Across the Universe (25 page)

58

ELDER

AMY’S STARING AT THE SCREEN AS UPSET AS SHE WAS BEFORE we got here. This is not going as planned. This was supposed to be the thing that made her happy again. I tap the screen and let Lincoln fade. A picture of people during the German Inflation replaces Lincoln’s creased face, their wheelbarrows of money blending in with his chaotic hair.

“We should go back,” Amy says. “Harley’s been guarding the cryo level long enough. I’ll take a turn.”

There is so much more here I want to show her: the rooms of books, real books, from Sol-Earth. The artifact room on the second floor, where there are models and Sol-Earth artifacts, including an original tractor that we base our tractors on. The science records room that shows how we developed the wi-com systems and the grav tubes. But she doesn’t want to see any of it, so what’s the point?

“I know that man,” Amy says, awe and wonder in her voice. She pushes me aside so she can see the image on the screen.

I stare at the picture, but don’t remember him. He’s an older man, somewhere between Doc’s and Harley’s ages, with dark hair and eyes but that distinct oddness in his look shows how different he is from us—he’s not monoethnic, and he just looks ... different. He’s sitting in front of a trailer, holding a fat baby in his lap. Certainly, he’s no one important, no one Eldest made me memorize facts about.

“It’s Ed.”

“Who?”

“Ed. I met him just before I was frozen. He was actually one of the men who froze me and my parents.”

That doesn’t seem like an important enough reason for his picture to be located beside Abraham Lincoln’s. I reach past Amy and touch the screen. The picture of this “Ed” stops; when I touch the screen again, the text about him pops up.

“Edmund Albert Davis, Junior,” I read aloud. “The first child born on
Godspeed
, shown here with his father, Edmund Albert Davis, Senior, one of the recruits from Sol-Earth on the departing flight.”

“I knew him,” Amy says. Her head is cocked, and she’s gazing at the picture as if Edmund Albert Davis, Senior, were alive and she was talking to him. “I had no idea he signed up to leave Earth on
Godspeed.
”

I am thinking about Edmund Albert Davis, Junior, and how he was the first person born to captivity here. I wonder how he felt about it, growing up with people who’d lived on Earth, knowing he’d never ever see that.

“I wish I had known,” Amy says. “I wish I had talked to him more. I wish I had asked him why he’d joined the crew. He seemed so bitter when we met. But maybe that was just ...” She trails off, staring at the screen without seeing it. Suddenly, she laughs. “Just think! I met this man centuries and centuries ago, and now I could meet his ancestors on this ship! Descendants of the man who froze me! How cool would that be?” She turns to me, her eyes widening. “What if
you
were a descendent of Ed? Talk about a coincidence!”

I laugh because she’s laughing.

“I wonder if you are,” she says, her gaze dancing between me and the image on the wall floppy.

“Are what?”

“A descendant of Ed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, please!” Amy snorts. “With all this technology, surely someone’s kept a genealogical chart. I bet Eldest or that doctor has one—they were the ones all concerned about incest.”

“They keep all the records here. This is the Recorder Hall,” I say. She doesn’t notice my hollow tone. I know that even if we find Ed’s descendant, it won’t be me. My birth records are hidden. We can trace Ed’s whole lineage back to Sol-Earth, but I can’t even go one step back on my family tree.

“Oh, come on! Let’s see if you’re related to Ed!” She grabs my arm, and I haven’t seen her this caught up in excitement since ... ever. The weight of worry she’s been carrying around is forgotten, if just for a moment. And I’ll do anything to keep it from coming back.

“It shouldn’t be too hard to trace,” I say. “With this being the first baby born on the ship, I’m sure they kept a record.”

My fingers run across the hotspots on the screen, pressing in an info spot, then tapping in key words. Amy watches me, fascinated. I tap faster. My fingers get all tangled up, the screen beeps at me in anger, and I have to start the search engine over.

Finally: “Here it is!”

Amy’s head tilts back as she reads the top of the screen. “Ed Senior leads to Ed Junior ...” she mutters. Her eyes slowly sink down the screen before she looks up, puzzled. She looks as if she’s going to ask me a question, but then she looks back at the screen and starts to count under her breath. “One, two, three ...” She finally looks up at me, her brows creasing. “Thirteen generations. There are thirteen generations on this chart. From Ed Junior all the way down to Benita, here, there are thirteen generations of people recorded.”

“So?”

Amy starts to pace from the model of Sol-Earth back to the screen. “How many generations can be born in a century? Maybe four or five? So thirteen generations would be around three centuries, right?”

I nod.

“But look at this.” Amy points to the bottom of the screen.

And just under Benita’s name are the words, “Killed by Plague.”

“When was the Plague?” Amy asks.

“A long time ago,” I say, slowly. I think of the statue of the Plague Eldest in the Hospital garden. It’s worn and weathered so much that the details of his face are gone.

“How long?” Her words are quick, urgent, and they are infecting me.

“Longer than Eldest. Longer than the Eldest before him.”

“So, like, maybe a hundred years. So that would mean that Benita, the thirteenth generation of this family ... she had to have been born around three hundred years after the ship left. But she was killed by this Plague ... and that happened like a hundred or more years ago. This ship’s been flying at least a century longer than it was supposed to ....”

“But the ship was supposed to have landed in fifty years. We’ve only been flying for two hundred and fifty years,” I say.

Amy stops pacing, turns, and faces me. Her eyes are wide, boring into mine.

“How do you know for sure?” she says. “Let’s look up the charts after the Plague. If we count how many generations were born after the Plague, maybe we’ll be able to figure out how long this ship has really been traveling.”

It feels as if there is a rock in my stomach, pulling me down, pulling the entire ship down. “There are no genealogical charts after the Plague. I just remembered: Doc told me once that the Plague wiped out so many people that they quit making the charts after that.”

“The Season,” Amy whispers more to herself than to me. “The Season started after the Plague, right?” She is staring hard at nothing. “This can’t be a coincidence. That thirteenth generation, Benita’s generation—that was when the ship was supposed to land. It must have been close to three centuries then, surely. But then this Plague happened, and the Season was started, and they quit doing genealogical charts—”

“And photography was banned,” I add. “There are no pictures of the ship from the year before the Plague till now. I was fascinated by the Plague when I was younger—it’s one of the first things Eldest taught me about—but there aren’t pics or vids of it at all, and now only the scientists on the Shipper Level can use photography, and only then as a record of their discoveries.”

“Something happened during that Plague,” Amy says slowly. “Something so bad that all the records of it were destroyed. And everything after—the Season, the way people act here—it all comes back to the Plague.”

59

AMY

ELDER STARTS TO SAY SOMETHING TO ME, BUT JUST WHEN he opens his mouth, the door to the Recorder Hall flings open.

“Elder!” Eldest��s voice, strong and cold, rings out across the empty hall.

Elder lunges for the control panels. All the forbidden images of the people and places of my home disappear. The telltale genealogical chart fades to black; the stuck image of the engine slides away.

“Don’t bother,” Eldest growls. He taps one finger behind his left ear, where the communicator is implanted. “I keep tabs on what you study on this ship. I know what you’ve used your access to open.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Elder says automatically, but I can tell he doesn’t mean it, and he regrets saying it altogether. He stands straighter and regains some of his composure. “But since when do you keep ‘tabs’ on me? And honestly, I’m surprised you even noticed. The last time I saw you, you were dru—”

My head whips around to Eldest. Drunk? Was Elder about to say Eldest was
drunk
?

The movement’s not lost on Eldest. He doesn’t address me, though, just Elder when he says, “A true leader is never out of control, nor drunk on anything.”
Now
he looks at me. “I seem to remember believing that you have the potential to disrupt my ship. Clearly, I am right.”

“I didn’t do anything!” I say. There is a hint of panic in my voice. I haven’t forgotten his original threat.

Eldest waves his hand dismissively at me. “Your presence is enough. It’s completely distracted my ... student.” He says this last bit with a sneer in his voice, as if he equates a student with an annoying, yapping little Chihuahua. He returns his gaze to Elder. “It’s time to resume your studies. I’ve been busy with the Season and let you play with your little girl here, but if you have time to look up what I saw you looking up, then clearly it is time to refocus your studies to something more productive.”

He walks back to the door. Elder chews on his lip, unsure of whether to follow or not.

“Wait!”

Eldest turns at my call, but does not come back.

“I want some answers, dammit,” I say, striding toward him. “You and I both know there’s some crazy crap going on. That Season was bad enough, but now the doctor’s calling
me
crazy, and I’ve got to take that pill Elder takes, and this place has—”

“Enough.” Eldest cuts me off with cold authority. “I told you not to become a disturbance. You clearly did not listen.”

“I think this ship needs some disturbance!”

“The last man who thought that way no longer thinks anything at all.”

Other than Elder’s sharp intake of breath, the Recorder Hall is silent. We are facing off, Eldest near the door, me near the clay planets, and Elder in the middle, our mark in a tug-of-war game for the truth.

“Come on, Elder.” Eldest turns again for the door.

“What happened in the Plague?!” I shout at him. “What are you not telling us? You know—I know you know! Why can’t you just tell us the truth?”

At this, Eldest crosses the hall in three long strides and faces me. “This ship is built on secrets; it runs on secrets,” he says, tiny droplets of spittle flying from his mouth to my face. “And if you keep asking about them, you’ll see how far I’m willing to go to keep mine. Go to your chamber; I’ll have Doc deal with you this time. Come, Elder!” he bellows. Elder jumps and follows Eldest out the door, shooting me an apologetic look just before the doors close, leaving me in the darkened hall with the dusty models.

I don’t realize that my fists are clenched until I relax my grip, letting my fingers stretch out. I am shaking with rage. There is one thing I know for sure: I
will
find out whatever secret it is that Eldest is so determined to keep, and when I do, I’m going to shout it from the rooftops.

60

ELDER

NO SURPRISE: ELDEST LEADS ME STRAIGHT TO THE GRAV TUBES and the Learning Center. I take a seat at the table as if I am waiting for my lesson, but my mind is racing.

I know Amy thinks that I just meekly followed Eldest, an obedient dog trailing after his master. I could see the disappointment in her eyes as I left her in the Recorder Hall. I will have to let Amy think me weak; I will have to sacrifice her image of me.

Because that is what a leader must do.

I must play this game a little longer. Rely on Eldest’s perception that I am stupid and ignorant, on his contempt for my weakness. Not forever. Just long enough to break down the wall he keeps up between me and my role as leader on board this ship.

Eldest is crumbling. The argument with Amy, the way he’s so quick to lose his temper now, the sudden bursts of shouting and violence that have surfaced since the Season—Eldest’s cool, grandfatherly exterior is cracking, and his true self, his petty, power-hungry self, is leaking through.

When he was arguing with Amy, he looked foolish in his anger. He is just an old man clutching his power as tightly as he can. And all I have to do is poke at those cracks, and I will be able to break through and discover what it is he’s kept hidden from me for so long, why he never felt that he could share the secrets of the ship with me.

Although I was born Elder, for the first time I finally feel as if I can one day be Eldest.

Across from me, Eldest pinches the bridge of his nose between his eyes. “Why are you looking for this kind of information?”

“What kind of information?”

“Sol-Earth history, engine schematics, the Plague—what are you looking for?” His voice is tight and controlled, but barely.

“Why does it matter?”

“IT MATTERS!” Eldest roars, slamming his fists onto the table. I do not jump.

I force myself into the picture of calm. If I have learned one thing from Eldest today, it is this: Losing my temper will make me look foolish and childish. Instead, I speak slowly, calmly, and clearly, as if I were explaining something very simple. “I have begun to look for the information that you have refused to teach me. I am supposed to be the Eldest one day. If you don’t tell me what to do or what I need to know to rule, then I’ll just figure it out another way. If you’re going to stand there and be mad at me for looking for answers to these questions, then you have only yourself to blame; it’s your job to teach me these things first.”

Eldest’s face flushes pale, then purples. “Have you never thought I had a
very
good reason for keeping information from you?”

“No,” I say simply. “I have known you since I was a kid; you had a hand in every part of my growing up; I have spent the last three years living with you. What possible reason could you have for not trusting me with any information at all about this ship?”

“You think you know
everything
,” Eldest sneers. “You’re still just a kid.”

“You’re losing it,” I say calmly, tilting my head up at him. “You’re not in control anymore. Look at you. You’re raving. You’re not fit to be Eldest.”

“And you are?” Eldest is practically screaming, his voice rising to a painfully high pitch.

I shrug. “There must have been something in what Amy and I were looking up to make you get so angry. I wonder what it is ....”

Eldest is seething. I think to myself,
Orion was wrong. You don’t have to be sneaky to get around Eldest. You just have to make him really frexing mad.

“It can’t be the history floppies; you’ve shown me them before. It must be the Plague.”

Eldest raises his head and faces me. His anger now is deep inside him, a burning coal in his stomach, one that he’s swallowed so I can’t see it anymore. “I haven’t talked about this in a very long time.”

I suck in my breath. “The Elder before me?” Eldest nods. “Did he die? Or did you ...” I can’t bring myself to ask the question.

“You want to know about the Plague?” he says in a terrible monotone. “Fine. Let me tell you about the Plague.”

He jumps to his feet, then shifts his weight off his bad leg. With both fists on the table, he looms over me, and I can do nothing but look up at him with meek eyes, waiting.

“Let me start with this,” Eldest says. “There was never any Plague.”