Read Across the Universe for Free Online

people looks like forever when you’re gazing down at it. But when you’re actually there, in the fields or the City, crammed up next to people whose eyes are always on you, it feels much more crowded.
    The grav tube ends about seven feet from the ground of the Feeder Level. For a second, I bob in the air at the end of the tube, then beep, beep-beep fills my ear as my wi-com connects with the ship’s gravity system, and I drop to the little round metal platform under the tube. I hop off the platform and begin walking down one of the four main roads on the Feeder Level. Only a few yards ahead is a tall brick building, the Recorder Hall, and beyond that is the Hospital.
    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