Across the Universe

75 AMY

ELDER STARES THROUGH THE SMALL WINDOW INTO ORION’S frozen face. I wrap my arms around him from behind. I try to pull him back, but he won’t move, so I just hold him.

“It’s over,” the doctor says. “Unless you wake him back up, you’re Eldest now.”

I can feel Elder stiffen under me.

Elder shakes his head. “Let the people he tried to kill judge him when they land.”

I think of my father, and what kind of judge he will be to this man, and I am not the least bit sorry for him.

“How am I going to lead a ship full of people?” Elder asks, his voice catching. “When the Phydus wears off, they’re going to realize the lies. They’re going to be angry. They’re going to hate Eldest, and me.”

“They won’t hate you,” I whisper into the back of his neck. “They will relish their anger, because that is the first emotion they will have ever truly felt, and then they will realize there are other emotions, and they’ll be glad of them.”

“Will you stay with me?” Elder whispers. His breath fogs the glass covering Orion’s face.

“Always.”

Elder pushes his ear button, and he makes an announcement to the entire ship, just as Eldest did before when he told the ship to fear me. His first announcement is simple. In childlike terms, he explains that they’ve all been under the influence of a drug, and that they will slowly start to regain their own emotions. Elder encourages them to remain calm as they begin to feel for the first time, especially the pregnant mothers.

Doc begs me for the wires to fix the pump.

“We should at least keep putting the hormones in the water,” he insists, “so that they don’t start mating with relatives.”

“Most people don’t want to commit incest,” I say dryly. “When they wake up from the drug, we’ll just explain to them what incest is, and what it does, and that they should get a blood test before they have sex. You’ve got those scanner things that test DNA. We could start mapping out family trees again.”

I hand the wires to Elder.

Doc turns to him. Elder just looks at him coldly. “No more drugs,” he says.

And that’s that.

Later, when men with thick gloves have taken Eldest’s poisoned body and thrown it out of the hatch after Harley, when Doc has put Orion in an empty cryo chamber, when we’re safely back in my room with Harley’s painting watching over us, Elder gives his second announcement. It is a repeat of Eldest’s last one: Everyone is to go to the Keeper Level.

Before we go up there, we discuss the truth.

“That’s what killed Harley,” I say. “The truth. When he heard about how he’d never leave the ship—” I choke on my words.

“He couldn’t live with that truth,” Elder finishes for me.

“We should have known that it wasn’t Eldest killing the frozens. He would have known it would make you seek the truth, and he wanted to keep it from you, from everyone.”

Elder looks down at his hands, then up at Harley’s painting. “A part of me thinks that we cannot share the truth, not all of it.”

I start to speak, but Elder cuts me off.

“A part of me thinks that the truth will kill them all, just like it killed Harley. This is a big truth, a great truth. We cannot just say it. We must let people discover it.”

Elder goes to the Keeper Level alone. He will stand on the platform, and he will tell the people, who are feeling for the first time, some of the truth, but not all of it.

He will tell them that he is Eldest now. That the old Eldest is dead.

He will tell them about Phydus, about the hormones in the water, about the lie of the Season.

They will be angry, furious even, but then they will realize that they are feeling, and they will know that Elder was right to do as he did.

He will tell them of the engine, but not how far behind schedule we are. Anyone with any interest in science, mechanics, engineering, will go with the Shippers and will see the engine, and will try to help the scientists solve the problem.

Elder will not tell them about Orion, or the frozens.

But he won’t keep the truth from them, either. While he is telling them as much of the truth as can be told, I’m writing out all I know in pages ripped from the notebook my parents brought from Earth. I fold the pages in half, and leave them in the Recorder Hall. They’re there for anyone who looks to find.

Many won’t. They won’t care to know; they won’t seek any kind of truth. Some will — and they will not believe the truth. But others will need the truth, and crave it, and they will seek it, and accept it for what it is.

Later, Elder and I will continue working in the Recorder Hall. I will rewrite as much of the falsely written history as I can. All the files of Earth’s past will be made available to all the people. And Elder will have his people start recording the lives of the ship’s inhabitants, just like before, so that they may feel they are more than forgotten shadows of a ship floating through empty space.

But now, I open my blue notebook to the remaining blank pages. I hold the pen over the first page, then slowly scratch out the first words.

Dear Mom and Daddy,,