Pills and Starships (31 page)

So we turned away from the animal enclosures—I was reluctant, because there was still a lot to see—and headed downhill a bit, walking along the creek again.

Instead of Kate leading the meeting this time it was an old man. He was standing up on a box and he wore a mike, so everyone could hear him, but it was hard to see him from where I was standing.

His name was Rone. He was a coleader with Kate and his job was logistics, for those of us who didn’t already know him. He’d been in the army a long time ago, and in the army that had been his specialty. And he was going to direct the establishment of the new HQ.

First off, he said, they needed to bless the camp. And say goodbye to the old one. Xing was next to me and she whispered they always did that when they had to move, it was part of the ritual. They’d been at the old camp for six years; before that it had been mostly a fruit orchard, which they had planted and tended.

That time, she explained, they’d moved not because any helicopters came and not because of a high-cat storm but mostly for convenience. They wanted to be closer to both the resort, where their recruits often came from, and a secret, sheltered port they used.

The port was where the boats came in—the boats that carried the babies.

“The name of the new camp shall be Athens, after the ancient Greek city of democracy,” said Rone. “And now for the blessing.”

That sounded a little corpspeak to me, it reminded me of
Bless Happiness
, and I looked around and saw LaTessa, who was standing on Xing’s other side. I was shocked for a second: she’d cut off her princess hair. It was chopped off in a messy way all around her head, making her look like a boy. But she was standing proudly with her shoulders thrown back and I could see what Sam had said, that she had a toughness to her, and I guessed she wasn’t vain and had cut her hair to be practical.

I felt a bit different about her then, maybe a little admiring.

Rone sang a poetic song, which
didn’t
sound like corpspeak, and everyone in the camp seemed to know it because they sang it along with him. It was a religious poem, Xing whispered to me, a poem from the Christian godbelief, but some nights there were blessings from Buddhist systems or Jewish or Hindu or even Earth godbeliefs, with tree nymphs and that kind of ancient thing.
“All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all,”
they sang.

After the blessing things got less ceremonial and down to brass tacks, as Rone put it. He detailed the process for setting up the camp, what the priorities were, and the order we had to do things in. We were each part of a work group, and Sam and I and LaTessa were all in Xing’s, which reported to Keahi.

We worked the whole day after that, until we were exhausted all over again. I won’t tell all the things we did—I don’t think I’ll have much time to keep a journal for a while, and there are only a few pages left in this booklet even though I’ve written everything so tiny. But they were things like moving the tents into a pattern they mapped out for us, helping to set up cooking and eating areas and also the composting systems—toilets and otherwise.

Let’s just say ours isn’t the work group with the most glamorous tasks. But one really good thing is, I’m also going to have two spaces of time each day—one in the morning and one in the afternoon—with no tasks at all. And during that time I’ll be able to do my collections. There’s going to be a special shelter, the man named Rone told me, where I can show the items I collect, and other people will also put things there.

He said it will be an important place, “a place that honors the beautiful,” is what he told me, and my collections can be there too.

When it came time for the evening meal we all stopped working and gathered at the tables. Normally we would be eating the evening meal in shifts, I guess, since there are almost five hundred of us. But this was a special occasion because we were inaugurating the camp so we packed the tables fuller than usual. Off to one side, an older boy sat on a tree stump and played a weird instrument Xing said was an accordion, which pumped open and closed. The music was haunting and festive by turns, depending on what he played, and gave an air of ceremony to the proceedings.

It was cool to sit at a table I’d helped put up, to know how all its parts fitted together as I sat there. We’d brought all the boards for the tables from the old camp; even the screws that joined the parts together had been carefully labeled and packed and pulled out again when we arrived. Not even a nail went to waste in the camp. I liked how everything had value; I liked how careful people were with what other people had made.

In the middle of our table’s long boards, the cooks’ helpers set out baskets of bread and huge bowls of soup, steaming into the cooling air. Each of us had our own plate to eat off—actually not a plate but a rectangular slab of bamboo with a handle on one end. They called it a
trencher
. Sam and I were told we had to carve our initials in the side of our own trenchers, with a special design we invent to stand for ourselves. That way we’d always know whose was whose. Everyone has her own trencher and bowl and utensils, and we have to wash them after every meal and keep track of them and all that.

We served ourselves pieces of bread and ladled the thick soup into our bowls. I wondered how they’d baked the bread—was there an oven set up already? I hadn’t seen the kitchen area yet at all; a lot of the workings of the camp were still a mystery to me.

I picked up a spoon but Sam elbowed me. “Wait,” he hissed. “We always have to wait for the food blessing. They usually sing it too.”

Yet before the food blessing Xing stood up and spoke.

“Arriving here,” she began, “to work and live with you is the culmination of many years of work for me. And so many years of anticipation.”

She said she’d never expected a Cat Six to welcome her to the island and the camp, but that was the world we lived in—the only thing that wasn’t surprising was that there was one surprise after another.

Then she asked Sam and me to stand. She told everyone who we were, and who our parents had been. When she finished speaking—it was like a eulogy for them—everyone clapped; it started with just a few people but soon everyone joined in, and people stood up and pushed the benches back so that some of them even fell over behind them.

All the people in the whole camp were clapping for my mother and father and for what once, long ago, they must have done.

After dinner, when the dusk had settled into dark, we washed our trenchers and bowls where Xing showed us, in a basin beneath a tap, and set them to drip dry on a big rack woven together with what looked like rope and vines.

Xing went off in the direction of Kate’s tent and Sam and LaTessa and I sat by the brook listening to the water and talking a bit. Or sorry, not LaTessa—that was her corporate label, I guess, not her real name at all, but I’m still getting used to it. Her real name’s Fred. I kid you not. It’s short for Frederica, the name she was born with. She says she was always a tomboy growing up—though she’s very pretty, she only dressed all girly at the resort because it was her job to—and no one has ever called her Frederica, they just always called her Fred.

The camp doesn’t do old-fashioned campfires too often, for obvious security and carbon-footprint reasons, but we do have some orangey-red solar lights we stick into the ground that are hard for planes and other surveillance equipment to pick up on. They don’t have much of a footprint, as fuelfires would; they don’t give off any heat, either, that I can tell. All they do is cast a gentle light on the underbrush, on the contours of tree trunks and the sides of tents.

In the distance the accordion had been retired but there was still music, this time from someone’s tent—a sad song played on a string instrument. It was the evensong, Fred said—she’d once lived in a camp, briefly. Every night we would have evensong, music to thank the sun and praise the onset of the cool and healing night. It floated out onto the air and for a second I had the weird feeling it was taking me with it, that I was as fluid and light as the notes themselves, as movable and changing as waves of sound.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and jumped a bit.

It was Kate standing there, a flashlight in her hand. “I’d like to show you something.”

We followed her through the camp and into a tunnel. There were no lights turned on inside—maybe this tunnel hadn’t been wired yet, I don’t know—so all we had was the spots of her flashlight and our headlamps bobbing in front of us. It was a wide hallway, and pretty flat underfoot, by lava-tube standards. A couple of twists and turns, and then there was enough light to see by coming from the room it opened into, so we switched off our lamps.

There were rows of narrow beds there, with curtains hanging beside them. The cloth of the curtains looked oddly familiar, and then I got it: they were made of the off-white, waffled cotton robes from the resort, the same ones we’d worn for healing and therapy sessions. They’d been cut up and stitched together.

I remarked on the recycled robes and Kate smiled, seeming pleased that I’d noticed the detail.

“This is our infirmary,” she said. “It’s where you’ll come if you get a bug or break a leg. Though I have to warn you, you might find yourself sharing the space with a sick bird or a big lizard. It’s happened before. We treat some of the animals here too.”

We smiled politely. I was thinking, great, they have a place for health care, but is it really worth forging through darkness for? Could it not have waited till morning?

“We have three doctors,” she went on, still walking ahead of us between the rows of beds, “and then there are Aviva and four other nurses with good training. They work in shifts, so at any given time there’s usually just one doctor and two nurses on duty.”

The curtains could be pulled around the beds for privacy. Mostly no one was in them right now—we could tell because the curtains around empty beds were open—though I recognized the man with the hurt leg from the cave.

Back and back we went, to a curtain at the rear. Kate pulled it in toward the wall.

And there she was.

Our mother.

At first I thought she was dead and Kate had brought us her body—her eyes were closed and she was pale and completely unmoving.

I felt a shock that wasn’t that far from anger, a kind of fierce impulse. Then I saw a bag of liquid hanging off a stand beside her, and the bag fed into a needle in her arm.

My stomach lurched and my hand flew up to my mouth. “How’d you do it? We thought—I was told—”

But I wasn’t even listening to what Kate said, I was in a kind of panicky buzz. I leaned in close, I wanted to do something for her but had no idea what that might be.

Sam just stood beside me, gazing. He did appear almost happy, though, I thought in passing. For once.

“And our—our dad?” he asked.

I already knew in the pit of my stomach. For our father there hadn’t been a save at the eleventh hour. It was clear from the empty bed beside her.

I didn’t even look up at Kate, I really couldn’t, just stared down at my mom’s face. The cheekbones my dad had claimed I got from her.