Pills and Starships Page 4

  The management doesn’t want random unknown starlings or doves—they could have parasites, could bring in one of the flus or malarial spinoffs, migrating just like people do, with the heat waves and micro­climates and changing ecologies.

  There are also, in these courtyard gardens, more exotic birds, beyond the sparrows and pigeons: some peacocks and peahens, a moody emu, a bevy of fat quail. The groundskeepers bring in new animals now and then to mix it up a little. They’re my favorite part of where we live, and I go out for my sun time to the maximum allowed because I love to follow them around whenever I spot them.

  After a couple of floors with a sky view you drop into the canopy, the trees opening themselves to you with their complex curving architecture and green hollows. There are squirrel nests there—or sorry, chipmunk nests—and elaborate, well-populated birdhouses, even the odd raccoon. Sam claims he saw a porcupine once that sat right on a branch, huddled like a spiky ball. Looking too wide to balance there.

  Down through the green canopy, down along the tree trunks, and finally we landed facing the landscaped rock gardens, the fountains and splashing waterfalls of perfectly reclaimed sewage. At ground level the courtyard suffers from a minor mouse problem, and stepping off the elevator onto the patio we saw little beige mice skitter away from our feet.

  They sneak in for the birdseed.

  “What a nice evening,” said my mother, and we looked up dutifully at the fading bands of red and yellow in the western sky.

  One thing we do have, in the new world, is beautiful sunsets.

  They’re on their way back from the cliffwalk now. I see them coming up the path again, so close they’re almost beneath me—I see the three circles of their shiny white umbrellas.

  We have our first counseling session next, then spa treatments, then drinks and dinner in the Twilight Lounge. It’s the flagship room of the resort, which calls itself the Twilight Island Acropolis.

  And that’s another thing you wouldn’t know from outer space, o astronaut reader. This kind of resort hotel is partitioned. It’s not a contract-only venue, although there are some like that, only for contracts and survivors. No, parts of this resort are multipurpose and others are only for us. Don’t get me wrong, all resort guests have been carefully vetted for their codes—no one has to carry their handface here to transmit them. We’re all preapproved for socializing with each other, just in case, but service likes things organized. They don’t want a chaotic mingling; they don’t like humans milling around loosely.

  The Twilight Lounge is a contract-only area.

  We have a map of the hotel—it came inside the Coping Kit—and all the colors just for us are shaded in pale lavender. We can go into the other parts too, but people who don’t have contracts can’t come into the lavender areas. So you won’t see newlyweds in the lounge, or casual vacationers. Of course, vacationers are only the superrich these days or people with high connex. But some extremely affluent newlyweds buy travel permits, and Hawaii’s Big Island is still popular with them.

  Anyway, I haven’t been to the Twilight Lounge yet. I’ve only been to the lobby, the waste room down the hall, and this suite.

  Half the time I feel like throwing my arms around both of my parents and not letting go, the other half of the time I feel pretty distant. Even a little bit repelled.

  The handbook in the Coping Kit has whole sections on the psych of Final Weeks. They claim that repulsion is caused by resent­ment, along with some “feeling-detaching mechanics.”

  I can believe it. The worst I’ve felt so far was when Sam and I picked them up at the condo to leave for the Port of Seattle. They’d helped us to move out by then, to this group home for survivors who aren’t quite old enough to live alone. It’s where we’re going to live starting when we get back, after the boat trip home. We’ll be there for a year and a half, until I turn eighteen. If I’ve got certified by then for work phase, I’ll get matched with a corporate and take on Sam’s guardianship as a wage earner. I’m fairly cool with that part of things, because we’ll meet new people in the transition home—new people our own age. It’s not terrible to contemplate.

  We have to be in big rooms of bunkbeds, separated by sex, and it’s nothing fancy, there are plenty of chores and obligations, but my only real friend in our old building had to move out not long ago and I miss having flesh friends. The ones on face are good, I’m glad to chat and vidconf with them and everything, but still it’s not the same.

  Our former condo was completely bare—nothing was left of where we’d all lived for several years. The only things my parents were bringing with them, besides clothes and mementos we needed for Final Week, were bed­rolls, tooth-cleaning equipment, and some instant caffbev. Their luggage stood in a neat row against the wall, small cases packed with lightweight toiletries and clothing.

  The sight of that luggage made me feel like the stomach was falling out of me. Like gravity was sucking me into a hole in the floor.

  We already knew rationally that they’d gotten rid of everything they owned—we’d helped them to sell some of it and donate other stuff, and then the older and more precious things they’d carefully given to us; they even classified the items and filed them. But it was still a shock to see the sterile emptiness of those rooms.

  Another family was moving in later that day. A family, I thought while I looked at the luggage, that was staying alive.

  At least for the moment.

  “Well,” said my mother perkily, turning back to cast a glance at the clean and bare living room as we were filing out the front door, “goodbye, everything.”

  One thing that’s a relief for adults is, we don’t have babies around anymore. Brand-new humans are something you never see these days, not in our country anyway, or at least not in the rich parts, which we call the First—no one would wish this spinning-out world on them.

  It’s not even legal to have them, now.

  The no-baby thing started when the last tipping point came, right after Sam was born. That means you won’t find anyone around here any younger than Sam. Sam and I are what some people call the last generation. There are these labs—banks they call them—where they keep eggs and sperm frozen, in case things get better but by then it turns out we’re all too old or can’t have kids anymore. I know, it’s kind of grisly. I browsed that they keep the eggs and sperm in huge rooms, active refrigerators with a major footprint, not the low-end, passive wall-set fridges people use for food at home.

  In the poor parts of the world (like I said, we call the rich parts the First, and the rest is where the poors live) the facenews says they keep on having babies. Some of the countries try not to, but still the babies are arriving. We send those countries charity shipments of pills and stuff—the corporates and houses of godbelief both brag on doing it—but it doesn’t always get where it’s going, often it’s sold or stolen.

  On the sailboat out here, Sam kept to his bunk a lot, seasick and also still angry. My mother and father spent their time holding hands, lying beside each other on deck chairs, and reading or watching the ocean. I did a little of that, but more often I wandered the boat and talked to the other passengers.

  It was exciting to have so many brand-new peeps around, all of them with different styles, ways of talking, even smells. The last time I’d met so many new people at once was when we moved, under the last traject, to our new complex. It was kind of awesome. Some mornings I would wake up basically swelling with excitement at all the faces I was going to see, the mannerisms they would be using, the funny little habits people had that I hadn’t seen before. Habits you only notice in the flesh, like one guy pulls on his earlobe when he talks and there’s a woman who laughs whenever she says an opinion.

  There were a couple of people I liked best: a crewman named Firth who was funny and rude and made remarks about the other crewmembers behind their backs; a pretty Asian-Am woman named Xing. Xing was always nice to me, and very interested in hearing about my family. I wasn’t used to peo
ple being interested.

  When I got tired of talking to new peeps—because it really took it out of me, even though I loved it; my cheeks and mouth would ache sometimes from smiling and talking—I used the publicface in the passenger rec room to keep informed on news and facefriends. And at mealtimes we met together to eat (even Sam, once he got over the seasickness) in the boat’s cafeteria.

  The captain had a twisted humorsense and always kept the wallscreens tuned to weather as we sat there and ate our meals. Usually that’s thought to be in pretty bad taste—in the complex at home it was practically verboten. Screens would always play vids or scenes, never news or weather.

  So in the background, as we ate, scrolled daily lists of updates on sea rise, tsunamis, hurricanes, heat waves and droughts, crop deaths, methane and carbon eruptions, famine fatality totals, bug vectors and paths, certified plant and animal extinctions.

  Sam and I weren’t that bothered by it, it’s just the weather to us, but to my parents it’s not. My mother says weather is something else, weather means how warm or cold it will be, whether it’s going to rain or be clear all day, windspeed, humidity. (When she says that, Sam and I kind of roll our eyes, like: Weird. Boring.) She says that’s what “the weather” used to mean, that what we have now isn’t weather, it’s chaos description.

  Anyway, we often ate in silence, with my parents depressed by the screens and trying not to look and the passengers at the other tables making small talk or arguing about celebrity model spokesmen or popular new trajects.

  Trajectories—trajects for short—are subsets of models. They tell how things are supposed to go down in particular locations or for certain groups or commodities—for instance, the eastern seaboard has a traject, or Toronto, or corn crops, or bird flu. Trajects are the “applied specifics of a model,” as my mother puts it. Phew.

  It was at mealtimes, when they put all of us together, that I noticed the different groups on the boat. There were the smooth-looking people from the First, contracts mostly and a few megarich newlyweds; the crew and the cooking and cleaning staff, more hardscrabble in appearance; and then some obviously-not-rich passengers, almost an underclass, who reminded me of facefriends I had in Indonesia and Singapore. Indonesians have had it hard, ever since this big tsunami killed a quarter-million people about two hundred years ago. I heard about it from my friends and browsed about it too, mostly on disasterpage, which keeps a tally that’s updated every few minutes.

  The Indonesians are the opposite of the chosen people. Or maybe they are the chosen—chosen for suffering. I browsed that’s even part of being chosen, in some godbeliefs anyway. You have to suffer to be special! The Indonesians must be superspecial, then, because they get one mass-death event, then another. The waves, quakes, and bugs just keep coming. It’s gotten so bad that, like with Bangladesh, people make mean jokes about the whole country.

  I know, wise cosmonaut: flat lame.

  I made friends with some of the passengers but the Indonesian-looking men, most of whom wore the same outfit—some kind of uniform, I guess, like police or medics—would never talk to me, even when I tried to tell them about my cohort of facefriends from that area. They shook their heads and claimed not to speak American.

  My dad said maybe they were strangerhates.

  We’re a melting-pot poster family: part white people, part slave-trade African, part extinct Seminole. Sam’s lighter-skinned than I am; he looks more white, where I look like nothing or everything. Whatev. People don’t judge each other based on colors or sex orients that much these days, which used to be a major bad habit. That part’s pretty prominent in the tutorials, because the corps are proud to boast how we got over it.

  But what we have is strangerhate, which is just people who are so afraid of anyone they don’t already know that they won’t talk to them, period. People migrate so much, and everything is up in the air, and sometimes people’s handfaces can’t read each other’s vaccine codes, and then people get scared and even violent, keeping strangers from touching or breathing them. So now we have xenos. Some of them don’t ever want you to come close. To show that they feel that way, to stop any approach, they wear these creepy sunglasses that turn their whole faces dark. No one but xenos wears those things, so it’s always a sign to stay away.

  Anyway, the trip felt long because it was always the same routine: all you saw was the boat and the sea and the sky. Clouds and airtox gave us a whole sky full of purple and pink glamour, so at sunset we’d gather on the deck with drinks and spectate boringly.

  I say “boringly” because we’d do nothing but look, but actually I liked those times. They were like no times I’d ever had before.

  I’d never been to a place with so much water and so much air. I loved the colors of both of them, and the sense of eternity.

  One day there was a brief alarm when the crew thought a tsunami was coming, but that obviously never panned out since I’m here writing this. Way out to sea, tsunamis aren’t tall like they are when they finally hit the coasts.

  The only different thing was passing through the Great Pacific Trash Vortex, where the eternal oil plastics swirl in the middle of the sea. It was so huge it took us three days to sail past a small edge of it. Sam actually came out of bed for the first day of passing the Vortex and stood with me at the rail and looked at the garbage through a scope. You could see individual pieces of it, some of them really old—things that aren’t made these days because of carbon and poisonous dyes. It was a field of primary colors, bright yellows and reds and royal electric blues and stark white.

  Milk jugs, my dad showed us, from when they drank cow’s milk before raising cows was criminal; bicycles you wouldn’t think would float, huge fishing nets cast over the jumbles of smaller debris from when they sent huge trawlers out to catch schools of wild ocean fish to eat.

  And once we saw a brown inflatable pony wearing a purple saddle with flowers printed on it.

  They say the Vortex is bigger than South America.

  I think what put my parents over the edge was another trip they’d taken, a light-rail weekender to the place where my father grew up. One place for all his childhood! His family lived there, in the same house, for twenty years, he told me. Amazing.

  It wasn’t a coastal town in the strict sense—it wasn’t right on the beach—but it was on a river delta, maybe twenty miles from where the true coast used to be. And so, when the first storm surges came that seawalls couldn’t stop, the town got a wave of coastal refugees. Wave after wave came after that, though most of the people didn’t stay. Back then they were migrating to places like Ogallala, with fertile land or thick forests. If you look at an old map-animation morph you can see the masses moving away from the coasts, inward and upward from New York and Florida, from Southern California and the ruined cities of the desert—Las Vegas and Phoenix, say. The animations look like storms or vast, sky-darkening flocks of birds.

  If there were any such flocks.

  But we’re the only birds that darken those skies now.

  Sometimes, at home, I take a mood softener, sit at my screen, and gaze at the map morphs dreamily. You can customize them to show whatever details you want—the continent shrinking as the oceans rise, plus the massive migrations, say. And you can filter the migrations by category, a game I like to play when I have nothing else to do. Where did Latinos go? you can ask the morph, and choose a color for the migrating Latinos. Where did the women go? and you can make the women pink. Where did the whites end up, the blacks, the Jewish, or the Catholics?

  Then you can sit back and watch the swirling trails of color.

  They can’t keep such good records anymore, because of the chaos. So what you’re looking at is pretty much historical stuff. But still, it gives you a sense.

  I also like to watch the building of the seawalls. You see the swamping of Cape Cod, which happened too fast for walls, and the swallowing up of the Florida Keys: ditto. Islands all over the oceans get smaller and smaller, contracting to t
he size of pinheads and then vanishing—the famous canaries in the coal mine, the super-early casualties like Micronesia and Tuvalu. Or you can zoom way out and watch the planet rotate, see the surges of ocean that followed the melting of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica.

  There’s something lovely about it, lovely like Eno or Mozart, yet—especially if I haven’t had my pharms—it can be pretty sad. I didn’t know those places, but once, after I watched a morph, I browsed some pics of them the way they used to be and I got way teary.

  Anyway, my father’s hometown had been leveled by all the waves of refugee camps. Nothing was left of the play­grounds he swung and climbed in when he was little or the leafy cemetery where his parents were buried. All that was gone—even the precious trees, cut down uselessly for fuelwood it was a major crime to burn anyway. The grassy meadows had been trampled down into dirt and the whole town had turned to tent cities.

  His baby brother, my uncle Den, died awhile back in a DIY. He didn’t have his own kids and hated the service corps.

  Sam and I were sad when Den went, we barely knew him but we both had this one memory of a visit: Den took us out of our complex for a walk through the code zone—a safe zone made mostly of sidewalks, between the complexes, where everyone’s updated on vaccines—and showed us pictures on his handface as we strolled. Where there were just regular parts of other complexes butting up against ours—mostly parts of condo buildings or some­times a small veg-garden—he called up an olden-time city map on his handface. It was a sat map showing real photographs, from both the air and ground, of the olden-time city.

  “Here there was a museum,” he would say. “See? It looked like this. Yes: stone elephants! And they had a whole huge room with scenes from an Egyptian tomb—I once came here on a school trip and saw a real mummy. Even a mummified cat. It was creepy but I loved it. And over here, right where the outdoor waste room is, there used to be beautiful trees and in the middle of them was a library.” He went on and on like that, showing us where things used to be before the tipping point, when people didn’t need codes—before the new bugs and the new regime when people mingled freely.