Pills and Starships (27 page)

“Some of us are natives,” explained Xing. “The camp began that way, with native Hawaiians. But every community needs immigrants, or it dies the death of inbreeding. Not just genetic but—well, call it
of the spirit.
We’ve known that and we’ve tried to keep our community alive and changing. Many people have come to us through Twilight Island itself. I recruited in the First, you see, since that was my own background, and over the years a number of families used their Final Week as an opportunity to join. It’s why some of them—though just a few among hundreds of thousands—selected the Big Island.”

“So of all the survivors and contracts staying there right now . . . I mean, why was it me and Sam you picked? Was it—was it his hacking? Him being so good at tech?”

Because that was my fear, that was what was eating at me: that Sam was the one they’d really wanted, and they’d only brought me along because he asked them to. And now what if they didn’t have Sam at all, only me, and I wasn’t good for anything? I was soft and weak and I didn’t know shit.

“We believed Sam’s skills would be valuable to us,” said Xing carefully.

My heart sank, because I’d been right and I so much hadn’t wanted to be.

“Those skills are what put us in touch in the first place, but not why we recruited,” Xing went on. “The First is full of hackerkids. It’s not the talent; it’s how you use it. I was on a rogue listserve with Sam, one of the ones that changes locations constantly so it doesn’t get shut down too fast. Standard recruitment strategy—as long as I lived in the First, doing my work as a psych counselor, it was my job to find new recruits and bring them in. I conducted most of my research on face because it’s far and above the most efficient way. What attracted me to Sam, what made me pursue a correspondence with him, was personality. That’s what everyone looks for, in the end. We need talents, but more than that we need friends. I liked the soul of your family.”

“The soul—?”

“There was Sam himself, of course. I loved his attitude and it’s always good to have another techie onboard. And there was you, with your collecting—art is being lost these days, and we look for artists. We always do. We desperately want to bring art back.”

“O-oh,” I said haltingly.
Art
. Believe it or not, I hadn’t ever thought of my collection like that.

It made me feel a strange lift of hope.

“But there were also your parents. Kids tend to underrate the value of those. Yours in particular: they had a history as rebels themselves, you know. Before they gave it up.”

“I know. They were the last of the treehugs,” I said, not without pride. “I—I always thought that was cool of them. It had to be hard to stand up for—for things that couldn’t stand up for themselves. And really hard to lose.”

Xing peered at me quizzically, over the bundle of baby she was hefting onto her shoulder. “Your mother was more than just any treehug. Once upon a time, she was one of the greatest. The most fearless. She was a revolutionary.”

“A
what?”

“Her specialty was explosives. I got from Sam that you two hadn’t been told. Yes. That’s how she lost the fingers on her hand. Those fingers got blown off.”

I think, right at that moment, my mouth must have been gaping open as far as the drooling babies’.

“Explosives?”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or accuse her of lying. But somehow I couldn’t do either.

“She was a chemist by training, you know that part, but the pharma job she held down for so long was a cover, while she was an activist, and just an income, after she retired. What she made best was bombs. Along with your father, who was one of the people working with her, she blew up stuff. Not people, you understand—never people, nothing alive, she was very moral that way. She took down installations. Corp properties, strategic sites—weapons and drug warehouses, communications centers. She fought the corporates.”

My mother had never fought anyone, was what I’d thought. Except when she yelled at my dad and they got going. But that was over things like taking too long in the waste room. It was halfway funny, most of the time.

It wasn’t bomb material. Bombs and my mother didn’t go together.

But neither did bombs and Xing—Xing talking in admiring tones about rebels with explosions as she jiggled a drooling big-eye and seemed to be patting its butt repeatedly.

“In the end she got disillusioned, you see, and went into retirement. She’d always loved the natural world, she did everything in the name of animals and landscapes and the people who valued them. Even her operations were named after animals—Marten, Wolf, Lynx. Her monkey-wrenches, as the treehugs used to say. The end of her career came after a series of extinctions, when the last of the captive animal populations died out in the zoo pandemics. The word went out she’d collapsed, she’d said she was stopping the fight forever. And that . . . well, that was what happened.”

I watched some people huddled in a corner, passing around a jug and pouring liquid from it into their canteens. People could look so regular, I thought—so
average
on the outside. But who knew what was inside them? Who knew what they’d been in the past, or would be in the future on some distant horizon?

“What was amazing was that she never got caught. I mean that was sheerly amazing. The corporates never found out her real name or her codes. They never knew what she looked like. They never had her DNA. The DNA she’d put on record when she went to work for the pharmacorps, for instance—after she gave up, and her only goal was to bring up you guys—belonged to someone else entirely. No one ever knew how she did it. But she was so good at disappearing that they were never able to grab her and torture her, as some people feared they would. Despite her injury, which should have made her stand out in the most obvious way possible . . .”

I remembered how strictly, how carefully she’d always put on her attachment to go to work—the rubbery prosthesis she called her
fake fingers
.

“Somehow she managed to disappear,” said Xing, with a kind of reverence. “She flew the rest of her life under the radar so she could raise the two of you safely. Your mother was a hero to many.”

The rest of her life.

I don’t remember what I said after that—it must have been something inane, because all I cared about was what she’d said to 
me
. They were the best words I’d ever been given—purely collectible. My mother a hero. And then the fact that I’d never known it made it a complicated thing, and I felt tears coming and a tearing, acute pull of wanting to change the past.

The most hopeless want of all.

“That’s why we had to risk trying to bring you in. Because we believed in 
all
 of you,” said Xing softly.

The next moment my loss came back full force and it made me sadder than I’d been before, to think that my mother was lost not only to these people who had believed in her, like Xing, but to Sam and me. And we hadn’t even known how brave she was.

Or really, if I’m being honest, that she was brave at all. I thought of her as my mother. I barely thought of her outside that.

And now I was mad at myself because of it.

I wandered among the people for a while but found I didn’t want to talk much anymore, just tended to smile weakly. Words weren’t really flowing for me. After a while I kind of accepted that for once I wasn’t feeling social. I sat down with my knees drawn up, leaning back against the wall and thinking; finally I lay down, wondering about my mother, shunting ideas and regrets back and forth in my head. First I was elated at the new picture I had of her, then I was crushed that she was gone, then I was torn up that she’d hidden her rebel past from us for all our lives. Next I was telling myself she’d pretty much had to, if she wanted us all to stay together.

And alive.

Eventually I dozed off, sleeping fitfully on my thin mat. As the storm battled on late into night and then stretched into the early hours of day—or so I was told, because time passing was a half-dream in the cave—most of the others fell in and out of sleep too. I’d turn on my side and watch one or another of them, sometimes exhausted, sometimes alert. Or I’d get tired of looking at faces and just watch the lamplight flickering on the walls. There was a timeless quality in there, a strange mood that combined anxiety and relief—anxiety over those who weren’t with us and over our uncertain future, relief that we still seemed to have one.

Through the whole storm that place felt secure. I remember marveling at that, at any place that could make people feel safe during a Cat Six. We were surrounded by the most comforting walls I’d ever known. They weren’t the flimsy, temporary walls that humans built but thick and abiding. They were the warm body of a mountain—and a living mountain, because Deep High Station was under the volcano.

D
AY
S
EVEN

A
CCEPTING
& G
RATITUDE

Theme of the Day: Recovery

The noise of the wind finally dwindled and died down, and we started to get impatient and restless. Where before the walls had felt like shelter, now they were starting to feel suffocating.

It seemed like way too long till the scouts were finally given the signal to go out. When at last they were dispatched, they went jogging off down the tunnel carrying portable tech, small satellite dishes, and facesets to check the weather systems. You can’t get face signals in the volcano—you can’t know anything about the outside world in there. It’s just too thickly insulated, Xing told me.

But if we ever had to retreat here for longer, she said, we might be able to. It would mean work, and where the rebels put their work effort is carefully chosen, Xing explained. The holes that were drilled for oxygen—the system of ventilation already installed in the mountain—were a first phase of a something called Project Safe House. There’s still a lot more planning that has to go into it, though, a lot of engineering and a lot of energy, but it will probably get done sometime in the future. There are geologists in the Resist, she said, who believe that certain places inside the mountain are safer than outside—that new eruptions of magma would be less likely to touch us there.

I had a chance to talk to Kate while we were waiting for the scouts to come back with their report. Xing was helping with the babies and with one person who’d been hurt in the evac, an old man with an injured foot. Kate must have seen me sitting alone and decided to be nice to me; she sat down beside me and inspected my injuries, taking the bandage off my head wound and checking to make sure that it wasn’t infected, then moving down to the bandage on my side.

Because she wasn’t the kind of person who was content to do a single thing at once, she also told me more about the camp.

And about the rest of the world.

While she was looking at my injuries, and trying to distract me from the soreness while she patted more disinfectant onto the stitches, she talked on and on in her matter-of-fact voice. And a realization dawned on me: I’d always lived in the kind of cave we were huddled in now. In a way I’d always been sheltered like that, always had a thick roof over my head and no signals from the outside.

Because I hadn’t
tried
to hear those sounds. I’d never worked at it, not like Sam had. I’d done my collecting; I’d only wanted to look at things that were beautiful.

I hadn’t wanted to look at the opposite.

Kate said the corps were mostly trying to get rid of people—as fast as they could, because it was people who were the biggest carbon footprint, and the corps wanted to make the world livable again.

And of course, she said, there was nothing wrong with wanting fewer people to live on Earth. “Everyone knows there are too many of our species, by orders of magnitude. But the answer isn’t Death Math. Now, the corps aren’t doing their kills because they think it’s right; they simply don’t care what’s right. They just want a stable world back, and they want it for themselves. They think they can groom it back to being their playground again—and mind you, dear, our world being a playground for all the powerful corps is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. For them, Death Math is the fastest way back.”

The Resist, she said, believed in livability too, just not through Death Math, and for the poors as well as the First. Only by not having many babies and by raising the ones that were abandoned or targeted.

She added that there was a powerful movement in the corps that didn’t believe the last tipping point was irreversible. They believed if we took people out now the globe could recover more quickly, and then they could have it for themselves. But Resist scientists said it would take hundreds of years no matter what, and all we could do was reduce our numbers slowly, live simply, try to rebuild a better culture, and wait.

In the Resist they believe in science and philosophy, she said, literature and art and even some kinds of the softer godbeliefs, as long as the beliefs are open to anyone.

Corps mostly believe in math. And not math in the best sense, but math only as it served them.

“So Sam had these lists of numbers I found,” I said. “In his room. Some of them were really big numbers, hundreds of thousands . . .”

“You know what those were, now, don’t you?” she asked softly, and closed up my last bandage.

“They were numbers of people killed, weren’t they?”

She didn’t nod because she didn’t have to; she just went on talking. She hadn’t seen Sam’s lists but he’d mentioned them. Those numbers, she told me, were whole populations taken out by corp-army actions. Because bombs had a big footprint, they mostly used sneakier weapons, like gases and chemicals that killed people but left buildings intact. Sometimes they poisoned water supplies, if they knew the water supply would recover. There were poisons that had a shelf life, she said, poisons that disappeared from the water over time, so that a few months or years after they did their work the water was safe to drink again.