in A-pod for a very long time.”

  “The captain?” Onor asked.

  “The man who tells Ix what to do.”

  “Who is that now?” Ruby asked. “Who tells Ix anything?”

  “Garth. Garth Galesman, but he’s a lousy captain even though he wears the uniform.” The Jackman stretched and looked uncomfortable.

  “He’s the one who killed Lila?”

  “No. He couldn’t be. It was too long ago.”

  “Tell me about Garth anyway?” Ruby asked.

  “No. And we don’t want to make Lila’s mistakes either.”

  They were all silent until it felt awkward. Ruby mused, “Lila was a hero. I want what she wanted.”

  The Jackman’s face grew hard and full of warning. “She failed. And she was one of them. A red. She had more chance than you do.”

  Ruby imagined people fighting through the corridors of the pods, inside the habs where people lived, shooting weapons across common. She could hear the yelling and the fighting, smell the blood and the fear. “How would anyone win a battle in a ship? There aren’t enough people for all that death.”

  The Jackman stood up and shouldered his pack. “After she died, the levels were shut completely, like now. That’s why you’ve never talked to a blue.”

  “I have.”

  “That doesn’t count. It wasn’t his fault he fell on you.”

  She managed not to lunge at The Jackman only because he was four times her size and she knew he was trying to bait her. Instead, she stared him down as he plucked the data stick out of the player and put it carefully in a box that he folded into his pack.

  After he left, Ruby whispered. “He knows things he’s not telling us.”

  12: Suri

  Ruby’s hand dipped and wove through the air, in and out of piles of bright beads. Her needle trailed a long, thin line of glass and metal across her thigh. Most of the beads were blue, but here and there silver caught the light and gave the strand extra life.

  “So, Miss Sullen, are you ready for Suri?” Daria asked

  “I didn’t ask Mom to come here.” She hadn’t expected to wake up excited about seeing her mom, since she’d kind of dreaded it, too. Oddly, being happy about seeing Suri was winning by a long shot at the moment. But she didn’t want to look happy, not in front of her aunt. She didn’t expect to stay happy, after all. Suri was . . . Suri.

  She kept her face as emotionless as she could, testing the strand’s strength by pulling it through her fingers. “I hope she’s in a good mood.”

  “She must have missed you a lot.”

  “Maybe she misses telling me what to do.”

  “Maybe she just misses you.”

  “She thinks about herself and about safety.”

  “Maybe she’s more than you think.”

  Ruby sighed. She liked Daria better, but the women were alike. Willing to be led and bullied and happy to trade small favors for safety. With Suri it was sex. With Daria, it was jewelry and maybe more. No way to know.

  Daria got her power somehow. The room they were sitting in was almost as big as Owl Paulie’s whole hab. The walls were all shelves, with container after container of beads and tools, string and wire. Spare bot parts and broken bits of bot parts and odd little metal shapes she’d never seen filled wire-topped baskets on the lower shelves. A nest of tangled twine and metal filaments scrounged from a hundred previous uses tried to escape from one of them, as if the raw material of Daria’s workshop wanted to make itself into art.

  Three mismatched homemade chairs fit in the middle of all this, surrounded
by end tables and footstools, leaving almost no actual floor space. She and Daria each balanced large soft-bottomed lap tables on their knees. The tables had cloth tops that beads and oddments could be spilled out onto without rolling into the corners, and soft, slight bumpers to keep escapees from rolling off.

  Daria held up the complex beaded wedding shawl she was making and squinted at it. “I missed a red one three rows back.”

  “You told me to make at least one thing wrong in every piece.”

  “That’s to know it’s handmade.” Daria frowned, “I’m up to four. That’s not handmade, that’s sloppy.”

  “It’s a big piece.”

  “And it’s due soon.”

  Ruby got up and pawed through the shelves for more silver beads. “They’re still not letting anyone get married.”

  “This’ll be needed the day the reds change their minds. There will be a shipful of weddings then.”

  “You’re exaggerating.” Ruby sighed as she sat back down. “I told you, we’re almost home. Maybe they won’t allow new families until we are.”

  Daria set the delicate lace of beads carefully across her lap and leaned back in her chair. “You might not have understood Fox.”

  Ruby picked through the silver beads for a medium-sized one. “I never told you his name.”

  Her aunt’s voice was shaded with a slight bitterness, or maybe sadness. “You think I don’t know all the stories they tell about you?”

  “What do they say?”

  “You’re going to break the gates open and go inward. You’re starting a revolution. You’re in love with a man named Fox and he’s coming for you.” Daria’s voice rose higher with each phrase, although her beads stayed in her lap, her hands still on top of them. “You figured out how to make the great test available again, even though no one ever heard about the great test before you got here. You’re going to help us all become blues.”

  Ruby shook her head.

  Daria leaned in toward her. “You’re going to set us free. That’s what they say.”

  “Are you accusing me, or wishing it was true?” Ruby found the bead she wanted and quickly popped three blue ones onto the needle behind it. She wasn’t allowed to wear blue clothes, but at least she could wear blue jewelry.

  “You need to be careful.” Daria pursed her lips. “People are making you out like something you’re not. If you disappoint them, they’ll be mad at you.”

  “How am I supposed to create a revolution when you almost never let me go out?”

  Her aunt laughed. “I let you go out last night. Are you unhappy?”

  “I like making jewelry.” And she did. Way back when she was eleven and they started her on the bot repair lines for training a few hours a day, she’d learned to sit and clean parts with both of her hands but only some of her brain. That left the rest free to be curious. It had become a blessing, which the pleasant monotony of beading also gave her. Even better, her hands suffered less than they had from degreasing parts. Of course, spending evenings in this close, cluttered place with Daria and the sparkly mounds of color was at best a pleasant jail. She wanted to be out with Marcelle and Onor.

  She dragged her thoughts away from herself. Suri thought about herself all the time, and she wasn’t going to be like Suri. “Daria? What do you know about what happened to us in the past. To the grays? Not to your parents, not to their parents, but further back?”

  Daria picked up her beadwork and plunged her needle into a pile of pale yellow beads. “People get in trouble when they talk about history.”

  “How come all the old people are afraid?”

  “Maybe you need fear to live a long life on this ship.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Daria’s voice had fallen to a whisper. “The accidents down here . . . you think they’re all really accidents?”

  Ruby flinched, dropping a bead. She saw Nona’s dying look again. “No.” She searched for another bead, accidentally poking the long, thin needle into the index finger of her other hand and biting her lip.

  Daria’s voice went soft, almost to a whisper. “Anything they don’t like, you keep quiet.”

  “Who do you mean when you say they?”

  “Ix and the reds.”

  “Ix is a machine.”

  “Ix is the one who sees everything, hears everything.”

  Ruby looked around the walls for emphasis. “Not in our habs. It’s not allowed.”

  “Taping inside our habs isn’t allowed as evidence against us, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”

  Suri had always told her they could say anything they wanted in the hab. But come to think of it, The Jackman was always careful.

  Daria hadn’t answered her question about history. And she couldn’t search the library without leaving a record.

  The Jackman. She and Onor had talked about that, but he’d said that if the reds were watching anyone, it was The Jackman. She swallowed the knot of fear the idea drove into her sternum and picked up another bead, waiting for Suri.

  She finished the necklace and started another.

  The door let her little brother Ean in first. It slammed open, and she smelled him before she saw him; he always smelled of the medical creams he worked with, almost like robot grease but sweeter. Freckles flashed across his face, and his nose turned up like her father’s must have. Macky looked like Suri, Ean was supposed to look like their dad, and she was in the middle. He grinned at her. “Hi, Sis. Mom’ll be along in a minute. She sent me ahead to make sure you didn’t escape to another pod before she gets here. She blames you, you know.”

  But his voice made it a joke, and Ruby let the string of blue and silver pool on the table beside her so she could fold Ean in her arms. “I missed you.” She hadn’t actually thought of him much, but now that she was happy to see him she knew she had missed him. “I really did. What have you been doing?”

  “Taking care of Mom, you dope. Someone had to.”

  Her cheeks flared hot, but she didn’t say anything about the cut in his comment. “Where is she?”

  “Dragging luggage.”

  Ruby eyed the puddle of beads, but Daria was up hugging Ean next, exaggerating about him being knee high last she saw him. He rolled his eyes and mouthed the word “help” over Daria’s shoulder.

  “Daria, watch the beads.” She grabbed Ean’s hand and dragged him out the door.

  Ean narrowed his eyes and grinned widely. “What? Are the beads going to run away?”

  She stifled a giggle and whispered, “It will take her a minute to think that through.”

  He gave her a knowing look and picked up his pace until they rounded the corner and almost ran into two reds on patrol.

  The reds glared at them. One of them put up his hand in a slow-down gesture.

  She nodded at the red, slowing, and whispered, “Why didn’t Macky come?”

  “He’s important now. Got an inspection job he doesn’t want to lose.” They turned a corner. “And a girl.”

  Ruby grunted, trying to hide her relief.

  When they came face to face with Suri, she was pulling a wheeled cart laden with packed boxes and bags, everything taped and neatly labeled. A light sheen of sweat brightened her brow as she stopped, frowned, and then dropped everything and raced forward. “Ruby, you’re okay.”

  Even though she’d just been dragging the cart, Suri’s primary scent remained the soft perfume of juice-flowers, and for a moment Ruby felt small in her mother’s arms, drawing comfort.

  Suri pushed her away, still holding her, looking into her eyes.

  “I’m okay, Mom.”

  “I’ve heard so much. I’m worried.”

  From Daria? Ruby shook her head. “I’m just me. In school. Same stuff.”

  Suri handed Ean the long tongue of the wheeled cart and waved him down the corridor. After the cart passed them, Suri grabbed Ruby’s hand and directed their pace to match Ean’s, staying behind him and out of his earshot. “Daria told me about
Fix, or Fox, or whatever his name is, and Greg brought home a rumor that you’re in trouble with the reds here, and I want you to tell me everything.”

  Ruby decided she hadn’t missed Suri after all. If she really couldn’t test inward, then maybe some other pod needed an apprentice robot-repair girl.

  13: The Owl’s Talk

  A week later, Ruby looked up from her seat in common to see Hugh wheeling Owl Paulie to a nearby table. The old man looked determined, as if some secret store of energy drove him. Hugh had attended study sessions, but he’d never brought his grandfather. Ruby eyed them from time to time as she finished walking Salli and Jinn through a math problem. Owl Paulie watched her, contemplative. He seemed to draw strength the longer he sat there, as if he were drinking in the young people’s energy.

  A few students came up to greet him, and others waved.

  They’d been meeting here for over a week. It had been Marcelle’s idea to start a study group so they could get to know the other students and maybe get more people excited about testing into other levels. They’d done it by example and rumor and invitation. First, it had been Salli and Jinn, who never left each other’s sides. Two days later, another group—three boys and a girl. And then they brought friends. There were two new students today. One was a pale girl, Nia, who had looked scared when Ruby stopped and introduced herself.

  Right now, common held almost half of the last-years in the pod.

  Ruby leaned over and whispered to Marcelle. “I half expect the reds to come bouncing in to break us up. An illegal gathering.”

  Onor glanced over at her, grinning. “Studying together is encouraged. We’re not protesting. We’re studying.”

  Marcelle moved from table to table, supporting, asking questions, and greeting today’s crop of new people.

  Onor went back to his journal. Ruby peeked. He was lost in a diagram of interactions between the water reclamation systems, the fruit and vegetable gardens, and the oxygen/CO2 balance.

  Ruby fingered the blue beads around her neck, small and hard against her skin.

  “Cookies!”

  The moment Kyle said it, Ruby smelled them. Kyle balanced two platters of his cookies, one on either arm, a great big smile on his face.