Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

“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.

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.