Join (16 page)

Josette's condition is a serious problem. When her body becomes a drive, it won't be very useful. Her mind, however, is healthy and sharp. Still, many of those willing to consider a join seem motivated by money. Josette rejects all of those candidates.

One candidate named Elevation, a join of three, sends over a contract that includes an agreement to euthanize Elevation Four, as Josette's body would be known, the day after the official integration period ends. Leap is astounded—after a join, Josette would be Elevation, so a prejoin contract is meaningless. Josette rejects Elevation on principle. (She calls it the bozo principle and says it's been very helpful over the years.) Several other candidates bring up the topic of euthanizing Josette's body. Josette isn't ready to confront that possibility, so those discussions create another category of rejection.

And Josette flares up at any hint of pity. Sometimes the heat of her anger is just barely perceptible. Sometimes she produces withering death rays of scorn in the midst of what had seemed like civil conversation. The end result is always the same: no join. Her condition worsens. She is spending more time in bed.

After the final vidcon with Elevation (Josette to Elevation, “I hope that's not too much of a letdown”), Leap One goes to fetch Josette's medication. As he's leaving the room, he hears Josette ask Oceanic in a hushed voice, “So, tell me quickly, how does sex work?”

“Mutual consent is an explicit requirement of the join procedure,” Oceanic says. “After the procedure, all of an individual's needs for intimacy, both emotional and physical, can be addressed by the join directly . . .”

It's clear that both Oceanic and Josette would prefer a private chat. Leap One moves beyond earshot, then waits a few extra moments before returning.

Leap Four is dreaming. Leap
is both in the dream and outside of it. Leap One is also sleeping, but not dreaming. Leap Two is in a cafeteria. Leap Three is talking with an orderly. The drives are like the hands of a pianist. They accomplish incredibly difficult tasks without conscious intervention. Leap experiences everything simultaneously. The experience of dreaming while awake is akin to feeling an emotion. Leap pays attention to the world each drive experiences. Leap says things. Leap makes decisions. Leap deliberates on responses, or weights the inclinations that shift a drive one way or another. Leap can do many things at the same time. Leap is not a core, not a trunk. Leap is an idea, a coherence, an overlap.

In Leap's dream, the Vitalcorp logo, four birds in flight, becomes a flock of thousands of starlings streaming across the bright afternoon sky. The dark ribbon of their bodies encloses space and the stars. Deep within that darkness, beyond what is possible, at the end of space and in the last few feet of time, is a decision that Leap must approach.

Leap Four and Josette are
walking a trail that passes by the distantly spaced neighbors' spreads and across the cold autumn slopes at their steading's edge. They've walked for forty minutes to the Benthic Bench, one of nine benches installed by the steading. This one is covered with colorful paintings of the old sea life of Puget Sound—crabs, anemones, clusters of mussels, oysters, purple curving millipedal worms, corals, the long-necked geoducks. Josette sits; her face is pale. She's wincing with pain, and her breathing is ragged.

“I need one of the large blue ones. I need it now.”

Leap fumbles in the knit bag to find one of the large blue ampoules.

“Here,” says Josette. Her crabbed hands scrabble at the black lining of her coat as she pulls its edges and the tear-away fleece beneath to expose the soft, loose skin of her neck above her clavicle. “Just quickly, please.”

Leap Four touches the cold metal contacts of the ampoule's dispensing end to activate it. She carefully rubs it against Josette's skin for a moment, and then holds it still. It vibrates subtly with the faint ticking of a tiny pump as its nanowires fire thousands of microscopic doses into capillaries beneath Josette's skin. When Leap lifts the ampoule, Josette's skin is moist and reddened. Leap drops the ampoule back into the knit bag and watches Josette.

Josette's breathing becomes more regular, shallower. She sits back against the bench.

“I can't walk back,” she says.

Leap says, “I'm sending for a pod.”

Josette closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them and breathes deliberately, slowly.

“How is it?” Leap asks.

“Not too good,” she says.

After that, Josette spends more
time in bed. Oceanic continues to come by daily to talk with her. Leap sits in on most of their conversations. Oceanic almost seems to be visiting a friend, but she asks specific kinds of questions, and her questions aren't always guided by the flow of conversation. Her questions both invite reminiscence and request factual responses. “What did the back of that church look like?” “Did you have a favorite neighborhood store?”

Leap has always known Josette as a private person, or at least a person who shares the morsels of her life sparingly and deliberately. The type of conversation Josette's having with Oceanic is something she would typically resist. Instead, she plays along.

Josette tires quickly, but each day when she leaves, Oceanic looks satisfied. Until one day when Oceanic draws Leap One aside after her conversation.

“You know, the sea isn't full of fish anymore. The two of you have rejected a lot of options. I don't know how many more will come along.”

“She's not doing well,” Leap says.

“No, she's not,” says Oceanic.

Leap One says, “I try to keep her walking, at least for a while each day, but she's in pain, even with the medication.”

“She's also depressed.”

Leap would never have said that about Josette, never have thought of her in that light. He says, “She doesn't think we're going to find someone for the join.”

“No.”

“How close . . . should I be thinking about hospice?”

“I don't think so,” says Oceanic, “but that's not really my area. Her health is getting worse, but I think she's still okay, and her mind is fine. Even where things stand now she could have years left.”

“We'll keep looking then,” Leap says.

Oceanic doesn't respond. She's just watching Leap calmly. Not hinting at a response.

Leap is thrown for a minute but is not sure why or what to say. “We'll keep looking,” he says again.

“Okay,” says Oceanic.

Leap One says, “I can't
do it for you. You have to say yes to someone.”

Leap One and Josette are stepping out of the house on a cold autumn afternoon. Leap One has been reading a history of popular a cappella music and is a bit logy. Josette started the walk by telling him he was not doing enough to find her a join.

“Mark should help me,” she growls. She's dressed in a shiny black down coat that falls to her calves and makes low rustling and squeaking sounds as she moves. “Without me, he wouldn't have had a goddamn practice. Sanctimonious bastard. I probably sent him a third of his business over the years. Said he appreciated it. Sends me champagne at Christmas. Of course, it hasn't been real champagne since the first bottle. Oh, God, what have we done to our world.”

From Civ News this morning, they know that a superhurricane has split off one of the southern storms and ripped through the Cordial spire community in the El Coahuilón Mountains in Mexico. Over forty thousand bodies are dead or missing. Rescue operations are impossible as the hurricane is “squatting,” with its eye just half a mile from the community. Once again, weather is the story, as it has been since the drowning of Dhaka.

And, of course, the Champagne region is completely arid—one more place on a long list of places—and no longer produces grapes. For years, a synthetic champagne—the pressed juice of closely engineered bacterial sediment formulated to produce the effects of terroir—has been the nearest thing to the traditional drink that's available.

They walk slowly and in silence for a while.

“It's all going to hell.” Josette scowls. After a little while, she looks over at Leap One and says, with genuine curiosity, “You're happy, aren't you?”

Leap is surprised, and it takes a moment to find a thought that might lead to a response. “If you mean am I satisfied with what I have, then yes.”

“I'm not,” Josette says. “I'm fucking not.” She's quiet for a few more moments, then she stops walking and turns to face him. “And I don't understand how you can be! Forty thousand bodies died. You can bet there were a lot of joins down there who aren't feeling very immortal anymore. And a lot of—” She stops, as if she's heard herself and is disappointed.

“You know,” she says, calming herself, the discoloration on her face starker, the tendons of her neck taut, “when I was a girl, before you were born, we didn't have megastorms.”

Leap remembers Josette's voice reading from a children's story, “. . . before them was a lovely, sunny country that seemed to beckon them on . . .”

Josette snorts, “Yes, you know. Of course, you know. You spend all day reading. You and the cute one, Himiko.”

“Mom, she's me.”

Josette waves a hand dismissively and winces in pain.

“Yeah,” she says. Then she stops walking. “I love you, you know. I just can't see past this pain. I can't walk today.”

Leap tries to change her mind, but she turns around and slowly walks back toward the house and then inside. He follows.

She hasn't taken her coat off. Her back is to him.

“You want me to ask?” she says stiffly.

“Mom—”

“You need me to ask?”

“Mom, I—”

Her voice is dry, stressed, reedy.

“You can't bring it up, so I will. I've fought enough battles. I'm not going to stop at this one. You can't bring it up, so fine! I want to join with you. You should let me join with you.”

Leap One's throat and chest constrict. “I can't believe you want that,” he says quietly.