Pills and Starships

by Lydia Millet

  The only thing I’d ever smelled before that even faintly reminded me of the goatstench was at a schoolmeet once where we got to go to an olden farm, a historical reconstruction of when real animals (other than fish in fish farms) were raised to be eaten. Those school­meets only happened once a year, so I always remembered them—a whole group of us together not on face but in the flesh. I was young then and couldn’t stop staring at the exhibit of chickens, these funny weirdos strutting around like they were mega-important. I remember how strong it all smelled, how unlike life in the complex, and I remember wondering if olden farmers used to wear nose plugs.

  Still, it wasn’t anywhere close to the goatstink.

  We wouldn’t feel the storm’s force ourselves, exactly, because we would keep on walking for hours, up and up and up—some­times on stairs built into the lava tube, where it was narrow and steep, and sometimes just winding through the dark with only a few stray lights to guide us, bobbing and winking ahead, so that I often felt half-blind and stumbled into Xing’s heels.

  I had plenty of time to mull over what she’d told me—how all over the world the corps were murdering innocent people, how they were making war on them, just mowing them down by the hundreds of thousands to slash the planet’s carbon footprint. Something lodged in me as I walked, a kind of solid grief that felt like it changed the contours of my bones.

  This was the most important thing I had ever learned, I realized.

  In a way, it was the only thing I’d ever learned.

  When we finally got where we were going, we still didn’t feel the storm. We could hear it as a faint rush, though, through these small holes somewhere in the system that let in oxygen from the outside. And somehow we could sense it, or at least I could, as though my whole body was paused, waiting for an impact.

  And that was how it would be for more than a day, as it turned out. With only the sounds of the wind and the rain, the sound of a massive but muffled roaring, we would pass the storm tucked away in a vast, dark cave, a lava cave whose black walls were not flat but bulging and wrinkled. It was a cave lit with all kinds of lamps the camp people had brought in over time, old-fashioned lamps that ran on gas, lamps that had batteries, solar lamps, lamps that were candles, lamps you powered by winding—all these different kinds of light, white and yellow and orange and red, some bright and others dim.

  We clustered there, sitting or kneeling on the folded and bumpy lava floor, some people lying on blankets, others perched on crates or folding chairs they’d carried up with them. There were hundreds of people in that cavern. Later I’d learn that the camp had numbered more than four hundred, before the storm.

  The giant sea turtles weren’t in there; they’d stayed down lower, in another holding area that wasn’t inside the mountain at all but at some other protected location, and the same with the other animals, I guess. Only the baby goats had come into the tunnels with us, because they were small and good climbers and didn’t mind narrow spaces, I was told. Luckily for me—because otherwise I would have had to smell the goatstink the whole time—they hadn’t come the whole way up either. They were being kept in a smaller cavern, down lower than ours was.

  Keahi and some of the other animal specialists had stayed down there looking after them, along with the turtle biologists who were taking care of those eggs.

  Xing introduced me to a few of the people, some of the younger ones and some of the older ones too. They were all shapes and colors but one thing struck me about them that was different from most of the people I’d met in the past: they had a glow of sun to them, a shine to their skin that must have been from spending most of their time outside, instead of inside the walls of a complex. There was no wasted flesh on them—I mean we don’t have fat people since the 21st c. anyway, food rations and footprint taxes and that, but plenty of us aren’t muscular, we aren’t fit because we’re immobilized, using our faces, most of the time. But none of the rebels were like that. Every piece of them seemed useful and solid.

  I was glad to meet them because it made me feel less alone, though I was also worried and half of my mind was on the ragged green slopes of the island outside us, the wind that had to be raging through the trees, the vast wall of water that might be approaching, might have crashed on the shores already, might already have swept away my little brother.

  And those tiny glittering hummingbirds, I thought—the ones that buzzed around us at the resort, diving and sucking at red and pink flowers with their needles of beaks. Where was the shelter for them?

  Every so often one of the babies would cry a little and then be rocked to sleep again, or walked around and jiggled or given a drink. A couple of them were bigger and could already walk, after a fashion, and they would totter around from person to person, clutching onto people’s knees and seeking attention. I put on one of the white masks and played with one of them for a while—weird since it doesn’t know how to talk. Him, I guess. Not it. But I really liked him and I wondered what he thought about me. Did they think about other people at all? I didn’t know.

  He was a starer and a drooler, just looked at me for long periods out of those glassy round eyes while water dripped from his gaping lower lip. Those messy habits, which in a grown-up person would make you think of mental challenge, were apparently quite normal.

  People were murmuring low conversations with each other, some shared out the snacks they’d brought or passed around water canteens. We rode out a lot of the storm like that, waiting, sleeping, and talking, since there was nothing else to do. For me it wasn’t bad because I met people, something I’ve always loved and never did that often in the flesh—at least, not until this trip. Some of them told me a bit about themselves and I answered questions about myself, though most of them had more to tell, I thought, and I felt flat boring by comparison.

  Lots had hard jobs in the camp or dangerous histories, they’d lived in bug ghettos or worked in places where there weren’t too many food deliveries and the water was teeming with parasites. A sad-seeming guy, who wasn’t that much older than I am, had lost a whole city. He’d lived in a place I hadn’t even heard of, though the name sounded Indian, where one summer night people began to get a sickness whose major sign was blood leaking out through the pores in their skin. It happened fast, he said, the blood seemed almost to turn to water, a pinkish color, and more soak out of them than drip, as though they were sponges. He didn’t say more than that except to tell me he’d walked among the dead until there was nothing to do but leave and no one left to stop him.

  He’d come alone from there, over the ocean in a ship, because he’d been an apprentice in the corp merchant marines and knew how to steer them. He’d ended up on the Big Island, and was lucky enough to find the camp. He brought his ship to them, he said. They hid it from aerial surveillance, and they had it still.

  I liked meeting the people from the camp; I worked on memorizing their names, telling myself I was collecting them because that might help me to remember. I know you can’t collect people, of course. But some of their stories lodged in me like heavy stones—ominous promises of more bad news to come, news that would pull me down.

  By and by it seemed like a good time for me to talk to Xing again, because I was still wondering why Sam and I had been invited—who’d made the first contact, why we were worthy of risk in the first place. I got to speak with her while we were both on baby duty, passing a very small, squish-faced one back and forth and trying to stop it from crying by bouncing it up and down and feeding it a bottle, with Xing showing me how and singing to it in a soft voice now and then. She said babies were not her specialty, not at all. They were tough, she said. Harder than turtles for sure. But she’d held a couple of them in her time and she didn’t mind stepping in when she was needed.

  “I’m wondering,” I said, “why me, Xing? Why us? I know you need new people and all that. But there have to be other people who want to get out. Where did you all come from, the rebels? How did you end up here?”

 
; “Some of us are natives,” explained Xing. “The camp began that way, with native Hawaiians. But every community needs immigrants, or it dies the death of inbreeding. Not just genetic but—well, call it of the spirit. We’ve known that and we’ve tried to keep our community alive and changing. Many people have come to us through Twilight Island itself. I recruited in the First, you see, since that was my own background, and over the years a number of families used their Final Week as an opportunity to join. It’s why some of them—though just a few among hundreds of thousands—selected the Big Island.”

  “So of all the survivors and contracts staying there right now … I mean, why was it me and Sam you picked? Was it—was it his hacking? Him being so good at tech?”

  Because that was my fear, that was what was eating at me: that Sam was the one they’d really wanted, and they’d only brought me along because he asked them to. And now what if they didn’t have Sam at all, only me, and I wasn’t good for anything? I was soft and weak and I didn’t know shit.

  “We believed Sam’s skills would be valuable to us,” said Xing carefully.

  My heart sank, because I’d been right and I so much hadn’t wanted to be.

  “Those skills are what put us in touch in the first place, but not why we recruited,” Xing went on. “The First is full of hackerkids. It’s not the talent; it’s how you use it. I was on a rogue listserve with Sam, one of the ones that changes locations constantly so it doesn’t get shut down too fast. Standard recruitment strategy—as long as I lived in the First, doing my work as a psych counselor, it was my job to find new recruits and bring them in. I conducted most of my research on face because it’s far and above the most efficient way. What attracted me to Sam, what made me pursue a correspondence with him, was personality. That’s what everyone looks for, in the end. We need talents, but more than that we need friends. I liked the soul of your family.”

  “The soul—?”

  “There was Sam himself, of course. I loved his attitude and it’s always good to have another techie onboard. And there was you, with your collecting—art is being lost these days, and we look for artists. We always do. We desperately want to bring art back.”

  “O-oh,” I said haltingly. Art. Believe it or not, I hadn’t ever thought of my collection like that.

  It made me feel a strange lift of hope.

  “But there were also your parents. Kids tend to underrate the value of those. Yours in particular: they had a history as rebels themselves, you know. Before they gave it up.”

  “I know. They were the last of the treehugs,” I said, not without pride. “I—I always thought that was cool of them. It had to be hard to stand up for—for things that couldn’t stand up for themselves. And really hard to lose.”

  Xing peered at me quizzically, over the bundle of baby she was hefting onto her shoulder. “Your mother was more than just any treehug. Once upon a time, she was one of the greatest. The most fearless. She was a revolutionary.”

  “A what?”

  “Her specialty was explosives. I got from Sam that you two hadn’t been told. Yes. That’s how she lost the fingers on her hand. Those fingers got blown off.”

  I think, right at that moment, my mouth must have been gaping open as far as the drooling babies’.

  “Explosives?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or accuse her of lying. But somehow I couldn’t do either.

  “She was a chemist by training, you know that part, but the pharma job she held down for so long was a cover, while she was an activist, and just an income, after she retired. What she made best was bombs. Along with your father, who was one of the people working with her, she blew up stuff. Not people, you understand—never people, nothing alive, she was very moral that way. She took down installations. Corp properties, strategic sites—weapons and drug warehouses, communications centers. She fought the corporates.”

  My mother had never fought anyone, was what I’d thought. Except when she yelled at my dad and they got going. But that was over things like taking too long in the waste room. It was halfway funny, most of the time.

  It wasn’t bomb material. Bombs and my mother didn’t go together.

  But neither did bombs and Xing—Xing talking in admiring tones about rebels with explosions as she jiggled a drooling big-eye and seemed to be patting its butt repeatedly.

  “In the end she got disillusioned, you see, and went into retirement. She’d always loved the natural world, she did everything in the name of animals and landscapes and the people who valued them. Even her operations were named after animals—Marten, Wolf, Lynx. Her monkey-wrenches, as the treehugs used to say. The end of her career came after a series of extinctions, when the last of the captive animal populations died out in the zoo pandemics. The word went out she’d collapsed, she’d said she was stopping the fight forever. And that … well, that was what happened.”

  I watched some people huddled in a corner, passing around a jug and pouring liquid from it into their canteens. People could look so regular, I thought—so average on the outside. But who knew what was inside them? Who knew what they’d been in the past, or would be in the future on some distant horizon?

  “What was amazing was that she never got caught. I mean that was sheerly amazing. The corporates never found out her real name or her codes. They never knew what she looked like. They never had her DNA. The DNA she’d put on record when she went to work for the pharmacorps, for instance—after she gave up, and her only goal was to bring up you guys—belonged to someone else entirely. No one ever knew how she did it. But she was so good at disappearing that they were never able to grab her and torture her, as some people feared they would. Despite her injury, which should have made her stand out in the most obvious way possible …”

  I remembered how strictly, how carefully she’d always put on her attachment to go to work—the rubbery prosthesis she called her fake fingers.

  “Somehow she managed to disappear,” said Xing, with a kind of reverence. “She flew the rest of her life under the radar so she could raise the two of you safely. Your mother was a hero to many.”

  The rest of her life.

  I don’t remember what I said after that—it must have been something inane, because all I cared about was what she’d said to me. They were the best words I’d ever been given—purely collectible. My mother a hero. And then the fact that I’d never known it made it a complicated thing, and I felt tears coming and a tearing, acute pull of wanting to change the past.

  The most hopeless want of all.

  “That’s why we had to risk trying to bring you in. Because we believed in all of you,” said Xing softly.

  The next moment my loss came back full force and it made me sadder than I’d been before, to think that my mother was lost not only to these people who had believed in her, like Xing, but to Sam and me. And we hadn’t even known how brave she was.

  Or really, if I’m being honest, that she was brave at all. I thought of her as my mother. I barely thought of her outside that.

  And now I was mad at myself because of it.

  I wandered among the people for a while but found I didn’t want to talk much anymore, just tended to smile weakly. Words weren’t really flowing for me. After a while I kind of accepted that for once I wasn’t feeling social. I sat down with my knees drawn up, leaning back against the wall and thinking; finally I lay down, wondering about my mother, shunting ideas and regrets back and forth in my head. First I was elated at the new picture I had of her, then I was crushed that she was gone, then I was torn up that she’d hidden her rebel past from us for all our lives. Next I was telling myself she’d pretty much had to, if she wanted us all to stay together.

  And alive.

  Eventually I dozed off, sleeping fitfully on my thin mat. As the storm battled on late into night and then stretched into the early hours of day—or so I was told, because time passing was a half-dream in the cave—most of the others fell in and out of sleep too. I’d turn on my side and watch one
or another of them, sometimes exhausted, sometimes alert. Or I’d get tired of looking at faces and just watch the lamplight flickering on the walls. There was a timeless quality in there, a strange mood that combined anxiety and relief—anxiety over those who weren’t with us and over our uncertain future, relief that we still seemed to have one.

  Through the whole storm that place felt secure. I remember marveling at that, at any place that could make people feel safe during a Cat Six. We were surrounded by the most comforting walls I’d ever known. They weren’t the flimsy, temporary walls that humans built but thick and abiding. They were the warm body of a mountain—and a living mountain, because Deep High Station was under the volcano.

  DAY SEVEN

  ACCEPTING & GRATITUDE

  Theme of the Day: Recovery

  The noise of the wind finally dwindled and died down, and we started to get impatient and restless. Where before the walls had felt like shelter, now they were starting to feel suffocating.

  It seemed like way too long till the scouts were finally given the signal to go out. When at last they were dispatched, they went jogging off down the tunnel carrying portable tech, small satellite dishes, and facesets to check the weather systems. You can’t get face signals in the volcano—you can’t know anything about the outside world in there. It’s just too thickly insulated, Xing told me.

  But if we ever had to retreat here for longer, she said, we might be able to. It would mean work, and where the rebels put their work effort is carefully chosen, Xing explained. The holes that were drilled for oxygen—the system of ventilation already installed in the mountain—were a first phase of a something called Project Safe House. There’s still a lot more planning that has to go into it, though, a lot of engineering and a lot of energy, but it will probably get done sometime in the future. There are geologists in the Resist, she said, who believe that certain places inside the mountain are safer than outside—that new eruptions of magma would be less likely to touch us there.