After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (17 page)

Med patches are tiny, almost weightless, but I can already feel one boring into my
neck.

The man in the robe—I must think of him as Eldest now, he
is
Eldest now, but I can’t bear the thought of what made him Eldest—he pushes through
the crowd and back toward the grav tube. He opens his mouth several times, as if to
tell me something, but he never speaks. I can’t tell if his face is full of sorrow
or pride or fear or something else, but I’m pretty sure mine’s just full of shock.

When we get to the grav tube, Eldest pauses. He looks at the base, perhaps remembering
the way the old Eldest climbed down it to go to the garden and die, just the opposite
of how this new Eldest is climbing up to it in order to live on the Keeper Level.

“Your training begins today,” Eldest says, still looking at the grav tube base.

“No kidding.”

He spares me a knowing smile, then commands the tube to take him to the Keeper Level.
It sucks him up, and he’s gone before I can blink. I step up onto the base as well.
For a moment, I turn and look out at the Feeder Level. This is the largest level of
the whole ship, with acres and acres of farmland, all wrapped in steel and soaring
through space. This is what we need to survive—farms and produce and even livestock.

This is my kingdom.

Or, it will be. And even though I’ve grown up knowing that I was in line to rule,
I never quite realized that it meant…all of this.

I command the tube to take me up, too. The grav tube manipulates the simulated gravity
on the ship, enabling my body to rush upward much faster than the elevator in the
hospital. I strain to keep my eyes open, focused on the green and brown of the Feeder
Level, but soon I’m sucked all the way up to the Keeper Level.

I’d been there before, but not like this. Not when I was the only Elder.

Eldest waits on me. The tube ends in a small room with a wooden table—a
real
wooden table, an antique relic from Sol-Earth, where they had trees—and blue plastic
chairs and an ancient-looking globe. Eldest slips the robe from his shoulders and
breathes a sigh of relief. The robe drops and crumples, just like the old Eldest did.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I wanted to warn you—but Eldest said it would be better to
say nothing…to let you experience it blind, so to speak.”

He sees my eyes staring at the robe, remembering who else wore it. He bends down and
carefully picks it up, smoothing out the wrinkles and folding it until it no longer
holds the shadow of a dead man inside. He lays the robe on the table.

“This is the Learning Center. We’ll begin proper lessons here.”

“I’ve had lessons.”

“You’ve had some.”

Eldest opens the door to the Learning Center, and I see a giant room with a curved
ceiling. “This is the great room,” Eldest says simply, and he turns to a nearby door.
“This is my chamber now,” he says. “And this is yours.” He nods for me to open the
door, so I roll my thumb over the biometric scanner and watch as it zips open.

The room has been neatly made up, and there are two bags sitting in the center of
the bed. My belongings—clothes, a few mementos. I’m ashamed to note that the old blanket,
the one I’ve had since I was a baby, is draped over the second bag. I don’t want Eldest
to think I’m a baby.

Eldest moves forward, so I go all the way inside the room. He steps around me and
sits down on the bed, picking up the blanket and fiddling with it. I wish he wouldn’t.
I wish he’d pretend it’s not there, that mangy, holey scrap of cloth.

“When
Godspeed
left Sol-Earth,” Eldest says, twisting the fabric between his fingers, “we had a clear
mission. Our ancestors were to run the ship and, while it traveled, develop new, better
ways to colonize the planet when it eventually lands on Centauri-Earth. Originally,
the Feeder Level was designed for biological and agricultural research. The Shipper
Level was for other scientific research. This, the Keeper Level, was used for navigation
and offices for the captain of the ship.”

We have no captain now. Instead, we have Eldest.

“Of course,
Godspeed
is essentially a biodome. We are a self-sustaining environment, able to produce the
necessities of life in a constant cycle. But our original mission was not just to
find the new planet in the Centauri star system: it was to take the methods of Sol-Earth—the
science and philosophy and everything else—and make it better. Our ancestors were
creating a perfect world, an enclosed world, where we could become the perfect people.
We separated ourselves from Sol-Earth and Sol-Earth’s problems, and we became a society
worthy of the new planet.”

He puts the blanket down on the bed.

“There are three rules on
Godspeed
,” he says, meeting my eyes.

“I only know two of them.”

“Tell me.”

I don’t know why—does he want me to remember the second rule now, the way Eldest told
it to me before he died?

“Rule one: No differences. Rule two: Without a leader, the ship will fail.”

“Rule three,” Eldest says. “No one is allowed individual thought.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “What?” I say.

“Haven’t you noticed? The Feeders. How empty, emotionless they are? We have ways to
control them.”

Something inside of me lurches, a sick feeling not in my stomach, but deeper, a feeling
that makes me want to expel myself from myself. “They’re controlled?”

“They have to be. Elder, you know the size of this ship. You know the importance for
control.”

I think back to the “celebration” and remember the way the Shippers seemed to know
what the old Eldest was about to do before he did it. “What about the Shippers?”

“We need labor to feed us, and we need minds to keep us moving forward. The Feeders
have what they need: strength and obedience. The Shippers have what they need: intelligence.”

The way he says “need” strikes a chord deep within me. “Genetic modification?”

Eldest nods. “Among other things. Whatever it takes to maintain control.”

“You…” I taste bile in the back of my throat. “You’re a monster!”

Eldest smiles sadly and stands up from the bed. On the dresser beside it is a digital
membrane screen. With a swipe of his finger, the screen comes to life. Eldest taps
on it quickly, scans his thumbprint for access, and taps again.

“This was the ship before the first Eldest,” he says, handing the screen to me. While
I look down at it, Eldest walks out of the bedroom, and the door zips closed behind
him.

“Locked,” the computer by the door chirps.

I drop the screen on the bed and roll my thumb over the biometric scanner. “Access
denied,” the computer chirps.

Shite. Eldest has locked me in here with my thoughts and whatever is flashing on the
screen.

I hit the door once, hard; hard enough to make my hand hurt. I pick the screen back
up with my other hand.

These are vid feeds from across the ship. The people here are all different—different
ages, different sizes, different skin and hair colors. There’s no sound, just visual,
but I can tell that there’s vibrancy in their lives, something beautiful and strange
that I’ve…I’ve never seen before.

But it’s also terrible.

Because they’re all fighting.

It is worse because there is no sound. The vids switch from camera to camera, flashing
different scenes. I recognize some things—the Hospital is the same, but there is no
garden, no statue. Instead, there are people—wounded, brutalized, bleeding, broken
people. The City has all the same buildings in the vids as there is now, but they
are cluttered and filled to the breaking point. Some are on fire—and I think about
the new buildings in the weaving district, and how this is the reason why they are
new.

And over and through it all: fighting.

Groups form. I recognize some of the same people—I start to seek them out in the vids,
watch the way they fight, see who they are fighting with. This is a battle.

A battle for the ship.

Eldest made it seem like the mission of the ship was to separate ourselves from the
past—but it seems to me as if the past followed us here.

There are two people who show up over and over again. One is a woman—a tall, dark,
wild-haired woman who always wears red. The people who follow her also mark themselves
with red—scarves on their arms, bandannas around their heads, even just threads woven
into the fabric on the hems.

I look down at the clothes Eldest gave me today. Black—with red stitching at the hem.

The other person who shows up is a man. He has long salt-and-pepper hair that hangs
from his skull like a curtain. He’s very, very tall, with a heavy brow and fat lips.
His color is white.

Some of the vids are backed up, shot from a distance—and I’m grateful for it. Then
I can blur my eyes and see the people as dots of reds fighting dots of white. But
some of the videos are very close. I see their faces then.

There are more people in white than red. The man stays in the City, gathering people
around him. But the wild-haired woman stays on the other side of the ship, near the
Recorder Hall and the Hospital, and though there are fewer people with her, they are
fiercer fighters. They are smart and ruthless.

I lean up, my back stiff. I don’t know how much time has passed. I’d forgotten that
the door was locked, I’d forgotten even the reason why I was here, and the strangeness
of the day I’d just had. I’m focused on the vids.

Because I care.

I care about that wild woman. I care about what happens to her. I want her to win.

This is so strange. To see a battle on the place you thought was perfectly peaceful.
To watch a rabbit field through a red-colored film because blood splattered the camera.

When a woman in red—a petite thing with short choppy hair—is killed by a man (a boy?
He can’t be much older than I am), the wild-haired woman leaps up and strangles the
boy-man with her bare hands. There is such fierceness in her eyes, such murderous
passion, that she chokes him long after he stops moving, chokes him until a man in
red pulls her off and drags her away.

Even though I’ve come to know their faces, I realize that now I’m knowing their lives.
The wild-haired woman is fighting with everything she has, and with the death of the
other woman, she has very little left.

The videos are dark when the man in white leads a march across the Feeder Level from
the City toward the wild-haired woman’s base behind the Hospital, where the garden
is. Many have died—so many that I have little wonder now why there are empty buildings
in the City, unoccupied homes. The man in white marches resolutely. He goes right
by a camera once, and his face, though marred by shadows, also shows a hard mouth.
He doesn’t look happy; he doesn’t thrill in the battle.

He has the same sad look that the old Eldest gave me just before he slapped the black
patch over his neck.

The wild-haired woman wakes up too late. She was not expecting the attack. The men
and women in white rush over those in red like a violent, terrible wave. Red stands
to fight, but white won’t relent, and they are pushed farther and farther back.

Until they are up against the wall.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? We’re all on a ship. A ship soaring across the universe,
that’s not on the old Earth, but not on the new one, either.

There’s nowhere to go.

The wild-haired woman realizes it the same time I do. I can see it in her eyes. I
can see it in the way she almost puts down the blade she’s fighting with…but doesn’t.

She’s against the wall, and she won’t stop.

It’s not the man in white who kills her. He’s not fighting—he’s already celebrating
his inevitable victory. No, it’s some other boy-man who I don’t recognize. Some anonymous
fighter, too young to have fought in many of these fast and furious battles, who slips
a slender knife past the wild-haired woman’s defenses and slides it across the smooth
skin of her neck, quick and neat, like a butcher (which I realize he might have been).

And then she’s dead.

Just like Eldest.

But not like Eldest—because instead of just giving up the mantle, she clung to it
until it was ripped from her. I pick at the red stitching in my shirt, prouder of
it than of the Eldest Robe.

The door zips open. Eldest stands, hesitant, a plate of food in one hand. “Are you
done?” he asks.

My stomach roars as I stand. “Yeah.”

He hands me the plate, and we sit on the bed, the video screen between us as it fades
to nothing.

“So you see now?”

I nod as I take a bite.

“We have to use control. We have to prevent something like this from ever happening
again.”

“The way she died…And she was the source of the Eldest system?” I say, my mind still
on the blossoming line of red dripping into the neck of her red tunic, darkening it
until the red cloth is almost black.

“She?” Eldest asks. “No, it’s the man, the man in white—he was the first Eldest. He
won. His rule is our rule.”

My food tastes dry, and I lower the plate. I should have realized—obviously, the woman’s
death meant she’d lost, but I’d forgotten that such a noble death also meant that
of course she was the other side, the bad side, the side we’re trying to prevent from
happening again.

And I remember the look in the wild-haired woman’s eyes when she killed the man who
killed the petite woman. Yes—the Feeders don’t have the bloodthirsty viciousness that
made her hands squeeze the life from a man, but their eyes also don’t have the love
she had when she saw the woman die.

I am a product of the man in white, not the woman in red. I am from the side that
won, the controlled, even march across the ship to press the passionate, angry, fighting
people against the walls until their blood stained the metal the same red as the shirts
they wore.

“The first Eldest saw what violent emotions can cause. The woman in red is exactly
what we’re trying to prevent from happening again. Did you see how close she was?
How close to chaos she brought the whole ship? Don’t you see how
dangerous
that was?”