Pills and Starships (11 page)

Wow.

After dinner, around ten p.m., there was a knock at the door of our suite. Mom and Dad were already in their sleep garments, and their cool-down pharms were making them practically nod off on the couch where they were reading, so I went and opened it.

First I was relieved, and then I was alarmed.

Because there was Sam (relief) with a corp worker on each side of him (alarm). These ones had name tags—uniforms and name tags, and faces like the side of our concrete-reinforced cliffs.

Big guys. Between them Sam looked very small.

He wore a facial expression that was trying for apology or obedience or something, but behind that I could see another emotion—I don’t know, triumph or pleasure or excitement. His eyes sparkled.

“We found him on the grounds,” said one of the craggy uniforms. His name tag read,
Rory
.

“Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Dad,” muttered Sam.

“Samson,” said my father, rising belatedly from the sofa.

“Oh, good,” said my mother, and she stood up too.

Their response time was long, and I noticed my mom’s brown eye makeup was a bit smeared. I wondered if she’d get all doddering and bleary as the sunset pharms took over. I really hope not.

“Have you seen the smallgolf course they have?” asked Sam, with childish glee. “It’s so totally cool and awesome!”

Clearly he was dialing up the kid thing for the benefit of Rory and his colleague. These days not all adults know how kids are supposed to act at different ages; they just don’t have enough experience with the last gen to know what’s normal for age nine compared to, say, age fourteen.

Of course, Sam hasn’t seemed much like a kid since before he was ten. I’m pretty sure I’d never heard him say
cool and awesome
anyway, even before then. That’s more the kind of gush I do.

LaTessa would never have fallen for the idiot disguise since she’d already seen him function at his real mental age. But maybe, I figured, these rock-faced guard types didn’t communicate with the feeling-believing VRs.

“I didn’t know you liked smallgolf,” said my dad. Instead of instantly seeing through Sam’s kindergartner act, as he would have even
days
ago, he seemed befuddled by the situation.

“Are you kidding?” replied Sam, and walked over to the sideboard to pour himself some electrolytes. “This course is rad! They have hologram olden-time players, you can play against them. Like famous golfers from the big-course days. There’s a robot man named Tiger!”

“Let’s make sure there’s no more going off-plan, okay, Samson?” Rory interjected sternly. “It causes inefficiencies. It’s hurtful to your parents and it’s extremely disruptive.”

“Sorry, guys,” said Sam, but at the same time he shrugged like he was too clueless to fully get the problem.

“We’ll keep him on a short leash from now on,” said my dad, half-jokingly.

Then Rory and his colleague did these little head bows and retreated. There was silence after the door clicked closed, with Sam glugging his drink down as though he was dying of thirst.

“Sam, dear,” said my mother, “we may be on heavier pharma doses than you are, but we’re not
completely
out of it. Are you really expecting us to believe you took off just to look at a golf course?”

“I’m sorry,” said Sam again, dropping the little kid façade. “And Nat, sorry to you too. Felt suffocated. I had to get some space.”

“But you
have
space,” said my dad. “It’s built into the system! Your own room—even your own balcony! We went over this in training, Sam. The importance of the schedule.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint,” answered Sam, a new stiffness in his voice. “What can I say? My bedroom didn’t feel like space to me. But you know what? Right this minute it’s not looking so bad. Tell you what: I’ll go in there now.”

And he went. And shut his door behind him.

My parents looked at each other, my mom sighed, and then they gave me their goodnight hugs and went into the master bedroom to sleep.

I headed to my own room, but I didn’t go to sleep. I waited. And sure enough, a few minutes later Sam slipped in. No knock. He closed my door softly behind him.

“The corp mikes the main room,” he whispered. “But not the bedrooms, they don’t have the manpower to listen in everywhere.”

“Mikes?” I blurted.

“Shh! They’re sensitive, though. Keep it to a whisper.”

“Are you saying they—they listen to our family? They listen in to what we say privately? In the suite?”

“They monitor the microphones if someone goes off-plan,” he whispered, sitting down next to me on the bed. “They don’t bother otherwise. But if you go off-plan you get flagged.”

“Really,” I said, probably a bit coldly. “Thanks a bunch, then. And how did you find
that
out?”

“Keahi told me.”

“Keahi?”

“The dude from the massage pool. His name means
flames
. In Hawaiian.”

“So you get your top-secret info from a masseur.”

“He’s not just a masseur,” said Sam, shaking his head. “But listen. My list is gone. You have it, right?”

I thought about denying it, because I was annoyed at him. But that would be too mean.

“I have it,” I said, and went to the closet to get it out of the pocket I’d stuffed it in. “I couldn’t make head or tail of it.”

“Something I’m researching,” he said evasively, and tucked it away. “I’ll tell you if it pans out. Meantime, I need your help. I really do, Nat. This is so important.”

“My help with what?”

“First I have to swear you to secrecy.”

“Are you kidding?”

“I mean it, Nat. I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

He was so close to me I could see the white ends of his eyelashes in the candlelight and a faint orange trace of ’lyte juice on his upper lip. It made me think:
He’s still just a kid!

But I could see how big a deal this was to him. Whatever
this
was.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly.

“We have three hours of Personal Time tomorrow morning. Three whole hours—it’s their final healing session. That’s why it’s so long. It’s the biggest chunk of free time this whole week, and the last one before Goodbye Day. So I want you to come with me. But the rule is, no questions. Not till we’re out of range.”

“Range?”

“Away from the hotel. Please, Nat. I’ve never cared about
any single thing
in my life as much as I care about you coming with me.”

“But you’ll bring me back here in three hours? You promise? Because I don’t want to upset them. I don’t want to do anything like what you did today, Sam.”

“We’ll be back,” he nodded.

So that’s the plan.

After he left my room I went out onto the balcony. I stood looking up at the constellations and thinking how lame “To the Stars” was compared to the real thing. Then I thought about last night’s show, “Ancient Oceans.” And it occurred to me that, as great as that show was, the real thing was probably a million times greater.

For a second that scared me. For a split-second I was on the edge of a terrible cliff. I think maybe I got a glimpse of the world how Mom and Dad may see it—this landscape of beauty that’s been lost.

Then I grabbed hold of the balcony’s railing and I was back in a normal mode again. I concentrated on the solid, familiar feel of the railing against the palms of my hands. I said to myself, there’s history, sure—there’s always going to be history. There always has been, there always will be. Things are always changing. And sure, a lot of that old world is gone. But leaving is what alive things do.

Out there among the stars there are probably a million worlds being born and dying. Just like people used to be—just like the animals were. Before the being-born part stopped.

This is just
one
world, I thought. It’s not all of them. It’s not all that there is.

I thought of the butterfly Jean wanted us to be, all flitting between the flowers on its light feathery wings, blah blah. Okay, the way she said it to us was corpspeak and weak. But still, I can’t deny she has a point. Things die, things go extinct, that much is true, it’s just the price of living. Only a rock stays the same.

And who would want to be a rock?

Boring.

It’s normal, I said to myself. If you’re not a rock you’re lucky. But if you’re not a rock you also have to pay for it.

D
AY
T
HREE

R
EMEMBERING
& A
PPRECIATING

Theme of the Day: Lasting Togetherness

I’m up early today, so early the others are still sleeping. I brought this journal with me to a bench on the cliffwalk.

Some of the benches have awnings and I chose one of them. You can only see the ocean from where I’m sitting—I mean if you look straight ahead there’s nothing but blue over the line of tufty grass at the edge of the cliff—but if you walk closer to the edge and peer down you can make out the concrete and metal architecture of the seawall. I wish I hadn’t looked over; I wish I still had the illusion that the bluffs were natural. Because it’s nice: hummingbirds buzz around, diving into the red flowers and feeders.

The sun’s just come up and I can see boats sailing in. Passenger-boats are powered by wind and sun, but not the corp and military transport boats—some of those use massive batteries and have no sails at all. They’re big and stay far off the coasts, mostly, dispatching pontoon boats to bring in batches of supplies. On the way over, my dad told me about big luxury ships they used to have for people to vacate in—giant and white and towering like miniature cities. They had really bad carbon footprints, them and the jet planes and the fossil-fuel cars.

I will admit it: I can’t decide what you, my spacegirl reader, already know and what you have no idea about. So sometimes I probably tell more than you need to hear, and sometimes I probably tell less. Sorry.

I’m rocking some moodpharms today, nothing too strong. It’s not the absolute min dose, but it’s the second-least you can take. I was going to dial it up further and then something about Mom’s blurry eye makeup last night turned me off.

Personally, I don’t want to take the risk of becoming some kind of tottering wreck.

But there’s another risk too, because this afternoon’s going to be heavy. Before our field trip we have a session for all four of us, cheesily called “Togetherness Memories.” The hardcore emoting session comes tomorrow on so-called Goodbye Day, but we’re supposed to prepare for it today by watching old homevids. My dad helped a corp worker run a bunch of family footage together, pick music to set it to and all that, and we’re going to spend an hour watching them in one of the hearing rooms, after our Day Three excursion is over.

Talk about tearjerkers.

And later this morning, of course, in Personal Time, Sam’s making me hang with him.

People are up and passing by my bench now, walking along the clifftop with their parasols. There’s a lady with a curly white dog—a robodog obviously—and a group of cottontops jerkily race-walking, the goofiest sport ever invented.

And I just saw Keali or Keahi or whatever his name is, the worker Sam’s apparently made friends with, pushing a cart loaded with drywipes toward one of the pool areas. He smiled at me and half-saluted.

So he’s cute. No biggie.

The bells are ringing in the clocktowers—they have those kinds of quaint touches here, nice chiming bells to call out every hour from these tall, thin white towers with bulbs on top that jut out of the hotel buildings—which means I have to go in.

Fruit smoothies and corn toast for breakfast.

I don’t know what to write first. Let’s see.

Well, my parents went off to their healing. And the first surprising thing that happened after that was, Sam came into my bedroom and gave me boots.

Yep. Boots.

They didn’t fit exactly right, they were a little big and rubbed along the heels, but he said I had to wear them anyway. They’re these solid, heavy boots of a type I’ve never seen before—really thick soles and a lot of ankle support. He said he almost ruined his sneaks yesterday, and that if he hadn’t been able to borrow someone else’s at the last minute he would have tracked mud and ash into the hotel suite.