Whatever else she thought about him, The Jackman knew the back warrens of the Fire.
Marcelle had stayed behind to take care of Lya. She’d clung to Ruby for a long while. Both thinner and dirtier and scrappier than ever. Conroy was still waiting for orders, but he’d sent Ruby and Onor and Ani with The Jackman.
It was as if her time of being a well-dressed blue was days or even a week behind her instead of only hours or maybe a day.
To keep her feet moving, she started planning the words to a song about change. The ship was going to need one.
The Jackman opened a door, and she expected it to open on another dusty, empty corridor, just like the other twenty or thirty doors he’d led them through.
Just beyond the door, KJ stood ready, hands at his side, clearly prepared to fight. When he recognized them, he stopped and gaped. Blinked. And then relaxed. He stepped aside.
Ruby looked closely, trying to tell if he was glad to see her.
KJ gave no clue.
The room was big, with red couches and chairs bolted to silver walls and a square table with a vid screen embedded in the middle. There were no chairs around the table. Instead, about ten people stood around it, looking down.
Joel stood across the table from her. He looked up, a momentary lightness crossing his features. He waved and then returned to a conversation he was having with Par.
Thank god. Her doubts about The Jackman melted. She turned and planted a kiss on his right cheek, which felt stubbly and wrinkly and dry under her lips.
The Jackman flinched and took a step away from her.
She frowned but didn’t take time to worry. She had already recognized Joel and KJ and Par. She looked closer, half expecting Colin, but he wasn’t here. There were four others she didn’t recognize: two men and two women. Both women were older than Ruby, but one of them—a gray-haired matron—was much older. Only Joel and the oldest woman wore green.
Everyone else in the room was male, and neat, and looked confident. Clearly none of them had been fighting or running through corridors.
The table drew her.
As Ruby stepped toward it, KJ stepped between her and the table. He blocked her, but he spoke to The Jackman. “What’s she doing here?”
Ruby tried to step around KJ to glimpse the table, but he blocked her again.
She stepped on his foot.
“She’s rather difficult,” The Jackman said dryly as KJ lifted his foot and leaned into Ruby, one arm around her waist in an imprisoning caress.
Ruby struggled.
“She’s also rather hard to say no to,” The Jackman said.
Joel spoke from across the room. “Let her come.”
The Jackman said, “See?”
KJ grinned at her. There was no anger. If anything, the crook in his smile suggested tenderness and worry. “If you’re caught here, Garth will have you killed.”
Ruby smiled. “It’s no different for you, right? He’d kill you, too?”
KJ nodded.
As she stepped past him she said, “I hope your foot’s okay.”
“It’s fine.”
As she stepped up to the table, a set of blinking colors disappeared. Still, her eyes were drawn to the surface, where golden light still glowed in lines and circles.
She recognized the image as a very precise drawing of the Fire. She’d seen pale imitations of the picture back in school, when they were trying to teach her about the universe outside of the world she saw inside The Creative Fire. It had always fascinated her—an unseen mystery in her life. “You can’t come out of the shell,” one of her teachers had said. “There is no way to leave the ship while it flies through space. But there is a whole universe out there. We have stories. We have these drawings passed to us from the Fire’s makers.”
Ruby had repeatedly asked for more detail, to know what the ship looked like from the outside as well as the inside. No one had ever shown her. It hadn’t really helped that none of her teachers seemed to really understand the universe—the one outside the Fire, or maybe even the one within the Fire. And now, in front of her, the Fire was drawn in detail and light. Every corridor. On the screen, the ship was round, the open corners full of words and controls. Movement bloomed in various places. Different levels and views were available at a flick of a hand.
She would never have imagined such a thing as the table, or such a place as this room full of the answers to almost every question she had ever asked, existed. She felt completely awed.
The cargo pods were half the ship, maybe more. The gray pods—if you included the two dead ones—took half the rest. Actually seeing the dimensions told her volumes about the control of the ship, about the reasons the cargo bays had become partly taken over, even about the number of reds.
Joel came to stand beside her. She asked him, “Where are we?”
He pointed to a pulsing yellow light in one of the inner levels—but still not the center—of the ship.
She pointed to the very center, which was dark and thick with shapes she didn’t understand. “Is that command?”
“No. This is command.”
“Here?” An idea dawned on her. “We won?”
He shook his head. “No. Not yet. There are four places like this.” Joel pointed to each of them. “They control three. They think this one is broken, and so we’re here.”
“Ix?”
His eyes looked approving. “Colin told me you’re brilliant.”
“So what’s in the middle?” she said.
“That’s where the Fire’s guts and brains are, where Ix lives, where pilots go when they’re needed.”
Wow. She spread her hands out across the whole table, including all of its lights and colors. “Tell me what this shows you.”
She expected him to show her the battle, but he didn’t. He started with the ship, making sure she understood how to read the labels and how to control the images on the table.
A few of the other people in the room watched, but mostly they gathered in corners. Ruby sensed they were talking about her, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to be ripped away from the table in front of her, ever. It was bigger and more important than her hunger or her thirst or her curiosity about the old woman dressed in green. It was simply the best thing she had ever seen, and each time Joel touched a control and brought a new bit of information up, she felt fuller and more complete.
The pulse of fresh and grey water through the veins of the Fire fascinated her. So did Joel’s quiet explanation of how water acted as lifeline, as ballast, as shield, and as fuel.
The movement of trains. The stopped trains, one for sabotage in the tunnel and the others to cut off parts of the ship and make it hard for people to get around. The train lines that were broken. “Some have been broken for generations,” Joel said, “and maybe they never worked.”
She needed to know more. She had to figure out how to help. “What did you turn off? When I came up?”
Joel stepped back for a moment, looking around. She caught a nod from KJ and then another one from the old woman. A trio of deciders? Or had she missed some? At least they all agreed.
The lights blossomed again. They started out as gray, red, blue, and green. Thousands of lights, thousands on thousands of lights, tiny, bigger when a lot were clumped together. “It’s the battle, isn’t it?” she asked. “Who’s on our side?”
In response, the lights changed to three colors. Not points, not individuals like the other ones must be. Instead, it was shading. White—the gray pods all colored white. Brown—most of command and some spots everywhere else, a few long lines of brown, quite controlled. And everywhere, like a contamination, tans shaded to darker brown or lighter.
She understood immediately. She pointed at a knot of tans. “These are the people Ix can’t tell us about. It doesn’t know what side they’re on.”
Joel laughed. “Mostly Ix knows if the people themselves know. They wear the sign, which Ix can see as well as we can, or they’re dire
ctly following Garth’s orders. Ix can read all of that pretty well. But humans can’t always read themselves.”
“Are we winning?”
Joel shook his head. “We’re not losing yet. It’s close.”
The other people in the room had slowly gathered back around the table. She felt out of place. Still, she watched, the colors mesmerizing. She was pretty sure she could see battles and movement, and also the simple rhythms of work. The work would have to go on. They would all die if the orchards perished or the water systems stopped working.
She had a hundred questions, but no one looked like they had time to answer them. She put her hands down on the edge of the table, needing something to lean on. She’d been so fascinated that she’d forgotten how much her feet hurt.
The surface under her hand glowed red in the outline of her fingers.
Joel plucked her hand up and backed her away a step or two. “Don’t touch the screen.”
“I need to sit down.”
To her surprise, he backed up with her. Surely he was the boss and had other things to do. “Wait,” she whispered. “I’ll be right back.”
She went to the privy, splashing water on her face and doing her best to comb her fingers through her hair. Walking forever to get here had undone all the repairs she’d managed in her hab, and worse. She pulled her soiled gray shirt off and scrubbed at her body with damp wet hands and a twist of material she ripped from the shirt. Where was Ani when she needed her? For advice. For a comb. She sighed. The mirror showed a topless wild woman with a stunner wrapped around her middle. She pulled the shirt back on and frowned. At least she smelled better.
Joel stood outside, waiting calmly, looking a tiny bit bemused. He led her to one of the couches. She sat awkwardly, the stunner on her hip an unfamiliar object that unbalanced her. “I’ll get you water,” he told her.
Ruby took the moment to look around. Onor and Ani and KJ stood in the far corner talking. Two peacers had joined them.
Most of the rest of the people still clustered around the table, and Ruby realized she hadn’t even noticed if Onor had been able to see the table close-up like she had. She needed time to talk to him. There was too much to do, too much to remember.
Joel appeared beside her with a flask of water and a plate of flat protein crackers and orbfruit. Her hand reached for the food before her brain even recognized it was there.
She watched Joel as he watched her. She hadn’t really noticed details about him before. There hadn’t ever been a quiet moment like this.
The effort of leading his side—her side—their side—had taken a toll on him. The spidery age lines that edged his eyes ran long. Exhaustion sat deep in his eyes and face, aging him and making him look a bit vulnerable. In spite of that, he was neat, his gray hair combed back from his prominent cheeks and thin lips. His eyes were a lovely blue-green she could swear she’d never seen in another face anywhere.
She’d nearly emptied the plate before she could concentrate on anything other than eating and watching him. “Thank you,” she managed to choke out.
He smiled, his teeth an even white, his lovely eyes looking pleased. “You’re welcome. I needed a small success.”
“So I’m a success?”
“You look much better now, so feeding you must have been a success.”
“Are we going to win?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. They’re killing us and we aren’t killing them. Do the math.”
“Even with Ix?”
“Ix can’t disobey direct orders, except orders that hurt people.”
“But Ix is helping us?”
“Of course. We’re right.”
She loved how he was sure of himself. The food had given her energy, and she drew more from the way Joel looked at her, as if she were clean and her hair had been done up for a trip to sing in the cargo bar. “We are. I want to help.”
“You can. But not now. Now, we’re stopping for a bit, resting, getting ready to start all over. Garth has agreed to talk to us in the morning if we promise to keep working.”
“You mean the gray shifts?”
“Everyone. But we’ve set plans in motion.”
“What plans?”
He shook his head.
“He’ll keep his word?” she asked. “Garth will talk to us?”
He nodded.
“How much time, then? When is morning?”
He laughed. “A few hours yet.” He reached over and touched her cheek lightly. “Time to rest.”
“I want to help.”
“Will you sing me a song? That will help.”
He was flirting. In the middle of a battle, this man was flirting with her.
She’d fallen for Fox’s flirting, and look how that had turned out. She couldn’t give Joel, or anyone else, power over her. Ever. But she could feel him like a magnet. She wanted to touch him, to know how far her head would come on his shoulder. Which was really, really stupid. She shook herself, and a tiny moan escaped her lips. “I’ll sing for you.”
“Would you like to go someplace more private?”
She would. She did. “As long as you know I have more to offer you than you think.” There. She’d got the words out. “I have a good head for strategy and for talking to people. I’m smart.”
He looked amused.
“I can help you with the grays. The workers. I can help us win.” She was talking too fast. “They matter to you. There are so many of them.”
He laughed out loud. “You are a vision. You are who I’m fighting for, you know.” He took her hand, pulling her up. “I’m off now. My people told me to rest. You need to rest, too.”
She let go of his hand and gestured for him to lead, confused. “I need to know what you believe. Why are you fighting on our side?”
He didn’t answer until they were out of the large room, down a hallway, and into what must be his own hab. A small kitchen, a living room, a bedroom. Tasteful, neat, military. Here and there, a splash of color or a bit of homemade craft that suggested a woman took some interest in him, but no real sign of anyone else living there. Of course, maybe this wasn’t even his hab.
He went through the door to the bedroom.
54: Song of Joining
Ruby settled down on an oversized light green chair and crossed her legs, waiting for Joel to notice she hadn’t followed him to the bedroom. It didn’t take long for him to turn around in the doorway. She watched his expression carefully as he reached for her and found she wasn’t there. His face registered a moment of surprise, but no anger. He came back to sit opposite her, his expression open and curious. She liked it that he didn’t comment, and that she didn’t feel pressured.
“The question you asked. About how things were and are. It’s a long story.”
“I have time. I want it all, but what matters most is how you want the future to be.”
“Of course, you want it all.” At least he was smiling. Sort of. “I’ll tell you the short version of the story. That’s all I’ve got the energy for.”
She leaned forward.
“We left Adiamo roughly four hundred ship years ago. You know that.”
She nodded. “We went to explore and to bring back the samples and other goods we have in cargo.”
“Close enough. Raw materials that Lym wanted. Knowledge. Frozen plants and animals. Video. Our ancestors all volunteered. They chose this life for us.”
He sounded a bit . . . put off. Ruby wouldn’t label his voice as bitter, but maybe mystified and sad.
“They’d done it before, five other generation ships. None of the other ships had come back by the time we left. So maybe no one knew how hard it is.” He shifted and stood. “I need water. Would you like some?”
“Yes.”
He brought back the water. “What do you think is the hard part?” he asked her.
“Keeping it all going? Keeping the orchards alive and the robots working and the ship in one piece. There’s a lot of ways we could ha
ve died, could still die.”
He set his glass down. “That’s a good answer. But the most true answer is that it’s nearly impossible to stay focused and driven.”
She laughed. “We have work to do every day, enough to fall into bed exhausted.”
“But we don’t. Not in command or logistics. The cruelty? The reds who cause trouble?” He must have seen the look in her eyes because he said, “That’s how it is. There’s nothing new, and this is a very tiny world.”
“It took me half a day to walk here.”
“We grew up on worlds where we could walk all of our lives and not see everything. You’ve played the game.”
Adiamo. “Is it real? Adiamo? And birds?”
He gave her a funny look. “I was born here, too. But I think so. I think it is, or it was. Let me see if I can get you to understand another way. Your work hasn’t changed. When you worked in the robot shop, you did what your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents did.”
“So? I’m proud of it.”
“Hey, I’m not insulting you. But you did outgrow it.”
“Yes.” She held a hand to her necklace. “We dream.”
“That’s exactly it. We all dream, but there’s no place to expand here. It’s so controlled that it kills our soul. We think it is the whole world, that the universe is inside this ship.”
Ruby was silent. Her whole universe was here, and right now it felt bigger than it ever had.
He pursed his lips and took a drink. His voice was so soft she could barely hear it. “None of us knows about the universe. Not you, not me. Not really. No one on this ship has been outside of it. Not even the oldest people, like Owl Paulie, have been outside of the Fire.”
He had a point. She finished her water and sat back, waiting.
“It’s a very bad thing for humans to have nothing new to learn or do. We have this inner drive to create. That’s what makes you sing. You’ve even made a situation where your songs have changed the little world we live in. Because that’s what we need to do. Humans. We need to change our world.”
“So?”
“Well, if we changed much on the ship, we’d kill it. And we know it. We know how to run the Fire but not how to make it or remake it.”
The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song) Page 33