Pills and Starships (32 page)

“I’m sorry,” said Kate.

“How did it go down?” asked Sam, trying to cover his disappointment.

“The Happiness Attendants had to induce comas in both of them, so they could meet the death tests. And he wasn’t—he just wasn’t able to pull through on his. As you know, he was almost a decade older than your mother. His system wasn’t as resilient. He couldn’t come back from it.”

“Is she—she’s still in a coma, then?” I asked.

“A medicated sleep. It’ll be a long time till she can see or hear you.”

I moved closer to my mother, after a minute of standing there rooted to the ground. It was almost like I was noticing everything
but
her—the red clay of the floor, with its uneven, raised patches, the lever on the side of the cot that would lift up the head part.

I leaned in close over her and touched her cheek and then laid my own cheek against hers.

It was warm.

Somehow that made her real, suddenly. I was tongue-tied and didn’t know what to do or say; there was heat in my face, heat rushing through me.

“It will take time,” said Kate. “You’ll have to be very patient and just go on with your lives for a while, as though she isn’t here at all. Because she’s not, really—not right now. We have to bring her out of it slowly. And then her brain will need retraining, she’ll need to be weaned off all the sunset pharms she was on. The pathways in her brain were literally reshaped by those drugs, and they’ll have to be reshaped again. She may have to relearn some skills—relearn who she really is, in a way.”

Sam and I both stood next to the cot, awkward, staring down at our mother’s face, which was so pale white it almost looked blue. Underneath the thin blanket, her body seemed straight and formal, with the toes sticking up at the bottom. She might have been an ancient mummy or a lying-down statue of a saint.

“Kate,” said Sam solemnly, “I don’t know how we’ll ever make it up to you. Well, I mean we can’t.”

“We can’t,” I whispered, with no breath behind the words.

And I remembered how my father had echoed all the time in his last days, those last days of not being himself. I remembered his song about the chariot of fire, and what he’d said about wanting the dinosaurs to come back.

I remembered him standing over the ocean and wishing it was still full of life.

“You will,” said Kate.

Tears sprang into my eyes. In his own way our father had been so hopeful, I thought, even though he despaired. You could be full of hope and sadness at the same time, I thought. And I wanted to collect that feeling—how hope and sadness could live in one person.

We’d survived, the three of us. We’d gotten here.

And he was gone.

I outright cried then and wasn’t even embarrassed. In fact I was almost proud. I stood there crying for my dad.

When I was done with the emoting that used to mortify me, I realized Kate wasn’t beside me anymore. She’d disappeared like smoke while I wasn’t looking. Sam was wandering slowly around the room, staring at the pieces of equipment they had and talking to a couple of other patients who were there.

It was odd to look at my mom lying there and think of her the way Kate and Xing said she was, a hero first, admired by rebels, and then a disillusioned person who retreated, gave up, and went home and had us because she couldn’t keep fighting.

Or maybe it hadn’t happened in that order. I don’t know.

And finally, of course, she hadn’t been able to handle what the world was anymore. She turned into a victim, I’d been assuming, of service corps and other corporates whose downfall she’d once spent so much energy, and even some fingers, fighting for.

It was weird to consider walking away from the ideas I’d once had about her. Maybe she wasn’t a hero
or
a victim. Maybe she was a person who first believed in something, and then just didn’t anymore.

I wondered: what if it was less
what
you believed in that made the difference in your life than whether you believed at all?

Maybe belief is what makes the world glow.

After a while Sam found his way back to the bedside, where I was still gazing down at her eyes and mouth and cheeks—inert and lifeless-seeming as only a shut-down face can be, a small machine with no power. (I think I may have mouthed the words silently, like a crazy booze migrant.
Machine with no power
.) But Sam wasn’t looking at me, and I snapped out of my trance finally.

“When she wakes up,” he asked, “what do you think she’ll say?”

I peered up and around us—at the ceilings, which were a dark-gray, sometimes dark-brown color, and stippled with lavacicles jutting down in irregular peaks and points. In a long row beside the cots, the bedside lamps were all perfectly round and gave off a phosphorescent blue light.

This was her new home, I thought—after the condo she said goodbye to for always.
Goodbye, everything
. After the hotel room with its fakeness and bright tropical flowers. After the small boats with the candles in them burning down to nothing, sailing away.

Now there was this room of silent beds laid out in rows under the thickness of magma. Like a tomb in a pyramid.

And she was one of the lucky ones.

My mind wandered to the ruins of the resort, to which I’d already heard them planning an expedition. They were going to look for salvage we could use. There was too much there, potentially, for them to waste the chance. It was the one good thing to come of the storm, I’d heard Rone say to someone else—the fact that there would be useful objects in the rubble, important building blocks for Athens. There could be tech, there could be furniture, appliances and hardware, wires and pipes of all kinds, even minor items like drywipes and blankets. And of course food and clothing.

All kinds of objects it might have taken us years to make or get on our own.

I wondered if I would have to go with the salvage team; I didn’t want to, but I would if they asked me. What would we see there, in the ruins—people’s bodies?

There’d have to be some bodies, after a storm like that. Not all of them would have been washed out to sea. I hoped my father’s had, though. I hoped the ocean he loved had taken him back again.

And the kids, the kids that had been there. There hadn’t been many, but still—there was a lot I didn’t want to see, in those ruins.

But maybe, I thought, that was the price of living unmanaged. You had to be willing to look at what you didn’t want to see.

I thought of the animals in their pens outside, the birds with crowns, the ancient prehistoric turtles that moved their heads like defective robots, these tufted anteater things with their long snaky tongues. There was the stream that ran through Athens, the trees growing away and away down the foothills and into the valleys in their bright-green splendor. A few hours’ walk away there was the spray of the ocean’s waves as they crashed against the rocks and the mist that rose up.

This would be an unmanaged life. From now on, we had the others but we didn’t have our pills. And I was less scared than I had been before, and more excited. I didn’t believe pharma was bad all by itself—it was medicine, some of it, and I knew it could help us when we needed it. But it had been used against us, I saw that clearly now, and what we didn’t need it for was to face the world every day.

Sam had been right. I’d been flat for some time, no pharms at all, and more and more the separate parts of the world shone at their edges.

My spirits were lifting.

The best part of it all was the rawness of life without pharms—how exposed I was to the things that might happen but, in exchange, how much more this felt like living.

“Maybe not right away, but in the long run,” I said, “I think she’ll be glad. That we didn’t let her go. Don’t you?”

We stood there looking down at her—at the moons of her closed eyes, her poor claw of a hand lying on top of the blanket. She
didn’t
look her age, I thought: she and my father had been right, when we were all in the elevator and they were laughing hysterically. She still had a kind of beauty to her, even if it was, at the moment, like the beauty of stone.

One day maybe the stone will move again.

“I bet she’ll see the world in a new light,” said Sam.

After that we went out from under the mountain and left our mother to her long sleep.

P.S.: My Final Bulletin to the Capsule

I guess you already know, my astronaut friend, we never made it into space.

We took a step or two, though. Some guys in white went dancing on the moon—my lots-of-greats-grandmother watched them on a television from her crib, shaking a rattle as they made their giant leaps.

And later robot probes were sent to Jupiter.

But in person we never got beyond our own backyard in this huge spiral galaxy. As it turned out, we never took a spin around the planets in airships with round windows. We never headed for the stars.

We did it in books and vids and games, though. We did it in our dreams. It may be for pretend, but that doesn’t mean that out there in the universe there
isn’t
somebody watching. There are too many worlds, too many galaxies, too many stars for us to be alone. Somewhere there must be other homes.

These days I have this place to think about, this Earth and how to save it. But I still like to think about the faraway neighbors we must have. Sure, maybe they look a little bit different from me. Like you, spacegirl or spaceboy—maybe
you
even look different from how I pictured you at first, my cosmonaut.

Maybe you’re not so similar to me. Maybe you’re not young, not what I already know as beautiful.

Maybe you’re not even, technically, human.

The important thing is that you’re a friend, and like me, like all of us, you’re traveling. You’re making your way past all the things you had to leave behind—you’re passing unknown planets and unfamiliar asteroid belts, shimmering clouds of interstellar dust. You move across the diamond-and-black velvet of space and stars toward a strange and beautiful new country.

If you could see me, you would smile and wave—and at my brother too. You’re someone we’d both be glad to know, even if we’ve never known anyone like you before.

One day I’ll copy this journal into a face and send my words into the infinite ether. And one day you may find these words and take the time to read them.

The only thing left to say is this: My astronaut friend, I still believe in you.

So please, believe in me too. Believe in
us
, won’t you? We made our mistakes, fell when our wings melted. But we did other things too. We saw that the world we’d been given was beautiful, we tried to understand that beauty. Some people even gave their lives for what they believed was true, and a few of those sacrifices were made into stories and legends.

But far more of people’s sacrifices went unheard of, passing unnoticed into the dark.

I know we can be worthy of what we were born into, I
know
we can do better. I swear, we’ll never stop trying, we’ll never ever give up. We’ll hope and hope and be brave, right through the end of time.

The End

Discussion Guide

___________________

Character

1
. Nat and her little brother, Sam, live in a setting that's at once more sheltered and more dangerous than the lives many American teenagers lead now. How have they responded to this dramatic dichotomy in their lives?

2
. Have the siblings' responses to their world been similar or dissimilar, and if so how? Do you think you'd react more as Nat does or more as Sam does to being confined to an apartment complex amid great cultural and climate chaos?

3
. Considering the seriousness of what's happening in the world outside, Nat seems fairly even-tempered and emotionally healthy. Do you think that's believable? Why or why not?

4
. Sam and Nat's parents, like other older people in the book, decide to take out a "contract" on themselves, assisting—and even paying for—their own "managed" deaths. It's a dark decision, and one fairly alien to us as readers. How and why can they possibly do this? Do you see anything like it today, in the real world?