Across the Universe

33 AMY

A SPLATTER OF RAIN ON MY SKIN. AND JASON’S THERE, AND WE almost kiss. But it’s not rain, it’s my steamy shower, and it’s not Jason, it’s Elder.

My head thunks on the tile of the shower stall, warmed by the steam.

I don’t know what to do.

I wrap a towel around myself as I leave the bathroom. The chart I painted on the wall grabs my attention, and I stand, dripping shower water on the matted carpet as I stare at it. It doesn’t help. I still can’t see any connection between me and Mr. Robertson.

I have never felt this lost — this alone — before in my life. All the people who should be with me — my parents, Jason, my friends — are gone. Without them, the ship feels empty and small—I feel empty and small.

I should go to the cryo level and guard my parents. I shouldn’t have left Harley there. It’s my parents down there, not his. He has no ties to this.

But I saw the longing in his eyes when we left, and I don’t want to be the one to pull him from the stars.

And I don’t want to be the one alone down there, in the coldness of death.

I sit on the edge of the bed, unwilling to lie down.

I cross the room to the chair by the window. I glance back at the bed, the covers wrinkled but not pulled back. My first night here, Elder sat in this very chair while I slept there.

I pull my feet up into the chair and wrap my arms around my knees. I fall asleep facing the window.

There is no sunrise. The big yellow lamp in the center of the ship’s roof flicks on like a light, and it is day.

My head feels fuzzy, like I can’t wake up all the way. I grab a glass of cold water from the bathroom, but it doesn’t help. If anything, the world is fuzzier. I’m so tired. Of thinking, of worrying. There’s only one way I know to stop the babble in my head.

Luthe, the tall man who watches me too closely, is the only person in the common room when I go through it to the elevator. Does he ever sleep? It almost feels as if he stays in the common room just so he can stare at me and make me feel uncomfortable. I want to turn around and tell him to keep his eyes to himself, but he’d probably like the attention. He scares me a little, anyway.

The day is only a few minutes old. Without a proper sunrise, it doesn’t feel like early morning, just regular daylight, the same it will be at noon or a few minutes before dark. Still, even though it looks like nearly the entire level is sleeping, I stick to the rural areas, jogging past the cows and through the rows of corn with tassels that tickle me as I brush by. After ten minutes or so, I pick up the pace, willing my body to enter the zone.

“Why do you like to run, Red?” Jason asked me after our third or so date, after we had started kissing, but before I’d worked up the courage to tell him I despised the nickname “Red.”

“I told you. I love that moment when you get totally focused on running, when all you are is pounding feet.”

Harder. I have to run harder.

“I guess I can get that.” Jason leaned in for a kiss, but I was already focused on tying my shoestrings, and all he got was a cheek.

I looked up at him. “And I want to win.”

“Win?”

I can outrun these memories. I just have to go faster. The cornfield stops against a low fence. Sheep stare at me from the other side. I skid in my turn, racing along the fence.

“Yeah. Win the New York City Marathon. It’s kind of my dream.” I was avoiding his eyes now not because I was focused on adjusting my socks, but because I’d never told anyone about this before.

“The New York City Marathon?”

“Yeah. It’s a big deal. One of the best marathons in the world. Over twenty-six miles, through all the boroughs. But to run it — I mean really run it, not just show up and get to the end — well, you have to be good.”

“How good?”

“The best time is like in two and a half hours.”

“Two and a half hours? For twenty-six freaking miles? Dude!”

“I know. I’m nowhere near that. But…” I glanced up at him now. He wasn’t joking, like usual; he was taking me completely seriously.

“You can do it.”

“I can barely do ten miles in two hours.”

“You can do it. For real. You never give up. I’ve watched you. One day, you’re going to win that marathon, and I’ll be at the finish line, waiting for you. With a surprise.” He grinned now, mischievous again.

“Lemme guess,” I said. “Is the surprise this?” And I kissed him, pressing all the love I had for him and his faith in me from my lips to his.

I stop when it hits me, gulping at air that tastes like ozone.

It’s not just that there is no Jason. There is no marathon. There is no New York. New York—New York! It’s huge. There are — there were so many people there. No New York. Whatever New York exists now, it’s not the way it was. It’s not subways and Central Park, marathons and Broadway. By now it’s something else entirely — flying cars and teleporters for all I know. I’ll never see it, and it will never be what it was. For me, forever, there is no New York.

But, my heart whispers, there is Elder.

I run harder.

When I start seeing people outside, awake and beginning their days, I turn back to the Hospital.

I can’t lie to myself.

I know I want to hide.

I slow down when I see the cows up close.

They’re not normal cows.

I haven’t, you know, grown up on a farm or anything, but still, I know what a cow is supposed to look like. And these cows — well, clearly they’re supposed to be cows, but I’ve never seen any cow like these before.

For one thing, they’re shorter. A lot shorter. Their heads barely reach my shoulder. The males have horns like cows are supposed to have horns, but they’re mushroom shaped and blunted, not because they’ve been cut off, but because they’ve grown that way.

They seem as curious about me as I am about them. I stop at the fence and lean over it, panting and sweaty, and a few of the cows wobble in my direction. They have more muscle on them than normal cows, meat bulging under their hides, making them bowlegged and slow. They chew on cud in even, measured movements, smacking a little each time, releasing a whiff of dirt and grass that almost reminds me of home.

One of them moos, but it’s not a regular moo; it ends with a squeal like a pig. Moo-uh-eeee!

I back away from the fence.

The cow-pig-things watch me as I go, their silent big brown eyes somehow ominous.

Next is a field of plants, at least twice the size of the other fields I’ve run past, the corn and wheat and green beans. Rows and rows and more rows of bright green leafy plants grow in neat, long lines. I bend down and pluck a round leaf, delicate and a little fuzzy, but it tastes bitter. The stem is thick and hard; I guess the plant is like a carrot or potato — the food part of it is underground.

Then I hear something.

Beep! “Number 517, inoculated.” A clatter of something like hard plastic, a scurry of feet.

A low fence made of thick chicken wire encloses the field behind me. Squatting near the edge, bent down so low I didn’t see her at first, is a girl a few years older than me, about Harley’s age. She’s just released a fat, short-legged oversize rabbit, and it’s hopping away, shaking its back left leg every few hops. Its fluffy white tail is flashing, and I can hear it chattering its teeth angrily as it bounds off.

I start to say something, but the girl rises up on her knees. Another rabbit nibbles on clover a couple of feet away. Without making a sound, the girl lunges at the rabbit, grabs it by its back legs, and pins it to the ground before it can so much as twitch. She reaches behind her for one of those thin plastic computer things I’ve seen Elder use, and waves it behind the rabbit’s ears, like a cashier at a grocery store checkout. The computer thing beeps, and she glances at it, then tosses it to the ground beside her.

“Hello,” I say.

I expect her to be surprised — she hadn’t acknowledged before that she’d noticed me — but the girl just glances up and says, “Hello.”

She does do a double take when she sees me, though. I remember what Elder said about me, and how easy I’d be to recognize. My hair is sweaty from my run and plastered to my skull, with flyaways escaping my hasty braid. I smooth my hands over it anyway, not that it will do any good; there is no hiding who I am on this ship.

“You’re the genetically modified experiment,” the girl states. I nod. “Eldest has said we don’t have to speak to you.”

“Well you don’t have to,” I say, unable to keep the growl from my voice, “but you could at least be polite.”

The girl tilts her head, considering. She reaches behind her and grabs a small basket full of hypodermic needles. About half are empty; the other half contain golden-yellow liquid that looks like honey swirled with butter.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Inoculations,” the girl says, turning to the rabbit she still holds pinned to the ground. The rabbit doesn’t seem to have any fight in it. It twitches its heavy back legs occasionally but doesn’t really struggle against her grip.

“Are these your pets?” I ask.

She looks at me, and I can tell she’s thinking about what Eldest said, how I am supposedly slow and stupid. “No,” she says. “They are food.”

Stupid question. The field is fairly large, and I can see about twenty rabbits nearby, and dozens more in the distance. On the far side of the field is a house — the girl’s home, I suppose — and lined around the house are wired hutches for more rabbits. There must be hundreds of people on Godspeed; it makes sense that they’d need a source of protein that reproduces as quickly as rabbits.

“I saw you running,” she says, her attention on the rabbit. “What were you running from?”

“Just running,” I say. She’s watching me silently and intently, like a cat.

“Why?” she asks.

I shrug. “Why not?”

“It’s not Productive.” She says it like productivity is holy, the only thing worth having.

“So?” I say.

Instead of answering, the girl just cocks her head to the left, then turns away from me. She picks up one of the full needles in the basket, jabs it into the rabbit’s back leg, and lets the rabbit go. “Number 623, inoculated,” she says. The computer thing flashes a wavy line and a green light, and the words she’s spoken show up on a chart on the screen.

“What are you inoculating them against?” I ask. How many rabbit diseases could there be on a contained ship?

“It makes them stronger. Healthier. Better meat.” She squats on her heels and stares at me. “You live in the Hospital, right?”

I nod.

“My grandfather was taken to the Hospital,” she says.

“Is he better now?”

“He’s gone.”

She says this matter-of-factly, without a hint of emotion, but her eyes are glistening. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“Why?” she asks simply. “It was his time.”

“You’re crying.”

She wipes one dirty finger under her eye, leaving a smudge of dirt and green grass stains on her cheek. She looks at the tear on her finger, confused that such emotion should leak from her eyes. “I have no reason to be sad,” she tells the evidence dripping down her fingertip. Her voice is even, monotone, and I know she believes she’s not sad, even though her body tells her differently.

The girl picks up her basket and then reaches for the computer thing. It’s further away than she’d thought, and it slips out of her hands, floating toward me. I catch two words on the top of the screen: GENETIC MODIFICATION.

“What’s that say?” I ask, pointing.

She obeys me without question, which surprises me a bit. “Genetic modification to manipulate reproductive genes and muscle mass,” she recites in her same even monotone. “Projected increased productivity: 20 percent, with increased meat production at 25 percent.”

“Those shots aren’t inoculations,” I say, searching her blank eyes. “They’re something to do with gene manipulation. I know. My mom was a genetic splicer back—” I pause. She still thinks I’m a freak, a by-product of a science experiment on board the ship. “Look, I’m not who Eldest said I was. I’m from Earth. Sol-Earth, I mean. I was born there. I was cryogenically frozen and I woke up early. And my mother, back on Ear — on Sol-Earth, she was a genetic splicer. That stuff you’re injecting the rabbits with — that’s not a vaccine. That’s genetic modification material. You’re changing the rabbits’ DNA.”

She nods like she’s agreeing with me, following every word, but she says, “Eldest said you were simple and didn’t understand things.”

“I am from Earth — but that’s not the point! Look, the point is, that stuff is dangerous. Genetic modification material isn’t something to play around with, not even with rabbits, especially if you’re going to eat them. Don’t you know what you’re doing?”

“Eldest said it was an inoculation,” the girl says. She starts to walk away from me.

“Hey, wait — hold up!” The fence keeps me back.

The girl stops — but only because she is positioning herself to lunge at another rabbit.

“Look, you read that stuff on the computer thing. It says right there that you’re injecting them with genetic mod material. Right. There.” I point at the screen. She looks down at it, curiously, like she’s looking for what I’m talking about, even though the chart she’s been working on is clearly labeled. “Look at that. There. Do you even see the word inoculation?”

She shakes her head slowly, her eyes scanning the words on the screen.

“So…” I say, waiting for her to realize my point. When she doesn’t, I add, “So you’re not inoculating the rabbits. You’re modifying their DNA.”

She looks back up at me, eyes wide, and for a moment I think she’s understood. “Oh, no,” she says. “You’re wrong. Eldest told me. Inoculations.” She holds out the basket of needles for me to inspect. “They make the rabbits healthier. Stronger. Better meat.”

I start to protest, but her wide, innocent, and empty eyes tell me it would be pointless. I shiver, but it has nothing to do with how cold I feel as my sweat dries on my skin. Eldest’s control is absolute. I don’t know why this girl is so vacant that she won’t believe what’s right in front of her face when it contradicts what Eldest has told her. I don’t know for sure if it even is Eldest behind the unpluggings. But I do know one thing: if it is him, and he’s got the entire ship blindly following him like this, there’s no chance I can stand against him.