Beggars and Choosers

Twenty

Annie was out in the deep woods when I finally found her, me, after looking for a couple hours. She didn’t even tell me that she was going. More and more in the last year she’s independent like that, her. I was mad.

“Annie Francy! I been looking, me, all over the woods for you!”

“Well, I been right here, me,” Annie said. She sat up. She’d been lying on her back in a little sort of hollow in the leaves, and when she sat up, her, I forgot that I was supposed to be mad. She’d been feeding, her. Her naked chocolate breasts bobbed, them, and her hair had a few leaves stuck in it, and I could see the edge of her ass where it pushed on the soft ground. My pipe swelled. I was next to her, me, in two jumps.

But she pushed me away. I might of forgot, me, that I was mad, but Annie don’t ever forget when she is. “Not now, Billy. I mean it, you!”

I stopped. It was hard. She tasted so sweet, her, it seemed like I couldn’t never get enough of her. Not in the year since we went down into Eden. Not in ten more years, not in hundred. My old pipe was stiff as a hunk of metal.

Annie got up, her, real leisurely, dusting the leaves off her thighs and ass. She knew, her, how I was watching. There was even a little smile in her eyes. But she was still mad.

“Billy — I still don’t want, me, for us to go to West Virginia. It ain’t going to help nobody.”

I eased my pants a little, me. “Lizzie wants to go. She is going, her. With or without us.”

Annie scowled. Her and Lizzie fight even more now, them, since Lizzie turned thirteen. Annie wants to keep Lizzie a little girl, is what I think, same as for a long time she wanted to keep me an old man, like old men used to be. Before. Annie didn’t never like change, her. That’s why she don’t want to go to West Virginia.

“Lizzie really said that, her? That she’d go without me?”

I nodded. Lizzie would, too. She would go, her, even if Vicki didn’t. There ain’t no stopping Lizzie these days. You’d of thought it’d be the old and the sick who’d be the most changed since Before, but the truth is, it’s the young. There ain’t no stopping none of them from doing nothing. Used to be a thirteen-year-old — or twelve, or ten — needed to be taken care of. Fed, nursed through sickness, protected from a rabid raccoon or a bad cut or spoiled food. No more. They don’t need us, them.

Just like we don’t need the donkeys.

Annie pulled on her dress, her, watching me watch, but without seeming to notice nothing. The dress was longer than the youngest women wear, even in the summer — Annie can’t change everything about herself, her, just ’cause there ain’t no more endless supplies of jacks or parkas or boots. Her dress was weaved out of some plant thing, not cotton, on the weaving ’bot, just two weeks ago. It didn’t have no color, like they don’t now. People like their clothes, them, to look natural, which don’t make sense because Annie’s dress had already started to get eaten by her breasts and hips and ass. There was tiny holes in interesting places. My pants was the same way. I ain’t going to wear no dress, me, like the younger men, even if it is easier for feeding. I ain’t no young man in my head, me, no matter what my body can do now.

Annie Francy’s gorgeous ass disappeared under the drop of her dress.

She tied on her sandals, left over from Before. They were nearly worn out, them. Shoes and boots was supposed to of been on the Council’s meeting tonight, until this other thing come up so fast and hard and there ain’t going to be no East Oleanta Council meeting tonight. Maybe never again, for all I knew, me.

I held Annie’s hand, me, while we walked back to town. I remember when she wouldn’t never go into the woods, her. But now not even Annie’s afraid in the woods.

In West Virginia — that’s something else.

Annie’s hand felt smooth and strong. I rubbed my thumb, me, in a little circle over her palm. Annie Francy. Annie. Francy. She was scowling, her, her lips pressed tight together.

“It ain’t right to let them vote in Council as young as twelve. It ain’t right.”

I knew better, me, than to get into that again. “If it wasn’t for the kids’ votes, we wouldn’t be going, us, on this useless trip. And it is useless, Billy. What does a thirteen-year-old know, her, about adult voting? She’s still a baby, her, even if she don’t think so!”

I didn’t say nothing. I ain’t no fool.

We walked in silence, us. There was pine needles underfoot, and in the sunny places, daisies and Indian paintbrush. The woods was just as pretty, them, and smelled just as sweet, as if the world hadn’t of changed for good over a year ago by things too small, them, to even see.

Vicki’s tried right along, her, to explain the Cell Cleaner to me. And the nanomachinery. Lizzie seems, her, to understand it, but it still ain’t clear to me.

It don’t have to be clear. All it has to do, it, is work. “Annie,” I said, just before we got to town, “you don’t know, you, that we can’t do nothing in West Virginia. Maybe somebody’s got a plan, them — one of the kids, even! — and by the time we get there—”

She scowled. “Nobody’s got no plan.”

“Well, maybe by the time we get there, us … you got to figure walking will take three, four weeks—”

She turned on me. “Nobody will make no plan! Who knows, them, how to break into that prison and get that girl out? Donkeys? They put her there! That Drew Arlen, her own man? He put her there, too! Her own kind? They’d of done it by now, them, if they knew how! We can’t do nothing, Billy. And meantime, we could use the time and brains, us, on things we do need! Better weaving, and more of it! We still only got that one weaving ’bot the kids put together, and it’s slow, it. And the clothes keep getting eaten. And boots! We still ain’t settled, us, about getting boots, and winter will come eventually!”

I gave it up, me. You can’t argue with Annie. She’s too right, her. Winter would come eventually and the weaving ’bot is only one ’bot for the whole town, which might be all right for summer clothes but winter is something different. And we ain’t settled the boots, us. Annie’s still feeding the world, even when there ain’t no cooking.

Sometimes it’s kind of scary, knowing there ain’t nobody to take care of us but us. Sometimes it ain’t.

Vicki met us, her, at the edge of town. Her dress was nearly as bad as Lizzie’s. I could see pretty near one whole breast, and — old fool that I am — damn if my pipe didn’t stir a little, it. But her face was too thin, and she looked unhappy, her, like she done for months now. She was the only one, her, in the whole town who looked so unhappy.

“It’s coming apart, Billy. This time, it really is.”

“What?” I said. I thought, me, she meant her dress. I really did. Old fool.

“The country. The classes, For good this time. The gap between donkeys and Livers was always held together with baling wire and chewing gum, and now the last semblance is going.”

I motioned Annie on, me, with a wave of my hand. She marched off, her, probably to find Lizzie. I sat down on a log and after a minute Vicki sat down too. She can’t help, her, being upset about the country. She’s a donkey. In East Oleanta that don’t matter, everybody left is used to her, but we still get news channels in the cafe. A few, anyway. Donkeys are having a hard time, them. It’s like when Livers found out we don’t need donkeys anymore, we got mad, us, that we’d ever needed them. Only that ain’t all of it. There’s been a lot of killing, and most donkeys are holed up, them, in their city enclaves. Some ain’t come out in damn near half a year.

I looked, me, for something to make Vicki feel better. “There ain’t no police no more. To punish people who break the law, them, by attacking other people. If we got security ’bots back—”

“Oh, Billy, it’s broader than that. There isn’t any law anymore. There’s just the town councils. And where people don’t feel like obeying those, there’s anarchy.”

“I ain’t seen, me, nobody get hurt here.”

“Not in East Oleanta, no. In East Oleanta the Huevos Verdes plan worked. People made the transition to small, local, cooper-ative government. To tell you the truth, I give Jack Sawicki, poor dead bastard, credit for that. He had everybody primed for self-responsibility. And other places have worked just as well. But they’ve killed off donkeys in Albany, they killed off each other in Carter’s Falls, they’ve had a rape fest and general lawless might-makes-right in Binghamton, and in other places they’ve had a witch hunt for “subhuman genemods” worse than any the GSEA ever mounted. And where is the GSEA? Where is the FBI? Where is the Urban Housing Authority and the FCC and the Department of Health? The entire network of government has just vanished, while Washington walls itself off, issuing decrees to which the rest of the country pays not the slightest attention!”

“We don’t need to, us.”

“Precisely. As an entity, the United States no longer exists. It fragmented into classes with no common aims at all. Karl Marx was right.”

“Who?” I didn’t know, me, nobody with that name. “Never mind.”

“Vicki—” I had to hunt, me, for my words. “Can’t you… care less, you? Ain’t this enough? For the first time, we’re free, us. Like Miranda said, her, on her HT broadcast, we’re really free.”

She looked at me. I ain’t never seen, me, before or since, such a bleak look. “Free to do what, Billy?”

“Well. . . live.”

“Look at this.” She held out a piece of metal, her. It was twisted and melted.

“So? Duragem. The dissembler got it. But the dissemblers are clocked out, them. And the kids are figuring out all new ways to build stuff without no metals that—”

“This wasn’t duragem. And it wasn’t attacked by a genemod organism. It was melted by a U-614.”

“What’s that?”

“A weapon. A very devastating, powerful, government weapon. That was only supposed to be released in case of foreign attack. I found this last week near Coganville. It had been used to blast an isolated summer cottage where, I suspect, there’d been some donkeys hiding months ago. Not even the bodies are there now. Not even the building is there.”

I looked at her, me. I didn’t know she’d walked, her, to Coganville last week.

“Don’t you get it, Billy? What Drew Arlen hinted at during Miranda Sharifi’s trial is true. He didn’t say it outright, and I’ll bet that’s because somebody decided it was prejudicial to national security. ‘National security’! For that you need a real nation!”

I still didn’t get it, me. Vicki looked at me, and she put her hand, her, on my arm.

“Billy, somebody’s arming Livers with secret government weapons. Somebody’s engineering civil war. Do you really think all this violence isn’t being deliberately nursed? It’s probably the same bastards who released the duragem dissembler in the first place, still out there, trying to get all the donkeys wiped out. And maybe all the Sleepless, too, that aren’t holed up in Sanctuary. Somebody wants this country to continue coming apart, and they’ve got enough underground government support to do it. Civil war, Billy. This last nine months of bioengineered pastoral idyll is only a hiatus. And we people — struggling to create weaving ’bots and rejoicing in our liberation from all the old biological imperatives — are not going to stand a chance. Not without a strong government participation on our side, and I don’t see that happening.”

“But, Vicki—”

“Oh, why am I talking to you? You don’t understand the first thing I’m talking about!”

She got up, her, and walked away.

She was half right. I didn’t understand, me, all of it, but I understood some. I thought of Annie not wanting, her, to leave East Oleanta, not even to get Miranda Sharifi free. We got it good here, Billy. There ain’t nothing to be afraid of here…

Vicki came back. “I’m sorry, Billy. I shouldn’t take it out on you. It’s just. . .”

“What?” I said, me, as gentle as I could.

“It’s just that I’m afraid. For Lizzie. For all of us.”

“I know.” I did know, me. That much I knew.

“Do you remember what you said, Billy, that day that Miranda injected us with the syringes, and she and Drew Arlen were arguing about who should control technology?”

I don’t remember that day, me, real clear. It was the most important day in my entire life, the day that gave me Annie and Lizzie and my body back, but I don’t remember it real clear. My chest hurt, and Lizzie was sick, and too much was happening. But I remember, me, Drew Aden’s hard face, may he rot in Annie’s hell. He testified against her at her trial, and sent his own woman to jail. And I remember the tears in Miranda’s eyes. Who should control technology…

“You said it only matters who can. Out of the mouths of the untutored, Billy. And you know what? We can’t. Not the syringed Livers or the syringed donkeys in their shielded enclaves. And without some pretty sophisticated technology of our own, any really determined technological attack by the government or by this demented purist underground could wipe us out. And will.”

I didn’t know, me, what to say. Part of me wanted to hole up with Annie and Lizzie — and Vicki, too — forever in East Oleanta. But I couldn’t, me. We had to get Miranda Sharifi free, us. I didn’t know how, me, but we had to. She set us free, her.

“Maybe,” I said, slow, “there ain’t no underground stirring up fighting. Maybe this is just a … a getting-used-to period, and after a while Livers and donkeys will go back, them, to helping each other live.”

Vicki laughed, her. It was an ugly sound. “May God bless the beasts and children,” she said, which didn’t make no sense. We weren’t neither.

“Oh, yes, we are,” Vicki said. “Both.”

The next week we left, us, to walk to Oak Mountain Maximum Security Federal Prison in West Virginia.

We weren’t the only ones, us. It wasn’t the East Oleanta Council’s original idea. They got it, them, off a man walking south in one of the slow steady lines of people moving along the old gravrail tracks. Feeding in the afternoons in pastures and fields. Leaving the grass torn up to lie in the sweet summer mud. Deciding together where the latrines should be. Making chains of daisies to wear around their necks, until the daisies get slowly fed on and disappear, the same as cloth does from the weaving ’bot. Vicki says, her, that eventually we’ll all just go naked all the time. I say, me, not while Annie Francy’s got breath in her beautiful body.

Our second day on the road I talked, me, to another old man come along the tracks clear down from someplace near Canada. His grandsons were with him, carrying portable terminals, the way the young ones all do, them. They were moving south before the weather gets cold again. The old man’s name was Dean, him. He told me that Before he had soft, rotted bones, him, so bad he couldn’t even of sat in a chair without nearly crying. The syringes came to his town in an airdrop, them, at night, the way a lot of towns got them. He said they never even heard the plane. I didn’t ask him, me, how he even knew it was a plane.

Instead, I asked him if he knew, him, what the government donkeys were doing about all the Livers on the road moving toward Oak Mountain.

Dean spat. “Who cares? I ain’t seen no donkeys, me, and I better not. They’re abominations.”

“They’re what?”

“Abominations. Unnatural. I been talking, me, to some Livers from New York City. They set me straight, them. The donkeys ain’t no part of the United States.”

I looked at him, me.

“It’s true. The United States is for Livers. That’s what President Washington and President Lincoln and all them other heroes meant, them, for it to be. A government for the people, by the people. And the real people, the natural people, is us.”

“But donkeys—”

“Ain’t natural. Ain’t people.”

“You can’t—”

“We got the Will and we got the Idea. We can clean up the country, us. Rid it of abominations.”

I said, “Miranda Sharifi’s not a Liver.”

“You mean you believe, you, that the syringes come from Huevos Verdes? Because of that lying broadcast? Them syringes come, them, from God!”

I looked at him.

“What’s the matter, you an abomination lover, you? You harboring one of them donkeys?”

I raised my head, me, real slow.

“ ’Cause a few donkey lovers tried, them, to join up with decent Livers. We know how to deal with those kind here, us!”

“Thanks for the information,” I said.

All the way back to Vicki, I breathed funny, me. I could feel my chest pound almost the way it used to, Before. But Vicki was all right, her. She sat on a half-busted chair by the gravrail, in the shade of some old empty building, brooding. The people from East Oleanta went around her doing what they always do, them, paying her no attention. They were used to her.

“Vicki,” I said, “you got to be careful, you. Don’t go away from us East Oleanta people. Keep your sun hat on, you. A big sun hat. There’s people going south, them, that want to kill donkeys!”

She looked up, her, cross. “Of course there are. What do you suppose I’ve been telling you for days and days?”

“But this ain’t some big-word argument about the government, it, this is you—”

“Oh, Billy.”

“Oh Billy what? Are you listening, you, to what I’m saying?”

“I’m listening. I’ll be careful.” She looked ready to cry, her. Or shout.

“Good. We care, us, what happens to you.”

“Just not to the government,” she said, and went back to staring, her, at nothing.

We walked the tracks, us, for days. At places in the mountains it was pretty narrow, but we weren’t none of us in any particular hurry. More and more Livers joined us, them. At night people sat around Y-cones or campfires, them, talking, or knitting. Annie liked teaching people to knit. She did it a lot, her. People wandered, them, into the woods to feed or to use the latrines we dug every night. There was ponds and streams for water. It didn’t matter if the water wasn’t too clean, it, or even if it was close to the latrines. The Cell Cleaner took care of any germs that might of got into us. We wouldn’t need no medunit, us, ever again.

The young ones carried their terminals, them. The older ones carried little tents, mostly made from plasticloth tarps. The tents were light, they didn’t tear, and they didn’t get dirty. They didn’t even get that mildewed smell, them, that I remember from tents when I was a boy, me. I remember, me, a lot more than I used to. I kind of miss the mildewy smell.

When it rained, we put up the tents, us, and waited it out. We weren’t in no hurry. Getting there would take as long as it took.

But Annie was right. Nobody had no plan, them. Miranda Sharifi, who gave us back our lives, sat there in Oak Mountain, and nobody had the foggiest idea, them, how we were supposed to get her out.

I never saw, me, other donkeys beside Vicki, who laid pretty low. A few times strangers gave her dirty looks, them, but me and Ben Radisson and Carl Jones from East Oleanta sort of stood up, us, near her, and there wasn’t no trouble. Some other people didn’t even seem to realize, them, that Vicki was a donkey. Since the syringes, a lot more women got bodies, them, almost good enough to be genemod. Almost. I told Vicki, me, to keep her sun hat pulled low enough to shade them violet genemod eyes.

Then we came, us, to some town with a HT in the cafe. Vicki insisted, her, on watching one whole afternoon of donkey news-grids. Lizzie sat with her. So did me and Ben and Carl, just to be safe.

That night, around our campfire, Vicki sat slumped over, her, more depressed than before.

There was her, me, Annie, Lizzie, and Brad. Brad was a kid, him, who joined us a week ago. He spent a lot of time, him, bent over a terminal close to Lizzie. Annie didn’t like it, her. I didn’t like it neither. Lizzie’s body was feeding on her dress faster than mine or Annie’s, the way the young bodies did, them. Her little breasts were half hanging out, all rosy in the soft firelight. I could see she didn’t care, her. I could see Brad did. There wasn’t a damn thing Annie or I could do.

Lizzie said, “The Carnegie-Mellon Enclave hasn’t lowered its shield once. Not once, in nine months. They have to be out of food completely, which means they have to have used the syringes.”

She didn’t even talk, her, like us anymore. She talks like her terminal.

Annie said sharply, “So? Donkeys can use syringes. Miranda said so, her. Just so long as they stay, them behind their shields, and leave us alone.”

Vicki said sharply, “You didn’t want them to leave you alone when they were providing everything you needed. You were the one, in fact, who had the most reverence for authority. ‘Give us this day our daily bread…’ ”

“Don’t blaspheme, you!”

“Now, Annie,” I said, “Vicki don’t mean nothing, her. She just wants—”

“She just wants you to stop apologizing for her, Billy,” Vicki said coldly. “I can apologize myself for my outworn caste.” She got up, her, and walked off into the darkness.

“Can’t you stop bothering her?” Lizzie said furiously to her mother. “After all she’s done for us!” She jumped up and followed Vicki.

Brad looked helplessly after her, him. He stood up, sat down, half got up again. I took pity, me. “Don’t do it, son. They’re better off, them, alone for a while.”

The boy looked at me gratefully, him, and went back to his everlasting terminal.

“Annie…” I said, as gently as I could.

“Something’s wrong with that woman, her. She’s jumpy as a cat.”

So was Annie. I didn’t say so, me. Their jumpiness wasn’t the same kind. Annie was thinking, her, about Lizzie, just like she’d always been. But Vicki was thinking, her, about a whole country. Just like donkeys always did.

And if they didn’t, them, who would?

I thought, me, about Livers not needing donkeys no more, and donkeys hiding behind their shields from Livers. I thought about all the fighting and killing we’d watched, us, that afternoon on the newsgrids. I thought about the man who’d called donkeys “abominations” and said the syringes was from God. The man who said he’d got the Will and the Idea.

I got up, me, to go look for Vicki and make sure she was all right.

Twenty-one

They don’t understand. None of them. Livers are still Livers, despite the staggering everything that’s happened, and there’s a limit to what you can expect.

I walked toward West Virginia wearing my new legal name and my rapidly decaying dress, full of health and doom. Where was Heuvos Verdes in all this? Miranda Sharifi had been tried under the most spectacular security known to man, and the press from thirty-four countries had waited breathlessly for the Lance-lotian high-tech rescue, the snatching from the legal fire, that had never materialized. Miranda herself had said not one word throughout the trial. Not one, not even on the stand, under oath. She had, of course, been found in contempt, and the crowds of Livers outside — syringed, all — had raised enough un-Liver-like howls to compensate for the silence of ten sacrificial lambs. But not for Huevos Verdes’s silence. No rescue. No defense, to speak of. Nada, unless you count syringes raining from the sky, pushing up from the earth, appearing like alchemy out of the very stones and fields and pavements of the country the Supers were utterly, silently, invisibly transforming.

Drew Arlen had testified. He’d described the illegal Huevos Verdes genemod experiments in East Oleanta, in Colorado, in Florida. The last two labs were apparently only backup locations to East Oleanta and Huevos Verdes, but Jesus Christ, there were only twenty-seven Supers. How in hell had they staffed four locations?

They weren’t like us.

That became clearer and clearer, as the trial progressed. It became clear, too, that Arlen was like us: stumbling around in the same swamp of good intentions, moral uncertainties, limited understanding, personal passions, and government restrictions about what he could or could not say on the stand.

“That information is classified,” became his monotonous response to Miranda Sharifi’s defense attorney, who was surely the most frustrated man on the planet. Arlen sat in his powerchair, his aging Liver face expressionless. “Where were you, Mr. Arlen, between August 28 and November 3?”

“That information is classified.”

“With whom did you discuss the alleged activities of Ms. Sharifi in Upstate New York?”

“That information is classified.”

“Please describe the events that led to your decision to notify the GSEA about Huevos Verdes.”

“That information is classified.”

Just like wartime.

But not my war. I had been declared a noncombatant, removed lock and stock and retina print from any but the most public databases, in perpetuity. Three times over the last year I had been picked up, transported to Albany, and knocked out, while bio-monitors gave up their secrets to scientists who, most probably, had by now syringed themselves with the same thing. The results of the biomonitoring were not shared with me. I was a government outcast.

So why did I even care that the United States, qua United States, was on the verge of nonexistence, the first nationalistic snuff job brought about by making government itself obsolete? Why should / care?

I don’t know. But I did. Call me a fool. Call me a romantic. Call me stubborn. Call me a deliberate, self-created anachronism.

Call me a patriot.

“Billy,” I said as we trudged along the endless gravrail track in the high rolling hills of Pennsylvania, “are you still an American?”

He gave me a Billy-look, which is to say intelligent without the remotest glimmer of vocabular understanding. “Me? Yes.”

“Will you be an American if you are killed by some fanatic last-ditch legalistic donkey defense at Oak Mountain?”

He took a minute to sort this out. “Yes.”

“Will you still be an American if you’re killed by some attack by a purist Liver-government underground that thinks you’ve sold out to the genetic enemy?”

“I ain’t going, me, to be killed by no other Livers.”

“But if you were, would you die an American?” He was losing patience. His old eyes with the young energy roamed over our fellow walkers, looking for Annie. “Yes.”

“Would you still be an American if there is no America, no central government left and nobody to administer it if there were, the Constitution forgotten, the donkeys wiped out by some fanatic revolutionary underground, and Miranda Sharifi rotting in a prison run exclusively by ’bots?”

“Vicki, you think too much, you,” Billy said. He turned his concern on me, that agape concern off which I’d been living, out of caste, for so long. It didn’t help. “Think about whether we’re going to stay alive, us — that makes sense. But you can’t take on the whole damn country, you.”

“The human mind, Charles Lamb once remarked, can fall in love with anything. Call me a patriot, Billy. Don’t you still believe in patriotism, Billy?”

“Besides, I once saw a genemod dog fall to its death off a balcony.” But Billy suddenly spotted Annie. He smiled at me and moved off to walk by his beloved, whose dress, despite her best efforts, was being consumed by her big-breasted body. She looked like a pastoral goddess, utterly unaware that the industrial revolution has begun and the looms are clacking like gunfire.

We reached Oak Mountain July 14, which only I found funny, or even notable. There were already ten thousand people there, by generous estimate. They ringed the flat land around the prison and spread up the sides of the surrounding mountains. Brush had been cleared for feeding for miles around, although the trees remained for shade. No one was on solid food; there was little shit. Tents in the wild colors of Before jacks dotted the grounds: turquoise, marigold, crimson, kelly green. At night, there were the usual campfires or Y-energy cones.

World War I lost more soldiers to disease, the result of being messed together in unsanitary conditions, than to guns. At the siege of Dunmar, they had eaten the rats, and then each other. During the Brazilian Action, the damage to the rain forest was greater than the damage to the combatants as high tech destroyed everything it touched. Never again, none of it.

Did history still apply? Human history?

Billy was right. I thought too much. Concentrate on staying alive.

“Put more dirt on your face,” Lizzie said, peering at me critically. This seemed superfluous; everyone was constantly covered in dirt, which had become acceptable. Dirt was clean. Dirt was mother’s milk. I suspected that Miranda and Company had altered our olfactory sense with her magic brew. People did not seem to smell bad to each other.

“Put more leaves in your hair,” Lizzie said, tipping her head critically to study me. Her pretty face was creased with worry. “There are some weird people here, Vicki. They don’t understand that donkeys can be human, too.”

Can be. On sufferance. If we join the Livers and give up the institutions by which we controlled the world.

Lizzie’s lip quivered. “If anything happened to you…”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I said, not believing it for half a minute. Too much already had. But I hugged her, this daughter slipping rapidly away from both Annie and me, who nonetheless fought over her just as if she weren’t already a different species. Lizzie was almost completely naked now, her “dress” reduced to a few courtesy rags. Unself-consciously naked. There were thirteen-year-olds in this camp who were just as unselfconsciously pregnant. No problem. Their bodies would take care of it. They anticipated no danger in childbirth, had no fears about supporting a baby, counted on plenty of people around all the time to help care for these casual offspring. It was no big deal. The pregnant children were serene.

“Just be careful,” Lizzie said.

“You be careful,” I retorted, but of course she only smiled at this.

That night the first holo appeared in the sky.

It appeared to be centered above the prison itself. Eighty feet up and at least fifty feet tall — it was hard to judge from the ground — it was clearly visible for miles. The laser lighting was intricate and brilliant. It was around ten o’clock, dark enough even in summer for the holo to dominate even a nearly full moon. It consisted of a red-and-blue double helix bathed in a holy white light, like some biological Caravaggio. Below it letters pulsed and flashed:

People screamed. In a year, they had apparently forgotten how ubiquitous political holes used to be.

Death to non-humans. Cold seeped along my spine, starting in the small of my back and traveling upwards.

“Who’s making that holo^ them?” a nearby man called indignantly. There was a frenzied babble of answers: the government, the food franchises nobody needed anymore, the military. The donkeys, the donkeys, the donkeys…

I didn’t hear anyone say, “The underground, them.” Did that mean there were no members of it present, not even informers? There must be informers; every war had them.

Informers would have to fit in, which meant they’d have to be syringed. Did that mean they, too, were non-humans? Who exactly qualified as “non-human”?

I saw Lizzie fighting through the crowd, felt her hands drawing me back into our tent. If she was saying anything, it was lost in the noise. I shrugged off her small insistent hands and stayed where I was.

The holo continued to flash. Then there was a general surge forward, toward the prison. It didn’t happen all at once; nobody was in danger of being trampled. But people began to move around tents and campfires toward the prison walls. By the garish pulsing light I could see similar movements down the sides of the distant wooded slopes. The Livers were moving to protect Miranda, their chosen icon.

“Anybody tries, them, to give death to her. . .”

“She’s as human, her, as anybody with fancy holos!”

“Just let them try to get at her…”

What on earth did they think they could actually do to help her?

Then the chanting started, first closest to the prison walls and quickly spreading outward, drowning out the more random babble of discussion and protest. By the time I reached the edge of the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, it was strong, rising from thousands of throats: “Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”

Torches appeared. Within a half hour every human being in miles stood packed by the prison walls, faces grim and yet exalted in that way people get when they’re intent on something outside themselves. Firelight turned some of their homely Liver faces rosy; others were striped red and blue from the flashing holo above us. Free Miranda, Free Miranda, Free Miranda…

There was no response at all from the silent gray walls.

They kept it up for an hour, which was the same length of time the holo flashed its message of death to those like Miranda.

And me.

And the syringed Livers?

When the holo finally disappeared, the chanting did, too, almost as if cut off from above. People blinked and looked at each other, a little da2ed. They might have been coming off a Drew Arlen lucid dreaming.

Slowly, without haste, ten thousand people moved away from the prison, back to their tents, spreading out over miles. It took a long time. People moved slowly, subdued, talking softly or not at all. As far as I knew, nobody got pushed or hurt. Once, I would not have believed this possible.

People sat up very late, huddled around common fires, talking.

Brad said, “That holo didn’t come from the prison.”

I’d never thought it did. But I wanted to hear his reasoning. “How do you know?”

He smiled patiently, the newly fledged techie addressing his illiterate elder. The little prick. I had forgotten more tech than he had yet learned in his belated post-syringe love affair with actual knowledge. He was sixteen. Still, I had no real right to contempt. I hadn’t noticed where the holo originated.

“Laser holos have feeds,” he said. “You know, those skinny little lines of radiation you can only see kind of sidewise, and only if you’re looking—”

“Peripheral vision. Yes, I know, Brad. Where were they coming from, if not the prison?”

“Lizzie and me only studied about them last week.” He put a proprietary hand on Lizzie’s knee. Annie scowled.

“Where were the feeds coming from, Brad?”

“At first I hardly noticed them at all. Then I remembered the—”

“From where, damn it!”

Startled, he pointed. Horizontally, to the top of a not-very-near mountain I couldn’t name. I stared at the mountain, silhouetted in moonlight.

“I don’t see why you’re yelling at me, you,” Brad said, somewhere between a sulk and a sneer. I ignored him. I hoped Lizzie was losing interest in him. He wasn’t nearly as bright as she was.

0 same new world.

1 stared at the dark nameless mountain. That’s where they were, then. The Will-and-Idea underground, which Drew Arlen had hinted at, and of which Billy had met a member weeks ago. But that man had been syringed. Did that mean you could be syringed, with all its changes to basic biological machinery, and still be considered human by the underground? Or was the man being used as an informer, who would be dealt with for his turncoat treason once the war was over? Such things were not unknown in history.

This movement had loosed the duragem dissembler. They were killing donkeys. They had successfully hidden Drew Arlen for two months from Huevos Verdes. They armed their soldiers with United States military weapons.

It was dawn before I slept.

The next night, the holo was back, but changed.

The double helix, red and blue in white light, was still there. But this time the flashing letters read:

Don’t tread on me? What pseudo-revolutionary group could possibly have the demented idea that a bunch of pastoral dirt-feeding chanters were treading on them? Or even interested in them?

I had a sudden insight. It wasn’t only that Livers, due to using the syringes, may or may not have become non-human. That alone hadn’t provoked the underground’s hatred. The Liver’s non-interest had. Syringed people not only didn’t pay the established government much attention, most of them were equally uninterested in its would-be replacements. They didn’t need any replace-ment, or thought they didn’t. And for some people, being hated is preferable to being irrelevant. Any action that provokes response, no matter how irrational, is better than being irrelevant. Even if the response is never enough.

Another thing: These holos were not trying to convert anyone. There were no broadcasts explaining why people should join the underground. There were no simply worded leaflets. There were no cell members furtively reaching out to the susceptible, persuading in hushed voices. The people projecting these holos were not interested in recruitment. They were interested in self-righteous violence.

The Livers gazing upward at the sky responded to this second holo exactly as they had the night before. Orderly, without confusion, without any signal given, they began to move toward the prison. There was no haste. Mothers took the time to wrap up babies against the night chill, to finish breast-feeding, to arrange who would stay with sleeping toddlers. Fires were banked. Knitters did whatever they do at the end of a row of stitches. But within ten minutes every adult in the camp had started to move, ten thousand strong, toward the walls. They moved courteously around the tents and temporary hearths of those camped hard by the prison, careful not to step on anything. As soon as they were shoulder-to-shoulder, they started to chant.

“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”

The holo pulsed for fifteen minutes, then changed:

The white light changed to an American flag, stars and bars su-perimposed over the double helix.

“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…” Fifteen minutes later the holo words changed again:

“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…” The American flag became a rattlesnake, poised to strike. It looked so real that a few children started to cry.

Another fifteen minutes and the snake was replaced by the original double helix and holy white light. This time we got three lines:

The double helix rotated slowly. I wondered how many of the chanters even knew what it was.

“Free Miranda…”

At the end of an hour, it was over. It took another hour for the huge crowd to quietly disperse, which it started to do the moment the holo vanished.

Back in my tent, I borrowed Lizzie’s terminal, with its library crystal. “Don’t tread on me” was first used on flags in the Colonial South, as relations with Great Britain deteriorated, and later adopted as Revolutionary slogan in much of New England. “Liberty or Death” appeared on flags in Virginia, following Patrick Henry’s exhortation to turn on the British masters. “Hope” was the legend on the flag of the Colonial armed schooner Lee, the first flag to also feature thirteen stars. I couldn’t find a record anywhere of “Will and Idea.”

These maniacs considered themselves colonists in their own country, fighting to overthrow a donkey establishment that was largely in passive hiding and, maybe, a syringed Liver population that was essentially defenseless. Unless you count chanting as a weapon.

The government existed, in part, to defend its citizens against this sort of demented civil insurrection. Did we have a government left? Did we have a country left?

The only official representative of that country in sight, Oak Mountain Maximum Security Federal Prison, sat silent and dark. Maybe it was even empty.

I walked back toward the prison walls. This time I went right up to them, borrowing a torch from some obliging camper who asked mildly, without insistence, that I return it when I was done. I walked along the prison walls, inspecting.

A few graffiti, not very many. Few Livers could write. What graffiti there was hadn’t been written on the walls themselves, which of course shimmered with a faint Y-energy shield. Instead river boulders had been rolled laboriously against the shield, the earth scraped raw from their passage. On the rocks was painted FREEE MARANDA. WE R PEEPLUL TO. TAK DOWN THEEZ WALLZ.

A pathetic scratching in one rock, a half-inch deep, where some group had begun, symbolically at least, to tak down theez wallz.

The prison door, facing the river, blank and impenetrable. Thirty feet up the security screens, which may or may not have been recording, were dark blank patches.

Above the walls the shimmer, hard to see unless you used your peripheral vision, extended outward a few feet, like eaves. I couldn’t imagine why.

Towers loomed at each of the four corners. They had no windows, or else windows holoed to look like they didn’t exist.

I walked back to my tent, returning the torch on the way. Annie, Billy, Lizzie, and Brad had already disappeared into their tents, two by two. Clouds were rolling in from the west. I sat outside for a long time, wrapped in a plasticloth tarp, cold even though it was at least seventy degrees out. The prison, too, sat massive and silent, not even flying a holographic flag. Dead.

“Lizzie, I need you to do something for me. Something tremendously important.”

She looked up at me. I’d found her deep in the woods, after hours of patiently asking total strangers if they’d seen a thin black girl with pink ribbons tying up her two braids. Lizzie sat on a fallen log, which the backs of her thighs were probably eating. She’d been crying. Brad, of course. I’d kill him. No, I wouldn’t. There was no other way for her to learn. Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David.

The timing was good for me. I could make use of these tears.

I said, “There’s a message I have to get to Charleston. I can’t go myself because the GSEA is monitoring me remotely; I told you that. They’d know. And there’s nobody else I can trust. Annie wouldn’t do it, and Billy won’t leave Annie…”

She went on looking at me, not changing expression, her eyes swollen and her nose red.

“It’s about Miranda Sharifi,” I said. “Lizzie, it’s unbelievably important. I need you to walk to Charleston, and I’ll time-encode in your terminal what you need to do after you arrive. In fact, I’ve already done that. I know this sounds mysterious, but it’s essential.” I put everything I had — or once had — into that last sentence. The donkey authority. The adult tone of command. The confidence that this girl loved me.

Lizzie went on gazing at me, expressionless.

I handed her the terminal. “You walk along the gravrail track until it branches at Ash Falls. Then you—”

“There’s no message about Miranda Sharifi,” Lizzie said.

“I just told you there was.” Donkey authority. Adult command.

“No. There’s nothing anybody can do about Miranda. You just want me out of here because you’re afraid that underground will attack tonight.”

“No. It’s not that. Why would you think—” you, who owe me so much, my tone said ” — that I don’t have resources you don’t understand? If I say there is a crucial message about Miranda, there is a crucial message about Miranda.”

Lizzie stared at me emptily, hopelessly.

“Lizzie—”

“He left me. Brad. For Maura Casey!”

It’s wrong to laugh at puppy love. For one thing, it’s not that different from what most adults do. I sat on the log next to her.

“He says … he says, him… that I’m too smart for my own good.”

“Livers always say that,” I said gently. “Brad just hasn’t caught on yet.”

“But I am smarter than he is, me.” She sounded like the child she still was. “Lots smarter. He’s so stupid about so many things!”

I didn’t say, Then why do you want him; I recognized a hopeless arena for logic when I saw one. Instead I said, “Most people are going to look stupid to you, Lizzie. Starting with your mother. That’s just the way you are, and the way the world is going to be now. For you.”

She blew her nose on a leaf. “I hate it, me! I want people to understand me!”

“Well. Better get used to it.”

“He says, him, I try to control him! I don’t, me!”

Who should control the technology? Paul’s voice said to me, lying in bed, pleased to be instructing the person he had just fucked.

Pleased to be on top. Lizzie probably did try to control Brad. Whoever can, Billy said.

“Lizzie … in Charleston…”

She jumped up. “I said I’m not going, me, and I’m not! I hope there is an attack tonight! I hope I die in it!” She ran off, crashing through the woods, crying.

I took after Lizzie at a dead run. At ten yards, I started gaining. She was fast, but I was more muscled, with longer legs. She was within a yard of my grasp. It was six hours before dark. I could tie her up and physically carry her as far from Oak Mountain, from danger, as I could get in six hours. If I had to, I’d knock her out to let me carry her.

My fingers brushed her back. She spurted forward and leaped over a pile of brush. I leaped, too, and my ankle twisted under me as I fell.

Pain lanced through my leg. I cried out. Lizzie didn’t even falter. Maybe she thought I was faking. I tried to call out to her, but a sudden wave of nausea — biological shock — took me. I turned my head just in time to vomit. Lizzie kept running, and disappeared among the trees. I heard her even after I couldn’t see her anymore. Then I couldn’t hear her either.

Slowly I sat up. My ankle throbbed, already swollen. I couldn’t tell if it was sprained or even fractured. If it was, Miranda’s nan-otech would fix it. But not instantly.

I felt cold, then sweaty. Don’t pass out, I told myself sternly. Not now, not here. Lizzie…

Even if I could find her again, I couldn’t carry her anywhere.

When the biologic shock passed, I limped back to camp. Every step was painful, and not just to my ankle. When I reached the outskirts of the camp, some Livers helped me get to my tent. By the time I got there, the pain was already muted. It was also dark. Lizzie wasn’t there, and neither was Annie nor Billy. Lizzie’s terminal and library crystal were gone from her tent.

I sat huddled in front of my tent, watching the sky. Tonight was cloudy, without stars or moon. The air smelled of rain. I shivered, and hoped I was wrong. Completely, spectacularly, om-nisciently wrong. About the underground nobody admitted actually existed, about their targets, about everything.

After all, what did I know?

# # *

“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”

The red-and-blue helix pulsed, overlaid by the red, white, and blue flag. WILL AND IDEA, no other legend. Whose will? What idea? Oak Mountain Prison sat dark and still under the rhythmical light.

“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”

I still sat in front of my tent, nursing my ankle. Annie had wrapped it tightly in a strip of woven cloth, which my skin was probably consuming. I sat perhaps a quarter mile from the ten thousand chanters. Their chant carried to me clearly.

The sky’was dark, overcast. The summer air smelled of rain, of pine, of wildflowers. I realized for the first time that these scents were as strong as ever, whereas the stink of human bodies was muted in my altered olfactory nerves. Miranda Company knew their business.

The torches held by the chanters mixed with Y-energy cones: wavering primitive light and steady high tech. And above it, the red-and-blue glare. Broad stripes and bright stars.

The first plane came from Brad’s nameless mountain, flying without lights, a metallic glint visible only if you were looking for it. They didn’t need planes; they could have used long-distance artillery. Somebody wanted to record the action close up. I staggered to my feet, already crying. The plane came in over the top of the prison and swept low, buzzing the chanters. People screamed. It dropped a single impact bomb, which went off in the middle of the crowd. Barely enough to cause fifty deaths, even in that mass of bodies. They were playing.

People started to shove and push, screaming. Those fortunates on the edge of the crowd ran free, toward the distant wooded slopes. I could see figures behind them, distant but separate, stumble over each other. Miranda had left me with 20/20 vision.

A second plane, that I hadn’t seen in advance, flew over me from the opposite direction and disappeared over the prison walls. I didn’t hear the second bomb, which must have fallen on the other side of the walls. The explosion was drowned out by the screaming.

People started to trample each other.

Billy. Annie. Lizzie…

The first plane had wheeled and was returning from behind me. This time, I knew, it wouldn’t be to play. Too many people from the edges of the crowd were scrambling to safety. Would the bomb take out Oak Mountain itself? Of course. That’s where the chief abomination was. I didn’t know what kinds of shields the prison had, but if the attack was nuclear…

The holo above the prison changed for the last time:

I thought I saw Lizzie. Insane — it wasn’t possible to distinguish individuals at this distance. My mind merely wanted me to die in as much dramatic anguish as possible. And so I thought I saw Lizzie run forward, and be trampled by people panicked to escape what had been inevitable since the creation of the first genemod.

I squeezed my eyes shut to die. And then opened them again.

In time to see the nanosecond in which it happened.

The shield around Oak Mountain glowed brighter than the holo in the sky. One moment the prison was wrapped in silvery light. The next the same silvery light shot out from the prison walls over the crowd below, in grotesquely elongated eaves of pure energy. The bomb, or whatever it was, hit the top of the energy shield and detonated, or ricocheted, or was thrown back. The plane exploded in a light that blinded me, but wasn’t quite nuclear. An instant later a second explosion: the other plane. Then dead silence.

People had stopped running, most of them. They looked up at the opaque silver roof protecting them, the roof of manmade high-tech radiation.

I cried out and staggered forward. Immediately my ankle gave way and I fell. I raised myself chest-high off the ground and stared up. The “roof extended all the way to the lowest slopes of the mountain. I couldn’t see through it. But I heard the subsequent explosions, artillery or radiation or something that must have been directed from the top of the distant mountain.

People were screaming again. But the shoving and trampling had stopped. Huddled under this high-energy umbrella was the safest place to be.

I thought: Huevos Verdes protects their own.

I lay back down on the ground, my cheek pressed against the hard-packed dirt. It felt as if I had no bones; I literally couldn’t move. Small children could have trampled on me. Huevos Verdes had protected their own, incidentally saving the lives of nine or ten thousand Livers while wiping out some other unknown number of Livers. That was who made the laws now: Huevos Verdes. Twenty-seven Sleepless plus their eventual offspring, who did not consider themselves part of my country. Or any other. Not donkeys, not Livers, not the Constitution, which even to donkeys had always been silent in the background but fundamental, like bedrock. No longer.

Who was the statesman whose last, dying words concerned the fate of the United States? Adams? Webster? I’d always thought it was a stupid story. Shouldn’t his last words have concerned his wife or his will or the height of his pillow — something concrete and personal? How grandiose to think oneself large enough to match the fate of a whole country — and at such a moment! Pretentious, inflated. Also silly — the man wasn’t going to pass any more laws or influence any more policy, he was dying. Silly.

Now I understood. And it was still silly. But I understood.

I think I have never felt such desolation.

There was a final explosion that left my ear, the one not pressed to the ground, completely deaf. I struggled to turn my head and look up. The shield had disappeared, and so had the holo and the entire top of the distant mountain. I had never even learned its name.

More screaming. Now, when it was all over. The Livers probably didn’t realize that, might never even realize what had been lost. Small bands of roaming, self-sufficient tribes, not needing that quaint entity, “the United States,” any more than Huevos Verdes did. Livers.

The first fleeing people ran past me, toward the dark hills. I stumbled to my feet, or rather foot. If I didn’t put my full weight on the self-healing ankle, I could hop forward. After a few yards I actually found a dropped torch. I extinguished it and leaned on it like a cane. It wasn’t quite long enough, but it would do.

It was slow work being the only person moving toward the prison. People had stopped shoving, and some kind or guilty souls started to carry away the trampled dead. But a crowd that size takes a long time to disperse. The noise from the crying and the shouting was overwhelming, especially after I started pressing my way through the narrow capillaries between people. My ankle throbbed.

It was at least an hour before I reached the prison itself.

I hobbled the length of the wall and turned the corner toward the river. It was somehow astonishing to me that the water continued to flow and murmur, the rocks to sit in their usual dumb fashion. For a second I saw not this river but another, with a dead snowshoe rabbit beside it — which river did I hear murmur in the darkness? There were no people left on this side of the walls, but I thought I saw dead bodies on the ground. They were actually shadows. Even after I realized this, they went on looking like corpses. They went on looking like Lizzie, all of them, at different moments. The pain had spread from my ankle to my whole leg. I wasn’t quite sane.

When I reached the prison doors, I looked up at the blank security screens, angled out from the wall much as the silvery shield has been. I said to them, “I want to come in.”

Nothing happened.

I said, louder — and even I heard the edge of hysteria in my voice — “I’m coming in now. I am. Now. Coming in.”

The river murmured. The screens brightened slightly — or maybe not. After a moment the door swung open.

Just like Eden.

I limped into a small antechamber. The door swung closed behind me. A door opened on the far wall.

I have been in prisons before, as part of my long-ago intelligence training. I knew how they worked. First the computer-run automated doors and biodetectors, all of which passed me through. Then the second set of doors, which are not Y-energy but carbon-alloy barred doors, run only manually because there are always people who can crack any electronic system, including retina prints. It’s been done. The second set of doors are controlled by human beings behind Y-energy screens, and if there are no human beings, nobody gets in. Or out. Not without explosives as large as the ones the Will and Idea people had already tried.

I stood in front of the first barred door and peered through the cloudy window to the guard station, a window constructed of plasticlear and not Y-energy, because Y-energy, too, is vulnerable to enough sophisticated electronics. There was a figure there.

Somehow Huevos Verdes must have brought in their own people — when? How? And what had they done with the donkey prison officials?

The barred door opened.

Then the next one.

And the next.

There was no one in the prison yard. Recreation and dining halls on the right, administrative and gym on the left. I hobbled toward the cellblocks, at the far end. A solitary small building sat behind them. Solitary. The door opened when I pushed it.

I half expected, when I reached her cell, to find it empty, a rock rolled away from the tomb door. Playing with cultural icons…

But the SuperSleepless don’t play. She was there, sitting on a sleeping bunk she would never use, in a space ten by five, with a lidless toilet and a single chair. Stacked on the chair were books, actual bound hard copy printouts. They looked old. There was no terminal. She looked up at me, not smiling.

What do you say?

“Miranda? Sharifi?”

She nodded, just once, her slightly too large head. She wore prison jacks, dull gray. There was no red ribbon in her dark hair.

“They… your… the doors are open.”

She nodded again. “I know.”

“Are you … do you want to come out?” Even to myself I sounded inane. There were no precedents.

“In a minute. Sit down, Diana.”

“Vicki,” I said. More inanity. “I go by Vicki now.”

“Yes.” She still didn’t smile. She spoke in the slightly hesitant manner I remembered, as if speech were not her natural manner of communication. Or maybe as if she were choosing her words carefully, not from too few but from an unimaginable too many. I moved the books off the chair and sat.

She said the last thing I could have anticipated. “You’re troubled.”

“I’m…”

“Aren’t you troubled?”

“I’m stunned.” She nodded again, apparently unsurprised. I said, “Aren’t you? But no, of course not. You expected this to happen.”

“Expected which to happen?” she said in that slow speech, and of course she was right. Too much had happened. I could be referring to any of it: the biological changes since Before, the attack by the Will and Idea underground, the rescue.

But what I said was, “The disintegration of my country.” I heard my own faint emphasis on “my” and was instantly ashamed: my country, not yours. This woman had saved my life, all our lives.

But not completely ashamed.

Miranda said, “Temporarily.”

“Temporarily? Don’t you know what you’ve done?”

She went on gazing at me, without answering. I suddenly wondered what it would be like to encounter that gaze day after day, knowing she could figure out anything about you, while you could never understand the first thing she was thinking. Possibly not even if she told you.

All at once, I understood Drew Arlen, and why he had done what he had.

Miranda said — the perfect proof, although of course I didn’t think of that until much later — “Huevos Verdes didn’t extend that shield.”

I gaped at her.

“You thought they did. But we at Huevos Verdes agreed not to defend you against your own kind. We agreed it would be better to let you find your own way. If we do everything, you will just. . . resent. . .” It was the only time I ever felt she was genuinely at a loss for words.

“Then who extended the shield?”

“The Oak Mountain federal authorities. On direct order of the President, who’s down but not out.” She almost smiled, sadly. “The donkeys protected their own American citizens. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it, Vicki?”

“What I want to hear? But is it true?”

“It’s true.”

I stared at her. Then I stood up and hobbled out of the cell. I didn’t even say good-bye. I didn’t know I was going. I limped so fast across the prison yard that I almost fell. I didn’t have to cross the whole yard; they were there, conferring in a huddle. They stopped when they saw me, stared stonily, waited. Two techies in blue uniforms, and a man and a woman in suits. Tall, genemod handsome. With heads of ordinary size. Donkeys.

Federal officials of the United States, protecting citizens under the high-tech shield of the laws and on the subterranean bedrock of the Constitution of the United States. “The right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“The President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall so Commission all the Officers of the United States.”

“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government, and shall protect each of them… against domestic Violence.” Each of them. The donkeys glared at me, clearly unhappy that I was there.

I turned and limped back to Miranda’s cell. She didn’t seem surprised.

“Why did they let me into the prison? And where were they when I came in?”

“I asked them to let you in, and to let you bring your questions directly to me.”

She’d asked them. I said, “And why didn’t Huevos Verdes…” But she had already answered that. We agreed it would be better to let you find your own way.

I said quietly, “Like gods. Set above us.”

She said, “If you want to think of it that way.”

I went on gazing at her. Two eyes, two arms, a mouth, two legs, a body. But not human.

I said — made myself say — “Thank you.”

And she smiled. Her whole face changed, opened up, became planes of light. She looked like anyone else.

“Good luck to you, Vicki.”

I heard, To all of you. Miranda Sharifi would never need luck. When you controlled that much tech, including the tech of your own mind, luck became irrelevant. What happened was what you wanted to happen.

Or maybe not. She had loved Drew Aden.

“Thank you,” I said again, formally, inanely. I left the cell.

They would go back to Sanctuary, I suddenly knew. When they agreed the time was right they would, by some unimaginable technology that would look to us godlike, snatch Miranda out of Oak Mountain and return to their orbital in the sky. They should never have left Sanctuary. Whatever they wanted to do for us, down here, for whatever reasons, they could probably do just as well from Sanctuary. Where they would be safe. Where they belonged.

Not on Earth.

I realized, then, that in my preoccupation with the United States I had failed to ask Miranda about the rest of the world. But it didn’t matter. The answer was already clear. The SuperSleepless would supply the rest of the world with syringes, as soon as they had manufactured enough of them. Miranda would not make distinctions among nationalities — not in the face of the much greater distinction between all of us and the twenty-seven of them. And then the rest of the world, like the United States, would undergo the cataclysmic political changes that came from changing the very nature of the species. They would have no choice.

Nobody spoke to me as I made my way back through the barred doors and the automated doors and the biodetectors. That was all right with me; they didn’t have to speak. All they had to do was be there, officially there, upholding the laws, keeping law itself in existence. Even when the technology couldn’t be controlled, or even understood by most of us. The effort to include all of us humans in the law was what counted. The effort to understand the law, not just follow it. That might save us.

Maybe.

The doors all locked audibly behind me.

Outside it had started to rain. I hobbled through the drizzle, through the dark, toward the Y-lights of the camp. They shone brightly, but my ankle still ached and twice I almost stumbled. Nearly everyone was under cover. From one tent I heard crying, wailing for someone dead in the panic after the air attack. It started to rain harder. The earths beneath my feet, one whole and one temporarily smashed, started to turn to nourishing mud.

I had almost reached my tent when I saw them rushing toward me. Billy in the lead, waving a torch in the rain, his young-old face creased with relief. Annie, whom I didn’t like and probably never would. And Lizzie, leaping like a young gazelle, quickly overtaking and passing the other two, shouting and crying my name, so glad that I was here, that I was alive on Earth. My people.

It was enough.

Twenty-two

Oh, Miranda… I’m sorry. I never intended… But I would try to stop you again.

And I don’t expect you to understand.