The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song)

by Brenda Cooper

  Hugh gave her a shaky smile.

  Lya pushed Ruby forward.

  She stood staring down at the crowd. If anything, they’d grown even quieter. She glanced at Hugh and Lya, who didn’t know exactly what she planned to do. She took in a deep breath, then another. “Many of you will remember the song, ‘Requiem for Grandmother.’ This is for Hugh’s grandfather.”

  She had requested an instrumental version of it, so she stood quietly while the first few bars started. She smiled when she noticed some of the audience start to nod their heads as she began the last verse first.

  Beloved Grandfather who kept me

  Safe and taught me how to be

  Part of Creative Fire’s journey

  Wait for me in the cold of space

  For I too will pass in my day

  And I’ll need your lovely face

  To see me on my way

  She went right into the chorus:

  Grandpa, will you watch for me?

  I’ll be right here, growing old.

  Grandpa, will you catch me

  The day I go out the door?

  They had joined in, following along, a few getting confused and singing grandma instead of grandpa. “Now, just listen this time through.” She started in on the verse she’d been up modifying in more ways than changing the gender.

  Beloved Grandfather who kept me

  Safe and taught me how to be

  A person yearning to be free

  I’ll don the mantle you left behind

  I’ll hold you deep inside my soul

  I’ll keep our histories in my mind

  And use them to reach our goal

  She didn’t dare look behind her at Ben or the blue. “One more time.”

  She sang the same two verses (and the chorus) two more times through, using her hands and her body language to urge the crowd to sing. Behind her, Hugh and Lya sang, Hugh’s voice soft and breaking a bit and Lya’s loud and a tiny bit off key for all her enthusiasm.

  Neither Ben nor the blue sang.

  The last time through, Ruby closed her eyes and really let go on the last verse. As she sang, she felt like she meant the words, like Owl Paulie’s spirit was in her, beside her, helping her sing to everyone who’d come to see him off.

  When she finished, Ruby opened her eyes. Hugh and Lya looked shocked and a bit in awe.

  Even on the screen, the faces of the people watching and listening down in common weren’t streaked with tears, even though her own cheeks were wet. Instead, she saw . . . anticipation. Or maybe it was excitement. Only on a few faces, fear.

  The blue startled her by moving. He opened the hatch in the far wall, slowly and exactly, every movement scripted and practiced.

  Ben stepped back and gestured to Hugh, who bent down to grasp the stretcher on one side and with help from the blue, he lifted Owl Paulie’s shrouded body and held it up to the chute it would slide into. The light caught the strand of blue beads on Hugh’s chest, so they sparkled a bit as he moved. The two men slid the old man’s feet in and then his legs, and then his torso, the body slightly tilted. This way, The Creative Fire herself took some of Owl Paulie’s weight.

  The blue spoke the closing words, his voice stilted and tinged with anger. “We of The Creative Fire thank you for being one of us. We counted the years with you as years of grace, and we will miss you among us. May the Universe hold you in her arms.”

  There was no sincerity in the words, just ceremony. He was doing what he’d been told. Ruby wasn’t used to thinking of blues as people who did what they were told, but she was sure she was right.

  They tipped the old man’s body up a bit further and let it slide down into the chute and then shut and latched the hatch over it. Hugh moaned and Lya pulled him to her. The blue turned and stood formally, looking at the camera.

  The video screen went dark.

  As slowly and deliberately as he had dogged the hatch, the blue reached toward Ben and grabbed the string of beads Ruby had placed around his neck. The blue yanked, hard, and the beads spilled off their broken thread like a thin waterfall. They rolled and scattered across the floor, finding crevasses. Her first random thought was that she’d used almost all of Daria’s blue beads, and her next was that they’d never free this room entirely of blue beads.

  The blue’s face looked serene, until she saw the fear in his eyes.

  Fear. Real and dangerous, and far scarier than anger. Owl Paulie had warned them of this, but it had been a concept and not a truth to Ruby.

  She gazed back as levelly as she could, but only for a moment. She didn’t say anything; there was nothing a gray could say to a blue who had done nothing directly to her. She didn’t dare look at Ben in case she’d gotten him in trouble.

  She did resolve to make him a new necklace.

  15: Symbol’s Birth

  Ruby shook as she, Lya, and Hugh walked back from Owl Paulie’s funeral. Lya clutched Hugh’s hand tightly to her. She looked ovar at Ruby with her eyes narrowed. “Why’re you shaking? You sing all the time. You’re always brave.”

  “I never . . . never sang words I wrote before. Besides, the reds won’t like what I had to say.”

  “So why’d you do it?” Lya’s voice sounded slightly edged.

  Ruby let a few steps pass, listening to the echoes in the narrow corridor. They were alone here, but she kept expecting a blue or a red to come out of a door or an intersecting corridor and stop them. “Are you unhappy I did?”

  Lya shook her head, but she didn’t look at Ruby.

  Hugh spoke for the first time since they’d left the funeral. “He would have loved that song. Thank you.”

  Ruby flinched at footsteps in the corridor until she saw it was Marcelle and Onor, who had come to meet them. Tears fell down Marcelle’s cheeks as she embraced Ruby and murmured, “I’m so proud of you. That was beautiful.”

  The exclamations continued back in common. Even Ruby’s mother gave her a brief nod of recognition and clung to her for a few minutes, walking close, as if she wanted to be seen with her daughter. Ruby brushed Suri away by introducing her to Salli and Jinn’s parents and suggesting to them that Suri might like friends in her new pod.

  A few people ignored her. Some pointedly. Others came up and thanked her or just watched her curiously. The mood was hushed, and a bit wary, yet with an undercurrent of excitement she hoped had come from her song and from Hugh’s words. Also from Owl Paulie’s last speech, which she overhead three conversations about.

  Whatever the varied reasons, there were enough eyes on her to make her back itch. Twice reds came in and left again, and both times they made sure to meet her eyes. A message.

  In spite of that, maybe because of it, she talked to as many people as she could. She collected stories about Owl Paulie, shared some of her own, and nodded acceptance when people complimented her performance.

  After about an hour, just as the wake was beginning to break apart, a hand grabbed her roughly on the bicep from behind, and she spun to look up into Ben’s eyes. “That wasn’t smart.” His voice was harsher than she was used to from him.

  She hissed a question at him. “Did you get in trouble?”

  He shook his head. “No. But you will. You’ve been headed that way since I met you.”

  She swallowed. “Thank you for being there.”

  He licked his lips and leaned down and whispered loudly to her, his breath a bit rank from stim. “Be careful.”

  “I can’t,” she replied.

  “You’ve gone past the kinds of trouble I can protect you from.” He was still keeping his voice low. “You’re not the only one believes life should be different. But more like it how it is. And you’re getting pretty enough for a rape.”

  At the look she gave him, he said, “Not from me.”

  “I know.”

  “Some of the boys talk about it,” he said. “Be careful.” He pushed her away from him almost roughly.

  Now she was shaking more than she had while singi
ng the song. That had been fear and pride all at once, an edge that she liked. Ben manhandling her scared her. She left the room and hurried to Daria’s hab and the quiet of the jewelry room.

  She collapsed into the softest chair, suddenly grateful to be away from the stares of people. She’d wanted the attention, she knew that. But so many of the people had seemed to want something from her, more than ever before.

  She ran her fingers through colored beads. Surely people had wanted things from Lila Red, too, and that was how she became famous enough to matter.

  Ruby wanted to give the grays hope. That’s what the beads and the test and everything was about, finding more . . . what? More freedom, more choice. For all of them.

  Lila Red had been . . . well, a red. That was the secret. But she, Ruby, had Ben on her side. He’d been protecting her tonight, both by being there at the funeral and by warning her afterward. Except he was no hero. He was old.

  But so was Owl Paulie.

  Why was this so hard to think about?

  The blue at the funeral had been afraid.

  She felt afraid. A little. In this moment, anyway.

  She stood up and paced as best she could in the tiny room. Most of the jars that had held blue beads were empty now, although there were more left than she had remembered. Enough for at least five more necklaces. She selected a jar of them. She started humming as she took down a container of red beads, setting it beside the blue. Then a gray, and as an afterthought, a small jar of black beads.

  While she strung beads, her fingers moved in ways that had become practiced and smooth, like song itself. She hummed quietly and tried to think good thoughts about what the beads could change. Eventually she came to a place where she was thinking about nothing at all, and happiness seeped in between her fingers.

  16: Preparation

  Onor woke with the sheets tangled around his knees. On the bunk below him, Marcelle snored softly. He hadn’t expected girls to snore, especially not any as petite as Marcelle. But she did. He was almost used to it after three months.

  There was something he meant to remember, a bit of a dream bubbling up like a stray thought. He reached for his journal, flicked it on so he could see, and started writing. Reds lived on all the levels. If there were three levels, then they were gray and blue and something else. There must be at least one more level, no matter what The Jackman said, one more set of people with power that he never saw.

  He’d woken up in the middle of the night possessed by the certainty that the blues did what someone told them. The blue in the funeral had ripped off the necklace Ruby gave Ben. But he’d done it after the video was off. He hadn’t wanted to be seen. Since he hadn’t known Owl Paulie (Hugh had sworn he’d never seen him before), it wasn’t respect for the old man. But it was respect for someone.

  Ix?

  But the machine was run by men; it didn’t run them.

  So there were layers of blues, or there was something else.

  Marcelle snorted below him and rolled over.

  That was another thing to figure out. Ix. Ix saw everything, kept everything running. Ix obeyed rules and laws. In fact, it was very careful to stay inside all the bounds they knew about for it. One of his teachers had called Ix too stupid to think for itself, although Onor didn’t believe the teacher was right.

  Ix enforced rules—or at least it helped the reds enforce them. But that was like Conroy keeping the reclamation plant going or Ruby cleaning up crusty old bots. It was what Ix did, not what Ix was.

  Marcelle’s voice drifted up. “Do you ever stop thinking?”

  “What?”

  “I can hear you thinking from here. You’re thinking about the test again.”

  “And you’re not?”

  Onor heard wrestling-with-clothes noises. He watched the ceiling until the sound stopped and Marcelle’s feet scuffed on the floor. She stood up and leaned against the wall, her dark curly hair a soft tangle around her face. “I’ll get stim.”

  “Don’t spill it.” He waited for the door to click shut behind her before he pushed his own covers away and pulled on his rumpled clothes.

  How the hell did he end up sleeping with Marcelle instead of Ruby? Not exactly sleeping with her, but he wanted to hear Ruby breathing at night. Surely Ruby didn’t snore.

  Marcelle padded back in. He took a steaming cup of stim from her, liking the way it warmed his hands and smelled of mint. “Thanks.”

  “Are you sure The Jackman’s going to be up this time of day?”

  “He asked me to come. We need him if we’re ever going to figure this out.”

  Marcelle blew on her stim to cool it. “What were you thinking so hard about?”

  “Power.”

  She was silent for so long that they almost finished their stim before she glanced at him thoughtfully. “So you mean who has the power to tell us what to do?”

  “The blues.”

  She held out her cup to him. “Your turn.”

  Onor took both cups and put them neatly in the sink in Kyle’s neat kitchen. Then he slid his shoes on, grabbed his journal, and met Marcelle by the door. She wore a pale dress with darker gray straps and a gray belt, and she’d pulled a comb through her hair to make it lay in dark waves and rings across her shoulders. He swallowed back a compliment. It was Marcelle, after all.

  Five minutes later, they knocked on The Jackman’s door. It slid open a crack, and Onor whispered, “It’s me and Marcelle.”

  The door opened wide enough to let them in, and after they entered, it closed quietly behind them. A faint light from The Jackman’s sterile kitchen illuminated a bulky profile on the couch. Onor swallowed and wished the door hadn’t closed.

  “Onor,” Conroy said unnecessarily.

  “Good to see you.” Onor blinked, trying to parse Conroy’s presence. “Did you move here?”

  “No.”

  He came for this talk? Onor let out a worried sigh. “Is Ruby here yet?”

  “No,” The Jackman answered. “We want to talk to you two first.”

  Great.

  Conroy laughed. “You could move over to F with me. I tried to find you the day of the disaster.”

  “He wanted to be with his girlfriend.” The Jackman laughed, a good-natured tease that still stung.

  If only Ruby were his girlfriend.

  Conroy stood up, his physical bulk intimidating. Onor stepped around him, flustered, instinctively trying for a little distance from his former boss. “I’m not working for you today.”

  “I can fix that.” Conroy sounded matter-of-fact about it. Not bragging.

  “Maybe. Maybe that’d be good again someday. I’m studying now. So why are you here this morning?”

  Marcelle stuck her hand out and smiled up at Conroy. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Marcelle. The Jackman told us you’re one of us.”

  Conroy’s face twitched like he was swallowing a laugh. He glanced at The Jackman before saying, “I don’t know who us is. I came to talk about you and Ruby. You’re making enemies. Dangerous enemies.” He looked at Onor. “I don’t want to see you dead.”

  Marcelle answered, sounding for all the world like Ruby. “So we just lay down and do nothing? I don’t want to stay here all my life, getting told what to do.”

  “What’s so bad? You’ll finish growing up and you’ll fall in love and you’ll have kids and you’ll have a job and you’ll have food.”

  Onor tried to keep up. That was exactly what Marcelle had always wanted, and Conroy had always grumbled at the reds. It was like the world was upside down, especially when Marcelle spoke with complete certainty. “I don’t want my kids to be slaves. And if we’re really going home, I want to help decide how things are. Where are we going to go when we get there? Are people waiting for us?”

  The Jackman spoke from the dark shadows of the kitchen. “I told you they were naïve.”

  Marcelle flinched but stood her ground and looked from man to man.

  “So enlighten us,” Onor snapped at
The Jackman, not liking that he was picking on Marcelle. “Owl Paulie said they were scared of us.”

  “I know. The vid went viral; we’ve all seen the clip of the Owl’s last speech.”

  Conroy didn’t live in this pod. Onor let that sink in a bit. “Everywhere. All the pods?”

  The Jackman again. “And the ‘The Owl’s Song.’ Ruby’s famous.” He narrowed his eyes at Onor, looking disappointed. “You all are, a bit. You might have succeeded before, when it was mostly quiet. We were watching you, and we thought just the three of you, and maybe Hugh and Lya, were going to take this on.”

  “We didn’t do that,” Marcelle said. “Distribute the video.”

  Conroy laughed. “No, you didn’t.”

  “Who did?”

  “There’s a better question. Who didn’t stop it from going viral?”

  Onor drew in a deep, slow breath. “Someone out to help us?”

  “Or not. Maybe to get you all in trouble. We don’t know for sure.”

  “It’s gotta be Ix,” Marcelle said.

  The Jackman shrugged.

  Conroy spoke next. “You might have convinced Ix to let you in. Heck, you might have provided entertainment, been a curiosity. The blues might have decided letting you succeed quietly was better than the noise you’d make if you failed. But so many? They’ll never let it happen. The test is lost.”

  “So they are scared of us,” Onor mused.

  The Jackman came out from the kitchen with glasses of water. “Sit down. We need to talk this out. Before Ruby gets here.”

  Marcelle flounced past Conroy, giving him a sharp glare as she went. She settled onto the frayed, dirty couch. “I want to know who they is. Is they all the blues on the world, or some of them, or is they Ix?”

  Conroy gave her such a hard stare that she leaned back away from him, pressing her spine to the back of the couch.

  Impressive, given that Marcelle never listened much to anyone, and here she was reacting to a stern look.

  Conroy said, “Them is about who’s in charge. Really in charge. Not about the color of uniforms, which is just an easy way to tell you who you’re supposed to think has power. And who you have to listen to. If you don’t listen to a red, they make you do extra work, or they lock you up for a day, or they get you in trouble at school. Maybe, if they’re told to, they do worse. But the reds aren’t power. Not usually. Others tell the reds what to tell you.”