Across the Universe (5 page)

Ah. I’d forgotten. These are images approved for everyone, but the information Eldest wants me to find is restricted. I step over to the biometric scanner against the wall and roll my thumb over the scan bar. “Eldest/ Elder access granted,” the computer’s female voice chirps.

The images change. Now there is art from Sol-Earth, not just
Godspeed
. The people aren’t monoethnic. Unlike the images of Centauri-Earth, those of Sol-Earth are not an artist’s rendering. I stand back, staring into the paper-white face of a woman with a mountain of powdered hair and a dress so wide it borders each side of the screen. I wonder about the time and place she is in, the person she was. I am looking into the face of another world, one as unreachable to me as Centauri-Earth.

“Perhaps Genghis Khan’s campaign is what Eldest wants you to learn about?” Orion mutters. He taps on the screen, and the woman’s white-painted face melts into a screaming brown man with almond-shaped eyes and matted, dirty hair. “Or the Armenian Genocide?” A map of Sol-Earth replaces the terrifying man, and the outline of a small country flashes, inviting me to tap on it and learn more.

Before I can touch it, though, Orion taps something else on the screen. The map fades, replaced with a chart. I squint up at the tiny words and jumbled lines. A genealogical chart, tracing parents to children. My eye roams the chart, jumping from name to name, and it isn’t until Orion murmurs, “Oops,” and changes the screen to another map that I realize the name I was seeking on the screen was my own, even though I know that’s silly—that chart was way too old.

I breathe deeply, ignoring whatever war or genocide Orion is now pointing out to me on the screen.

As Elder, I am not allowed to know my parents. It would make me partial and biased; it would lead to sentimental feelings that would impede my leadership and decisions as Eldest. I know this. I even
agree
with it.

But still.

I’d like to know who they are.

“Elder?” Orion asks, concern filling his voice. “Is something wrong?”

I shake my head. “Nothing.”

Orion searches my face, but I’m not sure what he wants to find.

And then I find myself searching his face in return, and I know what I’m seeking. Is that
my
nose on his face? My eyes? My lips? I’ve never really noticed Orion before. He’s always been in the background, fading into the records he keeps. But now that I really look at him...

Could
this
man be my father?

My breath catches, and I have to shake my head again before I can get a grip on myself. Sure, Orion reminds me of me. But on a ship where everyone’s monoethnic, that’s not hard to do. I can as easily see myself in Eldest as I can in Orion.

I just wish I could see myself in me.

Orion smiles at me, as if he understands what I’m going through, but he can’t possibly. “So,” he says, in such a fatherly tone that I flinch, “Eldest is having you do research? Sounds like he’s really focusing on training you now.”

“Yeah.”

“Has he taken you below the Feeder Level yet?” Orion leans forward, his eyes eager.

“Below? There’s nothing below the Feeder Level.”

Orion’s face slips into a blank mask. “Oh,” he says, leaning back, disappointment evident in his down-turned mouth. “Well, let’s get on with that research.” He turns back to the screen.

“No, wait! Did you mean there’s another level below this one?”

Orion hesitates. He brushes his long hair behind his ear, and I notice that the left side of his neck is marked by a peculiar spiderweb scar. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I was going through the floppies recently, and I saw something....” He taps his finger against the floppy, and the screen speeds through images. “I found some diagrams of
Godspeed
. But I shouldn’t have been looking at them. Besides, surely Eldest will go over all that with you in your training, when it’s time for you to learn about those sorts of things. I was just curious.”

Of course he is. As a Recorder, his home and work is on the Feeder Level. Everyone’s constrained to the Feeder Level except the Shippers, who have access to the Shipper Level, and Eldest and I, who also have the Keeper Level. Orion’s probably spent his whole life on this one part of the ship.

“Can I see the diagram?”

Orion’s hand twitches toward the screen, but he doesn’t tap anything in. “Eldest would probably not want...” His voice trails off, indecision making him waver.

I smile back at him. “Let me,” I say. “Then you can’t be to blame.” Orion looks a little guilty, but also eager and curious as I knock his hand aside and tap in “
Godspeed
ship diagram.”

A list shows up instead of an image. Two options. Two different diagrams.

BEFORE PLAGUE

AFTER PLAGUE

“What does this mean?” I ask. “How did the ship change after the Plague?” I knew the Plague Eldest had renamed the levels, reallocated some of the rooms, and reserved the Keeper Level for the Eldest and Elder, but that’s all.
Or at least I thought that was all. That hidden star screen must have been hidden for a reason . . . .

Orion leans in closer. “See, that’s what interested me, too. Look.” He reaches up and taps the “After Plague” option. A diagram brightens the screen: a cross section of the ship, a big circle divided into levels. There’s nothing unusual there. The top floor is marked “Keeper Level.” It’s simple and vague—there’s just an outline of the rooms that Eldest and I occupy. Underneath that, the Shipper Level is more complicated, with space set aside for the engine room and the command center, as well as all the research labs used by the scientists. What is now the Feeder Level takes up more than two-thirds of the chart. The diagram is old; it shows the buildings that were a part of the ship’s original design, including the Hospital and the Recorder Hall, where we are now. But it doesn’t show the new additions made since launch—the grav tubes, developed two gens before Eldest, aren’t on the diagram. Instead, there’s a set of stairs connecting the Feeder Level to the Shipper Level, which were torn down when the grav tubes were made.

My eyes drift down. “Was this what you were talking about?” I ask, pointing to the unlabeled part of the diagram under the Feeder Level. “It’s probably just electrical stuff, or pipes, or something.”

“I thought that, too,” Orion says. “But look.” He taps the screen and goes back to the main menu, then taps “Before Plague.”

The same chart shows up, but everything’s labeled differently now. The Keeper Level is now labeled “Navigation,” just like on the plaque I saw on the screen hidden under the ceiling. The Shipper Level is sectioned off into three portions: technological research (where the labs are now), the engine room, and something called a “Bridge.” That’s not far off from what we have now, just different words for the same things. It’s the Feeder Level where things really start to change. The left side, where the City is, is marked “Living Quarters (inclusive)” and all the rest of the Feeder Level is labeled “Biological Research.” Biological Research? That’s what they used to call goat herding and sheep shearing?

But it’s what’s under the Feeder Level that really fascinates me. What was blank space on the other diagram is now all filled in. It’s like there really is another level of the ship below our feet, a level I never knew of, one that has, apparently, a genetic research lab, a second water pump, a huge section marked “Storage—Important” and a very small area labeled simply “Contingency.”

“What is this?” I ask, staring at it. “I know they changed the names of the levels and moved some things around after the Plague, but this? This is more than just rearranging. There’s a whole other
level
.” What I don’t say is:
Why didn’t I know about this already? Why didn’t Eldest teach me?
I already know the answer: because he doesn’t think I’m ready or—worse—he doesn’t think I’m worthy of knowing the secrets of the ship.

“They changed a lot of things after the Plague,” Orion says. “There was no Eldest system then.”

I know this much, at least. Everyone knows about that. After the Plague killed off around three quarters of the ship, dropping our numbers from over three thousand to little more than seven hundred, the Plague Eldest took control and remade the government into the peaceful, working society we have now. In the gens since then, we’ve rebuilt our population to over two thousand, developed new tech like the grav tubes, and maintained the peaceful society the Plague Eldest originally envisioned.

But I hadn’t known just how much he changed the ship, or what all of those changes meant.

“Don’t you want to know what’s down there?” Orion asks, staring at the fourth level.

And now that he’s said it—yeah, I really do. “Here, let me see that.” I push Orion out of the way and tap on the wall floppy, searching. It takes me a few minutes, but then I find what I’m looking for. “Let’s see what the designers put there,” I say, grinning in triumph.

A blueprint flashes on the screen, but it’s much more complicated than the diagrams of the ship’s levels. I squint up at the lines, trying to trace pipes and electrical wiring and separate them from the walls and doors. The image is so big that I either have to zoom in and scroll, or zoom out and squint.

“I don’t understand any of it,” I say finally, throwing my hands up.

“I started with the elevator.” Orion scrolls the blueprint up, and suddenly I recognize the building whose blueprints I’m seeing. The Hospital. He points to the fourth floor. “There’s a second elevator.”

“There’s no second elevator!” I laugh. I’ve spent my share of time in the Hospital, and there’s only one elevator there.

“At the end of the hall, there’s another elevator. The blueprints don’t lie.”

“All the doors on that floor are locked,” I say. I know. I’ve tried them all. And they’re not locked with biometric scanners—I could get past those with a swipe of my thumb. No, those doors have old-fashioned Sol-Earth locks, made of metal. Harley and I once spent a week trying to break in until Doc caught us.

Orion’s shaking his head. “Not the last door. That one’s open. And there’s a second elevator there.”

I laugh again. “There’s just no way. If there was some secret elevator leading to a secret level of the ship, I’d know.”

Orion just looks at me. His silence is an accusation: Would I really know?

Eldest has kept things hidden from me before. Maybe there is another level.

7

AMY

I HEAR SOMETHING
.

A creak. My door is open, my little morgue door is pulled open, and it’s brighter here, I can see a tinge of light through my sealed-shut eyelids, and now something, someone is pulling out my glass coffin.

Something makes my glass coffin lift up; there’s a sensation in my frozen stomach like being pushed on a swing, and I try to hold on to the feeling, assure myself it is real. Did they lift the lid off? I can hear—I can hear!—muffled cadences of speech through the ice. Growing louder! The sounds are not just vibrations through the ice, they’re sounds! People are talking!

“Just a little more,” a voice that reminds me of Ed says.

“The ice melts quickly.”

“It’s the—” I don’t catch those words—a whooshing sound washes over me.

And warmth. I
feel
warmth for the first time in 301 years. Not ice—but a tingly sensation, crackling against the nerve endings in my skin, washing me with a feeling I thought I had lost forever. Warmth!

“Why hasn’t she moved yet?” says the first voice again. It doesn’t sound like harsh, careless Ed now, but gentler Hassan.

“Add more gel.” Something is being rubbed into my skin. I realize that, for the first time in over three centuries,
someone is touching me
. Gentle hands knead my cold flesh with a goo that reminds me of the Icy Hot lotion I used on my knee when I twisted it at a cross-country race my freshman year. I am so happy I might explode.

And that’s when I realize I can’t smile.

“It’s not working,” says the gentle voice. It sounds sad now. Defeated.

“Try—”

“No, look, she’s not even breathing.”

Silence.

I will my lungs to pump air; I will my chest to move up and down with the rhythm of life.

Something cold—I never want to feel cold again—is pressed against the top of my left breast.

“No heartbeat.”

I concentrate all my will on my heart—beat, dammit! Beat! But how can you tell your heart to beat? I could no sooner have told it
not
to beat before I was frozen.

“Should we wait?”

Yes! YES. Wait—I’m coming. Just give me some time to thaw, and I will rise from the ice and live again. I will be your frozen phoenix. Just give me a chance!

“Nah.”

My mouth. I concentrate everything I have within me on my mouth. Lips, move! Speak, shout—scream!

“Just put her back in.”

And the table bows under the weight of the lid lowering over me. And my stomach lurches as they shove me back into the morgue.

The door clicks shut.

I want to scream, but I can’t.

Because none of this is real.

It’s just another nightmare.

8

ELDER

DOC IS IN THE LOBBY OF THE HOSPITAL, HELPING ONE nurse lead an old man toward the front desk where another nurse starts to check him in. When Doc sees me, he heads my way.

“Have you seen Harley?” he asks.

“No.” I can’t help but smile. Harley’s famous for escaping Doc when med time rolls around.

Doc runs his fingers through his thick hair, then notices my smile and scowls. “It’s no laughing matter. Harley needs to take his medication on a regular schedule.”

I make an attempt to sober up my expression. Harley does sometimes get intense and dark, but I think that has more to do with how artistic he is than how crazy Doc thinks he is. Besides, he’s my best friend; I’m not going to scamp him out to Doc.

“I ain’t going!” the old man at the front desk yells. Doc whips around. The old man has shaken off the nurse who helped him walk in and is leaning toward the one sitting at the desk. “You can’t make me! I ain’t going to no ’spital bed, I ain’t sick!” He punctuates this with a hacking cough and spits out a mouthful of phlegm on the floor.

“Now, now, calm down,” Doc says, striding over to the man.

The old man turns his cataract gaze to Doc. “Where’s my wife? You got her?”

“Ms. Steela isn’t here,” Doc says, putting his hand on the man’s arm. “She isn’t sick. You are.”

“Ain’t sick!” the old man roars, but immediately after he speaks, a glazed expression falls over his eyes. His breathing calms, and he sags under the weight of his own clothing. When Doc moves his hand, I see why: Doc has slipped him a med patch. The lavender square of sticky cloth on the old man’s arm is already calming him into submission.

Doc shoots me a triumphant grin as he helps the man settle into a wheelchair and then sends him and the nurse to the elevator. I swallow, hard. Doc is a good man, but his answer to everything is always medicine. He doesn’t like emotion, any emotion. He prefers things quiet, controlled.

That’s why he’s so frexing close to Eldest. They think alike.

“So, what are you doing here?” Doc says once the old man is safely ensconced in the elevator and on his way to treatment.

I scuff my shoes on the smooth tiled floor. There’s no way I’m going to tell him that I’m off to explore a secret elevator on the fourth floor. I’m not even sure if I believe Orion enough to try it.

“Just thought I’d see Harley,” I say finally.

Doc frowns. “If you find him, send him straight to me. It’s long past med time.” He glances at the clock over the nurse’s desk. “For that matter, have you taken yours?”

I flush. I’m not proud of the year I lived here. On the third floor, the Ward. Where the mental patients are. I think living with the Feeders cracked me. It was fine when I was little, but the older I got, the more I felt like I was different from the rest of them. I couldn’t make myself care about crops or cows the way they did.

(I remember, when Doc first made me start taking mental meds, I asked: Should I still be Elder? I was on mental meds, after all! I spent a year at the Ward! I was all ready to step down. But Doc and Eldest wouldn’t let me.)

“I took them this morning,” I mutter, my face hot. I hope the nurse at the desk hasn’t heard. What would she think of a future leader who’s on mental meds?

Doc scrutinizes me. “Is there anything wrong?” he asks.

Eldest lied to me about the stars, and there might be a secret level on the ship, and Orion looks more like me than I’d ever care to admit, but no, nothing’s wrong, because if Doc thinks anything is wrong, he’ll just give me more meds. I shake my head.

Doc doesn’t look convinced. “I know it’s hard on you. You’re different.”

“I’m not that different.”

“’Course you are. You know you are.”

I shrug. The elevator, now empty, returns to the lobby. I want to escape to it, and Doc, mercifully, lets me go.

Inside the elevator, my hand hovers over the round number four, then slides down to three. If Harley’s off his meds, maybe I
should
check in on him before searching for the mysterious second elevator.

My spirits lift with the elevator. Despite Doc, one of my favorite places to be is the Ward. All my friends are here. The elevator bobs to a halt, and the doors slide open to the third-floor common room. I grin so hard it hurts. The Ward feels more like home than any other place on the ship, even if it’s filled with crazy people.

Paint splatters onto my sleeve; I look up and see that Harley is attacking a canvas, letting his brush flick off the side of it. There’s a ring of splattered red and blue paint all around where he’s sitting.

“Hey Harley,” I say. “Doc’s looking for you.”

“Haven’t got time for him”—he spares a glance up at me—“49 and 267,” he says before turning back to the canvas and attacking it with his paintbrush again. I grin wryly. You can count on Harley to know exactly when the ship’s going to land. Most people—I mean, most people in the Ward—keep track of the time until the ship lands, but I bet if I asked, Harley would know not only the years (49) and days (267) before we land, but also the minutes and seconds.

I dodge the flying paint and peer around to see what he’s painting. A koi fish floats in a sea of bright blue, but the light from the fish’s scales and the sparkles on the water’s surface intermingle, as if the fish is a part of the water and the water is a part of the fish. Harley’s used these amazing colors—colors that no one else would think of. The fish’s eyes are bright, bright green, almost yellow, like jade swirled with gold. The scales are shiny and bright, too, but they’re all edged in blood red that looks like it should clash with the lighter colors, but it doesn’t. The red makes it seem more real, somehow, as if the water could spill from the canvas and the fish could swim past our feet.

“I like this,” I tell Harley after a long moment. “I mean it; this is frexing good.”

Harley grunts. He’s in his painting mood, and there’s not really much point in talking to him. Doc will have a hard time giving him his meds, even when he inevitably finds him.

All around me, a subtle form of chaos flowers. This whole room is filled with creativity and art. It’s actually a pretty brilly place to be. Except now, when everyone’s all busy with their own stuff. I’m starting to feel like I’m a bit of a chutz just standing here while everyone’s so intent on their own work.

“See you,” I say, but Harley doesn’t notice.

A pang of guilt bites at my stomach as I reenter the elevator and head to the fourth floor. Eldest wanted me to research the third cause of discord, and I’m definitely not doing that.

But lies are a cause of discord, too
, I think sullenly as the elevator opens.

The fourth floor is silent. I go past the doors on the left and right, straight to the end of the hall. I put my hand on the doorknob. It’ll be locked. All the doors on the fourth floor are locked. I’ve been here before, tried them all before.

But the knob twists under my hand, just like Orion said it would, to reveal a small room that contains a desk, a metal box, and, against the far wall—

Another elevator.

Above the call button is a biometric scanner. I half expect to be blocked. Eldest has banned me from his chambers and the engine room on the Shipper Level. Even though I have total access to the rest of the ship, I can’t help but think that if he knew, Eldest would ban me from here, too. When I roll my thumb over the scanner, however, the doors slide open immediately.

There are five buttons inside—one for each floor, and another one labeled “C.”
C? What does C stand for?
I think back to the diagram Orion showed me. There was a section marked “Contingency,” but this elevator doesn’t go there; it goes to the area marked “Storage—Important.” I put my finger on the C button, but I don’t push it in, just feel the curve of the letter. How could there have been a whole other elevator, a whole other
level
of the ship?

I lean forward, letting my whole body weight push the button. The doors slide shut.

The little light over the doors blinks with every floor. Three. Two. One.

The light blinks out. I descend past the first floor. I start to count the seconds. I stare at the buttons by the door, but the “C” doesn’t light up yet. The elevator keeps sinking. It’s taken twice as long as it normally does to go from floor to floor in the Hospital... three times as long. A full minute passes. How big is
Godspeed
, really?

With a slight bump, the elevator stops.

The doors slide open.

I take a deep breath and step out onto a level of the ship that isn’t supposed to exist.

It’s dark. “Lights,” I say, pushing my wi-com, but nothing happens.

The elevator door swishes closed, taking the dim glow of the elevator with it. I put my hand to the nearest wall so that I don’t get too lost, and my finger brushes against a stubby piece of plastic.

A flickering fluorescent bulb switches on, then another, then another, like dominoes of light from the ceiling. Huh. A light switch. I’ve only seen them in floppies and vids of tech from Sol-Earth. The ship was rewired for wi-com control long before the Plague.

It’s big, this place. Unusually big. It reminds me of the Keeper Level, actually—lots of space and no one filling it. Big enough for everyone on the ship to stand next to each other, just like the Great Room. There’s a closed door to the left, and a hallway branching off to the right. It’s all metal and hard edges. Apart from the vastness of it, there’s an odd shape to it, almost egg-like and tapering at the roof, making a dome. I’m not sure why the roof rounds—the Feeder Level above is flat ground—but I can see heavy iron pipes extending through the curves.

This large room is filled with rows and rows of small metal doors. Like the old Sol-Earth bookshelves in the back of the Recorder Hall (locked away from the Feeders, of course), the rows stick out, ready to be browsed, but the contents are all hidden behind tiny square doors with heavily bolted hinges. The air feels cooler here, and the walls seem quieter. As if this is a place where only whispers are allowed, and few people.

I start down the nearest aisle, small doors on either side of me. The doors are numbered, scribbled with sloppy white paint. Lined along the bottom are little rectangles engraved into each metal door. I squint—they’re flags, half a dozen of them, from Sol-Earth countries. At the end of the row of flags, three letters are engraved into the metal: FRX. The same letters on the star screen. This stuff is old. Part of the original design of the ship. I put my hand on a door—number 34—and start to turn the heavy lever when a flash of red catches my eye.

One of the doors is already open. A long metal tray extends from the mouth of the door like a tongue, and on that tray is a narrow clear box filled with frozen water speckled with blue glitter. Floating immobile in the ice, as still and silent as this empty room, is a girl.

It’s her hair that pulls me forward. It’s so
red
. I’ve never seen red hair before, not outside of pictures, and the pictures never caught the vivacity of these burnished strands tangled in the ice. Harley has a book of paintings he stole from the Recorder Hall, and one of the paintings is just a series of haystacks at different times of the day. He showed me the last painted haystack, the one covered in snow, the one at sunset. Harley went loons over it, saying how the artist was so brilliant to paint stuff with different light, and I said that was stupid, there’s light or there isn’t, and he said
I
was stupid, on Sol-Earth there were things like sunrise and sunset because the sun moves like a living thing and isn’t just an overrated heat lamp in the sky.

This girl’s hair is more brilliant than the rays of the sun on Sol-Earth captured by an artist Harley said was the most genius man ever to live.

I reach out to touch the glass that traps her inside, and only then do I realize how cold it is. My breath is rising in little clouds of white. My fingertips stick to the glass.

I stare down at her. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, but also the strangest. Her skin is pale, almost translucent white, and I don’t think it’s just from the ice. I lay my hand on top of her glass box, above her heart. My skin is a dark shadow over the luminescence of hers.

This girl is definitely not monoethnic. She’s not like anyone else on
Godspeed.
Her skin, her hair, her age—
my
age!—her very shape... short, but slender with an enticing curve to her breasts and hips.

How can this girl fit into the monoethnic no-differences-at-all world Eldest says provides perfect peace?

My eyes devour her body, then drift back to her breasts. The ice is a little foggy there, teasing me, but I can see enough to know they’re lush, and even if they’re frozen, I imagine that if they were warmed up...

“
Elder!
” I jump away from the clear box, as startled as I would have been if the beauty inside had suddenly awoken.

But it’s just Doc.

“What are you
doing
down here? And how did you get down here in the first place?” Pause. “How did you even know about this place?”

“I took the elevator.” I try to appear brilly, but my heart’s banging around in my chest.

“You shouldn’t be down here.” He frowns. He touches the wi-com button behind his left ear. “Com link: Eldest,” he says.

“No! Don’t com Eldest! I’ll go!” I say, but I don’t want to go, I want to look more at the girl with sunset hair.

Doc shakes his head at me. “It’s dangerous down here. Touch those buttons,” he nods toward a little black electrical box at the frozen girl’s head, “and you could wake her.”

I look at the box. It’s simple. On the top are three buttons: ELECTRICAL PULSE, CHECK DATA, and, under a clear protective case with a thumbprint scanner, a yellow button labeled “REANIMATION.” Wires extending from it go back into the glass box; I follow the tubes with my eyes to her perfect cherry mouth.

“I won’t touch it,” I say, but Doc’s already turned away from me.

“Elder’s down here,” he says, and I know those words aren’t for me, but for Eldest, who must have connected to Doc’s wi-com. “Yes,” Doc says. Pause. “I don’t frexing know.” He eyes me again, a cold, evaluating look I have not seen since the days I was his patient. Doc touches the wi-com, and Eldest is disconnected. I know it won’t be long before Eldest comes down here and drags me back to the Learning Center.