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 thought differently. They were happy, content to plow fields and shear sheep. They never seemed to feel the walls of the ship cave in around them, to grow angry at time for passing so slowly. It wasn’t until I moved to the Hospital in my thirteenth year, and met Harley, and talked to Doc, and then moved to the Keeper Level and started training with Eldest that I started to be happy on Godspeed. That I started to enjoy this life.
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 Godspeed feel that it is too small. I suppose it’s because when I go there, I go by myself, or with Eldest. Everyone else went with their gen, when they were younger and still in school. Since no one else on the ship is as young as me, there’s no reason to have school. I just have Eldest.
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 Godspeed the way he clearly does. The painted Eldest is happy in ruling — that much exudes through the oil pigments. I can picture how the painting session went. I bet Eldest stood right here, where I am, looking past the railing. The painter stood on the lawn, below Eldest — of course below him — and gave shape to the paint with strong, broad sweeps. When Eldest looked at Godspeed, as I’m looking at it now, he saw the same things I see: an interior of a ship modeled like a county in Sol-Earth’s America, but in miniature, trapped in a round bubble of ship walls. A city piled on one side, with neat, orderly streets laid out in a careful grid, the center of each block stacked with box trailers that served as homes and workplaces for trade. One block for weavers, like my friend Harley’s parents. One block for dyers, one for spinners, one for tailors. Three blocks for food preservation: canners and dryers and freezers. Two blocks for butchers. Four blocks to house the scientists and Shippers who work on the level above this one. Each family, gen after gen, born and raised to work until death in the same block of the same city on the same ship.
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 Godspeed as a box. He never saw the City as a cage. You can tell that from his painted eyes, from the way he strides down the streets of the City now, like he owns them, because he does.
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.
I push open the big doors to the Recorder Hall and smile at the topographical models that hang from the ceiling in the large entryway. Framed by the light pouring through the open doors behind me is a large clay Sol-Earth, thick with dust. A scale model of Godspeed shoots around Sol-Earth, designed to mimic the ship’s departure so long ago. It looks small and insignificant compared to the planets beside it, a ball with wings and a pointed nose. I step into the hallway and crane my neck up. Directly overhead is the model of Godspeed’s goaclass="underline" the big, round globe of Centauri-Earth. It’s bigger than either of the two other models, and hangs in the center of the entryway. I’m not sure if the designers intended it or not, but the shaft of light pouring from the big entryway doors spills right across the surface of the Centauri-Earth model, illuminating it with a halo of light.
Striding forward, I reach my hands up so my fingertips brush Sol-Earth’s Australia. I have always preferred the model of Sol-Earth to that of Centauri-Earth. While the model of Sol-Earth is detailed, with bumps for mountains and squiggly lines for waves on the oceans, Centauri-Earth is smooth, accurate only in terms of its relative size. We’re not sure what we’ll find there, mountains or oceans or something else entirely. We only know that the probe sent before us labeled Centauri-Earth as “habitable”—oxygen-based atmosphere, a significant amount of freshwater, and soil samples suitable for plant growth. Those are the only things we’re sure of.
I want to touch it as well, but it’s too high up.
Centauri-Earth always seems to be beyond my reach.