On Whetsday (4 page)

7

Cousin Kettle grabbed Denny coming out of the Porium, and made him come back to the compartment building to help with moving furniture down from the level where Kettle and Auntie Flash made their home. Like many of the compartments, Kettle's place was tiny and cramped. He and his mother might have taken over the whole floor. Except for Cousin Yulia, who lived in another little compartment right below them, there was not another human within a dozen levels. But like so many of the humans remaining in Jukal Plex, Kettle and Flash had not spread out when their neighbors were consigned to some other place. Some people had tried it. Poppa Gow had turned a whole floor into his compartment. But spreading out only seemed to make most folks feel even more alone than they did in their little places. Some people even said the old, empty apartments were haunted. Denny didn't believe that, but he also didn't like to go into the places where families had come and gone. It was sad.

Kettle drummed his fingers across the top of an old closetbox as they waited for the lift down to the gather room. “You should go through your own stuff,” he said to Denny. “Time to clear everything out and get ready to leave.”

Denny only shrugged. “Why?”

“Because Poppa Jam will pay for it.” The whistle sounded and Kettle tipped the box over so that he and Denny could wrestle it onto the platform. “Because it'll be a whole lot easier to carry a handful of credits instead of a bunch of junk when the authority comes to consign us all.”

“Someone is always saying we're going to leave soon.” Denny sat down his end of the box as the lift began to move down. “If I cleaned out things every time, I'd have been sitting on the floor for the last cycle.”

“It's a lot different when one of them says it instead of one of us,” replied Kettle. “You know the old saying about consignment—you can't take it with you.” Which was true enough. Most of the time, people got no warning when consignment really came. You got consigned with clothes on your back and nothing else.

By the time Denny was through helping Kettle, the scarlet sky of Skimsday had settled into a deep purple. There were some light clouds crossing the sky that were lit more by reflections from the plex than they were by the pair of faint stars. Sometimes, if you looked very carefully right about the time that Skimsday turned into Dimsday, out of the corner of your eye, you could even catch a glimpse of stars.

Denny rode the lift back to his own home, eight levels up from the gather room, and slipped into the compartment. No one else had been there in a long time, almost two years, and Kettle would have been surprised if he could actually see inside. The truth was, Denny had already sold off nearly every stick of furniture, every lamp, every knick-knack, doodad, and geegaw his family had picked up while living in Jukal Plex. He'd sold them to pay for Restaurant on those days when dancing hadn't gotten any chips and he was too embarrassed to go to Talla empty handed. He'd sold them for when Auntie Flash got sick, and everyone had chipped in to help. He’d sold them for when he outgrew his shoes and Poppa Jam charged way too much for new ones. He’d even sold things to pay for picture books and sweetpops, both because he liked them, and because it was important that nobody understood just how little he had left.

He'd sold almost everything. The beds. The chairs. Even most of the clothes and plates. He'd sold everything but the things his father made.

Denny's father hadn't just known how to beat metal into a stove. He'd known how to twist it, stretch it, cut it, shape it, until it formed things that were more than just useful. He'd known how to make things that people didn't have a name for, but which all people–humans and chugs and klickiks and even cithians–had a need.

In the center of the floor in Denny's compartment, there was a small figure made of metal. It wasn't the most detailed of the things his father had made, and it was far from the largest, but Denny gave it a big space in the room. It looked like a man, or maybe a boy. It looked sort of like he was dancing. It looked sort of like he was shaking his fists at the sky.

Denny laid down next to the statue and fell asleep on the hard floor.

8

Dimsday

On Dimsday, Denny took a walk. In the stuttering gray-blue light of Dimsday morning, Denny left the compartment building and hurried down the central street that ran through the human quarter. The street had no actual name, just a number in the massive snarl of Jukal Plex, but someone—someone long ago—had put up a sign that said Oak Street. Denny had no idea what the sign meant.

At the end of the narrow street, Denny passed between the two low, blocky buildings that guarded the edge of the quarter. The old gate and cutwires were gone, but you could still see the heavy posts where they had once been bolted to the walls. In the half-light, with the bright point of the tiny blue sun still just about to rise, everything seemed, not just dim and shadowy, but actually made of shadows. Like a dream, though not an especially good one.

Just outside the quarter were the empty sleeping stadium where the staff of the Human Assistance Authority had lived, and the even larger buildings where humans had been tested and examined when they were being brought into Jukal Plex. Nearly all of the buildings were empty now. The only lights were around the smaller building where the Overcontroller, Omi, and the few remaining guards were sleeping.

Passing through all the long, empty spaces, Denny wondered what it had been like when these buildings had been filled with people coming in from other places. Had they been excited to be there? Had they been worried? A few people had come to Jukal in the last few years, but only a handful, and most of those had already been consigned again somewhere else. Denny tried to peek into one of the silent halls, but there was nothing to see but darkness. It must have been very different back when there were hundreds, or even thousands, of humans coming here. Everything crowded and noisy and busy. Maybe it would be like that again, once they were consigned to somewhere else.

Denny came out into Jukal and stayed on the perimeter of the great plex, so most of the largest buildings were still some ways off in the distance, looming up out of the darkness. Even though it was almost all the way on the far side of the city, the Cataclysm stood higher than everything else. There was a gap between the tall white spike and the rest of the plex. Denny knew there was a wall between it and the other buildings, though he had never been close enough to see it.

The cithians had tried to do something special at the Cataclysm. Make some kind of power plant said some of the old stories. Build too high, said another–though that didn’t make sense to Denny, since shuttles went higher every day. Whatever had happened, it was bad, and now anyone who got too close to the Cataclysm would die. Which seemed like a good reason to stay far away.

The sections of the plex where Denny traveled were typical for the edges of Jukal. There were the big stadiums where most of the cithians slept away Dimsday, nestled in piles with little regard for rank. Cithians didn't have family homes–didn’t really have families–so the arrangement kind of made sense, though Denny was glad that humans didn't live that way. He wouldn't have liked listening to Poppa Jam snore. Around these sleeping domes were domed buildings for storage and tall cubes where the cithians did...whatever it was that most cithians did for most of the cycle. Despite the new rules, humans still weren't allowed in most of the cithian buildings. The Overcontroller said it was for their own safety. Cithian workers had to concentrate on their work. They couldn’t be looking out for foolish, careless, easily injured humans.

Each grouping of buildings was connected to the rest by both streets and by the ground transport. Some were even hooked together by the tall sky transports or by air taxis. Humans weren't allowed on either of those. Denny might have taken the ground transport, but sometimes the pods weren’t all running on Dimsday, and he didn’t know how to give directions to where he was going. And he was almost out of credits. So he just kept walking.

On most days, the streets between the buildings would have been crowded with cithians, and Denny would have spent much of his time just staying out of their way, but this was Dimsday. On Dimsday, most cithians stayed in the stadiums, resting during the near darkness. Now just about the only cithians he saw were the darting yellow shapes of the very young, and those like Omi, fresh off a molt, with the plastic shells on their backs and their soft bodies covered in cloth. The moltlings moved around slowly, clumsily, unable to rest with the other cithians until their new shells had at least started to harden. They really couldn't do much, not even make a warning rumble, but Denny stayed away from them as much as he could.

He made his way down the nearly empty streets, being careful to cross when he had to, dodging around the occasional road ferry, giving as much room to the few cithians he met as he could. Even so, more than one cithian rumbled at Denny, thumping their clangers against their shells in a sound that was half threat, half alarm. Twice Denny was stopped by cithians who had the red slash of the Jukal Plex Legal Authority striped across their shells. One of these made Denny empty his backpack, and spilled half his water before accepting that it was just water. Fortunately, Denny still had the purple cube in his pocket, and no one found it.

Slowly the flickering light of the blue sun wheeled around the perimeter of the sky. The winds that sliced in along the curving streets were actually chilly enough to make Denny shiver. He kind of wished now that he had a big jacket, like Yulia. He also wished there was a way to capture some of that coolness and keep it with him. He would be happy to have it when Whetsday swung around again.

Denny was very tired and thirsty by the time he caught sight of the black lake glimmering in the half-light. A curve of land swept out into the black lake, and on the end of this curve was a series of very small buildings made of stone that matched the shimmer of the sky. There were lights out there in pale pink and faded green, lights that were reflected into smears on the dark waters. Denny turned off the broad road and walked through the more twisty paths that lead out to the skynx community.

Unlike the cithians, the skynx kept small, neat little houses that were as close to the water as they could get. Those that were not directly against the black lake were raised up a bit so that those inside could see down to the waters. As far as Denny could tell, none of the homes was more than a few steps from the shore. The skynx liked water.

As Denny got closer, he could see that some of the skynx were out and moving between the homes. Even more of them were actually in the waters of the lake. The little paddles that lined the sides of the skynx' flexible bodies seemed as good at moving them around in water as they were on land. Under the faint bluish light of Dimsday, the skynx' red-brown bodies were as black as the waters of the little lake, but they moved fast enough to carve curling wakes in the still water. Several times Denny saw a skynx throw itself completely free of the water, twist, glistening, through the air, and come back to the lake with only the slightest splash. Whether it was for a purpose or just for fun, Denny couldn't say. Maybe this was skynx dancing.

The first of the skynx that Denny encountered on the street ignored him. They slipped around him on their long, low bodies, moving past as if he was just another obstacle. It wasn't until he stood in the center of the path and called out “'Scuse me” that one of the skynx actually stopped and turned his way.

The skynx raised its head until it was nearly as tall as Denny. “Yes?” it asked. It had the same fast, chirpy voice as every other skynx Denny had ever met.

“I'm looking for a human.”

“Human?” A ripple moved through the paddles at the front of the skynx' long body. “They are there,” it said, shaping its front paddles into an arrow that pointed back the way Denny had come.

“Not the human quarter,” said Denny. “Just one. Old Loma.”

In response, the skynx dropped back to its paddles and took off along the path at such a pace that Denny had to run to keep up.

Two years before, when the Human Assistance Authority had consigned Denny's father and so many others from Jukal off to new locations, Overcontroller Hiser had announced that the rules which said that humans had to stay in the quarter were being relaxed. It was a big surprise to the few humans left. From now on, humans would be allowed to travel around the city as they pleased, so long as they didn't get on any of the transports leaving Jukal Plex. And, of course, so long as they showed the proper respect to their cithian hosts. And stayed away from cithian buildings, and cithian transports, and especially the Cataclysm.

Most humans had been excited to get a chance to see more of the great city where generations of humans had lived, but never really been a part. Denny still liked to visit the spaceport, and watch the many different peoples who visited the markets and squares near the center of the city. Auntie Talla also got out into the city, shopping for food at the market, and trading things she cooked. A few others, like Kettle, had even gotten jobs out among the citizens of Jukal. But many of the humans had found that giving the cithians proper respect meant always waiting for an empty transport or walking in a hot street on Whetsday so cithians could enjoy the shade. That made traveling around the city less pleasant. Many had found it was easier to just stay in the quarter.

When it came to places to live, even though the authority would now allow them to travel to most areas, the humans still lived in the quarter. All but one.

Denny was just about to decide that the skynx he was following didn't really know Old Loma and wasn't taking him anywhere in particular, when the low figure stopped at the front of one of the tiny houses. “The human is here,” it said. Then it left, moving faster than ever.

From what Denny could see, the house looked like the other houses. Same low doors. Same pink and green lights. Same walls made from stone that was, close up, actually more like melted glass. It didn't look like a human place.

Even so, he went to the small door at the corner and rapped against it with his knuckles. It turned out that the door was more like a thick curtain, changing Denny's knocks into soft thumps. He rapped again at the frame. “Old Loma?” he said. “Are you here?”

The door curtain was suddenly swept aside. The woman on the other side was short, short enough that the skynx' door seemed well suited to her. She wore a loose robe crossed by dark bands, and her hair was a thin, fly-away tangle of white puffs. Her eyes stared at Denny with an expression that seemed more angry than surprised.

“Old Loma, I'm...”

“You're Carrel's boy,” she said, cutting him off. She leaned out the door for a moment and looked along the dimly-lit path behind Denny. “You alone?”

“Yes, I...”

Loma held the door open wider. “Get in here,” she said. “Quickly.”

Denny stepped into the house, and the door immediately fell back into place. For a moment, the room was truly dark, and Denny saw nothing but nothing. Then a light flashed on. Like some of the lights outside, it had a pinkish tone. The room it revealed was small, low-ceilinged, and cramped from top to bottom with shelves, papers, and small boxes that Denny didn't recognize.

Old Loma stepped around him. She looked older than Denny remembered from the last time she had been in the quarter. He supposed she was older. There were new creases in the skin of her face, and the whites of her eyes had taken on a yellow tint that did nothing to soften her expression. “What are you doing here, Carrel's boy?”

“I...” Denny stopped and cleared his throat. “Old Loma, I'm here to...”

“Don't call me that,” she said, cutting him off again. “I feel old enough without you reminding me.”

“Nonni Loma?”

“Just Loma will do,” Loma said. She walked slowly around Denny. “You've grown.”

Denny shrugged. “You've been gone.”