The Rock Rats

DOSSIER: JOYCE TAKAMINE

The name on her birth certificate read Yoshiko Takamine, but once she started at public school everyone called her Joyce. Her parents didn’t mind; they were fourth-generation Americans, with only a vague feeling of nostalgia for the family’s roots in Japan. The first time one of her schoolmates called her a “Jap,” Joyce thought she meant “Jewish American Princess. ”

Father moved them to the hills above Sausalito, but when the greenhouse floods wiped out most of the electrical power generation plants in the Bay area, they were plunged into darkness along with everyone else. Those were desperate times, with half the county thrown out of their jobs. No electricity, no work. Joyce’s class held their senior prom by candlelight, and there was talk of bringing in drilling companies to bore wells deep enough to tap the natural gas that lay kilometers below-ground.

All the kids had to find some kind of job to help support the family. Joyce did what her great-grandmother had done more than a century earlier: migrant stoop labor in the farms down in the rich valleys of California. The floods hadn’t reached that far inland, although prolonged drought was searing the orchards and vineyards mercilessly. It was hard, bitter work, picking fruits and vegetables beneath the hot sun while grim-faced men armed with shotguns kept on patrol against wandering bands of starving looters. They expected casual sex from the workers. Joyce quickly learned that it was better to please them than to go hungry.

When Joyce returned home that winter, she was shocked to see how much her parents had aged. An epidemic of dengue fever had swept the coast and even reached into the hills where they lived. Her mother sobbed softly at night; her father stared into the hot cloudless sky, racked with bouts of coughing that left him gasping for breath. When he looked at his daughter he seemed ashamed, as if all this devastation, all this ruination of the family’s plans, was his fault alone.

“I wanted you to become an engineer,” he told Joyce. “I wanted you to rise beyond my station in life.”

“I will, Dad,” she told him, with the careless assurance of youth. And when she turned her eyes to the sky, she thought about the wild frontier out along the Asteroid Belt.