Across the Universe (24 page)

56

ELDER

I LEFT HER WITH DOC FOR THE NIGHT.

Believe me, I didn’t want to. But Doc wanted to give her some meds intravenously, and they knocked her out. She was just sleeping; it wouldn’t do me any good to watch her sleep. I walk around for most of the night, drifting off once in the garden by the pond, but I’m just avoiding the inevitable.

I need to see Eldest.

I take the grav tube up before dawn. The Keeper Level is empty now, but it still smells crowded. Sweat and dirt linger in the air.

Eldest is on the floor, leaning against the wall by his door, staring at the false stars.

“Feeling proud?” I snarl, remembering the last time I found him here, like this.

Eldest doesn’t look at me. “No,” he says simply.

“How can you stand to do it?” I shout. “Lie to them like that?”

“Shaddup,” Eldest snarls, standing up to face me. And then I smell it. That harsh, stringent smell. I don’t see the bottle, but I know it’s got to be somewhere—and it’s probably empty now. But why? Why get drunk now? He’s told his terrible truth, and the people still love him. This is his moment of triumph. What does he have to mourn with liquor?

“Ya don’ know what iz like. But ya will. Ya will.” He leans in close, and his breath burns my nose hairs.

I don’t have time for this drunken stupidity. “What happened to Amy?” I say, leaning in even closer to him. I don’t intimidate him, I can tell, but I don’t back down, either.

Eldest snorts, a great honking wet noise that he’d never allow himself to make when he was sober. “Amy, Amy, Amy,” he mocks. “Throw one pale-skinned freak your direction and your chutz shoots up to tha stars! You’ve forgotten ’bout the ship, ’bout your ’sponsibility!” He stresses every syllable of the last word, jabbing a finger into my chest each time.

“What’s wrong with her?” I roar.

“What’s wrong with you?” Eldest says, still mocking. “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with this whole frexing ship?”

“Just tell me. Did you do it?”

“Do what?” he asks warily.

“Did you give her something to make her sick?” He’s not above it. I know that much. He gave the Feeders extra hormones before the Season to make them lusty. He gives babies goo to make them who they are. What did he give Amy? And
how
?

Eldest throws back his head and laughs at me.

So I punch him.

He stops laughing, a red mark already blossoming on his cheek.

“You’d do it too,” he hisses, the stink of his breath making me gag. “You’re more like me than you think.”

I leave. There are no answers to be had from this drunk fool.

When I get back, Amy’s awake.

Sort of.

She lies on her bed with her back perfectly straight, her arms to her side, her toes pointing up, her eyes staring at the ceiling.

I wonder how long it will be until the mental meds kick in.

I don’t use the word Doc used.
If
.

Tapping the bottle of pills against my leg, I pace around the small room. Finally, I sit at the desk and pick up the floppy on it. The wi-com locator map only shows Harley on the cryo level, standing still in the hallway where the hatch is. Part of me wants to com him and tell him to guard the frozens, but I don’t feel like having another fight. They’ll be fine.

It worries me, though, how obsessed he is with the stars. He hasn’t been this way since Kayleigh died, since Doc upped his mental meds.

I glance at Amy, wondering when the mental meds will fix her.

If
.

I turn my back on her, and look at the wall Amy painted the list of victims on. She’s updated the roster, adding Number 63, the woman who didn’t die, and Number 26, the man who did. She’s only been able to add what information she knew at the time—Number 63 is female, black, survived. Number 26 is Theo Kennedy, male, white, bio-weaponry specialist, from Colorado. And dead.

After looking up their files on the floppy, I grab the brush and paint on Amy’s wall to add more details. Number 63 was named Emma Bledsoe. She was thirty-four and worked in the Marines as a tactician. I add Mr. Kennedy’s age—sixty-six—and that his spot aboard
Godspeed
was funded by the Financial Resource Exchange.

I step back and examine the wall. Lines snake from one victim to the other, but no line connects them all. Mr. Robertson and Mr. Kennedy are both male, but Amy’s not. There’s at least a decade in each of their age differences. None of them were born in the same month. The similarities that are there are weak. I add a line from Emma Bledsoe’s Marine experience to William Robertson’s. Both Amy and Mr. Kennedy are from Colorado. I hesitate at Amy’s chart, the thick black paint dripping from my brush and down the wall before I can make myself draw the line connecting them. It feels wrong to paint this line. It’s weird to see Amy’s name connected to the dead man’s. But nothing connects all four victims. From the scribbles and crossings out that Amy has streaked the wall with, I can see she’s come to the same conclusion I have, that it all might just be random. There is both too much and too little. Too many insignificant details line up, but nothing important enough for murder.

I turn to ask Amy what she thinks.

But she’s still staring at the ceiling.

I’ll ask her when she’s better.

If.

Replacing the paintbrush on Amy’s desk, a flash of blue catches my eye: the notebook Amy took from her father’s trunk. Bells jangle in my mind when I reach for the book. Privacy is valued on this ship of limited space, and I’ve never consciously violated someone’s privacy before. I smirk. Except when I broke into Eldest’s room.

Amy seems to inspire me to be all kinds of different.

Eldest’s lesson reverberates through my mind: Difference is a cause of discord. Fine. This ship could do with some discord.

On the first page of the book is a list of names. At the top is Eldest’s. She’s written over that name repeatedly, making it stand out in bold, and she’s underlined and circled it dozens of times. Under it is “the doctor” and a question mark, followed by several tiny streaks on the paper, as if she tapped the end of the pencil against the page while thinking. Beneath Doc’s name, a hasty list of names and descriptions of people is scribbled: me, Harley (although his name has been crossed out), Luthe (underlined so hard that her pencil ripped through the paper), “that mean girl” (surrounded by question marks and a doodle of a frowny face), and Orion (also crossed out).

I stare at the list of names, wondering at their importance and why Amy would bother writing them down in her special notebook.

Then it hits me.

This is her list of suspects.

My lips tighten as I stare down at it. She’s eliminated Harley and Orion, and seems unsure about “that mean girl” (Victria? Maybe). But she hasn’t marked me off. She still thinks I might be a suspect, or at least she did when she wrote her list.

I wonder what Harley’s done to get his name marked off, what I need to do to have that same honor.

When she wakes up, I’ll prove my worth to her.

If
.

This is just another test, one which I have failed. I have proven myself, somehow, as unworthy in Amy’s eyes, just as Eldest always sees me as unworthy to be a leader.

“Uhr ...” Amy moans.

I drop the book and pencil onto her desk and rush to her. Her fingers pinch the bridge of her nose between her eyes, and when she drops her hand, I can see that the light has returned to her eyes.

“I’ve got a killer headache,” Amy groans, shutting her eyes. There is more expression on her face now than I’ve seen from her all day.

“What happened?” she asks.

“What do you think happened?”

“Lord, I don’t know. I remember when you got that all-call. And we rode in that tube thing. That was fun. But by the time we got to that big room with the lights, I was starting to feel kind of ... woozy.”

“Doc said that you’ve had a reaction to the ship. He’s put you on ment—on the Inhibitor pills.”

“Inhibitor pills? The same pill you and Harley and everyone ‘crazy’ takes?” Amy pushes me aside to sit up straight.

“Well—yes.”

“Gah!” Amy screeches. She leaps off the bed, pacing, her hands curling into fists. “This ship is so effing messed up! I’m not crazy! You and Harley aren’t crazy!”

I don’t say anything because I half believe her. She takes my silence, however, for contradiction.

“What happened to make you and everyone else on this stupid ship think that things like—like screwing around with anything that walks, like being mindless drones—what made you think that—
that
—was
normal
!?”

I shrug. It’s the way it’s always been. How can I explain to this girl, who was raised among differences and lack of leadership and chaos and war that this is the way a normal society is run, a peaceful society, a society that doesn’t just survive, as hers did, but one that thrives and flourishes as it hurtles through space toward a new planet?

Amy marches to the desk and picks up the floppy. “How do you make this freaking thing work?” she demands, fiddling with it. “This thing is like a computer, right? Doesn’t it have information on Earth? Let me show you what real people, normal people, are like! Let me show you how weird this place is!”

She’s not doing it right—she’s swiped her finger across the screen and brought up the wi-com locator map I showed her before, but she doesn’t know how to access anything else. She taps it, then jabs it, then balls her hand into a fist and pounds it against the table. I stand, walk to her, and gently take the floppy from her hands. There are tears in her eyes.

“I can’t stand it,” she whispers. “I can’t stand these people, I can’t stand this ‘world.’ I can’t live here. I can’t spend the rest of my life here. I can’t. I
can’t.
”

So. Enough of Eldest’s speech on the Keeper Level penetrated into her mind. She knows how trapped she—all of us—are.

I want to take her into my arms and hold her tight. But at the same time, I know that is the exact opposite of what she wants. She wants to be free, and all I want to do is hold her tight against me.

“I think I know something that will help,” I say.

57

AMY

AS WE WALK ALONG THE PATH LEADING AWAY FROM THE Hospital, Elder is very mysterious. He won’t tell me anything, and I suppose that’s what really lifts my mood—he is like a little kid, eager to show his friend a new toy. That alone is enough to make me forget about the weird, fuzzy, slogging-through-water feeling of the day.

A couple sitting on the bench by the pond wave at us as we pass. The woman’s face is aglow, and she leans against the man’s chest with a look of utter bliss. Her right arm is wrapped around her stomach, and the man’s arm cradles hers.

The woman bends her head down, and I realize she’s talking to her unborn baby, not the man she’s leaning against. “And the stars all had streaks of light chasing them, all shining down on us, on you.”

“Eldest told me it wasn’t for me,” Elder says under his breath as the couple’s chatter fades behind us.

I give Elder a confused look.

“The star screen in the Great Room. Eldest told me it wasn’t there for me when I found out they weren’t real stars, just lightbulbs.” He looks away from me and says in a very small voice, “That was the day you woke up.” His words hang in the air between us. It feels like a long time ago, for both of us.

Elder motions back at the happy couple on the bench. “Eldest said the fake stars were for them.”

“Oh, I see.” Typical that Eldest would want to control even the stars. He used them to manipulate the people of the ship, so that when they were told they would not be alive at planet-landing, they could at least have a taste of the stars to tell their children about. I look behind me at the woman sitting on the bench, holding her stomach with gentle hands and whispering to her unborn child about the stars they saw, promising it a lifetime under the heavens.

“It’s cruel,” I say. “To tantalize them with the outside, and then to take it away.”

Elder shakes his head. “It’s not like that. It gave them a story to feed their children. It’s the way hope is passed down.”

I stare at Elder. “You sort of agree with Eldest, don’t you?”

“Sort of.”

I want to argue. Eldest is like a spoiled child throwing his toys around. Waiting for an excuse to break us, watching for any sign that we don’t want to play his game. Always watching, with eyes that remind me of Luthe’s. He’s not helping people, like Elder almost seems to think—he’s twisting the situation to make no one really care about the fact that we’ll all be dead or super-old before we land on the new planet. But before I can say anything, Elder announces, “We’re here!”

He’s so proud of himself that I don’t have the heart to tell him I’ve been to the Recorder Hall before. Then again, the last time I was here, I was a mess, covered in mud and tears. I remember the man who helped me then, Orion. His kindness kept me sane.

One of the rockers on the porch moves slowly, as if someone has just left it, but there’s no other sign of life. Elder reaches to open the door for me. I see eyes then, and I smile, expecting Orion, but instead, Elder’s painted face peers up at me from the brick wall.

“Oh!” I say, leaning over to inspect the new portrait by the door. Elder’s face has replaced Eldest’s dour one.

“Yeah.” Elder sounds sheepish. My first thought was that he was going to show off with the painting—that’s what Jason would have done, hammed it up—but I can tell he wishes I hadn’t noticed it.

“Come inside,” Elder says. The Recorder Hall is empty except for us, silent and dark. Elder shows me the big model of Earth and the ship that I saw earlier. I pretend to pay attention, but I’m distracted by the flashing images on the walls. The last time I was here with Orion, these were blank; I’d barely noticed them.

“Wall floppies,” Elder says when he notices my distraction. “This is what
Godspeed
has been doing while you slept.”

He grins at me, but I barely notice. I’m fascinated by all that’s flashing in front of me: a diagram of how wi-coms work, and more of grav tubes. Art: I can pick out several scans of Harley’s artwork—several of them koi fish, which seems to be his favorite subject—but there’s more: sculptures, pottery, drawings, hand-sewn quilts. One of the floppy computers lists different titles, and when Elder taps on the screen, music fills the entryway.

For the first time since I woke up, I feel as if this is a place I could learn to love. It’s not Earth, not by any stretch of the imagination—but I’m seeing art and inventions and life that Earth will never know.

And all this happened while I dreamt nightmares below generations of people’s feet. They didn’t know about me any more than I knew about them.

“That’s odd,” Elder says, rapping his knuckles on one of the big wall computer things.

“What?”

“The image won’t change,” Elder says.

If it weren’t for the label at the top—LEAD-BASED FAST REACTOR PROTOTYPE—I wouldn’t know what it was at all. Not that the name helps me. I still don’t know what it means.

“It’s locked,” Elder says. “Let me see if I can ...” He steps over to one of the black boxes on the wall and runs his thumb over the scanner. “Eldest/ Elder access granted,” the computer chirps.

All around us, the pictures change. Now, images of Earth intermingle with images of
Godspeed
. A landscape painting of the Hospital and garden are replaced with a photograph of Monument Valley. Although I didn’t live there, it does remind me of the place out west where the space lab was, an hour from Colorado, where I met Jason, the last place I called home.

“Most people aren’t allowed to see this,” Elder says, still trying to get the one monitor to show something other than the engine schematics. “Whenever the new gen is born, school will start again. The children will see the model of Sol-Earth and the model of
Godspeed.
But they aren’t allowed to see this.”

“Why not?” I ask, brushing my fingers against the screen showing Monument Valley just before it melts into the Sphinx in Egypt.

“Eldest says it’s best for people not to dwell too much on Sol-Earth. That we should think about the future, not the past.”

“But he lets you see it.”

Elder turns to stare at the screen, and for a moment, he looks a photo of Kim Jong-il in the eyes, but then the picture fades into one of the old presidents. I can’t remember which one it is, the fat one with the big mustache.

“It’s part of his lessons. He wants me to learn about Sol-Earth, so that I can prevent its mistakes. Why won’t this frexing thing work?”

I want to say that Earth did not have mistakes, but I know that’s not true. And I want to say that Eldest’s method of running a world isn’t right, but I’m not sure that’s true. There is so much about this world inside a ship that I just don’t understand.

“Orion!” Elder calls. “One of the wall floppies is stuck!”

“Is he here?” I look around—the place looks empty except for us.

The screen behind Elder shifts, fading from one old president to another.

“As I was saying, Eldest wanted me to learn from Sol-Earth. A lot of your leaders had it right—they just didn’t get their people to follow. Like him.”

I glance back at the image on the screen. “Who? Abraham Lincoln?”

Elder nods. “Sixteenth governmental leader of the United States of America, located in the northern hemisphere of Sol-Earth, between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He was leader during the Civil War, a war between the states.”

“Yes, I know.” I am wary now. There is something in the way Elder speaks of Abraham Lincoln, so cold and disconnected, that makes me unsure—either of what he knows, or of what I know. I see a flicker of movement in the shadows near the door.

“He is the kind of leader Eldest wants me to be like.” The picture starts to fade, but Elder touches the screen, and Lincoln’s picture stays. I wait for him to continue. “When the states wanted to break up into discord, Lincoln provided the strong central leadership that kept them together.”

“Yes.” The word drawls out of my lips, long and low. Half my attention is on the door—is that Orion listening to us, or someone else? And why won’t whoever it is come out of the shadows and talk to us?

“And when the differences that existed between the states were too strong, Lincoln was the one who eliminated the cause of that discord.”

“I—what?”

“Monoethnicity. The cause of the war was that two races could not live in one country. Lincoln sent the black race back to the continent of Africa, and the war ended.”

I sputter. “What are you talking about? That’s not what happened!”

Elder taps on the screen, and the picture of Lincoln is replaced with text. He reads the words aloud, a hint of reverence in his voice.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men must be equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation can long endure if men are not equal. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war to determine the future of one nation, one people, free of discord, at peace through sameness. Our nation will now discover the strength of unity and uniformity.”

The text scrolls on. Elder takes a deep breath, about to continue reading.

“Stop.”

Elder looks at me, surprised.

“That is not the Gettysburg Address,” I say.

“Of course it is.”

“It’s not.”

“Then what’s the Gettysburg Address?”

I dig in my brain, trying to remember. “The four score part was the same. But this one is saying things like everyone should be the same—that’s not in there.”

“Then what does the Gettysburg Address say?”

“Er ... Four score and seven years ago ... um ... Okay, look, I don’t have the thing memorized, but I know enough to know that one’s wrong.”

Elder looks at me doubtfully, and I realize how weak my argument sounds. Inside, I’m beating myself up: how could I have left Earth without knowing this?

“That’s—this thing is basically racism,” I say. Elder doesn’t seem to know what “racism” is. “The speech you just read—that was all about dividing the races. But that’s not what the Gettysburg Address is about. And besides—look at you.” I wave my hand at Elder’s tan skin, almond eyes, high cheekbones, dark hair. “You’re like the ultimate in mixed races.”

Elder looks even more confused now. He has no concept that a race is part of a person’s identity—he just sees it as a difference, a difference that’s better off eliminated.

And I realize: That’s exactly how Eldest wants him to think.

I think I hear laughter, soft chuckling, from near the door, but when I whip around to see, no one’s there. Just Elder, who still doesn’t understand me. And why should he? How can he learn from history if history’s been altered?

I’m the only one who knows, and I don’t know enough to fix it.

Would they even believe me if I tried?