Pills and Starships (6 page)

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 people 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.