To Evan, Louise, Andrea, Marc, Stan, Phil, Jen, Erik, Lisa, Becky, Steph: Don’t forget to gather for the collectors along the way. We have permission to gather along the banks here and we’ll want to get construction going before we get to the next area where materials will be available.
I don’t want malaria or dengue fever, so I leave Chad on mosquito duty. The scrapyard that the Vietnamese government donated to us in Ho Chi Minh City provided plenty of material for our fleet, but we’re going to be providing our own supplies as we go from now on and I want all the younger sibs to get used to that. A stream of acknowledgements come in from everyone and before long I feel piles of metal ingots start to form on the decks of the boats as our bots get to work. I finish unpacking in the room Evan and I will be sharing. I hear Marc in the other room, still getting his stuff situated. I think Evan is already over with the girls on their cat, but with my bots busy collecting I can’t feel him. I walk outside and pull back enough bots to fly, then hop over and land on their deck.
“Hey, Noah, we’re in here,” Valerie greets me from inside the cabin. I step through the clear sliding door to where she is setting up her medical station, unpacking boxes of gauze, bandages, sealed surgical tools, and lots of bottles of pills into the cabinets. She’s taking her job as the trip nurse seriously. The two boxes of medical bots that are already on one of the shelves could take care of anything really serious, but it won’t hurt to have someone with formal medical training handy. And drugs. None of the sibs have much background with pharmaceuticals other than the ones the auto-dispensers use for anesthesia. Having antibiotics and painkillers available is probably a good thing if anything goes wrong.
“Hey Valerie,” I say. “Is Evan around?”
From Evan: Behind you.
I turn and see Evan sitting at a small table in the corner, I’d missed him entirely. It’s weird having my whole cloud out working; it leaves me with blind spots I’m not used to. Valerie opens her mouth to respond, sees me looking at Evan, and turns back to her work.
To Evan: Time to talk about Chad. Want to keep it private or use words?
From Evan: Words. I don’t keep secrets from Valerie other than that big one. I think she might have some useful insights. Andrea and Louise too, and they should be out here in a minute once they finish unpacking.
I nod and grab the seat next to Evan.
“Hey, hon,” Evan says, “would you mind giving us your opinion on something?”
“Yeah, sure. What’s up?” she says, stowing the last box of syringes in the cupboard and joining us at the table.
“I’m afraid it might be a sensitive subject for you,” Evan says gently, “but it’s important.”
I turn on my overlay to double-check that no bots from Chad’s cloud are formed into speakers nearby. The mosquito routine should be occupying all of Chad’s bots, but a little paranoia never hurts. It’s all clear, but I pull some bots off of work duty to put up an eavesdropping shield anyway.
I fill Valerie in on what I already told Evan, and relate my whole conversation with Chad from last night. Her usual smile fades to a somber expression.
“Hmm, yeah,” she says, looking like she’s trying hard to find the right words.
“It’s OK if you’re not comfortable talking about this,” Evan says.
“No, it’s good. I can be open about this. There are some things I’ve wanted to say to you for a while anyway, but I just haven’t found the right moment. I guess this is as good as any.”
She takes a deep breath and releases it slowly.
“So, let me start by saying that I came from nothing,” she says. “Which is something you can’t understand unless you’ve been there, but I’ll try to explain it as best I can. I’ve got poverty going back as far as I can track my family tree. My dad’s dad jumped the border from Mexico without a single cent to his name. He picked fruit and vegetables every day of his life after that, moving around, following the harvests. He died young from an infection that any hospital could have fixed with a single shot, but he was so afraid of getting deported that he never got it treated. He died right out in an almond grove, working until the minute he dropped, leaving his pregnant girlfriend even more broke than he was. I’ve told you a little about my Ba, my grandmother from here in Vietnam. She came over alone as a refugee when she was in her teens, looking for her dad. Never did find him. She ended up in California raising my dad alone, and I’m not going to tell you how she swung that but you can probably guess. She died when I was eight. My mom was a runaway. She didn’t talk much about her parents but from what she did tell me, I think they can most charitably be described as abusive meth heads. She just called them trash that I shouldn’t worry about, and that’s all I know about them.”
She gets up and walks to the fridge. She takes her time grabbing a drink and taking a sip.
“My parents both worked at least two jobs every day I can remember, Christmas included, but they never got ahead.” She slowly walks back towards the table as she talks. “Every cent they could spare they sunk into me, making sure I had the opportunities they never did. Even then, I never owned a shirt that didn’t come from a thrift store until I was getting ready to do job interviews. I studied my ass off because I couldn’t stand to work any less hard than they did. I skipped fifth grade and ninth grade and then got into college, a good one, with a good scholarship that covered tuition. There was no money for lodging, or books, or food, but my parents insisted that I go anyway. So I borrowed the money. I almost stopped after I got my nursing license, but my parents insisted I get all the education I needed to do what I really wanted. Grad school wasn’t cheap, but student loans seemed like a good investment. I knew with what I was doing I could pay them back and still help my parents out, but I walked out of school with a couple of advanced degrees and a quarter million dollars of debt.”
Stolen novel; please report.
She pauses again and takes another deep breath and another long sip of her drink. She sits back down and Evan reaches across the table and takes her hand. She grasps his fingers like a lifeline.
“So, when I was looking for my first job a very unusual recruiter approached me about taking a position that paid way more than the going rate, of course I was interested. They don’t lead with the sex thing. They start with the pay, the benefits, the free housing, and the retirement plan. I saw my debt melting away. I saw the house I could buy for my parents, finally letting them get out of that shitty apartment they’d been stuck in for twenty years. I saw them finally dropping down to one job each. I saw Christmas where there was more than an hour between shifts and more than one present each.”
At some point, Andrea and Louise had silently entered the room and stood back against the wall separating the kitchen from the cabins, just listening.
“Then they talked about what I’d be supporting. Tom Butler’s vision for the future, the lives that the Butler Institute was already saving and the ones you were going to save. The end of famines and wars and pollution. I looked at some other jobs, but none of them felt like they were changing the world.”
She turns and sees our sisters there. Andrea softly steps forward and puts her hand on Valerie’s shoulder. I don’t know how much she heard but she seems to sense that Valerie’s dumping out her heart here. Valerie looks at her, nods, and continues.
“The recruiters reach out early and wait like a week between each contact, reeling you in slowly. Once you’re ready to go in for the final interview, they tell you about how if you decide to contribute your genes to the project, you’d get the ten million dollars. Ten million! That number didn’t even make sense to me. They might as well have offered me the moon, it was so impossibly huge. And you have to remember, I was barely twenty-one at this point. That money was my parents retiring early. Mom not coming home from scrubbing toilets to sit worrying over which bill they’d have to let slip until next month. Dad not breaking his back stocking shelves all night.”
Louise comes around and sits next to me.
“And then I met your father,” Valerie continues, “and he was so nice, and so old. I thought there was no way he was fathering anything anymore, that he had some frozen sperm stored and that was how they did it. In my head I had already spent the money, bought my parents the house. By the time they got to the part where I had to register as a sex worker, I probably would have taken a Rumpelstiltskin deal to get in. Actually, I literally did.”
A tear wells up in one corner of her eye.
“I never ended up sleeping with him. God, I’m still a virgin. Surprise!” she laughs and a bunch of tears shake out. Evan grips her hand more tightly, his knuckles lightening. “I would have, though. I would have without feeling bad about it for one minute. I’m glad I didn’t, because then I know I couldn’t have what I have with you now, Evan. But I would have.”
Louise runs and grabs some tissues for Valerie to blow her nose. She takes a moment and regains her composure.
“So, if the deal was that tempting to me, who grew up in America with food in my belly every day and clean water coming from a faucet in my home, you can imagine what it might mean to someone coming from a less privileged place. I don’t know what it’s like where Keeya and Lucie are from, but I’m not going to judge them for taking the deal, whether it was with your father or with your brother. I know they have their reasons, like we all did.”
She lets that sit for a moment. Evan just holds her hand, not saying a word.
“I don’t judge them either,” I tell Valerie, wishing it were as true as I want it to be now, having heard her story. “But we can all do a lot more good in the long run if we can manage to make sure neither of them gets pregnant on this trip or any time in the next few years.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Valerie says, nodding. “The kind of thing we’re doing on this trip goes way beyond taking care of one or two families.”
“Exactly. So, how do we make sure Chad backs off?”
She snorts and shakes her head.
“I was young when I was in college, but I wasn’t blind. I know how guys your age work. Once you boys go sexually active, you don’t stop. And condoms are pretty unreliable. Less fun too, from what I’ve been told. I think we’re going to do a lot better working this from the other end, getting the girls to wait. If they’re at all like me, it’s not just about the money. They’ve bought into the whole vision and they won’t want to wreck it. I have birth control pills, if we can get them on those and get them to practice safe sex for the first few weeks while they kick in, we should be OK.”
“You packed birth control pills?” Louise asks.
“You do know I have as much training as most gynecologists, right? Just specialized in childbirth. Of course I’m packing pills. The rest of the nursing training was just a nice side effect of learning the stuff I really cared about, which is everything about women’s reproductive systems. Plus, I’m on them. They keep me regular. I’m not about to take any long trips without a good supply of anything I need.”
“We should talk more about that,” Louise says.
“Anyway,” Evan says, clearly trying to forestall a conversation about menstruation and birth control with our sister, “that sounds like a way better plan than what I was thinking of.”
“What were you going to do, beat him up?” Valerie jokes.
Evan just looks down. I guess that was the extent of his planning so far. We all laugh.
“Nevermind that,” I say. “Let’s do it Valerie’s way. But I think it needs to come from you three. I think that if Chad sees any of the guys getting close with either of them, he’s just going to get jealous and lash out. Can you three ladies become their best friends and talk them into it?”
They all nod in agreement.
“They seem all right,” Louise says. “I wanted to get to know them better anyway.”
“Me too,” Valerie says, and Andrea pops a smiling icon into the air.
I feel a little hope. If anyone can get this situation sorted out it’s these three.