The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow by Cory Doctorow Read Free Book Online

I expected that Dad was alive, immortal, coming for me. That we’d have our immortality together. It was lonely, being the only one.
    “Redwoods,” I finally said. It came out in a croak.
    “Big mutant ones,” she said, eating her burrito, apparently oblivious to me. “Didn’t last, of course. What does? They all got some kind of blight that petrified them where they stood. We think it was some kind of exotic mesoite that traded their carbon for calcium, harvesting the good stuff for who-knows-what. It went top down, so it took a while for us to notice. For a while, they all stayed upright, white and chalky. Then they crumbled until they were nothing but powder, which blew away.”
    “What doesn’t?” I said. I was still thinking of Dad. I knew I’d get over it, though. Brain plasticity.
    “Yeah,” she said. “Mom and Dad hung in there with the rest of the Treehuggers for a while, but I wasn’t going to stay there forever, I knew that much. I went west on my sixteenth, got as far as the Oregon coast. Kept in touch with the parents for a while, but they moved to Bangalore when I was about twenty-five and so that was it for them and me. I dated this guy who found me a job maintaining these weird brain-scanners at a research facility and I did that for a while too, which would have given my parents seizures if they knew. I probably stayed in that job for longer than I would have, just for that reason.
    “But the people who ran the research station got bored or went broke—they didn’t ever tell us peons—and one day they didn’t show up for work. We all kept coming in and cleaning the floors and keeping the machines running and signing for deliveries for a week, but then we figured that they weren’t coming back. So I hit the road again (the boyfriend didn’t last as long as the job) and now I’m here. And so are you!”
    She ate another burrito. She could really put them away.
    She told me more minutiae from the road, places she’d been and people she’d met, talking for a long, long time. So long that I started to shiver as the sun dipped low. The pack whined around me, climbing up on my lap and my shoulders and head. Lacey was oblivious to the passage of time, her cowl keeping her warm. I had one like it that I’d bought from a traveler a couple years before, but I didn’t wear it much—it was too big for me and it tripped me up a little.
    “We got to get going,” I said. “I’m freezing.”
    She stopped talking and looked around. There was something hunted in her look. She stood up and slapped at her cowl to knock the crumbs off it and then she looked around again.
    “So,” she said. “So. Nice to see you again, Jimmy. Really nice! You can send me e-mail or something sometime if you want to. Good luck with everything.”
    I stopped folding up the tarp and putting away the leftovers. “Why? Where are you going?”
    She looked around for a third time, then pointed south. “That direction looks promising. Do you know what’s there?”
    I followed her finger through the woods. “About half a day’s walk will get you down to Jordan Lake. Nice places around there. Holiday cottages. Keep on going and you’ll hit Myrtle Beach, eventually. Might take you a week or two. Where are you headed, anyway?”
    “It was really great to see you.” She grabbed me in another one of those hugs, so fierce that I couldn’t breathe for a moment.
    “Where are you going?” I said again, once she’d released me.
    She felt in her cowl and found a hanky, blew her face on it and wiped away all the stuff she’d started leaking all of a sudden.
    “I just go,” she said, finally. “That’s all I’ve done for the past two years, Jimmy. I just go, and keep going. All the places are different, but they’re all the same, too. Nothing’s like what I’m looking for.”
    “What are you looking for?”
    “I don’t know, but I’ll know it when I see it. I just hope that I find it soon.”
    “If you go off