A Million Suns

13 ELDER

I FEEL ALONE.

I don’t mean I feel lonely; I mean I feel alone, the same way that I feel the blanket resting on my body, or the feathers of my pillow under my head, or the tight string of my sleep pants twisted up around my waist. I feel alone as if it were an actual thing, seeping throughout this whole level like mist blanketing a field, reaching into all the hidden corners of my room and finding nothing living but me. It’s a cold sort of feeling, this.

When I finally get out of bed, the only thing I want to do is to go straight to Amy and demand her forgiveness. Maybe we can at least go back to what we had before our fight, even if all we had was an awkward friendship punctuated by significant silences. I have to figure out what to do about the ship’s engines — if anything even can be done — but I can’t fix the ship without first fixing whatever I broke in Amy.

I’m so intent on this idea that it’s not until I’m halfway down the grav tube to the Feeder Level that I remember the look in her eyes as she left me yesterday — a combination of anger and hurt and sad — and I realize that she probably doesn’t even want to see me. The solar lamp clicks on as my feet land on the dais under the grav tube. I trudge down to the path. The morning mist evaporates before my eyes.

Instead of going to Amy’s room in the Hospital Ward, I veer left to the Recorder Hall. Maybe if I give Marae some of the books I’ve read on police forces and civics, she’ll have a better idea of how to organize the Shippers in this new duty. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. But the reality is I dread seeing Amy, knowing that she’ll still be mad at me. And that she has every right to be.

I’m surprised that when I enter the Recorder Hall, there are already people here, gathered around the wall floppies in the entryway. Most of them crowd around the Science section. Second Shipper Shelby points to the generator in a diagram of the ship’s engine as she lectures to the crowd gathered at her feet. She meets my eyes and nods at me. I knew Shelby had, with First Shipper Marae’s and my permission, begun a class for interested Feeders on the technical aspects of the ship, but it hadn’t occurred to me that these lessons would begin just fifteen minutes after lamp-on.

I hesitate before I go down the hallway into the book rooms. Isn’t Shelby’s lecture futile? The engine is dead, even if the Feeders don’t know it yet. Frex, we’re not even sure how far we are from Centauri-Earth. Even if these Feeders do garner enough information to get the ship moving again, chances are that they won’t see the planet in their lifetimes.

One of the Feeders listening to Shelby rubs her stomach in a slow circle. She’s three months pregnant now, but her tunic hides her rounding belly. Her movement, as unconscious as it is, reminds me — that’s what this is about. Shelby’s lectures aren’t meant to solve the engine problem — not really — but to give these people hope.

That’s the one thing Eldest did right. He may have lied — but in the end, he gave them a reason to keep going.

That’s what everyone’s missing now.

I duck silently into the hallway and head to the book rooms. I throw open the door of the room dedicated to works on civics and social studies.

“What the?” someone shouts from inside.

I jump back, startled, my heart racing. “You scared the shite out of me!” I exclaim, collapsing in the chair at the table across from Bartie.

Bartie’s laughing too hard at his own response to reply. For a moment, this feels like old times. Bartie and I were friends when I lived in the Hospital for the year before moving to the Keeper Level with Eldest. There was a whole gang of us, then: Harley, Bartie, Victria, Kayleigh, and me, counting my lucky stars that, for the first time ever, I had friends.

We would spend our days in the Hospital or the garden. Harley would paint while Bartie played guitar and Victria wrote. Kayleigh was always flitting around, trying to tinker with everything. She made a metal canvas stretcher for Harley that nearly bit his fingers off, and she once tried to figure out the old Sol-Earth schematics for an electric guitar that very nearly electrocuted Bartie.

Those times were all laughter and happiness.

The smile slips off my face, and Bartie’s grin fades. I don’t have to look at him to know we’re both thinking the same thing: everything changed after Kayleigh died. Kayleigh was the glue that held our friendship together, and with her gone, we were nothing. Harley spiraled into darkness that only Doc’s meds got him out of. By the time he’d started recovering, I’d moved to the Keeper Level, and Bartie and Victria had drifted in different directions. Victria spent her time in the Recorder Hall with Orion, and Bartie, as far as I could tell, found friendship only in his music.

“How have you been?” I ask, leaning forward.

Bartie shrugs. A stack of books surrounds him, but they’re all thick, regal-looking tomes from the civics section of the book room, not music books.

“It’s odd to see you without Amy,” Bartie says.

“I — it’s just — we—” I heave a sigh, running my fingers through my hair. Amy and I have spent a lot of time lately in the Recorder Hall, in this very room, actually, developing a plan for a police force. I know she’s wary of me, hesitant to trust me after I confessed to being the one to have woken her up, but… she’d quit flinching at my touch, she used to smile at me easier.

Until I called her a freak.

Frex.

“Everything okay?” Bartie asks, a hint of real concern in his face.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “It’s just… Amy…”

Bartie frowns. “There are more problems on this ship than a freak from Sol-Earth.”

“Don’t call her a freak!” I say, snapping my head up to glare at Bartie so violently my neck cracks.

Bartie leans back in his chair, throwing up both hands in a gesture of either defense or dismissal. “I was merely pointing out that you have more important things to worry about.”

My eyes narrow, reading the title of the thick book Bartie had been scrutinizing. On the cover is a woman with skin paler than Amy’s and a dress so wide I doubt she’d fit through the doorway. I read the title — a history of the French Revolution.

“Why are you reading that?” I ask. I try to laugh in a genial sort of way, but the sound comes out like a garbled snort. I look at Bartie with new eyes, wary eyes. A lot of time has passed since we would follow Kayleigh and Victria to the Recorder Hall and race rocking chairs across the porch.

And the French Revolution isn’t a topic I would have thought Bartie would study.

Was he interested in the frea — I stop myself from even thinking the word — was he interested in the unusual woman on the cover of the book? Or was he interested in the guillotine cutting off the king’s head? I mentally shake myself. I’m being paranoid.

“Food,” Bartie says.

“Food?”

He nods, pushing the volume closer to me and picking up a slender book bound in green leather. “I thought it was… interesting. That ‘let them eat cake’ bit — I wonder if they would have even revolted if there hadn’t been the shortage of food.”

“Maybe they were just revolting from dresses like that,” I say as I point to the voluminous swaths of silk pouring off the woman’s skirt on the cover of the book. I’m trying for levity again, but Bartie’s not laughing and neither am I — my mind is remembering the red line in the chart Marae showed me, the line that showed the decreasing food production. When the rest of the ship sees how quickly the food’s disappearing — that the ship is dead in the empty sky, and that soon we will be too — how long will it be till they, like the people in Bartie’s book, turn their farm tools into weapons and revolt?

Bartie doesn’t answer me, just flips open the smaller green book. His eyes don’t move over the letters, though, and I get the feeling he’s waiting for me to say or do something. I’m not so sure I’m just being paranoid anymore.

“Something’s going to have to change, and soon,” Bartie says, his eyes on the book. “It’s been building for months, ever since you turned them.”

“I didn’t—” I say automatically, defensive even though there was no real accusation in his voice. “I just… I mean, I guess I changed them, but I changed them back. To what they’re supposed to be. What they are.”

Bartie looks doubtful. “Either way, they’re different now. And it’s getting worse.”

The first cause of discord, I think, is difference.

Bartie turns the page of the slender green book. “Someone’s got to do something.”

The second cause of discord: lack of a strong central leader.

What does he think I’ve been doing? Shite, all I do these days is run from one problem to the next! If it’s not a strike in one district, it’s complaints from another — and every problem is just a little worse than the one before it.

Bartie glares at me. There’s no question about it now: there’s contempt and anger in his eyes, although his voice remains soft-spoken. “Why aren’t you stepping up? Why aren’t you keeping the order? Eldest might’ve been a chutz, but at least you didn’t have to worry about getting through the day when he was in charge.”

“I’m doing what I can,” I protest.

“It’s not enough!” The words bounce around the room, slamming into my ears.

Without thinking about it, I pound my fist onto the table. The noise startles Bartie; the shock of it makes me forget my anger. I shake my hand, pain tingling up my arm.

“What are you reading?” I growl.

“What?”

“What are you frexing reading?”

When I glance up, Bartie’s eyes meet mine. Our anger melts. We’re friends — even without Harley, we’re still friends. And even if the ship hasn’t exactly been a friendly place lately, we can still hold onto our past.

Bartie lifts the smaller book for me to see the title: The Republic, by Plato.

“I read that last year,” I say. “It was confusing as frex. That bit about the cave made no sense at all.”

Bartie shrugs. “I’m at the part about aristocracy.” He pronounces it “a-risto-crazy.” Eldest told me it was “ah-rista-crah-see” but he probably got it wrong too, and besides, what’s the difference?

I know the part he’s talking about well — it was the center of the lesson Eldest had prepared for me. It was also, essentially, the base of the entire Eldest system. “An aristocrat is someone born to rule,” I say. “Someone born with the innate talent to guide everyone else.”

Bartie can’t be thinking what I’m thinking: that the only reason I was born to rule was because I was plucked as an embryo from a tube full of other genetically enhanced clones whose DNA had been modified to make the ideal ruler.

“But even Plato says that the ideal state of an aristocracy can decay,” Bartie says.

The word decay reminds me of the entropy Marae mentioned, how everything is constantly spinning out of control, including the ship. Including me.

“An Eldest is like an aristocrat,” Bartie adds. He’s searching my eyes now, the book forgotten, as if he wants me to pick up some deeper meaning to what he’s saying. I pull my mind away from the broken engine and Marae’s lies and back to the conversation at hand.

“But the Eldest system isn’t decaying,” I say. “It works. It is working.”

“You’re not Eldest,” Bartie points out. “You’re still Elder.”

I shake my head. “In name only. I can rule without taking on the title.”

“Titles confuse me.” Bartie picks up The Republic again, closing it and staring at the cover. “This book talks about aristocracy and tyranny like they’re two different things, but I don’t see a difference.” He slides it across the table. “There are other forms of government, though.”

“What are you saying?” I ask warily.

Bartie stands and so do I. “You don’t have to be alone in this,” he says. “Look at the reality of the situation. Even if you are the one aristocrat on this ship, the one leader — you’re sixteen years old. Maybe you will be a great leader…”

“Will be?” I growl.

He shrugs. “People don’t respect you now. Maybe in another five or ten years.”

“People respect me because of what I am!”

Bartie drops the book on the table; its thud echoes on the metal surface. He heads toward the door, shouldering past me when he nears. “You’ve given us all the chance to think, to choose for ourselves what we want.” His voice is quiet, almost a whisper. “I respect that. But you’ve got to realize that maybe, when we’ve had a chance to think about it, we’re not going to choose you as our leader.”

Bartie picks up two books from the table — the history of the French Revolution and a book from the science room, Technical Instruction on Communication Systems. He abandons Plato’s Republic on the table and carries the other books across the room without speaking. When the door zips closed after him, though, it feels as if there are a lot of words drifting through the silence he leaves behind.

The last cause of discord. Individual thought.

He has no idea that I haven’t slept a full night in three months. That I do nothing but try to figure out how to keep a ship full of angry, passionate, self-aware people from self-destruction. That now, on top of everything else, I have the dead engine to worry about. All he sees is my failure.

If I can’t rule without Phydus, that’s all any of them will ever see.

Failure.

For giving them back their lives and not being able to save them from themselves.

When I step back outside, I have to blink to adjust to the brightness. Everything seems calmer here, more still, almost reverent. The Recorder Hall wasn’t loud, exactly, but it wasn’t quiet, either.

Something catches my gaze. I turn slowly.

Beside the door to the Recorder Hall is a painting, a portrait of me, held in a place of honor. It was one of the last paintings Harley ever made.

And someone’s shredded it.

It looks as if a giant claw of knives ripped through the canvas — five long gashes slice through my face and chest, spilling out strings and dried paint like bleeding wounds. The background behind me in the painting — a mirror of Godspeed’s fields and farms — is mostly untouched. Whoever did this took care to dismantle my face and leave the rest of the painting unharmed.

And it wasn’t like this when I entered the Recorder Hall. Whoever did this waited for the perfect opportunity — to make sure I saw, and to make sure I knew it was done when I was nearby.

I force myself to turn. My eyes dart around the fields and down the path. There’s no one here. The vandal fled already… or simply strolled into the Recorder Hall to fade among the crowd, watching me as I walked past.