Pills and Starships

by Lydia Millet

  “These enclosures go on,” he said. “They go on and on, around the base of the mountain. And each of them has a tunnel network, with inside habitat underneath in case of eruption and lava flow. Manmade, not lava tubes.”

  “You’re kidding.” The scale of it was starting to dawn on me—what it must take to feed these creatures and keep them alive. To have brought them here in the first place. The skill and dedication of the rebels.

  Just then Keahi came out of one of the enclosures, carrying a bucket of what looked like grain. He gave me a slow smile. “Let me show you guys.” He put the bucket down to take me by one arm. The arm, right then, felt like the center of my body. “Look at these,” he said, and he led me past a couple of other bird areas to a muddy enclosure with a big pool of water in it. There we saw these funny animals, large and dark and leathery and covered in mud, with soft square snouts and short, squat legs. “Pygmy hippos.”

  The three of us walked along for a while, looking at those animals. There were plenty of things I’d never heard of: spider monkeys that were really smart—their enclosure was full of trees—and anteaters and hairy piglike creatures called peccaries and sections of small cages that had snakes and mice and even bugs and caterpillars in them. American Burying Beetle, said one label, and there were these huge black-and-red beetles in there, really dramatic looking.

  “We should go back,” said Sam, after a while, and Keahi squeezed my arm almost imperceptibly.

  I peered down and noticed my new wristface was blinking—a blue light, which wasn’t an emergency-type alarm but just told us it was time for a meeting.

  “This way,” said Keahi, “it’s faster along the stream.”

  So we turned away from the animal enclosures—I was reluctant, because there was still a lot to see—and headed downhill a bit, walking along the creek again.

  Instead of Kate leading the meeting this time it was an old man. He was standing up on a box and he wore a mike, so everyone could hear him, but it was hard to see him from where I was standing.

  His name was Rone. He was a coleader with Kate and his job was logistics, for those of us who didn’t already know him. He’d been in the army a long time ago, and in the army that had been his specialty. And he was going to direct the establish­ment of the new HQ.

  First off, he said, they needed to bless the camp. And say goodbye to the old one. Xing was next to me and she whispered they always did that when they had to move, it was part of the ritual. They’d been at the old camp for six years; before that it had been mostly a fruit orchard, which they had planted and tended.

  That time, she explained, they’d moved not because any helicopters came and not because of a high-cat storm but mostly for convenience. They wanted to be closer to both the resort, where their recruits often came from, and a secret, sheltered port they used.

  The port was where the boats came in—the boats that carried the babies.

  “The name of the new camp shall be Athens, after the ancient Greek city of democracy,” said Rone. “And now for the blessing.”

  That sounded a little corpspeak to me, it reminded me of Bless Happiness, and I looked around and saw LaTessa, who was standing on Xing’s other side. I was shocked for a second: she’d cut off her princess hair. It was chopped off in a messy way all around her head, making her look like a boy. But she was standing proudly with her shoulders thrown back and I could see what Sam had said, that she had a toughness to her, and I guessed she wasn’t vain and had cut her hair to be practical.

  I felt a bit different about her then, maybe a little admiring.

  Rone sang a poetic song, which didn’t sound like corpspeak, and everyone in the camp seemed to know it because they sang it along with him. It was a religious poem, Xing whispered to me, a poem from the Christian godbelief, but some nights there were blessings from Buddhist systems or Jewish or Hindu or even Earth godbeliefs, with tree nymphs and that kind of ancient thing. “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all,” they sang.

  After the blessing things got less ceremonial and down to brass tacks, as Rone put it. He detailed the process for setting up the camp, what the priorities were, and the order we had to do things in. We were each part of a work group, and Sam and I and LaTessa were all in Xing’s, which reported to Keahi.

  We worked the whole day after that, until we were exhausted all over again. I won’t tell all the things we did—I don’t think I’ll have much time to keep a journal for a while, and there are only a few pages left in this booklet even though I’ve written everything so tiny. But they were things like moving the tents into a pattern they mapped out for us, helping to set up cooking and eating areas and also the composting systems—toilets and otherwise.

  Let’s just say ours isn’t the work group with the most glamorous tasks. But one really good thing is, I’m also going to have two spaces of time each day—one in the morning and one in the afternoon—with no tasks at all. And during that time I’ll be able to do my collections. There’s going to be a special shelter, the man named Rone told me, where I can show the items I collect, and other people will also put things there.

  He said it will be an important place, “a place that honors the beautiful,” is what he told me, and my collections can be there too.

  When it came time for the evening meal we all stopped working and gathered at the tables. Normally we would be eating the evening meal in shifts, I guess, since there are almost five hundred of us. But this was a special occasion because we were inaugurating the camp so we packed the tables fuller than usual. Off to one side, an older boy sat on a tree stump and played a weird instrument Xing said was an accordion, which pumped open and closed. The music was haunting and festive by turns, depending on what he played, and gave an air of ceremony to the proceedings.

  It was cool to sit at a table I’d helped put up, to know how all its parts fitted together as I sat there. We’d brought all the boards for the tables from the old camp; even the screws that joined the parts together had been carefully labeled and packed and pulled out again when we arrived. Not even a nail went to waste in the camp. I liked how everything had value; I liked how careful people were with what other people had made.

  In the middle of our table’s long boards, the cooks’ helpers set out baskets of bread and huge bowls of soup, steaming into the cooling air. Each of us had our own plate to eat off—actually not a plate but a rectangular slab of bamboo with a handle on one end. They called it a trencher. Sam and I were told we had to carve our initials in the side of our own trenchers, with a special design we invent to stand for ourselves. That way we’d always know whose was whose. Everyone has her own trencher and bowl and utensils, and we have to wash them after every meal and keep track of them and all that.

  We served ourselves pieces of bread and ladled the thick soup into our bowls. I wondered how they’d baked the bread—was there an oven set up already? I hadn’t seen the kitchen area yet at all; a lot of the workings of the camp were still a mystery to me.

  I picked up a spoon but Sam elbowed me. “Wait,” he hissed. “We always have to wait for the food blessing. They usually sing it too.”

  Yet before the food blessing Xing stood up and spoke.

  “Arriving here,” she began, “to work and live with you is the culmination of many years of work for me. And so many years of anticipation.”

  She said she’d never expected a Cat Six to welcome her to the island and the camp, but that was the world we lived in—the only thing that wasn’t surprising was that there was one surprise after another.

  Then she asked Sam and me to stand. She told everyone who we were, and who our parents had been. When she finished speaking—it was like a eulogy for them—everyone clapped; it started with just a few people but soon everyone joined in, and people stood up and pushed the benches back so that some of them even fell over behind them.

  All the people in the whole camp were
clapping for my mother and father and for what once, long ago, they must have done.

  After dinner, when the dusk had settled into dark, we washed our trenchers and bowls where Xing showed us, in a basin beneath a tap, and set them to drip dry on a big rack woven together with what looked like rope and vines.

  Xing went off in the direction of Kate’s tent and Sam and LaTessa and I sat by the brook listening to the water and talking a bit. Or sorry, not LaTessa—that was her corporate label, I guess, not her real name at all, but I’m still getting used to it. Her real name’s Fred. I kid you not. It’s short for Frederica, the name she was born with. She says she was always a tomboy growing up—though she’s very pretty, she only dressed all girly at the resort because it was her job to—and no one has ever called her Frederica, they just always called her Fred.

  The camp doesn’t do old-fashioned campfires too often, for obvious security and carbon-footprint reasons, but we do have some orangey-red solar lights we stick into the ground that are hard for planes and other surveillance equipment to pick up on. They don’t have much of a footprint, as fuelfires would; they don’t give off any heat, either, that I can tell. All they do is cast a gentle light on the underbrush, on the contours of tree trunks and the sides of tents.

  In the distance the accordion had been retired but there was still music, this time from someone’s tent—a sad song played on a string instru­ment. It was the evensong, Fred said—she’d once lived in a camp, briefly. Every night we would have evensong, music to thank the sun and praise the onset of the cool and healing night. It floated out onto the air and for a second I had the weird feeling it was taking me with it, that I was as fluid and light as the notes themselves, as movable and changing as waves of sound.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and jumped a bit.

  It was Kate standing there, a flashlight in her hand. “I’d like to show you something.”

  We followed her through the camp and into a tunnel. There were no lights turned on inside—maybe this tunnel hadn’t been wired yet, I don’t know—so all we had was the spots of her flashlight and our headlamps bobbing in front of us. It was a wide hallway, and pretty flat underfoot, by lava-tube standards. A couple of twists and turns, and then there was enough light to see by coming from the room it opened into, so we switched off our lamps.

  There were rows of narrow beds there, with curtains hanging beside them. The cloth of the curtains looked oddly familiar, and then I got it: they were made of the off-white, waffled cotton robes from the resort, the same ones we’d worn for healing and therapy sessions. They’d been cut up and stitched together.

  I remarked on the recycled robes and Kate smiled, seeming pleased that I’d noticed the detail.

  “This is our infirmary,” she said. “It’s where you’ll come if you get a bug or break a leg. Though I have to warn you, you might find yourself sharing the space with a sick bird or a big lizard. It’s happened before. We treat some of the animals here too.”

  We smiled politely. I was thinking, great, they have a place for health care, but is it really worth forging through darkness for? Could it not have waited till morning?

  “We have three doctors,” she went on, still walking ahead of us between the rows of beds, “and then there are Aviva and four other nurses with good training. They work in shifts, so at any given time there’s usually just one doctor and two nurses on duty.”

  The curtains could be pulled around the beds for privacy. Mostly no one was in them right now—we could tell because the curtains around empty beds were open—though I recognized the man with the hurt leg from the cave.

  Back and back we went, to a curtain at the rear. Kate pulled it in toward the wall.

  And there she was.

  Our mother.

  At first I thought she was dead and Kate had brought us her body—her eyes were closed and she was pale and completely unmoving.

  I felt a shock that wasn’t that far from anger, a kind of fierce impulse. Then I saw a bag of liquid hanging off a stand beside her, and the bag fed into a needle in her arm.

  My stomach lurched and my hand flew up to my mouth. “How’d you do it? We thought—I was told—”

  But I wasn’t even listening to what Kate said, I was in a kind of panicky buzz. I leaned in close, I wanted to do something for her but had no idea what that might be.

  Sam just stood beside me, gazing. He did appear almost happy, though, I thought in passing. For once.

  “And our—our dad?” he asked.

  I already knew in the pit of my stomach. For our father there hadn’t been a save at the eleventh hour. It was clear from the empty bed beside her.

  I didn’t even look up at Kate, I really couldn’t, just stared down at my mom’s face. The cheekbones my dad had claimed I got from her.

  “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 ther
e 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.