The Resisters Read online

  “You don’t have to have unfettered access to everything about everyone to get good data,” I said. “You know how we federate power, so that states are both connected but autonomous? To a large degree, you can federate machine learning, too.”

  “You mean, you don’t necessarily need a surveillance state,” said Gwen.

  “Exactly.”

  “And don’t forget there’s a backlash going on in ChinRussia even as we speak,” said Eleanor.

  “Because there’s something in a person that does not like Total Persuasion Architecture,” said Gwen. “Is that what you mean? Because there is something in a person that will resist?”

  “People don’t like to live in fear,” I said.

  “Which is not to say that you have to resist,” said Eleanor.

  “We’ll be proud of you no matter what,” I said.

  “What if I become a terrorist?” said Gwen.

  “Just don’t bomb anyone we like,” I said.

  Gwen laughed. “And what if I do resist but it’s just—what’s that word…”

  “Quixotic?” I said.

  “Quixotic. What if it’s just resistance for the sake of resistance. So I’m not complicit. Is that a stupid way to live?”

  “You should live however you want to live,” said Eleanor firmly.

  “I thought it matters to at least struggle,” said Gwen. “I thought the one thing that matters in life is to be able to look in my daughter’s eyes and see respect.”

  “Should you be lucky enough to have a daughter,” I said—knowing that I wasn’t the only one sorry to have assumed Gwen would have children. How many things Eleanor and I had said not realizing every word was being taped. It was what my mother used to call the shock of the echo.

  Now Gwen looked exasperated. From a standing position she arched so far back that her hands touched the floor. “Anyway,” she said, upside down, “I haven’t made the team yet. So there’s nothing to decide.”

  “Very true,” said Eleanor.

  Gwen straightened up, then did it again. A shiny line of sweat trickled down her neck toward her chin. “But you guys’ve started raising your Living Points? Just in case?”

  “Not because we want you to go to Net U,” said Eleanor.

  I felt hopelessly vertical as Eleanor also did a backbend. Then, with a little push of her wrists, she straightened up the way Gwen had. Were all women devastatingly superior to men, or was it just these two compared to me?

  “We want you to have what freedom you can,” Eleanor finished.

  “We want you to feel You have a choice. That You always have a choice,” I said.

  Gwen laughed. “Because this is supposed to be a free country, you mean. ‘Th-e land of the free,’ ” she began singing, only to have the house chime in.

  And the ho-ome of the brave.

  We all looked at one another. Since when did the house sing?

  “Maybe it’s a phase,” I said.

  “That’s what parents always say,” said Gwen.

  * * *

  ◆

  The morning of the tryouts, Gwen knit a few rows of the scarf she was making—a glorious thing, with silver bats and copper gloves and golden baseballs, all against a blue sky with fluffy white clouds such as we did not see much anymore, thanks to the wind. The scarf was for Ondi. Did Gwen not remember what happened to the scarf with the vines and the birds? She was even reusing the golden yarn that I myself had untangled for her. But should I remind her of that whole sorry time?

  “Are you ready?” I finally just asked.

  She nodded, then shook her head, then nodded.

  I laughed. “Just remember to breathe. And wiggle your toes. As my mother used to say, Goats don’t jump, their feet jump.”

  “And hold on to my hat.” After working all day on the Surplus Fields case, Eleanor had stayed up half the night to embroider the Chattanooga Lookouts logo onto Gwen’s red hat.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Though maybe it’s too beautiful to wear?” Gwen reached down and, rather than don the Lookouts hat, put her glove on her head the way she used to when she was little. “I’m going to wear this instead,” she announced. “And if they tell me to take it off, I’m going to throw it at them.”

  “Just the attitude they’ll be looking for,” I said. “Make sure you spit at them, too.”

  Gwen laughed.

  “Grant.” Eleanor glared as she came in, and I could see her point. A little regression was all right, but too much was too much.

  “Get ’em in the face,” I said anyway.

  Gwen laughed again, which I thought good for her. “I’ll make ’em wish they had windshield wipers,” she said. But then, admiring the hat Eleanor had made her, she put it on and, with it, her prosecutor face.

  * * *

  —

  We were not surprised by the stadium, which Gwen had described so well. We were surprised, though, by how many competitors there were. For all Dana the Enforcer’s talk of Spectrum Thinking, too, almost everyone else was angelfair and male. And how conspicuous we felt—how Surplus. No one else wore twenty-year-old shoes, as did I, or plastic shoes, as did Eleanor. We were just happy we were armored in such beautiful, if strangely old-fashioned, sweaters: a long peach-and-rose mohair cardigan for Eleanor and, for me, a light blue herringbone turtleneck. When Eleanor first made that turtleneck I had thought it looked like what used to be called casual-Friday clothes. Now I was glad to look what my mother would have termed fine.

  As for how poor Gwen and Ondi felt out there on the field, I could only imagine. We overheard the man a row ahead of us in the bleachers say, “They must be really good. Like, really good”—at which Eleanor immediately began to lean forward to tap on his shoulder. I gripped her hand tightly, though—not now, not here. We were so close to the field—the man in the fourth row, we in the fifth.

  “The girls will hear everything,” I whispered.

  Eleanor frowned but took out her knitting as a way of settling herself down. She had just gotten her yarn lines straightened out when Ondi’s parents appeared.

  “Nick Nickelhoff,” said Ondi’s father gruffly. “And this is Jill. Jill Nickelhoff.”

  Eleanor and I stood, reaching to exchange handshakes. It was a bit awkward, as the Nickelhoffs were standing in the aisle steps—he level with us, and she a step above—and as they were apparently disinclined to extend their hands quite far enough for our hands to meet. We stretched our arms a bit farther, making up the gap, then sat back down again, shocked. Where had Ondi gotten her clear cocoa skin and Afro-puff hair? Her parents were not only straight-haired and light-haired, they were angelfair. Of course, it was true that Surplus could, in theory, get PermaDermed. But how could the Nickelhoffs have amassed the Living Points?

  Interestingly, apart from in skin color, the Nickelhoffs did not match each other. If Jill was a cup of tea, with fine bones and Ondi’s spy-eyes, Nick was a barrel of beer. And not just in appearance: he had the crisp shirt and bullying impatience you see in men who, if they do not think every encounter a staff meeting, certainly wish it were. He looked at me as if to say, My budget when I was chief of radiology was in the tens of millions of dollars, and, well, he had me there. At the height of my career, after all, I had boasted a staff of two and a half—an assistant director and four teachers, all part-time.

  “We’re here to see Ondi win,” he announced.

  “We’re rooting for them, too,” I said.

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Well, we’re not exactly here to put a jinx on them,” I said stubbornly.

  “You know what we mean,” Jill chimed in. Between the hydrangeas on her skirt, the violets on her scarf, and the lilies of the valley on her handbag, she seemed to have a liking for botanicals. Was this related to Ondi’s love of our
garden?

  “Look,” said Nick. “We get it that you have a land right. We get it that you read books and garden. We get it that you cling to old ways and engage in Problematic behavior from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep. But if you did that in a houseboat, you would have sunk to the bottom of the ocean by now. Do you understand? Let me say it again. If you did that in a houseboat, you would have sunk to the bottom of the ocean by now. Where you live, if the Enforcers want to harass you, they open your gate and let the geese flock in. Out on the water, you come out and find they have sliced your pontoons again. Now tell me with a straight face that you knew that.”

  Of course, we did know that.

  “And that’s your life even without having spent a month Cast Off,” said Eleanor.

  “You got it,” said Nick. “You have no damned idea.”

  “Do you mean we would have sunk to the bottom of the ocean by now?” I asked.

  “Very funny. I mean, you have no right to be giving Ondi ideas.”

  Of course, I did have some sympathy for him, as I had for everyone living in a Flotsam Town. But did that justify his sending Ondi into the water to fetch basketballs? Did that justify his bullying her?

  “Well, pleased to meet you,” said Eleanor, “but with all due respect, no one is giving your daughter ideas. Intelligent young lady that she is, she picks them up quite on her own.”

  “She is going to Net U,” said Nick, “whether Gwen goes or not.”

  “Are you asking us to make sure Gwen doesn’t talk her out of it?” said Eleanor. “Because if so, we cannot help you. Gwen will do what she wants, and Ondi will, too. Because like it or not, they’re grown-ups.”

  “Grown-ups. What a sense of humor you people have,” said Nick. “Ondi told us that, but how nice to have a chance to witness it myself.”

  “Glad to be a delight,” said Eleanor.

  “Haha!” barked Nick, moving away. “Hahahaha!”

  He stomped down the stairs toward the first row, though not quite as quickly as we expected, perhaps because Jill had one hand placed on the back of his shoulder, as if for balance. She paused as she passed us, her other hand gripping her bag.

  “She’s my little girl, you know,” she said—adding, as if she’d just realized she’d forgotten to recite the family mantra, “You are not going to get anywhere, being like this.” Then she continued down the steps after her husband as if they were in a line dance.

  Down on the field, the players were also lining up.

  “Ondi doesn’t seem to have told them she got hacked,” I observed.

  “They would have brought it up if she had,” Eleanor agreed.

  She knit. We returned our attention to the field.

  * * *

  —

  The pitching tryout was first. Gwen and Ondi were given a number then sent to sit on a bench. Gwen had her Lookouts hat on backward and was chewing gum; Ondi, suited up, played with her mitt. They were sixteenth.

  Eleanor and I watched the first fifteen pairs as they came up. Some seemed completely at home, some distinctly ill at ease. And their throwing was likewise mixed, with many quite a bit stronger on speed than control. Was that all right at this age? Would the control eventually come? Eleanor and I knew more about pitching all the time, but we had the parochial understanding of parent-experts. I wished the real expert, Coach Wilkie, were here. Shouldn’t he be around, lending moral support to the girls? I kept an eye out. But as the girls sat miserably, with no one to wave to, I had to conclude he hadn’t come.

  The judges, meanwhile—one taller, one shorter—might as well have been a pair of pontoons for all they gave away.

  “Number sixteen!”

  Gwen jogged up onto the mound, deliberate and unhurried. When she arrived she pawed at the dirt a bit with her feet; a FieldBot hurried over to groom it. She waited. She had fifteen balls—five to warm up, then ten pitches of her choice. The judges stood to the side with their clipboards. The short one held his out in front of him, ready to write on it; the tall one tucked his under an arm. An assistant stood behind Ondi, speedometer in hand.

  Gwen circled her hips, then rolled her shoulders, getting loose. She tossed a ball to Ondi. Ondi returned the ball, a nice smooth throw. Gwen did it again. Ondi returned it again. Then, with no further warm-up, Gwen let loose a fastball. The assistant looked at his meter. Seventy-five miles per hour, he said. A bit under what my meter said, but never mind. That pitch having been high and away, Gwen threw three more balls, hitting the other corners of the strike zone. Up and in. Down and in. Down and away. Every throw was what Coach Wilkie would have called right on the black—right over the edge of home plate. The other pitchers watched, transfixed. Next came her circle changeup—its delivery completely identical to her fastball’s but with a twelve-miles-per-hour drop in speed, according to my meter. Then she threw a sinker—almost as fast as her fastball, but moving down and armside. Then her cutter, fast but moving gloveside with a sharp, late break. And finally her curveball, with its precipitous nose-to-toes drop. She started to leave the mound, only to have the taller judge motion her to stay.

  “Can you put the ball wherever you want to?” he asked.

  “I can.”

  “All of the time?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Head down, the shorter judge nodded as if in agreement with his clipboard. “Thank you,” he said.

  Later, both Gwen and Ondi were asked to hit some balls. Ondi managed to smack every ball she was thrown; nothing more than a double, but she was consistent. Gwen, on the other hand, swung at several balls she shouldn’t have, then finally pulled out a single. Was the pitching enough? We had heard that pitchers didn’t bat at Net U, but if they didn’t, why was Gwen put in the batting cage? And what did it mean that the tall judge commented, as Gwen left the stadium, “Some arm”? Despite having nodded so much earlier, the short one now said nothing. Did that mean something? And what did it mean that, when we passed Gwen’s bedroom door that night, we saw that she had fallen asleep with her glove on—something we hadn’t seen her do since she was a girl? And did wanting to make the team mean she wanted to go to Net U? Did she know herself?

  * * *

  —

  The hours the next day were like bricks; we moved them one at a time. And with the day after that came another pile. Gwen missed Coach Wilkie’s special program. She missed the stadium. She did not want to throw balls under the grape arbor at the sandbag. Eleanor and I tried to get her to read. We tried to get her to knit. We tried to get her to garden. I made her curried vegetables. Eleanor made her hot-and-sour potatoes, mapo tofu, dandan noodles. In all of these, she used the hottest chili peppers we had—to wake Gwen up, she said. She and Gwen fenced a little.

  The third day, Mimi was barely in the door before she announced, “You made it!” A couple of the guys had thrown harder than Gwen. “But your accuracy! Your consistency! And all those off-speeds! We’ve never seen anything like it. A girl like you is once in a generation! Congratulations!”

  Gwen could hardly speak for her surprise and relief. As for how Ondi did—Gwen’s first question—Mimi would not say. But not an hour later, Ondi appeared at our door, her disappointment plain.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Gwen.

  Ondi said she just knew this would happen. “Now you can go to Net U,” she said. “Now you can have a ball career and then a real career, and as many kids as you want and a real house, and a yard big enough for your kids to throw in. You can have as big a garden as you want, too, and then who knows. Maybe Winny Wannabe will Cross Over. Then you can get a PermaDerm and marry him.”

  “Ondi,” said Gwen. “I don’t know if I’m going to join the team, much less if I’m going to Net U.”

  “Yes, you are,” said Ondi savagely. Her face was wild and yet sad, too. “You’re going to hesitate long enough to feel
how moral you are but then you are going to go. Try and AskAuntNettie. She’ll tell you. You’re going to join the team and go to Net U and feel guilty the whole time, and do what you can to change things. And like you’ll quote your mother about how right makes might until one day you realize that there really isn’t anything anyone can do. Then you’ll feel tortured because there you are, Gwen Wannabe! You’ll lose a lot of sleep. It’ll be a tragedy.”

  Gwen tried to object, but Ondi wouldn’t listen.

  “You have to go!” shouted Ondi. “You have to! Because you have an arm! Because you were born with it! Because Aunt Nettie gave you that arm and you have no choice!”

  Gwen started to cry. “Aunt Nettie didn’t give me this arm, and you know it.”

  “Why are you crying? You could have been born without an arm, you know! Stuck as you are with having an arm, you could be just as stuck with having no arm. Forever and ever, no arm! Think about it! How can you be the one who’s upset?” Ondi stomped out of the garden.

  “Is everything all right?” Eleanor asked.

  “This isn’t your fault,” I said. “It really isn’t.”

  Even the house seemed nonplussed.

  Now that’s no way to leave, is it? said the house. Where are her manners? And, as Ondi slammed the front door, Some people need to get hold of themselves. They do. Some people need to get hold of themselves.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Because she has a choice. She does. You humans always have a choice.

  “Oh, yeah? How about an on/off button, then?” I said. “Because I’d love to choose an on/off button.”

  The house did not reply.

  * * *

  —

  Mimi was not surprised to hear that Gwen was on the fence. “But can I arrange for a tour of Net U, at least? We can fly you and your parents out and put you up. Why not have a look?”

  “I don’t see the point,” said Gwen.