5
AMY
I AM AS SILENT AS DEATH.
Do this: Go to your bedroom. Your nice, safe, warm bedroom that is not a glass coffin behind a morgue door. Lie down on your bed not made of ice. Stick your fingers in your ears. Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me.
Because what if I am dead? How can someone without a beating heart, without breathing lungs live like I do? I must be dead. And this is my greatest fear: After 301 years, when they pull my glass coffin from this morgue, and they let my body thaw like chicken meat on the kitchen counter, I will be just like I am now. I will spend all of eternity trapped in my dead body. There is nothing beyond this. I will be locked within myself forever.
And I want to scream. I want to throw open my eyes and wake up and not be alone with myself anymore, but I can’t.
I can’t.
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.