Pills and Starships

by Lydia Millet

  “They hardly let anyone in, Nat. We’re lucky,” put in Sam.

  “So then,” I said stubbornly, “why us?” I still wasn’t quite believing all the hush-hush stuff. It seemed like little boys playing pretend, to me.

  And then this older woman stepped out of the trees, an older woman with silver-gray hair, which was a new one on me—I thought they got rid of the gray-hair gene a long time ago. I was staring at that weird silver hair as she spoke.

  “Because your brother reached out to us and we can use more people,” she said softly. “Hi, Nat. Hi, Sam. My name is Kate.”

  “She’s one of our leaders,” said Keahi. “And also, my mother.”

  “Oh. Hi,” I said.

  “We need young people, Nat. So we did some monitoring, which I hope you’ll forgive us for when you get to know us and why we do what we do. We did some background checks and held one of our councils. It’s not a democracy here—at least not the kind you’re used to—we vote on real stuff more. Beliefs. Actions. And here’s the situation: we think this place might be the best opportunity for you.”

  “Need young people for what?” I asked. The whole trip was starting to make me nervous. Plus it was getting late, and I worried we’d keep my parents waiting.

  “Why don’t you follow me,” she said.

  We went back out the turtle gate, behind a row of tents at one edge of the encampment, and down a flagstone path in the dirt to a low building—not a Quonset but a bamboo shack with a pointy thatch roof. There were flower boxes in the windows (open, no plexi) and a mat in front of the door.

  Before we went in Kate handed us these white fibrous masks and told us to wear them over our mouths.

  “They’re more vulnerable than we are,” she said, mysteriously. She knocked on the door, and it opened. She turned to us and raised a finger to her lips, then stood back to let us in. Sam went first, and then me, and then Keahi.

  It was just natural light inside, light streaming in from those big windows, and there was a soft colorful carpet on the floor. And then there was a row of miniature bamboo beds with odd vertical bars on the sides.

  And in the beds were very small people with heads that were way too big for their bodies. It looked like almost a deformity. They had barely any noses either, just tiny flat nubs. They had round, soft faces and bald heads.

  In other words, babies.

  “They breed those too,” whispered Sam, while I stood there staring.

  There were four of them, and they were asleep and not moving, but then one of their small, fattish feet would jerk a little, or an arm would move.

  I mean, since Sam was born, when I was only two myself so I don’t really remember it, I’ve never seen one. Except on face, of course.

  Then one of them woke up. The only way you could tell was that the eyes opened. They were deep blue and the white part was completely clear, like I’ve never seen—no bloodshot veins or anything.

  And he or she looked at me, just gazing.

  It was surprisingly cool. The thing had a kind of inner glow, or something.

  “Well, not breed, technically,” said Keahi’s mother, laughing. “Of course, we agree with the corps that there are too many unwanted babies out there already. But here they’re not unwanted. We just started this part of our work recently, when babies began coming to us from the poor parts. They’re smuggled out of where they’re born and brought to us; we take them in and raise them. And there will be more. If we have more people, like you, to help us nurture them. You’re older, of course, but you’re not Old Worlders, as we are. You’re New Worlders. Children like other children. And failing that, other young people. They’re happiest when they can play with, and learn from, their peers.”

  “I can’t believe it,” I said, and stepped closer.

  The woken-up baby did a kind of almost-smile deal.

  “Are we—am I allowed to touch it?” I asked.

  “Her,” said Kate, still smiling. “Sure. Here, why don’t you give her this,” and she handed me a bottle with white stuff in it.

  I took the bottle and leaned over the bed, which, with the bars on it, seemed like an infant prison. The baby reached out and grabbed the bottle and started sucking on it.

  It was too weird. The fat-cheeked little human really got a serious mouthhold on that thing. I couldn’t have torn it away if I’d wanted to.

  I touched her arm-skin. It was unbelievably soft.

  “Why don’t we go outside again and let the little ones sleep,” said Kate. “We’ll leave you to it, Aviva.”

  Aviva was the nurse person, the one guarding the babies. She smiled at us as we left.

  Long story short, Kate sat us down and talked to us in her soft, level voice, with Keahi watching the clock to make sure Sam and I could still get back on time and not raise more corp-worker eyebrows. Meanwhile, an old Japanese-looking gardener guy in a straw hat brought fresh fruit on a platter—slices of mango for each of us.

  It was far and away the best-tasting thing that ever touched my tongue. I’m not kidding. Kind of distracting, because as I was eating this wild, amazing food unlike anything I’d ever tasted before, and freaking out a little, she was talking to us about some heavy issues.

  I can’t write all of it down. I thought about not writing down any of it. Because what if a corp rep found it?

  So I wear this journal everywhere I go now. I keep it in a bag I never put down, even while I’m sleeping. It never leaves my body. I keep a candle and matches in the pouch too, so I can burn it, if need be.

  For now I’ll just say this: they want us to come live with them. They want us to never get on that boat again.

  And it’s crazy, I know. But there’s this one thing that they have that no other people do—at least no adults I’ve ever met.

  A future.

  We made it back to the hotel just in time, and only because Keahi led us out again and it went a lot faster downhill, with him in front, than it had uphill with Sam.

  Our parents didn’t notice anything weird, at least not as far as I could tell. When we got back to the room they’d left us a message on the board: they were in the shower rooms down the hall, freshening up for lunch. That meant they’d be back any second, since the luxury showers here take up to four minutes, so we used our sinks—the only plumbing we have in the actual suite—to wipe down a little more carefully. We’d already wet our hair at the hose when we stopped off to clean and put away our boots; we had to look like we’d been swimming. Now we lathered up with scented soap in my room too, in case we still had any eau-de-jungle about us.

  We checked each other over and agreed to talk again during Personal Time tonight, then went out and sat all docile on the living room couches waiting for them, me with my journal and Sam with his old book about flies.

  Next was lunch in the Waterfall Room, where we ate spicy gluten wraps at a small table surrounded by these water features planted with spider plants and flowers. There were red-and-blue tropical birds squawking and flapping around near the ceiling. The Waterfall Room’s not lavender so there were tourists there too—couples on honeymoon holding hands over the tables, probably ignoring the unromantic signs on the artificial rocks that said, Reclaimed Sewage Grade C Do Not Drink.

  Like anyone would drink from a fake waterfall anyway. Did they think that, without the signs, people would just lean over and suck it up?

  The pools are reclaimed sewage too, of course, but at least it’s Grade B. Also, they keep it pretty clean in there, like in the rest of the resort, though I did notice the odd splash of parrot crap on those hollow rocks.

  Anyway, the mood was pleasant, more or less. I liked watching the noncontract people, living their regular lives. And I hadn’t taken any new pharms because I was still thrilled and excited from the morning; I felt jangly, but in a good way. Everything was in flux suddenly—as though, for the very first time in my life, not everything had been decided for me.

  And then lunch was over and it was time to w
atch our homevids.

  They put us in this pitch-black room, which I sleuthed was supposed to be an imitation of an old theater from the mid-20th c., though quite a bit smaller. It was the custom back then to watch movievids in big stranger­groups, before crowds of random people were a bug danger. I think there must have been a godbelief temple aspect to those cineplexes, because their rooms were dark and you weren’t allowed to speak, and all the attention was focused on a massive screen up at the front, where images of beautiful people were blown up all perfect and a couple stories tall. The cineplexes had supercooled air, my father says, and everyone sat respectfully, like for a godbelief worship, and listened without speaking to the booming sound systems.

  We didn’t look at each other because it was so dark. But now and then if I glanced sideways I could see the light from the screen flickering on Sam or my dad or my mom, see them in profile as they gazed.

  The vids themselves were your standard family stuff, nothing shocking, except I’d never seen most of them before. My dad and the corp tech had done a good job—the music was up-tempo for most of the hour, and there were scenes of us from different stages of life. The twist on it was, it started with the most recent memories and then it went backward from there. So the first scenes we saw were from this year and last, me and Sam talking over the dinner table as Dad held the camera, the two of us decorating a birthday present for my mom, and then we got younger and younger, till we were little kids again.

  There were the usual occasions—parties and holidays, guests who I didn’t know from Adam anymore. Scenes of little kids filing into our condo, each showing his or her codes at the camera and smiling goofily. There were family trips—we never took a big one like this before but we would go, once a year, a couple of hours away on a bus or something, or do an overnight on a boat. My father was something called an insurance manager they used to have, I guess there used to be corps that ensured other corps didn’t lose all their money. But on his own time he played music and stuff like that. After insurance ended he went into model marketing, selling models to large entities—basically promoting them.

  My mother was good at all kinds of applied and brainy things, she studied risk and science and then went to work as a chemist for a pharmacorp, before she got depressed and quit. Yep, ironic. My father used to tell me privately that she quit everything then. The only thing that kept her okay was deciding to look at things a simple way, “focusing on a single point,” as my dad said. So she accepted a simple model instead of using her brain anymore and tried hard not to think of the large, only the small and what was right in front of her.

  It was one day at a time after that, he said, always one day at a time.

  We also had a small family legacy from generations ago when, believe it or not, one of our ancestors was a rap-music dude. I’m not kidding. He had a gangsta rap album that sold zillions of copies but he was mostly a business­man. When my parents were prepping me to deal with money stuff last month, they told me that. He left us actual gold. I never knew before.

  There’s not that much left anymore from the rap guy, Rakim somebody, but it’s what let them afford Hawaii, for instance. Their careers were regular-paying jobs, more or less—regular jobs for white-collar Firsts, anyway. So we’re the lucky ones, which is part of how Sam and I have stayed healthy. We’ve always lived in that one-millionth of 1 percent of the population of the First that isn’t constantly moving, that has gated communities and security.

  Anyway, so we were kids in the homevids, and then we watched ourselves as babies. We’d never seen those vids before, since my parents couldn’t stand to dwell on the past—they made the vids back then, but couldn’t ever bear to actually watch them. So all this time the footage had sat in a storage pod, waiting.

  When I saw those movies all I could think of was the baby I’d met at the camp. Actually the baby version of Sam looked a lot like the camp baby. Even I did. We both have brown eyes, but other than that it was surprising how much we looked like that baby … maybe that’s normal, maybe a lot of babies look the same. I wouldn’t know. There was Sam, with me, a little bigger, standing over him smiling, and then Sam wasn’t born yet and I wasn’t yet walking, I was still crawling, and then I was just lying there in the baby bed like those small humans were today. And then I was a misshapen red lump lying on my mother’s chest two minutes after being extracted.

  More tearjerking than the vids of Sam and me, though, were the ones of our parents before we even existed. Because time kept unspooling backward as the memories kept playing, and so my parents got younger and younger. The quality of the footage of them was good—sharp and full of color.

  In front of my very eyes they turned into kids again. And I don’t know, somehow it broke my heart to look at them.

  In one scene they played a game sort of like smallgolf, hitting balls through these little bridges on some green, green grass. I’ve always longed for grass, and for the big old trees that shimmered in the light with a million fluttering leaves moved by the wind. Watching them smile and laugh as they hit a red ball through the arches, I felt this strange yearning—I wanted to be them, back in that other time. I wished they could have stayed there, lived on forever in that happy moment. I wished they’d never had to see what came next.

  Another scene was of my mother laughing and talking with her friends, then putting her arms around the neck of this really happy-looking shaggy dog. The large pets were outlawed first for their footprint, so she must have been in her twenties. Because by the time she was thirty you couldn’t keep anything bigger than a hamster.

  Watching that scene, I suddenly agreed with Sam.

  I knew it was against what I was supposed to think, against what my parents wanted, against the service corps and everything.

  But I didn’t want to let them go.

  The Day Three field trip was called “Jungle Hike,” but after this morning and the homevids it was a total let-down, with the exception of three howler monkeys they brought in that Sam said were probably tame anyway. There were never monkeys in Hawaii, back in the day, so that was fully bogus.

  Still I liked watching them, they made odd calls and swung around, these fuzzy black shapes with long arms swooping and leaping in the vines.

  I was completely distracted the whole time, in a mood turbulence—a tingly confusion, a sense of thrill. I didn’t mind, I really dug the sensation, but I also didn’t pay much attention to the hike. It was actually just a guided walk along brick pathways in the gardens, with a youngish corp worker named Chad walking backward in front of us and making the odd hokey joke as he pointed out extremely uninteresting plants.

  So I’m going to skip right over that to what happened tonight. Because tonight turned out to be a fancy surprise party. They called it the “Eve of Goodbye Gala.” It wasn’t a surprise to the contracts themselves, but to Sam and me it was.

  What they do is, they invite all the week’s contract families—and there are hundreds of us—to a big bash, with fancy food and drinks (and custom pharmabevvies for the contracts). They had a live orchestra playing old standards in the main ballroom and big audio systems doing music for the “young people” in a smaller dancehall next door. Personally I love all music, especially loud, which is a rare thing to hear, so I was into both rooms. They even had professional dancers to lead the ballroom dances when that was the kind of music playing.

  We all had to dress up. Black tie is what they called it. My parents had ordered special outfits for the occasion for all of us—a long, shiny silver dress rental for me and a tuxedo for Sam—and they busted those out like special gifts.

  I felt half-guilty then, because Sam and I were both unpsyched by it—we had more urgent things to do, and we were thinking about that when our parents sprung the news on us like it was the best thing since sliced pita. I got that service was trying to imitate the golden days, when people had realmeet parties all the time, but still: a big party seemed beside the point.

  Because i
t was a crowd event we had to have booster shots first—we were up to date on all vaccines, of course, but since the gathering was large the corp wanted extra protection. Sam was paranoid, like maybe there were some sneaky controlpharms in the needle along with the vaccines, but if that was the case it didn’t do anything to him. So we did the boosters before we got dressed up, and then we all headed down to the party—my father, in his tuxedo, looking pretty swank for an old guy and my mother looking picturesque in a white ball gown.

  My own dress was tight and uncomfortable but I told my mother it fit perfectly.

  The main ballroom for the gala was the Twilight Lounge, all changed around so there was lots of open space, and then the smaller studio next to it, with the so-called youth music, had mirrors on the walls and sparkling balls that hung from the ceiling and turned. In the main room were long tables of food and servants going around with silver trays of fancy drinks; they’d tricked-out the little alcoves around the room with screens where clips from everybody’s homevids played, and some of those images were also projected on the ballroom walls, with happy images when the music was fast and more poignant images (I noticed a lot of babies and old people in those segments) when the slower songs were playing.

  So from time to time I would look up and see a faint image of my mom or dad floating across the wall. Trippy.

  The only people we recognized were the ones from our survivor group. I talked to Xing for a while; I liked her more and more. She comes from a community not too far from ours back home, about twenty minutes away, so there were a few things we had in common—a game club we’d both belonged to at different times, a food center we both knew. All I could think about, while we were talking, was the camp, the turtles, and those wild babies. I found myself wondering what Xing would think of the whole thing and wanting to tell her about it, but I knew I couldn’t, no way, so instead I led her into the disco room and we tried dancing around a bit.

  Our parents had put in some song requests for us, knowing my taste for old stuff, so we heard “Backwater” by Eno on the big audio, one of my favorites, and a song called “Ghosts of American Astronauts” by some ancient obscure punk band that Xing was a fan of. (It made me think of you, spacefriend.) Neither were dance numbers but they were still amazing to hear. With the lights and the rhythm and all the crowds every­where, and the slight buzz of my wheat beers, there were a couple of times I felt like I was flying.