Pills and Starships by Lydia Millet

of—something long ago or from another life.
    Then suddenly there was lava.
    It was dried up, it wasn’t hot—I didn’t see any orange-lit holes where Sam could murder LaTessa. It was just these big, gray tongues lapping at the jungle.
    We jumped onto one and walked up it for a while.
    But by this time I was getting nervous, because it was neat and all, I had to admit that, but it was taking forever.
    “It’s not that far now,” said Sam.
    We were walking up a lava slope and then we stopped to look around. You could see the canopy of trees beneath, the jungle we’d just come through, and stretched out in the distance beyond it the resort, all these white buildings. Beyond the blobs of white you could faintly see the ocean shining.
    “Pretty good, huh,” said Sam.
    I nodded. It was breathtaking.
    And we were all alone. No tour guide or anything.
    And no parents.
    The wind picked up our hair and cooled the skin on my arms so it rose into goosebumps.
    I felt a stab of—well, I would have to call it grief.
    Mixed with longing.
    Because it was beautiful. And lonely.
    There was all this air around us, and there was the big blue sky above. Beneath us there was a huge lake of emerald green, the specks of white, the shine of water on the horizon. And above it all just the two of us, in our thin, fragile bodies of skin and bone.
    We were alone, standing on the lava slope, feeling the wind, and waiting for time to pass.
    And I thought: So this is how it’s going to be .
    It almost flipped my stomach. But I didn’t want to pass the sadness along.
    “It was totally worth it,” I said, and smiled at Sam.
    “Oh,” he replied, after a second. “Oh—you mean the view? Yeah, cool. But this isn’t where we’re going.”

    When we finally did get to our destination it was through these tunnels in the lava—tunnels Sam said the corp didn’t know about, which were actually called lava tubes. They were spooky like a Halloween scene, all gray and black inside, with wrinkled walls and cavernous rounded ceilings. I half-expected bats to flap out at us like in an old horrorvid. But of course that didn’t happen, since bats all died out from a white fungus on their noses in the 21st c.
    And when we came out of the lava tube we were in a caldera, Sam said, which is like a dent on the side of a volcano where the ground once collapsed inward after an eruption. It was surrounded on all sides by lava sloping up, so that it was like a bowl-shaped valley, protected on all sides.
    It was full of fruit trees and greenery and life. We wandered through a grove going in, and I looked up and saw avocados and mangoes and bananas and I don’t know what else, all growing right in front of me and just hanging off branches to be picked—stuff I’d only seen pictures of on face, mostly, that we only get to eat in powdered form or sometimes, on special occasions, dried and sweetened.
    People lived there. Mostly Hawaiian looking but there were some whites and blacks and Asians and mixed people like us too, and they were all wearing beachy style clothes, ragged shorts, and bare chests, in the case of the guys, or halter tops or shirts for the girls and women, with patterned sarong-type skirts that wrapped around their waists and tied.
    All the colors were pretty muted though—no reds or yellows.
    “It’s camouflage in case of flyovers,” said Sam. “They’re rare. But they can still happen.”
    And the whole encampment was hidden that way, I saw. There were these pavilion tents with big cloths strung up overhead, whose green was exactly the green of the trees—even patterned with leaves and branches, or some of them had actual leaves and branches positioned on top. Some were mud brown and some were green and gray, in splotches. In the middle of these tent structures there was something Sam told me was called a Quonset hut—long and low and rounded on top like a half-cylinder, a house-sized tube laid on its side and sunk into the ground.
    It