"No," I said, my voice a whisper. I stood, nodded at each of them. Held the banner to my chest, and left the room.
Garrett and I discussed it on the way back to the house. The rest of the crew was waiting in the courtyard for us: Dakota in her skirt and tunic, hair in a tangled bun; J. J. with his arms crossed, looking worried; Sun, shirtless, hands on hips, inquiring. And Nina, right there in front, bouncing almost.
I regarded them, trying to be inscrutable, gritting my teeth to keep from bursting into laughter. I held our banner behind my back to hide it. Garrett held my other hand.
"Well?" Nina finally said. "How did it go? What did they say?"
The surprise wasn"t going to get any better than this. I shook out the banner and held it up for them to see. And oh, I"d never seen all of them wide-eyed and wondering, mouths gaping like fish, at once.
Nina broke the spell, laughing and running at me, throwing herself into my arms. We nearly fell over.
Then we were all hugging, and Dakota started worrying right off, talking about what we needed to build a crib, all the fabric we"d need for diapers, and how we only had nine months to save up the credits for it.
I recovered enough to hold Nina at arm"s length, so I could look her in the eyes when I pressed the banner into her hands. She nearly dropped it at first, skittering from it as if it were fire. So I closed her fingers around the fabric and held them there.
"It"s yours," I said. "I want you to have it. " I glanced at Garrett to be sure. And yes, he was still smiling.
Staring at me, Nina held it to her chest, much like I had. "But. . . you. It"s yours. . . " She started crying. Then so did I, gathering her close and holding her tight while she spoke through tears, "Don"t you want to be a mother?"
In fact, I rather thought I already was.
Pop Squad.
by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Paolo Bacigalupi"s debut novel, The Windup Girl, published in 2009, took the science fiction field by storm, winning the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards. He is also the author of the young adult novel, Ship Breaker, and several short stories, most of which can be found in his award-winning collection, Pump Six and Other Stories. In 2006, his story "the Calorie Man" won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and was nominated for the Hugo Award; in 2007, a story set in the same world, "Yellow Card Man," also made the Hugo ballot. "The People of Sand and Slag," which first appeared in 2004, was a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
In a world rebuilding itself from the ravages of global warming, in a New York City whose edges are being absorbed by jungle, life is beautiful. Floating above the monkeys and tropical trees, men and women make art, create music, and never grow old.
This is life after rejoo.
Rejoo: it"s an elixir of life, a chemical rebirth anyone can buy. It keeps the body slim and full of youth and pulls the stops on aging. There"s no reason to die anymore. A quick trip to clinic gives a person a whole new lease of life.
But just because there"s no mortality doesn"t mean there"s no crime or no police to reign in the criminals. Our next story"s narrator might prefer attending the symphony, but in his day-job, he"s a cop who fights against a population explosion.
Because if no one dies, there"s no reason to procreate, and in a world still healing from environmental disaster, children are the new America"s Most Wanted-and they get the death penalty.
When there really is a fountain of youth, what price are we willing to pay for a drink?
The familiar stench of unwashed bodies, cooked food, and s.h.i.t washes over me as I come through the door. Cruiser lights flicker through the blinds, sparkling in rain and illuminating the crime scene with strobes of red and blue fire. A kitchen. A humid mess. A chunky woman huddles in the corner, clutching closed her nightgown. Fat thighs and swaying b.r.e.a.s.t.s under stained silk. Squad goons crowding her, pushing her around, making her sit, making her cower. Another woman, young-looking and pretty, pregnant and black-haired, is slumped against the opposite wall, her blouse s.p.a.ckled with spaghetti remains. Screams from the next room: kids.
I squeeze my fingers over my nose and breathe through my mouth, fighting off nausea as Pentle wanders in, holstering his Grange. He sees me and tosses me a nosecap. I break it and snort lavender until the stink slides off. Children come scampering in with Pentle, a brood of three tangling around his knees-the screamers from the other room. They gallop around the kitchen and disappear again, screaming still, into the living room where data sparkles like fairy dust on the wallscreens and provides what is likely their only connection to the outside world.
"That"s everyone," Pentle says. He"s got a long skinny face and a sour small mouth that always points south. Weights seem to hang off his cheeks. Fat caterpillar brows droop over his eyes. He surveys the kitchen, mouth corners dragging lower. It"s always depressing to come into these scenes. "they were all inside when we broke down the door. "
I nod absently as I shake monsoon water from my hat. " Great. Thanks. " Liquid beads scatter on the floor, joining puddles of wet from the pop squad along with the maggot debris of the spaghetti dinner. I put my hat back on. Water still manages to drip off the brim and slip under my collar, a slick rivulet of discomfort. Someone closes the door to the outside. The s.h.i.t smell thickens, eggy and humid. The nosecap barely holds it off. Old peas and bits of cereal crunch under my feet. They squish with the spaghetti, the geologic layers of past feedings. The kitchen hasn"t been self-cleaned in years.
The older woman coughs and pulls her nightgown tighter around her cellulite and I wonder, as I always do when I come into situations like this, what made her choose this furtive nasty life of rotting garbage and brief illicit forays into daylight. The pregnant girl seems to have slipped even further into herself since I arrived. She stares into s.p.a.ce. You"d have to touch her pulse to know that she"s alive. It amazes me that women can end up like this, seduced so far down into gutter life that they arrive here, fugitives from everyone who would have kept them and held them and loved them and let them see the world outside.
The children run in from the living room again, playing chase: a blond, no more than five; another, younger and with brown braids, topless and in makeshift diapers, less than three; and a knee-high toddler boy, sc.r.a.p diaper bunched around little muscle thighs, wearing a T-shirt stained with tomato sauce that says "Who"s the Cutest?" the T-shirt would be an antique if it wasn"t stained.
"You need anything else?" Pentle asks. He wrinkles his nose as new reek wafts from the direction of the kids.
"You get photos for the prosecutor?"
"Got "em. " Pentle holds out a digicam and thumbs through the images of the ladies and the three children, all of them staring out from the screen like little smeared dolls. "You want me to take them in, now?"
I look over the women. The kids have run out again. From the other room, their howls echo as they chase around. Their shrieks are piercing. Even from a distance they hurt my head. "Yeah. I"ll deal with the kids. "
Pentle gets the women up off the floor and shuffles out the door, leaving me standing alone in the middle of the kitchen. It"s all so familiar: a typical floor plan from Builders United. Custom undercab lighting, black mirror tile on the floors, clever self-clean nozzles hidden behind deco trim lines, so much like the stuff Alice and I have that I can almost forget where I am. It"s a negative image of our apartment"s kitchen: light vs. dark, clean vs. dirty, quiet vs. loud. The same floor plan, everything about it the same, and yet, nothing in it is. It"s archeological. I can look at the layers of gunk and grime and noise and see what must have underlain it before. . . when these people worried about color coordinating and cla.s.sy appliances.
I open the fridge (smudgefree nickel, how practical). Ours contains pineapples and avocados and endive and corn and coffee and brazil nuts from Angel Spire"s hanging gardens. This one holds a shelf cluttered with ground mycoprotein bars and wadded piles of nutrition supplement sacs like the kind they hand out at the government rejoo clinics. Other than a bag of slimy lettuce, there isn"t anything unprocessed in the fridge at all. No vegetables except in powder jars, ditto for fruit. A stack of self-warming dinner bins for fried rice and laap and spaghetti just like the one still lying on the kitchen table in a puddle of its own sauce, and that"s it.
I close the fridge and straighten. There"s something here in the mess and the screaming in the next room and the reek of the one kid"s p.o.o.py pants, but I"m stumped as to what it is. They could have lived up in the light and air. Instead, they hid in the dark under wet jungle canopy and turned pale and gave up their lives.
The kids race back in, chasing each other all in a train, laughing and shrieking. They stop and look around, surprised, maybe, that their moms have disappeared. The littlest one has a stuffed dinosaur by the nose. It"s got a long green neck and a fat body. A brontosaurus, I think, with big cartoony eyes and black felt lashes. It"s funny about the dinosaur, because they"ve been gone so long, but here one is, showing up as a stuffed toy. And then it"s funny again, because when you think about it, a dinosaur toy is really extinct twice.
"Sorry, kids. Mommy"s gone. "
I pull out my Grange. Their heads kick back in successive jerks, bang bang bang down the line, holes appearing on their foreheads like paint and their brains spattering out the back. Their bodies flip and skid on the black mirror floor. They land in jumbled piles of misaligned limbs. For a second, gunpowder burn makes the stench bearable.
Up out of the jungle like a bat out of h.e.l.l, climbing out of Rhine-hurst Supercl.u.s.ter"s holdout suburban sprawl and then rising through jungle overstory. Blasting across the Causeway toward Angel Spire and the sea. Monkeys diving off the rail line like gra.s.shoppers, pouring off the edge ahead of my cruiser and disappearing into the mangrove and kudzu and mahogany and teak, disappearing into the wet bowels of greenery tangle. Dumping the cruiser at squad center, no time for mopdown, don"t need it anyway. My hat, my raincoat, my clothes into hazmat bags, and then out again on the other side, rushing to pull on a tux before catching a ma.s.slift up 188 stories, rising into the high clear air over the jungle fur of carbon sequestration project N22.
Mma Telogo has a new concerto. Alice is his diva viola, his prize, and Hua Chiang and Telogo have been circling her like ravens, picking apart her performance, corvid eyes on her, watching and hungry for fault, but now they call her ready. Ready to banish Banini from his throne. Ready to challenge for a place in the immortal canon of cla.s.sical performance. And I"m late. Caught in a ma.s.slift on Level 55, packed in with the breath and heat of upper-deck diners and weekenders climbing the spire while the seconds tick by, listening to the climate fans buzz and whir while we all sweat and wilt, waiting for some problem on the line to clear.
Finally we"re rising again, our stomachs dropping into our shoes, our ears popping as we soar into the heavens, flying under magnetic acceleration. . . and then slowing so fast we almost leave the floor. Our stomachs catch up. I shove out through hundreds of people, waving my cop badge when anyone complains, and sprint through the gla.s.s arch of the Ki Performance Center. I dive between the closing slabs of the attention doors.
The autolocks thud home behind me, sealing the performance s.p.a.ce. It"s comforting. I"m inside, enfolded in the symphony, as though its hands have cupped themselves around me and pulled me into a chamber of absolute focus. The lights dim. Conversational thrum falls away. I find my way to my seat more by feel than sight. Dirty looks from men in topaz hats and women in spectacle eyes as I squeeze across them. Gauche, I know. Absurdly late to an event that happens once in a decade. Plopping down just as Hua Chiang steps up to the podium.
His hands rise like crane wings. Bows and horns and flutes flash with movement and then the music comes, first a hint, like blowing mist, and then building, winding through a series of repeated stanzas that I have heard Alice play perhaps ten thousand times. Notes I heard first so long ago, stumbling and painful, that now spill like water and burst like ice flowers. The music settles, pianissimo again, the lovely delicate motifs that I know from Alice"s practice. An introduction only, she has told me, intended to file away the audience"s last thoughts of the world outside, repeated stanzas until Hua Chiang accepts that the audience is completely his and then Alice"s viola rises, and the other players move to support her, fifteen years of practice coming to fruition.
I look down at my hands, overwhelmed. It"s different in the concert hall. Different than all those days when she cursed and practiced and swore at Telogo and claimed his work couldn"t be performed. Different even from when she finished her practices early, smiling, hands calloused in new ways, face flushed, eager to drink a cool white wine with me on our balcony in the light of the setting sun and watch the sky as monsoon clouds parted and starlight shone down on our companionship. Tonight, her part joins the rest of the symphony and I can"t speak or think for the beauty of the whole.
Later, I"ll hear whether Telogo has surpa.s.sed Banini for sheer audacity. I"ll hear how critics compare living memories of ancient performances and see how critical opinion shifts to accommodate this new piece in a canon that stretches back more than a century, and that hangs like a ghost over everything that Alice and her director Hua Chiang hope for: a performance that will knock Banini off his throne and perhaps depress him enough to stop rejoo and stuff him in his grave. For me, competing against that much history would be a heavy weight. I"m glad I"ve got a job where forgetting is the most important part. Working on the pop squad means your brain takes a vacation and your hands do the work. And when you leave work, you"ve left it for good.
Except now, as I look down at my hands, I"m surprised to find pinp.r.i.c.ks of blood all over them. A fine spray. The misty remains of the little kid with the dinosaur. My fingers smell of rust.
The tempo accelerates. Alice is playing again. Notes writhe together so fluidly that it seems impossible they aren"t generated electronically, and yet the warmth and phrasing is hers, achingly hers, I"ve heard it in the morning, when she practiced on the balcony, testing herself, working again and again against the limitations of her self. Disciplining her fingers and hands, forcing them to accept Telogo"s demands, the ones that years ago she had called impossible and which now run so cleanly through the audience.
The blood is all over my hands. I pick at it, sc.r.a.pe it away in flakes. It had to be the kid with the dinosaur. He was closest when he took the bullet. Some of his residue is stuck tight, bonded to my own skin. I shouldn"t have skipped mopdown.
I pick.
The man next to me, tan face and rouged lips, frowns. I"m ruining a moment of history for him, something he has waited years to hear.
I pick more carefully. Silently. The blood flakes off. Dumb kid with the dumb dinosaur that almost made me miss the performance.
The cleanup crew noticed the dinosaur toy too. Caught the irony. Joked and snorted nosecaps and started bagging the bodies for compost. Made me late. Stupid dinosaur.
The music cascades into silence. Hua Chiang"s hands fall. Applause. Alice stands at Chiang"s urging and the applause increases. Craning my neck, I can see her, nineteen-year-old face flushed, smile bright and triumphant, enveloped in our adulation.
We end up at a party thrown by Maria Illoni, one of the symphony"s high donors. She made her money on global warming mitigation for New York City, before it went under. Her penthouse is in Sh.o.r.eline Curve, daringly arcing over the seawalls and the surf, a sort of flip of the finger to the ocean that beat her storm surge calculations. A spidery silver vine over dark water and the bob of the boat communities out in the deeps. New York obviously never got its money back: Illoni"s outdoor patio runs across the entire top floor of the Sh.o.r.eline and platforms additional petals of spun hollowform carbon out into the air.
From the far side of the Curve, you can see beyond the incandescent cores of the supercl.u.s.ters to the old city sprawl, dark except along where maglines radiate. A strange mangle of wreckage and scavenge and disrepair. In the day, it looks like some kind of dry red fungal collapse, a weave of jungle canopy and old suburban understory, but at night, all that"s visible is the skeleton of glowing infrastructure, radial blooms in the darkness, and I breathe deeply, enjoying all the freshness and openness that"s missing from those steaming hideouts I raid with the pop squad.
Alice sparkles in the heat, perfectly slim, well curved-an armful of beautiful girl. The fall air is under thirty-three degrees and pleasant, and I feel infinitely tender toward her. I pull her close. We slip into a forest of century-old bonsai sculptures created by Maria"s husband. Alice murmurs that he spends all his time here on the roof, staring at branches, studying their curves, and occasionally, perhaps every few years, wiring a branch and guiding it in a new direction. We kiss in the shadows they provide, and Alice is beautiful and everything is perfect.
But I"m distracted.
When I hit the kids with my Grange, the littlest one-the one with that stupid dinosaur-flipped over. A Grange is built for nitheads, not little kids, so the bullet plowed through the kid and he flipped and his dinosaur went flying. It sailed, I mean really sailed, through the air. And now I can"t get it out of my mind: that dinosaur flying. And then hitting the wall and bouncing onto the black mirror floor. So fast and so slow. Bang bang bang down the line. . . and then the dinosaur in the air.
Alice pulls away, seeming to sense my inattention. I straighten up. Try to focus on her.
She says, "I thought you weren"t going to make it. When we were tuning, I looked out and your seat was empty. "
I force a grin. "But I did. I made it. "
Barely. I stood around too long with the cleanup guys while the dinosaur lay in a puddle and sopped up the kid"s blood. Double extinct. The kid and the dinosaur both. Dead one way, and then dead again. There"s a weird symmetry there.
She c.o.c.ks her head, studying me. "Was it bad?"
"What?" the brontosaurus? "the call?" I shrug. "Just a couple crazy ladies. Not armed or anything. It was easy. "
"I can"t imagine it. Cutting rejoo like that. " She sighs and reaches out to touch a bonsai, perfectly guided over the decades by the map that only Michael Illoni can see or understand. "Why give all this up?"
I don"t have an answer. I rewind the crime scene in my mind. I have the same feeling that I did when I stood on spaghetti maggots and went through their fridge. There"s something there in the stink and noise and darkness, something hot and obsessive and ripe. But I don"t know what it is.
"The ladies looked old," I say. "Like week-old balloons, all puffy and droopy. "
Alice makes a face of distaste. "Can you imagine trying to perform Telogo without rejoo? We wouldn"t have had the time. Half of us would have been past our prime, and we"d have needed understudies, and then the understudies would have had to find understudies. Fifteen years. And these women throw it all away. How can they throw away something as beautiful as Telogo?"
"You thinking about Kara?"
"She would have played Telogo twice as well as I did. "
"I don"t believe that. "
"Believe it. She was the best. Before she went kid-crazy. " She sighs. "I miss her. "
"You could still visit her. She"s not dead yet. "
"She might as well be. She"s already twenty years older than when we knew her. " She shakes her head. "No. I"d rather remember her in her prime, not out at some single-s.e.x work camp growing vegetables and losing the last of her talent. I couldn"t stand listening to her play now. It would kill me to hear all of that gone. " She turns abruptly. "that reminds me, my rejoo booster is tomorrow. Can you take me?"
"Tomorrow?" I hesitate. I"m supposed to be on another shift popping kids. "It"s kind of short notice. "
"I know. I meant to ask sooner, but with the concert coming up, I forgot. " She shrugs. "It"s not that important. I can go by myself. " She glances at me sidelong. "But it is nicer when you come. "
What the h.e.l.l. I don"t really want to work anyway. "Okay, sure. I"ll get Pentle to cover for me. " Let him deal with the dinosaurs.
"Really?"
I shrug. "What can I say? I"m a sweet guy. "
She smiles and stands on tiptoe to kiss me. "If we weren"t going to live forever, I"d marry you. "
I laugh. "If we weren"t going to live forever, I"d get you pregnant. "
We look at each other. Alice laughs unsteadily and takes it as a joke. "Don"t be gross. "
Before we can talk any more, Illoni pops out from behind a bonsai and grabs Alice by the arm. "there you are! I"ve been looking everywhere for you. You can"t hide yourself like this. You"re the woman of the hour. "
She pulls Alice away with all the confidence that must have made New York believe she could save it. She barely even looks at me as they hustle off. Alice smiles tolerantly and motions for me to follow. Then Maria"s calling to everyone and pulling them all together and she climbs up on a fountain"s rim and pulls Alice up beside her. She starts talking about art and sacrifice and discipline and beauty.
I tune it out. There"s only so much self-congratulation you can take. It"s obvious Alice is one of the best in the world. Talking about it just makes it seem ba.n.a.l. But the donors need to feel like they"re part of the moment, so they all want to squeeze Alice and make her theirs, so they talk and talk and talk.
Maria"s saying,". . . wouldn"t be standing here congratulating ourselves, if it weren"t for our lovely Alice. Hua Chiang and Telogo did their work well, but in the final moment it was Alice"s execution in the face of Telogo"s ambitious piece that has made it resonate so strongly already with the critics. We have her to thank for the piece"s flawlessness. "
Everyone starts applauding and Alice blushes prettily, not accustomed to adulation from her peers and compet.i.tors. Maria shouts over the cheering, "I"ve made several calls to Banini, and it is more than apparent that he has no answer to our challenge and so I expect the next eighty years are ours. And Alice"s!" the applause is almost deafening.
Maria waves for attention again and the applause fades into scattered whistles and catcalls which finally taper off enough to allow Mariato continue. "To commemorate the end of Banini"s age, and the beginning of a new one, I would like to present Alice with a small token of affection-" and here she leans down and picks up a jute-woven gift bag shot with gold as she says, "Of course a woman likes gold and jewels, and strings for her viola, but I thought this was a particularly apt gift for the evening. . . . "
I"m leaning against the woman next to me, trying to see, as Maria holds the bag dramatically above her head and calls out to the crowd, "For Alice, our slayer of dinosaurs!" and pulls the green brontosaurus out of the bag.
It"s just like the one the kid had.
Its big eyes look right at me. For a second it seems to blink at me with its big black lashes and then the crowd laughs and applauds as they all get the joke. Banini = dinosaur. Ha ha.
Alice takes the dinosaur and holds it by the neck and swings it over her head and everybody laughs again but I can"t see anything anymore because I"m lying on the ground caught in the jungle swelter of people"s legs and I can"t breathe.
"Are you sure you"re okay?" "Sure. No problem. I told you. I"m fine. " It"s true, I guess. Sitting next to Alice in the waiting room, I don"t feel dizzy or anything, even if I am tired. Last night, she put the dinosaur on the bedside table, right in with her collection of little jeweled music boxes, and the d.a.m.n thing looked at me all night long. Finally at four a. m. I couldn"t stand it anymore and I shoved it under the bed. But in the morning, she found it and put it back, and it"s been looking at me ever since.
Alice squeezes my hand. The rejoo clinic"s a small one, private, carefully appointed with holographic windows of sailboats on the Atlantic so it feels open and airy even though its daylight is piped in through mirror collectors. It"s not one of the big public monsters out in the cl.u.s.ters that got started after rejoo"s patents expired. You pay a little more than you do for the Medicaid generics, but you don"t rub shoulders with a bunch of starving gamblers and nitheads and drunks who all still want their rejoo even if they"re wasting every day of their endless lives.
The nurses are quick and efficient. Pretty soon, Alice is on her back hooked up to an IV bladder with me sitting beside her on the bed, and we"re watching rejoo push into her.
It"s just a clear liquid. I always thought it should be fizzy and green for growing things. Or maybe not green, but definitely fizzy. It always feels fizzy when it goes in.
Alice takes a quick breath and reaches out for me, her slender pale fingers brushing my thigh. "Hold my hand. "
The elixir of life pulses into her, filling her, flushing her. She pants shallowly. Her eyes dilate. She isn"t watching me anymore. She"s somewhere deep inside, reclaiming what was lost over the last eighteen months. No matter how many times I do it, I"m surprised when I watch it come over someone, the way it seems to swallow them and then they come back to the surface more whole and alive than when they started.
Alice"s eyes focus. She smiles. "Oh, G.o.d. I can never get used to that. "
She tries to stand up, but I hold her down and beep the nurse. Once we"ve got her unhooked, I lead her back out to the car. She leans heavily against me, stumbling and touching me. I can almost feel the fizzing and tingling through her skin. She climbs into the car. When I"m inside, she looks over at me and laughs. "I can"t believe how good I feel. "