The People of Sparks (11 page)

So she shut her eyes and tried to look deep into her imagination. But the old version of the city, the one she’d drawn so many times, seemed to be stamped inside her eyelids. She kept drawing the same thing—the tall buildings, the lighted windows. She added a few extras: some trees, a couple of trucks with their oxen, a chicken. But it didn’t look quite right. Would the buildings be taller than the trees? How much taller? Would there be chickens in the city? She felt discouraged. So she set aside her city drawings and tried to draw what she saw around her.

She drew the lemon tree outside the doctor’s back door. She drew her bike. She drew the front of the doctor’s house, and the gate, and the grapevine over the door. Once a truck parked a little way up the road to unload some crates, and she dashed out with her paper and pencil and drew the truck and its oxen.

But none of these gave her quite the same thrill as drawing the city. There was a feeling that went with drawing the city, a feeling of longing and excitement and mystery. It was as if her drawings of the city were a half-open window, a glimpse of something she couldn’t quite see clearly.

Torren sometimes came up behind her when she was drawing and peered over her shoulder. Now and then he would point out some part of the picture that didn’t look right, but most of the time he didn’t comment at all. He was hopping with impatience these days, waiting for his brother to come home. “He’ll be bringing me something,” he said one day. “Every time he comes home, he brings me something.” He went to the window seat and took his bag of treasures from the cabinet underneath. “I’ll show you these,” he said to Lina, “if you promise not to touch them.”

Lina wandered over. She didn’t want to appear too interested, since Torren was certainly never interested in anything
she
did, but she was curious about these prized possessions he’d been hiding.

He reached into the bag and took out one thing at a time, placing it carefully on the window ledge. There were six things, all different. Lina could not identify a single one of them.

“Caspar brought me these,” Torren said. He lined them up, making tiny adjustments to their positions until he got them just right. “They’re all extinct.”

Lina took a step closer and bent down to look.

“Don’t touch them!” Torren cried.

“I’m not,” said Lina irritably. “Well, what are they?”

Torren pointed to the first thing, which was shaped like a T and made of scratched silver metal. “An airplane,” Torren said. “It carried people through the air.”

“Oh, come on,” said Lina. “It’s not even a foot long.”

“Real airplanes did,” Torren said. “This is just a
model
of a real airplane.”

He pointed to the next one. “A tank,” he said. “It runs over people and crushes them.”

“What’s the point of that?” Lina asked.

Torren sighed at Lina’s stupidity. “It’s for fighting enemies,” he said.

The next thing looked like a short, chubby bike. “Motorcycle,” said Torren. “It goes really fast.” Then came a battered silver tube. “Flashlight. You push this button, and light comes out.”

“Show me,” Lina said.

“It doesn’t
work,
” said Torren. “I told you, all these are extinct.”

The next thing was a black rectangle with rows of small colored buttons. “Remote,” said Torren.

“What’s it for?”

“It makes things happen when you press the buttons.”

“What kind of things?”

“Just things,” said Torren. “I don’t know. It’s very technical.”

The last thing was different from all the rest. It seemed to be an animal, made of some stiff grayish material. It stood about ten inches high, on four thick feet. “Elephant,” said Torren. “As tall as a house.”

“Tall as a
house
?” Lina tried to imagine it. “You mean if I stood next to one I’d only come up to here?” She pointed at the creature’s knee.

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, shoveled 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.