Beth Revis - Across the Universe

It’s big, this place. Unusually big. It reminds me of the Keeper Level, actually-lots of space and no one filling it. Big enough for everyone on the ship to stand next to each other, just like the Great Room. There’s a closed door to the left, and a hallway branching off to the right. It’s all metal and hard edges. Apart from the vastness of it, there’s an odd shape to it, almost egg-like and tapering at the roof, making a dome. I’m not sure why the roof rounds-the Feeder Level above is flat ground-but I can see heavy iron pipes extending through the curves.

This large room is filled with rows and rows of small metal doors. Like the old Sol-Earth bookshelves in the back of the Recorder Hall (locked away from the Feeders, of course), the rows stick out, ready to be browsed, but the contents are all hidden behind tiny square doors with heavily bolted hinges. The air feels cooler here, and the walls seem quieter. As if this is a place where only whispers are allowed, and few people.

I start down the nearest aisle, small doors on either side of me. The doors are numbered, scribbled with sloppy white paint. Lined along the bottom are little rectangles engraved into each metal door. I squint-they’re flags, half a dozen of them, from Sol-Earth countries. At the end of the row of flags, three letters are engraved into the metal: FRX. The same letters on the star screen. This stuff is old. Part of the original design of the ship. I put my hand on a door-number 34-and start to turn the heavy lever when a flash of red catches my eye.

One of the doors is already open. A long metal tray extends from the mouth of the door like a tongue, and on that tray is a narrow clear box filled with frozen water speckled with blue glitter. Floating immobile in the ice, as still and silent as this empty room, is a girl.

It’s her hair that pulls me forward. It’s so red . I’ve never seen red hair before, not outside of pictures, and the pictures never caught the vivacity of these burnished strands tangled in the ice. Harley has a book of paintings he stole from the Recorder Hall, and one of the paintings is just a series of haystacks at different times of the day. He showed me the last painted haystack, the one covered in snow, the one at sunset. Harley went loons over it, saying how the artist was so brilliant to paint stuff with different light, and I said that was stupid, there’s light or there isn’t, and he said I was stupid, on Sol-Earth there were things like sunrise and sunset because the sun moves like a living thing and isn’t just an overrated heat lamp in the sky.

This girl’s hair is more brilliant than the rays of the sun on Sol-Earth captured by an artist Harley said was the most genius man ever to live.

I reach out to touch the glass that traps her inside, and only then do I realize how cold it is. My breath is rising in little clouds of white. My fingertips stick to the glass.

I stare down at her. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, but also the strangest. Her skin is pale, almost translucent white, and I don’t think it’s just from the ice. I lay my hand on top of her glass box, above her heart. My skin is a dark shadow over the luminescence of hers.

This girl is definitely not monoethnic. She’s not like anyone else on Godspeed. Her skin, her hair, her age- my age!-her very shape… short, but slender with an enticing curve to her breasts and hips.

How can this girl fit into the monoethnic no-differences-at-all world Eldest says provides perfect peace?

My eyes devour her body, then drift back to her breasts. The ice is a little foggy there, teasing me, but I can see enough to know they’re lush, and even if they’re frozen, I imagine that if they were warmed up…

“ Elder! ” I jump away from the clear box, as startled as I would have been if the beauty inside had suddenly awoken.

But it’s just Doc.

“What are you doing down here? And how did you get down here in the first place?” Pause. “How did you even know about this place?”

“I took the elevator.” I try to appear brilly, but my heart’s banging around in my chest.

“You shouldn’t be down here.” He frowns. He touches the wi-com button behind his left ear. “Com link: Eldest,” he says.

“No! Don’t com Eldest! I’ll go!” I say, but I don’t want to go, I want to look more at the girl with sunset hair.

Doc shakes his head at me. “It’s dangerous down here. Touch those buttons,” he nods toward a little black electrical box at the frozen girl’s head, “and you could wake her.”

I look at the box. It’s simple. On the top are three buttons: ELECTRICAL PULSE, CHECK DATA, and, under a clear protective case with a thumbprint scanner, a yellow button labeled “REANIMATION.” Wires extending from it go back into the glass box; I follow the tubes with my eyes to her perfect cherry mouth.

“I won’t touch it,” I say, but Doc’s already turned away from me.

“Elder’s down here,” he says, and I know those words aren’t for me, but for Eldest, who must have connected to Doc’s wi-com. “Yes,” Doc says. Pause. “I don’t frexing know.” He eyes me again, a cold, evaluating look I have not seen since the days I was his patient. Doc touches the wi-com, and Eldest is disconnected. I know it won’t be long before Eldest comes down here and drags me back to the Learning Center.

“Who is she?” I ask. I want to know all I can, while I can.

Doc narrows his eyes at me, but he bends down, looks at the front of the metal door. “Number 42. I was examining all the forties today, just a visual check that all is clear.” He shakes his head. “I should have finished before going up to the Ward,” he mutters to himself.

“The forties?”

Doc looks up at me. “They’re all numbered.”

“Yes, I can see that.” I can’t keep the impatience from my voice. “But what does it mean ? Why are there numbered doors and frozen people here?”

Doc stares down at the girl with sunset hair. “You should ask Eldest that.”

“I’m asking you .”

Doc turns to me. “I’ll tell you if you tell me how you got down here. All the doors that lead to that elevator are locked.”

“Not the one on the fourth floor,” I say. “It was unlocked.”

He narrows his eyes. “And you just happened to come across an unlocked door on the fourth floor?”

I hesitate. “I found some blueprints of the ship in the Recorder Hall. I saw the second elevator there.” I’m not going to scamp out Orion. It’s not his fault I got caught.

I can tell Doc’s thinking fast-his face has become blank and emotionless.

“So,” I say, looking down at her again. “Who is she really?”

Doc walks past her glass box to a work desk on the far wall and comes back with a floppy. He slides a finger on it to open a program, punches in a code, and presses his index finger on an ID square. Then he types one-handed.

“Number 42, Number 42. Ah. She’s nonessential.”

“What?” I crouch down so that my face is even with her face. Her hair looks as if someone has poured yellow, orange, and red ink into a glass of water; the strands swirl around, pouring from her head, curling up at the ends at the bottom of the glass box. How could anyone say someone with sunset hair is nonessential?

“Her parents, apparently, put in a special request for her to be included,” Doc continues, scrolling down the floppy. “They seem important enough-mother in biological engineering, father rather high up in the military. Lucky her. Not many nonessentials were allowed on. Not enough cargo space.”

I blink. She’s “cargo”? Nonessential cargo ?

“Why is she here? Why are any of them here? Why is there a level full of frozen people?”