Across the Universe

I can tell Eldest wants to look away, but I don’t break eye contact.

“The short answer? We’re going slower. And slower. At first, we were at 80 percent maximum speed, then 60. Now we sometimes hit 40 percent maximum speed, but it’s usually worse.”

“That’s why the ship’s landing was delayed? That’s why it’s taking extra years to land?”

Eldest snorts—his first betrayal of emotion since we entered the Engine Room. “Twenty-five years behind schedule? I wish. We’re not even halfway there. As of now, we’re 250 years behind schedule.”

63

AMY

DOC IS WAITING FOR US ON THE FOURTH FLOOR. HE’S NOT surprised to see either of us, which I take to mean that the fat nurse downstairs used her ear button to call ahead. I knew we couldn’t trust her.

“Steela, how are you?” the doctor says in falsely bright tones. “Amy, I can handle her on my own; you go on back to your chamber.”

“No, thank you,” I say as Steela’s hand clenches on my arm.

“What?” The doctor looks surprised.

“I’m sticking with Steela.”

“But—”

“I want her to,” Steela says without a quaver in her voice.

The doctor frowns.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say.

There is a thin white line around the doctor’s lips. “Fine,” he says. He looks down at the floppy in his hand. “Bed 36 is available.” He turns to the third door in the hallway. There are no biometric scanners on the door—instead, the doctor withdraws a big iron key from his pocket.

The large room has ten beds, five against each wall. The doctor leads Steela to the bed all the way across the room, the only one not occupied.

“We were waiting for you,” the doctor tells Steela. A chill goes down my spine. “It’s so much easier to do a room all at once,” he mutters.

The doctor indicates a neatly folded hospital gown on the bed. Steela looks at me. She doesn’t want to let me go; I don’t want her to let go. When her hand releases my elbow, it is like a goodbye.

The doctor just stands there as if nothing is out of the ordinary. Steela’s hands shake as she unfastens the top button of her tunic.

“Give her some privacy,” I hiss at him. When he doesn’t register what I’ve said, I take his elbow and turn him around. While we’re waiting for Steela to change, I inspect the doctor—his back is turned as he fiddles with the instruments on the table by the wall. He’d not intended to peep on Steela—why would he want to? She’s so old. No, he’d just forgotten that Steela might be sensitive about undressing in front of him. He doesn’t look at her as a human with feelings. He’s been playing doctor too long with the simple Feeders, and forgotten what a real person is like.

“I’m done,” Steela says in her crackling voice.

She sits on the hospital bed with her legs sticking out straight in front of her and the sheet pulled up to her knees. Glancing around the room, I see that every other patient in the room is doing the same, but that they are all, as Steela would say, “brainless twits.” She’s emulating them, perhaps unconsciously.

Her tunic and trousers are folded neatly on the end of the bed. The hospital gown, so much thinner than her regular clothing, makes Steela look smaller, weaker, sicker than before. And so much more scared. She is shivering, but I don’t think it’s from the cool air blowing through the room.

“What are those?” Steela asks, her voice catching.

“Just IVs.” The doctor holds them out. “For ... nutrition.”

“Why can’t you use those med patch things?” I ask.

“Med patches are just for simple things, like headaches and stomach aches. This is more serious than that.”

“None of the others have three IVs.” Steela says.

The room is so quiet I’d almost forgotten that anyone else was here. The elderly in the other beds are meek, staring at the ceiling. Feeders. But Steela’s right—the others have only two IVs—one each in the left hand and the left forearm.

“The third one’s special, because you’re special.”

“Hogwash.”

The doctor grins wryly. “It’s because you’re the only one here on mental meds.”

Steela bites her lips. Like Elder, she believes she’s as crazy as the doctor’s been calling her all her life. And now she’s uncertain—now she thinks that she needs to be here, cloistered with the others who are staring blankly straight ahead.

“You haven’t even examined her yet,” I say.

“Hmm?” The doctor doesn’t look up from rubbing Steela’s arm with disinfectant.

“You’re jabbing her with needles and IVs and you haven’t even examined her. What’s going on?” My voice comes out low and deep. I wonder if the doctor realizes that this is how my voice gets before I get very, very angry.

“The nurse downstairs informed me of the situation.”

“What situation?” I ask, glaring. My glare is worthless; he doesn’t even look up. Steela’s watching us, though.

“She’s having delusions. Just like everyone here.” In quick order, the doctor attaches two of the IVs to Steela’s left arm, then moves over to her right one with the third needle. The doctor pinches Steela’s skin at the crease of her elbow. He jabs the “special” IV needle deep into her big, thick blue vein. Steela gasps at the pain of it.

And even though the doctor had said that this was an IV to give her nutrition, a thick dark red stream of blood drips down into the waiting bag at the end of the tube.

I don’t think. I just ram my shoulder so hard into the doctor that he flies back and hits the wall. I pin him there with my arm. I may not be as big as he is, but I’ve got rage on my side.

“What are you doing?” I shout at him. “You said that was an IV—but it’s not. Why are you always lying? What are you hiding?”

When I am done yelling, silence fills the room. The nine other patients on their beds all stare blankly ahead of them, unaware that anything has happened.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Steela blink, staring straight ahead, oblivious to me shouting less than a foot away.

“Steela?” I whisper.

Nothing.

64

ELDER

WE ARE BACK IN THE LEARNING CENTER, AND I FEEL AS hollow as the model of Godspeed in the Recorder Hall, each of us lacking an engine to propel us through life.

“Two hundred and fifty years behind schedule?” I ask. The words echo in my mind, replacing the whirr-churn-whirr of the engine’s rhythm that had still been ringing in my ears.

Eldest shrugs. “Roughly. We were supposed to land about a hundred and fifty years ago—now it looks like we’ll land in another hundred years. Maybe. If the fuel systems hold. If nothing else goes wrong.”

“And if something else goes wrong?”

“Then the ship floats dead in the water, so to say. Until the internal reactors cool. And then the solar lamp dies, and we’ll be in darkness. And then the plants die. And then we all die.”

Inside the ship, we are always surrounded by one another, so much so that we cherish our tiny private rooms and time alone. Never before have I appreciated how truly alone we are on this ship. There is no one else but us. I always felt before that we were anchored between the two planets, and even if we couldn’t reach them immediately, they were there, on the other end of an invisible rope. But they’re not. If we fail, there is no one out there to save us. If we die, there is no one out there to mourn us.

“Do you see now?” Eldest asks, his eyes bringing me back aboard the ship.

I nod, not really registering his question.

“This is why you—you—must be the leader. A strong, assured leader. The Plague was not a plague. It was what happened when the leader of the ship told the people the truth, how long it would take to land the ship. When they learned that they would never see planet-landing, that their children, and their grandchildren would not see it, that there was a chance none of them would see it ... the ship itself almost died.”

I raise my face to Eldest, wetness blurring my vision of him. “What happened?”

“Suicide. Murder. Riots and chaos. Mutiny and war. They would have ripped through the walls into space if they could have.”

“That’s the Plague? That’s the three-fourths of the ship who died—the ones who learned the truth?”

Eldest nods. “So one man, the strongest leader, stood up and became the first Eldest. He worked with the survivors. They developed the lie. They came up with the idea of a Plague to explain the deaths to the next gen, and the gen after that.”

“How did they survive?” How could anyone survive this knowledge Eldest has given me? The loss of planet-landing is so much worse now than when I heard of it before.

“The first Eldest noticed that most of the survivors were members of a family—or were pregnant. People will survive anything for their children.”

Now I am confused. I cock my head and struggle to piece together this information. “You say the survivors were pregnant. But wasn’t everyone of that gen pregnant? If the Season had just happened ...”

Eldest rolls his eyes. “I thought you’d figured that out from the girl. The Plague Eldest developed the Season. Before this, people mated whenever they liked. Some were pregnant; some were not. The generations were blurred. The Plague Eldest came up with the idea of establishing the Season, ensuring everyone is pregnant at the same time. Every other gen, after the Season, we inform them they will not see the new land. But their unborn children will. This is motivation enough for them not to revert to chaos and riots. This is motivation enough for them to accept the delay for one more gen. And then another, and then another ...”

“The water pump on the cryo level ...” I say, thinking it through. “But wasn’t that part of the ship’s original design?”

Eldest nods. “It was. Used to distribute vits directly to the populace. But the Plague Eldest figured out another use ....”

Eldest smirks as he crosses the room to the tap on the far wall. He pulls a glass from the cabinet over the sink and fills it with water; then he comes back and sets the glass in front of me.

I stare at it. Clear, calm, still. Nothing like me. My first instinct is to drink from the glass before me. After all, water is the remedy all the Feeder wives use to calm their children, to placate the adults.

My eyes grow wide. “It’s not just hormones, is it?” I ask, my gaze locked on the innocuous-looking liquid. “There’s something else in there.”

Eldest sits down across from me. The glass of water stands between us like a wall.

“It’s Phydus.”

“What?”

“Phydus. A drug developed after the Plague.”

“What does it do?”

Eldest holds his hands on the table, palms up, as if asking for grace or forgiveness—or perhaps he thinks he’s bestowing it. “Phydus ensures that people’s emotions do not override their instinct for survival. Phydus controls extreme emotions, so that people won’t cause so much death and destruction again.”