Read Online Transcendent by Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online

of transfer. Of migration, if you want to put it like that.
Evacuation
is what refugees do,” she said sternly. “It’s not as if we’ll be underwater tomorrow.”
    I knew how painful this was. Since the automobile had vanished from America, this had become an age when you stayed home rather than traveled, an age of villages, of local stuff. And for a close community to be broken up was difficult.
    “We have a program of agreements with other population centers,” she said. “In Minnesota, for instance. John has helped negotiate the settlements.” I hadn’t known that. “Seventy-five here, a hundred there. Always family groups, of course.” It had to be planned, she said. You couldn’t let the community left behind just fall into decay. So there were incentive schemes to keep teachers, doctors, civil servants working here, even though there was no long-term career for them. “It’s a long-term program. A cultural achievement, in its way.”
    “But Minnesota is a long way from the sea,” I said.
    “Well, I know that, but it can’t be helped. What’s worse is that everything is being”—she waved her trowel vaguely—“dispersed. All the history here. The culture.”
    “History? Mom, you’re a newcomer here. You’re from England!”
    “Yes, but so is everybody a newcomer but the Tequesta Indians. That’s part of the charm of the place. I think it’s important that we stay, you know. We old ones. Isn’t that what old people are, symbols of the past, of continuity? If we go then the place will just die. And what will happen to people then? . . . It does feel very strange to live in a place which has no future, I admit that.”
    “Mom—”
    “You know, it’s odd. In my lifetime they’ve taken away so many of the things that used to kill you when I was young. Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, even schizophrenia—
all
of those chronic diseases turned out to be caused by infection, all of them preventable once we targeted the right virus or retrovirus. Who’d have thought it? So with nothing left to kill you, you just live on, and on. But then they took away the world instead.”
    She wasn’t really talking to me, I saw. She continued with her patient gardening, digging and digging.
             
    I found John out back. He was sweeping windblown sand off the porch.
    He had a distracted expression. I wondered if he was getting news about Tom. But it turned out he was listening to his personal therapist. He grinned, touched my ear, and I heard a gentle male voice: “John, you’re overly perturbed about a situation you can’t control. You know you have to accept what can’t be changed. Take an hour off, then let me play you some stuff on cognitive feedback which . . .”
    I pulled away.
    “You should try one of these things,” John said. “It can even prescribe pharmaceuticals, you know. Spin-off from the space program. Would you like me to set you up?”
    “No, thanks.”
    He stepped toward me. Our closeness of last night had dissipated back into the usual rivalry; his blocky face, in the slanting morning light, looked ugly, coarse. “You never did accept any drug therapy after Morag, did you? You know, it is possible to block the formation of traumatic memories altogether. You just take the right pill in the hours immediately after the event—you target the formation of proteins, or some such—I guess that’s too late for you now with Morag, but—”
    “I suppose you fed pills to your kids after Inge left, did you?”
    He flinched at that, but he snapped back, “They didn’t need it. You, on the other hand—”
    My anger, frustration, helplessness came boiling out. “You know the trouble with you, John, your whole fucking life? You deal with symptoms, not causes. You fix your kids so they’ll never be sad. You listen to a tin voice in your ear and you pop your damn pills so you don’t carry scars from anything bad, even from your wife dumping you. And your