by Gish Jen
A reasonable question to which I’d have loved to read her answer, but she just left off.
* * *
◆
Eleanor and I, meanwhile, continued to accumulate news, almost all of it good. First, with much fanfare a new policy had been unveiled: some Surplus were being allowed to move into some of the marooned places. Of course, what with such permission tied to one’s Living Points, this was quite transparently a diversion strategy. Let people angle for better housing instead of plotting against Aunt Nettie, right? Still, some people were going to be able to move off the water. Their pontoons would no longer leak and their kitchens would no longer rock. They were going to be living on land! That was heartening.
Other good news was that the SwarmDrones that had so spooked the League during the Lookouts-Jedis game had not returned. Why, no one knew. Was Aunt Nettie worried about incipient insurrection and afraid to inflame us? Was she not as worried about us as about other groups of which we were unaware? Or was there yet some other reason we’d been back-burnered? It was even possible that we Surplus were being winnowed quickly enough that eventual reintegration was on the table, said Ben PfoHo. Other members of the League technical team thought that wildly optimistic. But Bart Emmenthaler had heard that a lot of elderly Netted had rejected their CareBots and demanded humans; he said one woman had short-circuited her CareBot with a water hose. So maybe more of us could be Retrained after all? Especially if we agreed to be PermaDermed?
The best news of all was that Eleanor and her team won their Surplus Fields suit. As for whether they would have won had the AutoJudge assigned to the case not kicked it out as too complicated, who knew? But it was heard by a human judge—a Netted man with Surplus relatives, it turned out. So now it was officially acknowledged that there were indeed enfeebling emanations. Per court order, too, they were going to stop immediately, and though all affected kids were assigned a new gene therapy along with their settlement, Eleanor and her team were quite certain the kids could opt out of it if they liked. Experimental therapies could be prescribed and pushed but, thanks to an earlier battle Eleanor had fought, the Surplus could not simply be used as guinea pigs.
We celebrated the Surplus Fields win with a shindig at our house—a champagne-fueled sing-along and dance party, by far the biggest gathering Eleanor and I had ever hosted. Who would have thought we could fit forty people in our garden? But we did, and much more revelry was had than we could have imagined. As for the house offering, as it did, to roll’n’clear every other minute, that just added to the hilarity. People said no sometimes and yes sometimes, and yes then no sometimes, and when the HouseBots appeared, people hid the objects the robots sought to clear, or danced with the Bots, or shone lasers in their sensors, with such spastic results that I almost felt sorry for them. Are we humans torturers at heart? I was just glad the Bots could feel nothing.
The highlight of the evening was the moment that everyone who could do a headstand did one, all at once, in a circle in the garden. How impressive to have seven among us who could do this, even tipsy—and all those feet! Yet more impressively, all seven participants were able to give coherent instructions as to where their handphones might be found, so we could take HoloPix for them. And touchingly, too, before they resumed their normal orientation, they gave a toast.
“Here’s to Nellie!” they shouted, their glass stems between their toes. “Here’s to all that you’ve done!”
What with the continued suspicion around the mall-truck food, we did break up knowing there was more work to do—indeed, that ahead lay a fight that threatened to expose one of the foundations of the New Segregation. For if AutoAmerica overproduced food, why didn’t Aunt Nettie just dump it? What exactly was in NettieFood? It wasn’t what emanated from the Surplus Fields, that much we knew. It was something else—some said a sedative, though no one knew what sort.
As for whether we were prepared to place ourselves squarely in Aunt Nettie’s crosshairs, Eleanor pushed her reading glasses up her nose the next day and looked coolly down at her notes.
“Now where were we?” she said. “Have you figured out how to narrow down the list of winnowing agents?”
“We’re getting there,” I said.
“And the drones,” she began, as a NosyDrone crossed overhead.
“We’re on that, too,” I said, for the drone silence we had enjoyed since the disappearance of the SwarmDrones had recently been resoundingly broken. Was it because of the Surplus Fields win that, once again, there were not only drones at League games but around the house? What’s more, it wasn’t just NosyDrones and Eleanor’s ever-faithful DroneMinder, but some sort of new drone. The geese honked and honked at them.
“Jody Commoner thinks they’re ScoutDrones. Which we maybe can’t get a fix on because of their FieldObstructors,” I said.
Eleanor nodded, still reading, although FieldObstructors, ScoutDrones—this was AutoWar stuff, intended for enemy combatants. Was it all related to our having been black-coded?
Later, I walked by Gwen’s empty room and stood in the doorway, thinking how glad I was that she didn’t know what was happening—that she could not bug us as I had bugged her. There was peace of mind in knowing less, and I was glad she had it. At the same time, the less she knew, the more distant she felt. We held her close by holding her away.
* * *
◆
Playing in the Underground League, Gwen and the Lookouts had of course analyzed and strategized. There were outfielders toward whom they hit every ball possible, knowing how butter-fingered they were or how absentminded or how error-prone. There were batters to whom Gwen pitched fastballs and batters to whom she pitched curveballs. But the Lookouts had never focused on a rival the way that Net U focused on ChinRussia. As Gwen wrote, “Focus” isn’t even the right word. The word is “obsess.” They obsess about ChinRussia, I guess because of the stories.
To begin with, ChinRussia having absorbed most of Asia, they did have those Japanese players, some of the finest in the world. But more important, they had HomoUpgrade. As for what that really meant, who knew? We still traded with ChinRussia—everyone did—but no live ChinRussian had set foot in AutoAmerica since Ship’EmBack. So what were the ChinRussians like now? Did they have quicker reflexes? Larger biceps? Better vision? Longer strides? People said that GenetImprovement had produced a lot of freaks. Geniuses who could not count. Musclemen who could knock over small trucks. Giants who had to be fed by cranes. Visitors who had managed a peek sent back reports as crazy as Marco Polo’s, with one particularly bad piece of news from the Net U baseball team’s point of view: the ChinRussian players, people said, were all switch-hitters.
Perhaps all this was fear pure and simple on the part of Gwen’s teammates. But feeding their obsession, of course, was the sense that baseball was more than a sport—that it was a crown jewel. There were people who said it wasn’t even invented in America. There were people who pointed out it was mentioned by Jane Austen long before it was ever mentioned here. But if baseball took on a hallowed meaning, it took on that meaning in our American dreams. For was this not the level playing field we envisioned? The field on which people could show what they were made of? And didn’t we Americans believe above all that everyone should have a real chance at bat? Didn’t we believe that with the good of the team at heart, something in us might just hit a ball off our shoetops and send it sailing clear out of the park? If Gwen’s teammates were playing ChinRussia for something, I thought, it was for this—for a chance to show, my mother would have said, that even if we returned to the dirt and the wind and the rain like the plants and the animals, we had a bigness in us. Something beyond algorithms and beyond Upgrades—something we were proud to call human. Or so it seemed to me.
But, meanwhile, as in the region around Net U the storms went from late winter right into the spring, baseball had become a fall sport. Meaning that league games were start
ing soon and that, obsessed or not, the players had to focus. As Gwen Greeting-Grammed,
It’s like trying to tie a hot-air balloon to a tree, but Coach keeps reminding us that we have Army coming up soon, then Navy. Then Net West, our sister school on the West Coast. And then our biggest rival, data-driven Cyber U. That means we have to make our motions like silk, he says. That means we have to tie our eyes to the ball. “Ball games are won and lost in microseconds,” he said today. “You can’t think of a second as a flash. You have to think of it as a string, a length, all along which you can work. That is how you expand the possible, you get me?”
“Is that the same as killing Army?” said Beetle Samsa.
“Yes,” said Coach.
Because that is his job as coach, he says. To get through to everyone whether you can get through to them or not. As for why he tells me these things, I really don’t know.
“Though perhaps we are beginning to guess,” commented Eleanor wryly.
I just hoped we were wrong.
* * *
—
The next conversation I overheard was with Ondi:
“But you were so beautiful the way you were,” said Gwen.
“When in Rome,” said Ondi.
“What about if you go back home? What then?”
“I’m not going back.”
“But what if. You haven’t been asked to Cross Over permanently. So how can you be sure?”
“I’m not going back,” Ondi insisted. “And I had the Living Points. So.”
“But you were so beautiful,” Gwen said again. “And think how Clara Zee is going to gloat. Think how she’s going to say, So you realized all along how sorry-ass you looked.”
“I don’t care what Clara Zee thinks. It’s what’s on the inside that matters. Isn’t that what you always used to say? It’s just your wrapper.”
“But it was your wrapper.”
“Why should I look coppertoned? Now I look like my parents. Isn’t that more natural?”
“Were they PermaDermed, too? Is that why they look so angelfair? And how did they get their PermaDerms, anyway? Was that thanks to their famous doctor friends? And is that where you get all your Living Points?”
“What a smartass you are,” said Ondi. “Just like your mother.”
“You flatter me.”
“Anyway, guess what?”
“You’re seeing someone and he loves it.”
His name was Traymore Crescent. He was a junior cybereconomics major and vice-president of the investments club as well.
“Was it his idea?” Gwen went on.
“I don’t just do what guys tell me to do, Gwen.”
“They don’t need to tell you, you mean. You pick up their cues.”
“If you mean I didn’t grow up reveling in my weirdness, the way some of us did, you’re right.”
“Actually, you did,” said Gwen. “Actually, you were rebellion personified.”
“Maybe I was myself personified,” said Ondi. “And maybe I am still.”
“Well, good. Then you’ve done the right thing. I just have one more question.”
Ondi waited.
“Are you going to do your eyes now? Does Open’EmUp come next?”
* * *
—
As for what came next for Gwen, Eleanor could only say, her head in her hands, “That Coach Link.” For in a PigeonGram, Gwen wrote,
Coach gets that I didn’t really want to come here but he says that Satchel Paige learned to pitch at reform school, where he didn’t want to be, either. So there could be a silver lining to it. “Okay, I’ll just think of myself as attending Net U Reform School,” I told him. That made him laugh.
I do think he is the only person I’ve ever met who is as interested in pitching as I am. And he says such interesting things about it. Like, “Think how important it would have been to us as hunter-gatherers, to be able to throw. Don’t you think part of our fascination with pitching is an atavistic interest in something we’ve lost touch with?” Of course, I did not tell him I didn’t know what “atavistic” meant. But, yes, I looked it up on my handphone when he wasn’t watching. And I was glad that when he said, “I love all those threes in baseball—three strikes, nine innings, nine players. It’s as if it’s a code written in base three,” I at least knew that base three wasn’t third base. You’ll be happy to hear, too, Dad, that I knew what Coach meant when he said he thought baseball stitched together the agricultural south and the manufacturing north of long-ago America—that I understood what he meant when he said, “One of the beauties of baseball is that there’s no clock. We go back and forth from the field, working as we did in our farming days, namely until the job was done. And yet there’s something clockwork about it, too—the players making their way around a clockface, or trying to. Backward, as if they’re still a little confused about this time thing. And all the fans with their stats—don’t they harken back to factory days, when people loved numbers and believed in them? When numbers were oracular? It’s arithmetic’s last stand.”
I thought he maybe used to be a professor but it turns out that’s wrong. He did originally want to be a professor, though, and was almost an Unretrainable himself, even though he was born to a Netted family. Because it turns out they can Cross Over, too, only the other way. Of course, no one wants to. But he wrote his thesis on dystopias, which I guess was too much for Aunt Nettie. It was just lucky that he had this sideline, since he was never going to get a job.
He says that when he was in college, there was almost no baseball left, and that a lot of people had never even heard of it, though he had because his grandfather pitched for the Boston Red Sox. So he can sort of imagine what it must be like to be an alien like me. It’s still different to belong to a group where there’s an actual legal line separating them from us, he knows, and now to look so different from everyone else at Net U. It’s not just a matter of feeling different inside. But still he says he thinks he gets it, a little. And I think he does.
How old was this Coach Link? Maybe thirty? Was he married? Had he ever been? And were there rules around coach-player relationships at Net U? Eleanor and I did not dare ask; parental protocol forbade it. And let me say that, tempted though I was, I did not increase my bugging, either—I suppose because this sort of danger did not seem to me extraordinary. No doubt it was the most laughable possible moral reasoning to see things this way, but I believed it to be Aunt Nettie that justified my vigilance. Coach Link did not. And so, like Eleanor, I suffered in ignorance.
Meanwhile, Gwen GreetingGrammed,
I wasn’t sure he’d put me in, but guess what—I was the relief pitcher for the Army game! We started out ahead, 5–0, thanks to a run in the first inning and a grand slam in the third. But Army chipped and chipped away at us until suddenly it was 5–4, bases loaded, two outs, with their biggest slugger at bat—a guy they called So Long, Salami. I don’t know what his real name is but that’s what the crowd started chanting. So-long-Salami! So-long-Salami! Or sometimes just Sa-la-mi! Sa-la-mi! And then who do you think Coach brought in? Surprising a lot of people, although actually it made perfect sense that he’d bring in someone Army had never seen.
It was tense. Even though I am almost never nervous, as you know, I was shaking when I got to the mound, and the sun was in my eyes. And I don’t know why but my uniform seemed scratchy, as if it had been washed in something I was allergic to, and all I could think was what someone once told me—that if you threw to the outside corner with the sun like that, the ball could come back right in your face. Was that going to happen to me?
Still, I’d noticed earlier that Mr. Salami liked fastballs, and I knew that was why Coach had put me in. Because we needed to try something else. But I’d also noticed that he was no ambusher—that he liked to watch the first ball to get a sense of what
the pitcher was bringing. He was patient. And I figured that what was true in general was going to be even more true with me, a total unknown. So I shook off Beetle’s sign and threw an extra-fast four-seamer—at the very top of my range, well into the eighties—and on the outside corner, the exact throw I’d spooked myself thinking about. And sure enough, he let it go. Strike one. Then, just when he thought he had his timing, I threw a circle changeup because I’d noticed his long stride and thought he might have trouble with a changeup. Strike two. Then I threw a plummeting curveball I was a little worried Beetle would lose track of, there in the dirt.
But Mr. Salami missed, and Beetle did not, and that was the inning and the turnaround. We started hitting, and I continued to deliver. Guys hate being struck out, but to be struck out by a girl is demoralizing in a way that helped us get up some momentum that demoralized them yet further until we’d won it, 6–4. Naturally, Ondi was upset later that she didn’t get put in to catch me—that in the clutch, Coach seemed to think Beetle was up to the job. But what could I do? It wasn’t my call, I told her, and no, I wasn’t going to say anything about it. He was the coach. It was up to him.
Anyway, the guys carried me out on their shoulders!—and were all whooping and cheering, and Coach took me out for a beer later, to celebrate. He said the turnaround was like something out of a novel—new kid in town shows legend the door. The question was, what next? Because no novel ever ended there. But when I shrugged and told him I wasn’t in a novel and thanked him for advising me to hang out in the Dugout and get comfortable with the guys, because it wasn’t just that strikeout that won the game, it was the teamwork, he came down to earth.