The City of Ember Deluxe Edition
Page 18
As they went along, they talked less and less; the path sloped relentlessly upward, and they needed their breath just for breathing. The only sound was the light pat-pat of their footsteps. Lina and Doon took turns carrying Poppy on their backs—she had gotten tired of walking very soon and cried to be picked up. Twice, they stopped and sat down to rest, leaning against the walls of the passage and taking drinks from Doon’s bottle of water.
“How many hours do you think we’ve been walking?” Lina asked.
“I don’t know,” Doon said. “Maybe two. Maybe three. We must be nearly there.”
They climbed on and on. Their first candles had long ago burned down to the last inch, as had their second candles. Finally, when their third ones were about halfway gone, Lina began to notice that the air smelled different. The cold, sharp-edged rock smell of the tunnel was changing to something softer, a strange, lovely smell. As they rounded a corner, a gust of this soft air swept past them, and their candles went out.
Doon said, “I’ll find a match,” but Lina said, “No, wait. Look.”
They were not in complete darkness. A faint haze of light shone in the passage ahead of them. “It’s the lights of the city,” breathed Lina.
Lina set Poppy down. “Quick, Poppy,” she said, and Poppy began to trot, keeping close at Lina’s heels. The strange, lovely smell in the air grew stronger. The passage came to an end a few yards farther along, and before them was an opening like a great empty doorway. Without a word, Lina and Doon took hold of each other’s hands, and Lina took hold of Poppy’s. When they stood in the doorway and looked out, they saw no new city at all, but something infinitely stranger: a land vast and spacious beyond any of their dreams, filled with air that seemed to move, and lit by a shining silver circle hanging in an immense black sky.
In front of their feet, the ground swept away in a long, gentle slope. It was not bare stone, as in Ember; something soft covered it, like silvery hair, as high as their knees. Down the slope was a tumble of dark, rounded shapes, and then another slope rose beyond that. Way off into the distance, as far as they could see, the land lay in rolling swells, with clumps of shadow in the low places between them.
“Doon!” cried Lina. “More lights!” She pointed at the sky.
He looked up and saw them—hundreds and hundreds of tiny flecks of light, strewn like spilled salt across the blackness. “Oh!” he whispered. There was nothing else to say. The beauty of these lights made his breath stop in his throat.
They took a few steps forward. Doon bent to feel the strands that grew out of the ground, almost higher than Poppy’s head; they were cool and smooth and soft, and there was dampness on them.
“Breathe,” said Lina. She opened her mouth and took in a long breath of air. Doon did the same.
“It’s sweet,” he said. “So full of smells.”
They held their hands out to feel the long stems as they waded slowly through them. The air moved against their faces and in their hair.
“Hear those sounds?” said Doon. A high, thin chirruping sound came from somewhere nearby. It was repeated over and over, like a question.
“Yes,” said Lina. “What could it be?”
“Something alive, I think. Maybe some kind of bug.”
“A bug that sings.” Lina turned to Doon. Her face was shadowy in the silver light. “It’s so strange here, Doon, and so huge. But I’m not afraid.”
“No. I’m not either. It feels like a dream.”
“A dream, yes. Maybe that’s why it feels familiar. I might have dreamed about this place.”
They walked until they came to where the dark shapes billowed up from the ground. These were plants, they discovered, taller than they were, with stems as hard and thick as the walls of houses, and leaves that spread out over their heads. On the slope beside these plants, they sat down.
“Do you think there is a city here somewhere?” Lina asked. “Or any people at all?”
“I don’t see any lights,” Doon said, “even far off.”
“But with this silver lamp in the sky, maybe they don’t need lights.”
Doon shook his head doubtfully. “People would need more light than this,” he said. “How could you see well enough to work? How could you grow your food? It’s a beautiful light, but not bright enough to live by.”
“Then what shall we do, if there’s no city, and no people?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Doon didn’t feel like thinking. He was tired of figuring things out. He wanted to look at this new world, and take in the scent of it and the feel of it, and figure things out later.
Lina felt the same way. She stopped asking questions, drew Poppy onto her lap, and gazed in silence at the glimmering landscape. After a while, she became aware that something strange was happening. Surely, when she had first sat down, the silver circle was just above the highest branch of the tall plant. Now the branch cut across it. As she watched, the circle sank very slowly down, until it was hidden, except for a gleam of brightness, behind the leaves.
“It’s moving,” she said to Doon.
“Yes.”
A little later, it seemed to her that her eyes were blurring. There was a fuzziness in the sky, especially around the edges. It took a while for her to realize what was making the fuzziness.
“Light,” she said.
“I see it,” said Doon. “It’s getting brighter.”
The edge of the sky turned gray, and then pale orange, and then deep fiery crimson. The land stood out against it, a long black rolling line. One spot along this line grew so bright they could hardly look at it, so bright it seemed to take a bite out of the land. It rose higher and higher until they could see that it was a fiery circle, first deep orange and then yellow, and too bright to look at any longer. The color seeped out of the sky and washed over the land. Light sparkled on the soft hair of the hills and shone through the lacy leaves as every shade of green sprang to life around them.
They lifted their faces to the astonishing warmth. The sky arched over them, higher than they could have imagined, a pale, clear blue. Lina felt as though a lid that had been on her all her life had been lifted off. Light and air rushed through her, making a song, like the songs of Ember, only it was a song of joy. She looked at Doon and saw that he was smiling and crying at the same time, and she realized that she was, too.
Everything around them was springing to life. A glorious racket came from the branches—tweedling notes, peeps, burbles, high sharp calls. Bugs? wondered Doon, imagining with awe the bugs that could make such sounds. But then he saw something fly from a cluster of leaves and swoop down low across the ground, making a clear, sweet call as it flew. “Did you see that?” he said to Lina, pointing. “And there’s another one! And there!”
“There there there there!” repeated Poppy, leaping from Lina’s lap and whirling around, pointing in every direction.
The air was full of them now. They were much too large to be insects. One of them lit nearby on a stem. It looked at them with two bright black eyes and, opening its mouth, which was pointed like a thorn, sent forth a little trill.
“It’s speaking to us,” said Doon. “What could it be?”
Lina just shook her head. The little creature shifted its clawlike feet on the stem, flapped its brown wings, and trilled again. Then it leapt into the air and was gone.
They leapt up, too, and threw themselves into exploration. The ground was alive with insects—so many that Doon just laughed in helpless wonder. Flowers bloomed among the green blades, and a stream ran at the foot of the hill. They roamed over the green-coated slopes, running, sliding, calling out to each other with each new discovery, until they were exhausted. Then they sat down by the entrance to the path to eat what was left of their food. They untied Doon’s bundle, and Lina suddenly cried out. “The book! We forgot about the book!”
There it was, wrapped in its blotched green cloth.
“Let’s read it out loud while we eat,” said Doon.
Friday
They tell us we leave tonight. I knew it would be soon—the training has been over for nearly a month now—but still it feels sudden, it feels like a shock. Why did I agree to do this? I am an old woman, too tired to take up a new life. I wish now that I’d said no when they asked me.
I have put everything I can into my one suitcase—clothes, shoes, a good wind-up clock, some soap, an extra pair of glasses. Bring no books, they said, and no photographs. We have been told to say nothing, ever again, about the world we come from. But I am going to take this notebook anyhow. I am determined to write down what happens. Someday, someone may need to know.
Saturday
I went to the train station yesterday evening, as they told me to, and got on the train they told me to take. It took us through Spring Valley, and I gazed out the window at the fields and houses of the place I was saying goodbye to—my home, and my family’s home for generations. I rode for two hours, until the train reached a station in the hills. When I arrived, they met me—three men in suits—and drove me to a large building, where they led me down a corridor and into a big room full of other people—all with suitcases, most with gray or white hair. Here we have been waiting now for more than an hour.
They have spent years and years making this plan. It’s supposed to ensure that, no matter what happens, people won’t disappear from the earth. Some say that will never happen anyhow. I’m not so sure. Disaster seems very close. Everything will be all right, they tell us, but only a few people believe them. Why, if it’s going to be all right, do we see it getting worse every day?
And of course this plan is proof that they think the world is doomed. All the best scientists and engineers have been pulled in to work on it. Extraordinary efforts have been made—efforts that would have done more good elsewhere. I think it’s the wrong answer. But they asked me if I would go—I suppose because I’ve spent my life on a farm and I know about growing food. In spite of my doubts, I said yes. I’m not sure why.
There are a hundred of us, fifty men and fifty women. We are all at least sixty years old. There will be a hundred babies, too—two babies for each pair of “parents.” I don’t know yet which one of these gentlemen I’ll be matched with. We are all strangers to one another. They planned it that way; they said there would be fewer memories between us. They want us to forget everything about the lives we’ve led and the places we’ve lived. The babies must grow up with no knowledge of a world outside, so that they feel no sorrow for what they have lost.
I hear some noises across the room. I think it’s the babies arriving.… Yes, here they come, each being carried by one of those gray-suited men. So many of them! So small! Little scrunched-up faces, tiny fists waving. I must stop for now. They’re going to pass them out.
Later
We’re traveling again, on a bus this time. It is night, I think, though it’s hard to be sure because they have boarded up the windows of the bus from the outside. They don’t want us to know where we’re going.
I have a baby on my lap—a girl. She has a bright pink face and no hair at all. Stanley, who sits next to me, holds a boy baby, with brown skin and a few tufts of black hair. Stanley and I are the keepers of these children. Our task is to raise them in this new place we’re going to. By the time they are twenty or so, we’ll be gone. They’ll be on their own, making a new world.
Stanley and I have named these children Star and Forest.
Sunday
The buses have stopped, but they have not allowed us to get out yet. I can hear crickets singing, and smell the grass, so we must be in the country, and it must be night. I am very tired.
What kind of place can this be, safe from earthly catastrophes? All I can guess is that it must be underground. The thought fills me with dread. I’ll try to sleep a little now.
Later
There was no chance to sleep. They called us off the buses, and we stepped out into a landscape of rolling hills, in full moonlight. “That’s the way we’ll be going in,” they told us, pointing to a dark opening in the hill we stood on. “Form a line there, please.” We did so. It was very quiet, except for the squalling of a few of the babies. If the others were like me, they were saying goodbye to the world. I reached down to touch the grass and breathed deeply to smell the earth. My eyes swept over the silver hills, and I thought of the animals prowling softly in the shadows or sleeping in their burrows, and the birds standing beneath the leaves of the trees, with their heads tucked under their wings. Last, I raised my eyes to the moon, which smiled down on us from a long, cold distance away. The moon will still be here when they come out, I thought. The moon and the hills, at least.
The opening led us into a winding passage that ran steeply downhill for perhaps a mile. It was hard going for me; my legs are not strong anymore. We moved very slowly. The last part was the worst: a rocky slope where it was easy to miss your footing and slip. This led down to a pool. By the shore of the pool our group of aged pioneers gathered. Motorboats were waiting here for us, equipped with lanterns.
“When it’s time for people to leave this place, is this the way they will come?” I asked our pilot, who has a kind face. He said yes.
“But how will they know there’s a way out, if no one tells them?” I said. “How will they know what to do?”
“They’re going to have instructions,” said the pilot. “They won’t be able to get at the instructions until the time is right. But when they need them, the instructions will be there.”
“But what if they don’t find them? What if they never come out again?”
“I think they will. People find a way through just about anything.”
That was all he would say. I am writing these notes while our pilot loads the boat. I hope he doesn’t notice.
“It ends there,” said Lina, looking up.
“He must have noticed,” said Doon. “Or she was afraid he would, so she decided to hide it instead of taking it with her.”
“She must have hoped someone would find it.”
“Just as we did.” He pondered. “But we might not have, if it hadn’t been for Poppy.”
“No. And we wouldn’t have known that we came from here.”
The fiery circle had moved up in the sky now, and the air was so warm that they took off their coats. Absently, Doon dug his finger into the ground, which was soft and crumbly. “But what was the disaster that happened in this place?” he said. “It doesn’t look ruined to me.”
“It must have happened a long, long time ago,” said Lina. “I wonder if people still live here.”
They sat looking out over the hills, thinking of the woman who had written in the notebook. What had her city been like? Lina wondered. Like Ember in some way, she imagined. A city with trouble, where people argued over solutions. A dying city. But it was hard to picture a city like Ember here in this bright, beautiful place. How could anyone have allowed such a place to be harmed?
“What do we do now?” asked Lina. She wrapped the notebook in its covering again and set it aside. “We can’t go back up the river and tell them all to come here.”
“No. We could never make the boat go against that current.”
“Are we here alone, then, forever?”
“Maybe there’s another way in, some way that lets you walk down to Ember. Or maybe there’s another river that runs the other way. We have candles now, we could cross the Unknown Regions if we found a way to get there.”
This was the only plan they could come up with. So, all day long, they searched for another way in. Under the brow of the hill, they found a hole where a stream wandered into the dark. The water was good to drink, but the hole was far too small for them to fit through. There were gullies full of shrubs, and Lina and Doon crawled among the leaves and prickly branches, bu
t found no openings. Bugs buzzed around their ankles and past their eyes; brown earth stained their hands, and pebbles got into their shoes. Their thick, dark, shabby clothes got all full of prickly things, and since they were much too hot anyhow, they took most of them off. They had never felt such warmth against their skin and such soft air.
When the bright circle was at the top of the sky, they sat for a while in the shade of one of the tall plants on the side of the hill, in a place where the thick brush gave way to a clearing. Poppy went to sleep, but Lina and Doon sat looking out over the land. Green was everywhere, in different shades, like a huge, brilliant, gorgeous version of the overlapping carpets back in the rooms of Ember. Far away, Lina saw a narrow gray line curving like a pencil stroke across a sweep of green. She pointed this out to Doon, and both of them squinted hard at it, but it was too far away to see clearly.
“Could it be a road?” said Lina.
“It could,” said Doon.
“Maybe there are people here after all.”
“I hope so,” said Doon. “There’s so much I want to know.”
They were still gazing at the far-off bit of gray when they heard something moving in the brush nearby. Leaves rustled. There was a scraping, shuffling sound. They stiffened and held their breath. The shuffling paused, then started up again. Was it a person? Should they call out? But before they could decide what to do, a creature stepped into the clearing.
It was about the same size as Poppy, only lower to the ground, because it walked on four legs instead of two. Its fur was a deep rust-red. Its face was a long triangle, its ears stood up in points, and its black eyes shone. It trotted forward a few steps, absorbed in its own business. Behind it floated a thick, soft-looking tail.
All at once it saw them and stopped.