Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

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?”

“Yes,” I admit, but my voice is laced with anger. “But I don’t see how that’s wrong!”

Eldest looks at me as if he doesn’t recognize me. “If we didn’t control the people, if we didn’t have the Eldest system, if the three rules didn’t exist, the ship would fall to mutiny and war. We cannot let people have the same sort of passion that led to this.” He sighs, his face full of regret. “We’re…trapped. It’s easier to forget how very alone we are but…there’s not that many of us. It’s only through the Eldest system that we’ve survived so far.”

I can see why he’s showing me this. I understand the lesson he wants me to learn. He wants me to see that passion is bad, that chaos is evil, and anything as intense as the wild-haired woman’s eyes were when she watched the other woman die can kill everyone on board this ship.

But…I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

I mean, yeah. The death. That part was bad. But the fire in her eyes?

I’ve never seen fire like that.

Ever.

Even in myself.

“This can’t be wrong,” I say slowly, to myself—I’d forgotten that Eldest was there until he moves, and I notice he’s watching me intently. But that’s not fire in his eyes—it’s something cold and hard.

“This sort of passion,” I go on, “it can’t be wrong. It makes evil things, yes, the battles were terrible, the blood…but. But. It was worth it. It was.” My fingers curl into fists. “It can’t have been for nothing. It can’t have.”

“It wasn’t,” Eldest says. “It gave us the Eldest system. We had to purge that sort of thing from our lives, and then we could become this society. This perfect society.”

“I don’t want perfect! I don’t want control!”

Eldest stands. Slowly. He takes my plate even though I’ve eaten only a few bites. He walks out of the room. He locks the door.