Across the Universe (2 page)

And then the tubes were forced down my throat, hard. They did not feel as flexible as they had looked; they felt like a greased broomstick being crammed down my mouth. I gagged, and gagged again. I could taste bile and copper around the plastic of the tubes.

“Swallow it!” Ed shouted in my ear. “Just relax!”

Easy for him to say.

A few moments after it was done, my stomach tingled. I could feel the wires inside me being pulled and tugged as Hassan plugged the little black box to the outside of my very own shoebox coffin.

Shuffling noises. The hose.

“Don’t know why anyone would sign up for this,” Hassan said.

Silence.

A metallic sound—the hose being opened up. Cold, cold liquid splashed on my thighs. I wanted to move my hands to cover myself
there
, but my body was sluggish.

“I dunno,” Ed said. “Things ain’t exactly peachy here now. Nothing’s been right since the first recession, let alone the second. The Financial Resource Exchange was s’posed to bring more jobs, wasn’t it? Ain’t got nothing now other than this P.O.S. job, and it’ll be over soon as they’re all frozen.”

Another silence. The cryo liquid washed over my knees now, seeping cold into the places on my body that had been warm—the crease of my knees, under my arms, under my breasts.

“Not worth giving your life away, not for what they’re offering.”

Ed snorted. “What they’re offering? They’re offering a lifetime’s salary, all in one check.”

“Ain’t worth nothing on a ship that won’t land for three hundred and one years.”

My heart stopped.
Three hundred ... and one? No—that’s wrong. It’s three hundred years even. Not three hundred and one.

“That much money can sure help a family out. Might make the difference.”

“What difference?” Hassan asked.

“Difference between surviving or not. It’s not like when we were kids. Don’t care what the prez says, that Financial Act ain’t gonna be able to fix this kinda debt.”

What are they yammering about? Who cares about national debt and jobs? Go back to that extra year!

“A man has time to think about it anyway,” Ed continued. “Consider his options. Why’d they delay the launch again?”

Cryo liquid splashed against my ears as my shoebox coffin filled; I lifted my head.

Delay? What delay?
I tried to speak around the tubes, but they filled my mouth, crowded my tongue, silenced my words.

“I have no idea. Something about the fuel and feedback from the probes. But why are they making us keep all the freezing on schedule?”

The cyro liquid was rising fast. I turned my head, so my right ear could catch their conversation.

“Who cares?” Ed asked. “Not them—they’ll just sleep through it all. They say the ship’ll take three hundred years just to get to that other planet—what’s the difference in one more year?”

I tried to sit up. My muscles were hard, slow, but I struggled. I tried to talk again, make a sound, any sound, but the cryo liquid was spilling over my face.

“Just. Relax,” Ed said very loudly near my face.

I shook my head. God, didn’t they
know
? A year made the world of difference! This was one more year I could be with Jason, one more year I could
live
! I signed up for three hundred years ... not three hundred and one!

Gentle hands—Hassan’s?—pushed me under the cryo liquid. I held my breath. I tried to rise up. I wanted my year! My last year—one more year!

“Breathe in the liquid!” Ed’s voice sounded muffled, almost indecipherable under the cryo liquid. I tried to shake my head, but as my neck muscles tensed, my lungs rebelled, and the cold, cold cryo liquid rushed down my nose, past the tubes, and into my body.

I felt the finality of the lid trapping me inside my Snow White coffin.

As one of them pushed at my feet, sliding me into my morgue, I imagined that my Prince Charming was just beyond my little door, that he really could come and kiss me awake and that we could have a whole year more together.

There was a
click, click, grrr
of gears, and I knew the flash freezing would start in mere moments, and then my life would be nothing but a puff of white steam leaking through the cracks of my morgue door.

And I thought:
At least I’ll sleep. I will forget, for three hundred and one years, everything else.

And then I thought:
That will be nice.

And then
whoosh!
The flash-freeze filled the tiny chamber. I was in ice. I was ice.

I
am
ice.

But if I’m ice, how am I conscious? I was supposed to be asleep; I was supposed to forget about Jason and life and Earth for three hundred and one years. People have been cryo frozen before me, and none of them were conscious. If the
mind
is frozen, it cannot be awake or aware.

I’ve read before of coma victims who were supposed to be knocked out with anesthesia during an operation, but really they were awake and felt everything.

I hope—I
pray
—that’s not me. I can’t be awake for three hundred and one years. I’ll never survive that.

Maybe I’m dreaming now. I’ve dreamt a lifetime in a thirty-minute nap. Maybe I’m still in that space between frozen and not, and this is all a dream. Maybe we haven’t left Earth yet. Maybe I’m still in that limbo year before the ship launches, and I’m stuck, trapped in a dream I can’t wake from.

Maybe I’ve still got three hundred and one years stretching out before me.

Maybe I’m not even asleep yet. Not all the way.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I only know one thing for certain.

I want my year back.

2

ELDER

THE DOOR IS LOCKED.

“Now
that,
” I say to the empty room, “is interesting.”

See, there are hardly any locked doors on
Godspeed
. No need.
Godspeed
isn’t small—it was the largest ship ever built when it was launched two and a half centuries ago—but it’s not so huge that we don’t all feel the weight of the metal walls crushing us. Privacy is our most valued possession and no one—
no one
—would dare betray privacy.

Which is why the locked door before me is so strange. Why lock a door no one would ever breach?

Not that I should be so surprised. A locked door just about sums up Eldest.

My mouth tightens. The worst part? I know that door is locked because of me. It has to be. This is the Keeper Level, and Eldest and I, as the current and future leaders of the ship, are the only ones allowed here.

“Frex!” I shout, punching the door.

Because I know—I
know
—on the other side of that door is my chance. When Eldest was called to the Shipper Level to inspect the engine, he rushed to his chamber for a box, went all the way to the hatch, then turned around and took the box back to his room. And locked the door before he left. Clearly, whatever is in that box is important and has something to do with the ship, something that I, as leader-in-training, should know about.

It’s just one more thing Eldest is keeping from me. Because stars forbid he’d actually train me instead of giving me more mindless lessons and reports.

If I had that box, I’d
prove
to him I could ... what? I don’t actually know what’s in there. But I
do
know that whatever it is has been making him spend a lot more time on the Shipper Level. There’s a serious problem going on, something that’s kept Eldest more preoccupied than I’ve ever seen him before.

And if they would just give me a frexing chance, maybe I could help.

I kick the door, then turn and fall against it. Three years ago, when it was time for me to start training, I didn’t care for shite about whether or not Eldest trained me as he should. I was just glad to be off the Feeder Level. Even though my name is Elder, I’m the youngest person on the ship, and I’ve always known that I, as the one born in the off years, would be the Eldest of the generation born after me. I was never comfortable living with the Feeders and their obsession with farming. Moving in with Eldest felt like a relief.

But I’m sixteen now, and I’m tired of doing nothing but lessons. It’s time for me to be a real leader, whether Eldest likes it or not.

Defeated by a locked door. No wonder Eldest doesn’t bother to train me.

I bang my head against the wall and bump it against a piece of raised square metal. The biometric scanner. I’d always assumed it operated the lights to the Great Room. Most of the biometric scanners are there to interface with the ship—to turn on lights, start electronics, or
open doors
.

I turn around and roll my thumb over the biometric scanner bar. “Eldest/Elder access granted,” the computer chirps in a cheerful female voice. As Elder, I always have the same security access as Eldest.

“Command?” the computer asks.

Huh. That’s odd. Usually, a door opens automatically once access is granted. What other command does a door need?

“Um, open?”

Eldest’s chamber door doesn’t zip open like I expect it to. Instead, the ceiling moves. I spin around, my heart banging around inside my chest. Above me, the metal ceiling splits into two pieces and drops down slowly, exposing—

Exposing a
window.

That shows the outside.

And the
stars
.

There are hatches in the ship, I know there are, but Eldest has never let me see them, just like he hasn’t let me see the massive engine that fuels the ship, or some of the records of the ship before the Plague. I didn’t even know the metal ceiling over the Great Room covered a window to the uni.

I’ve never seen stars before.

And I never knew they were so beautiful.

The entire uni stretches out before me. So big, so frexing big. My eyes fill with starshine. There are so,
so
many of them. The stars are abbreviated white dashes in the sky with streaks of faint colors—mostly reds and yellows, but sometimes blues or greens. And, seeing them all, I feel closer to planet-landing than I ever have before. I can see it: the ship disembarking for the first time, at night, with no moon or clouds, and before we set out to build our new world, we all stop and stare at the stars above.

“Access override,” the computer says in its still-pleasant voice. “Screen lowering.”

Screen lowering? What?

Above me, the stars glow brightly.

And then the window to the universe breaks. A thin line cracks right at the center of the window, splitting open, wider and wider.

Frex.
Frex!

A rumbling sound fills the Great Room. My head whips left and right, and left and right again, looking for something to hold on to, but there’s nothing here—the Great Room is just a wide-open floor. Why did I never notice how useless it is to have a room with nothing to hold on to? It’s huge, sure, but there’s nothing
here
except the vast floor and the walls and the doors—nothing that can save me from a broken window that exposes me to space. And what then? The ship will rip apart? And me? I’ll explode or implode or something. I can’t remember which, but it doesn’t matter. The end result will still be the same. My tunic weighs heavily on my shoulders, sticking to my sweat, but all I can think about is how thin the material is against the ravages of space.

I’m going to die.

I’m going to be sucked out into space.

Implosion.

Death.

And then another thought hits me: the rest of the ship. If the Keeper Level is exposed, space won’t just suck
me
out—it will rip through the Keeper Level, into the Shipper Level and the Feeder Level below it. They’ll all die. Everyone. Every single person aboard the ship.

My feet slip on the tiled floor as I tear across the room. (For one tiny moment, my feet try to turn to the hatch door, the door that leads to life and freedom, but I ignore my feet. They’re just trying to keep me alive; they don’t care about the rest of the ship.) I throw myself at the big red lockdown button over the hatch. The floor shakes as the Keeper Level closes itself off from the rest of the ship. There’s no going back now.

I turn toward the ceiling, toward the exposed universe.

Toward death.

3

AMY

THE PRESIDENT CALLED IT THE “EPITOME OF THE AMERICAN dream.”

Daddy called it the “unholy alliance of business and government.”

But all it really was, was America giving up. Bailing out in order to join the Financial Resource Exchange. A multinational alliance focused on one thing: profit. Fund global medical care to monopolize vaccines. Back unified currency to collect planet-wide interest.

And provide the resources needed for a select group of scientists and military personnel to embark on the first trip across the universe in a quest to find more natural resources—more profit.

The answer to my parents’ dreams.

And my worst nightmare.

And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I’ve been sleeping longer than I’ve been alive.

I hope. What if this is just a part of a long dream dreamt in the short time between when Ed locked the cryo door and Hassan pushed the button to freeze me? What if?

It’s a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body.

The dreams weave in and out of memories.

The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn’t possibly be a hundred more years before I wake up.

Not a hundred years. Not three hundred. Not three hundred and one. Please, God, no.

Sometimes it feels like a thousand years have passed; sometimes it feels as if I’ve only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I’m in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I’ve tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I’m sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I’m mostly just awake with my eyes shut.

Yeah. Cryo sleep is like that.

Sometimes I think there’s something wrong. I shouldn’t be so
aware
. But then I realize I’m only aware for a moment, and then, as I’m realizing it, I slip into another dream.

Mostly, I dream of Earth. I think that’s because I didn’t want to leave it.

A field of flowers; smells of dirt and rain. A breeze ...
But not really a breeze, a memory of a breeze, a memory made into a dream that tries to drown out my frozen mind.

Earth. I hold on to my thoughts of Earth. I don’t like the dreamtime. The dreamtime is too much like dying. They are dreams, but I’m too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I’ve already lost too much to let them take over.

Pressure on my pinky where Daddy wrapped his finger around mine, and a whisper of his words promising me I could stay with my aunt and uncle. The heaviness in my chest, where I thought about it, where I really thought about it.
I push the dream-memory down. That happened centuries ago, and it’s too late for regrets now. Because all my parents ever wanted was to be a part of the first manned interstellar exploratory mission, and all I ever wanted was to be with them.

And I guess it doesn’t matter that I had a life on Earth, and that I loved Earth, and that by now, my friends have all lived and gotten old and died, and I’ve just been lying here in frozen sleep. That Jason lived and got old and maybe he married and had kids and everything, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s dead now. God, his
great-grandchildren
might be my age.

A splatter of rain on my skin, but it’s bright and sunny under the blue sky. And Jason’s there, and we almost kiss, but then everything changes and we’re at that party where we met
because dreams are like that: they go in and out of memories and scenes, but they’re never real. They’re never real, and I hate them because they aren’t.