The People of Sparks (7 page)

“But fires are terrible,” said Lina.

“Terrible or wonderful,” said the doctor, who had found her bag behind a chair and was heading out the door. “They can go either way.”

Lina never did go down to the plaza that day. She didn’t think Doon would worry—he knew Poppy was sick, and he’d figure out that Lina had stayed with her. She would go and look for him tomorrow, she decided, and find out then what was happening to the people of Ember.

Late in the afternoon, Lina went outside and sat on a rickety bench in the courtyard of the doctor’s house, waiting to see if anyone was going to make dinner. It seemed unlikely. The doctor was off treating someone’s toothache, and Mrs. Murdo was up in the loft with Poppy, who had started crying an hour ago and still had not stopped.

A door opened, and Torren came outside. He sauntered over to Lina and stood in front of her.

“Your sister is probably going to die,” he said.

Lina jerked back. “She is
not.
”

Torren shrugged. “Looks like it to me,” he said. “Looks to me like she has the plague.” He sat down on a wooden chair, where he could stare straight into Lina’s face. He was wearing a sort of undershirt—it was white and looked like a sack with holes for neck and arms—and his thin legs stuck out from baggy shorts of the same material. He had combed his hair so that it stood up like a tuft of grass at the top of his forehead, making his long, narrow face look even longer.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lina said.

“You don’t know about the Three Plagues?” said Torren in a tone of exaggerated surprise. “Or the Four Wars? You’ve never heard of the Disaster?”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Lina. “But I don’t know what it is. I don’t know about anything here.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you,” he said. “You can’t go around being so ignorant.”

She said nothing. She didn’t like this boy’s superior attitude, but she wanted to know everything there was to know. She would let him tell her, but she wasn’t going to ask him to.

“It was a long time ago,” he said. He spoke in a precise, teacherly voice. “There were millions of people in the world then. They were all geniuses. They could make their voices travel around the world, and they could see people who were miles away. They could fly.” He paused, waiting, no doubt, for Lina to be amazed.

She
was
amazed, but she wasn’t going to show it. Besides, he was probably lying. She just nodded.

“They could make music come down out of the air. They had thousands of smooth roads and could go anywhere they wanted, really fast. They had pictures that moved.” He waited again. He took a few apricot pits from his pocket and rattled them idly in the palm of his hand.

All right, she would ask. “What do you mean, pictures that moved?”

“Didn’t think you’d know that one,” Torren said with a tight little smile. “They were huge pictures, taller than a house. They were called movies. You’d look at a wall and see a story happening on it, with voices and other sounds.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Lina. She thought he might easily be making it up.

“We learn it in school,” said Torren. “They teach us
a lot
about the old times, so we won’t forget.”

“Have you seen a moving picture, then?”

“Of course not,” he said. “You have to have electricity. There hasn’t been any for a long time.” He chucked one of the pits at a bird that was about to drink from the water dish. The splash scared it away.

“We had electricity,” Lina said, glad to score a point over him. “We had it in Ember, until it ran out. We had street lights, and lamps in our houses, and electric stoves in the kitchen.”

For a moment Torren looked dismayed. “But did you have
movies
?” he said.

Lina shook her head. “Anyway,” she said, “what does all this have to do with my sister?”

“I’m about to tell you, if you’d just let me.” The important tone came back into his voice. “So there were all these billions of people, but there got to be too many of them. They messed up the world. That was why the Three Plagues came. But before the Three Plagues, they had the Four Wars.” Once again he paused and looked at her in that infuriating way, lifting his thin eyebrows.

“Just tell me,” she said. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“You don’t know about the Four Wars?”

“No. War—what’s that?”

“A war is when one bunch of people fights with another bunch, when both of them want the same thing. Like for instance if there’s some good land, and two groups of people want to live there.”

“Why can’t they both live there?”

“They don’t
want
to live there
together,
” he said, as if this were a stupid question. “Also you could have a war because of revenge. Say one group of people does something bad to another group, like steal their chickens. Then the first group does something bad back in revenge. That could start a war. The two groups would try to kill each other, and the ones who killed the most would win.”

“They’d kill each other over chickens?”

“That’s just an example. In the Four Wars, they were fighting over bigger things. Like who should get some big chunk of land. Or whether you should believe in this god or that god. Or who got to have the gold and the oil.”

All of this was enormously confusing to Lina. She didn’t know the meaning of “god” or “gold,” and she wasn’t sure what he meant by “oil.” “You mean,” she said, thinking of the jars that had once been stocked in the storerooms of Ember, “the kind of oil you cook with?”

Torren rolled his eyes. “You
really
don’t know anything,” he said. He flung the rest of the pits he was holding at three little red-headed birds pecking at the weeds between the bricks, and the birds scattered, cheeping. “This was really beautiful, valuable oil. Everyone wanted it, and there wasn’t enough of it to go around, so they fought over it.”

“They hit each other?”

“Much worse than that,” said Torren. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and in a low, husky voice told Lina about the weapons they had had in those days, the guns that let you kill people without even getting near them, and the bombs that could flatten and burn whole cities at once. “They set the cities on fire all over the world,” Torren said. His small eyes glittered. “And afterward came the plagues.”

“I don’t know what a plague is,” Lina said.

“A sickness,” said Torren. “The kind where one person catches it from another person, and it spreads around fast before you can stop it.”

“We had one of those,” Lina said. “The coughing sickness—it would come sometimes and kill a lot of people and then go away again.”

“We had three,” said Torren, as if three plagues were better than one. “There was the one where you wither away, like you’re starving to death; the one where you feel like you’re on fire and you die of heat; and the one where you suddenly can’t breathe. No one knew where they came from, they just rose up and swept over the whole world like a wind.”

Lina shuddered. She was tired, all at once, of listening to Torren, who took such pleasure in describing horrors and saying words she didn’t understand.

“So,” Torren said. “The Four Wars and the Three Plagues—those together were the Disaster. When it finally got over with, hardly any people were left. That’s why we had to start all over again.” He stood up and brushed away a twig that was clinging to his shorts. “We don’t have war anymore,” he said. “Our leaders say we must never have war again. And besides, there’s no one to fight against. But if we ever
do
have to have one, we’ll win, because we have the Terrible Weapon.”

“The Terrible Weapon?” said Lina. “What’s that?”

But just then Mrs. Murdo came out the door with Poppy in her arms. Lina jumped up and ran over to her. “Is she better?”

“She’s a little better.” Poppy lay against Mrs. Murdo’s shoulder, her head turned sideways, her eyes dull. “Wy-na,” she said in a small voice. Lina ruffled her fine brown hair.

Torren cast an indifferent glance at Mrs. Murdo and walked away across the courtyard. The gate clattered behind him.

“Poppy doesn’t have a plague, does she?” Lina said.

“A plague? Certainly not,” said Mrs. Murdo. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“That boy,” said Lina. “That horrible boy.”

CHAPTER 7

                    
A Day of New People

The next day, back in the plaza, Ben Barlow organized the residents of the Pioneer Hotel into teams. The teams would work together and eat lunch together. Each team would be led by someone from Sparks, who would decide where that team’s labor was most needed each day. Some days a team might work with the people of Sparks at the bakery or the shoe workshop or the wagon yard; other days they might do a job on their own, such as repairing a fence or digging a ditch. Sooner or later, nearly everyone would have done nearly every kind of work. This was the best way for them to learn, Ben said.

Doon’s team included his father, two teachers from the Ember school (Miss Thorn and Mrs. Polster), Clary Laine, the greenhouse manager, and Edward Pocket, the librarian, who would join them for lunch but not work with them because he was so old.

Doon found Lina in the crowd—the first time he’d seen her since they arrived. He told her about the Pioneer Hotel; she told him about the doctor’s house and what she’d learned from Torren about the Disaster. Lina and Mrs. Murdo were told they’d be a team of two with the job of helping Dr. Hester, since they were staying at her house. They were sent home, and all the other work teams went off to their first project: digging the hotel toilets.

They went out into the scrubby woods behind the Pioneer. The work leaders had brought picks and shovels from town; they gave each person a tool. “You’ll dig fifty holes,” one of the leaders said, “each one six feet deep. Then you’ll build a shelter of scrap lumber around each one.”

But the people of Ember had never done much digging or picking. They had to be shown how to put a foot on the shovel’s edge to drive it into the dirt, and how to lift the pick over their shoulders and bring it down hard. At first they scraped and hacked awkwardly at the hard, dry earth, grunting with effort, dislodging only a few crumbs of dirt with each stroke. After ten minutes of hard work, they’d made hardly more than shallow dips in the dirt. They were breathing fast. “Did you say six
feet
deep?” someone called out.

“That’s right,” came the answer.

So the Emberites set themselves to the task, which was for most of them the hardest work they’d ever done. After an hour, Doon had blisters on both hands and a kink in his neck. Some of the others had given up entirely and had flopped down onto the ground, dripping with sweat and aching in every muscle. Doon made himself keep going, but he was glad when the work finally stopped at noon and the team leaders marched them back into the town. He heard people murmuring to each other as they walked. “Do you think we’ll have to work like this
every day
?” “It’ll make us strong, I guess.” “Or else kill us.”

Each team was assigned to a different household for lunch. Doon’s team went with the Parton family. Through the streets of the village, they followed a stout, cheerful woman named Martha Parton, whose wide rear end wagged from side to side as she walked. “Here we are,” she said after a few minutes. She opened an unpainted wooden door and ushered her six guests inside. “Welcome to our home,” she said.

Doon looked around the low-ceilinged room. At one end was a long wooden table; at the other, a couple of benches stood before a niche in the smoke-stained wall. Sitting on the benches were two people, who got up and came forward as Martha introduced them. “My husband, Ordney,” Martha said. He was tall and narrow, with a mustache like a brown toothbrush under his nose. “And my son, Kensington.”

Kensington was a little younger than Doon, a skinny boy with yellow hair, big ears, and a freckled nose. He kept his eyes on the floor, except for a couple of quick, curious glances. “Hi,” he said to the floor in a soft, shy voice.

“And these,” Martha Parton said to her family, sweeping her arm in the direction of the guests, “are the people from underground.” She raised her eyebrows at them. “You’re lucky to have found your way here,” she said. “The only other settlements we know of are little miserable ones hundreds of miles away. Everything else is just hard, rocky dirt, and ruins, and grass.”

“And you’ve not only come to the right place,” added Ordney. “You’ve come at the right time. It’s taken years of hard work, but Sparks is finally doing well.”

“Now!” said Martha, clapping her hands. “Time to eat!”

They sat down at the big table, and Martha brought out dishes of food. “I suppose you’ve never tasted anything like this,” she said, handing around a bowl of fresh peas. “Just picked this morning. And this is pumpkin bread, made from what I canned of last year’s crop. Good, isn’t it? Did you have pumpkin bread where you came from?”

“No, indeed,” said Doon’s father.

“We did have peas, though,” said Clary. “Grown in our greenhouses.”

“And very fine they were,” said Mrs. Polster loyally. “Though slightly smaller than these.”

“Probably you haven’t had pickled carrots, either,” Martha said, passing the dish around. “These are from my mother’s famous recipe.”

“We did have carrots,” said Mrs. Polster. “A nice pale orange, some of them fully four inches long.”

“Is that right,” said Martha. “Ours are twelve inches, usually.”

Miss Thorn picked delicately at her food, making a polite comment now and then. Edward Pocket ate with such a vigorous appetite that he had no time for talking. Kensington ate steadily and silently. Every time Doon glanced his way, he found the boy staring at him, but as soon as their eyes met, Kensington looked back at his plate.

Ordney Parton cleared his throat. Apparently this meant he was going to speak, because his family all instantly looked at him. “I never knew,” he said, “that there was a kind of people who lived underground. Must feel strange to you here on the surface.”

“Actually,” said Doon, “we aren’t a different kind of people. This place feels familiar, in a way, because we came from here originally.”