Across the Universe

6 ELDER

“SO, WHAT’S THE THIRD CAUSE OF DISCORD?” I ASK ELDEST AS silence creeps around us in the Learning Center.

He contemplates me. For a moment, anger flashes in his faded eyes, and I wonder if he’ll strike me. When I blink, though, that crazy idea is gone. Eldest puts both hands on his knees and pushes against them to raise himself, creaking, into a standing position. The Learning Center is small, and with Eldest standing, it feels oppressively so. The chair he’s pushed back butts against the wall; the table feels like a chasm between us. Behind him, the faded globe of Sol-Earth looks miniscule, even smaller and more insignificant than me.

“I’ve told you enough,” he says, heading to the door. “And I’ve got work to do. I want you to go to the Recorder Hall, do some research, see if you can figure out some of the reasons Sol-Earth had so much discord. You’ve got the first two reasons for their reign of blood and war; you should be able to figure out the third. It’s not hard, not when you look at Sol-Earth history.”

I recognize the challenge in this. Eldest is testing my ability to be a leader, testing my worthiness to follow in his footsteps as the next Eldest. He does this a lot, actually. Although the Elder who should have been between me and Eldest died a long time ago, Eldest didn’t like him. The most I’ve ever heard Eldest speak of him was when he’d compare him to me. And the comparisons have never been positive. “You’re slow, like him,” Eldest would say. “That idea is something he would have said, too.” I learned almost as soon as I started living on the Keeper Level to keep my ideas to myself and my mouth shut. Eldest still tests me often just to make sure I won’t turn out as bad as that other Elder. I try to look confident, assertive — but it’s wasted, because Eldest hasn’t looked back at me once.

Part of me wants to call Eldest back and argue with him, remind him of his promise to tell me everything and insist he teach me the third cause of discord.

The other part of me, the part that could spend all day looking at vids and pics of Sol-Earth on the floppies, is relishing an assignment by Eldest to do just that.

On the far side of the Learning Center is the entrance to the grav tube Eldest and I use. This one is just for us, a direct link to the Feeder Level. The one that runs between the Shipper Level and the City in the Feeder Level is for everyone else.

I press my wi-com button behind my left ear.

“Command?” the pleasant female voice of my wi-com asks.

“Grav tube control,” I say.

Beep, beep-beep fills my ear as my wi-com connects to the grav tube control. I roll my thumb over the biometric scanner on the far wall of the Learning Center, and a circular section of the floor slides open. There is nothing under it but empty space.

My stomach lurches — as it always does — when I step into the empty air of the grav tube. But the wi-com has linked to the ship’s gravitational system inside the tube, and I bob gently over the air before sinking down like a penny dropped in a fountain’s pool. Darkness envelops me as I slip down the tube through the Shipper Level, and then light floods my eyes. I blink; the Feeder Level is below me, distorted through the clear grav tube. The City rises up along the far wall, and the farms spread throughout the center, vast fields of green dotted with crops, cows, sheep, goats. From here, the Feeder Level is huge, a world in and of itself. 6,400 acres designed to support over 3,000 people looks like forever when you’re gazing down at it. But when you’re actually there, in the fields or the City, crammed up next to people whose eyes are always on you, it feels much more crowded.

The grav tube ends about seven feet from the ground of the Feeder Level. For a second, I bob in the air at the end of the tube, then beep, beep-beep fills my ear as my wi-com connects with the ship’s gravity system, and I drop to the little round metal platform under the tube. I hop off the platform and begin walking down one of the four main roads on the Feeder Level. Only a few yards ahead is a tall brick building, the Recorder Hall, and beyond that is the Hospital.

As I stride toward the Recorder Hall, I think of how different my life is now from three years ago. Until I was thirteen, I lived on this level, passed from one family to the next. From a very young age, it was clear I’d never fit in. For one, everyone was very aware that I was Elder. Perhaps because the Elder before me died unexpectedly, the Feeders were always overprotective. But more than that — we were different from one another. The Feeders thought differently. They were happy, content to plow fields and shear sheep. They never seemed to feel the walls of the ship cave in around them, to grow angry at time for passing so slowly. It wasn’t until I moved to the Hospital in my thirteenth year, and met Harley, and talked to Doc, and then moved to the Keeper Level and started training with Eldest that I started to be happy on Godspeed. That I started to enjoy this life.

I don’t always agree with Eldest, and his temper, shown only to me on the Keeper Level, can be terrifying, but I will always love him for taking me from the mind-numbing farms.

I bound up the steps toward the big brown doors that have been painted to look like wood. The Recorder Hall has always seemed too big to me, but Eldest assures me that most of the residents on Godspeed feel that it is too small. I suppose it’s because when I go there, I go by myself, or with Eldest. Everyone else went with their gen, when they were younger and still in school. Since no one else on the ship is as young as me, there’s no reason to have school. I just have Eldest.

Eldest watches me mount the steps to the Recorder Hall. Not the real Eldest, of course — a painting of him, done before I was born, when Eldest was about Doc’s age. The painting is large, about half the size of the door, and hung in a little inset built into the bricks next to the entry.

Eventually, they will take Eldest’s portrait down from here, and hang it in a dusty spot in the back of the Recorder Hall somewhere, with the portraits of all the other Eldests.

And my portrait will hang here, surveying my tiny kingdom.

The painted Eldest stares past me, past the porch on the Recorder Hall, looking out over the fields and, in the far distance, the City, a towering jumble of painted metal boxes where most of the Feeders and Shippers live. The painter has given Eldest kinder eyes than I’ve ever seen in his wrinkled face, and a soft curve of his lips that seems to indicate inquisitiveness, maybe even mischief. Or not. I’m reading too much into this painting. This Eldest isn’t the Eldest I know. This Eldest looks like the kind of guy I could look up to as a leader. Not the kind of leader who rules through fear — the kind who listens to others, and cares about what they have to say, and gives them a chance. We have the same narrow nose, the same high cheekbones, the same olive skin — but this Eldest already has the authority in his eyes, the self-assurance in the tilt of his chin, the sense of power in his posture that I never have. That the real Eldest has sharpened and honed like a hunter does a knife.

I look behind me, to match the painted Eldest’s line of sight, but I can’t see Godspeed the way he clearly does. The painted Eldest is happy in ruling — that much exudes through the oil pigments. I can picture how the painting session went. I bet Eldest stood right here, where I am, looking past the railing. The painter stood on the lawn, below Eldest — of course below him — and gave shape to the paint with strong, broad sweeps. When Eldest looked at Godspeed, as I’m looking at it now, he saw the same things I see: an interior of a ship modeled like a county in Sol-Earth’s America, but in miniature, trapped in a round bubble of ship walls. A city piled on one side, with neat, orderly streets laid out in a careful grid, the center of each block stacked with box trailers that served as homes and workplaces for trade. One block for weavers, like my friend Harley’s parents. One block for dyers, one for spinners, one for tailors. Three blocks for food preservation: canners and dryers and freezers. Two blocks for butchers. Four blocks to house the scientists and Shippers who work on the level above this one. Each family, gen after gen, born and raised to work until death in the same block of the same city on the same ship.

When Eldest posed for his painting here, did he think of this? Did he look at the City and marvel at its smooth efficiency, its careful construction, its consistent productivity?

Or did he see it as I do: people boxed in trailers that are boxed in city blocks that are boxed in districts that are boxed in a ship, surrounded by metal walls?

No. Eldest never thought of Godspeed as a box. He never saw the City as a cage. You can tell that from his painted eyes, from the way he strides down the streets of the City now, like he owns them, because he does.

Even here, where fields and pastures and farms stretch out beyond the Recorder Hall porch all the way to the far wall, you can’t escape the boxes. Each field and pasture and farm is blocked off in careful fences, each fence measured out centuries ago, on Sol-Earth, before the ship launched. The blocks of land are not all equal in size, but they are all square, all meticulously measured. The hills in the pastures are designed to be evenly spaced, exactly placed bumps of grass for sheep and goats who don’t realize that their hills are just carefully organized, manufactured mounds of dirt and compost.

I’ve seen the landscape of Sol-Earth in the vids and maps. The land wasn’t perfectly laid out in neat little squares. Even grid-like cities had alleys and backstreets. Fields were fenced off, but the fences didn’t all go in perfect lines — they dipped around trees; they cut off at funny angles to avoid creeks or include ponds. Hills didn’t make even rows of bumps.

When I look at the fields, all I can see is how fake they are, how poor an imitation they are of the pictures of Sol-Earth fields.

I bet when Eldest posed for his portrait, he was reveling in the one thing I can’t stand about life aboard the ship: the perfect evenness of everything.

And that’s why I’ll never be as good an Eldest as he is.

Because I like a little chaos.

I push open the big doors to the Recorder Hall and smile at the topographical models that hang from the ceiling in the large entryway. Framed by the light pouring through the open doors behind me is a large clay Sol-Earth, thick with dust. A scale model of Godspeed shoots around Sol-Earth, designed to mimic the ship’s departure so long ago. It looks small and insignificant compared to the planets beside it, a ball with wings and a pointed nose. I step into the hallway and crane my neck up. Directly overhead is the model of Godspeed’s goal: the big, round globe of Centauri-Earth. It’s bigger than either of the two other models, and hangs in the center of the entryway. I’m not sure if the designers intended it or not, but the shaft of light pouring from the big entryway doors spills right across the surface of the Centauri-Earth model, illuminating it with a halo of light.

Striding forward, I reach my hands up so my fingertips brush Sol-Earth’s Australia. I have always preferred the model of Sol-Earth to that of Centauri-Earth. While the model of Sol-Earth is detailed, with bumps for mountains and squiggly lines for waves on the oceans, Centauri-Earth is smooth, accurate only in terms of its relative size. We’re not sure what we’ll find there, mountains or oceans or something else entirely. We only know that the probe sent before us labeled Centauri-Earth as “habitable”—oxygen-based atmosphere, a significant amount of freshwater, and soil samples suitable for plant growth. Those are the only things we’re sure of.

I want to touch it as well, but it’s too high up.

Centauri-Earth always seems to be beyond my reach.

Eldest’s words echo in my mind: my job is not to get the ship to Centauri-Earth, but to get the people there.

“Can I help you?”

I nearly jump out of my skin. “Oh, it’s you,” I say, laughing at my own skittishness.

Orion is a Recorder. Whenever someone invents something or writes something or does something brilly, the Recorders log it away and store it here. The last time I was here was to help my best friend, Harley, move some canvases. He’s a painter — he’s got a whole room of his art hanging up on the second story of the Recorder Hall. But I’m not here for that.

“Can you help me find some information on Sol-Earth?” I ask Orion.

Orion grins. I cringe — his teeth are stained and yellow. “Of course.”

“I need to find out about…” I pause, thinking of how to phrase it. I can’t just ask him if he knows what the third cause of discord is — he’d have no idea what I’m talking about. “Sol-Earth wars,” I say finally. “Conflicts. Battles. Things like that.”

“Anything specific?” Orion rushes toward me, excitement palpable on his face. I guess with school long over, there are very few visitors to the Recorder Hall. Come to think of it, I’ve never actually seen Orion outside of the Recorder Hall. His existence must be a lonely one.

“Whatever caused the problems on Sol-Earth.”

“Oh.”

“What?”

Orion doesn’t say anything for a long moment, just contemplates me as if I were a puzzle with a piece missing. “It’s an unusual topic for you to be studying, that’s all. Bit grim.”

I shrug. “Eldest needs me to figure something out.”

“Ah, research for Eldest. Well, the easiest way to do this is with the wall floppies.” He nods to the four long screens that hang from the walls of the entryway like tapestries, two on each side. Walking to the one closest to him, Orion taps the screen, and all four floppies turn on, filling the entire entryway with light.

Images flow in and out of each other: diagrams of a lead-cooled fast reactor, an irrigation map of the Feeder Level, paintings from Harley and other artists on board, digital representations of possible geographical features of Centauri-Earth.

“We’ll need your access,” Orion says, drawing my attention away from the wall floppies. When he sees my questioning face, he adds, “Feeders aren’t allowed to view images of Sol-Earth.”

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.