Free On Whetsday by Mark Sumner Page A

needed. All the buildings were almost finished. It was almost time for everyone to move to the new buildings. Yulia’s father could barely wait to show it all to her. Yulia said that she could not come. She was too dirty from working all day at the mine.
    Her father said that was nonsense. Even though it was Dimsday, and very cold, he took off his own coat and wrapped it around Yulia to hide her tattered jacket. Then he walked on in his shirtsleeves, saying that he was not cold at all.
    There were many more cithians around than there had been before. Yulia thought many of the cithians seemed upset that a human was going in and out of their buildings. Some of them even rose up on their back legs and sounded their clackers in protest. Yulia’s father said she should not be afraid. “They’re new here,” he said. “They don’t know how we do things in Halitt Plex.” He said the “Plex” part with a big smile. After so long on the edge of things, now they were a real city.
    Her father took Yulia first to see the new sleeping stadium, which was the biggest building she had ever seen. There were ranks and ranks of sleeping cradles arranged in big circles for the cithians. Even though there were no cithians inside the building yet, it was already deliciously warm. Yulia asked where the humans would sleep.
    “I don’t know,” said her father, tousling Yulia’s curly hair. “Maybe this time they will give us the top level.”
    He took her next into the big square workshops, then into some of the smaller control rooms, and then through one of the stations for the ground train. It was all new. All amazing. Yulia’s father could not help showing her things about how the buildings were designed. He was proud of how his work, and the work of many other humans, had helped build the Plex.
    Finally, he took Yulia into one of the huge domes at the center of each unit. The domes were full of shelves and the shelves were full of...everything. Crates and boxes and barrels. Casks and packages and cans. Not every shelf was full, but the trains had been coming and coming and coming with new things ever since the tracks reached Halitt.
    For the first time in her life, Yulia saw dasiks. She had been told there were other kind of people than cithians and humans, but Halitt was too cold for most of them. Now that the new buildings had come, dasiks had come with them. Long lines of dasiks were carrying things in from the trains and putting them on the shelves. To Yulia the dasiks looked very big, and their teeth seemed very sharp. Her father only laughed.
    “They work with the cithians,” he said. “Just like us. We all work together.”
    Bram took Yulia into one of the aisles that ran between the high shelves. The variety of sizes and shapes that rose up around her made Yulia a little dizzy. “What are all these things?” she asked. And he told her.
    Later, they stood on the south wall, the way they had on many other Dimsdays, and looked out over the frozen land. The tracks were finished. The city was finished. Everything looked very different than it had the first time Yulia could remember coming to that place. Only the stars overhead seemed the same.
    While they were walking back to their home, two cithians stopped them. These were not strangers. They were cithians that had worked with Yulia’s father for years while the city was being built, only this time there were several dasiks with them. The cithians asked Bram to come with them, and he agreed.
    “I will see you at home,” Yulia’s father told her. “Tell your mother to pack up our things. It’s time to move.”
    Yulia might have said that they had very little to pack; just a few cooking things and a few worn clothes and a few old blankets. The blankets were all stiff and smelly and impossible to keep clean. All the way home, Yulia thought how nice it would be to leave the old blankets behind and sleep in the warm sleeping stadium instead. When she got home, her mother