The Resisters Page 9
“Ondi,” said Eleanor immediately.
“Wow, great guess, Mom. Yes.” Gwen tossed a ball up into the air—something she was not allowed to do in the house. Eleanor frowned.
Ondi had apparently also received a GreetingGram invitation to the tryouts, to which she had answered that, yes, she was willing to put her name in the training partner pool. And why not, Gwen guessed Ondi had figured. The League needed girls. As for whether she was the best of Gwen’s three choices, that really did not matter, Gwen said, because she was not planning either to train or to try out.
“I thought you told Mimi you were,” I said. “Or at least declined to say you weren’t.”
“Well, I’m not,” she said firmly.
In fact, she reported that she had recently joined a group of knitters who were knitting sweaters big enough to cover whole houseboats. “Sweater bombing,” she called this, with more excitement in her voice than we’d heard in years. “It’s an art thing.” She had enormous bags of yarn in her room—“stash,” as she referred to it—all from her new friends, and huge new needles, too. These were almost an inch in diameter, as befit the stretches of knitting she was producing—on a scale like nothing we’d ever seen. She was knitting a kind of mural, really—a series of panels depicting a forest of sunflowers, with such dramatically curling petals and leaves they seemed almost animate.
This place is quite a mess, the house kept complaining. Clear-float now? This place is quite a mess.
And, Someone is going to trip. You always have a choice. But someone is going to trip.
And, Do note that your choice is on the record. Nothing is being hidden from you. But your choice is on the record.
Gwen was unperturbed.
“See? This is the opening for a window,” she said. “I’m doing the whole right side of the house.”
Her decision could not have been clearer. She told us she had even received a GovernorGram offering her use of the Netted League facilities regardless of whether or not she tried out for the team. But why would Aunt Nettie offer her that? There had to be a catch.
“I mean, that’s the AutoAmerica Stadium she’s talking about,” Gwen said.
She remained adamant even after Mimi came in person to encourage her to take advantage of the situation.
“Just go and, you know—have some fun!” she said, waving her reading glasses as if trying to inspire by example. “Bring Ondi with you!”
“I’m not going to try out,” said Gwen.
Mimi nodded. “Well, you have a choice. You always have a choice. But why don’t you go anyway?”
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
Gwen stuck stubbornly with sweater bombing until, a week later, all her friends had their pontoons slashed.
“I told them right makes might,” she said despondently. “I told them they should think about where true north lies. I told them they should resist Aunt Nettie—that they should be resisters, not quitters. But they just said there was no winning against her, and that was that.”
I moved the bags of yarn into the basement so that Gwen would not be constantly reminded of her disappointment. Still, she threw savage pitches into the sandbags in the garden, muttering into her glove. Was the crackdown really due to the project itself? Or was it because she was involved in it and Aunt Nettie wanted her to play ball?
“You always have a choice.” Gwen threw so hard I could hear the ball whistle. “Ha.”
“With all due respect,” said Eleanor with a wave of her chopsticks. “The sweater bombing of whole houseboats is what was long ago called guerrilla art—art that attempts to subvert the whole accepted order of things. Which, of course, Aunt Nettie would oppose. She might also be set on limiting your options to the one she favors. But it is possible the slashing has nothing to do with you.”
Gwen did not respond.
Later I was at least able to convince Gwen to go out and throw a ball around with me in the garden, and it goes without saying that I did my best to catch what she had to deliver. But I could no longer catch her the way I had when she was little. I was often in the wrong spot and, even when she aimed right for my mitt, kept dropping the ball out of sheer shock at how hard she threw. Our session ended with my failing to keep my mitt in the proper position and getting hit so hard, the underside of my wrist swelled up like an orange. What had happened to the little girl whose stuffed animals I had so ably returned? Now she sweetly applied SprayIce. She finagled a way to elevate my hand. She kept up a patter to cheer me. But when Ondi dropped by to try to convince Gwen to at least go check out the AutoAmerica Stadium, Gwen gave in, I believe, as much out of frustration with me as anything else.
* * *
◆
Though all Prospects received OmniPasses to the AutoAmerica Stadium, most lived too far away to use them. Gwen and Ondi, however, were lucky enough to live a half-hour AutoLyft ride away, an expense that was covered by the program. They were only allowed, as Mimi explained, into the practice area. But still, Gwen reported, no marooned place could begin to compare. The field was so pristine that Gwen did not even think the grass real at first. It had this giant stripe pattern to it, with bands of lighter and darker green, she said, and it didn’t seem ever to have been rained on.
But Ondi said it was, it was real. And though Gwen was too self-conscious to touch it to see, once Mimi was done showing them around, Ondi not only lay down on the ground but rolled over a few times, sniffing the grass blades. “Real,” she pronounced even as a FieldBot headed over.
Is everything okay? Do you need a medic? I can call one right away.
“No, no.” Ondi laughed. “I’m just checking out the grass.”
It’s something special, that’s for sure, said the FieldBot then. We take good care of it and let the sun and rain do the rest.
“Really,” said Gwen.
In the end there is nothing like nature, it said. Man is no match for it, not even close.
“Is that so.” The girls laughed.
The lighting was perfect, Gwen said. The diamond had perfect lines. The infield had perfect dirt. And beyond the outfield lay a series of pitchers’ mounds, so that multiple people could practice at once. Only two were in use when they were there, though, both by guys. As for whether any Surplus had ever been seen in this stadium before, much less a battery of Surplus girls, who knew? In any case, everyone carried on as if Gwen and Ondi were nothing unusual, allowing Gwen to marvel at the mound she found herself on—at how firm it was, and how dry. It did not need to be shored up in any way, and she did not wonder if it was regulation height. Of course, Gwen and Ondi had brought their own ball. But had they forgotten to bring one, they learned, the FieldBot would provide one. Even if you forgot your glove or mitt or could just use a new one—which Ondi said she could—the Bot would, no problem, produce an array of options. Right, left, catcher’s or fielder’s, broken in or not. It was true that Bots did the breaking in, not humans. Still, Ondi now sported a new mitt. As for whether she could keep it? The answer was, Sure.
Best of all, there was unlimited coaching. Gwen learned tons even the first day, she said, starting with basics like, How do you find your natural arm slot? and How can you know if you have excessive tilt? But the girls also learned about things they had never thought to focus on—things like bunt defense, and pickoff moves, and rundowns. Covering first. Handling a wild pitch. Things far beyond what I could teach them. Really what they mostly learned, Gwen said, was how much they had to learn.
There were stretching coaches and mental strength coaches, too, and a yoga coach with offerings ranging from shoulder yoga to Zen ball. There were FitBots who could be trained to aid with any drill, and there were all sorts of treatments you could sign up for, including MuscleStim, which promised to speed up your learning by stimulating your peripheral nervous system. Gwen loved nothing more than the new pitching exercises, t
hough: tapping three times, and staying over the rubber before getting out front and down the hill, for example, or driving the shoulder through then holding your finish like a ballet dancer. And she appreciated the personalized strength and flexibility training.
“They said I have an amazing arm for a girl but should still be working to make the best of what I have,” she reported, “not to say making sure I don’t get hurt. So now I have arm-care exercises with rollers and medicine balls and a bucket of rice. I’m doing flexions and rotations and abductions with weights, too, and working on the muscles of my rotator cuff, which it turns out need to be isolated if they’re going to get strengthened.”
So was she still opposed to the tryouts? Eleanor and I were accustomed to the about-face of children’s phases—to the blitheness with which they dropped horses for dragons, say, or dragons for cats. Still, the speed with which sweater bombing had given way to training took us aback, even if to train was not necessarily to try out. Indeed, it seemed to be training for training’s sake that Gwen loved, captivated as she was, for example, by a program called iPitch. First, she said, you had yourself filmed. Then you held a special ball and played with your grip. Then the program showed you what happened if you slid your first two fingers together, or put your middle finger just inside the middle of the ball, or slid your first finger closer to the inside of the ball and put a bit more pressure on it. Of course, factoring in your height and strength and so on was important. But once the program had all that, it could predict how the ball was going to behave, including where and how sharply it was going to break. Gwen was so excited, she played with the program for the entire afternoon of her second day.
The third day, Gwen came upon something even better than iPitch. That was Coach Wilkie, who did not think she should be focusing on her off-speed pitches at all. Throwing comes first, pitching comes later, he told her. Focus on your strength and throwing mechanics. Think fastball velocity and fastball command. Because the fastball, like it or not, he said, is king.
“Girls don’t like to hear it because we don’t generally throw as hard as the guys,” said Gwen. “But he also said that I throw exceptionally hard for a girl, and of course I’m a southpaw. That’s typically an advantage with left-handed batters, but I guess I’m one of the few who can throw just as well to right-handed batters. So that makes me more than a southpaw. That makes me really exceptional, he said. And he said I have exceptionally long fingers, too—long enough to throw a circle changeup—plus I’m consistent. Like he said my fastball windup and release point never vary by more than a degree, which he said was amazing. Or, no—mind-boggling, I think he said. He said it was mind-boggling. And he said it’s great I can throw any off-speed pitch consistently. But still, he said, I need to focus on my four-seamer. I’m throwing mid-seventies now but he said he thinks I can get up into the eighties and should.
“Also, he said my attitude needs work. He said I throw like I’m basically friends with the batter. While good pitchers, he said, have an edge. Like, he asked me if there was anything I’m mad about? Like, really mad about? And when I said yes, I’m mad that some people are Surplus and some are Netted, he looked surprised. But then he said, I should do fine. Because every batter I’m going to face is Netted. So before I wind up, I just need to think about everything they have that the Surplus don’t and, goddamn it, go get it back.”
Was it Aunt Nettie’s doing that Coach Wilkie happened to have a ten-week program perfect for Gwen and Ondi? Gwen wondered, as did Eleanor and I. Still, Gwen and Ondi signed up.
“It’s just such a special chance,” Gwen said. We could not disagree.
Indeed, Eleanor and I could see a difference in both girls’ playing already. Since, the raised hands at the All-League meeting notwithstanding, a number of Leaguers had quit, Ondi was now catching Gwen sometimes, the way she had when they were little. And what a revelation it was to behold how cleanly she caught, and how well she read the field. She and Gwen were quite a pair, too—communicating, it seemed, telepathically. Eleanor and I shook our heads in admiration. As for whether it was thanks to the improvement in them both that Gwen threw a no-hitter against the Jedis—the first no-hitter she’d ever pitched—who knew for sure? One thing was clear, though: for all Gwen’s ambivalence about the Netted League program, her arm was not at all ambivalent. Quite the contrary, it was like water undammed—as if it had a natural direction and, being allowed to flow, just poured and poured out, jubilant.
* * *
◆
It wasn’t a secret that Gwen and Ondi were training at the AutoAmerica Stadium. But they somehow agreed without having to discuss it that they should not bring it up with the people they knew. And this wasn’t the only understanding they reached in a way they could not have described, Gwen said later. By the time the tryouts approached, the girls’ energies were squarely focused, not on whether to try out but on how to succeed. Gwen was pensive.
“Did you really say no to Net U twice?” she asked Eleanor.
They had just finished a bout of fencing, which Gwen had all but won. Eleanor was still the more strategic and adroit. But Gwen was taller, longer armed, and, thanks to her baseball drills, far stronger and faster than she used to be—so much so that I had put down my book to watch them. Of course, parents everywhere are astonished by their child’s unfolding capacities—at the talents and interests that come into view like mountain range upon mountain range as you ascend a high peak. But when did Gwen learn to feint so convincingly that she could trick her mother, not once but several times?
“It wasn’t as hard then as it would be today,” answered Eleanor, removing her mask and stopping to catch her breath. “What resistance can accomplish is so much less clear. It’s odd…” Her padded jacket heaved. “We’ve won a lot of battles but lost a lot of our fight.”
Gwen’s eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed but she was not breathing hard at all. “I have a question,” she said, sheathing her foil, as she always did, in a length of plastic pipe. “Do you think that what happened was all Aunt Nettie’s fault? I mean, do you think there was another way?”
“Was this Surplus-Netted split inevitable, you mean?” said Eleanor, removing her jacket and gloves. She hung them up to air on a clothesline. “Do you mean, was it somehow natural and just made worse by Aunt Nettie?”
“Yeah.” Gwen hung her jacket up as well, at the very end of the line, away from Eleanor’s jacket.
“Good question.”
I brought them both some water as Eleanor began her stretches—standing on one leg as she folded the other like a paperclip.
“The fact is that for most of history the question had been how we could produce enough to feed people, to house people, to clothe people,” she said. “And capitalism, it turns out, was a great answer. It had some serious drawbacks but it worked better than anything else people tried.”
“Like what kind of drawbacks?”
Eleanor explained about exploitation and inequality, and how while capitalism brought out the philanthropy in some, it mostly brought out people’s greed. “Especially as corporations focused more and more on shareholder profit and forgot about the greater good,” she said.
“You mean, the commonweal?” said Gwen. “That the colonists talked about?”
Eleanor looked surprised, while I beamed with pride in my student.
“Very good,” I said. “And do you remember all that went by the wayside when corporations got defined as people? When they came to be protected under the Fourteenth Amendment?”
Gwen, disappointingly, frowned.
Eleanor, diplomatically going on, explained how in any case, thanks to Aunt Nettie, we don’t struggle to produce anymore. In fact, the Netted produce so much that we Surplus have to concertedly consume to keep things in balance. “So the question is, why haven’t we changed course?”
“What do you mean?”
“She means why haven’t we gone to a four-day workweek?” I said. “Why don’t we have job sharing? Why don’t we define taking care of children and the elderly as real work, regardless of whether or not it supports a ‘productive’ member of society? And while we’re at it, why can’t we call cleaning up the environment ‘work’ even if it doesn’t result in a product that can be sold? Why do we behave as if producing is still the be-all and end-all, when it’s not?”
Eleanor took up the thread. “And why are the Netted so upset about paying Basic Incomes when there’s more than enough to go around? Why do they treat us like parasites when they’ve gone out of their way to deny us work? Is it because now that Big Tech doesn’t need us, they just want to winnow us? Especially as that solves the population problem, too? It’s not their first-choice solution no doubt. But what are they going to do now that they see moving to Mars isn’t going to work out, right?”
“And has Aunt Nettie enabled certain people not only to stay on top, by the way, but to stay on top of an angelfair pile?” I put in.
“You mean, has she enabled the New Segregation,” said Gwen.
“Touché,” said Eleanor.
Gwen was stretching the same muscles Eleanor stretched; now it was their hamstrings.
“But could we really have used Automation and AI to rethink capitalism?” Gwen asked. “Weren’t we, like, worried about ChinRussia, and that if our system didn’t win, we’d all have to live under theirs?”
“So how about making ours a just society to which people would of course want to move?” said Eleanor. “A place free of Total Persuasion Architecture? Wouldn’t that help us compete?”
“Well, up to a point,” said Gwen, pushing back. “Because, I mean, the better the data, the better the AI, right? And AI in a lot of ways is smarter than even the smartest people. So people can move here but if ChinRussia has better data, we’re screwed.”