Pills and Starships (14 page)

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 it 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.

I looked around for Keahi sometimes, I admit, and would catch a glimpse of his dark, elegant head as he passed by in his beige robe with a tray of drinks held up, and every time my stomach would do a small weird flip. Like I had something to look forward to. I didn’t know why, it didn’t make sense. And then the flip would go away and I’d feel sheepish.

At a certain point Sam came in and got me, on a parental pretext. We traipsed out of the room and through a couple of doors and into a back passageway, where Keahi was hovering. I was suddenly nervous to talk to him, but he only smiled and said in a soft voice that he needed to find out where Sam and I were on the whole fleeing-society-and-joining-the-rebels thing.

“I’m still thinking about it,” I said. “It’s only been a few hours!”

“The problem is . . .” began Keahi, and he was looking at me in a way that made me feel like I should find something to do with my hands, or my feet. I don’t know. My limbs. “You see, we need a decision. I’m sorry to put pressure, but plans have to be made soon.”

“I’m in,” said Sam.

I wheeled around and stared at him. “Even if I don’t come?” I asked after an uncertain pause, and even before I said it I started to feel queasy.

Because Sam, after this week, will be all I have.

“I’m sorry, Nat. You’re my sister. But I can’t—I just can’t stand to live in that world anymore.”

We stood there for another few seconds, me confused and trembly, Sam biting his lip and staring at his feet, and finally I told Keahi I’d decide by midnight. Sam had a way of contacting him.

When we went back into the main ballroom we were walking a few feet apart. I felt alone and there was nothing I could say to Sam in public anyway.

Xing found me again at the dessert table a little while later, where I was halfheartedly spearing a rice pastry off a tray with a colored toothpick.

“What was that all about?” she asked. “He said your parents needed you for some emoting, and then you went away in the opposite direction from them.”

I stared at her, alarmed. I was thinking, if she noticed something fishy, anyone could have.

Anyone—like service.

“I’m a psych counselor back home,” she went on, a little apologetic. “I pick up on things.”

“He just—you know, he’s having a hard time,” I bluffed. “He has some problems. With this whole thing.”

“Hmm.” Xing nodded slightly, but I could tell she wasn’t quite buying into my vagueness.

But the party went on, and we did the things there were to do—drinking, eating, dancing. It would have been a blast if my thoughts and feelings hadn’t been going in at least twenty directions, including death and rebels. I went to check up on my parents a few times, who seemed to be talking with other contract couples, making the rounds, enjoying themselves. I looked at them once, chatting and lifting their goblets to their lips, and I thought:
What’s in your heads? Aren’t you frightened?

But it passed. And there they were, still laughing and talking.

As the night wore on I got a little more buzzed, so by the time the climax of the evening came I was definitely pharmatipsy. A service guy, some kind of exec or manager or something, stood up in front of the orchestra and gave a little speech about how special it was to share this historic and bountiful night with all of us. He said it was a privilege to be near us in this intense and lovely parting. Then he said it was his honor to introduce an operatic recital, just one song. After the song we would have the very last dance and then the party would be over.

“And so, before the goodnight waltz, I give you this evening’s pièce de résistance, the lovely Greek diva Maria Callas in hologram from the mid-20th c. with a command performance of—from Giuseppe Verdi’s 19th c. masterwork
The Force of Destiny
—‘Peace, Peace, My God.’ Ms. Callas will sing in the original language of Italian.”

He left the stage while people clapped and the lights dimmed and then an elegant woman appeared where he had been, fading in slowly. She had black hair wound up on top of her head and wore a long dark-red dress. She bowed her head slightly and then peered up again sadly and began to sing, though of course her voice was coming from the sound system. But I have to say it was perfectly synced.

I’d never listened to opera before, I thought it would be high and screechy and flat boring, but this was—it was beautiful. I didn’t understand a word.

We stood there rapt. And when the last note faded, well, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, as the old folks used to say.