Pills and Starships (26 page)

Sam cried when he showed that message to me. The mother had liked to read to him. He was about ten then, I think. Soon after that he began really learning about interface, hacking corporate prop and browsing rebel sites and getting really interested in how the world worked.

Anyway, I thought about Sam crying as Xing and I trucked up the hill—I didn’t like thinking of that but I couldn’t help it. The trail was harder going now because of the rain. Water was pouring down the edges of the trodden part of it, collecting in gullies like little brown streams, turbulent and fast-moving. Those got deeper and faster until the force of the water washed parts of the path away, and sometimes we had to get off it and bushwhack through the trees because the path itself was too slippery. The path seemed to draw water toward it, and you had to move out of its way.

I got scraped on top of the bruises I already had, and once I slipped and tore the skin off one knee beneath my camo pants, but I kept on going and didn’t mention it—I knew it was minor compared to what we were dealing with, even though it hurt constantly and the pain nagged at me. There were people behind us and ahead of us, and sometimes the ones behind would pass because I was so slow. They were stronger, the rebels, from living out where they did. I admired their toughness—it was a kind of good all to itself, a kind of integrity that seemed to shine out of them and be worthy of envy.

I wondered if I would lose my softness over time and grow muscles and abilities, learn how to tie knots or fix tech or grow vegetables—if I’d become like them, if I kept living here.

If I kept living.

Because it was a Cat Six, roaring toward us across the purple-black sky.

They didn’t even have Sixes before the last century. The worst storm category they had before the Greenland ice-sheet melt was Fives, and even those were extremely rare. They had to invent a whole new system for classifying storms, in fact, and throw away the old one. Sixes, at their greatest extent, can be the size of a country. They can take out entire coastlines. I’ve browsed about Sixes that turned a thousand miles of lived-on shoreline into oil-slicked mudflats, Sixes that caused nuclear plant meltdowns and left radiation plumes firing into the sky like poisonous fountains for years after the rain and wind had died down. Some of the most notorious Sixes have carried half a million people out to sea.

And here we were, on a fairly small island in the middle of the ocean. I told myself to face facts, that this was extremely dangerous. Maybe we wouldn’t make it, in the end, and I should be like a heroine on face, looking death squarely in the eye.

We will survive
, I said to myself instead. At least for me, it didn’t work to dream of being a dead hero. I talked to myself about life. I said these mantras in my head, things with a rhythm that let me keep marching.
We will survive. We will survive. One foot and then the next.

I thought of space, all around us and on and on until the end of the universe, or past the end of the universe to whatever’s beyond that. And how the Earth must seem so small, from way out there; the storms must look almost pretty, if you’re seeing them from beyond the stratosphere. Anything can look beautiful from far enough away.

Like on a wallscreen, where vast landscapes are neat and contained and nothing but a nice picture.

Rotate, rotate. Swirl, swirl.

We made it into the lava tube, Xing and I and some stragglers with wheelbarrows and some baby goats they herded in at the tail end, just before the full force of the storm hit. The goats smelled unlike anything I’ve ever smelled before. I don’t even have words for it. They really have a stench to them. No offense to those dudes; they were cute in a way, but it was more important that they stank. I’m sure I could get used to it—they say you can get used to any smells if you live with them long enough, that people live in dung heaps and don’t notice it, etc. Xing told me the older goats are even worse.

The only thing I’d ever smelled before that even faintly reminded me of the goatstench was at a schoolmeet once where we got to go to an olden farm, a historical reconstruction of when real animals (other than fish in fish farms) were raised to be eaten. Those schoolmeets only happened once a year, so I always remembered them—a whole group of us together not on face but in the flesh. I was young then and couldn’t stop staring at the exhibit of chickens, these funny weirdos strutting around like they were mega-important. I remember how strong it all smelled, how unlike life in the complex, and I remember wondering if olden farmers used to wear nose plugs.

Still, it wasn’t anywhere close to the goatstink.

We wouldn’t feel the storm’s force ourselves, exactly, because we would keep on walking for hours, up and up and up—sometimes on stairs built into the lava tube, where it was narrow and steep, and sometimes just winding through the dark with only a few stray lights to guide us, bobbing and winking ahead, so that I often felt half-blind and stumbled into Xing’s heels.

I had plenty of time to mull over what she’d told me—how all over the world the corps were murdering innocent people, how they were making war on them, just mowing them down by the hundreds of thousands to slash the planet’s carbon footprint. Something lodged in me as I walked, a kind of solid grief that felt like it changed the contours of my bones.

This was the most important thing I had ever learned, I realized.

In a way, it was the
only
thing I’d ever learned.

When we finally got where we were going, we still didn’t feel the storm. We could hear it as a faint rush, though, through these small holes somewhere in the system that let in oxygen from the outside. And somehow we could sense it, or at least I could, as though my whole body was paused, waiting for an impact.

And that was how it would be for more than a day, as it turned out. With only the sounds of the wind and the rain, the sound of a massive but muffled roaring, we would pass the storm tucked away in a vast, dark cave, a lava cave whose black walls were not flat but bulging and wrinkled. It was a cave lit with all kinds of lamps the camp people had brought in over time, old-fashioned lamps that ran on gas, lamps that had batteries, solar lamps, lamps that were candles, lamps you powered by winding—all these different kinds of light, white and yellow and orange and red, some bright and others dim.

We clustered there, sitting or kneeling on the folded and bumpy lava floor, some people lying on blankets, others perched on crates or folding chairs they’d carried up with them. There were hundreds of people in that cavern. Later I’d learn that the camp had numbered more than four hundred, before the storm.

The giant sea turtles weren’t in there; they’d stayed down lower, in another holding area that wasn’t inside the mountain at all but at some other protected location, and the same with the other animals, I guess. Only the baby goats had come into the tunnels with us, because they were small and good climbers and didn’t mind narrow spaces, I was told. Luckily for me—because otherwise I would have had to smell the goatstink the whole time—they hadn’t come the whole way up either. They were being kept in a smaller cavern, down lower than ours was.

Keahi and some of the other animal specialists had stayed down there looking after them, along with the turtle biologists who were taking care of those eggs.

Xing introduced me to a few of the people, some of the younger ones and some of the older ones too. They were all shapes and colors but one thing struck me about them that was different from most of the people I’d met in the past: they had a glow of sun to them, a shine to their skin that must have been from spending most of their time outside, instead of inside the walls of a complex. There was no wasted flesh on them—I mean we don’t have fat people since the 21st c. anyway, food rations and footprint taxes and that, but plenty of us aren’t muscular, we aren’t fit because we’re immobilized, using our faces, most of the time. But none of the rebels were like that. Every piece of them seemed useful and solid.

I was glad to meet them because it made me feel less alone, though I was also worried and half of my mind was on the ragged green slopes of the island outside us, the wind that had to be raging through the trees, the vast wall of water that might be approaching, might have crashed on the shores already, might already have swept away my little brother.

And those tiny glittering hummingbirds, I thought—the ones that buzzed around us at the resort, diving and sucking at red and pink flowers with their needles of beaks. Where was the shelter for them?

Every so often one of the babies would cry a little and then be rocked to sleep again, or walked around and jiggled or given a drink. A couple of them were bigger and could already walk, after a fashion, and they would totter around from person to person, clutching onto people’s knees and seeking attention. I put on one of the white masks and played with one of them for a while—weird since it doesn’t know how to talk. Him, I guess. Not it. But I really liked him and I wondered what he thought about me. Did they think about other people at all? I didn’t know.

He was a starer and a drooler, just looked at me for long periods out of those glassy round eyes while water dripped from his gaping lower lip. Those messy habits, which in a grown-up person would make you think of mental challenge, were apparently quite normal.

People were murmuring low conversations with each other, some shared out the snacks they’d brought or passed around water canteens. We rode out a lot of the storm like that, waiting, sleeping, and talking, since there was nothing else to do. For me it wasn’t bad because I met people, something I’ve always loved and never did that often in the flesh—at least, not until this trip. Some of them told me a bit about themselves and I answered questions about myself, though most of them had more to tell, I thought, and I felt flat boring by comparison.

Lots had hard jobs in the camp or dangerous histories, they’d lived in bug ghettos or worked in places where there weren’t too many food deliveries and the water was teeming with parasites. A sad-seeming guy, who wasn’t that much older than I am, had lost a whole city. He’d lived in a place I hadn’t even heard of, though the name sounded Indian, where one summer night people began to get a sickness whose major sign was blood leaking out through the pores in their skin. It happened fast, he said, the blood seemed almost to turn to water, a pinkish color, and more
soak
out of them than drip, as though they were sponges. He didn’t say more than that except to tell me he’d walked among the dead until there was nothing to do but leave and no one left to stop him.

He’d come alone from there, over the ocean in a ship, because he’d been an apprentice in the corp merchant marines and knew how to steer them. He’d ended up on the Big Island, and was lucky enough to find the camp. He brought his ship to them, he said. They hid it from aerial surveillance, and they had it still.

I liked meeting the people from the camp; I worked on memorizing their names, telling myself I was collecting them because that might help me to remember. I know you can’t collect people, of course. But some of their stories lodged in me like heavy stones—ominous promises of more bad news to come, news that would pull me down.

By and by it seemed like a good time for me to talk to Xing again, because I was still wondering why Sam and I had been invited—who’d made the first contact, why we were worthy of risk in the first place. I got to speak with her while we were both on baby duty, passing a very small, squish-faced one back and forth and trying to stop it from crying by bouncing it up and down and feeding it a bottle, with Xing showing me how and singing to it in a soft voice now and then. She said babies were not her specialty, not at all. They were tough, she said. Harder than turtles for sure. But she’d held a couple of them in her time and she didn’t mind stepping in when she was needed.

“I’m wondering,” I said, “why me, Xing? Why
us?
I know you need new people and all that. But there have to be other people who want to get out. Where did you all come from, the rebels? How did you end up here?”