Pills and Starships by Lydia Millet Page A

talked. He wasn’t going to walk out, because he didn’t want to hurt the ’rents’ feelings that badly. He wasn’t willing to go that far, I figure. So all he could really do was sulk.
    There was mandatory hand-holding after that and my mom and dad said how painful it was to leave us. They said it was the hardest thing they ever had to do and they didn’t mind dying at all, they only minded having to leave the two of us. They said why couldn’t it be a better world, why did the world and our ultimate history break their hearts like this? My dad said he was angry with the dead people a long time ago who didn’t stop the warming before the feedback loops started. He talked louder and louder and said they were energy hogs and food hogs and overall hogs for a super-easy life. He kept saying “hogs.” Just hogs hogs hogs.
    LaTessa said calmly that she received his anger, and the world was yet only the world , it was a sunset-time glorious nowness of being .
    Very insightful, thanks for that, I thought.
    She never said “but,” she always said “and.” I don’t think there are any buts in language technology.
    At that point I was suspecting maybe she was actually a member of the Hot Earth Society, who welcomed the chaos as an end to sin. But I didn’t ask, because the session wasn’t about her and who cared what she thought anyway.
    My parents had made peace with leaving the friends and acquaintances they still had, they told LaTessa.
    “Some of our friends are already thinking along contract lines themselves,” my mother added.
    My father nodded and said they had an understanding, their generation. They felt for each other, but they also knew what time it was. (Whatever that fossil expression meant. My dad’s the worst when it comes to using fossilized expressions.) So they didn’t worry so much about their adult friends.
    Then my mom looked over at Sam and me and averted her eyes. “But my—I mean—it’s a cliché, I know, but it’s so real to me: it seems like yesterday they were babies. I held them and wanted to protect them forever.”
    Then she started crying; she was sobbing even though the pharma was making her smile while tears ran from her eyes. But I have to say, that smile made it worse, not better. My father’s eyes were wet and he got choked up, but in his case the tears didn’t actually come out.
    I started blinking rapidly.
    I was wishing my own pharms were more powerful, at that point. I mean I know maybe it’s weak—Sam thinks it’s weak to use pharma every day, lately he’s been suggesting pharma should be for special occasions. I don’t know where he gets this stuff—a rebel listserve or somewhere like that. Sometimes, even though it’s weird, I can almost see his point of view, but other times I feel like, Come on, small angry-dude brother, live a little. Everyone can’t be wrong. Can they?
    Plus there have been times I was on pharma when I saw things I’d never have a chance of seeing flat. Pharma can turn the ugly into the beautiful.
    Of course, it can also work the other way around.
    Sometimes a visionpharm helps me work on my collection. I don’t need it, but I can definitely use it to good effect. Once or twice I’ve found things whose loveliness I wouldn’t have seen without the pills I was on. But, see, that loveliness is real, because later, after the pills wear off, I can still see it in the collected thing.
    For instance, this one day I took a visionpharm because I was sad—a facefriend had caught a bug called Marburg and she died. I’d really liked her, we’d been gaming for over a year and vidconfing for just the last month or two; she had freckles and a sweet smile. I didn’t want moodpharm, for some reason, I wanted visionpharm instead.
    And after I took it I was wandering in the complex thinking of her and I found a plain rock. Somehow the rock became lovely to me, like I could see pieces of stars in it, pieces of primordial matter. In that plain rock I