All at once Lina was overcome with tiredness. The disorderly house, the unfriendly boy, the fire . . . all of it was strange and disturbing. And Poppy was terribly sick, which worried Lina so much that she felt a little sick herself. She sat down by Mrs. Murdo and laid her head on Mrs. Murdo’s lap. She was vaguely aware of clattering and chopping noises coming from the kitchen, and then she dozed off into a confusing dream of lights and shadows. . . .
“Dinner!” shouted Torren. Lina bolted upright, and he laughed. “Have you heard of food?” he said. “Have you heard of eating?”
They sat at the table, all of them but Poppy, and the doctor ladled out something from a big bowl. Lina wasn’t sure what it was. Cold potatoes, she thought, and something else. She ate it because she was hungry. But when she had eaten she suddenly became so tired again that she could hardly move.
“Quite tasty,” said Mrs. Murdo. “Thank you.”
“Well,” said the doctor. “Certainly. You’re welcome.” She started to stand up, then sat down again, looking flustered. “Maybe you’d like to read? Or . . . walk around? Or . . .”
“We’re a bit tired,” said Mrs. Murdo. “Perhaps we could go to bed.”
Dr. Hester’s face brightened. “Bed, yes,” she said, standing up. “Of course, why didn’t I . . . Let’s see. Where will we put you?” She looked around, as if an extra bed might be hidden in the mess. “The loft, I suppose.”
“No!” cried Torren. “That’s my room!”
“It’s the only place with two beds,” said Dr. Hester. Picking up a candle, she made her way through the clutter to the stairway.
“They’ll touch my things! And Caspar’s things!” cried Torren.
“Don’t be silly,” said Dr. Hester, starting up the stairs.
“But where will I sleep?” Torren wailed.
“In the medicine room,” said Dr. Hester. Tears had appeared in Torren’s eyes, but the doctor didn’t notice. She disappeared into the loft, and for a few minutes Lina heard thumps and scrapes from above.
“Come on up,” the doctor called.
Lina climbed the stairs, and Mrs. Murdo came after, carrying Poppy. By the light of the doctor’s candle, Lina saw two beds under a sloping ceiling. There was a chest at the foot of each bed. Some clothes hung from hooks, and some boxes were neatly lined up on the sill of the one window.
“Two beds, but three of you,” said the doctor, frowning. “We could . . . hmm. We could put the baby . . .”
“It’s all right,” Lina said. “She’ll sleep with me.”
And a few minutes later, she was in bed, Poppy in the crook of her arm, covers drawn over them. “Good night,” Mrs. Murdo said from the other bed, and the candle was blown out, and the room went dark—but not as dark as the rooms in Ember at night. Lina could still see a faint gray rectangle where the window was, because of the lights in the sky, the silver circle and the bright pinpoints. What are they called? she wondered. And who is Caspar? And how can the doctor stand to have that huge, awful fire right there on the floor of her house?
Everything here was the opposite of Ember. Ember was dark and cold; this place was bright and hot. Ember was orderly; this place was disorderly. In Ember, everything was familiar to her. Here everything was strange. Will I learn to like it here? she wondered. Will I ever feel at home? She held Poppy tight against her and listened to her snuffly breathing for a long time before she fell asleep.
The First Town Meeting
While Lina slept, the three town leaders were holding a meeting. They sat at a table in the tower room of the town hall, which looked out over the plaza. Mary’s hands were clasped tightly in front of her. Ben scowled, his gray eyebrows bunched together, deepening the two lines between them. Wilmer pulled nervously on one ear and looked from Mary to Ben and back to Mary.
“They can’t stay here,” said Mary. “There are too many of them. Where would we put them? How would we feed them?”
“Yes,” said Wilmer. “But where can they go?”
No one spoke. They had no answer for that question. Outside the settlement of Sparks, the Empty Lands stretched for miles in all directions.
“They could go up to Pine Gap,” said Wilmer. “Maybe.”
Mary snorted and shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “That’s at least two weeks’ walk away. How could these feeble people travel that far? How could they carry enough food with them? Where would they get enough food, unless we emptied our storehouse and gave them everything?”
Wilmer nodded, knowing she was right. The people of Sparks knew of only three other settlements, and they’d heard from the roamers that those places were smaller and poorer than Sparks. Their inhabitants wouldn’t want extra mouths to feed, either.
The three of them gazed out the window and down at the moonlit plaza, filled with strange sleeping people from a city under the earth. Four hundred of them, with no food, no possessions to speak of, and nowhere to go.
“What I fail to understand,” said Ben, “is why this particular misfortune has happened to us.” He paused, looked into the air to his left, and frowned. This was a habit of his; he seemed to need a pause and a frown every now and then to put together his thoughts. Wilmer and Mary had gotten used to waiting through these pauses. “I don’t see that we deserve it,” Ben went on after a few seconds, “having labored as diligently as we have. And just when we are starting to prosper at last, after so many years of . . . well, adversity is a mild word for it.”
The others nodded, thinking of the hard years. There’d been winters when people shivered in tents and ate chopped-up roots and shriveled nuts. There had been years of drought and plagues of tomato worms and devastating crop failures that meant people had nothing to eat for months but cabbage and potatoes. There had been times when people had to work so hard to stay alive that they sometimes died just from being too tired to go on. No one wanted to go back to those times.
“So what do we do,” said Mary, “if they can’t stay and they can’t go? What is the right thing to do?”
The others sat silent.
“Well, there’s the Pioneer,” said Wilmer. “As a temporary solution.”
“True,” said Ben.
“A good thought,” said Mary, and Wilmer beamed. “So what about this,” Mary went on. “We’ll let them stay in the Pioneer. We’ll give them water and food—we do have some extra in the storehouse. In exchange, they work—they help in the fields, they help with building, they do whatever there is to do. We’d have to teach them how. As far as I can see, they know nothing. After a while, when they’re stronger, and when they know better how to get along, they can move on. They can set up their own village somewhere else.”
“We’ll have to watch them carefully if we let them stay,” said Ben. “They’re strange. We don’t know what they might do.”
“They seem fairly ordinary to me,” said Mary. “Except for the business about living in a cave.”
“You believed that?” said Ben.
Mary shrugged. “The question is, shall we let them stay?”
“How long would we have to keep them,” asked Wilmer, “before they were ready to go?”
“I don’t know. Maybe six months? Let’s see. It’s near the end of Flowering now.” Mary counted out the months on her fingers. “Shining, Burning, Browning, Cooling, Falling, Chilling. They could stay through the summer and fall seasons and leave at the end of Chilling.”
“That would mean they’d be on their own for the winter,” Wilmer pointed out.
“That’s right,” said Ben. “Are you suggesting we should keep them even longer? We’ll be stretching ourselves to keep them at all.”
They fell silent again, considering this.
Finally Mary spoke. “Shall we let them stay for six months, then?” she said. “And teach them as much as we can?”
No one really liked this idea. They thought of the food the refugees would need, which would mean less for their own people, and the bother of teachin
g them all the skills they’d need to survive on their own. Each one—Mary, Wilmer, and especially Ben—wished the unfortunate cave people would simply vanish.
But they weren’t going to vanish, and the leaders of Sparks knew that they must for the sake of their consciences do the right thing. They wanted to be wise, good leaders, unlike the leaders of the past, whose terrible mistakes had led to the Disaster. So they would be open-minded. They would be generous.
With this in mind, the three leaders voted:
Mary voted yes, the cave people should stay.
Ben voted yes, reluctantly.
Wilmer voted yes.
So it was agreed: They would give them a place to stay. They would help them for six months. After that, the strangers would have to take care of themselves.
Mary, Ben, and Wilmer shook hands on this agreement, but none of them said out loud what they were thinking: that even after six months, the people of Ember would be hard-pressed to start a town. The founders of Sparks had known carpentry and farming, and even so it had taken them two years just to build rough shelters and get the rocks out of the fields. They had known how to manage animals and build good soil, but still their animals sometimes died of disease and hunger in the many years when the crops failed. They had known to expect harsh weather, wolves, and bandits, and still they suffered losses from all three.
The town leaders knew in their hearts that in this vast, empty country, where there were a thousand dangers the people of Ember did not understand, they would never be able to take care of themselves.
CHAPTER 5
The Pioneer
In the village the next morning, criers ran through the streets calling to the people of Sparks. They told them to bring out all their old blankets, pillows, towels, and rags, and any clothes they no longer needed. They were to heap these on the street in front of their houses. From the storehouse, people collected food—things that didn’t need to be cooked, like apples from the prior fall, and dried apricots, and bread, and big hunks of cheese. Doon, who had gotten up at the first sign of light in the sky, watched these preparations with rising excitement.
By midday a caravan was moving southward out of the village. It was composed of strange vehicles that the villagers called “truck-wagons,” or just “trucks.” They were made of rusty metal and had four fat black wheels. At the front was a boxy part, like a metal chest with a rounded top, and behind that was a higher box with two seats in it where the drivers sat. The back of the truck was flat; this was where the crates of supplies were loaded. Attached to each of these trucks by sturdy ropes were two big, squarish, muscular animals, by far the most enormous animals Doon had ever seen. They made snuffling noises, and sometimes a low sort of groan.
“What are they?” Doon asked someone walking near him.
“Oxen,” the man answered. “Like cows, you know? That milk comes from?”
Doon had never heard of cows. He had thought milk came as powder in a box. He didn’t say this, of course. He just nodded.
“And what does ‘truck’ mean?” he asked. He understood the “wagon” part.
The man looked surprised. “It just means ‘truck,’” he said. “You know—what people used to drive in the old times. There are millions of them, trucks and cars, everywhere. They used to run on their own, without oxen. They had engines in here.” He rapped on the front of the truck. “You poured stuff called gasleen on the engine, and it made the wheels turn. Now, since we don’t have gasleen anymore, we take the engines out, and that makes the trucks light and easy to pull.”
Doon didn’t ask what “gasleen” was. He didn’t want to show his ignorance all at once. He’d spread his questions around, find out just a few things from one person at a time.
He and his father walked along together beside one of the trucks. Doon had expected Lina to be with them, but by the time the caravan left she hadn’t come. That was all right. She’d easily find out where they’d gone and come later.
Doon’s father still had sore muscles from the long walk of the days before, so Doon soon went ahead of him. He was bursting with energy and joy and simply could not walk slowly. He took deep breaths of sweet-smelling morning air. Over his head, the sky was a deep, clear blue, a thousand times bigger than the black lid that had covered Ember, and around him the green-and-golden land seemed to stretch away without end. Doon kept wondering where the edges were. He made his way to the front of the procession and asked Wilmer, who was trotting along with his arms swinging jauntily.
“Edges?” said Wilmer, glancing down.
“Yes. I mean, if I were standing way over there”—he pointed to the horizon, where the sky seemed to meet the land—“would I be at the edge of this place? And what’s beyond the edge?”
“There is no edge,” said Wilmer, looking at Doon as if he must have something wrong with him. “The earth is a sphere—a huge, round ball. If you kept going and going, you’d eventually come back to where you started.”
This nearly knocked the breath out of Doon, it was so strange and hard to comprehend. He thought at first that Wilmer was playing a joke on him, thinking he was a fool. But Wilmer’s expression was plainly puzzled, not sly. He must be telling the truth.
There were a million mysteries here, Doon thought. He would explore them all! He would learn everything! That morning, he’d already learned the words sun, tree, wind, star, and bird. He’d learned dog, chicken, goat, and bread.
He had never in his life felt so good. He felt as huge as the land around him and as clear and bright as the air. No laboring in dank tunnels here; no running through dark streets to escape pursuit. Now he was out in the open, free. And he was powerful, too, in a way he hadn’t been before. He had done something remarkable—saved his people from their dying city—and, along with Lina, he would be known for that deed all his life. He gazed around at this new world full of life and beauty, and he felt proud to have brought his people here.
The road passed the last houses of the village and ran along the river, which was wide and slow, with grasses bending along its banks. The trucks rattled. Clouds of dust billowed from their wheels. All around Doon rose a babble of voices as people pointed things out in tones of astonishment.
“Look—something white floating in the sky!”
“Did you see that little animal with the big tail?”
“Do you feel that? The air is moving!”
Children darted every which way, daring each other to touch the broad sides of the oxen, plucking blossoms from the brambles at the edge of the road, jumping onto the trucks for a quick ride until they were shooed off again.
And the sun shone down on everyone. The people of Ember loved the strange feeling of heat on the tops of their heads. They put their hands up often to touch their warm hair.
The road went up a gentle rise and around a clump of trees. “Here we are!” cried Wilmer, sweeping his arm out proudly. “The Pioneer Hotel!”
At the crest of the slope stood a building bigger than any Doon had ever seen. It was three stories high and very long, with a wing at each end perpendicular to the main part. Windows marched in three rows across its walls. In the center, overlooking a long field that sloped down to the river, was what must once have been a grand entrance—wide steps, a roof held up by columns, a double doorway. But the building was grand no more. It was very old, Doon could tell; its walls were gray and stained, and most of the windows were no more than dark holes. The roof had sagged inward in some places. Grass grew right up to the steps, and far down at the other end, Doon could see that a tree had fallen against the building and smashed a corner of it.
Ben Barlow strode across the wide, weedy field in front of the hotel and climbed the steps. Wilmer followed. He leaned against a column, and Ben took a position on the top step and waited for the crowd of refugees to assemble before him. Doon wove among the people until he found his father again, and they stood together.
Ben held up both hands and called, “Attention, please!” The
crowd grew silent. “Welcome to your new home, the Pioneer Hotel,” he said.
A cheer arose from the crowd. Ben frowned and held up both hands, palms out, and the cheer died away. “It is a temporary home only,” he said. “We cannot, of course, keep you here in Sparks on a permanent basis. To do so would severely strain our resources and no doubt cause resentment and deprivation among our people.” Ben cleared his throat and frowned into the air. Then he went on. “We have decided you may stay here for six months—through summer and fall, to the end of the month of Chilling. After that time, with the training you’ll receive from us, you will go out into the Empty Lands and found a village of your own.”
The people of Ember glanced at each other in surprise. Found their own village? Some of them smiled eagerly at this idea; others looked uncertain. The city of Ember had been constructed for them. All they’d ever had to do was repair work as the buildings got older. They’d never built anything from scratch. But, Doon said to himself, thinking about all this, I’m sure we could learn.
Ben went on. “The Pioneer Hotel has seventy-five rooms,” he said, “plus a big dining room, a ballroom, offices, and a lobby. There will be adequate space for everyone.”
Excited murmurs swept through the crowd. Doon started doing the math in his head. Four hundred and seventeen people divided by seventy-five rooms equaled five or six people per room. That sounded crowded, but maybe they were big rooms. And then there were the dining room and the ballroom, whatever that was, maybe those would hold ten or twenty people. . . .
“Now, of course this building is somewhat less than fully functional,” Ben went on. “You won’t have water pumps here, as we do in the village. But the river is close, just down this slope, and the water is clean. The river will provide water for drinking, bathing, and washing clothes. Your toilets will be outside—you’ll start digging them tomorrow, once we’ve organized you into work teams. Today you’ll settle into your rooms.” He paused, frowning. The two lines between his eyebrows deepened. “There’s not much furniture left in the rooms,” he said. “Maybe a few rooms still have beds, but I think we’ve taken most of them by now. You’ll be sleeping on the floor.”