Pills and Starships (23 page)

They gave me the bad news a bit later: Sam wasn’t there.

And not only that.

I heard the story lying on a cot in the camp, while Aviva, the baby-guarding lady, sewed up the cut in my elbow and some other cuts I turned out to have. One was on my head, under my hair, and she had to shave some of the hair off to sew the scalp together. The blood from that one had run down the back of my neck, though I hadn’t noticed it, and soaked my shirt. There was another cut I hadn’t noticed on one of my bottom ribs. She sewed that one up too and then put ointment and a bandage on it.

The stitches actually hurt a lot and I didn’t hear everything that was said to me while I was clenching my teeth and trying to ignore the pain of the needle. But I got the gist.

What happened was, the plan for Sam had gone wrong. He did what he was supposed to do, it wasn’t his fault at all, but the corp caught him.

One of the cameras Keahi and his friends had disabled set off a backup alarm it wasn’t supposed to. That is, the backup had been disabled too, or the connection to it anyway, but the central computer fixed the connection faster than they thought it would. So in the middle of Sam’s breakout attempt it switched back on and there he was in his full digital glory—perfectly visible to the guys watching the screens in the guardroom.

Not only Sam was caught but also Keahi’s friend, the one who made me jump down the waste chute.

So while I was lying there on the cot, the people from the camp blew up one of the lava tubes, the one that led most directly to the resort and which, if they tried hard enough, the service employees could maybe have got to us through. The rebels had certain key parts of the tunnels rigged with explosives the whole time, Aviva told me, in case they had to do just that: cut off access on short notice.

We heard the low rumble and we felt the vibration.

“But then how can we get to Sam?” I asked her, panicked. “How will we get him out?”

“It’ll be harder now,” she admitted.

They must have moved me while I was fast asleep and dead to the world, because in the morning I woke up alone in a small tent, lying on a thin bedroll. I sat up and inspected myself, the bandages stuck onto my skin beneath some clothes I didn’t recognize, a pair of camo pants and a dark tank top. I touched the back of my head gingerly, the bandage over the cut up there.

And then I remembered Sam.

And my mother. And my father.

I looked around for my shoulder bag, suddenly needing to know I had this journal and my collection and my old, bedraggled mouse. The bag was still with me, luckily, crumpled near the bedroll, and I leaned over and pulled my stuff out, the journal and the pouch housing the best of my collection. And the mouse and my parents’ letters.

I just sat on the bedroll for a while clutching those things and feeling alone. Not only alone but completely out of place, a mistake, something shaken loose from where it was supposed to be and dropped in a corner, forgotten.

Everything was black or shades of gray, like the inside of my tent, which had a kind of dim gray light filtering through the cloth. Outside could have been anything, with only that flat grayness showing through.

And I still smelled really bad, I noticed. I hadn’t bathed—how could they take baths or showers here? I’d probably never be clean again. I smelled like the sickly sweet perfume they used on the compost, and behind that of pee and moldy dung. So here I was, sitting cross-legged and slouching in a gray tent, patchy with crusted blood and filth and sporting a shaved-bald patch on my head and without anyone in the world who was mine or loved me. All I had were the pouch with my few collected items, some pieces of bound write-fiber with cheesy sayings and messy writing on them, and a sad little stuffed mouse missing its tail and both ears.

You couldn’t even tell the thing
was
a mouse anymore, I realized. It looked like a fist-sized ball of lint.

Sam had to be even worse off than me, I thought next, and then . . . my poor parents . . .

I thought:
They wanted to be gone.

I thought:
They insisted.

But it didn’t make me feel better.

More slowly than you’d think, maybe, I also realized the amped-up feeling was gone, that I was empty of all my happy pharms and the adrenaline that had been driving Sam and me.

In all ways, I was flying solo.

I wondered how many years it had been since I was completely flat like that. I wondered if this was depression; I’d never been depressed before, only sad. It was hard to see an upside.

Almost impossible, actually.

The people here—the people at the camp—hadn’t said we
couldn’t
go get Sam, though, I reminded myself. They’d just said it would be more difficult with the tunnel blocked. But they hadn’t said they were giving up.

Not yet.

I sat there pathetically for what felt like a long time until finally there was nothing to do but get up, so I opened the tent flap and wandered out into camp.

It was a bustle of activity.

I wandered through the people, who were striding back and forth smartly, all seeming to have tasks, all knowing what they were doing. I alone was lost, meandering slowly among those fast and purposeful humans with no particular goal, just looking around, taking it in—and at the same time, in my flatness, feeling pretty indifferent to everything.

They buzzed past me, some pushing wheelbarrows, some carrying loops of cable or other equipment. I kept being impressed by their industriousness, and I realized as I watched that I hadn’t been around momentum much in my life. It was as if my parents and Sam and I had waited in rooms for years. We’d just waited out our lives in a bunch of rooms, not doing much except watching—watching the news on face, watching commercials, watching tutorials, occasionally gaming or chatting, but mostly watching. We’d sat in some rooms and watched some screens.

And now here were people doing something. Doing a lot of things.

As though their actions mattered.

Plus they were all new people, which normally is exciting to me—realmeets with strangers, or people who used to be strangers and now might possibly be friends. But this time, as I considered in a stunned, background kind of way how wasted my life must have been up to then, I was a solid wall of misery. No joy rose in me to greet the sight of them.

One or two glanced in my direction as I stumbled through them, but no one stopped to say anything and I had a strong feeling of being an intruder.

I hoped the rushing around wasn’t because of Sam and me—that we alone hadn’t caused all this and disrupted them. But I was afraid it was. There was the blown-up lava tube, after all, and the fact that one of their own people was trapped with Sam, in the grips of corp guys like the man-mountain Rory. I wondered if any of the people around here hated me. They had a right to: they didn’t even know me, but now they were in danger because of me and my family.

For the first time it occurred to me to wonder why they’d bothered. They didn’t even know us, yet they’d taken risks for us—risks that, now that I thought about it, didn’t make sense unless there was something we had for them. Something more than just the will to live—something other people didn’t have to offer them.

My ribs hurt, and my head and elbow. Everything throbbed all over.

Some of the people, I saw then, were pushing trees around. I swear—they had these potted trees in giant planters with wheels on the bottoms of them. I mean these were big trees, not little saplings or anything, they had to weigh thousands of kilos. And groups of boys and men and the occasional woman were pushing them from out of the forest around us into the clearing, rolling them on their platforms.

I looked up and saw the trees were blocking us, from up above. I stood staring up. It was like they were filling in the clearing where the tents and the Quonset and the other shacks were with these portable trees. The trees had broad canopies, they were all tall with slender trunks compared to the wide vegetation on top of them. That had to make them relatively light—easier to move for how much cover they gave. I was pleased that I saw it clearly. They were camouflage trees.

“In case of flyovers,” came a voice.

I looked down and there was Xing.

I was almost as relieved to see her as I had been the night before, when she was standing under the faint light at the end of the tunnel. I’d almost forgotten she was there, what with feeling so abject about my family. My flatness didn’t exactly lift at the sight of her, but I felt a bit less lost—slightly more rooted in the ground beneath me.

Unlike the giant potted trees.

She was dressed in camo, like me, only she had a jacket on too, an army-green thing with a lot of pockets. She smiled at me. “How’re you feeling?”

“Not great,” I said weakly.

“If you mean the depression, don’t worry,” she explained. “It’s withdrawal from the pills we had you on. Sucks, coming off them. But it’ll get better. You’ll see.”

That was a relief. But it was hard to believe, the way I felt. Like nothing would ever get better.

“All this . . .” I said. “Is it our fault? Did we do this?”

She stepped up close, slung an arm around my shoulders, and squeezed gently. “Don’t worry. They were prepared. They have good defense strategies. We’ve moved to Plan B, that’s all.”

“Plan B,” I repeated.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get a little food into you. And water. Water’s important here. Living outdoors, you have to remember to drink.”

I hadn’t noticed before, but suddenly I was practically aching with thirst.

She led me through all the moving people, through the trees they were wheeling around and arranging. We got to a little structure with a roof over it and a pipe; she turned a handle on that pipe and water poured out of its tap into a bucket. There were cups on a small shelf in the structure, little cups of some light metal, and she filled one for me and handed it over. I drank the whole thing in a quick bunch of long gulps, despite the absence of fruit flavor we’ve always had in our water, which I only realized after I swallowed. At home they put in fruit smells and flavors on a certain schedule as a code, to let us know the water was okay to drink. It meant the corporates were all in sync on keeping waterborne bugs out of the supply. Here, I thought, no one was testing it at
all
, or more like,
we
were testing it—drinking it right out of the ground!

That’s where it came from, she told me. Right out of the ground.

Drinking that water was like licking mud.

And yet here I was, doing it.

And even though I could taste something in it that I thought must be the metal of the cup—it reminded me of the taste of blood, that iron tinge—it was still the most thirst-quenching water I’ve ever had.

“If you want to get clean,” she told me, “you can do that too, as long as you make it superquick. I’ll show you.”

She led me into the jungle a little ways, along a path, and I saw a wooden fence and behind it a bag hanging from a tree, a big, long bag.

“You stand on the grill here, see? There’s a basin underneath so the water gets captured and recycled. You pull on this cord, and the water comes out of the showerbag. It’s solar-heated so you don’t freeze. Soap’s there; washcloths and drywipes are there,” and she gestured at a rack a couple of feet back.

She looked down at a nanoface on her wrist.

“I’ll give you three minutes,” she continued. “You can get the smell off, if you scrub hard. But try not to get your bandages wet. We don’t have time for the full tour today, everything is in flux and we can’t get your wardrobe from laundry yet so you’ll have to put on those same clothes. But at least they didn’t go through the waste chute with you.”

“Plus other people won’t have to smell the compost,” I said.

She smiled and left me there, to shrug off the camo clothes and stand under lukewarm water falling out of this bag in the trees. Beneath my feet were bamboo slats covering a hole the water poured into. Or dripped, more like. I have to say that water didn’t pour, it more trickled reluctantly. I felt like someone was splashing me from above or possibly just spitting on me. I tried not to think of spit.
Warm rain
, I told myself,
it falleth like a gentle rain from heaven
, though I have no idea where the thought came from.

I had to really scrub to make the dirt come off.

It felt extra weird to be naked outdoors, where anyone might see me if they peeked around the fence or crept out of the jungle behind us. It was like naked-plus. Hypernaked.

But even though it was rushed and furtive, it was still really nice to get the stink of the waste-composting bin off my skin. It made a big difference. And standing there, half-shivering in the open air with light shifting on the leaves around me, I felt like collecting the moment. Just like I’d tried with the opera singer and the beautiful song she sang, the second after it was done. I closed my eyes and tried to capture it, to keep forevermore. This outside light, the leaves, the water hitting my bare skin. I shivered in it and felt raw and new. I felt I had to be easier to hurt here, like this, than I had ever been in our complex. Anyone could see me, anyone could suddenly appear.