Across the Universe

“Make it stop,” I say to Eldest. A burbling sound pops in my ear, which isn’t too bad on its own, but each burble is punctuated by a short high-pitched eep! that makes me jump a little with surprise every other second.

The elevator doors slide open and we step into the common room.

“The noise will stop as soon as you enter the Learning Center prepared to learn and listen,” Eldest says pleasantly. He pushes his wi-com again. “Command: increase intensity to level four.” The sounds grow louder. Eldest smiles at me. Then he turns and strolls out of the common room toward Doc’s office.

I try sticking my finger down my ear, but it’s no good. The wi-com is wired directly into my eardrum. Something that sounds like glass shattering over a crowing rooster crackles in my ear.

“Nice flowers.”

“Orion?” Any surprise at seeing the Recorder here in the Ward is replaced by the cacophony vibrating through my left ear. I’d even forgotten the flowers clutched in my right hand. Green plant blood oozes between my fingers from broken stems.

“I needed to get more supplies.” Orion shakes a small plastic bottle, and pills rattle inside it. He must have swiped them. No one’s supposed to have a store of mental meds—even if you don’t live in the Ward, the Inhibitors are delivered daily, one pill at a time.

“Don’t want Eldest or Doc to catch me.” Orion pockets the pills.

I clap one hand over my ear in a feeble attempt to stifle the noise, but it’s no good.

Orion smiles grimly. “That old trick. There’s no point trying to stop the noise. It’ll just get worse the longer it goes.” He watches as I beat my fist against my ear. “Just do whatever he told you to do, or you’ll go mad from it.”

“How do you know?” The words come out harsh and angry, but only because I am having such a hard time concentrating on anything beyond the braying in my ear.

“I just wanted to give you a bit of advice—there’s no point in standing up directly to Eldest. Won’t work. He’s an old king, too used to power. You can’t face him directly. You’ll have to be a bit sneakier than that.” Orion tucks a piece of his long, straggly hair behind his ear, and I notice again the spiderweb white scars creeping down the left side of his neck, as if his flesh had been ripped open and the pieces didn’t quite fit back together again.

“I’ll do what I want,” I say as I push past him, one hand clutching my ear.

I stagger across the common room. When I pass Harley, I knock into his canvas as another high-pitched tone starts an unnatural staccato in my ear, throwing me off balance.

“Elder?” he asks, jumping up in concern.

I ignore him as I open the hall door and head toward Amy’s room. I’m going to give her these frexing flowers if it kills me. I won’t let Eldest push me around.

“What’s wrong?” Harley’s followed me. He leaves a koi-colored hand-print on my arm as he reaches for me, but I shake him off.

I stop at Amy’s room and knock on the door.

No answer.

“What are you doing here?” There’s a hitch in Harley’s voice that I notice through the loud crowing that’s started up in my left ear. I remember now—this was his former girlfriend’s room before it was given to Amy.

“A new res,” I say, wincing. My voice sounds loud to my pained ear.

Harley puts his hand to the wall, leaving behind a smear of orange-yellow on the matte white finish. No one will care; it’s just another mark of many. Ever since Harley moved into the Ward permanently, spots of color follow him everywhere he goes, like a trail of rainbows.

The wi-com is doing its best to distract me—the sounds and tones are cycling through at a dizzying pace. Part of me wants to bash my head against the door, just to make the noise stop. It’s driving me insane, the sort of insane that Doc’s mental meds can’t fix. My left hand grips my ear so hard that blood trickles between my fingers—I’m afraid I’ll rip it off. Instead, I punch the wall with my right hand.

The flowers I’d so carefully chosen from the garden—the big, bright blooms I’d selected specifically because they reminded me of Amy’s hair—crinkle against the force of my fist meeting the wall. Petals fall in a shower of reds and golds. I unclench my fist. The stems are a stringy, gooey mass. The leaves have been crushed beyond recognition. The flowers themselves are pitiful remnants of the natural beauty they held on the pond’s edge.

An undercurrent of clicking sounds adds itself to my tonal torture. I let the flowers drop at Amy’s door, slap both hands around my ears, trapping the noises inside my skull as I run from the Hospital to the grav tube to the Keeper Level and silent tranquility.

17

AMY

THE MAN IN FRONT OF ME HAS LONG FINGERS. HE WEAVES them in and out of one another, then rests his head upon them while he stares at me as if I am a puzzle he cannot solve. He seemed polite, almost sympathetic, when he’d fetched me from my room, but now I wish he’d left his office door open.

“I’m sorry you’re in this situation.” Although he sounds sincere, he just looks curious.

Even though that boy had explained everything to me, I still feel the need to have this “doctor” confirm it.

“We’re really fifty years from landing?” My voice is cold and hard, like the ice I am beginning to wish I was still encased in.

“About 49 years and 250 days, yes.”

It’s 266 days, I think, remembering what the boy said. “I can’t be refrozen?”

“No,” the doctor says simply. When all I do is sit there, staring at him, he adds, “We do actually have a few more cryo chambers—”

“Put me in one of them!” I say, leaning forward. I will face a century of nightmares if I can wake up with my parents.

“If you had been reanimated correctly, that might have been an option, and even then, it would have been dangerous. Cells are not meant to be frozen and refrozen. The body deteriorates with multiple reanimations.” The doctor shakes his head. “Refreezing might kill you.” He struggles to find a way to describe it to me. “You will become like freezer-burned meat. Dried out. Dead,” he adds when that gross image does not deter my eagerness.

For a moment, I’m crestfallen. Then I remember. “What about my parents?”

“What about them?”

“Are they going to be unfrozen early, too?”

“Ah.” He unwraps his fingers and straightens the objects on his desk, making the notepad parallel to the desk edge, the pens in the cup all lean to one side. He’s wasting time, avoiding eye contact. “You weren’t meant to be unfrozen. What you must understand is that your parents, Numbers 41 and 40, are essential. They both have highly specialized skills that will be needed when we land. We will require their knowledge and aid at Centauri-Earth’s developmental stages.”

“So, basically, no.” I want to hear him say it.

“No.”

I shut my eyes and breathe. I am so angry—so frustrated—just so pissed off that this has happened and that I can’t do anything at all about it. I can feel the hot, itchy tears in my eyes, but I do not want to cry, not now in front of the doctor, not ever again.

The doctor pushes the bottom right corner of his big notepad so that it is perfectly square to the edge of the desk. His long, twitchy fingers pause. There is nothing out of place on his desk. There is nothing out of place in his whole office. Except me.

“It’s not so bad here,” the doctor says. I look up. There’s a blurry film fogging my vision, and I know if I’m not careful, I’ll cry. I let him continue. “In a very real way, it’s better that you are here now, instead of there later. Who knows what Centauri-Earth will be like? It may not even be habitable, despite the probes sent before Godspeed left Sol-Earth. It’s not an option we like to consider, but it’s possible....” His voice trails off as his eyes meet mine.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What am I supposed to do now?” I say, my voice rising. “Are you just saying I’ve got to sit around? Waiting until the ship lands before I can see my parents again?” I pause. “God, I’ll be so old by then. I’ll be older than them! That’s not right!” I pound my fist on the desk. His pencils rattle in their neat little cup, and one of them does not settle back in line with the others. He reaches up to place it neatly against its fellows. With a roar of frustration, I grab the cup and hurl it at the doctor, who dodges just in time. The pencils fly like freed birds, then clatter to the floor like dead ones.

“No one cares about your stupid pencils!” I shout as the doctor jumps to pick up the fallen pencils. “No one cares! Why can’t you see that?”

He freezes, gripping his pencils, his back curved away from me. “I know this is difficult for you....”

“Difficult? Difficult? You don’t know what it’s been like! You have no idea how long I’ve suffered—only for it to amount to nothing! NOTHING!”

The doctor throws the pencils into the cup so violently that two pop back out again. He does not replace them, but lets them sit, disorderly and random, on the desk. “There is no need to react violently,” he says in a calm, even tone. “Life will not be so bad for you on the ship. The key,” he adds, “is to find a way to occupy your time.”

I clench my fists, willing myself not to kick his desk, not to throw the chair I am sitting in at him, not to pull down the walls that surround me. “In fifty years I’m going to be older than my parents, and you’re telling me to find a way to occupy my freaking time?!”

“A hobby, perhaps?”

“GAH!” I screech. I lunge for his desk, about to sweep everything on it onto the floor. The doctor stands, too, but instead of trying to stop me, he reaches for the cabinet behind him. There is something so calmly disturbing about this action that I pause as he pulls open a drawer and, after rummaging around for a bit, withdraws a small, square, white package, similar to the hand wipes I used to get from the Chinese restaurant Jason took me to on our first date.

“This is a med patch,” the doctor says. “Tiny needles glued to the adhesive will administer calming drugs directly into your system. I do not want to spend the next fifty years medicating you just so you stay calm.” He sets the white package in the center of his desk, then looks me square in the eyes. “But I will.”

The med patch lies there, a line in the sand that I do not want to cross. I sit back down.

“Now, do you have any hobbies or skills that you could put to use on the ship?”

Hobbies? Hobbies are something ninety-year-old men have as they piddle around the garage.

“I liked history in school,” I finally say, although I feel like a dork for thinking of school before anything else.

“We don’t have school here.” Before I can contemplate life without school, the doctor continues. “Not now. And besides, at this point, the life you lived is, well...”