The Resisters Read online

  “Come on.” Mimi put out a hand as if to take Gwen with her right now. “We’ll go look at the ballpark, and then the university. We’ll sit in on some classes. Don’t you want to see what it’s like? Aren’t you curious?”

  “I would prefer not to.”

  “Don’t you want to make an informed decision? I thought you were supposed to be so mature.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  And with that Gwen called for a clear-float. The HouseBots emerged, sensors blinking. Clear-float now? Is there something in your way? Clear-float now?

  I tried not to laugh.

  “Gwen,” said Eleanor sharply.

  “What?” said Gwen.

  “And you, too, Grant,” said Eleanor. “I know you had no father role model, but could you please act your age?” Then, turning toward Mimi, she said pointedly, “We would be delighted to go.”

  “I’ll arrange it,” said Mimi quickly.

  * * *

  ◆

  The Net U ballpark was a fraction the size of the AutoAmerica Stadium. Brand-new but oddly old-fashioned, it featured a green painted scoreboard and mechanical white numbers. There were no ads or mall trucks, and it was blessedly, astonishingly still.

  “It’s positioned to block the prevailing winds,” explained Mimi. “The balls don’t get blown around. There’s a retractable roof for storms, and while we don’t get tsunamis, the lake can get its back up. So we have QuikDams around the campus as well.”

  “Wonderful,” said Eleanor.

  Gwen wore her prosecutor face.

  “The coaching is the best in the world,” Mimi went on. “Have you ever heard of Woody Link? His grandfather was a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, and he is a legend in his own right, too. He set all kinds of records, and as if that wasn’t enough, he single-handedly made this program what it is. He got this stadium built; he built the team; everything. The players all say he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to them, and if you come, you’ll work with him, too.”

  Was Gwen disappointed that she didn’t get to meet him—that he was away at NetWest for some reason? If so, she gave no sign as we toured the libraries, the classrooms, the laboratories, the theaters, the plazas, the dining halls. The auditoriums, the lounges. The dorms. Did this all spring from sheer love of learning? I remembered believing that about my own education, back in the day. But now, I wondered whether it wasn’t more about being inducted than ennobled; maybe it was all just too painful for me to take in—too bright a reminder of the dullness of Surplus life. For we Surplus might be the righteous, and we might be the oppressed. But everywhere here, there were students and professors, books and plays and concerts, movies and workshops and talks. The students did have handphones. And, like their Surplus peers, they seemed much preoccupied by their phone worlds. But unlike the Surplus, these students had a capacious real world, too, rich with events and ideas.

  It was strange that everyone was so angelfair. And while no one stared at us, we could not stray from Mimi’s side without being asked so instantly if we needed help, it was like receiving an autoreply. Of course, with her dark skin and bright cane, Mimi stuck out, too. Did she feel like a spectacle? If so, she gave no sign as she explained that if Gwen decided to come, she would be here for four years. And, one more surprise—Mimi had just heard the news herself—it would not cost us a single Living Point.

  “Do you have any ThrobEase?” Eleanor asked her.

  “Is something giving you a headache?”

  Gwen was stoic. It was only at home that she put her head in her hands and sobbed. “I shouldn’t have thrown so hard. I wish I could cut my arm off.”

  “Don’t say that!” Eleanor and I said. “Please! Don’t! Don’t!”

  But how should she not cry when we ourselves were divided? Eleanor blamed herself for the whole situation.

  “Why did I insist we go?” she asked that night in bed. “Why?”

  “Because Gwen and I were so rude to Mimi,” I said.

  “You should have stopped me.”

  “As my mother used to say, A good woman is hard to stop. And you are the best of women.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Your problem is that you want Gwen to be free,” I went on. “But…”

  “But.” She sighed. “Exactly.”

  We lay listening to the white noisemaker, it made a sound like ocean waves crashing and crashing.

  * * *

  —

  The next week, on a day of record heat, Gwen made Mimi a counteroffer. She would join the Net U team if they would accept Ondi, too.

  “You sure can throw a curveball,” said Mimi.

  She said she’d go back and talk to her higher-ups but she didn’t sound hopeful, and when she left, leaning heavily on her cane and covered with sweat, Gwen looked, for the first time since the tryouts, relieved.

  * * *

  ◆

  The Underground League, meanwhile, continued to observe the sorts of precautions we had been taking all along. Then the number of NosyDrones began increasing, and we enacted additional security measures in response. Whereas before we had developed certain favorite locations, for example, now we were sticklers about never playing in the same place twice. What’s more, we put a moratorium on new players, no matter how sorely they were needed. And we limited the number of onlookers who could come, rotating through the parents and assigning turns. It was grim. Yet for all these measures—or was it thanks to them?—we were having the best season in League history. At least half the games went into extra innings, and we were all looking forward to the playoffs.

  As for why the drone activity then tapered off, who knew? Could Aunt Nettie have decided to leave us alone? Some people said the rebellion in ChinRussia had convinced her of the necessity of social safety valves—a plausible theory. Rumor had it that whole parts of ChinRussia were in chaos, after all. What was the harm of what we were doing in comparison? Maybe Aunt Nettie had realized that baseball—Unlawful Assembly or not—kept us out of trouble.

  In any case, after another few weeks, people began to question whether the additional measures were really necessary. Could we not loosen up a bit? And lo: where our numbers had shrunk to a bare eleven teams, now we had twelve full teams again. By the end of the year we’d have thirteen. Why was that? Maybe Aunt Nettie knew, but for us it was a mystery.

  * * *

  ◆

  Net U decided to accept both girls.

  “This is not possible!” Jumping up and down, hugging Gwen and crying, Ondi knocked over a small patio table, righted it, and knocked it over again.

  “Don’t worry about it!” we told her, delighted to see her friendship with Gwen rekindled. For there was Gwen jumping, too, her hands in the air, whooping and dancing out of pure elation. Or was it pure confusion?

  Indeed, after Ondi left, Gwen asked us what she should do.

  “You were bluffing,” guessed Eleanor. “You were saying no without saying no.”

  Gwen played with a ball, shifting her grip.

  “I wanted to do it the way you did,” she said. “I wanted to turn down Net U with the grand defiance you did. But I couldn’t.”

  Eleanor waved her hand—times had changed. “Do you want to go? That’s the question.”

  Gwen hesitated. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “But?” I said.

  “But if I don’t go, Ondi can’t go. And how can I do that to her?”

  Eleanor cleared her throat. “One thing I have never been quite clear about,” she said. “Could you attend school for the baseball season and then take classes remotely? You don’t need the degree, after all.”

  Gwen brightened. “That’s a great idea. Especially since their school year goes year-round.”

  “No winter break?” I tried to hide my disappointment.


  “ChinRussia doesn’t take breaks so Net U doesn’t, either.”

  “Ah. Well, maybe distance learning will work out,” said Eleanor.

  The answer, though, from Mimi was that living on campus was part of the experience. It was how people bonded.

  “Which she said in my case might be particularly important,” said Gwen, flexing her wrist.

  Eleanor, slicing vegetables, cut her finger.

  “Well, then, that’s that,” I said.

  A HouseBot fetched Eleanor some MediGlue.

  * * *

  ◆

  No one hit a home run in the next League game. Still, Gwen gave up several doubles—her pitches were a little high—on top of which she managed to botch what should have been an easy out: though the ball ricocheted right toward her, she let it get a little behind her body before she caught it, then just kept spinning around clockwise. This might have been a good idea, except that she spun too far, and the wind lofted the ball way over even beanstalk Diego Smith at first base. A player ended up on third, and the Lookouts went on to lose, 1–0; everyone could see Gwen was distracted. But worst of all, no one was upset with her. Quite the contrary, her fellow Lookouts were so understanding, she began to cry—wondering, she said later, if it would ever be all right to mess up so abysmally again.

  The sky was hazy with pollution from a nearby SuperFactory, but never mind. The after-game atmosphere was, as always, congenial. A parent had brought some beer for the teams to share—a single six-pack, which meant about a sip each—and though there was in truth a variety of snacks, the kids fixated on the marshmallows. Marshmallows and beer? We parents, standing a little apart, shook our heads as the kids blithely set about enjoying the combo anyway. Not daring a real campfire, they brought up some jumping flames on a bunch of handphones, then piled them together with another bunch of handphones SpritzGramming a smoky smell. Over this they play-toasted the marshmallows, popping them into their mouths and laughing as they complained of burnt tongues. They fanned their mouths; Gwen stared into the handphone fire. Her face glowed orange.

  “I have some news,” she said finally.

  No one could believe it. The Netted were recruiting baseball players? Gwen explained about AutoAmerica rejoining the Olympics, and about baseball having become an Olympic sport, and about the preparations to take on ChinRussia, assuming that AutoAmerica made it to the finals. All of this was still a year and a half away, but the powers-that-be were working on their pipeline, she said. They wanted to make sure they’d have the players they needed, especially since the games were going to be here in AutoAmerica.

  “Because the ChinRussians have some really good players,” she said.

  The handphones crackled.

  “Those Japanese pitchers, for example,” said Gunnar Apple, helpfully. “Or maybe they’re not ChinRussian?”

  No one knew for sure. What with no travel between the countries since Ship’EmBack, and separate Aunt Netties besides, ChinRussia had become a blur to many—a There-Be-Dragons place.

  “I think it’s a real honor,” declared Diego finally, his lanky arms outstretched. His armspan was huge and, as if encompassed by his reach, everyone agreed. To be recruited for the Netted League team! To be offered a place at Net U! To be in the pipeline for the Olympics! It was beyond anyone’s wildest imagining.

  “We’ll be rooting for you!” said Ralph Changowitz with a raised fist.

  “Maybe you’ll be on NetScreen!” Juan Palombo’s face shone at the idea of it.

  But like a guest who has been kicked out of a party only to sneak back in a back door, trepidation reappeared.

  “We’ll miss you,” people said. And, “We’re concerned for you.” And, “Won’t it be lonely?”

  “She’ll have Ondi,” said Brianna Soros—who, it seemed, had just seen a Sweet to this effect.

  “Ondi,” said Diego thoughtfully then. “Ondi.” It was hard to see his face by the phone light, but Eleanor and I both thought later he looked worried.

  Gwen’s dorm was unextraordinary except for how ordinary it was in the Netted world that a neo-brick building of no particular distinction should command its own large oval of high, dry land. It lay in the even midday sun, surrounded not by floodwater but by bustle. Every SkyCar had a lid of some sort agape—a trunk lid, a back gate. And around the SkyCars swarmed families, anxious and excited, their arms piled full as their SkyCars flew themselves off to park. Yet for all their life, the SkyCars and families seemed somehow incidental to the dorm—ephemera. Perhaps the dorm would one day be replaced by a science center or be taken over by Surplus. On this early fall day, with the leaves gold green and the grass grown out to its full inch and a half, though, such developments were unimaginable. Perhaps simply because it was not plastic, the dormitory seemed for all the world, like the university itself, an EternaFact.

  Gwen had two roommates. Neither of them had ever met a Surplus before, and though they had exchanged GreetingGrams and did know that they had been assigned a Surplus roommate, they seemed nonetheless taken aback to behold her in the flesh. Were they disconcerted to realize not only that Gwen did not meet their expectations, but that they even had expectations—that a part of themselves lay in wait for them around a corner? It was possible. And, of course, they would have many such moments over their next four years of school. But here Gwen was, their first growth opportunity, with her mismatched parents in tow. People with funny eyes, people with funny skin. People who had not come in their own SkyCar but by a long ride in an AutoLyft; people who had correspondingly unloaded a shockingly small mountain of stuff. People who apparently did not use HowDoILook, people whose clothes in fact appeared to be DisposaClothes except for their incongruously magnificent sweaters. In Eleanor’s case, that meant an elegant blue-buttoned vest with capped sleeves and a dropped waist rather like a Renaissance fencing doublet. In mine, it meant the sort of artisanal green vest I once associated with middle-school teachers—a seed-stitched affair meant to suggest old-time approachability rather than testosterone-fueled menace, in case anyone was unsure as to which of the two possibilities I presented. Gwen herself wore a gray-brown sweater with irregular stripes in gentle colors, with leaf-green jeans—a sweet outfit a bit belied by her ponytail, which in this context appeared more omnidirectional than ever, a true shock of hair.

  Shocked or not, her new roommates found it in themselves to be polite.

  “I can’t wait to hear all about your life,” said one. Pink (not her real name, of course; her real name was Galliano—which, yes, was her first name, don’t ask) was a short redhead with a ponytail of her own. Hers, though, was high and tapered neatly into an S. She had a wide-open pink face and curly red-gold eyelashes and, what with a white sweatband across her forehead as well as a white wristband and white polo shirt, she looked entirely ready for a game of tennis; she had only to swap her white jeans for white shorts. She didn’t have time to gab just yet; in fact, she was still explaining how her whole family and a bunch of friends from high school were all waiting for her to come join them as soon as she had figured out what to do with her stuff when her handphone rang. The ring was a woman’s voice—her mother’s?—saying, Pink, it’s me! Pick up, please! in a beseeching tone I later discovered Netted parents could achieve by pressing and holding their Send button. But Pink—rolling her eyes, remarkably, in just the way Gwen did, with an impressive show of the lower reaches of her eyeballs—did not answer. “Do you think they have storage somewhere?” she asked. “I flattened my boxes and put them in my trunk, but what in the name of the Earth that sustains us all are we supposed to do with our trunks?” She apologized; she was truly at her wits’ end; this was the worst day of her whole entire life. But, but, but! She was looking forward to getting to know Gwen, she really was. “I’m sure you have amazing stories,” she said. “I once saw a Flotsam Town and it, like, blew my mind. Do you live in one of them?”
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br />   “No,” said Gwen.

  “I’m sure your stories are fantastically amazing anyway,” said Pink, helpfully. “And, boy, are you lucky to have parents who actually show up and help.”

  Gwen’s less boisterous roommate was also less overwhelmed. Sylvie’s parents had apparently proved more helpful but were now recovering over PureCream cappuccinos in a café downtown. Sylphlike, doe-eyed, and alone, Sylvie appeared in a creative swirl of drapey clothes that looked to have been tied on, as if she were at once all-embracing and immovably anti-zipper. Like Pink, she seemed prepared to head elsewhere in a blink, though in her case it was not the tennis court but the dance studio. Indeed, so slipperlike were her street shoes that she did not look as if she would even have to change out of them to break into an impromptu pirouette. Now she drew her head slightly back to her shoulder as if she was about to tuck it into her clavicle like a sleeping swan. Onto the common room opened two bedrooms, one larger and one smaller.

  “Pink and I talked about this and agreed we’d let you have the single,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Gwen. “That’s so generous.”

  Sylvie smiled. “I grew up with a sister and a bunk bed,” she said. “She was lower, I was upper. I’m used to it. She sang in her sleep but I sleep with my chip on anyway.”

  “You have a chip?”

  A MediaChip was not a RegiChip. A MediaChip was a microchip Sylvie chose—had, in fact, had to fight with her parents for, and finally got implanted for her eighteenth birthday. Meaning, no more headphones! She mostly used it to listen to world music, especially stringed world music—sitar music, mandolin music, harp music—though it was also an OmniPass, she said. Something she could use instead of swiping her ID.

  “Sounds convenient,” said Gwen. “Mine is so Aunt Nettie always knows where I am.”

  Sylvie stopped. “Who is ‘Aunt Nettie’?”