Nicci put both hands to her fa
ce and sobbed harder. Amber’s own eyes tried to sting, but she wouldn’t let them. Crying was a pointless little-girl thing to do and it hadn’t fixed one goddamn thing since it had been invented by the very first pointless little girl. Problems only got solved when you did something about them.
“We’ll only be
allowed to take one standard-size carry-case each,” said Amber evenly, watching her baby sister cry, “and we can’t afford a storage pod, so most of this stuff will have to be sold or left behind.”
“Stop it! Please, just stop!”
“And we probably won’t be able to live together. Not in the same dorm room, maybe not even in the same complex.”
“I can’t be alone!”
“You won’t be alone, Nicci. You’ll be rooming with up to seven other women, they’ll just be strangers.”
“No!”
“We’ll lose our jobs and have to work a state-job as partial payment for those dorms, where our salary cap will be half what it is now, so once we move into those dorms, we are never getting out.”
“
No
!”
“
Yes
, dammit!” Amber snapped. “These are the facts, Nicci! We can’t stay here and nothing we do can change that. This place is all over. Maybe if we had enough time, we could find another place we could afford on just what we’re making now, but you know goddamned well that we’d end up on a first-served list and we could be there for years! Where are we going to live in the meantime, huh?”
“You could get more time!” Nicci s
natched at the lease, tearing it in her haste. “Did you even ask? There has to be a number that…that you could call and they’ll give us more time if they know we’re…on a list or…”
“We can file for a four-week extension
. That’s what we can do, and only if we can prove we can pay the lease at the end of those four weeks. That’s all they care about and that’s all they have to care about. Everything else is on us.”
“Then I’ll do like Ma
ma did! I’m not leaving!”
“You mean you want to be a whore.”
Nicci flinched. Amber did not.
“You w
ant to do like Mama did,” said Amber, ruthless and calm as her stomach churned. “You want to be a whore.”
“I…”
“How are you going to fuck men—”
That flinch again.
“—for money—”
Nicci broke, tried to get up. Amber caught her by the wrist again and held on in spite of her sister’s squirming efforts to tug free. She hated this, hated herself, but she kept on talking and her voice never shook. Sometimes you had
to say the bad stuff, right, Mama? Right.
“—if you can’t even admit you’ll be a whore?”
“I can do it,” whispered Nicci, but she wouldn’t look at Amber.
“Maybe you could, but you couldn’t do it here, and you had better be sure that’s the way you want to go beca
use they don’t let you stop anymore once you start. You’ll have to get the barcode and you’ll be subject to scans at any time. They’ll cancel your insurance—look at me, Nicci—and garnish your wages to pay for the state insurance and all your monthly tests, plus the initial registration and the operation where they spay you, and you know it took Mama five years to pay all that off. And in the meantime, where will you be living? Because you won’t be able to pay the new lease on a state-paid whore’s salary and this place will still be just as gone.”
“Stop it
!” Nicci shouted. “Stop bullying me! I’m not leaving!”
Amber pre
ssed her lips together and folded her hands. She told herself she wasn’t a bully. “What are you going to do, Nicci? Where are you going to go?”
“Shut up!” Nicci beat her palms on the table loud enough that old Mrs. Simon in the next apartment banged her cane on the wall. “I’m
not
leaving! You can’t make me
leave
, Amber! You can’t make me leave the
planet
!”
“I’m not making you do anything,” said Amber, knowing damned well it was a lie. “I’m just telling you that I
’m going, with or without you.”
Nicci stared, her mouth working in silent horror.
“There is no other place for us to go,” said Amber.
And she waited, but Nicci still couldn’t find anything to sa
y, so she picked up the brochure and started to flip through it.
“So
I went to see the Manifestors,” she said. She sounded, to her own ears, a lot like the pinch-faced old man at the orientation seminar, trying to be professional while still getting through something deeply unpleasant and perhaps contagious as quickly as possible. Everyone knew about the Manifest Destiny Society and their ship; she said it anyway. “They’ve still got room. I guess they’re having some trouble filling their quota for young women, so we’re actually guaranteed a contract if we apply.”
“They’re having trouble because it’s never been tested!”
“Sure it has. They’ve Tunneled out to all the other planets.”
“Oh what? To Neptune?
Saturn?” Nicci uttered a shrill, fearful laugh and shook her head. “They’ve never taken it to this other place! This…This…”
“Plymouth,” supplied Amber, not without rolling her eyes a little. The Director of the Manifest Destiny Society was simply full of the pioneering spir
it. “They’re calling the planet Plymouth.”
“I don’t care what they’re calling it!
I don’t want to go!”
“You don’t have to. But I am,” said Amber again, and watched her baby sister start to cry. “The trip’s going to take about three years, they said, but we’ll be in Sleep
ers the whole time. That’s kind of like in the movies, when they freeze you, only we won’t actually be frozen. We won’t feel anything and we won’t age, although the guy said sometimes the umbilical…the place where they plug you in leaves a pretty gnarly scar. Those weren’t his exact words—”
“Amber!” Nicci wailed.
She waited, but that was apparently the sum and substance of Nicci’s argument, so after a moment, she just went on.
“When we get there, the ship lands and becomes like the staging area for the colony. We’ll be building
the colony up around it—farms and stuff, I guess—but civilians like me won’t be responsible for much. I guess it’ll be pretty hard work, but it’s only supposed to be a six-hour shift, which is less than I’m working now. I got one of their silver civilian contracts, which means five years—Earth years, that is, and it doesn’t include the transport time. They’re going to pay me twenty thousand dollars a year, plus five thousand just for being a fertile female of childbearing age.”
Nicci looked up, her tears hitching to a brief stop in her throat. “W-what?”
“Plus another ten thousand for every kid I have while I’m there, but I’m not having any. I told them that, and they said that was my decision, but I still have to take my implant out before I go. They won’t pay for that, but they do pay for a full medical exam and I’ll get all my shots so I’m clean to go. By a doctor,” she added. “Not some insurance company’s medico. Plus, I’ll get the Vaccine.”
Not
a
vaccine. The
Vaccine
. And even Nicci, who obviously tried so hard to understand as little as she possibly could, knew what that was. Because before the Director had been the leader of a bunch of space-happy freaks, he’d been a doctor, and much as he would like to say that his greatest contribution to humanity was the ship that would carry the first colonists to another world (and he said that a lot), he would probably always be known best for the Vaccine, which worked itself all the way down into your DNA and made it so you could never get sick again. Here on Earth, people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to endure the agonizing year-long process while the Vaccine was introduced, but the Director was just giving them all away to his happy little colonists, who’d get them painlessly in their Sleepers, which was the perfect application process, according to the brochure. No more worrying about that niggling little 14% failure rate or the greatly exaggerated reports of the birth defects caused by genetic drift. They’d just wake up, secure in the knowledge that now they were cured for life of every possible virus—of the flu, of HIV, of whatever alien illness might be crawling around on Plymouth. Of everything.
Amber could see this sweeping, silent argument hammering away at Nicci’s defenses. Ever since the Ebola
attack at the UN summit, there had been a dramatic end to the prohibitions on biological warfare. These days, it was fight fire with fire, and now it seemed every country was bragging about the bugs they could grow. Super-polio, rabies-13, dengue, hanta, yellowpox and God only knew what else. They lived in the city. They were a target. It could happen any day.
“Well…” Nicci ran her wet eyes over the papers on the table without seeming to really see any of them. “Can’t we go on the next ship? When we know it’s safe?”
“No.”
“There’s going to be more!” She reached tentatively for the Manifestor’s pamphlet, but withdrew her hand without touching it. “We can take the next one, okay?”
“No, Nicci. They only pay people to be colonists for the first ship,
because
it’s the first and everyone wants to wait and see what happens. After it gets there safe and sound, the Manifestors stop paying and start charging.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I do know that, actually, because I was there and I talked to them. I also know that the next three ships are already booked, so it’s this or nothing. Well,” she amended ruthlessly, “it’s this
or
go on the state
or
start whoring. I guess we do have options.”
Nicci sniffled and rubbed at her face.
Amber picked up the brochure on the ship and made herself read it. It took a lot of time and when she was done, she could not remember a thing she’d just read. She’d hoped it would settle her twisting stomach some, but if anything, the wait and the silence and the sound of Nicci sniffling made her feel even sicker. She folded up the brochure and put it down, talking like she’d never stopped, like she didn’t care, like she was sure. “The best part is, the five years I spend on the planet counts as improved education when I get back. Not as much as a degree would, but some. My salary cap will be raised and I’ll even be eligible for college credit, just like if I’d been in the army.”
She waited. Nicci kept sniffing and wiping.
“Fine,” said Amber, sweeping the papers together in a single stack. “You stay here and have fun with the whoring. I’ll miss you.”
Nicci didn’t call her back as Amber walked down the narrow hall to the room that the sisters had shared since Mary brought baby Nichole home from the insurance company’s
birth clinic. Amber put the papers in the drawer with her shirts and socks, then changed out of her funeral clothes and into her work uniform. She went into the bathroom and threw up in the sink. She tried to be as quiet about that as possible and she didn’t feel a lot better when it was done. In the other room, she could hear her baby sister crying again. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and saw a big (
fat
) unsmiling (
mean-eyed
) stranger (
bitch
) who’d bullied her only living relative on the day of their mother’s funeral.
“It had to be said,” whispered Amber. She
rinsed her mouth and washed her face and put her hair up. “Sometimes you just have to say the bad stuff.”
She went on out past weeping Nicci and off to work like it didn’t matter.
In a way, it didn’t. They simply didn’t have any choice.
2
T
hey called the ship the
Pioneer
, of course. The launch had originally been scheduled for August 3rd, but it had been pushed back three times and now was set for January 22nd, and, barring another sanction from the United Nations, set in stone. That gave the Bierces a little more than twelve weeks to prepare for the flight, but they only had Bo Peep’s apartment for four. The Manifestors provided housing, but required a signed contract before approval, which in turn required a certificate of medical clearance. They got their exams the third day after requesting one and Nicci passed hers easily. Amber hit an old, familiar snag.
Her tests were all negative, the medico assured her, as though Amber needed assurances. She did not. Her job at the factory took the weekly drug-and-disability tests allowed by law and Amber had seen too many people dismissed, often with a hefty fine for ‘misrepresentation of
faculties,’ to ever be tempted by her mother’s stash. No, the problem was what the problem usually was: Her weight.
She wasn’t huge. She
had more than one chin and she lost her breath easy when she had to take the stairs, but she got her clothes at the same store Nicci did, just on the lower shelves. So this was a setback, but it wasn’t unexpected and it couldn’t be insurmountable. She just wasn’t that big.
“How much would I have to lose?” Amber asked bluntly, interrupting the medico’s careful dance around the three-letter F-word.