The Diamond Deep Read online

  “No.” Naveen shook his head. “The drink is fine. But I have never heard music delivered so . . . so raw.”

  “You don’t have concerts?” Ani asked.

  “Of course we do. Maybe I can take you to some. But they are . . . huge productions. Very different. I have not heard music move that many people.” He finished a third of his drink in one long swallow. “Not since I left Lym.”

  “You’re from Lym?” Onor asked. “A real planet? I had hoped we would go there. Our ship’s records say we came from there.” He sipped at his own drink. Slowly. Joel may be trying to get Naveen drunk, but Onor would pay for it later if he allowed himself to get lost in alcohol. “What’s it like. To have a sun? To stand with a sky above you?”

  “I’m not from Lym, but I was lucky enough to live there for a year.” Naveen smiled softly, his face warm. “I miss it. The openness of a world is amazing. The space and the fact that you can be completely alone.”

  “What do you think of the Fire?” Joel asked.

  “It’s gritty. The station is much lighter and greener.” He pursed his lips and glanced at Joel. “I mean no disrespect. And of course the Diamond Deep will never go anywhere the gravity of Adiamo does not pull it. I’m fascinated with your history.”

  Joel sipped at his fake drink. “Earlier, you said you chose to come here. Why?”

  “To see what we used to be like.” Naveen fell silent for a moment, looking contemplative. “Koren and I were chosen partly because we’re more like you.”

  Ani laughed. “Koren doesn’t look anything like us. We’ve no golden eyes and no white hair that’s not on the very old.”

  “Oh, yes, she does look like you. You’ll see.”

  Ani frowned and leaned back. “What about the robots? Humans don’t look like that, do they? Made of metal?”

  Onor admired the clever way to ask about Aleesi. Ani had grown much more subtle since Ruby took power alongside Joel.

  Naveen shook his head. “Humans and robots are not the same. Human minds are required to be in biological bodies, but they don’t all look like we do.”

  That supported Aleesi’s claim.

  The conversation wandered across the Fire for a while, with Naveen asking about their history and the way they fed themselves. None of them knew the answers to some of Naveen’s questions. Onor tried a few times to access Ix on his journal and failed. He settled for sipping his drink and contemplating how much power Ix had in the information it withheld, and how much they had given up by failing to learn. Ruby had been right to send them all to class. They should have been studying every free minute. “How old are you?” he asked Naveen. “I heard Koren is hundreds of years old.”

  Naveen cocked a head. “I’m only forty-seven. Koren is much older.”

  “You look twenty.”

  “So do you,” Naveen countered, “So do you.”

  “That’s because I am. Almost, anyway.”

  “How old is Ruby?”

  “Like me.”

  “So young.” Naveen set his empty glass down and leaned back against the headrest on his chair.

  Joel glanced over at him and raised an eyebrow. “Are you okay?”

  Naveen sat up straight again.

  Onor let his drink be picked up half-full and accepted another one for Naveen. Naveen finished his in three long pulls. “I’m always okay,” he said slowly.

  Joel gave Onor a worried look. It was one thing to loosen Naveen’s tongue, but another entirely if he got so drunk he got sick.

  When Naveen reached for a piece of orbfruit, Ani leaned forward and put a hand on his arm. “You’re not supposed to eat our food, are you?”

  “I’m drinking your drinks.”

  Onor and Joel looked at each other. Joel shook his head slightly, but Naveen already had a piece of fruit in his mouth. He sat back and chewed, and nothing awful happened.

  “So,” Joel leaned in. “What happens next? If we pass quarantine, what happens to us?”

  “I don’t know.” Naveen look a little dizzy. “I don’t know. I don’t think I could tell you if I did.”

  Ruby came up behind Naveen. She now wore her base uniform and hardly looked like she belonged at a party at all. Onor was pretty sure she had a plan by the way she came up quickly, but she stopped when she realized they had Naveen with them.

  Naveen must have noticed Joel looking at Ruby. He tilted his head up enough to see behind him. His eyes appeared slightly crossed. “I don’t want anything bad. To happen. To you.”

  “Why would it?” she asked.

  “Nishe conchert,” Naveen slurred.

  “Thanks.” She narrowed her eyes at Joel.

  He shrugged.

  Ruby shook her head and looked back at Naveen. “What bad things might happen?”

  Allen appeared, as silent as Colin had been, but with none of the confidence that would have painted Colin’s face in any situation. He looked quite worried. He leaned down and whispered in Joel’s ear.

  Joel stood up. “We’ll go to her.” He looked at Ruby. “Lose yourself. I’ll meet you back home. Later.” He looked at Ani. “Stay with Ruby.”

  Onor swallowed and set his drink down. Joel should have sent him. Except Ani hadn’t been drinking. Damn.

  Joel plucked the drink from Naveen’s hand and helped him up. “Come on. Koren’s here.”

  “Prolly read my output stats.”

  “Huh?”

  “Implanche.”

  Onor shook his head. Implants? “What do you mean?”

  “Our AI’sh can read our bodieshh. Can’t yours?”

  The idea of getting Naveen tipsy in case they could learn something suddenly seemed really dumb. Onor took his arm, and he and Naveen followed Joel and Allen toward the front of the room where the door guards kept people out who shouldn’t be here. He imagined Koren in that situation, and was suddenly glad he wasn’t a door guard. Of course, it might not be very good to be himself, either. Most of their guards kept a distance, although Onor had to wave one up to take Naveen’s other side so he wouldn’t fall down.

  Joel glanced back over his shoulder. “You can leave, too,” he told Onor.

  “Better if you did.”

  Joel nodded. “Thank you.” But he wouldn’t leave any more than Onor would. Maybe they could just hand the increasingly wobbly Naveen over to Koren and her robots and be done with it.

  Ruby paced in the quiet of her and Joel’s hab, back and forth the longest possible way, which led from the bedroom door down one side of the living room, past the entrance to the kitchen, and all the way to the front. The path was already worn; she often walked it when worrying about lyrics or about Joel’s safety. She suspected he walked it when he worried about her, or when he was mad at her. That happened.

  Right now, she worried about him. She worried about Onor, and even Naveen, who she barely knew, but liked. She could tell Onor liked him, and Onor was good at judging people. She worried about Koren, and what she had done to whom. Mostly, though, she worried about Joel. He moved from meeting to meeting without stopping, but there was nothing to actually accomplish except to wait.

  She wanted Koren off their ship. She wanted their ship free from the Diamond Deep. Both were impossible goals.

  She and Joel had bet their futures. All of their futures.

  The station had a right to do what they were doing. Maybe they even did it to every ship that docked here. There was no reason for them not to have rules that Ruby didn’t like. But the whole set-up felt like a threat, like she and her people were in some deep danger that she had absolutely no way to understand. She didn’t even know what questions to ask, and when that was true, she was used to asking Ix.

  She stopped in the kitchen, her hand hovering between stim and still, choosing water.

  Next, she started running through KJ’s most basic movement sequence, the one she’d learned in the big classes, way back in the days when Fox told her what to do and she listened.

  She hadn’t seen Fox in
a long time. The last time she’d seen him, he had been promoting a band of drummers, and he’d looked away from her as she headed toward him, turned sideways into a crowd, and disappeared.

  But she shouldn’t be thinking of Fox right now.

  She pushed all of the noise of her mind away and focused on moving her body, one flowing pose sliding into another, balance and weight and speed as exact as she could get them.

  She hadn’t practiced for weeks.

  All of her weight rested on one foot and her back stretched out even with the floor, the free foot behind her held flat, hands extended palm-down in from of her. A line of Ruby with a single leg to hold her up, thigh tightened for strength, knee loosened for safety. When the door opened, she tipped the wrong way and had to touch her fingers to the floor to tip back so she could get her foot under her and stand properly. “Joel?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You were gone a long time,” she called to him. “What happened to poor Naveen?”

  “Koren sent him to his room with an assistant to guard him.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  Joel came through the hall and stood in the door. His jaw was set with anger, his shoulders tight. “What happened?” she asked.

  He crossed both arms over his torso and stared at the wall. “We have to leave.”

  “What?”

  “We passed quarantine. We’re being told that we have to leave the Fire. Not just by Koren. That’s what she says, anyway.”

  He looked as angry as she had ever seen him, and like he could lose control at any moment. Ruby couldn’t tell if he was about to explode in anger or cry. She had never felt him like this, so fragile and so angry and so frustrated. She had never sensed despair in him.

  She brought him a glass of water, which he waved away. “Who?” she whispered, not wanting to set off whatever was inside him right then. “Who has to leave? You and me or all of command? What do they want?”

  “They say we all have to leave. The whole ship.”

  “Everybody? That’s thousands of people!” The mere idea of it spun her head. She’d assumed the Fire was their home, at least for now. That they’d move off it slowly. That people would find work or places to go. “They can’t do that, can they?”

  He sat on the couch and pulled her down to him. He held her so tight it hurt, his breath uneven as if he was as shocked with his news as she was, even though he’d clearly had it longer. “I think they can do whatever they want.”

  It felt hard to think. “Isn’t there a court? Didn’t you tell me that once? A system-wide court?”

  “I don’t see how that would stop them. They look at us like some kind of curiosity. As if we’re children. Maybe they’ll put us all in a play pen and watch us. I don’t know.”

  “We need the Fire. The holds. The things we brought back. That’s all we have.”

  His jaw was so tight he could barely get the next words out. “Koren says we’re lucky we are being granted a place to live for six months. The contents of the holds will be payment for that.”

  “How does she know what they’re worth?”

  “We don’t either.”

  Her brain raced. The Fire’s engines were off and might not be reusable at all. Certainly she didn’t know how to start them. Ix could. But Ix had been silenced. The Fire itself had started falling apart the minute they started slowing down, as if it knew it was coming back to die. Truth be told, even earlier, if you counted how much of their equipment was scrap and parts by the time Ruby was born.

  “What did you try to negotiate?”

  He shook his head. “It was all presented as orders. I got them to give us another day. That’s all.”

  He was accustomed to respect and to people following his orders. “Who knows this?” she asked.

  “Ani, Allen, Onor. KJ, because I sent Onor to hunt him down and tell him. That’s all. But we’ll have to tell them all soon. That’s why I came for you.”

  “How much time?”

  “Koren started with two days. I turned it into three.”

  “That’s not possible.” Thousands of people. They’d all want to bring their things. They’d want to group up as families. They’d be scared. “They can’t . . . what about the gardens and the parks and the water systems and the other things that have to be kept up?”

  “They’re turning off the water that goes to the parks and the gardens.”

  “That’s . . . that’s violating.” There were other words, other things it felt like. This should not be happening to them.

  “I’m not sure I can stand this.”

  In trade for his unusual vulnerability, she tilted her face up, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him. “We’ll do this together.”

  He went silent for a long time. “Maybe we shouldn’t. We don’t know anything. We might get blamed for this.”

  “Some will blame us.” She pulled herself out from under his arm and stood, facing him. He looked tired. But then he’d spent a whole day with Naveen, spent the evening at the cargo bars, and then had to deal with Koren. She took a deep breath, centering herself. “They need us to lead. Even the ones who blame us are going to need us. Besides, it’s not like either of us could hide in the crowds anyway.”

  He went still and watched her, assessing. Not quite hesitating. When he spoke he sounded measured and unemotional, like he was working for all of the control that he could get. His hands were clasped tightly together, as if to keep them from shaking. “Koren offered to take those of us from command somewhere else. The others will want to go. She promised a place that was more comfortable. More privileged. That’s the word she used.

  “You didn’t tell her yes?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t tell her no yet, either.”

  She tried to take that in. “To buy us time?”

  A slight shake of his head. “You might think about it. We could be comfortable.”

  “You’re just tired. We can’t abandon our people. And we can’t trust Koren anyway. We’re safer if we’re all together. You heard what I told them tonight, and how they reacted. They need to know we are all a family, one family.”

  “I want you to be safe.”

  “I don’t care about that. I never have. If the world were still only gray for me, if I were still a robot repair girl, I’d be maimed or dead or raped or something by now.” She took his face between her hands. “Whatever happens, it’s better than that already. It’s better for almost everyone.” She stepped back, biting her lip, giving him a moment. When he didn’t reply, she said, “We can’t go backwards. We have to protect them all.”

  He was so still. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, and he wasn’t meeting her eyes.

  “They need us,” she whispered.

  He fisted his hands and paced.

  “I’ll lead them myself if you won’t go, but I want you beside me. You’re our strength. You earned this job.” And now we need you to do it. But she said that part in her head. It would be so hard to do this by herself.

  He stopped and answered her, very quietly. “How are we going to lead them through a place we don’t know anything about?”

  “With our hearts.”

  He stood up and took her in his arms. He smelled of the cargo bars, of still and stim, of mint and talk. His heart beat against her ear.

  “I will tell her we’re staying with our crew.”

  She burrowed into his chest. “I love you.”

  Joel and Ruby stood side by side, watching the line of refugees snake through a gauntlet of uniformed Diamond Deep staff. As leaders, they had gone through first. Now, they waited. They’d sworn to watch as each individual left The Creative Fire.

  SueAnne led the line, walking slowly and carefully. Her face showed pain that Ruby suspected came from having to leave home even more than it came from her painful joints. All of Joel’s other advisors had taken Koren’s offer of safe haven somewhere else, but SueAnne had refused. In fact, when she’d learned of it, she had
slapped Laird across the face and walked away. Later, she had told Ruby she had wanted to do that for a long time.

  A specific process happened for each refugee. First, a pair of uniformed women took their names and pictures. A robot injected each person with medications, using small round buttons with needles that popped out on contact with the skin. Then, everyone passed through an arch where they stood on a plate while an unseen mechanism sprayed them with a fine mist, so they emerged with drops of liquid spangling their hair and cheeks. If they had looked happy, the mist might have made them pretty. On a few faces, it combined with tears.

  Ruby and Joel had done their best to message the banishment as well as they could, but without Ix to broadcast throughout the ship, the simple logistics of getting word to everyone and keeping order had required all of the three days they had been given. Koren had offered help from the Diamond Deep and by the end of the first day, they had grudgingly accepted a hundred people to help organize the exodus.

  Her mouth tasted like ash and she was tired to her bones. It was hard to stand up straight. Keep the rebels too busy to rebel.

  It tore at Ruby to watch how some of the people worked through the line. Some went shambling, the loss painted across features and dropping shoulders. Others walked with their heads up. Here and there, a few of the children and young adults looked excited or at least curious. Everyone carried bags of belongings, or wheeled makeshift carts.

  Ruby had managed to get permission to bring some of their robots as beasts of burden, so here and there a robot squeaked by with a pile of extra gray uniform cloth, tools, first-aid supplies, bedding, or piles of food from the last harvest.

  Joel stood beside her. He had chosen to wear his most formal dress uniform, and he stood still with his chin up and his jaw tight. Ruby was pretty sure she was the only person to recognize how angry he felt.

  A thousand details and questions threatened to overwhelm her. Underneath of those, an anger similar to Joel’s burned deep in her, eating at her belly, but she couldn’t afford to let it rise to her heart. Not now. She glanced up at him. “That’s a quarter of them.”