Across the Universe - Beth Revis [66]
One of them moos, but it’s not a regular moo; it ends with a squeal like a pig. Moo-uh-eeee!
I back away from the fence.
The cow-pig-things watch me as I go, their silent big brown eyes somehow ominous.
Next is a field of plants, at least twice the size of the other fields I’ve run past, the corn and wheat and green beans. Rows and rows and more rows of bright green leafy plants grow in neat, long lines. I bend down and pluck a round leaf, delicate and a little fuzzy, but it tastes bitter. The stem is thick and hard; I guess the plant is like a carrot or potato—the food part of it is underground.
Then I hear something.
Beep! “Number 517, inoculated.” A clatter of something like hard plastic, a scurry of feet.
A low fence made of thick chicken wire encloses the field behind me. Squatting near the edge, bent down so low I didn’t see her at first, is a girl a few years older than me, about Harley’s age. She’s just released a fat, short-legged oversize rabbit, and it’s hopping away, shaking its back left leg every few hops. Its fluffy white tail is flashing, and I can hear it chattering its teeth angrily as it bounds off.
I start to say something, but the girl rises up on her knees. Another rabbit nibbles on clover a couple of feet away. Without making a sound, the girl lunges at the rabbit, grabs it by its back legs, and pins it to the ground before it can so much as twitch. She reaches behind her for one of those thin plastic computer things I’ve seen Elder use, and waves it behind the rabbit’s ears, like a cashier at a grocery store checkout. The computer thing beeps, and she glances at it, then tosses it to the ground beside her.
“Hello,” I say.
I expect her to be surprised—she hadn’t acknowledged before that she’d noticed me—but the girl just glances up and says, “Hello.”
She does do a double take when she sees me, though. I remember what Elder said about me, and how easy I’d be to recognize. My hair is sweaty from my run and plastered to my skull, with flyaways escaping my hasty braid. I smooth my hands over it anyway, not that it will do any good; there is no hiding who I am on this ship.
“You’re the genetically modified experiment,” the girl states. I nod. “Eldest has said we don’t have to speak to you.”
“Well you don’t have to,” I say, unable to keep the growl from my voice, “but you could at least be polite.”
The girl tilts her head, considering. She reaches behind her and grabs a small basket full of hypodermic needles. About half are empty; the other half contain golden-yellow liquid that looks like honey swirled with butter.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Inoculations,” the girl says, turning to the rabbit she still holds pinned to the ground. The rabbit doesn’t seem to have any fight in it. It twitches its heavy back legs occasionally but doesn’t really struggle against her grip.
“Are these your pets?” I ask.
She looks at me, and I can tell she’s thinking about what Eldest said, how I am supposedly slow and stupid. “No,” she says. “They are food.”
Stupid question. The field is fairly large, and I can see about twenty rabbits nearby, and dozens more in the distance. On the far side of the field is a house—the girl’s home, I suppose—and lined around the house are wired hutches for more rabbits. There must be hundreds of people on Godspeed; it makes sense that they’d need a source of protein that reproduces as quickly as rabbits.
“I saw you running,” she says, her attention on the rabbit. “What were you running from?”
“Just running,” I say. She’s watching me silently and intently, like a cat.
“Why?” she asks.
I shrug. “Why not?”
“It’s not Productive.” She says it like productivity is holy, the only thing worth having.
“So?” I say.
Instead of answering, the girl just cocks her head to the left, then turns away from me. She picks up one of the full needles in the basket, jabs it into the rabbit’s back leg, and lets the rabbit go. “Number 623, inoculated,” she says. The computer thing flashes a wavy line