Across the Universe

21 AMY

THE WALLS OF THE ROOM CAVE IN AROUND ME. WITHOUT realizing it, I have begun to pace, back and forth, back and forth, but this room is too tiny to contain me. The window is solid, thick, and cannot be opened. I begin stretching my calf muscles without realizing what I am doing. My body has decided for me: I need to run.

I wasn’t kidding when I told the doctor I liked running. I joined the cross-country team as a freshman, but what I really wanted to do was run marathons. Jason used to laugh at me — he could never understand why anyone would want to run when there are video games to play and TV to watch. The closest he came to exercise was VR games.

I smile, but almost as soon as the corners of my mouth curve up, they sink again.

I can’t let myself think about Jason.

I need to run.

The clothes I am wearing are wildly inappropriate for running: loose trousers and a looser tunic paired with thin moccasin-like shoes. I smile. My mom, at least, would be happy. I always ran in these really short, tight running shorts and a sports tank, and it drove her mad. She would say it was like I was inviting the wrong sort of attention, but I just did it because I ran better in those clothes. We had a fight about it, once, a real screaming, yelling fight. It got so bad that Daddy had to jump in the middle and say I could run naked if we’d both just shut up about it. It was such a stupid thing to say that all three of us just laughed and laughed.

It hurts to think about that now.

On Earth I had short socks and Nikes. I always ran with a wide hair band on my head and music plugged into my ears. This wardrobe has only more of the same handspun clothes. I stretch my foot — the moccasins are certainly not $200 running shoes, but at least I have flexibility. It would have to do. I braid my hair and wrap the end with a bit of string I yank from one of the more raggedy pairs of trousers.

It takes me a couple of wrong turns to find my way out, but I soon discover a large room with glass walls and a pair of heavy glass doors. It’s a common room of sorts; there are tables and chairs scattered casually around the room. There’s only one person in the room, a tall man with biceps as big as my head. His gaze devours me, and his eyes pause too long in places I don’t want him looking. I glare back at him until he turns back toward the window, but I can tell he’s staring at my reflection. I don’t breathe properly until the elevator doors close.

Seeing the way the tall man looked at me reminds me of the doctor’s warning about leaving the Hospital.

No. I won’t be a prisoner.

The elevator has buttons for four floors, and I am on the third. I force myself to remember this, to map out where my room is in my mind. I don’t want to be lost and have to ask anyone for directions.

The elevator doors open to a lounge-like room, where a heavyset nurse sits at a desk tapping information on a thin screen. My muscles are taut, ready to go. I am already running before I reach the door, my moccasins making soft pat pat pat noises on the cold tile floor.

The air hits me like a wall, and I stop a few feet from the door. It smells processed, cool against my nostrils, just like the air-conditioned hospital. I’d expected mechanical, industrial-cold air inside. That air felt natural, because it was just like every other air-conditioned house back on Earth, with that falsely cool, slightly stale feel to it. But outside… the air is still the same. This is not air that has ever felt a breeze. This is air that has been used and reused for centuries. I breathe deeply, but cannot get over how it still tastes inexpressibly like indoor air.

I look around me. The hospital opens up to a flower garden. The path under my feet is not made from natural mulch, but some sort of rubbery-plastic. I step over to the grass and jog a bit in place, warming up. Out of the corner of my eyes, I can see the steel-gray metal of the walls that curve over this level of the ship, trapping us inside a metallic bubble.

I run with my back to the closest wall, straight out into the green fields. This ship’s level is vast, but not so wide that I cannot see the wall on the other side. Maybe three or four kilometers in diameter, less than the 5K track I ran for cross-country. Still, it’s small enough to make me claustrophobic, but large enough to make me marvel at its size.

A road winds around the area, but I ignore it. I run through rows of corn that are as tall as my shoulders; I race along the fence dotted with white puffs of sheep and goats who keep their distance from the low fence surrounding the pasture. I startle a group of fat chickens that have wandered onto my path. They flutter up, chattering at me, but when I turn my head to look back at them moments later, they’ve already forgotten me.

A sheen of sticky sweat films over my arms, pooling in the creases of my elbows and at my neck. I suck in the cool, recycled air. I can almost imagine that I’m just in an elaborate gym, that when I’m done running, I can leave, and Mom will be there, waiting for me in the car, and we can go home. The thought of it makes me stop, almost brings me to my knees. I breathe deeply, not because of running now, but because if I don’t, I’ll start sobbing.

They’re so close.

And so, so far away.

I run again. I cannot let myself think about anything. I can only run.

My legs pump up-down, I force myself to take longer and longer strides, to use my arms to make my entire body fall into the race. My muscles strain and burn, but I revel in the pain. Although the doctor must have done something to make my muscles not atrophy, they still feel unused, not as well-oiled as before I was frozen.

I turn a corner and see someone kneeling on the ground, hunched over some plants. I slow down, and the man looks up.

“’Lo,” he says in greeting.

“Um,” I say.

His eyes rove up and down, soaking in my pale skin, red hair, green eyes, and he instantly turns wary. I can see it in his face — his eyes narrow in suspicion, his mouth tightens. His grip on the trowel shifts, and it’s more a weapon than a gardening tool.

I nod and continue running. When I turn back, he’s still watching me, still clutching the trowel.

Run. Run harder.

When I reach that moment — when everything in my body is focused only on racing forward — that is when my mind is finally silent, when I can forget about everything the doctor said, when I don’t have to remember all that I’ve lost and will never have again.

It’s the zone. It’s why I run. That feeling of being nothing but movement. I tried to explain it to Jason once. He even went on a jog with me. He didn’t get it, but he got that I like it, and that was good enough. We walked back to his house after jogging less than a quarter mile. We didn’t talk, we just held hands, and even though I hadn’t broken a sweat with that baby run, my heart was still racing when I looked at him—

Don’t think of that.

Don’t think at all.

Run.

My thick braid swishes against my neck. I am aware of a trickle of sweat down my face, nothing else. I stop when the fields fade to gravel, then pavement. This is the city I saw from my window, although it is significantly smaller than any city I’ve ever seen on Earth. Mom once gave a speech to the biological engineering department at North Carolina State University, and they took us on a tour of the campus. This city is about the size of the old part of the campus, with stacked up metal trailers instead of dorms and college buildings. A thin tube of plastic hugs the curving metal wall behind the city. I stare at it curiously, panting from my run, then gasp aloud as I see a figure zooming up through the tube. A second later, another zooms up. People—people! — are being sucked up from that tube into another level of the ship, like the tubes of money sucked up in the drive-through bank teller line. How cool! It must be like flying! So much better than an elevator! I stare at the tube, open-mouthed, for so long that I don’t notice how close I have come to other people, not until I start to hear their whispers.

My gaze drops from the people-tube to the people who are slowly starting to gather around me. A dozen or so. My eyes flick to the trailers. There are at least a couple hundred people on the streets of the makeshift city. I feel vastly outnumbered.

They’re all a little older than me; this must be the twenty-year-old generation. They have dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair. And they’re all staring at me. I reach my hand up to my sweaty, braided red hair, bright under this false sun. My pale skin flashes white. I am different from them in every way. I am shorter, younger, paler, brighter. I am from another world.

Even from here, I can tell that their first reaction is wariness, too — but there are more of them than me. I want to speak. But none of them even smile at me. They just stare, mutely, eerily.

My heart seizes with a deep, primal fear.

“Hello,” I say, hating the quaver in my voice.

“What are you?” one of them, a man, asks. Not who. What.

“I–I’m Amy. I, uh, I live here now. Not here, I mean, at the Hospital.” I point to the white building in the distance behind me, but I don’t feel comfortable turning my back to them.

“What’s wrong with you?” the man asks. A few of the others nod, encouraging him to ask what they’re all thinking.

Goose bumps prickle under my cold sweat. I stare at them. They stare at me. I have never felt more different, more of a freak — more alone — than now. I bite my lip. These people are nothing like Elder. Elder may stare at my skin and hair, but he’s not staring out of fear. He didn’t look at me like I’m a sideshow.

“What’s going on here?” a gruff female voice calls. A woman emerges from the fields toward the City. She scans the crowd, her eyes lingering on me. She’s older than everyone else here, older even than the doctor at the Hospital, but there’s a spark in her missing from the others.

She swings her basket as she walks. It’s filled with broccoli as big as melons.

The old woman stops a few feet away from me, glaring at the crowd. She looks at me once, slowly, from head to toe, then faces the man who spoke to me. “All right,” she says in a soft, drawling voice. “Nothing to see here. Go on, get back to your work.”

And they do.

They don’t protest. They don’t argue. They just accept what she’s said, and they all leave. They don’t even talk to one another as they go. They just turn and wander away.

“Now,” the old woman says, turning back to me, “You’re living in the Hospital, I hear that right?”

I nod. “Yes, I mean — I—” I trip over my words. This world is crazy. Earlier, a man was going to attack me with a gardening trowel. Now, a little old lady is able to single-handedly disperse a group of people who looked like they were about to grab some pitchforks and turn into a proper mob.

The woman raises her hand to stop me. “I’m Steela,” she says. “Don’t know who you are or where you came from. But looks to me this is some of Eldest’s doing. Most of the strange stuff that happens here starts off on the Keeper Level.”

Does she… does she not like Eldest?

“I don’t want to get mixed up with none of that. Had enough of Eldest’s experiments when I lived in the Ward. Worked as head agriculturalist for three decades.” Despite herself, there’s a note of pride in Steela’s voice. She pauses, inspecting me. “You don’t look stupid.”

“I’m… sorry?”

“You’re weird-looking.” She says it bluntly, and I flinch. “You might be okay in the Hospital. The Ward’s used to weird. But you be careful out here. Most Feeders don’t know how to react to something strange.”

“But you — all you did was tell them to go away, and they did.”

Steela shifts her basket of broccoli to her other arm. “Thing is,” she says, “I’m one of them. You’re not.”

“So?”

Steela looks at the backs of the people who had crowded around me as they fade into the town. “You’ve got to understand. The Feeders are simple people. If you complicate their world, they’ll get rid of you just to eliminate the problem. Why do you think they round up every person with a shred of creativity and jam them in a building clear on the other side of the ship?”

My first instinct is to protest, but then I remember the man in the fields. The way he clutched his trowel, the blade of it turned to me.

“You best head back to where you came from,” Steela says. Without glancing back at me, she continues on her way into the town. She walks briskly, and quickly overtakes the man from the crowd who spoke to me. He turns as she passes, and he catches my eye.

Then he starts walking back to me.

I take three steps behind me, almost stumble, turn around, and race away faster than I’ve ever run. This is not my measured run from before. I am not pacing myself, counting my breaths, conscious of my strides. I race like a monster is chasing me; I race as if they were chasing me. I cannot go fast enough. I tear through the tall grass of the fields, the thin blades slicing my skin like paper cuts. I break corn stalks as I pound through the field.

I run and run and run.

Past the hospital, through the garden, past a pond.

And to the cold metal wall.

I stop, gulping at the air, my heart racing in my ears. I reach up with one hand and touch the wall. My fingers curl into a fist, but it falls weakly to my side.

And that’s when I realize the most important truth of life on this ship.

There is nowhere to run.