Pills and Starships (13 page)

And even zoos don’t have sea turtles.

Sea turtles are supposed to be all gone.

“So why us?” I asked. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the turtles. “How come they let
us
in here, if it’s so secret?”

“I have an inside source,” he said.

And finally I looked up, and there, standing a couple of feet away, was Keahi. He had his arms crossed and was just looking at me and smiling slightly with his mouth closed.

I almost didn’t recognize him without the beige robe. Instead he was wearing this dull, sage-green outfit that matched the Quonset hut and the tents.

“He’s been close to us the whole time,” said Sam.

“You were never out of my sight,” said Keahi.

I realized I’d never heard him say anything, up till then. He had a deep gravelly voice.

“Okay, so that’s creepy,” I said.

He was attractive though and it made me feel abnormal. I should have been more creeped out than I was, if you want to know the truth; I already have corporate watching me, I don’t need any more spies.

“It seems like we just walked in here,” said Sam, “but there were people surveilling us all the way. They have to.”

“We do have a lot of surveillance,” said Keahi, almost apologetically. “We have to.”

“But—is it illegal for you to live here? I mean, where do the corporates you work for think you live? They know you have to live
somewhere
.”

“Well, there’s onsite rooms for contractors,” answered Keahi. “In the resort. But as for our families, they think they all live in a poor coastal complex a couple miles down the cliff from where the Twilight is. That’s where they get most of their local employees.”

“Then—why would they even care if you guys have a camp here? How would it hurt them?”

Sam and Keahi glanced at each other sidelong, like maybe I was a mental challenge.

“First off, harboring wildlife is illegal . . .” said Keahi.

“But that’s not the service corps’ focus, that’s up to the army police,” I said.

“One and the same, actually. And in the second place, they look at this island as their own. They don’t care that we lived here for centuries before they bought up the coastal real estate.”

“They hardly let anyone in, Nat. We’re lucky,” put in Sam.

“So then,” I said stubbornly, “why us?” I still wasn’t quite believing all the hush-hush stuff. It seemed like little boys playing pretend, to me.

And then this older woman stepped out of the trees, an older woman with silver-gray hair, which was a new one on me—I thought they got rid of the gray-hair gene a long time ago. I was staring at that weird silver hair as she spoke.

“Because your brother reached out to us and we can use more people,” she said softly. “Hi, Nat. Hi, Sam. My name is Kate.”

“She’s one of our leaders,” said Keahi. “And also, my mother.”

“Oh. Hi,” I said.

“We need young people, Nat. So we did some monitoring, which I hope you’ll forgive us for when you get to know us and why we do what we do. We did some background checks and held one of our councils. It’s not a democracy here—at least not the kind you’re used to—we vote on real stuff more. Beliefs. Actions. And here’s the situation: we think this place might be the best opportunity for you.”

“Need young people for
what?”
I asked. The whole trip was starting to make me nervous. Plus it was getting late, and I worried we’d keep my parents waiting.

“Why don’t you follow me,” she said.

We went back out the turtle gate, behind a row of tents at one edge of the encampment, and down a flagstone path in the dirt to a low building—not a Quonset but a bamboo shack with a pointy thatch roof. There were flower boxes in the windows (open, no plexi) and a mat in front of the door.

Before we went in Kate handed us these white fibrous masks and told us to wear them over our mouths.

“They’re more vulnerable than we are,” she said, mysteriously. She knocked on the door, and it opened. She turned to us and raised a finger to her lips, then stood back to let us in. Sam went first, and then me, and then Keahi.

It was just natural light inside, light streaming in from those big windows, and there was a soft colorful carpet on the floor. And then there was a row of miniature bamboo beds with odd vertical bars on the sides.

And in the beds were very small people with heads that were way too big for their bodies. It looked like almost a deformity. They had barely any noses either, just tiny flat nubs. They had round, soft faces and bald heads.

In other words, babies.

“They breed those too,” whispered Sam, while I stood there staring.

There were four of them, and they were asleep and not moving, but then one of their small, fattish feet would jerk a little, or an arm would move.

I mean, since Sam was born, when I was only two myself so I don’t really remember it, I’ve never seen one. Except on face, of course.

Then one of them woke up. The only way you could tell was that the eyes opened. They were deep blue and the white part was completely clear, like I’ve never seen—no bloodshot veins or anything.

And he or she looked at me, just gazing.

It was surprisingly cool. The thing had a kind of inner glow, or something.

“Well, not breed, technically,” said Keahi’s mother, laughing. “Of course, we agree with the corps that there are too many unwanted babies out there already. But here they’re not unwanted. We just started this part of our work recently, when babies began coming to us from the poor parts. They’re smuggled out of where they’re born and brought to us; we take them in and raise them. And there will be more. If we have more people, like you, to help us nurture them. You’re older, of course, but you’re not Old Worlders, as we are. You’re New Worlders. Children
like
other children. And failing that, other young people. They’re happiest when they can play with, and learn from, their peers.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said, and stepped closer.

The woken-up baby did a kind of almost-smile deal.

“Are we—am I allowed to touch it?” I asked.

“Her,” said Kate, still smiling. “Sure. Here, why don’t you give her this,” and she handed me a bottle with white stuff in it.

I took the bottle and leaned over the bed, which, with the bars on it, seemed like an infant prison. The baby reached out and grabbed the bottle and started sucking on it.

It was too weird. The fat-cheeked little human really got a serious mouthhold on that thing. I couldn’t have torn it away if I’d wanted to.

I touched her arm-skin. It was unbelievably soft.

“Why don’t we go outside again and let the little ones sleep,” said Kate. “We’ll leave you to it, Aviva.”

Aviva was the nurse person, the one guarding the babies. She smiled at us as we left.

Long story short, Kate sat us down and talked to us in her soft, level voice, with Keahi watching the clock to make sure Sam and I could still get back on time and not raise more corp-worker eyebrows. Meanwhile, an old Japanese-looking gardener guy in a straw hat brought fresh fruit on a platter—slices of mango for each of us.

It was far and away the best-tasting thing that ever touched my tongue. I’m not kidding. Kind of distracting, because as I was eating this wild, amazing food unlike anything I’d ever tasted before, and freaking out a little, she was talking to us about some heavy issues.

I can’t write all of it down. I thought about not writing down any of it. Because what if a corp rep found it?

So I wear this journal everywhere I go now. I keep it in a bag I never put down, even while I’m sleeping. It never leaves my body. I keep a candle and matches in the pouch too, so I can burn it, if need be.

For now I’ll just say this: they want us to come live with them. They want us to never get on that boat again.

And it’s crazy, I know. But there’s this one thing that they have that no other people do—at least no
adults
I’ve ever met.

A future.

We made it back to the hotel just in time, and only because Keahi led us out again and it went a lot faster downhill, with him in front, than it had uphill with Sam.

Our parents didn’t notice anything weird, at least not as far as I could tell. When we got back to the room they’d left us a message on the board: they were in the shower rooms down the hall, freshening up for lunch. That meant they’d be back any second, since the luxury showers here take up to four minutes, so we used our sinks—the only plumbing we have in the actual suite—to wipe down a little more carefully. We’d already wet our hair at the hose when we stopped off to clean and put away our boots; we had to look like we’d been swimming. Now we lathered up with scented soap in my room too, in case we still had any eau-de-jungle about us.

We checked each other over and agreed to talk again during Personal Time tonight, then went out and sat all docile on the living room couches waiting for them, me with my journal and Sam with his old book about flies.

Next was lunch in the Waterfall Room, where we ate spicy gluten wraps at a small table surrounded by these water features planted with spider plants and flowers. There were red-and-blue tropical birds squawking and flapping around near the ceiling. The Waterfall Room’s not lavender so there were tourists there too—couples on honeymoon holding hands over the tables, probably ignoring the unromantic signs on the artificial rocks that said,
Reclaimed Sewage Grade C Do Not Drink.

Like anyone would drink from a fake waterfall anyway. Did they think that, without the signs, people would just lean over and suck it up?

The pools are reclaimed sewage too, of course, but at least it’s Grade B. Also, they keep it pretty clean in there, like in the rest of the resort, though I did notice the odd splash of parrot crap on those hollow rocks.

Anyway, the mood was pleasant, more or less. I liked watching the noncontract people, living their regular lives. And I hadn’t taken any new pharms because I was still thrilled and excited from the morning; I felt jangly, but in a good way. Everything was in flux suddenly—as though, for the very first time in my life, not everything had been decided for me.

And then lunch was over and it was time to watch our homevids.

They put us in this pitch-black room, which I sleuthed was supposed to be an imitation of an old theater from the mid-20th c., though quite a bit smaller. It was the custom back then to watch movievids in big strangergroups, before crowds of random people were a bug danger. I think there must have been a godbelief temple aspect to those cineplexes, because their rooms were dark and you weren’t allowed to speak, and all the attention was focused on a massive screen up at the front, where images of beautiful people were blown up all perfect and a couple stories tall. The cineplexes had supercooled air, my father says, and everyone sat respectfully, like for a godbelief worship, and listened without speaking to the booming sound systems.

We didn’t look at each other because it was so dark. But now and then if I glanced sideways I could see the light from the screen flickering on Sam or my dad or my mom, see them in profile as they gazed.

The vids themselves were your standard family stuff, nothing shocking, except I’d never seen most of them before. My dad and the corp tech had done a good job—the music was up-tempo for most of the hour, and there were scenes of us from different stages of life. The twist on it was, it started with the most recent memories and then it went backward from there. So the first scenes we saw were from this year and last, me and Sam talking over the dinner table as Dad held the camera, the two of us decorating a birthday present for my mom, and then we got younger and younger, till we were little kids again.

There were the usual occasions—parties and holidays, guests who I didn’t know from Adam anymore. Scenes of little kids filing into our condo, each showing his or her codes at the camera and smiling goofily. There were family trips—we never took a big one like this before but we would go, once a year, a couple of hours away on a bus or something, or do an overnight on a boat. My father was something called an insurance manager they used to have, I guess there used to be corps that ensured other corps didn’t lose all their money. But on his own time he played music and stuff like that. After insurance ended he went into model marketing, selling models to large entities—basically promoting them.

My mother was good at all kinds of applied
and
brainy things, she studied risk and science and then went to work as a chemist for a pharmacorp, before she got depressed and quit. Yep, ironic. My father used to tell me privately that she quit everything then. The only thing that kept her okay was deciding to look at things a simple way, “focusing on a single point,” as my dad said. So she accepted a simple model instead of using her brain anymore and tried hard not to think of the large, only the small and what was right in front of her.

It was one day at a time after that, he said, always one day at a time.

We also had a small family legacy from generations ago when, believe it or not, one of our ancestors was a rap-music dude. I’m not kidding. He had a gangsta rap album that sold zillions of copies but he was mostly a businessman. When my parents were prepping me to deal with money stuff last month, they told me that. He left us actual
gold
. I never knew before.