“It’s not so bad here,” the doctor says. I look up. There’s a blurry film fogging my vision, and I know if I’m not careful, I’ll cry. I let him continue. “In a very real way, it’s better that you are here now, instead of there later. Who knows what Centauri-Earth will be like? It may not even be habitable, despite the probes sent before Godspeed left Sol-Earth. It’s not an option we like to consider, but it’s possible….” His voice trails off as his eyes meet mine.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What am I supposed to do now?” I say, my voice rising. “Are you just saying I’ve got to sit around? Waiting until the ship lands before I can see my parents again?” I pause. “God, I’ll be so old by then. I’ll be older than them! That’s not right!” I pound my fist on the desk. His pencils rattle in their neat little cup, and one of them does not settle back in line with the others. He reaches up to place it neatly against its fellows. With a roar of frustration, I grab the cup and hurl it at the doctor, who dodges just in time. The pencils fly like freed birds, then clatter to the floor like dead ones.
“No one cares about your stupid pencils!” I shout as the doctor jumps to pick up the fallen pencils. “No one cares! Why can’t you see that?”
He freezes, gripping his pencils, his back curved away from me. “I know this is difficult for you….”
“Difficult? Difficult? You don’t know what it’s been like! You have no idea how long I’ve suffered — only for it to amount to nothing! NOTHING!”
The doctor throws the pencils into the cup so violently that two pop back out again. He does not replace them, but lets them sit, disorderly and random, on the desk. “There is no need to react violently,” he says in a calm, even tone. “Life will not be so bad for you on the ship. The key,” he adds, “is to find a way to occupy your time.”
I clench my fists, willing myself not to kick his desk, not to throw the chair I am sitting in at him, not to pull down the walls that surround me. “In fifty years I’m going to be older than my parents, and you’re telling me to find a way to occupy my freaking time?!”
“A hobby, perhaps?”
“GAH!” I screech. I lunge for his desk, about to sweep everything on it onto the floor. The doctor stands, too, but instead of trying to stop me, he reaches for the cabinet behind him. There is something so calmly disturbing about this action that I pause as he pulls open a drawer and, after rummaging around for a bit, withdraws a small, square, white package, similar to the hand wipes I used to get from the Chinese restaurant Jason took me to on our first date.
“This is a med patch,” the doctor says. “Tiny needles glued to the adhesive will administer calming drugs directly into your system. I do not want to spend the next fifty years medicating you just so you stay calm.” He sets the white package in the center of his desk, then looks me square in the eyes. “But I will.”
The med patch lies there, a line in the sand that I do not want to cross. I sit back down.
“Now, do you have any hobbies or skills that you could put to use on the ship?”
Hobbies? Hobbies are something ninety-year-old men have as they piddle around the garage.
“I liked history in school,” I finally say, although I feel like a dork for thinking of school before anything else.
“We don’t have school here.” Before I can contemplate life without school, the doctor continues. “Not now. And besides, at this point, the life you lived is, well…”
Oh. I see his point. My life, my former life, already is history. What will it be like to see the things I loved and lived in a history book? What if I flip through the pages and recognize someone? What if I recognize myself, staring up at me from the pages of a history tome older than I am?
“I was on the cross-country team,” I say. The doctor looks at me blankly. I realize the phrase “cross-country” means nothing to him, here on a ship where there is no country to cross. “I ran. It’s a sport where you run.”
The doctor looks skeptical. “You can, of course, ‘run’ whenever you’d like. But…” His gaze roves over me. “It may not be advisable. You will stand out on board this ship… I cannot vouch for your safety when you leave the Hospital.”
My stomach clenches. What kind of people are these? And what does he mean by “safety”? Does he think I’ll be attacked?
The doctor, however, seems oblivious to my uneasiness. “What other activities could you do?”
“I was on the yearbook staff. I like photography,” I say, still a little distracted by thoughts of how I’m going to be treated when I go outside.
“Hmm.” The doctor sounds disapproving. “We do not actually allow photography on board the ship outside of scientific uses.”
Even though I’m determined to prove to the doctor I can be calm without medication, I can’t help but show my disbelief. “Are you serious? Photography’s banned?”
“What other activities do you enjoy?” he says, completely ignoring my question.
“I don’t know,” I say, throwing my hands up. “What do most of the teenagers around here do? Clubs? Parties?”
“We do not have school or parties or anything of that sort,” the doctor says slowly, replacing the two stray pencils on his desk into the cup, “because we do not have children aboard the ship. Not currently.”
“What?” I ask, leaning forward, as if by doing so I will actually understand what he is saying.
The door behind me slides open.
The doctor stands to greet the man walking through the door, but I don’t. He’s old, but he walks into the office as if he owns it, despite a slight limp.
“This is Amy.” The doctor sounds out my name as if he’s unsure of its pronunciation, even though it’s only three letters long.
“Obviously,” the man replies. He remains standing, sneering down at me. “Tell me what you know about Godspeed.”
“Is that the name of this ship?”
He nods impatiently. It seems so weird to me, that this ship has a name with “God” in it. This too-neat office that smells of disinfectant and something soured doesn’t remind me of God at all.
“They called it Project Ark Ship before I was frozen. All I know about it is that I’m on it. We’re heading to a planet in the Centauri system that NASA discovered a few years before I was born. It’s a generation ship — you all are supposed to have been born on the ship, keeping it running and all, until we get there and my parents and the rest of the people from the mission can terraform the new planet.”
The man nods. “That’s all you need to know about Godspeed,” he says. “Although you should also know this. I am Eldest.”
Good for you, I think. Congrats on being old.
He takes my silence as a cue to continue. “This ship does not need a captain. Its path was determined long ago, and the ship was designed to operate without need of human interference.” The old man sighs. “But while the ship doesn’t need guidance, the people do. I am the oldest. I am their leader.” The old man picks up a round paperweight from the doctor’s desk. He contemplates it as if he’s holding the world in his hands, and I realize that to him, the world is this ship.
“Okay.”
“As such, everyone follows my rules.”
“Fine.”
“Including you.”
“Whatever.”
Eldest glares. He slams the paperweight back on the doctor’s desk — but not in the same place it had been originally. The doctor’s hands twitch as if he’d like to move it to its proper place, but he restrains himself.