After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (16 page)

We run. And run and run and don’t care where. All of a sudden, here’s that little
two-room school that looks like a house. This time I don’t think twice. I break a
window and we fall inside, all worn out.

We lie there the rest of the day feeling sad…about Eppie being gone, but glad we’re
here together. We don’t even worry about not having anything to eat. When it gets
dark, we sleep.

But in the morning, we’re hungry and thirsty. There’s no water here that works. Everything
is turned off. No electricity. I find how to turn the water on under the house. I
know about that from home, but I don’t know how to turn on the electricity. At least
we have something to drink.

I don’t know what to do or where to go or how to get food, and then I think about
that lady who said I’d be a good helper.

Mrs. Sindee feeds us and I get hired and I’m going to get paid.

Things do get worse. Everybody wonders where fall got to and if it’ll ever cool off.
And there’s earthquakes where they never had them before, even one right here, and
then Mrs. Sindee gets flooded out. I help her clean up after the water goes back down.
Good thing is, people go on wanting their animals clipped and boarded sometimes, and
it finally does cool down. In fact it gets too cold. Mr. O’Brien and I and even Mrs.
Sindee…we don’t even care. We wear our long underwear and Mr. O’Brien grows a heavy
coat of new fur.

Mr. O’Brien and I live in that old school, and so far nobody has found out. And whenever
we find a wounded bird or cat or whatever, we rescue it. And everything we rescue
turns out to be the best there is, just like Mr. O’Brien. We’re all making do with
less, but we already have seven books.

I wonder if they’ll ever reach Proxima Centauri.

T
HERE ARE THREE RULES ON
G
ODSPEED
. I
ONLY KNOW ONE, AND
I’ve already broken it.

Rule One: No differences allowed.

And when you’re the youngest person on an interstellar spaceship, you’ve definitely
got some differences. I grew up knowing how different I was—when I was a six-year-old
boy, the next generation up was ten, and even though they should have obeyed whatever
command I gave, none of the ten-year-olds would play with a six-year-old. Or maybe
it wasn’t just my age—maybe they wouldn’t play with me because they already knew,
even more than I did, that the real reason I am different isn’t just my age, but also
my position.

I am the Elder. Not
their
Elder, of course: I will be Elder for the future generation of children born, and
I will rule them. The generation above me follows the next Elder up, and the generation
above them follows Eldest. My gen won’t be born until I am sixteen, and that feels
forever away even though it’s only three more years before the gen above me has their
mating season.

The other Elder came to the Feeder Level this morning to fetch me. This is rare—he
and Eldest live on the Keeper Level. Eldest trains him and they deal with all the
problems and people on the ship—the scientists, engineers, and researchers on the
Shipper Level, the farmers and manufacturers on the Feeder Level. The two of them
keep the ship running smoothly, and I am just the awkward kid who will maybe (absolutely
must) one day become good enough to join them.

Elder’s grin is lopsided when he walks up to the rabbit farm where I am living now.
As a future Eldest, I am never allowed to know who my parents are or to stay with
one family longer than another. I am supposed to be using my life now, before I really
become an Elder, to find compassion for the people I will one day rule, by living
among them, living as one of them, without staying long enough to form attachments
to anyone in particular.

“You know what today means, right?” the other Elder asks me after he lifts me up in
a hug.

I shake my head.

“You’re coming up to the Keeper Level.”

“Really?” I ask. My voice cracks over the words, but I don’t care.

The other Elder nods. “I will become Eldest. And you’ll be the only Elder.” There
is an odd note in his voice; his lips still smile but his eyes are sad.

“I can pack now,” I say. “I can go up to the Keeper Level with you now.”

The other Elder shakes his head. “Not yet,” he says. “You need to get ready for the
changing ceremony tonight.”

This is the first I’d heard of it—the rabbit farms are as far away as possible from
the City, and besides, the Feeders rarely celebrate anything. I’d been expecting nothing
special on my birthday, and the farmers I live with now had shown no excitement.

Not that they show much of any emotion.

That is another difference I have with all the other Feeders: I
care
about things. I cried at the pig slaughter; I remember the lurch in my stomach when
I saw the first calf born on the cattle ranch. But no one else shows emotion…and (I
suspect) no one else
has
emotion. The flicker of sadness on the other Elder’s face had only been noticeable
because no one else on the Feeder Level had even that.

The other Elder gives me a present: new clothes, a dark set of trousers and matching
tunic with red stitching on the hems. As I change clothes hurriedly, I can hear the
start of something big happening outside—a sort of vibrant excitement leaking into
the air. When I leave the farm with the other Elder, I can see why: everyone on the
whole ship, from the Feeders to the Shippers, is gathering in the garden behind the
Hospital.

On a ship somewhere between two inhabitable planets, there’s not much wasted space.
The Hospital garden is the only exception. It’s the only place on the ship where flowers
grow instead of food, where the paths meander aimlessly rather than going straight
between the City and the farms, where there is nothing to
do
except
be
. It is one of my favorite places on the whole ship, in part because so few people
ever come here.

Not today, though. Today, the garden overflows with nearly two thousand people. They
stand in the flower beds, crushing the blooms. They spill out onto the lawn beside
the Hospital, all the way to the heavy, metal wall on the side, painted blue and dotted
with rivets. Even though the Feeders almost never show any emotion besides
calm
, today they are chatting, alert, eager; and the Shippers, who’ve descended from the
level above this one for the celebration, are practically vibrating with anticipation.

“What’s going on?” I ask the other Elder in a quiet voice. He steers me away from
the garden and toward the grav tube, a fairly recent invention on the ship, makes
traveling between the levels simpler.

Eldest is waiting for us at the base of the tube. He’s wearing the Eldest Robe—a long,
elaborately embroidered robe that holds all the hopes of our society. I have only
seen it once before, long ago, when I first started asking questions about why I was
shuffled from home to home, why I was at least four years younger than everyone else
and no one was born after me, why I was, in short,
different
, when the very first rule of the ship was not to be.

The Eldest Robe is decorated with the dreams of the whole ship: fertile fields on
the hem, open skies at the shoulders. When
Godspeed
left Sol-Earth, it was bound for a new home in a new world, but in the meantime,
Godspeed
became our home. Generations later, the ship is still in transit, but even though
we are caged behind the curving metal walls, we have not forgotten our dreams for
a sky that never ends.

Eldest smiles at me, and his face holds the same sort of sadness as the other Elder’s
had. He is truly the oldest man on the entire ship. His age gives him wisdom, and
his presence gives us all strength. When he strides toward us, his shoulders are thrown
back, and he carries the weight of the robe as if it is nothing, even though I feel
certain that it would suffocate and crush me.

“Are you ready?” Eldest asks the other Elder when he sees me. The other Elder doesn’t
nod; he just gives him a sort of grim smile.

Eldest looks down at me next. Judgment clouds his eyes. I try to stand as straight
as possible. “You’re not ready,” he says simply, and I cave in on myself on the inside,
though I force my spine to stay straight and stiff.

Eldest strides past us, toward the garden and the buzzing crowd of people waiting.
“Elder,” he says, and the other Elder rushes forward to walk next to him. I trail
behind them both; I’m used to following them. “No,” Eldest tells him. “You’re no longer
Elder after today. I meant the other one.”

The other Elder grabs my arm and pulls me forward. I am practically running to keep
up with Eldest’s quick pace. “You know what the three most important rules of
Godspeed
are, right?”

I nod, but he’s not looking down at me—he’s looking over at the crowd of people. “I
know the first one,” I say. The other Elder had told me the same day I was shown the
Eldest Robe for the first time, but that was the only lesson I’d learned so far in
my training to be the future Eldest.

“No differences,” Eldest says. “It is a good rule, and the first developed by the
original Eldest.”

I know this. When the ship had been sailing between worlds for several generations,
a terrible plague had wiped out most of the population.
Godspeed
herself almost died. But a leader rose up to become the Eldest, reestablish rule,
and set us on the path to recovery.

“The second rule,” Eldest says, “is that our society will fail without a strong, central
leader. The Eldest and Elder system is in place for the entire society. All that we
do—all that we
are
—is necessary for survival.”

He stops now, and it takes me a few steps to stop myself, too. He looks down at me.
His eyes search mine, but I’m not sure what he’s looking for.

“Remember that,” he says.

It hangs in the air between us, as bright as the stars embroidered on the robe.

Rule Two: The ship must have one strong, central leader to survive.

And he marches into the crowd of people gathered at the garden. Everyone surrounds
the statue in the middle—a bigger-than-life-size statue of the first Eldest, his arms
spread wide in benevolence. My Eldest stands under the statue too, but his arms hang
limply by his side, weighted down with the elaborate robe.

The other Elder drags me through the crowd and places me on Eldest’s left side. “You
don’t have to do anything,” he whispers. “Just stand there.” He turns to go, then
turns back to me. “It’ll be better if you don’t watch. Look at the ceiling instead.”

I shoot him a glance, but the other Elder has already moved on, around to the other
side of Eldest, so he stands by his right. I look up at them both. They are exactly
the same height, with the same strong chin and heavy brows and piercing eyes. But
neither of them spare a glance at me.

Eldest looks up, and when he does, he seems to grow taller. I had not noticed before
that he slouched, but now, with his eyes bouncing from person to person in the crowd,
I realized that, yes, he does feel the pressure, that crushing, swallow-you-whole
sort of pressure I’ve felt since I first learned that I would one day take the robe
and responsibilities of the man beside me.

“My people,” he says, and with those two words alone, he has all two thousand sets
of eyes on him. They are
his
people, truly.

And then he stops. It’s as if the words have been choked out of him—his eyes are red
and watery, his throat closes up. His gaze flicks to mine, and I see in his face the
words he spoke to me moments ago: Rule Two.

Eldest swallows and turns back to the crowd. “I have been honored to be yours. All
that I have done—all that I have been—has been for you. All of you.” He swallows again.
“And now I am spent. My purpose has played. It is time for a new Eldest to take the
robe.”

There is silence now. I look out at the crowd. The Feeders are calm, curious, but
the Shippers’ excitement is not the happy anticipation I’d thought they had. It’s
more like dread, as if they suspected and feared what would happen, but know it is
inevitable.

Eldest raises his hand. Between his fingers, I see a black med patch. The small one-inch
square of fabric is embedded with tiny needles with which to inject medicine. Lavender
patches cure headaches, green ones fix stomachaches, yellow wakes you up, blue puts
you to sleep. But I’ve never seen a black one before.

“Follow your Eldest, and you cannot lose your way,” Eldest says. He presses the patch
into his skin.

The other Elder steps forward as Eldest crumples. I move toward him to help, but the
other Elder holds an arm out to stop me.

The other Elder says something, I don’t know what, all my senses are focused on the
way Eldest doesn’t blink, staring at nothing, and the way the corner of his mouth
twitches twice and then stills, and the way his fingers curl and then freeze, as if
he’s trying to grasp the air.

The other Elder stops speaking. My neck moves up slowly, slowly, not quite believing
what I’m seeing. The other Elder swoops down on Eldest, and at first I think he’s
going to harm him, but I see that his eyes are soft and his touch is gentle. He removes
the Eldest Robe, slipping it from his shoulders and stretching out Eldest’s body,
not just to gather the cloth of the robe up, but also to make Eldest look natural,
comfortable.

Eldest’s eyes still stare up.

The other Elder straightens, and with one clean, swift movement, twirls the robe around
his own shoulders. “An Eldest dies for his people,” he says, fastening the robe around
his neck. “An Eldest lives for his people.” He takes a step forward.

“Eldest!” the Shippers shout, and there is some sadness in their voices raised as
one.

A moment later, the Feeders repeat, “Eldest!” and there is no emotion at all behind
the volume.

The other Elder—the new Eldest—turns to me. “Come with me,” he says.

The crowd parts around him. Doctors descend on the man lying under the statue of the
Plague Eldest, but they are not there to help him. They leave the black patch on his
neck; it has already done what it was meant to do. Instead, they bundle the body up
in a plain white sheet and start to take it away for disposal in the stars.

I keep my eyes on the robe, not the man now wearing it. I think about how one day
when I assume the leadership of
Godspeed
from him, I will take this very robe after he takes his own life. And then I think
how the Elder after me will pull the robe from my dead body.

People die. I know this. The grays will die, one by one, as they reach their sixties.
They will go to the hospital, and they will not leave it. I know this; it is what
happens. But I’ve never seen death. And I never knew the Eldests chose it.