The Resisters Read online

  Eleanor’s Aran Island father had, it could not be denied, been a championship discus thrower—having gotten his start, Eleanor always said, throwing rocks.

  “Interesting,” I said. “All this isn’t because AutoAmerica has rejoined the Olympics, by any chance?”—something I had heard from a fellow Underground League parent.

  “Bingo,” said Dana. “In fact, the games are going to be held right here in the US of A.”

  Eleanor and I smiled, though it always bothered us when the US of AA was shortened to the US of A.

  “And as you know, we in the US of A believe in Spectrum Thinking.”

  “Ah,” said Eleanor pleasantly. “How enlightened.”

  But later, she fumed. “So they need a token?”

  “Blasian, female, and Surplus—does that make Gwen a threefer or a fourfer?” I said.

  “And since when is baseball even an Olympic sport?”

  “Since it became a way for ChinRussia to literally beat us at our own game?”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “That ChinRussia wants to humiliate us? Or that we have brilliantly taken the bait?”

  “Both.”

  “Redoubling,” I said. “This all has to do with Redoubling.”

  We agreed.

  “But is she better off—” Eleanor began.

  “—being able to say she had no idea how fast she pitched—.”

  “—should Aunt Nettie put out a call? For pitchers who can pitch seventy miles per hour, say.”

  I hesitated. “Not to tell Gwen what we know is paternalistic,” I said. Though where was the line between paternalistic and paternal? Between respecting Gwen and protecting Gwen?

  The white noisemaker swish, swished.

  “My meter is new,” I went on. “It could be wrong.”

  “You are grasping at straws.”

  “Better to grasp at straws than not to grasp at all,” I said—a lame joke, I knew. Still, I wished I had been able to make her laugh.

  “That golden arm,” she mused instead.

  “Will it prove a gift or a curse?”

  “And will she be invited to Cross Over?”

  While Eleanor had been asked to Cross Over twice, she had refused twice, too, saying she would never be co-opted. Would Gwen prove like her mother in this regard, though? A resister?

  * * *

  ◆

  It might have been grasping at straws, but still, in the morning I checked my meter against some SkyCars. These were, of course, all AutoSet for the same speed on the highway, and sure enough—there it was. Ninety-five miles per hour, exactly. Next I tried it on an Apparate 750, mounting my meter on a FleaDrone to get some height. Four hundred miles per hour. My meter was failing to fail. All the same, I tried tracking a SkyCar in its skylane. Four hundred miles per hour as well, as set by Aunt Nettie.

  In short, perfect.

  Did my new observation function work, too?

  We Surplus did not have much contact with the Netted, thanks in part to zoning laws. The highest, driest towns were generally zoned ten acres, while swamps like ours had no minimum acreage. Aunt Nettie didn’t have to segregate Netted from Surplus, in short; what with Basic Incomes so modest, we self-segregated as easily as sand and water.

  Of course, long ago many of us Surplus would have been the help on which the Netted relied, in which capacity we would not only have known them but known them intimately. Before the AutoHouse and the AutoLawn, we would have known their underwear and their shoes and their trash; we would have known their crises and their joys and their affairs. In fact, even just working as I had in a university job, I had had a glimpse into many such things, the lives of the Netted-to-be so closely resembling, at that point, the lives of the Surplus-to-be.

  But now, I tracked the SkyCar to its charging shed with fascination. Was not the billowing of the SkyCar’s luminescent wings astonishing? Or what about the landing gear that bent at the ankles so that the vehicle could descend, not parallel to the ground, but at a forty-five-degree angle? How Leonardo da Vinci would have loved this thing, I thought, as the machine reached out its wheels like a hawk about to snatch a vole with its claws; it rolled majestically down the last few hundred feet of the driveway. There was no pilot, of course. Still, the males in the cockpit managed to look as though they were in charge, scrutinizing the pavement out ahead of the SkyCar and moving their mouths—giving directions, apparently, to a voice box, a bit of a surprise. ThoughtCommand was expensive, but still I would have thought all the Netted had it. AutoDogs trotted everywhere, in any case—to chase away the Canada geese, I presumed—while in the backseat, a woman and a girl laughed and another girl frowned at her handphone. How flaxenfair these people were, how perfectly pulled together. You could all but hear them answering Yes when HowDoILook asked if they wanted the “consummately casual” option. And no one was consuming anything; that was noticeable. None of them got out of the SkyCar with a snack in hand. They had what my mother would have called very nice manners—church manners even when not in church.

  Indeed, the two older people carried nothing at all—their devices no doubt accessible via the SmartGlasses they seemed to be scanning as they walked—while the three younger people hoisted what looked to be rather heavy backpacks. Did the backpacks contain books? Certainly, when the young people adjusted the packs, their contents had that distinctly blockish way of shifting. Had their teachers opted for paper over ScreenRead because Aunt Nettie could not then keep tabs on their reading? Or were the studies simply still showing, as they had long ago, that students learned better from the printed page? And where were their HouseBots? Why did the young people have to carry the backpacks themselves? And was this a family with three children, or was one of the girls a friend? I couldn’t tell. Though—three children. Or even two. For Gwen to have some company! What a happy cacophony my sisters Marie-Elena and Elaine had made before their back-to-back heart attacks, years ago—so much so that their raucous quiet haunted me still. If only Gwen could have had a sister—someone like Ondi, except who wouldn’t abandon her—who would stay.

  The house, large and many-balconied, sat on a quiet cul-de-sac, with nary a mall truck in sight. Of course, Netted lives were full of pressure—I had heard that. And I did think I could see it in the way these people trudged up their beautiful stairs. They were not lighthearted; they were preoccupied. Where we Surplus had to concertedly consume, after all, they had to concertedly produce. And what a life it could be, I remembered—the meetings, the conferences, the politics. The anxiety about success—how you fought to define it for yourself, even as others blithely defined it for you. People said that the Netted looked at our lives with envy. To be state-supported! To draw a Basic Income for doing nothing! Gwen once showed me an online chat in which a Netted, somehow crossing into Surplus Space, claimed that he’d change places with one of us in a heartbeat. Naturally, he was missing a lot of the picture, as Gwen could have pointed out. Instead, she had simply collapsed his 3-D figure, first into 2-D, and then into a point. “What an asshole,” she said. She was contemptuous.

  Yet as I watched the people file into their beautiful house, I could not help but notice their air of exhaustion. Maybe they had just had a long day. But they did not exactly walk as if reveling in their good luck in being Netted. They walked as if they had enormous boulders to roll up a hill and no RockBots to help.

  * * *

  ◆

  The next League game featured the Lookouts versus the Thistles—an all-girl team, new this year. Eleanor and I were looking forward to their arrival until they showed up, to our dismay, in thistle-stamped T-shirts and hats. The first four players who arrived even sported thistle tattoos on their forearms, as well as purple nails and purple streaks in their hair. What were they thinking?

  “Have they forgotten this is an underground league?” demanded
Eleanor. “Where the hell is Andrea?”

  Andrea was their coach.

  “Maybe I should talk to her,” I said.

  “So what? So you can make it okay?”

  “Maybe the tattoos are henna?”

  But it was as if Eleanor had her fencing mask on and was headed into a match. No doubt her fuse was shortened by her preparations to file the Surplus Fields suit—the first steps of which involved exhausting the remedies for her complaint offered by the National Park Service. It was a process that could not, she joked, have been more exhausting. At any rate, she did not reply.

  We found Andrea trying to hide her large HydroBoard behind a small wall.

  “Are you crazy?” exploded Eleanor.

  Andrea draped an orange DisposaTowel over her board then stood up, pushing a purple headband to the top of her narrow forehead. Over and above the apparently standard team regalia, she boasted thistle-like hair, all purple and spiky—the sort of stylistic achievement that could not help but make you wonder how the young could be so adept at some things yet hopeless at the basics. At nineteen, Andrea was the youngest of the coaches—too young for the responsibility, Eleanor and I had initially thought. She had eventually won us over with her record, having founded the original ShelterBoat for battered Surplus women—a ShelterBoat that went on to spawn a nationwide network of such havens. But now her face crumpled like a girl’s.

  “I am so sorry,” she said.

  The hair, began Eleanor. And the tattoos—the tattoos, which, unfortunately, were not henna—one of the Shelter girls having, it seemed, wanted to practice the tattoo skills she’d learned from her mother.

  “Do you understand what you have done?” Eleanor’s voice was cold with anger as she went on. Did Andrea realize how many…Did she realize how seriously…Did she realize that everyone—the entire League, all the Leaguers—could be Cast Off?

  “I guess,” said Andrea. “Now that I think about it.”

  Now that she thought about it.

  Andrea wiped her eyes with her headband. “I wasn’t thinking, I guess. Everyone was just so excited.”

  Everyone was just so excited.

  “And I guess we were a little high.”

  Had there been a plate of bacon and eggs around, it would certainly have gone out a window.

  “The ShelterBoat is stressful,” Andrea continued. “It’s stressful for me and it’s stressful for the girls. I had to get them off the boat. I mean, it’s a boat. There’s nothing to do but FriendGram each other and fix our hair. I make everyone keep avatars on their phones—and I make sure their avatars roam the world. But we would go mad if we didn’t go ashore sometimes. And this was so much fun, I guess we didn’t think, especially because…” She hesitated. “Especially because one of the girls just got Cast Off for getting pregnant a second time.”

  I could see Eleanor’s anger begin to take a step back. And there just behind it stood her sympathy, like a fresh recruit, all ready to step forward. Indeed, I thought she would surely ask a bit more about the girl, and whether there was some way she could help. Eleanor was like that.

  Instead, she said, “And what if hundreds of others are now Cast Off, thanks to your efforts at stress relief?”

  Andrea toed the ground with her purple sneakers.

  I tried to make some suggestions as to how Andrea might handle the tattoo removal. Wasn’t there something called UnDo? I asked. I said I thought I had read that in a pop-up somewhere. And in truth, though I tried to ignore ads in general, such was the power of ProductPlug that now I perfectly recalled how UnDo could work miracles, even if you’d used EternaMom.

  Andrea said she’d look into it. As for whether she wished, as did I, that UnDo worked on more than tattoos, I’m sure that as Eleanor went on lambasting her, she did.

  “And do something about that damned HydroBoard,” said Eleanor, finally. “A blind person could see it from California.”

  Her anger seemed to have waned. When she sat down, though, and I moved to massage her temples, she stared unblinking as a fish.

  “It may not bring trouble,” I said. “It may die right here.”

  “It may,” she agreed. But I knew that was not what she guessed.

  * * *

  —

  On every team, players will hit a sacrifice bunt or fly ball so their teammates will advance. And these moments of self-sacrifice are felt to be ennobling—transcendments, as a pop psychologist once called them. But they are discrete; they are decisions. They are not what I beheld in the Thistles—a camaraderie reminiscent of that of the Lookouts, only far more organic and fluid. Utterly reckless as they had been, they were also, one had to say, something special. There was constant huddling and dispersing; there was constant swapping—of water bottles, of positions, of T-shirts. When one girl slipped, others appeared so instantly that it was as if their spirits were already there, and only had to perceive a need to materialize. Was this what you got with an all-girl team who lived together under special pressures, with a special leader? For if the Lookouts were an all-accepting party, this was a family—a group in which, as my mother used to say, everyone has a part of you and you have a part of everyone.

  If only Gwen could join them! Eleanor looked at me, and I knew the thought had crossed her mind even as it crossed mine. Of course, we were still furious with them. And Gwen loved the Lookouts, and they loved her. But looking to the future, we could see that she was going to need some deeper connection than what the Lookouts alone could give—that she was going to need what my mother would have called quality cement. Of course, it was possible that not even the Thistles would understand things like what it meant to grow up with a golden arm—how it was a gift to which Gwen had to answer as if to a boss.

  Still, I had all but convinced myself that they could understand it if they tried when she walked a batter for no reason. Did she know something we didn’t? It wasn’t like her to pitch around just anyone. Then she gave up a base hit to a girl who didn’t even swing at the first two pitches, and who would certainly have folded had Gwen placed her ball with the least finesse. Instead she all but fed the ball to the batter; the ball hit the bat more than the bat hit the ball.

  “Isn’t that Leila Clutch?” said Eleanor. And as soon as she said it, I remembered: the girl who once put a live roach in Gwen’s glove. I didn’t remember her name, though, from hacking her chip. Did she have another name?

  Now Gwen walked another player, loading the bases.

  “Cara Jack,” said Eleanor.

  How had I failed to recognize the dead-rat girl? It was true I’d never seen her in person, back when the girls were in middle school. And yet, and yet. Perhaps she had been hacked along with others on her team? Because while it had only happened once that a group of recruits had come to be hacked together, one afternoon some girls did arrive in a convoy.

  Then there it was—streaked, now, with purple, but still—that red-and-gold Afro-puff. And even more distinctively—that attitude.

  Ondi. Ondi who had dumped all our knitting on the walk. Ondi who had rejected Gwen and broken her heart. Ondi who was now on Leila Clutch and Cara Jack’s team.

  “What is she doing here?” Eleanor’s brow furrowed. “Did you hack her chip?”

  I had not, no. And yes, I was sure. Whoever else I had missed, I would have recognized Ondi. As for how she could be playing when she had not gotten hacked, all Eleanor would say was “The lax are never lax just once.”

  Was that aimed at Andrea, or me, or both of us?

  “She is putting the entire League in jeopardy,” I said, in any case—for having been Cast Off, Ondi’s family was almost certainly on a special watch list. And if Aunt Nettie chip-tracked Ondi, she would find us all—including, quite possibly, Eleanor. Eleanor, out and about. Eleanor having given the slip to her DroneMinder with the help of a heat signature forger. Eleanor
not only doing legal work but organizing as well. Would this bring more distinguished treatment? She always joked that no one needed ten toes and that she had nine to go, but I was not keen on a countdown.

  “What are we going to do?” I said as Ondi stepped up to bat, her thistle tattoo plainly visible. She wore a thistle T-shirt, sequined sneakers, and, to go with them, the same stance she had had since childhood. I was happy to see her eight knuckles lined up the way I’d taught her. There was the raised shoulder I had tried to teach her to relax, though. And there, too, was that nervous moving up to the front of the box, then back, then up again I had tried to get her to stop.

  Gwen, flummoxed, threw high.

  Ball one.

  Gwen threw again—this time so high that Ondi drew her head back, laughed, and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “That almost took my nose off.”

  Her teammates booed Gwen, who stopped to take off her cap. She redid her ponytail. But when she emerged from her routine, it was not to throw the cold, hard pitch she’d thrown against Gunnar Apple in the Jets game. Quite the contrary, you would almost have had to call her ball wild—so far inside that Ondi drew in her stomach and jumped back, hips in the air, so as not to be hit. Did she really need to do that, or was she just being dramatic?

  Ball three, and more booing that Ondi did nothing to quell—that she, in fact, egged on, exchanging smirks with her fellow Thistles. Now Andrea was out on the field, gesturing at Mabel.

  “What if someone gets hurt?” Andrea demanded. “Do you know what a mess it will be?”

  “She’s not going to hit anyone,” argued Mabel.

  “You have to pull her.” The very picture, now, of adult responsibility, Andrea lifted her chin; her hairband, hanging around her neck, oddly evoked the sort of necklace middle-aged women like my old assistant director, May, used to wear.

  Mabel, though, put her hands on her hips as if to say, I mean business when I set a brake. And, indeed, as a former cable car conductor, she did.