by Lydia Millet
Those tiny humanoids were perfectly able to sleep, even as they were marched at top speed along that rugged path.
The last in the line was Aviva, and she smiled at me quickly as she went past, one baby hanging on the front of her and another in back. They looked so funny with their bouncing, froggy little legs drooping out of the packets they were sitting in. The chubby legs, with the limp feet hanging from them, jiggled in the walking rhythm of the grown-ups carrying them.
I was distracted from my worry for a second. Small people are comical. I found myself hoping that I would get to be with them more, get to know them, even. They were a good kind of mystery; there was something about them I’d never seen anywhere else. They looked at you and knew nothing about you, but they seemed to know something.
“What I’m guessing,” said Xing, when the babies and their keepers were vanishing up ahead and we could start walking again, “is most of the employees, the low-down ones like our friend LaTessa for instance, and the regular guests? My guess is they’re sacrifice.”
I walked the rest of the way trying not to freak out or cry, not even able to wipe the tears of confusion from my eyes when they spilled out because my hands were holding the baskets. I’d been so mad at Sam last time I saw him, I’d blamed him for my parents dying—completely unfair, I knew that, and now he was in danger. Not only in danger—he was going to be hit by a tsunami. And it was my fault because I was older, and I was supposed to take care of him, and I hadn’t even succeeded for one goddamn hour after my parents died. I’d failed him right away. I’d failed him completely.
My parents would despise me if they knew. And they would be right to.
I shouldn’t have left without him. I should never have let us be separated.
It turned out we weren’t going to Deep High Station yet, or High Deep Station, whatever it’s called, because we had more tasks to do. Once we got to an opening in the mountainside—it was another lava tube entrance, not one I remembered seeing before—we handed the egg baskets over to some old women waiting there, who Xing said were biologists, in charge of the breeding, and we turned around and headed back the way we’d come.
It was easier to talk on the way back down, without the burden of the eggs. Xing led me along a different path so we wouldn’t get in the way of people coming up the first one. The downward path was wider, though still muddy and interrupted by tree roots, and we didn’t have baskets to protect so we could walk side by side.
By this time, though, the trees around us were starting to move in the wind, and we could hear the rustling of dry fronds and the sweep of leafy branches against each other like a sighing high above. The sky, when I tipped back my head and could see a piece of it through the leaves, was heavy, with dark banks of clouds rolling across. The air felt even wetter than usual, full of warm, moist particles though rain wasn’t actually falling.
“I can’t believe they don’t have an evac plan for the people at the hotel,” I persisted—bugging Xing, I guess. “How can they just leave them? I mean, if they do that and the storm hits and people get drowned—won’t facemedia find out? Won’t they get in major trouble? Bad PR and the law and stuff?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know yet,” said Xing, “about the service corps and their cohorts in other sectors. But these aren’t people who, in a tornado, would worry much about evacuating hotels. They wouldn’t think twice.”
“Sam said something I didn’t understand, something that made even LaTessa look shocked,” I began, after a minute. “The other day, in the healing session, when he was on those meds? The truth drugs or whatever they were? He said something about quotas. Right before we faked the sickness and I dosed him with those tranks he gave me. I knew it was something he shouldn’t say, just from how her face looked, but I didn’t get what he meant at all. Do you know what he meant?”
She glanced down at her wristface, which must have been hard to read while she was walking.
It was blinking orange now, I saw, not the green from before. But there was the pond ahead, with its sand mounds and its eggs.
“Less than two hours before we have to be secure,” she murmured, more to herself than me. “We may have to abandon the last load of eggs. I hope not. But we may.”
We started gathering them up and laying them gently in our baskets; we hefted the baskets onto our hips.
I caught her eye as we turned to start up the trail again.
“Xing. Do you know what he meant?” I repeated.
She sighed and shook her head, then ducked past me. I followed at her heels, struggling to balance my basket.
“I’m not sure you’re ready for that,” she said.
“But Sam was? He’s younger than I am, Xing, he’s only fourteen!”
“Well,” she said slowly, “look, Nat, if I had it my way he wouldn’t know either. It’s messed with him a little, frankly. But you can’t do much to stop a gifted hackerkid from learning what he wants to know. Or even what he doesn’t know he doesn’t want to know.”
“Uh, you’re kind of losing me,” I said, a bit impatient.
She took a deep breath. “Here goes. The deal is, the service corps are tasked with population reduction. That’s their whole reason for being. Their official mission. So it’s not just that older people in the First are ready to go, Nat. That’s propaganda. It’s all prop—pharms and prop. Because they’re made ready. They’re prepped with a tailored pharma diet over many months. The old-age ‘vitamins.’ Buying the contract is a part of that; it’s not the first thing that happens. They only buy once they’re already sucked in. By making the system look and function like a service, the corps can meet their reduction quotas and collect revenues in the process. That way what private monies still exist are shifting to the corporates. In the First—the gated communities—they take people’s money and their lives at the same time. A neat deal; they get carbon credits when they make their quotas, and they trade those to get even richer. It’s an enormous racket.”
I slacked off in my walking a bit, just processing and kind of dazed. Thinking, my parents were so smart—how could they fall for that? And thinking of all the other people who did.
Basically, everyone.
Or almost.
“But that’s not the worst news,” Xing went on quietly. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
“So tell me what the rest of the iceberg looks like,” I begged. “Under the water. You have to tell me, Xing.”
“The First has it easy, though the targets for contracts are certainly getting younger all the time. It used to be ninety, now they’re moving to eighty-plus. Soon it’ll be seventy-five. Then seventy …”
“And?”
“And in the poor parts, which is a carbon nightmare, the corps have much, much higher reduction quotas. The targets are pegged to what particular regions can sustain, carbon-wise. So certain types of forested areas in the poor parts tend to have lower quotas than certain arid ones, for instance, you understand what I’m saying? In areas where poors are more offset by carbon storage, natural or manmade, they’re not being taken out as fast. The corp scientists work up the equations and they’re the ones who determine the quotas, in collusion with corporate management. In the Resist—the resistance, in case you haven’t heard that before—we call it Death Math.”
“Death Math,” I repeated.
“In the poor parts there’s no money to be made off dying people. Because no one has money except the corporates there—regular folks have nothing. So the corps don’t care if the people they take out are young or old. There, they don’t bother to ask for anyone’s permission. There are no contracts there, because there don’t have to be.”
I stopped still, dead still, staring at her and gaping. “But that’s—but murder’s illegal.”
“Only for you and me.”
I didn’t say anything—I couldn’t.
“Remember the guys in the boat on the way over?” she asked. “The Indonesian guys in uniform, who
didn’t talk to anyone?”
I nodded. I’d had a bad feeling about them.
“There are some of them on every boat, pretty much,” she said. “Those were corp mercenaries. They get transported all over the world to do the corp dirty work at the ground level. They’re like indentured soldiers. And there are many of them—some operate the drones, others do infantry work. But they, and the corporate bosses, have killed more people than the bugs ever did. In fact, the corps greatly exaggerated the bug risks, to keep people under control.”
I don’t know exactly what happened, but I lost my focus in the shock of that and fumbled, and my basket jittered in my arms and tipped. I righted it, panicked, but not before one precious egg fell out and shattered on a rock in the path.
Xing and I stopped and looked down at it, and just then, when I was feeling flabbergasted and sick to my stomach, we heard a loud whirring overhead and looked away from the broken egg and up into the tree canopy. It was a helicopter noise. At first we couldn’t see anything, then a black dragonfly shape passed between the green blurs of the vegetation, hard to follow through the foliage but unmistakable.
And then another one. And one more.
“They’re headed inland to safety,” she said. “Yep. That’ll be them. Probably the first wave. Later they’ll catch a ride on a corp ship, somewhere between here and the mainland. Sorry, but we’ll have to talk more later.”
I was feeling cold suddenly, cold in the sweaty heat of the jungle.
“But Sam,” I said. “What can I do to help him, Xing? What can I do?”
“There’s no time to rescue anyone but ourselves. Your brother’s resourceful. And he’s not all alone. Look, Nat. Being scared stiff for him won’t help him and it could hurt you. And those who depend on you. I need you to focus, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, but it was weak. The sound of the choppers was fading away. It was like a wish—out of reach now and gone.
“He’s free now, Nat. I know he wouldn’t have it any other way. And you know too.”
Free? I thought. It’s a word I don’t really understand, except for in the phrase free death. It means unmanaged, I get that, but all I could think of when she said it was the other word in that phrase. Free death. Free = death.
I nodded.
“We’ve got to pick up our pace.” Xing patted my arm. “But no running downhill on this path, okay? We can’t afford an injury. Too high a risk of ankle sprain or other slippage, given the incline and the lack of traction in this wet soil. So let’s walk as fast as we can without losing our footing. Grab onto a sturdy branch whenever you need to.”
We did pick up the pace—we rushed. It was hard to talk at all after that. I didn’t think about the quotas or the poors just then, I pushed it all to the back of my mind.
Denial is a highly effective strategy, as my father used to say when he was still himself, and only half-joking.
All I could think was, Sam, Sam, Sam, my baby brother, as the trees whipped around overhead and my feet moved over the muddy ground and I stared down at them.
Sam. Forgive me.
By the time we picked up the very last eggs the turtles themselves were all gone. I wondered how the men were managing to push those big carts along the narrow, muddy paths in the jungle, but as we passed through the camp again I was amazed how much had already been moved. By then big drops of warm rain were starting to fall and I was wearing a membrane-thin, clear raincoat Xing pulled out of her gear for me; she must have only had one because she let herself get wet, and she wouldn’t take it back.
The Quonset still stood there, and a couple of other permanent-type structures like the cute little painted shack where the babies had been, but in just a couple of hours most of the tents had already been pulled up, and the solar panel arrays were gone, and the cooking equipment and the chairs and tables and just about everything else that wasn’t sunk into the ground on posts or actually growing there.
I saw that some of the potted trees set up to camouflage the camp had already been knocked over by the rising wind. They were lying across the clearing, forlorn and bedraggled, soil spilled around the bottoms of their trunks, their branches spread out over the ground. And I wondered, if the grove of fruit trees was destroyed, and the vegetable gardens, how would the camp feed itself? Did they get all their food from right here? Did they bring anything in? They had to bring in components for pharma and tech.
I realized I didn’t know how it worked yet, how alone the camp was or what its ties were to other rebel camps in other places across the sea. How many of them were there? Of us?
Kate had said something about Samoans, about twenty camps being destroyed. Were there a handful of others, or were there hundreds?
The rain was coming down harder as we struggled up the hill again with our last baskets, making a steady, almost deafening sound in the trees, and there was no way you could hear anyone talking. The sky had turned almost black. There was a purple hue to some of the clouds, though, a purple tinged with sickly yellow, like giant bruises.
I’d never been anywhere near a Cat Six. The worst storm I’d ever lived near was a Five, and it didn’t hit us directly, only some people on the coast nearby, and afterward we hosted some refugees at our home.
It was before we lived in the complex we live in now—I mean, used to live in before the Final Week—and we had a bigger place back then, with an extra bedroom. The refugees slept there for the months they stayed with us—two whole families, seven people in all. Four parents and three kids, a little older than we were.
I remember them well because of how sad they were, the parents more than the kids, because people they knew had drowned. They tried to put a brave face on it and they tried to find work and pitch in, but after a while, when they couldn’t find work or bring in any money, the condo seemed really full and we didn’t have quite enough food for them and eventually they had to leave. We never heard from them after that except for one message from the boy of the smaller family, which he sent to Sam—a face message on a social site. He said they were in Canada, he and his father, in some reforestation camp where life was hard, almost like slave labor, and that his mother wasn’t with them anymore because she had died of a new disease.
Sam cried when he showed that message to me. The mother had liked to read to him. He was about ten then, I think. Soon after that he began really learning about interface, hacking corporate prop and browsing rebel sites and getting really interested in how the world worked.
Anyway, I thought about Sam crying as Xing and I trucked up the hill—I didn’t like thinking of that but I couldn’t help it. The trail was harder going now because of the rain. Water was pouring down the edges of the trodden part of it, collecting in gullies like little brown streams, turbulent and fast-moving. Those got deeper and faster until the force of the water washed parts of the path away, and sometimes we had to get off it and bushwhack through the trees because the path itself was too slippery. The path seemed to draw water toward it, and you had to move out of its way.
I got scraped on top of the bruises I already had, and once I slipped and tore the skin off one knee beneath my camo pants, but I kept on going and didn’t mention it—I knew it was minor compared to what we were dealing with, even though it hurt constantly and the pain nagged at me. There were people behind us and ahead of us, and sometimes the ones behind would pass because I was so slow. They were stronger, the rebels, from living out where they did. I admired their toughness—it was a kind of good all to itself, a kind of integrity that seemed to shine out of them and be worthy of envy.
I wondered if I would lose my softness over time and grow muscles and abilities, learn how to tie knots or fix tech or grow vegetables—if I’d become like them, if I kept living here.
If I kept living.
Because it was a Cat Six, roaring toward us across the purple-black sky.
They didn’t even have Sixes before the last century. The worst storm category they had before the Greenland
ice-sheet melt was Fives, and even those were extremely rare. They had to invent a whole new system for classifying storms, in fact, and throw away the old one. Sixes, at their greatest extent, can be the size of a country. They can take out entire coastlines. I’ve browsed about Sixes that turned a thousand miles of lived-on shoreline into oil-slicked mudflats, Sixes that caused nuclear plant meltdowns and left radiation plumes firing into the sky like poisonous fountains for years after the rain and wind had died down. Some of the most notorious Sixes have carried half a million people out to sea.
And here we were, on a fairly small island in the middle of the ocean. I told myself to face facts, that this was extremely dangerous. Maybe we wouldn’t make it, in the end, and I should be like a heroine on face, looking death squarely in the eye.
We will survive, I said to myself instead. At least for me, it didn’t work to dream of being a dead hero. I talked to myself about life. I said these mantras in my head, things with a rhythm that let me keep marching. We will survive. We will survive. One foot and then the next.
I thought of space, all around us and on and on until the end of the universe, or past the end of the universe to whatever’s beyond that. And how the Earth must seem so small, from way out there; the storms must look almost pretty, if you’re seeing them from beyond the stratosphere. Anything can look beautiful from far enough away.
Like on a wallscreen, where vast landscapes are neat and contained and nothing but a nice picture.
Rotate, rotate. Swirl, swirl.
We made it into the lava tube, Xing and I and some stragglers with wheelbarrows and some baby goats they herded in at the tail end, just before the full force of the storm hit. The goats smelled unlike anything I’ve ever smelled before. I don’t even have words for it. They really have a stench to them. No offense to those dudes; they were cute in a way, but it was more important that they stank. I’m sure I could get used to it—they say you can get used to any smells if you live with them long enough, that people live in dung heaps and don’t notice it, etc. Xing told me the older goats are even worse.