by Mark Sumner
Yulia’s footsteps made a soft crunching as she walked across clumps of fallen plaster and stepped into a room at the end of the hall. She disappeared into shadows. Denny came forward slowly, waving his hand to feel ahead. He felt nothing. Saw nothing. The darkness was absolute.
“Yulia?”
There was a popping sound ahead, and suddenly there was light. Denny blinked. Not light, but lights, a whole series of tiny, bright, blue-white lights appeared overhead. At first they seemed like just a mess, but as Denny took another step, it seemed to him that there was something half familiar about these little glimmering points.
Under the faint glow, Denny could see that most of the room around him had been cleared away. There was rubble in the corners, along with still more of the too-small chairs, but the center of the room was empty, and more or less clean. On the walls there were old pieces of paper, stained brown by time and curled at the edges. Some of the paper had splotches of faded colors. One of them looked at first like it had words, but after a moment Denny realized it was just all the letters shoved next to each other.
He looked up again at the lights. They were clearly not part of the old structure. Thin wires had been stuck to the moldy ceiling with lots of tacks and handfuls of gloop. From the wires, hair-thin lines descended, each one tipped in light. “Who did this?”
Yulia shrugged, her shoulders moving up and down beneath her oversized jacket. “I did.” She stepped to the center of the room and sat down in the clean space, crossing her legs as she settled onto the hard floor.
Denny took a step closer. Some of the lights dangled down far enough that they floated in front of his eyes. Others seemed to be fixed hard against the stained plaster. Again he had the feeling that there was something to them. Something he should know.
“I thought there was no power over here,” said Denny.
“There’s power,” Yulia replied. She shifted around a little, pulling her feet up under her legs. “You just need to know how to find it, and how to hook it up.”
Denny stared down at her for a moment, then picked a spot a pace or two away and joined her on the floor. The concrete felt cold through his thin clothing. “But why?”
She shrugged again. “I wanted a place of my own. Not like the compartment. More like...like where I used to be when I was still with my parents.”
It took Denny a moment to remember. “You came from Halitt Plex, right? Did they have lights like these?”
“Sort of,” said Yulia. “They had stars.”
Stars. Denny glanced up again at the sprawl of tiny lights. Sometimes, only in the darkest part of Dimsday, and only if you were in just the right place, you could see the stars. They were faint—so faint that you couldn’t look at them straight on. You had to see them from the corner of your eye. And even then it was just one or two stars, or maybe a handful if you were lucky. There were nowhere near as many stars as there were lights on Yulia’s ceiling.
Denny started to say something, but Yulia tipped her head back, her thick curls falling from her face as the bluish lights reflected in her eyes. “Halitt Plex wasn’t like here. For one thing, it was colder. My father said it was north, but I don’t really know what that means.”
North. Denny rolled the word around in his mind. He had heard it before. No. He had seen it. He’d seen it in Loma’s book. “Was it cold there?”
Yulia nodded. “Colder than here, anyway. There wasn’t just a little frost on Dimsday. Sometimes there was real snow.”
Snow was another word that Denny knew from the book Loma had given him. He thought that maybe he should tell Yulia about the book with the dog people, but first...“You said you know where to get a maton.”
She hesitated, and then nodded. The green light shining down left shadows across her cheeks and around her eyes. “Like I said, Halitt Plex was different. It was a lot smaller. It was a new city, not like Jukal. There were no big sleeping stadiums. No real units at all. And no human quarter.”
“No quarter?” Denny sat down across from her. The floor was cold through the thin fabric of his pants. “Where did you live?”
“With the cithians.”
Denny would have been less surprised if Yulia had told him she had lived on the blue sun. “They let you stay with them?”
“Well, not exactly.” Yulia rocked back, looking off into the shadowy corners of the room.
15
Yulia’s story
Halitt Plex was the end of the world. Or at least, the end of the land.
There were no real oceans on Rask, but there were many large lakes and swamps and marshes that stretched on to the horizon in every direction. Halitt was perched on a long sliver of low ground, flanked on one side by dull gray water and on the other side by dull gray swamp. It was bitter cold on Dimsday, barely above freezing on Whetsday, and raked by sharp winds on every day. It was one of the few places on crowded old Rask that cithians had never lived. For good reason.
But then a survey team found minerals beneath the little swamp island, minerals that were valuable across the planet and off the planet. So cithians came to build a new settlement at Halitt, and they brought humans with them.
At first there were so few cithians in Halitt that it was more an outpost than a village. When Yulia was born, there were actually more humans in Halitt than there were cithians. Humans were everywhere. Humans worked in the mines. Humans drained away the swamps and built long dikes that made the island bigger. Humans built the new city where everyone would live.
Of course, humans didn’t do this by themselves. Humans didn’t have the skills or knowledge to build the mines, or plan the dikes or design the buildings. Cithians did all that. Humans just did the work.
All the humans in Halitt Plex had jobs. Even Yulia was given a job when she was still very small. There had been a big, flat belt that came out of the mine carrying rocks to a building where they were crushed. Some of the rocks were the right kind of rocks, the valuable kind. These were blue. Some of the rocks were not the right kind. They were brown or black or gray or sometimes blue—only the wrong kind of blue. It was Yulia’s job to reach onto the moving belt, pull off the rocks that were the wrong kind, and throw them onto a pile. There were other children, and sometimes old people, who also did this job. They would stand in a line, grabbing out the not-right rocks, and tossing them away. Every day Yulia’s hands were wet and cold and bruised from the rocks, but she did a good job. She worked hard.
Other people had the job of coming for the not-right rocks with little carts and carrying them to the edge of the island, where these rocks were used in making the dikes. They were not right for making whatever it was that was made from the blue rocks, but they were fine for making the low walls that kept out the water. Nothing went to waste in Halitt.
There were many other sorts of jobs. Few of the cithian crops would grow at Halitt, so Yulia’s mother worked in a building where bright yellow cathik and bright green wheat were grown under banks of lights. Yulia’s mother, whose name was Nata, tended the plants, and cut the plants, and ground the plants to flour. Nata’s job was also very hard. She came home at the end of each long shift aching from the work she had done all day, but sometimes she was allowed to bring some of the flour home with her. When she did, she and Yulia would use it right away to make flat bread. Which was somehow better than any other flat bread Yulia had ever eaten, even the flat bread made by Auntie Talla, which was very good.
Yulia’s father had a different sort of job. He worked in building the city, but he didn’t work with a hammer or push a cart like most of the humans. Yulia’s father went every day to the place where the new city was being built. He helped the cithians in putting in pipes and in putting in wires. He knew a lot about how the city was to be built. Even the cithians said he was very smart—for a human.
On Dimsday, when the cithians slept, the humans would keep working. On those days, the cithians would sometimes tell Yulia’s father what to do, and he would tell the other human
s. Her father’s name was Bram, but people called him Uncle Boss. Sometimes, after Yulia had worked most of the day, her father would take her to see the new city being built. He showed her how the wires brought power through the city and how the pipes brought water. He showed her how to connect the wires, and how the water was controlled by valves. He showed her how stone and sand and water could go together to make concrete, which could make walls that would not only go up and down, but could also make curves and arches and domes. He showed Yulia how some of the buildings in the new city would be one shape, and some would be another. Together all the different shapes would form a unit, where all the buildings went together to provide supplies and workshops and places to sleep and places to do other things. Halitt would have two of these units, and when they were done it would be Halitt Plex—Halitt the city—and they would all have big warm buildings with lots of space.
At the very end of Dimsday, when the sky was, Bram would take Yulia through the growing city to its south edge, where both of them would stand on one of the new dikes and look out across the swamp to where lights glowed on the horizon. The lights were from the crew laying tracks for the new ground train that would link Halitt to other cities. Every Dimsday the tracks were closer. Every Dimsday the buildings were higher. Every Dimsday the stars were bright overhead.
Bram was very excited about living in the new city. Yulia was excited too. Where they lived was not big and certainly not warm. The cithians had long, curved-top buildings where they worked, slept, and did their planning. The humans lived under their cithians, in rooms carved out of the frozen ground that never melted. Yulia and her mother and her father lived with two other families beneath one of the cithian buildings, in a space so low she couldn’t stand up, even as a child. Because the cithians liked Yulia’s father, they had extra room. But not much. For sleeping they all huddled together, wrapped in many, many blankets. Even then the cold would soak in and in and in until by the time she woke Yulia’s hands and feet would ache, then burn, then ache some more.
One Dimsday, when Yulia was twelve, her father came to the mine to find her. By then, Yulia didn’t work on the belt as a picker anymore. That was a job for small children. Instead she walked in and out of the mine, following the moving belt, making sure that no rocks got stuck inside all the rollers that made it go. Being a belt walker was an important job. If the belt got stuck, the mine would have to stop until it was fixed. Yulia’s mother and Yulia’s father were both proud that Yulia had been trusted to do such an important thing, even though working inside the mine could be dangerous.
That Dimsday, Bram was even more excited than usual. The train had reached Halitt a few days before, and now train after train was coming, bringing all the supplies that a city needed. All the buildings were almost finished. It was almost time for everyone to move to the new buildings. Yulia’s father could barely wait to show it all to her. Yulia said that she could not come. She was too dirty from working all day at the mine.
Her father said that was nonsense. Even though it was Dimsday, and very cold, he took off his own coat and wrapped it around Yulia to hide her tattered jacket. Then he walked on in his shirtsleeves, saying that he was not cold at all.
There were many more cithians around than there had been before. Yulia thought many of the cithians seemed upset that a human was going in and out of their buildings. Some of them even rose up on their back legs and sounded their clackers in protest. Yulia’s father said she should not be afraid. “They’re new here,” he said. “They don’t know how we do things in Halitt Plex.” He said the “Plex” part with a big smile. After so long on the edge of things, now they were a real city.
Her father took Yulia first to see the new sleeping stadium, which was the biggest building she had ever seen. There were ranks and ranks of sleeping cradles arranged in big circles for the cithians. Even though there were no cithians inside the building yet, it was already deliciously warm. Yulia asked where the humans would sleep.
“I don’t know,” said her father, tousling Yulia’s curly hair. “Maybe this time they will give us the top level.”
He took her next into the big square workshops, then into some of the smaller control rooms, and then through one of the stations for the ground train. It was all new. All amazing. Yulia’s father could not help showing her things about how the buildings were designed. He was proud of how his work, and the work of many other humans, had helped build the Plex.
Finally, he took Yulia into one of the huge domes at the center of each unit. The domes were full of shelves and the shelves were full of...everything. Crates and boxes and barrels. Casks and packages and cans. Not every shelf was full, but the trains had been coming and coming and coming with new things ever since the tracks reached Halitt.
For the first time in her life, Yulia saw dasiks. She had been told there were other kind of people than cithians and humans, but Halitt was too cold for most of them. Now that the new buildings had come, dasiks had come with them. Long lines of dasiks were carrying things in from the trains and putting them on the shelves. To Yulia the dasiks looked very big, and their teeth seemed very sharp. Her father only laughed.
“They work with the cithians,” he said. “Just like us. We all work together.”
Bram took Yulia into one of the aisles that ran between the high shelves. The variety of sizes and shapes that rose up around her made Yulia a little dizzy. “What are all these things?” she asked. And he told her.
Later, they stood on the south wall, the way they had on many other Dimsdays, and looked out over the frozen land. The tracks were finished. The city was finished. Everything looked very different than it had the first time Yulia could remember coming to that place. Only the stars overhead seemed the same.
While they were walking back to their home, two cithians stopped them. These were not strangers. They were cithians that had worked with Yulia’s father for years while the city was being built, only this time there were several dasiks with them. The cithians asked Bram to come with them, and he agreed.
“I will see you at home,” Yulia’s father told her. “Tell your mother to pack up our things. It’s time to move.”
Yulia might have said that they had very little to pack; just a few cooking things and a few worn clothes and a few old blankets. The blankets were all stiff and smelly and impossible to keep clean. All the way home, Yulia thought how nice it would be to leave the old blankets behind and sleep in the warm sleeping stadium instead. When she got home, her mother was not there. She waited. But it was cithians who came, cithians and dasiks. Yulia was put on a train the next day. She never saw either of her parents again.
16
When she was done with her story, Yulia stood up. “It’s very warm in Jukal,” she said, as she shifted inside her oversized coat. “But somehow I’m always cold.” She walked out, brushing aside stars as she went.
Denny stayed there for a long time, under Yulia’s stars. Finally, when he thought he understood what he needed to do, he stood and walked out of the dark room. It was almost surprising to find that it was not Dimsday outside, the way it had been in Yulia’s story, but still the same Pairday it had been when Denny had followed her across the street. He didn’t see Yulia anywhere as he crossed back over the cracked pavement.
When Denny came back into the Porium, Poppa Jam looked at him with cautious hope. “Decide there was something else you needed after all?”
Denny sat the torn box back onto the counter, and nodded. “Yes.” He thought for a moment and pointed across the counter. “I still want the picture book,” he said. Then he turned and nodded toward the rear of the store. “And I want some other stuff.”
17
Dimsday
It took Denny two trips to bring his purchases and other supplies to the old building at the edge of the human quarter. He had no way to lock the doors, and no way to explain what he was doing to anyone who saw him carrying his burden to the building. Denny wasn't sure that anyone had ev
er said they weren't allowed in the unused authority buildings, but he was pretty sure no one had ever said that they were. If one of the cithians stopped him, Denny would probably be in serious trouble. No chez for three days sort of trouble. Maybe worse. But he saw no one.
There were only two rooms inside the old building. The first one was cleaner, with a series of benches, but it also had a window that looked back into the quarter, a window someone might look through. Denny dragged all his things into a corner of the second room. This room had no windows. One wall of the room was lined with water pipes and nozzles. There was a dented metal sheet at one end, which would come in handy. The room smelled bad, an ugly mix of rotting wood and chemicals. When Denny came in, there were red scuttles as big as Denny's hand gnawing at some paperboard boxes. The scuttles moved out of his way slowly, like they were irritated about being disturbed. There were some chairs at the side of the room, but the scuttles had also gnawed at them, grinding them down until they were barely more than the ghosts of chairs. They surely weren't sturdy enough to sit on. Denny wrinkled his nose and put his things on top of a sagging box.
Carefully, he pulled out the spare clothing he'd brought in his duffle and began to assemble his disguise. There was a thick sweater that had belonged to his father. Two shirts, three belts, two pairs of pants, and a bag full of towels and rags. Denny meant to wear it all.
He put the extra set of pants in front of him, and looped a couple of belts together to hold them in place. Then he stuffed rags down the legs. He put an extra shirt on over his shirt, and stuffed more clothes into the arms. When all the human clothes were on, Denny took the bolts of the thick, coarse cithian cloth that had come from Poppa Jam's Porium, and began wrapping it around himself.
