Read Online Pills and Starships by Lydia Millet - Free Book Online

ripple effect, first the corals and mollusks and other animals with shell-like coverings, when the more-acid seawater stopped them from growing those shells. Next it was the animals that ate them, sea otters for instance, and then the animals that ate them , etc., all the way up to marine mammals like whales and dolphins.
    And these big burps of methane are bubbling out of the seas along the continental shelves and causing even more heating up—along with the methane burps from melting permafrost, which brought about the tipping point. So now we’ve got the feedback loops.
    And doom, and end of planetary life, and shit.
    Unless the scientists are completely wrong.
    It sounds flat negative, I know, but I’m actually in a good mood this morning. There are hummingbirds here!
    I’ve seen them before in zoos and parks, but never just buzzing around wild. They can flap their wings ninety times in a single second! And fly backward. They’re like jewels. They have shimmers, green and purple and golden.
    I wish I could collect the sight of them, like on my handface vidcam, but I don’t have it with me. And you can’t collect them for real, of course. People used to collect animals by killing them, though, back in the clonal period, when white people were going around killing the other kinds and taking over their countries.
    Back then collecting meant killing.
    But I found something cool. It sits in my favorites box with the other things I couldn’t stand not to bring. It was half a broken egg, just fallen on our balcony here. I have no idea where it came from; I haven’t found a nest and there aren’t any trees up here. But there was the half-eggshell, when I stepped out this morning, delicate and white. I’d never touched an eggshell before. We get synth-chicken eggwhite in bottles, once a year.
    The eggshell is so fragile and thin I can hardly believe it would keep anything alive. It’s preposterous! I feel like saying. And yet I’m pretty sure that’s just what eggshells do. What I found was closer to two-thirds of an egg than half, I think—you can see how the top would be shaped, the slightly pointed top that separated from the rest.
    I look at it and I don’t know if the bird inside it died or hatched and flew away.
    So as I was saying, the ocean—which used to contain oysters and orcas and who knows what all, even these bizarre creatures called seahorses—mostly has bacteria now and amoeba things and schools of mutated jellyfish.
    Plus of course the garbage vortex and mile-wide chemical streams.
    But still Mom and Dad stand at the edge of the bluffs, their arms around each other’s waists, and look out over the faraway waves like anything could be there—like those waves might still be the glittering roof over a marvelous underwater kingdom.
    Sam’s lying on his bed reading. He brought an antique book that was a gift from my father. Lord of the Flies. My dad split his collection between us, but I haven’t read any of mine yet.
    Me, I’m sitting here on the balcony watching the palm trees swaying in the breeze, listening to the fronds rustling, looking at my eggshell, and thinking about the Twilight Lounge. We went there after the nightmare therapy session and our massages, to eat dinner and relax. At first I’d been creeped out by the parts of the hotel that were set apart for contract people, but it turned out to be okay.
    Though maybe a bit hardcore.
    It’s kind of this skydeck setup, this restaurant, bar, and pool platform that juts out over the cliffs and looks like a big transparent bulb. You have a 360-degree view, there’s one of those pools with a waterfall at the end that makes it look like it’s just disappearing into the sky or ocean, depending on your angle. We sat at a poolside table and had our drinks in hand—my parents’ were custom-made pharmabevs since it’s a delicate balance; as far as I know ours were just generic—and were waiting for food when suddenly soft music started and