Read Pills and Starships for Free Online

backward toward the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen.
    What they weren’t saying, but obviously were, was they couldn’t stand to see our future. They could stand their own misery but not the prospect of us biting the dust too.
    It’s widespread. Along with the carbon footprint of new humans, it’s why there are no babies anymore.
    But most people don’t talk about it.
    “Your model is pure fantasy,” said Sam.
    Sam doesn’t have a model. When it comes to models, he’s an atheist. I’m more like agnostic.
    “Let’s all be kind, shall we?” said Jean, more purring than rebuking.
    “Honey,” said my mother to Sam, “don’t be angry. Or,” and she shot a look at Jean here like she was doing something she’d been taught to do—“I mean, I know it’s hard, and I understand your anger, I really do, honey. But please try to understand our needs as well. We’ve been thinking about this for years. You are the only things that kept us here. I promise you, Sammy, we don’t take it lightly. It’s very painful for us too.”
    “It’s never an easy decision,” put in Jean.
    Not too helpful, I thought.
    But then, they put the counselors there partly to deflect family members’ fear, rage, and resentment from the contract buyers. Once you see it, it’s transparent.
    “Your mother has always taken care of things, Sam,” said my father, in profile. He was fiddling with a pile of black olives on a tray. The olives were stacked in a pyramid, like in a picture I’d once seen of ancient cannonballs. They should have been a tipoff that this was a special occasion, so to speak, because they’re not the kind of food we get every day. Yet I hadn’t even noticed them till now.
    My dad poked at the top olive with a red-flagged toothpick. He didn’t seem to have an appetite.
    “She’s worked hard to keep you kids safe and healthy,” he went on. “But she’s so tired . Bone-tired. We both are, if I’m perfectly honest. Not in our bodies, in our minds. We don’t want to go downhill mood-wise and then have you always remember us that way. But it’s what will happen. If we don’t just get out soon.”
    We sat there for a while, not knowing what to say—nothing to say at all. We had objections but it felt like there was something large and breakable in the room.
    Eventually Jean suggested we take a walk outside, through the courtyards of the complex. Walks are quite popular with the service corps. Low-cost momentum and a natural mood boost! The corps believe in forward motion; they don’t approve of standing still.
    So we prepared ourselves fresh drinks, mostly in awkward silence, and took them with us into the elevator. Sam stood next to me, behind our parents and behind Jean, hunched and pale with his back to them. We gazed outside as the car descended.
    The elevators in our complex are external and made of shaded plexi (salvage from an olden shopping center, my mother says) so you can see the sky and then the buildings below it and then, as you drop, the changing levels of the courtyard gardens. Above the tops of the trees swoop hills and valleys of Invisinet, a mesh you can’t see till you’re up close to it. It used to be used in zoo exhibits, when those existed in the flesh as well as on face. Now it keeps the approved wildlife in and banned wildlife out.
    The management doesn’t want random unknown starlings or doves—they could have parasites, could bring in one of the flus or malarial spinoffs, migrating just like people do, with the heat waves and microclimates and changing ecologies.
    There are also, in these courtyard gardens, more exotic birds, beyond the sparrows and pigeons: some peacocks and peahens, a moody emu, a bevy of fat quail. The groundskeepers bring in new animals now and then to mix it up a little. They’re my favorite part of where we live, and I go out for my sun time to the maximum allowed because I love to follow them around whenever I spot them.
    After a