M. T. Anderson (7 page)

She took me up to a huge window. We stood in front of it. Outside the window, there had been a garden, like, I guess you could call it a courtyard or terrarium? But a long time ago the glass ceiling over the terrarium had cracked, and so everything was dead, and there was moon dust all over everything out there. Everything was gray.

Also, something was leaking air and heat out in the garden, lots of waste air, and the air was rocketing off into space through the hole, so all of the dead vines in the garden were standing straight up, slapping back and forth, pulled toward the crack in the ceiling where we could see the stars.

“Whoa,” I said.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It’s like . . . ,” I said. “It’s like a squid in love with the sky.”

She was only looking at me, which was nice. I hadn’t felt anything like that for a long time.

She rubbed my head, and she went, “You’re the only one of them that uses metaphor.”

She was staring at me, and I was staring at her, and I moved toward her, and we kissed. The vines beat against each other out in the gray, dead garden, they were all writhing against the spine of the Milky Way on its edge, and for the first time, I felt her spine, too, each knuckle of it, with my fingers, while the air leaked and the plants whacked each other near the silent stars.

We were watching Marty invent a game called Struggle of the Dying Warrior. It involved him being tied with all of his limbs, like his arms and his legs, onto the frame of his bed with the rubber tubing. Then he tried to get up and walk. He was not getting very far.

Violet and I were sitting on a bunk, swinging our legs in rhythm. We were talking about our families. I told her that I had a little brother. She said I hadn’t mentioned him. I said he was a lot younger and a real pain.

Violet asked me about my mom and dad. I told her that my dad did some kind of banking thing, and my mom was in design. I didn’t understand what my dad did exactly. Whatever it was, he was off doing it on the moon until tomorrow, when they were going to tell us about our feeds.

When I asked her what her dad did, she said, “He’s a college professor. He teaches the dead languages.”

“People study that?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“Okay. So what are the dead languages?”

“They’re languages that were once important but that nobody uses anymore. They haven’t been used for a long time, except by historians.”

“Like what languages?”

“You know,
FORTRAN. BASIC.
”

“What does one sound like?”

She slid off the bunk, and went to get her bag. She opened it and pulled out something, which was a pen. She also had paper.

I looked at her funny. “You write?” I said. “With a pen?”

“Sure,” she said, a little embarrassed. She wrote something down. She put the pad of paper on my lap.

She asked me, “Do you know how to read?”

I nodded. “I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School™. On the grounds that the silent ‘E’ is stupid.”

“This is the language called
BASIC
,” she said.

On the paper, it said:

002110 Goto 013500

013500 Peek 16388, 236

013510 Poke 16389, 236

She read it to me. I could tell the numbers fine.

“So what does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s the first thing my dad teaches the students on the first day,” she said. “It means, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’”

I looked at her pen. “You write all the time,” I said, completely in awe.

“I’ve done it since I was little.”

“Do you write . . . stuff?”

“Not stories or anything. I just write down things I see sometimes.”

“On paper.”

“Yeah.”

I looked at her. “You’re one funny enchilada,” I said.

She nodded real quiet.

“Doesn’t your hand get all cramped up?” I asked. “Don’t you end up like, hook-hand?” I made hook-hand. She made hook-hand. We pawed each other with hook-hand.

She shook her head and smiled.

I asked, “Why don’t you use the feed? It’s way faster.”

“I’m pretentious,” she said. “Really pretentious.”

“Yeah, so the studio audience has noticed, but seriously.”

“Seriously.”

Suddenly, something occurred to me. I looked up at her.

Marty had fallen to his knees, and was being pulled back toward the bed by the tubing. His cheeks were puffed out. His hands were in fists. His fingers were getting blue. All of the ridges on his arms stood out. Calista and Link were whistling with their fingers in their mouths. The other people in the ward were yelling, “Shut up! Would you all shut up?”

I asked Violet, “Your father, he’s a college professor, but he was too busy to come see you after you like completely collapsed from a hacker attack? Too
busy
?”

She looked me in the eye. “No,” she said, “but that’s what I told you.”

The salad days couldn’t last forever. We really wanted to get back to Earth. Everyone wanted to forget how sucky the moon had been.

Tuesday, just before lunch, a doctor and a policewoman and a technician came in. Our parents were all talking over in the corner. The rest of us were all sitting around, talking about spaceship disasters.

The technician called us all to attention and went through this whole thing, he was sorry for the delay, but they wanted to be absolutely sure there was no permanent hack, that our feeds were safe, etc. He was all like,
da da da, must have been a difficult time for all of us, da da da, we would find our normal service resumed without interruption, da da da da da, he was meg sorry we had to go through this, and he had complied with the police and handed over our data, da da da, like thank you all again for your patience.

One by one, we went into the examination room.

In there, there were nurses and the doctor and the technician. The nurses were watching the relays, our blood pressure and all. They were like, “Don’t worry about anything. You’ll feel it all coming back in a few seconds.” The doctor touched a bootstick to my head.

He said, “Okay. Could we like get a thingie, a reading on his limbic activity?”

The bootstick was cold on my neck. I could feel the little hairs standing up around it. There was some kind of static electricity.

They moved the bootstick a little. I heard it beep.

“You should feel it now,” said one of the nurses.

I didn’t feel anything. I looked around. They were watching me closely.

“No,” I said. I shifted on the bed. I didn’t feel anything. I said, “Nothing. I feel nothing.”

“Hold your head still,” said the doctor.

He shifted the bootstick and it beeped again.

I kicked my heels against the bed. “There’s nothing. Nothing,” I said.

“Why don’t you —” said the nurse.
Pulse up. Rising.

Limbic activity okay?

He’s just nervous.

Don’t worry. It’ll hit him in like a second.

We have readings on engram formation.

Signal engaged.

Don’t drop the exterior relays yet.

The Ford Laputa.
Sky and Suburb Monthly
says there’s no other upcar like it. And we agree.

“There you go,” said the nurse.

You’ll be more than a little attracted to its powerful T44 fermion lift with vertical rise of fifty feet per second — and if you like comfort, quality, and class, the supple upholstery and ergonomically designed dash will —

They slapped me on the back. I laughed, and the doctor and I did these big grins. I went back out into the other room, and we were all starting to feel it now. We were all starting to feel it good —

. . . name is Terry Ponk, and I’d like to tell you about upper-body strength . . .

And the feed was pouring in on us now, all of it, all of the feednet, and we could feel all of our favorites, and there were our files, and our m-chatlines. It came down on us like water. It came down like frickin’ spring rains, and we were dancing in it.

. . . Celebrate fun. Celebrate friends. You’ve just come through something difficult, and this is the time for a table full of love and friendship and the exciting entrees you can only find at . . .

We were dancing in it like rain, and we couldn’t stop laughing, and we were running our hands across our bodies, feeling them again, and I saw Violet almost hysterical with laughter, rubbing her cheeks, and pulling her hands down across her breasts, her chin up in the air.

. . . big bro? Big bro, you there? Mom says I should . . .

. . . until one crazy day when this cranky old woman and this sick little boy meet a coy-dog with a heart of gold — and they all learn an important lesson about love. The NYT called it . . .

. . . hits a grounder to the mound . . .

. . . In other news, protests continued today against the American annexation of the moon. Several South American countries including Brazil and Argentina have submitted requests to join the Global Alliance in response. President Trumbull spoke from the White House. “What we have today, with the things that are happening in today’s society, is . . .”

She held my hand — we found each other’s hands through the like, the waterfall, and —

. . . If you liked “I’ll Sex You In,” you’ll love these other popular slump-rock epics by hot new storm ’n’ chunder band Beefquake, full of riffs that . . .

. . . We handpicked our spring fashions . . . and holding hands, we danced.

. . . Hardgore,
the best feed-sim battle game ever to rip up the horizon. Sixty levels of detonation and viscera just waiting to fly at your command, Captain Bastard. If you don’t feel slogging waist-deep within fifteen seconds, we’ll eat our fucking hats . . .

. . . In your absence, you may not have heard . . .
Hand in hand, we danced.

Things were back to normal real quick. We went back to Earth, and we all rested up, and our moms brought us ginger ale in bed. We chatted all the time on the feeds and shared music and shit. We had this major debate going on because we watched the
Oh? Wow! Thing!
and there was this part where Organelle asked Jackie whether she had meg hips and he was like, “Since you ask, we both could work out more,” and she was like, “You shithead, you should’ve lied,” and so all the guys were saying,
no way, if she asked him this complete question he should answer it,
and the girls were like,
if you ever insult how I look then you’re completely shallow,
and we were like,
but she asked,
and they were like,
omigod, you don’t get it,
and Link said if they really didn’t want to know how they looked, then how come they asked so much, and then I said this thing, and Calista said this thing, and it was like,
da da da da da, da da da da da, da da da da da,
all day. It was kind of fun. I like debates where you argue about different points of view.