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
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.
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
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
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
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.
I look behind me, to match the painted Eldest’s line of sight, but I can’t see
When Eldest posed for his painting here, did he think of this? Did he look at the City and marvel at its smooth efficiency, its careful construction, its consistent productivity?
Or did he see it as I do: people boxed in trailers that are boxed in city blocks that are boxed in districts that are boxed in a ship, surrounded by metal walls?
No. Eldest never thought of
Even here, where fields and pastures and farms stretch out beyond the Recorder Hall porch all the way to the far wall, you can’t escape the boxes. Each field and pasture and farm is blocked off in careful fences, each fence measured out centuries ago, on Sol-Earth, before the ship launched. The blocks of land are not all equal in size, but they are all square, all meticulously measured. The hills in the pastures are designed to be evenly spaced, exactly placed bumps of grass for sheep and goats who don’t realize that their hills are just carefully organized, manufactured mounds of dirt and compost.
I’ve seen the landscape of Sol-Earth in the vids and maps. The land wasn’t perfectly laid out in neat little squares. Even grid-like cities had alleys and backstreets. Fields were fenced off, but the fences didn’t all go in perfect lines — they dipped around trees; they cut off at funny angles to avoid creeks or include ponds. Hills didn’t make even rows of bumps.
When I look at the fields, all I can see is how fake they are, how poor an imitation they are of the pictures of Sol-Earth fields.
I bet when Eldest posed for his portrait, he was reveling in the one thing I can’t stand about life aboard the ship: the perfect evenness of everything.
And that’s why I’ll never be as good an Eldest as he is.
Because I like a little chaos.