Red Sky: Chapter 12
The days go by fast.
I wouldn't have believed that before my time in prison. I would have assumed a life in prison meant slow drudgery. But the simple monotony of the exact same routine day after day, hour after hour, allows time to bend. Waking every morning, putting on the same mud-caked uniform, one day becomes the next, which becomes the next. Time becomes meaningless. There is no weekend to look forward to. There are no vacations or family visits or holidays. There is only the mine. And the cafeteria. And sleep back in the cell.
Of course, time should be different than it is on Earth. A day is not twenty-four hours long on the red moon. The sun stays in the sky for two straight weeks and then is gone for the next two weeks. All an inmate ever sees is a permanent red haze in various stages of brightness as we march to and from the mine.
Goodwell put up a giant clock in the prison block that counts everything in Earth hours and minutes. It was there to remind us of our five years of service to the Federation. After the cell lights are turned off for the night, the red figures of that clock are the only light in the cell block. To the untrained eye it would seem like total darkness. After the first month my eyes adjusted. I figured out how Com was able to write at night.
I began to stay up late. It wasn’t intentional. The lights would go out and I wouldn’t fall asleep. My body was exhausted, but I couldn’t stop my mind. I would lay in bed staring up at the black nothingness where my ceiling should be. There was no way to communicate with anybody and nothing to do. When there is nothing to occupy the mind it runs in circles, obsessing on details one cannot control.
I would look through the transparent shield to see if there were any other late-night wanderers. I could only make out shapes in the distance. There was the pacer who stalked back and forth in his cell, wearing out the same path, never deviating. There were a few others who meandered around their cells with no apparent purpose, absentmindedly bouncing from wall to wall. And way down in the lower left corner, there was Com. As Ray slept soundly in the cell next to him, Com would get up right after the lights went out and kneel beside his bed. Then he would walk to the back wall of his cell and emerge with a stack of papers. He would sit on his bed crouching over those papers.
I had Com show me where to find the chalk-like rock in the mine. It was easy to smuggle back to my cell. The image detector that scanned every inmate when we returned to the surface was programmed to detect metal and Qalladium not rocks. I stole a couple of sheets of paper as well. I had thoughts of starting a journal but no energy. My mind craved diversion not reflection. Every time I tried to put my thoughts on paper my mind would block and then skip from event to event like a broken recorder. The space-time jump was still screwing with my head, leaving me with little ability to focus.
*
The walk from the elevators to our mining spots was our only truly free time. During these walks we owed nothing to our captors. We weren’t being watched and there was no way to be productive, so we talked and told stories. Sometimes Com and Ray would join us and the four of us would mine together. Such teamwork was officially frowned upon for reasons I can only imagine, but in the outskirts of the mine those rules meant little.
I wouldn’t say the four of us formed a friendship exactly, but it was as close as we could under the circumstances. I trusted them in a way I didn’t trust any others on the red moon. For the most part I followed Ray’s advice of keeping my head down and surviving. Survival is such a simple concept for most. To survive all one needs to do is wake up each morning. On the red moon, survival isn’t so simple.
Every now and then a couple of inmates wouldn’t make it back from the mine. Usually buried under a cave-in. When this happened I would pick my head up in the cafeteria and try to find my fellow newts, to see if all twenty-four of them were still there. I wondered who would make it to the end of the five years. Did we have any control over our survival? I would look at the faces of those newts. I would divide them by half. Surviving seems like such a simple thing. But there are always ways to die.