The People of Sparks

by Jeanne DuPrau

  Torren swatted her hand away. “It was the biggest animal on earth,” he said. “If it wrapped its nose around you, you would die.”

  “I’d love to see one,” Lina said.

  “You can’t. There aren’t any more.” Torren spread his arms out, hiding his treasures from view. “You have to go away now,” he said. “You only get one look.”

  So Lina went out into the courtyard and picked a few green grapes, which turned out to be much too hard and sour to eat. Through the window, she could see Torren moving the tank and the motorcycle toward each other, and she could hear him making growling and crashing noises. What must the ancient world have been like, she wondered, with all these strange things moving around in it? Was it wonderful or terrible?

  One afternoon, when Lina was in the village picking up some salt for the doctor, she saw a long line of people at a clothing shop. A few Emberites were among them. Lizzie was in the line, wearing the black scarf around her neck that she’d worn ever since she arrived, to show that she was mourning for Looper, her boyfriend back in Ember.

  “Why are there so many people here?” Lina asked.

  “They have eyeglasses!” Lizzie said. “A roamer brought in a special load of them yesterday.”

  “Glasses? But you don’t wear glasses.”

  “These are dark glasses,” Lizzie said. “They call them sunglasses. They make it so the light doesn’t hurt your eyes as much.”

  Most of the people of Sparks already had sunglasses. A couple of the work leaders, understanding how much the light bothered the Emberites’ eyes, traded some extra wooden crates for a couple of boxes of the glasses and gave them out for free. Lina tried some on but didn’t like them because they made all the green look brownish. She also thought they made people look sneaky, as if they had evil secret plans.

  Lina liked going to the market plaza. It was always alive with people and animals, and the markets had things she’d never seen before—sandals made of old truck tires, hats and baskets woven of straw. It was a noisy, bustling, interesting place. It was also very messy.

  The animals made the mess. Goats and oxen, pulling carts in from the fields, left their big, smelly plops all over. These got cleaned up eventually—someone came and scraped them into buckets and took them away—but often this didn’t happen until halfway through the morning, and people had to step carefully until then and breathe in that powerful smell. This gave Lina a good idea. She would do a favor for the marketplace, she decided; everyone would appreciate it.

  So the next morning, just at dawn, she rode her bike down to the plaza with a big bucket hanging from the handlebars. She scooped up a load of cow plops and goat plops and dumped it into the river. Back and forth from the plaza to the river she went, scraping up one smelly, squashy load after another, and when she was just about to dump the last load, one of the shopkeepers arrived. She smiled at him, expecting some words of approval. But instead his face twisted in rage.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted. He started running toward her. “Dumping that good stuff in the river?” He seemed unable to believe his eyes. “What is the matter with you?”

  Good stuff? thought Lina. What was he talking about?

  He snatched the bucket out of her hand. “You people are—” He stopped. He pressed his lips together and closed his eyes for a moment. “All right,” he said in a tight voice. “I suppose you didn’t know. This stuff is precious. You do not throw it in the river!”

  Lina took a step backward. She felt as if she’d been slapped. “Oh!” she said. “Then what do you do with it?”

  “It goes out to the fields,” the man said. “It goes into the rotting pile, and when it’s ready they dig it into the ground. It’s fertilizer. I guess you’ve never heard of it.”

  “No,” said Lina. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I was trying to be helpful.”

  “The most helpful thing you people could do would be to . . . well, never mind.” He gave Lina a last disgusted look and walked away, leaving her with a half-filled bucket she didn’t know what to do with. She carried it out of the village and up the road, and when no one was around, she dumped its contents at the side of a field.

  It wasn’t only Lina who got into this kind of trouble. As time went on, she heard about other people doing or saying the wrong thing and irritating the people of Sparks. Sometimes it was because they seemed stupid. People from Ember were frightened by chickens, had never seen a cloud, and didn’t know the meaning of ordinary words like storm and forest and cat and lemon. They knew nothing about history. They’d never heard of other countries. They didn’t even know that the earth was round like a ball. To the villagers, they seemed unbelievably dumb.

  On the other hand, they sometimes acted a bit superior, boasting of the things they’d had in their underground city. The villagers didn’t like hearing that in Ember people had had electric lights and flush toilets and hot and cold running water. Once when Lister Munk, who had been the Pipeworks supervisor, was telling a Sparks man about the generator, the man called him a liar. When Lister protested that he was telling the truth and implied that Sparks was a rather backward place compared to Ember, the man hit him. It took five people to break up the fight.

  Worst of all was the ravenous hunger of the Emberites. The village families were pleased that these strangers were so impressed by their fruits and vegetables, but they were also worried. Their leaders had told them the newcomers were to be fed, and all households were being supplied with extra food for the purpose. But the people of Ember never seemed to get full. They cleaned every last crumb off their plates, asked for seconds, finished those off, and then sat there looking hungry. The villagers resented it. Lina sometimes overheard them talking in the markets. “It’s too much to ask,” she heard a woman grumbling. “And these cavepeople are going to be here nearly five more months! Am I going to have to give them some of my strawberry crop? I don’t see why I should.” And another woman was even more direct. “I wish they’d just get out,” she said. “It’s hard enough to feed your own family, much less a bunch of strangers.”

  Lina wasn’t used to feeling unwanted. She didn’t like it. There were plenty of things about this place she didn’t like. The dust that coated her feet and legs, for instance, turning them a yellowish brown. The tiny bugs that bit her and made red itchy spots on her arms. The way the sun burned the back of her neck. This place wasn’t so perfect, she wanted to tell those crabby villagers. In Ember, for instance, they didn’t have so many mean, snotty people as they did here.

  Lina sometimes rode down to the Pioneer Hotel to see Doon. He always seemed glad to see her, but it wasn’t the same as it had been back in Ember, when they were involved in the desperate search for a way out of their doomed city. Doon showed her around the Pioneer, and he told her about the work he did and the people he ate his lunch with. But he seemed distracted, or troubled, as if he was trying to solve a problem that he wasn’t telling her about.

  Lina would ride back to the doctor’s house after these visits with thoughts struggling against each other in her mind. She missed the old Doon, her clever, adventurous partner. And she herself felt different here, too. She didn’t know what to do or how to be. Some of the people were trying to be kind, but there was so much unkindness mixed in with the kindness. To the people of Sparks, the people of Ember were just a nuisance. How could they stay in a place where they weren’t wanted?

  This world was huge. There must be another place in it for the people of Ember.

  CHAPTER 11

  Tick’s Projects

  By the month of Burning, it was so hot that the people of Ember felt as if they were trapped in a huge oven. The sun blazed down, the grasses dried to a brownish yellow, the roads were deep in dust. People gasped and sneezed and wilted. All they wanted was to lie down in the shade, or wade deep into the cool water of the river. But the work went on as always—in the ferocious heat, they hauled garbage, cleaned out the goat pens, pulled weeds in the fields, shovel
ed manure. When they flopped down on the ground to rest or stopped every few minutes for a drink of water, the workers of Sparks glared at them and grumbled. They suspected them of being lazy, and that made the people of Ember angry. Resentment increased on both sides, until any little accident could flare up into a fight.

  At the Pioneer Hotel, the mood grew more and more grim. At first, it had been rather fun to live there, especially for the smaller children, who explored the hidden corners of the huge old building, held races in the long corridors, and played colossal games of hide-and-seek. Lizzie Bisco liked going into the Ladies’ Room on the ground floor, where there was still a large fragment of mirror attached to the wall. She could see almost her entire self in it, which pleased her on the days when she had just washed her hair in the river or found a bit of colored cloth to use as a ribbon.

  But for the older people, the Pioneer Hotel quickly stopped feeling like a fine adventure. They didn’t like sleeping on piles of pine needles and dry grasses wrapped in bedspreads. It annoyed them to have to go to the river for water, and to have no indoor bathrooms, only outhouses full of bad smells and spiders. They worried that the candles might set things on fire, and they wanted real windows, with glass, to keep the bugs out. Almost two months had passed since they’d arrived in Sparks. In about four months, they would have to leave. If they didn’t like living in the hotel, they knew they’d like even less to start from nothing somewhere out in the wilderness. They imagined sleeping with no roof over their heads, having no protection at all from the sun or the bugs, and scratching through the grass for something to eat. No one liked the prospect. In the dim hallways, in the roofless, ruined lobby, and in the dusty ballroom, people gathered in little clusters and spoke to each other in worried tones, and sometimes their worry turned to anger and fear.

  One person, however, did not stand around talking: that was Tick Hassler. When he saw a problem, he did something about it. He’d become a sort of leader around the Pioneer Hotel, just by the force of his personality. He started what he called the Pioneer Hotel Rehabilitation Project. He explained his ideas to anyone who would listen, and the way he explained them made them seem instantly exciting and fun.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” he said, the night he announced the first project. It was late evening of a very hot day, nearly dark, and a few people were still sitting out on the steps of the hotel, hoping for a cool breeze. Tick never seemed much affected by the heat. Everyone else was disheveled and sweaty by the end of the day, but Tick always managed to look neat, his hair combed so flat it looked almost polished, his bare arms and legs smooth and brown, his clothes—a plain black T-shirt and black shorts—never torn or stained. He wore his sunglasses almost all the time, and they gave him a commanding and slightly mysterious look.

  Doon was there the night Tick announced his first project. It was a relief, after a hard day, to be part of a group of people who were easy with each other, a group with a common purpose. Several of Doon’s classmates from the Ember school were part of it, and some boys who had been cart pullers with Tick, and quite a few others. There were some girls, too. Lizzie was always somewhere around Tick, listening eagerly as he talked, or trotting off on an errand of some sort for him. She had stopped wearing the black scarf that signified her mourning for Looper. “I’ve been sad long enough,” she told Doon. “Besides, Tick doesn’t think black looks good on me.” Now she wore her sunglasses all the time.

  “What we’re going to do,” said Tick, sitting on the low wall that bordered the steps, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and speaking in a way that made you feel his words were meant just for you, “is get ourselves organized. There’s a lot that needs to be done around here.” People nodded. “The first thing we need,” Tick went on, “is a gathering place, like the Gathering Hall back in Ember. And what’s the perfect spot for it?” He held out his hands, palms facing the sky, waiting for an answer.

  No one spoke.

  “This field, of course!” He swept an arm out, taking in the whole of the big field in front of the hotel, with its rough, weedy ground, scrawny trees, and chunks of concrete and other rubble. “We’re going to clear it out. We’re going to make it into a grand plaza, better than the one in the village. We can have meetings here, with our leader speaking to us from these steps.”

  “We don’t have a leader,” someone said.

  “But we will someday, once we decide who’s best for the job,” Tick said. “I’m going to start on it tomorrow—who wants to work with me?”

  And although they had already worked a full day, nearly all of them flung their hands up and volunteered. Doon did, too. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to clear the field and make a plaza; he wasn’t sure they really needed such a thing. After all, they’d be leaving here before long. But he wanted to be part of this; he didn’t want to be left out.

  The project got off to a great start: twenty or thirty people were out there every evening, pulling up weeds, digging out rubble, and hacking down trees. Tick was always there, working twice as fast and hard as anyone else and telling them all what terrific progress they were making. It was hard work, but somehow it was fun, too.

  Then one night Tick called everyone together and announced that he had a new idea. “We won’t stop working on the field,” he said, “but I’m going to take a team out to start on another project. We need to build a platform out over the river. It’ll get us out toward the deeper part, where we can swim and catch fish and maybe even launch a boat someday. There might be lots of places to explore besides this one. Who wants to work with me?”

  Of course everyone wanted to switch over to this new project. It sounded much more interesting than clearing the field. And besides, people wanted to be on the project Tick was working on.

  So a great many of them started helping with the new platform—the dock, Tick said it was called. They ripped boards off the old storage sheds behind the hotel, they piled up rocks in the river to make supports. The field project slowed way down. Hardly anyone was working on it anymore.

  And as the weeks went on, Doon began to see that this was how Tick’s projects went. He would have an idea and get everyone excited about it. They’d start in to work. Then after a while Tick would have an idea for a new project, and everyone would follow him to that one, while the old project withered away. What Tick seemed to like was the thrill of something new, and the power of being a leader. This slightly dimmed Doon’s admiration for Tick. But no one was perfect, after all. Tick had far more energy than most people, and far more ideas, even though they weren’t all good ones.

  In addition to helping with Tick’s projects, Doon had plenty of his own projects to keep him busy. In the early mornings, he helped Clary with the garden she’d put in near the river. He was working on a way to make watering easier for her. He’d seen a pump the villagers had constructed, which used the river’s current to push water out into the channels that watered the fields. This pump was fairly simple—a deep hole in the riverbank, with an arrangement of pipes and valves at the bottom. He thought he could figure out how to make one.

  In the evenings, by the last of the daylight, Doon read. He was choosing books from the room in back of the Ark every few days now. His choices at first were pretty random—he just grabbed whatever he could reach. But then he’d had a great idea for bringing some sort of order to this vast collection. One day, when he got back to room 215 after work, he’d found Edward Pocket standing by the window, frowning at the sky. Edward looked unhappy. His gnarled hands were tightened into fists, and his mouth was bunched up into a twisted knot.

  “Are you all right?” said Doon.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” said Edward. “I just love sitting around all day doing nothing.”

  “You’re bored,” said Doon.

  “Yes!” Edward cried. “Yes, yes, yes!” He raised both hands and grabbed wads of his frizzled gray hair and stretched his mouth into a mad grin. “They say I’m too old to work, but I’m not ready
to freeze up and die. I don’t want to spend my days chatting. Or sleeping.” He said the words with contempt. “What am I supposed to do with myself?”

  And of course Doon had the answer. It was so obvious he didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. “I know exactly what you can do,” he said, and he told Edward Pocket about the books.

  Now Edward spent all the daylight hours in the book room, sorting and organizing and arranging the books. He often picked out ones he thought Doon would like and brought them back to the hotel. In this way, Doon learned about bird migrations, cowboys, basketball, whales, mountain climbing, Egyptian history, dog training, French cooking, car repair, and dinosaurs, among other things. Edward even found a book called Science Projects, in which there was a chapter that explained how to do an experiment that made electricity. The experiment required things Doon didn’t have, but he kept the book anyway, in case he ever got them. You never knew what was going to turn up in the loads the roamers brought to town.

  In the meantime, Tick carried on tirelessly with his projects. The dock never did get built. It kept getting torn apart by the river’s current. But other projects succeeded. One of Tick’s ideas was to hoist the flag of Ember over the Pioneer Hotel. Lottie Hoover, who had worked in one of Ember’s city offices, had rolled the flag up and tucked it into her bag just before she rushed down into the Pipeworks to leave. Doon didn’t really see the point of flying Ember’s flag over the hotel—everyone knew that it was the people of Ember who lived there—but he helped with the project, sawing the limbs off a tall, thin tree to make a flagpole. Soon the flag of the city of Ember, deep blue with a yellow grid, flapped above the Pioneer.

  “Beautiful,” said Tick, gazing up at it. He turned to the people gathered around him. “We have to show them,” he said, “that we’re proud of being the people of Ember. They have all the advantages right now. They control the food. They control the work teams. They’re taller than we are, and stronger. But we can’t let any of that matter. If we want them to respect us, we have to respect ourselves.”