Pills and Starships Read online

  I looked around for Keahi sometimes, I admit, and would catch a glimpse of his dark, elegant head as he passed by in his beige robe with a tray of drinks held up, and every time my stomach would do a small weird flip. Like I had something to look forward to. I didn’t know why, it didn’t make sense. And then the flip would go away and I’d feel sheepish.

  At a certain point Sam came in and got me, on a parental pretext. We traipsed out of the room and through a couple of doors and into a back passageway, where Keahi was hovering. I was suddenly nervous to talk to him, but he only smiled and said in a soft voice that he needed to find out where Sam and I were on the whole fleeing-society-and-joining-the-rebels thing.

  “I’m still thinking about it,” I said. “It’s only been a few hours!”

  “The problem is …” began Keahi, and he was looking at me in a way that made me feel like I should find something to do with my hands, or my feet. I don’t know. My limbs. “You see, we need a decision. I’m sorry to put pressure, but plans have to be made soon.”

  “I’m in,” said Sam.

  I wheeled around and stared at him. “Even if I don’t come?” I asked after an uncertain pause, and even before I said it I started to feel queasy.

  Because Sam, after this week, will be all I have.

  “I’m sorry, Nat. You’re my sister. But I can’t—I just can’t stand to live in that world anymore.”

  We stood there for another few seconds, me confused and trembly, Sam biting his lip and staring at his feet, and finally I told Keahi I’d decide by midnight. Sam had a way of contacting him.

  When we went back into the main ballroom we were walking a few feet apart. I felt alone and there was nothing I could say to Sam in public anyway.

  Xing found me again at the dessert table a little while later, where I was halfheartedly spearing a rice pastry off a tray with a colored toothpick.

  “What was that all about?” she asked. “He said your parents needed you for some emoting, and then you went away in the opposite direction from them.”

  I stared at her, alarmed. I was thinking, if she noticed something fishy, anyone could have.

  Anyone—like service.

  “I’m a psych counselor back home,” she went on, a little apologetic. “I pick up on things.”

  “He just—you know, he’s having a hard time,” I bluffed. “He has some problems. With this whole thing.”

  “Hmm.” Xing nodded slightly, but I could tell she wasn’t quite buying into my vagueness.

  But the party went on, and we did the things there were to do—drinking, eating, dancing. It would have been a blast if my thoughts and feelings hadn’t been going in at least twenty directions, including death and rebels. I went to check up on my parents a few times, who seemed to be talking with other contract couples, making the rounds, enjoying themselves. I looked at them once, chatting and lifting their goblets to their lips, and I thought: What’s in your heads? Aren’t you frightened?

  But it passed. And there they were, still laughing and talking.

  As the night wore on I got a little more buzzed, so by the time the climax of the evening came I was definitely pharmatipsy. A service guy, some kind of exec or manager or something, stood up in front of the orchestra and gave a little speech about how special it was to share this historic and bountiful night with all of us. He said it was a privilege to be near us in this intense and lovely parting. Then he said it was his honor to introduce an operatic recital, just one song. After the song we would have the very last dance and then the party would be over.

  “And so, before the goodnight waltz, I give you this evening’s pièce de résistance, the lovely Greek diva Maria Callas in hologram from the mid-20th c. with a command performance of—from Giuseppe Verdi’s 19th c. master­work The Force of Destiny—‘Peace, Peace, My God.’ Ms. Callas will sing in the original language of Italian.”

  He left the stage while people clapped and the lights dimmed and then an elegant woman appeared where he had been, fading in slowly. She had black hair wound up on top of her head and wore a long dark-red dress. She bowed her head slightly and then peered up again sadly and began to sing, though of course her voice was coming from the sound system. But I have to say it was perfectly synced.

  I’d never listened to opera before, I thought it would be high and screechy and flat boring, but this was—it was beautiful. I didn’t understand a word.

  We stood there rapt. And when the last note faded, well, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, as the old folks used to say.

  I thought: I am collecting this moment. It’s invisible, it’s intangible, it’s nothing solid, and yet it’s perfect and it will always be. I closed my eyes and concentrated as hard as I ever had before, trying to remember it exactly and minutely.

  I’d never collected something before that wasn’t an object.

  I thought, this is a whole new kind of collecting for me. I can collect pieces of time.

  Even Sam, standing a few feet away from me—who had shot me a cynical look when the corporate guy said the name of the song—had tears in his eyes. He wiped them right away, though, when I noticed.

  There was complete silence in the ballroom and then a wave of quiet and worshipful applause. The name of the last waltz scrolled over the orchestra and they started to play something called “The Tennessee Waltz.” It had vocals to it, playing over the sound system along with the live instruments.

  I was going to sit down, because I have no clue about waltzes, but then I felt a tap on my shoulder and Keahi was standing there.

  “May I?” he asked, and I was too surprised to say anything. I let him take my hand and lead me onto the floor where the contracts were gathering and slowly starting to dance. I saw my parents in their black-and-white costumes, smiling at each other with shining eyes in a kind of predeath, pharmadaze, and felt my throat constrict.

  Somehow Keahi knew how to do that kind of dancing. Maybe it was part of his job, I was thinking, maybe he trained in that field along with massage and drink serving; maybe he was supposed to step in and dance with the survivors who didn’t have anyone else to dance with.

  But whatever the reason, he was good at it.

  “Just follow what my feet do with your feet and you’ll be fine,” he told me.

  And so there was this song, and this sad music, and I let him float me around and I wasn’t even crunching his toes. Plus he smelled good. Okay, I’m coming off idiotic, I know. I may as well admit, I’ve never had a boyfriend. It’s hard to meet people, with crowd rules. Once there was a guy at my game club that I liked a bit, and maybe he liked me and we kissed once, but then his family moved to Illinois. They had to go. They had to eke out a living. They’d stopped being in the one-millionth of 1 percent.

  We danced past and through the crowd, with that song in our ears. A woman’s gravelly but sweet voice sang, “I remember the night, and the Tennessee Waltz, and I know just how much I have lost …” and I was crying.

  And I knew Keahi could tell, even though my face was over his shoulder and he couldn’t see it straight on, but he didn’t pull back to look at me or make me feel embarrassed about crying. Instead he danced us out from under the Twilight dome onto the balcony, which jutted away from the ball­room, and you could hear the crash of the waves far beneath and see the stars spangling the skies.

  “There aren’t any mikes out here,” he whispered.

  This great starry blackness was over us, and the lights from inside fell across the balcony floor. To one side stretched the endless ocean, the ocean that once contained a world.

  And then as we danced, taking just small steps, out there on the balcony over that ancient sea that was invisible in the dark, he whispered again into my ear: “Nat. Don’t stay where there’s no hope.”

  I was still crying like a wuss and staring over his shoulder through the blur at the people inside, looking so fine and even proud in their suits and fancy gowns; most of them were prepared to die. I thought of my m
other and my father when they were babies. Now that I’d seen babies personally—those chubby, clear-eyed creatures that seemed like they’d be so ridiculously easy to hurt—I felt confused. Once even my parents had been these completely helpless creatures, utterly dependent on other people to protect them.

  Maybe now they were helpless again.

  “I don’t want to see you live your life as a drone,” he said. “No one’s promising we can win. But the point is we have to fight for it. Life is for trying. Don’t you see?”

  It was exciting to be out there over the sea, with the volcano rising massively into the sky behind me, though I couldn’t see it. I felt warmer knowing there were those ancient turtles sheltered beneath that mountain, lifting their feet off the warm sand with that ponderous slowness.

  And the babies, and the fruit trees, and the other living things I’d heard about but not yet seen. I thought of the not-so-green-green grass of home, and it seemed like someplace I’d lived a long, long time ago.

  Even though there were only a few weeks and one ocean between us.

  There was the transition housing or the jungle. The babies and turtles or the place I’d grown up in.

  I whispered: “Okay. I’ll come with you. But I don’t want to come alone.”

  Keahi pulled back, so we were at arm’s length, and looked down at me.

  We just stood there quietly, but I felt like the universe was rushing and tumbling around us.

  DAY FOUR

  COMMITMENT & COMMUNION

  Theme of the Day: Goodbye

  They don’t even trust us to say goodbye. Not entirely.And that’s inconvenient for Sam and me.

  Because Happiness, a/k/a Death, is scheduled for tomorrow, Day Five. Which means that if we’re going to have a chance of saving my parents, most of the time we have is today. At least, that’s the way it seems to me. But they’ve scheduled a group healing session this morning. To guide us in our process of “Commitment & Communion.” To give us tips and techniques, etc.

  And then, early this afternoon, a one-hour session with just our family and the VR.

  LaTessa has a full slate too. Xing mentioned that her own family’s one-hour session was planned for first thing this morning, so LaT. must have those private meetings back-to-back all day. That’s a whole lotta goodbye for one Vessel to Receive, don’t you think?

  Even knowing how much pharma they’re on, I’m surprised my parents aren’t more bummed. Or scared. The inside of their heads, at this point, is pretty much a mystery to me. But then again, this morning it’s more obvious than it was yesterday that they’re not all here anymore. The pills are taking them to Happyland already.

  I didn’t notice it so much last night, with the party and the new things we’d just found out about and all that. Maybe that’s why the service corp throws that party that particular night: to distract survivors from the personality changes in the contracts.

  Because right away this morning, when we came out of our separate bedrooms, I looked at my dad, who was pouring himself some caffbev in the kitchenette, and I got a strange feeling.

  My father’s always been a details guy. A dreamer, sure, but he’s always read a lot and loved to know things and tell us stuff about the world—he’s like a clearinghouse of information about books and history and animals and bug vectors and what have you. But when he glanced up at me from that caffbev, he didn’t look like a guy who would know any details at all. He smiled, but it was a loose, almost impersonal sort of smile. His mouth had a slackness to it.

  Also, the pupils of his eyes were dilated really huge and black.

  Which made me feel chilled.

  “So, um, Dad,” I asked, a little nervously, “how’re you feeling?”

  “It’s going really well,” he said, but he looked past me, not at me directly.

  “Yeah? Have you already … like, forgotten things?”

  “Forgotten … ?”

  “You know, because today is supposed to be the day when the forgetting begins,” I said. “It was in the training.”

  “We’re going to forget things,” he nodded.

  I was like, Ummm. Yeah.

  “But you haven’t yet, right?” I nudged. “You still know who I am, and all that.”

  “I know who you are.” He lifted his mug to drink. “You’re my little girl.”

  “Good job. A-plus,” I said, trying to make a light joke out of it.

  “You were born in a hospital with beds of tulips,” he went on, musing. But as he said this, he still wasn’t looking at me. He went over to a vase of purple flowers and touched one of the petals gently. “You were born in the night.”

  Now, there was nothing wrong with saying that. He said it in a nice way, on the fond side. It just didn’t sound like him, exactly.

  “When you were just a few months old,” he started again, “I said to her, Now, did you ever think we’d have such a lovely daughter? Such an amazing little kid … because when we were young, before you had to get the permits and all that, we never even thought about it. We didn’t want to have children, for a long time, because our spirits were broken. But then we changed our minds, you see. Your mother decided. She thought we could still have something of our own. Something to love and be loved by, in all the chaos descending. She said, Whatever the world is to us, maybe they’ll see it differently. There is the sky, after all. There’s always the sky. And they have a right to see it. The world deserves new eyes to behold it. That’s what she said to me, when we decided to have you. The world needs new eyes to behold it.”

  I was staring, because he’d never said that to me before.

  “Of course, too many people thought that, didn’t they? Billions too many … because the world didn’t need new eyes at all, did it? No eyes. No more. But maybe one day … the eye evolved more than once, after all. Rebirth is possible! Millions of years from now new creatures will walk these green hills … we think of that often, your mother and I. Who knows what new forms may evolve? Maybe there’ll even be another wave of mammals …”

  And then my father put down his mug of caffbev and began to sing.

  To sing. My dad. I vaguely remembered him singing, back when he made his own music, but not lately. Not since the tipping point.

  After the tipping point he’d never sung again.

  He sang in this deep, solemn voice.

  “And did those feet, in ancient times, walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy lamb of God … on England’s pleasant pastures seen? And did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, among these dark Satanic mills?”

  Sam came out of his room then, rubbing his eyes. But our dad didn’t stop.

  “Bring me my bow of burning gold; bring me my arrows of desire; bring me my spear, oh clouds unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire!”

  I remember practically the whole thing. I wrote it down right away.

  “Whoa, Dad,” said Sam, after my father stopped and was just standing there.

  “Your Uncle Den always loved that hymn,” explained my dad, musing. “It was his favorite. The poet William Blake. The sentiment was misplaced, of course … crusade mentality … but the song is still a fine one, don’t you think? Old William Blake himself. By God, sir. Yes. A great genius.”

  And he reached out for his drink.

  After that outburst he kind of settled into a resting cycle, absent-seeming. But that was how we started the morning of our Goodbye Day.

  I’m not going to write down the dull details of the group session—basically LaTessa telling us how to be nice to each other, how to forgive the effects of the pharma on our parents, how not to resent the changes we see in them because those changes are in aid of a greater good, namely the “peak emotional experience” of their Bountiful Passing.

  And her reminding us in no uncertain terms to please self-medicate generously if we found ourselves “creating barriers to loving.”

  But I’ll tell you what hap
pened as we left the room: Keahi handed Sam something. He slipped it into Sam’s robe pocket without anyone seeing. I didn’t notice it myself till we were back in the suite. And even then I didn’t have much time to get what it was or what was happening. I went down the hall to use the waste room, and then when I got there and was actually peeing, who should stick his head into the women’s section but Sam. Ick.

  Luckily it was just me between the curtains.

  “He says be very careful, that we can’t tell them anything about what we’re planning,” he hissed. “Nothing. Total radio silence. All we can do is follow the group’s guidance. There’s a Plan A and a Plan B. But no talking. None. Got it?”

  “But—”

  “And the rest that you need to know is, about Mom and Dad? They’ll try. But they can’t make promises. Keahi said to make sure you knew: it’s way harder with the contracts than with us.”

  And then before I could say anything he scrunched up the note. Which had been in his hand. And ate it.

  That kind of bamboo fiber was only ever good to eat for extinct black-and-white bears.

  “Following orders,” he said, chewing. And made a pained grimace as he swallowed.

  So that meant there was zero chance of getting my parents’ approval. Not that they would have given it anyway, but I’d been considering trying to sabotage their pharma or something so they might be more receptive.

  But no. It was too high-risk for the people in the camp, I got that—especially when I remembered how quickly my mom had ratted Sam out to service. All he’d done was go off-plan for a few measly hours. This was a lot bigger than that.

  For now, Sam had told me before he left the waste room, we had to act like everything was on track and keep saying goodbye.