Shards and Ashes

“My name is Mag,” the woman says. She searches my eyes, and I can tell that she wants me to stay.

“I’m—”

“I know who you are.”

Everyone does. I’m the heir to Eldest’s tyranny. I’m the one who was supposed to take over the ship after him.

I was the one he tried to have killed when I disagreed with him.

“I’m not that person anymore,” I say. “I can’t be.”

“You need a new name,” Mag says.

I open my mouth but don’t speak, my mind racing to come up with a name for her.

“No!” she says, her voice bouncing off the high walls of the Recorder Hall. “We’ll find a name for you!”

She turns to the giant digital membrane screens hanging from the walls and starts tapping on one. “Let’s name you after a story,” she says. “What about Quasimodo? He was in that story I was telling you about earlier. No,” she says before I have a chance to speak. “His name’s too long and weird. Maybe something from Shakespeare? Like Oberon or Puck? Or Romeo?” She giggles. Names flash on the screen she’s working on: lists of characters in the books preserved in the Recorder Hall, names of authors, charts of the most popular names used on Sol-Earth when the ship launched, a genealogy of the first generations born on Godspeed.

“I know,” Mag says, stopping her search and whirling around to face me. “I know. We’ll name you after a constellation. It makes perfect sense.”

There is something poetic in the idea: name me after the stars we’re soaring through.

“Here.” A star chart appears on the wall screen, with lines connecting the dots of stars and little name labels beside them.

She steps back, and it’s not until she’s studiously staring at the star chart that I realize how quiet the Recorder Hall is without her voice.

“What about that one?” she asks, pointing.

“Hercules?” I say.

She nods. “He was a hero in a lot of the really old stories.”

“No.” I shake my head. I’m no hero.

Mag frowns—not at me, at the chart. This is a puzzle for her to figure out, nothing more.

“That one.” I point to a trio of stars lined up. “Orion.”

“Orion? I don’t know that story. . . .”

I do. “He’s a hunter.” Much more fitting than a hero.

“Orion,” she says to the chart. She speaks slowly, as if tasting the word. Then she turns to me. “Orion,” she says, and with that, I am named.

It only takes three months for me to consider life at the Recorder Hall normal. Mag and I share the little room in the back of the third floor of the Hall—I sleep on the floor, she sleeps on the bed. We’ve slowly started increasing the food rations we take. There has never been a limit to the amount of food given out— with Phydus, people tend to only eat what they need—but we don’t want to risk some observant record keeper who isn’t on Phydus discovering a sudden spike in food consumption from the Recorder Hall.

Mag’s meds are delivered to her daily, one pill at a time, through the automatic dispenser built into her wall. She went to the Hospital with a faked stomach pain, though, and swiped a hundred-count bottle of pills for me. I keep it with me at all times. I have long since learned that if I have the choice between food and meds on this ship, the meds are more precious.

Now I upend the bottle Mag stole for me. Two pills fall into my hand. I put one in my mouth and swallow, then carefully put the remaining pill back in the bottle.

Mag pokes her finger into the dispenser in her wall and withdraws her own pill.

“I need to get more meds,” I say.

Mag stares at the blue-and-white pill in her hand. “I’m going to visit my grandfather today,” she finally says.

“Why?” I ask.

Her fingers curl over the pill. “I miss him.”

I watch her, but she doesn’t lift the pill to her mouth.

“He won’t be the same,” I say eventually.

Her fingers go lax. “I know.” She puts the pill on her tongue and swallows.

I don’t want her to go. Although it’s been months—nearly a year—since Mag and her grandfather switched places, I find it hard to believe that Eldest, who knows everything on this ship, hasn’t noticed. Going to her grandfather may draw attention to the fact they swapped roles, and that may bring Eldest here—to her, and to me.

But I can’t keep her locked up in the Recorder Hall. I can’t ask that of her. Just because I’m trapped doesn’t mean I can imprison Mag. Maybe she has escaped Eldest’s watchful eye, and she should take advantage of that while she can.

While she goes off to the farms to find her grandfather, I go down to the book rooms. I’ve been reading up on all the civic and social sciences materials from Sol-Earth. While the civics room is among the smallest of the collections in the Recorder Hall—more than twice the amount of space is reserved for mathematics, and twice that again is reserved for science—there are plenty of books on government to keep me busy.

I find that the volumes I tend to gravitate toward are not the thick, heavy tomes full of history and analysis. Instead, it’s the thin books that I spend the most time with. Plato’s Republic. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses— even though that one’s about religion, which I will admit to understanding nothing about, it’s also about who has the ability to dictate for others what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes it feels as if the shorter the book is, the harder it is to understand. The Magna Carta is tiny, but there are three books here in the Hall, each more than two inches thick, that try to explain just how important it is.

I push aside the analytical commentaries and look just at the source texts. In one stack I have The Republic, Common Sense, Ninety-Five Theses, and now the Magna Carta. I slide over Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” then add Thomas More’s Utopia.

On the other side of the table, I have a collection of essays written by samurai on Bushido, Machiavelli’s The Prince, an Indian book called Arthashastra, and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

This is the difference. On one side are the books that advocate voting and sharing the government with the people. The other has books that Eldest would agree with: a strong leader using fear or violence to control. This is it, as black-and-white as the pages inside the books.

I draw the stack on the right side closer to me. This is where I should find the key to overthrowing Eldest, making the ship into a world where people can live freely, with the truth and without the hazy acquiescence Phydus provides.

I remember Eldest, when I first learned of the drugs he put in the water.

“Give me that bucket, boy,” he said. I was thirteen years old, and felt special that he included me in today’s work rather than keeping me cooped up with lessons.

The bucket wasn’t big, but the syrupy liquid inside was heavy, and I had to use both arms to carry it. Eldest took it from me one-handed and lifted it to a small spout built into the side of the water pump.

“I thought the vits were already distributed,” I say, watching the liquid slide down into the pump.

“These aren’t vitamins.”

I chew on the inside of my cheek. I don’t ask questions: I want to prove to Eldest how smart I am by figuring this puzzle out for myself.

Eldest seems to know I can’t, though. He sets the empty bucket down and turns to stare at