Read Across the Universe Online

Authors: Beth Revis

Tags: #Adventure, #General, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #Social Issues, #Love & Romance, #Juvenile Fiction, #Dating & Sex, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Survival Stories, #Interplanetary Voyages, #Fantasy & Magic

Across the Universe (4 page)

BOOK: Across the Universe
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I scoot my chair closer. This is new. Finally—
finally—
Eldest is
really
going to train me to be the leader after him.

“On
Godspeed
,” he says, “do we all speak one language?”

“Of course,” I answer, confused.

“Do we have any differences in race?”

“Race?”

“Skin color.”

“No.” Everyone on board has the same deep olive skin, the same dark brown hair and eyes.

“You’ve studied the myths of Sol-Earth: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam. Does anyone on
Godspeed
‘worship’?” He says the last word with dripping derision.

“Of course not!” I laugh. One of the first lessons Eldest gave me when I moved to the Keeper Level was about Sol-Earth’s religions. They were magic stories, fairy tales, and I remember laughing myself silly when Eldest told me how people on Sol-Earth were willing to die or kill for these fictional characters.

Eldest nods once. “The first cause of discord is difference. There is no religion on
Godspeed.
We all speak the same language. We’re all monoethnic. And because we are not different, we don’t fight. Remember the Crusades I taught you about? The genocides? We will never have to worry about those types of horrific events on
Godspeed
.”

I am on the edge of my seat, nodding, but inside I’m hoping Eldest can’t see what a chutz I actually am. I remember those lessons. They were among my first lessons, when I was thirteen and had just moved to the Keeper Level to live with Eldest. Stars, I was such a kid then. I remember pictures on the floppies of people of different skin color and hair color, of people dressed in long gowns or loincloths, of the sounds of languages whose words I could not understand. And back then I thought it was all kind of brilly.

I slouch further down in my seat. No wonder Eldest has been slow to train me—clearly I never picked up the real lessons he’s been teaching me.

“The second cause of discord,” Eldest continues, “is lack of a strong central leader.”

He leans forward, reaching his gnarled, wrinkled hands toward me. “Do you understand the importance of this?” he says, his eyes watery from old age or something else.

I nod.

“Do you really?” he asks more urgently, gripping my hands so hard that some of my knuckles crack.

I nod again, unable to take my eyes from his.

“What is the greatest danger of this ship?” His voice has fallen into a raspy whisper.

Um. Maybe I didn’t understand. Eldest stares at me, expecting a response. I stare back.


Mutiny
. It’s
mutiny
, Elder. More than technical error or ship malfunction or outside dangers,
mutiny
is the greatest threat to this ship. So, after the Plague, the Eldest system was created. One person, born ahead of the people he would lead, to act as patriarch and commander to the people younger than he. Each generation has an Eldest to lead.
You
will one day be an Eldest.
You
will be the strong central leader who prevents discord, who preserves every living person on this ship.”

5

AMY

I AM AS SILENT AS DEATH.

Do this: Go to your bedroom. Your nice, safe, warm bedroom that is not a glass coffin behind a morgue door. Lie down on your bed not made of ice. Stick your fingers in your ears. Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me.

Because what if I am dead? How can someone without a beating heart, without breathing lungs live like I do? I must be dead. And this is my greatest fear: After 301 years, when they pull my glass coffin from this morgue, and they let my body thaw like chicken meat on the kitchen counter, I will be just like I am now. I will spend all of eternity trapped in my dead body. There is nothing beyond this. I will be locked within myself forever.

And I want to scream. I want to throw open my eyes and wake up and not be alone with myself anymore, but I can’t.

I can’t.

6

ELDER

“SO, WHAT’S THE THIRD CAUSE OF DISCORD?” I ASK ELDEST AS silence creeps around us in the Learning Center.

He contemplates me. For a moment, anger flashes in his faded eyes, and I wonder if he’ll strike me. When I blink, though, that crazy idea is gone. Eldest puts both hands on his knees and pushes against them to raise himself, creaking, into a standing position. The Learning Center is small, and with Eldest standing, it feels oppressively so. The chair he’s pushed back butts against the wall; the table feels like a chasm between us. Behind him, the faded globe of Sol-Earth looks miniscule, even smaller and more insignificant than me.

“I’ve told you enough,” he says, heading to the door. “And I’ve got work to do. I want you to go to the Recorder Hall, do some research, see if you can figure out some of the reasons Sol-Earth had so much discord. You’ve got the first two reasons for their reign of blood and war; you should be able to figure out the third. It’s not hard, not when you look at Sol-Earth history.”

I recognize the challenge in this. Eldest is testing my ability to be a leader, testing my worthiness to follow in his footsteps as the next Eldest. He does this a lot, actually. Although the Elder who should have been between me and Eldest died a long time ago, Eldest didn’t like him. The most I’ve ever heard Eldest speak of him was when he’d compare him to me. And the comparisons have never been positive. “You’re slow, like him,” Eldest would say. “That idea is something
he
would have said, too.” I learned almost as soon as I started living on the Keeper Level to keep my ideas to myself and my mouth shut. Eldest still tests me often just to make sure I won’t turn out as bad as that other Elder. I try to look confident, assertive—but it’s wasted, because Eldest hasn’t looked back at me once.

Part of me wants to call Eldest back and argue with him, remind him of his promise to tell me everything and insist he teach me the third cause of discord.

The other part of me, the part that could spend all day looking at vids and pics of Sol-Earth on the floppies, is relishing an assignment by Eldest to do just that.

On the far side of the Learning Center is the entrance to the grav tube Eldest and I use. This one is just for us, a direct link to the Feeder Level. The one that runs between the Shipper Level and the City in the Feeder Level is for everyone else.

I press my wi-com button behind my left ear.

“Command?” the pleasant female voice of my wi-com asks.

“Grav tube control,” I say.

Beep, beep-beep
fills my ear as my wi-com connects to the grav tube control. I roll my thumb over the biometric scanner on the far wall of the Learning Center, and a circular section of the floor slides open. There is nothing under it but empty space.

My stomach lurches—as it always does—when I step into the empty air of the grav tube. But the wi-com has linked to the ship’s gravitational system inside the tube, and I bob gently over the air before sinking down like a penny dropped in a fountain’s pool. Darkness envelops me as I slip down the tube through the Shipper Level, and then light floods my eyes. I blink; the Feeder Level is below me, distorted through the clear grav tube. The City rises up along the far wall, and the farms spread throughout the center, vast fields of green dotted with crops, cows, sheep, goats. From here, the Feeder Level is huge, a world in and of itself. 6,400 acres designed to support over 3,000 people looks like forever when you’re gazing down at it. But when you’re actually there, in the fields or the City, crammed up next to people whose eyes are always on you, it feels much more crowded.

The grav tube ends about seven feet from the ground of the Feeder Level. For a second, I bob in the air at the end of the tube, then
beep, beep-beep
fills my ear as my wi-com connects with the ship’s gravity system, and I drop to the little round metal platform under the tube. I hop off the platform and begin walking down one of the four main roads on the Feeder Level. Only a few yards ahead is a tall brick building, the Recorder Hall, and beyond that is the Hospital.

As I stride toward the Recorder Hall, I think of how different my life is now from three years ago. Until I was thirteen, I lived on this level, passed from one family to the next. From a very young age, it was clear I’d never fit in. For one, everyone was very aware that I was Elder. Perhaps because the Elder before me died unexpectedly, the Feeders were always overprotective. But more than that—we were different from one another. The Feeders
thought
differently. They were happy, content to plow fields and shear sheep. They never seemed to feel the walls of the ship cave in around them, to grow angry at time for passing so slowly. It wasn’t until I moved to the Hospital in my thirteenth year, and met Harley, and talked to Doc, and then moved to the Keeper Level and started training with Eldest that I started to be happy on
Godspeed
. That I started to enjoy this life.

I don’t always agree with Eldest, and his temper, shown only to me on the Keeper Level, can be terrifying, but I will always love him for taking me from the mind-numbing farms.

I bound up the steps toward the big brown doors that have been painted to look like wood. The Recorder Hall has always seemed too big to me, but Eldest assures me that most of the residents on
Godspeed
feel that it is too small. I suppose it’s because when I go there, I go by myself, or with Eldest. Everyone else went with their gen, when they were younger and still in school. Since no one else on the ship is as young as me, there’s no reason to have school. I just have Eldest.

Eldest watches me mount the steps to the Recorder Hall. Not the real Eldest, of course—a painting of him, done before I was born, when Eldest was about Doc’s age. The painting is large, about half the size of the door, and hung in a little inset built into the bricks next to the entry.

Eventually, they will take Eldest’s portrait down from here, and hang it in a dusty spot in the back of the Recorder Hall somewhere, with the portraits of all the other Eldests.

And my portrait will hang here, surveying my tiny kingdom.

The painted Eldest stares past me, past the porch on the Recorder Hall, looking out over the fields and, in the far distance, the City, a towering jumble of painted metal boxes where most of the Feeders and Shippers live. The painter has given Eldest kinder eyes than I’ve ever seen in his wrinkled face, and a soft curve of his lips that seems to indicate inquisitiveness, maybe even mischief. Or not. I’m reading too much into this painting. This Eldest isn’t the Eldest I know. This Eldest looks like the kind of guy I could look up to as a leader. Not the kind of leader who rules through fear—the kind who listens to others, and cares about what they have to say, and gives them a chance. We have the same narrow nose, the same high cheekbones, the same olive skin—but this Eldest already has the authority in his eyes, the self-assurance in the tilt of his chin, the sense of power in his posture that I never have. That the real Eldest has sharpened and honed like a hunter does a knife.

I look behind me, to match the painted Eldest’s line of sight, but I can’t see
Godspeed
the way he clearly does. The painted Eldest is happy in ruling—that much exudes through the oil pigments. I can picture how the painting session went. I bet Eldest stood right here, where I am, looking past the railing. The painter stood on the lawn, below Eldest—of course below him—and gave shape to the paint with strong, broad sweeps. When Eldest looked at
Godspeed
, as I’m looking at it now, he saw the same things I see: an interior of a ship modeled like a county in Sol-Earth’s America, but in miniature, trapped in a round bubble of ship walls. A city piled on one side, with neat, orderly streets laid out in a careful grid, the center of each block stacked with box trailers that served as homes and workplaces for trade. One block for weavers, like my friend Harley’s parents. One block for dyers, one for spinners, one for tailors. Three blocks for food preservation: canners and dryers and freezers. Two blocks for butchers. Four blocks to house the scientists and Shippers who work on the level above this one. Each family, gen after gen, born and raised to work until death in the same block of the same city on the same ship.

When Eldest posed for his painting here, did he think of this? Did he look at the City and marvel at its smooth efficiency, its careful construction, its consistent productivity?

Or did he see it as I do: people boxed in trailers that are boxed in city blocks that are boxed in districts that are boxed in a ship, surrounded by metal walls?

No. Eldest never thought of
Godspeed
as a box. He never saw the City as a cage. You can tell that from his painted eyes, from the way he strides down the streets of the City now, like he owns them, because he does.

Even here, where fields and pastures and farms stretch out beyond the Recorder Hall porch all the way to the far wall, you can’t escape the boxes. Each field and pasture and farm is blocked off in careful fences, each fence measured out centuries ago, on Sol-Earth, before the ship launched. The blocks of land are not all equal in size, but they are all square, all meticulously measured. The hills in the pastures are designed to be evenly spaced, exactly placed bumps of grass for sheep and goats who don’t realize that their hills are just carefully organized, manufactured mounds of dirt and compost.

I’ve seen the landscape of Sol-Earth in the vids and maps. The land wasn’t perfectly laid out in neat little squares. Even grid-like cities had alleys and backstreets. Fields were fenced off, but the fences didn’t all go in perfect lines—they dipped around trees; they cut off at funny angles to avoid creeks or include ponds. Hills didn’t make even rows of bumps.

When I look at the fields, all I can see is how fake they are, how poor an imitation they are of the pictures of Sol-Earth fields.

I bet when Eldest posed for his portrait, he was reveling in the one thing I can’t stand about life aboard the ship: the perfect evenness of everything.

And that’s why I’ll never be as good an Eldest as he is.

Because I like a little chaos.

I push open the big doors to the Recorder Hall and smile at the topographical models that hang from the ceiling in the large entryway. Framed by the light pouring through the open doors behind me is a large clay Sol-Earth, thick with dust. A scale model of
Godspeed
shoots around Sol-Earth, designed to mimic the ship’s departure so long ago. It looks small and insignificant compared to the planets beside it, a ball with wings and a pointed nose. I step into the hallway and crane my neck up. Directly overhead is the model of
Godspeed
’s goal: the big, round globe of Centauri-Earth. It’s bigger than either of the two other models, and hangs in the center of the entryway. I’m not sure if the designers intended it or not, but the shaft of light pouring from the big entryway doors spills right across the surface of the Centauri-Earth model, illuminating it with a halo of light.

Striding forward, I reach my hands up so my fingertips brush Sol-Earth’s Australia. I have always preferred the model of Sol-Earth to that of Centauri-Earth. While the model of Sol-Earth is detailed, with bumps for mountains and squiggly lines for waves on the oceans, Centauri-Earth is smooth, accurate only in terms of its relative size. We’re not sure what we’ll find there, mountains or oceans or something else entirely. We only know that the probe sent before us labeled Centauri-Earth as “habitable”—oxygen-based atmosphere, a significant amount of freshwater, and soil samples suitable for plant growth. Those are the only things we’re sure of.

I want to touch it as well, but it’s too high up.

Centauri-Earth always seems to be beyond my reach.

Eldest’s words echo in my mind: my job is not to get the ship to Centauri-Earth, but to get the people there.

“Can I help you?”

I nearly jump out of my skin. “Oh, it’s you,” I say, laughing at my own skittishness.

Orion is a Recorder. Whenever someone invents something or writes something or does something brilly, the Recorders log it away and store it here. The last time I was here was to help my best friend, Harley, move some canvases. He’s a painter—he’s got a whole room of his art hanging up on the second story of the Recorder Hall. But I’m not here for that.

“Can you help me find some information on Sol-Earth?” I ask Orion.

Orion grins. I cringe—his teeth are stained and yellow. “Of course.”

“I need to find out about...” I pause, thinking of how to phrase it. I can’t just ask him if he knows what the third cause of discord is—he’d have no idea what I’m talking about. “Sol-Earth wars,” I say finally. “Conflicts. Battles. Things like that.”

“Anything specific?” Orion rushes toward me, excitement palpable on his face. I guess with school long over, there are very few visitors to the Recorder Hall. Come to think of it, I’ve never actually seen Orion outside of the Recorder Hall. His existence must be a lonely one.

“Whatever caused the problems on Sol-Earth.”

“Oh.”

“What?”

Orion doesn’t say anything for a long moment, just contemplates me as if I were a puzzle with a piece missing. “It’s an unusual topic for you to be studying, that’s all. Bit grim.”

I shrug. “Eldest needs me to figure something out.”

“Ah, research for Eldest. Well, the easiest way to do this is with the wall floppies.” He nods to the four long screens that hang from the walls of the entryway like tapestries, two on each side. Walking to the one closest to him, Orion taps the screen, and all four floppies turn on, filling the entire entryway with light.

Images flow in and out of each other: diagrams of a lead-cooled fast reactor, an irrigation map of the Feeder Level, paintings from Harley and other artists on board, digital representations of possible geographical features of Centauri-Earth.

“We’ll need your access,” Orion says, drawing my attention away from the wall floppies. When he sees my questioning face, he adds, “Feeders aren’t allowed to view images of Sol-Earth.”

BOOK: Across the Universe
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