Red Sky: Chapter 17
“I don’t care what anybody says, he deserved it,” Ray was telling his story again. “Understand? If only his brother minded his own business.” This time was different. No matter how many times Ray told this story, it was different now. He was two weeks away from being released.
Released isn’t the correct word exactly. He was leaving the moon, that much we were sure of. It was time for the annual changeover when twenty-five recruits would take the place of the dozen or so inmates who had survived the five years. Ray was one of that dozen. He was going back to Earth, returning to the blue skies and fresh water of home. Beyond that, none of us was quite sure what awaited him.
Max said the survivors could volunteer for the Interstellar Fleet and get the rest of their sentence suspended. This obviously excited Ray.
“The first thing I’m going to do, after taking a few sweet breaths of that beautiful Earth oxygen, I’m going to call Angie and let her know I’m back.”
Angie was Ray’s sister.
“I’m going to tell her to bring the kids, all five of them, six of them? Five, I think it’s five. Hell, it might be more now. I’m going to hug every one of them harder than they’ve ever been hugged. God, I miss those little guys, I miss her and her husband, what’s ‘is name.”
“Daniel.” Com had a good memory for names, even for people he had never met.
“Visitation rights, who ever knew a man could be so excited about visitation rights.” Ray took a big helping of the paste.
“And no more of this shit. They have to have better food, real food back on Earth. My mother used to make a Bluebarb pie. God, it was so good. I can smell it now.” Ray inhaled. “The smell of that pie baking in the kitchen. I miss that smell. The way it would slowly go from room to room. I would be sitting in front of the holo and the smell would hit me. I would run into the kitchen with the biggest smile on my face.“ Ray smiled that smile now.
“I don’t care if they lock me up for the rest of my life, the chance to go back home is more than I could’ve ever dreamed when I first got here.”
“But if I’m in the Fleet, man, that would be great. And then when they let me out after basic training I’ll get to take leave on Earth. There’s a few girlfriends I need to look up. I could use a few months of leave for that.” Ray nudged me with his elbow.
I don’t think any of us had the heart to tell him this was just one of Max’s rumors. There was no way to confirm if it was true. It was as likely that Ray would get back to Earth and be put in another prison like the one on the red moon. And there were darker rumors. One version had it we could volunteer to get the rest of our sentence suspended. In the other version there was no volunteering, inmates were conscripted and sent on suicide missions along the front lines, guiding bombs deep into enemy territory with no chance of coming back.
“I’ll be a new man. I’ll be ready to fight for ‘em. All will be forgiven. I don’t care they locked me up, they took away my freedom. I’ll give ‘em everything I have so we can defeat those damn traitors.”
I began to wonder about Ray’s replacement, Com’s new partner. What if he was like one of the two quarreling partners Max and I worked next to on hauling duty. It would make Com’s life miserable.
I looked over to Cyclops’ faction on the left to see if I could find 55, but the Stork had vanished. I’d noticed a couple of days earlier. We all noticed a couple of days earlier. There was a minor scandal the previous week when 55 showed up at the end of the day without his partner, 12. He was holding a cut tether and said that 12 was buried under layers of rock. The guards never found 12’s body. Rumors swirled, not the type of rumors that Max liked to tell, but the gossip of schoolgirls and schoolboys. How 55 and 12 never liked each other. How 55 had been planning this for months and finally had the opportunity when 12 let his guard down. Some defended 55, others were sure he had executed 12.
55 was whipped and put in the box for cutting his tether. He was let out after two days and returned to the mine, working on his own until he could be paired with someone else. I saw him in the cafeteria the night after he got out. He was sitting on the edge of Cyclops’ faction next to 23. It was a sorry sight, they both sat there with their bowls of paste, two outcasts not making conversation with anybody.
Then the Stork was gone. There was some debate whether he went down to the mine in the morning. The days are so monotonous it’s easy for such details to get lost. That’s why we have partners to keep track of us. Only he didn’t have a partner, so he disappeared. Such a big show was made when he left the box, as there always is, and then nothing.
We all figured Goodwell finally heard about 55 and felt the box wasn’t enough. He broke the most important rule of the mine by taking away one of Goodwell’s miners. Cave-ins could do it, the box could do it, even Goodwell himself could do it, but the ultimate sin was for an inmate to do it. 55 disappeared not with the fanfare when Hades put three in the box and only two came out, but with quiet efficiency, like the Reaper coming in the middle of the night to steal someone’s soul. 55 was now a disappeared. In a way his silent disappearance was more frightening than any of Hades’ shows of torture.
“When I first arrived, I used to have these dreams where I would be running through a field.” Ray was still talking the fast rambling talk of an ecstatic man.
“I would be running, sprinting at top speed through this field of tall grass, completely free and happy. A fucking field of grass. Can you believe that? I don’t think I’ve ever sprinted through a grassy field in my life. I’m from the city. I like the city. We never wanted to go sprinting through any damn fields for no reason. And now I was dreaming about it every night. I would wake up smiling because of that fucking dream. I was smiling in my sleep. That only made it worse. When you’re running free like a kid in the sun and then you wake up staring at meters of rock above your head. That hurts. That really hurts.”
“After I was here long enough the dream went away. All good dreams went away. I didn’t have any dreams of freedom.” Ray let out this gigantic smile. “But not anymore. I’ve won. I’ve made it and I’m going home to have those dreams again. To see the sun again. Maybe one day I’ll even run in a field of fucking grass.”
“I’ve won!” Ray said again, banging his hand hard on the table with joy. All of the guards looked down at us.
Ray wasn't the only one who was feeling better about life. I was happier, too. Not just because Ray was escaping the red moon, but because of Max's theory, the one about our innocence. Even if it wasn’t true, the mere possibility of innocence gave me a rush of energy. It made me pick up my head a little higher. The entire experience on the red moon had been a process of being beaten down, of having my humanity slowly taken away so I would accept my enslavement. But I didn’t want to be a slave. I wanted the pride of a free man once again. Max’s theory gave me some of that pride back.
That pride came at a cost. If I was innocent and those memories were implanted, that meant I had enemies who put me on the red moon and those enemies were the ones who killed Aya. The unfairness of such a world may be even worse than a world where I was a monster and killed her in a fit of rage. In a strange way it was more comforting to accept a world where I was a killer than a world where others had so much power over me, so much power over everybody. I wanted to believe I was innocent, just as I wanted to believe the world was fair. Given my circumstances, there was room for only one of those beliefs.