The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song)

by Brenda Cooper

  She wished for Marcelle. She tried to send her a message, but her journal errored out. It errored on Onor and her mom and everyone else she knew. As she tried to sleep, her mind’s eye drew Sylva’s face glowering down at her. Though she drifted through an uneasy rest, sleep hid from her. It made her bones heavy and stole the feeling from her feet, but refused to settle over her brain and soothe. Her tired mind supplied her with thoughts about people she already missed. Onor and Marcelle and Ben and The Jackman and Daria and Hugh and Lya and Owl Paulie and even her mom.

  “I’ll figure this all out,” she whispered to the silent faces. “I will set you free.”

  24: Gray without Ruby

  Onor and Marcelle watched Ben’s slightly slumped back as he shuffled away along his appointed rounds. Onor held on to Ben’s last words, which carried more hope than the old red’s body language. He’d said, “We couldn’t have kept her alive here.” He’d meant it, too, his voice full of the certainty of someone who knows more than he’s telling. Maybe Fox could do what neither Onor nor Marcelle nor The Jackman nor Conroy nor all of them together could do: keep people with power from killing Ruby.

  How would they ever know? If she went up there and died, if it was a trap, they might never be certain what happened. News that trickled to journals and vid screens on this level never said anything about anywhere else on the Fire.

  While Ben told them about seeing Ruby in the corridor an hour ago, Marcelle slid ever closer to Onor. Her thigh warmed his and her left foot rested against his, toes touching him. It felt odd to be so close, and Onor slid away a few inches.

  “I don’t bite,” she said.

  “I can’t believe she went with Fox.”

  “Without us.”

  Marcelle looked like she needed his arm around her, but he couldn’t make himself do that, not with Marcelle. But still, she looked so lost. He nudged her softly. “It’ll be okay. We have to pack.”

  “And then I won’t see you ever again either.”

  “You don’t even like me,” he said.

  “Maybe not.” She gave a soft smile, stood up, and held her hand out for his.

  He let her have it, but stood up on his own.

  “I hate her for setting us up and then leaving.” Marcelle let go of his hand but stayed close. “Except I can’t hate her. But aren’t you angry, too?”

  “No.” He didn’t elaborate, since Marcelle seldom understood subtle emotions like sadness that made your heart want to fall into the bowl of your hips and lay still. He would miss Marcelle later, but now he missed Ruby so much that there wasn’t room to miss anyone else yet, or even to show his pain.

  Kyle waited for them in the kitchen. Somehow the story had gotten to him before they came home, but then bad news beat the speed of light regularly. Kyle had the common sense to remain quiet and not look directly at either of them until he’d put plates of food and cups of his special steaming hot stim in front of them. The smell made Onor curl his hands around the cup.

  Something else he’d eventually miss. He wondered idly if he would miss Kyle more, or Marcelle, or maybe The Jackman, but there was no feeling attached to the question at all.

  For years he had had a goal, and Ruby beside and in front of him.

  Kyle pointed at the fruit cut into tiny, sweet-smelling stars and placed on top of flat crackers spread with nut butter. “That’s for you. A going away. You might need the strength.”

  Onor took one. “Thanks for . . . everything.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Kyle said. “It will. Everything seems worse when you’re young.”

  Right. “I don’t need anyone to tell me things are as bad as they’ll ever be. I already know that.”

  Marcelle poked him in the ribs. “Maybe they won’t make us stay away long; like a punishment.”

  “This isn’t detention,” Onor snapped. “It’s jail.”

  “No,” Kyle said. “Lockup on D is far worse.”

  Onor shivered at the first-hand knowledge he heard in Kyle’s words.

  “Making people hate them is stupid.” Marcelle sipped her stim and made a sour face at the cup. “They’ll figure that out.” She took a cracker and ate, looking more thoughtful than usual.

  Kyle spoke into the small silence. “Everything is changing, with us getting near home. Nothing can go back to how it was ever again.” He slapped Onor on the back lightly. “Eat.”

  And then go become a glorified janitor. Or, more likely, a not-very-glorified janitor. They didn’t need humans to clean. They had robots for that. So it was pure punishment. He ate, slowly, the food good in his mouth even though he didn’t want it to be.

  Kyle went with them to the transportation station, Marcelle’s bags over his shoulder. People jammed the corridors, watching them, clearly curious about the exile; they stood in small groups, looking afraid or angry or empty. Marcelle walked close to Onor, her jaw clenched tight and her head up, her eyes glistening but tearless. Reds walked the halls in twos, their voices forceful as they broke up crowds and commanded people to keep moving.

  Two reds stood at the entrance to the transportation station checking people in. They stepped in front of Kyle. “You can’t go any further.”

  A flash of anger crossed Kyle’s face as he handed Marcelle her bag. He paused to look closely at each of them, as if memorizing their faces, his lips a thin line and his jaw tight. “Good luck.”

  The look in Kyle’s eyes made Onor wonder why he’d ever characterized him as mild-mannered.

  The train swayed, screaming too fast along its rails. Marcelle’s stop was first, and Onor squeezed her hand as they arrived. “Stop being so sad,” he whispered to her. “You’re stronger when you’re angry.”

  She nodded, but she slumped against him a little, burrowing her head into his shoulder.

  He held her closer than he ever had and then pushed her up and away. “You have to.”

  Before she left, she stood in the doorway and looked back.

  The door opened onto D-pod. Salli, on the same train, glared at him with near-hatred in her eyes. He mouthed a single word. “Sorry.”

  “Are you?” she whispered back.

  “Of course.” He pointed at their surroundings. “For me, too.”

  “Then fix it.”

  He didn’t answer, not sure what to say.

  He’d received detailed instructions from Ix via his journal this morning. He carried them out to the letter, reporting for duty at the D facilities crew lounge before he even checked into his assigned hab. He had to pass the reclamation plant on the way, and he tried not to look at the door. He should be going in there for hazing right now, worried but only a little, getting clapped on the back. Of course, he should be reporting for duty in a reclamation plant in a pod that no longer lived, but the doors were marked the same, with symbols for water and transformation.

  The big-machinery parts of the pods, where water and waste reclamation happened, were largely multilevel. The facilities lounge turned out to be a metal cave in the far back of the pod, under the sludge-processing part of the water plant. He half expected to smell the rotting stench of the waste-reducing bacteria at work, but apparently the gases produced there didn’t travel down. Instead, it smelled like grease and stale stim and the citrus and bark smell of a clean corridor, so strong his stomach felt like it had been slammed. As he’d suspected, the large windowless room had been designed more for robots than for people.

  Four semihumanoid bots stood loose limbed against one wall, their four feet grouped in twos for the moment, so they looked even more like people than they did when they were working. Straps held them to the wall by waist and torso. They didn’t turn their heads to look at him or anything as he entered; their true eyes were sensors that circled them all over. Above the top row of sensors, they had painted-on eyes and metal faces sculpted to look human, but neither male nor female.

  When he was little, he used to ask his mother where all the robots went at night. The memory brought a small, bitte
r taste to his throat.

  There were about twenty other bots, sporting various appendages, most of them standing at the right height to bang his knees. Grease stains and the shiny scar lines of repair welds gave them individuality.

  Hopefully he wouldn’t look as bad as the bots after he’d been here for a little while.

  None of the other exiled students had joined him in this particular misery. The benches along the one wall that wasn’t full of bots held three hard-looking women, an old man, and a man with a bruised cheek and scars on his arms who couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Onor. None of them looked like they used their shower rations.

  Probably not. Probably they sold them for still.

  He didn’t feel like talking to any of them, man or machine, so he didn’t. No one tried to talk to him either, although furtive glances passed between the others, often starting with a quick look in his direction.

  A middle-aged and middle-weighted woman walked around the room unstrapping the bots from their cradles. As she loosed them by type, the machines lined up and went out the door together in small groups. In two cases, humans were sent with them, but most chores were apparently fine for the bots all by themselves.

  A tall, thin man with a long ponytail of gray hair down his back called the other humans up one by one, speaking in hushed tones. Nothing passed between him and them except words, but Onor noticed they had their journals in small packs on their backs or bellies.

  The last person called up before Onor was one of the women, a block on legs, with short, graying hair and a slight limp. As soon as she came up, the man nodded at Onor and waved him up beside her. “Penny here will take care of you today. She’ll show you where the supplies are and how to deal with various messes.”

  Maybe he’d get lucky and the manual labor would drive Ruby’s face out of his imagination.

  Penny looked at him and smiled, but her dark eyes looked wary and her smile shed no light on her face. She smelled like sweat and dirt.

  The man kept talking. “I’m Jimmy, and you work for me. You can leave your stuff here and get it at the end of shift, and I’ll show you how to find your bunk. We take care of our own here.”

  Since his smile didn’t touch his face either, Onor didn’t feel very comforted. Or very happy about leaving his stuff. He tried to smile but couldn’t. “Thank you.”

  Onor followed Penny through the door.

  She led him down a corridor, boots echoing on the smooth metal floor. Bright overhead lights illuminated enough wrinkles around Penny’s mouth that he revised her age upward. He should talk to her, but he didn’t know what to say.

  D-pod was similar to every other pod, but the underpaths they walked were mostly strange to Onor, who lost his bearings after fifteen minutes of walking alongside the surly Penny. The dark corridors were anything but clean. They dodged bots from time to time, and once Penny kicked a broken wheel assembly into a corner beside a few other bits of metal.

  “Shouldn’t you report that?” he asked. No trash was supposed to lay loose on the ship.

  “Won’t hurt anybody that matters down here. Besides, the reclaimers will eventually find it.”

  He and Penny both wore gray, but he felt like the world had bifurcated; in his old life he had been a rich and privileged slave and now he had been handed down to something darker.

  At one point Penny was ahead of him by quite a bit, and she turned around and snapped, “Why are you dragging, boy? Think you’re too good to be one of us?”

  He shook his head at her. “Didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “The slower you work here, the worse work you get.” She sounded nervous, almost afraid. But he hadn’t given her anything to be scared about.

  “Hey! I’m a hard worker.”

  “Then keep up.” She rounded a corner.

  Onor followed her.

  A fist took him in the gut and the weight of a heavy body forced him back. A foot hooked around the back of his ankle and a hand slammed him hard, forcing him to the floor.

  He put his arms up over his face.

  Someone kicked the back of his hands.

  He held them in place anyway, afraid to be kicked in the nose or the mouth.

  Another kick in his side and he curled around his belly, a ball of Onor on the floor.

  A work-boot toe slammed into his thigh.

  His breakfast threatened to leave him.

  He split his fingers wide enough to look through them.

  Three. Three attackers. All men, he thought.

  No sign of Penny.

  How was he supposed to take on three?

  They were grays.

  He’d expected reds, but then he hadn’t seen any reds down here at all.

  A man kicked his side so hard he let out an involuntary screech. He bit down on his lower lip, drawing blood, keeping back sound.

  Nothing else happened immediately.

  “Sit up,” a voice growled at him.

  He slid his hands a little down from his face to get a better look at his attackers. Definitely three, and behind them, leaning against a wall and looking away from him, Penny.

  Onor loosed his hands, used them to push up into a seated position and scoot back against the wall.

  The man closest to him had a distinctive scar that split his lip. He said, “This is so you know we can hurt you and so we know you can take it.”

  Onor’s breath was fast and reedy from fright and pain. “You haze people to death down here?”

  A laugh. “You could call this hazing.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man shook his head. “We’re like you. Right now, you’re part of the reason we’re being watched so closely.” He cleared his throat, looking down at Onor. His face was thin, his eyes dark and full of confidence.

  Onor would remember his face.

  “This is a warning,” the man said. “You drew a lot of attention back in B-pod, and you’re to stop that now. Or we’ll make sure you’re never more than a cleaner. Got it?”

  Onor bit his lip, looking up.

  “Got it?”

  “I heard your warning.”

  The man turned and passed between the other two men, and they turned as well, the three of them disappearing around the corner.

  Penny came to his side and held out a hand.

  He glared at her. “You were part of that.”

  She shrugged. “Not my decision. No way for me to stop it.”

  He swallowed and contemplated her answer. “You led me here.”

  “I didn’t hit you.” She was still offering her hand to help him up.

  He took it. “Thank you.”

  “They beat me for longer the first time,” she said.

  “The first time? Do they beat people up regularly?”

  A thin-lipped smile crossed her square face. “Only the ones worth bothering about.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now we keep going. Got work to do.”

  25: The Fox’s Dinner

  A knock on the door dragged Ruby awake from a dream as dark as the middle of the cargo bay, unformed, lonely as only a strange place can be. It took a few moments to register that she lay on Fox’s soft bed, napping, waiting for him.

  The knock came again.

  Hope and an entirely different kind of fear goaded her to sit up and call out, “Right there!”

  In the privy, she ran her fingers through her hair and brushed her teeth. Thankfully, she’d graduated from looking exhausted to merely looking tired.

  Fox’s slender form stood just outside her door. Almost as good, the hallway was filled with the subtle scent of cooking so savory it might have wafted up from Kyle’s kitchen. Fox smiled at her. “Hungry?”

  She stepped toward him. “You cooked?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Dayn and Ani.”

  She swallowed, her disappointment nearly as deep as her hunger. The only time she’d had alone with Fox so far had been the long walk up the hidden
corridor. The food drew her out behind him, and the four of them sat at the kitchen table.

  “Sleep well?” Ani asked.

  Ruby nodded, looking the table over curiously. Kyle had served her similar food, a water soup with root vegetables and the curry tang of protein powder, yellow orbfruit, orange and red breakfruit, and flat bread with seeds baked into it. “Do you have gardens and orchards here, too?” she asked.

  “You grow our food,” Dayn said.

  Fox looked disapproving. “He means the outer pods grow the food for the whole ship, except for a few herb gardens and some greenhouses over in the university. We have no parks as big as yours and no trees. Your parks serve us all.”

  So the separation of the levels had a cost for the people inward? But what had Ix said? “You can go there. Ix told me you could.”

  Fox nodded. “It’s not Ix’s rules that keep us out. The machine only cares about keeping the ship safe. But it listens to Garth and the other idiots that run this place.”

  “Doesn’t Ix tell people what to do?”

  “Us? Yes. But not the captain.” He looked thoughtful. “I wish I’d seen the park working. I learned a lot the day you saved me.”

  “It’s my favorite place. I go there when I need to be alone.”

  “Is it as big as they say?” Ani asked.

  Ruby didn’t know how to answer, but Fox said, “Bigger than I thought.”

  “It’s very beautiful,” Ruby said. “Almost always partly empty.”

  Dayn’s voice had a small warning in it. “You can’t go back, you know.”

  She’d never see a park again? “Don’t you mean that if I go home, I’m stuck there?”

  Fox answered. “I had to promise you wouldn’t go back. And other things. I promised you wouldn’t run loose here,” he swallowed, looking apprehensive, “and that you wouldn’t contact anyone you’ve left behind, and that we would watch over you.”

  She set her spoon down and sat back. “You’ve promised a lot for me.”

  “Ani will teach you. And you’ll have to work. That part’s the same everywhere. You’ll start tomorrow with me, and we’ll spend a week or so recording. At night, you’ll stay here at first, then you’ll go out with Dayn and me and we’ll introduce you to people and teach you how to get along here.”