Free Pills and Starships by Lydia Millet Page A

sympathy in his brown eyes, and keep my gaze straight ahead.
    He must have had to wait for permission to leave from LaTessa, because he just stood there patiently without moving, until all the masseurs finished their work and withdrew from the people they were massaging. He didn’t seem offended or awkward but just graceful and sort of self-contained.
    Eventually they all filed out again quietly.
    By this time the snifflers had stopped sniffling and LaTessa made us hold hands and name the emotions that we felt. As we went around the circle saying our feelings, it struck me that everyone was zomboid. I wondered if the others were taking more pharms than us; but then, a second ago they’d been crying. So they weren’t mood-leveled. Who knows.
    They mostly said variations of the same thing—they felt abandoned, they loved their parents and/or they were pissed off at them, the dying was selfish; one with a hardcore godbelief said contracts were against God’s plan.
    It was all about them, was what I noticed—survivors, not the people who had to die in three days. But I guess that’s the point of therapy.
    Then Xing spoke up. She asked how she was supposed to go on with her life, knowing the last generation had already been born, which meant that she would never be a parent herself and neither would anyone she knew.
    Not that she wanted to; she didn’t, not at all.
    “But,” she said, “these are the last parents, you know? The parents that are choosing to go now, they’re some of the last parents around. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, in the First, there won’t be any parents left. Not only no babies and no little kids, but no parents. Doesn’t that seem kind of weird ?”
    “Hella weird,” said Sam abruptly. He really looked at her. “And hella dangerous.”
    “Dangerous?” asked someone else.
    “Dangerous,” said Sam firmly. “A world full of people who don’t have kids and never will. It’s kind of a huge psychotic experiment, isn’t it? I mean it’s never happened in the history of the world. Even the corporates talk about it. Not loudly but they do. A world of people who may be the last generation. No consequences to what they do. A massive social experiment.”
    I glanced quickly at LaTessa then to see if that had pissed her off. But she had her usual serene smile on, smooth and unwavering.
    “So now we’ve got, in the First World and corporate leadership, this old population that’s getting more and more decrepit,” Sam went on. “And then we’ve got the poor parts where they’re still having kids, which is making them even poorer plus emitting huge amounts of carbon we’re totally unable to put a lid on. We’ve got actual armies guarding our farms and water. If it weren’t bad enough that the global biome’s collapsing, now it’s two kinds of people against each other too? Ancient and rich against young and scrabbling to survive?”
    “But it’s already divided like that, isn’t it?” said Xing. “It’s already the First against the rest . . .”
    “Why don’t we just, like, kidnap the poor kids if we need them so badly,” suggested a meathead-type guy.
    Xing and Sam both shot him a look of disgust. Even LaTessa cleared her throat.
    “We’re headed for the next tipping point,” said Sam, looking around. “We’ve had the planetary one. Pretty soon now we’re going to have the human one.”
    “A social tipping point?” asked Xing.
    “The corps have already launched it,” said Sam, peering at the meathead. “ Total war .”
    There was a shocked silence. Xing looked a bit alarmed. It didn’t seem like anyone knew what Sam was talking about.
    I didn’t, anyway.
    “I am feeling,” said LaTessa after a few seconds, with a little head incline, a clos ing of the eyes and a reach ing out of her slim, graceful arms to the future survivors sitting on either side of her, “a gently bountiful healing is calling to us all. A lovely call for inward focusing. This is a