Across the Universe

Orion shrugs. “How do you know that for sure? And,” he adds before Amy can say anything else, “either way, better safe than sorry.”

“Your kind of safe means killing my dad!”

Orion glances behind her at Eldest’s body. Clearly, he has no hang-ups about killing.

“If you don’t like it ...” he says, walking over to the cryogenic freezing tube on the other side of the room. He opens the door and sweeps his arm to display the interior. “By all means, refreeze yourself. Sleep until we reach planetside, and see what kind of man your father really is. That is,” he adds, thinking, “if Elder and I decide to let your father live until planet-landing.”

“You’re as evil as him!” Amy hisses, pointing at Eldest’s lifeless body.

“But you know what’s really gonna twist you?” Orion asks. “The fact that Elder sort of agrees with everything I’m saying.”

“No, I don’t—” I start when Amy looks back at me with her beautiful accusing eyes.

“And the fact that Elder here’s the one who gave me the idea for unplugging them in the first place.”

Amy covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes fill with disgust, and it’s directed at me.

“Don’t believe him,” I plead.

“No, really, it’s true. You have realized that, haven’t you, Elder?” Orion sneers, laughing, and I wonder how much he knows. I search his face, and see mine in it. We share the same DNA, but we aren’t the same person. But maybe the same emotions and self-doubts and fears are woven into our identical genetic code.

“Why don’t you tell her?” Orion continues. “Or would you like me to?”

“Tell me what?” Amy asks.

I stride across the room to where Orion is standing beside the cryogenic freezer. My hands are clenched into fists.

“She’s a pretty thing,” Orion whispers to me, low so Amy and Doc can’t hear. “Very pretty. Is that why you did it?”

“Shut up,” I growl.

“Don’t let her get in our way.”

I know that there are all sorts of logical reasons why I should do it. Orion is as crazy as Eldest, his method of control just as twisted, if not more so. I’ll never be able to talk him out of killing the frozens, and he needs to be punished for the deaths he has already caused.

But those aren’t the reasons why I shove Orion into the cryofreezer and lock him inside.

“Let me out!” Orion screams.

I spin the dial. Cryo liquid held in the tank over the freezer bursts open, pouring blue-specked water over Orion’s head.

“Frex!” he splutters. He claws at the door, his face twisted with pure terror. Amy comes up beside me, watching Orion through the little window in the door. When he sees her, his eyes fill with an evil glint. He opens his mouth to shout something at her.

I spin the dial again.

The cryo liquid pours faster, filling his mouth, drowning him. His face is under the liquid now, his cheeks puffed out, his eyes bloodshot and popping. One hand presses against the window, and I notice the jagged scar on his thumb, the only thing that separates his thumbprint from mine.

“Freeze him now, or he’ll die,” Doc says. “He might die anyway.” He shrugs. “You didn’t prep him for freezing.”

I look into Orion’s eyes and see myself in them.

I slam my fist into the big red square button.

A flash of white steam escapes the box.

Orion’s face is pressed to the glass, his eyes bulging.

But he can no longer see us.

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 , , ,

76

ELDER

IT CAME TO ME, THE FIRST NIGHT AFTER ELDEST WAS KILLED and Orion was frozen, that I shared the same DNA as both of those men, but I was nothing like them. The truth of the ship twisted both men differently, turning one into a dictator, one into a sociopath.

The three of us, we’re the same. We were raised with the same knowledge, formed from the same genetic material, given the same truth. But one of us hid the truth through lies and control, one tried to change the truth through chaos and murder, and me ... well, I am still figuring out what truth is. And what I will do with it.

Was I lying to my people when I didn’t tell them about Orion?

Was it wrong to give them access to a truth that might kill them like it killed Harley?

And what right do I have to make any mandates about truth when my greatest joy is that Orion never had a chance to tell the truth to Amy?

In the end, am I really all that different from Eldest or Orion if I let her believe a lie?

THE PAST

ELDER

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED.

This is truth.

I saw her lying there, frozen in her glass box. And she was different. Really different. I could never have the sunset of Sol-Earth, but it was all there, in her hair, floating immobilized in ice, pale skin like lamb’s wool. And young. Like me.

She will never understand.

I went down there, later, to stare and dream. To think of what she could tell me of Sol-Earth. To think of how she—unlike every other person on this frexing ship—she would be my age during my Season.

And I wouldn’t have to be alone.

And then I heard it. A tiny whisper in my mind, a barely heard voice I almost—but not quite—ignored.

And the voice held a question. And the question was:

What if I unplug her?

And at first I did ignore it. But the question got louder. And louder.

It roared.

And so, just to make it shut up, I reached out, and I flipped the switch in the box above Amy’s cold head, and I watched the light blink from green to red.

And the voice inside my head sighed in relief and whispered words of comfort and told me she would smile at me when the ice melted.

I was going to wait, right there, be there for her when she yawned and stretched and emerged from the box. Be there as her eyes fluttered open, as her lips curved into a smile.

But I heard—

—Orion, scuffling in the dark, listening to his own voice—but I didn’t know that then. I swear I didn’t know it was him, watching.