Beggars and Choosers

One

For some of us, of course, nothing would be enough. That sentence can be taken two ways, can’t it? But I don’t mean that having nothing would ever be satisfactory to us. It isn’t even satisfactory to Livers, no matter what pathetic claims they lay to an “aristo life of leisure.” Yes. Right. There isn’t a single one of us that doesn’t know better. We donkeys could always recognize seething dissatisfaction. We saw it daily in the mirror.

My IQ wasn’t boosted as high as Paul’s.

My parents couldn’t afford all the genemods Aaron got.

My company hasn’t made it as big as Karen’s.

My skin isn’t as small-pored as Gina’s.

My constituency is more demanding than Luke’s. Do the bloodsucking voters think I’m made of money?

My dog is less cutting-edge genemod than Stephanie’s dog.

It was, in fact, Stephanie’s dog that made me decide to change my life. I know how that sounds. There’s nothing about the start of my service with the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency that doesn’t sound ridiculous. Why not start with Stephanie’s dog? It brings a certain satiric panache to the story. I could dine out on it for months.

If, of course, anyone were ever going to dine out again.

Panache is such a perishable quality.

Stephanie brought her dog to my apartment in the Bayview Security Enclave on a Sunday morning in July. The day before, I’d bought pots of new flowers from BioForms in Oakland and they cascaded over the terrace railing, a riot of blues much more varied than the colors of San Francisco Bay , six stories below.

Cobalt, robin’s egg, aquamarine, azure, cyan, turquoise, cerulean. I lay on my terrace chaise, eating anise cookies and studying my flowers. The gene geniuses had shaped each blossom into a soft fluttery tube with a domed end. The blossoms were quite long. Essentially, my terrace frothed with flaccid, blue, vegetable pe-nises. David had moved out a week ago.

“Diana,” Stephanie said, through the Y-energy shield spanning the space between my open French doors. “Knock knock.”

“How’d you get into the apartment?” I said, mildly annoyed. I hadn’t given Stephanie my security code. I didn’t like her enough.

“Your code’s broken. It’s on the police net. Thought you’d like to know.” Stephanie was a cop. Not with the district police, which was rough and dirty work down among the Livers. Not our Stephanie. She owned a company that furnished patrol ’bots for enclave security. She designed the ’bots herself. Her firm, which was spectacularly successful, held contracts with a sizable number of San Francisco enclaves, although not with mine. Telling me my code was on the ’bot net was her ungraceful way of needling me because my enclave used a different police force.

I lounged back on my chaise and reached for my drink. The closest blue flowers yearned toward my hand.

“You’re giving them an erection,” Stephanie said, walking through the French doors. “Oh, anise cookies! Mind if I give one to Katous?”

The dog followed her from the cool dimness of my apartment and stood blinking and sniffing in the bright sunshine. It was clearly, aggressively, illegally genemod. The Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency may allow fanciful tinkering with flowers, but not with animal phyla higher than fish. The rules are very clear, backed up by court cases whose harsh financial penalties make them even clearer. No genemods that cause pain. No genemods that create weaponry, in its broadest definition. No genemods that “alter external appearance or basic internal functioning such that a creature deviates significantly from other members of not only its species but also its breed.” A collie may pace and single-foot, but it better still look like Lassie.

And never, never, never any genemod that is inheritable. Nobody wants another fiasco like the Sleepless. Even my penile flowers were sterile. And genemod human beings, we donkeys, were all individually handcrafted, in vitro one-of-a-kind collector’s items. Such is order maintained in our orderly world. So saith Supreme Court Chief Justice Richard J. Milano, writing the majority opinion for Linbeckerv. Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency. Humanity must not be altered past recognition, lest we lose what it means to be human. Two hands, one head, two eyes, two legs, a functioning heart, the necessity to breathe and eat and shit, this is humanity in perpetuity. We are the human beings.

Or, in this case, the dogs. And yet here was Stephanie, theoretically an officer of the law, standing on my terrace flanked by a prison-sentence GSEA violation in pink fur. Katous had four adorable pink ears, identically cocked, aural Rockettes. It had an adorable pink fur rabbit’s tail. It had huge brown eyes, three times the size of any dog’s eyes Justice Milano would approve, giving it a soulful, sorrowing look. It was so adorable and vulnerable-looking I wanted to kick it.

Which might have been the point. Although that, too, might be construed as illegal. No modifications that cause pain.

“I heard that David moved out,” Stephanie said, crouching to feed an anise cookie to the quivering pink fur. Oh so casual — just a girl and her dog, my illegal genemod pet, I live on the edge like this all the time, doncha know. I wondered if Stephanie knew that “Katous” was Arabic for “cat.” Of course she did.

“David moved out,” I agreed. “We came to the place where the road forked.”

“And who’s next on your road?”

“Nobody.” I sipped my drink without offering Stephanie one. “I thought I’d live alone for a while.”

“Really.” She touched an aquamarine flower; it wrapped its soft tubular petal around her finger. Stephanie grinned. “Quel dom-mage. What about that German software dealer you talked to such a long time at Paul’s party?”

“What about your dog?” I said pointedly. “Isn’t he pretty illegal for a cop’s pet?”

“But so cute. Katous, say hello to Diana.”

“Hello,” Katous said.

Slowly I lowered my glass from my mouth.

Dogs couldn’t talk. The vocal equipment didn’t allow it, the law didn’t allow it, the canine IQ didn’t allow it. Yet Katous’s growled “hello” was perfectly clear. Katous could talk.

Stephanie lounged against the French doors, enjoying the effect of her bombshell. I would have given anything to be able to ignore it, to go on with a neutral, uninterested conversation. I could not manage that.

“Katous,” I said, “how old are you?”

The dog gazed at me from enormous sorrowful eyes.

“Where do you live, Katous?”

No answer.

“Are you genemod?”

No answer.

“Is Katous a dog?”

Was there a shade of sad puzzlement in its brown eyes?

“Katous, are you happy?”

Stephanie said, “His vocabulary is only twenty-two words. Although he understands more than that.”

“Katous, would you like a cookie? Cookie, Katous?”

He wagged his ridiculous tail and pranced in place. There were no claws on his toes. “Cookie! Please!”

I held out a cookie, which was from the Proust’s Madelines franchise and were wonderful: crunchy, fragrant with anise, rich with butter. Katous took it with toothless pink gums. “Thank you, lady!”

I looked at Stephanie. “He can’t defend himself. And he’s a mental cripple, smart enough to talk but not smart enough to understand his world. What’s the point?”

“What’s the point of your spermatic flowers? God, they’re salacious. Did David give them to you? They’re wonderful.”

“David didn’t give them to me.”

“You bought them yourself? After he left, I would guess. A replacement?”

“A reminder of male fallibility.”

Stephanie laughed. She knew I was lying, of course. David was never fallible in that department. Or any other. His leaving was my fault. I am not an easy person to live with. I needle, pry, argue, search compulsively for weaknesses to match my own. Worse, I only admit this well after the fact. I looked away from Stephanie and gazed through a gap in the flowers at San Francisco Bay, my drink frosty in my hand.

It is, I suppose, a serious flaw in my character that I can’t stand to be in the same room for ten minutes with people like Stephanie. She’s intelligent, successful, funny, daring. Men fall all over her, and not just for her genemod looks, red hair and violet eyes and legs a yard and a half long. Not even for her enhanced intelligence. Xo, she has the ultimate attraction for jaded males: no heart. She’s a perpetual challenge, an infinite variety that custom doesn’t stale because the tariff is always about to be revoked. She can’t really be loved, and can’t really be hurt, because she doesn’t care. Indifference, coupled with those legs, is irresistible. Every man chinks he’ll be different for her, but he never is. Her face launched a thousand ships? Big deal. There’s always another fleet. If pher-omone genemods weren’t illegal, I’d swear Stephanie had them.

Jealousy, David always said, corrodes the soul.

I’d always answered that Stephanie was soulless. She was twenty-eight, seven years my junior, which meant seven years more advancement in the allowable technological evolution of Homo sapiens. They had been a fertile seven years. Her father was Harve Brunell, of Brunell Power. For his only daughter he had bought every genemod on the market, and some of that hadn’t quite arrived there, legally. Stephanie Brunell represented the penultimate achievement of American science, power, and values.

Right behind Katous.

She plucked a penile blue flower and turned it idly in her hands. She was making me choke on my curiosity about Katous. “So it’s really over with you and David. Incidentally, I glimpsed him last night at Anna’s water fete. From a great distance. He was out on the lily pads.”

I asked casually, “Oh? With whom?”

“Quite alone. And looking very handsome. I think he had his hair replaced again. It’s curly and blond now.”

I stretched and yawned. The muscles in my neck felt hard as duragem chains. “Stephanie, if you want David, go after him. / don’t care.”

“Don’t you? Do you mind if I send your rather primitive house ’bot for another pitcher? You seem to have drunk this whole one without me. At least your ’bot works — the breakdown rate on the cop ’bots has accelerated yet again. I’d think the parts franchises were all owned by crooks, if they weren’t owned by some of my best friends. What’s your ’bot’s name?”

“Hudson,” I said, “another pitcher.”

It floated off. Katous watched it fearfully, backing into a corner of the terrace. The dog’s absurd tail brushed a hanging flower.

Immediately the flower wrapped itself around the tail, and Katous yelped and jumped forward, quivering.

I said, “A genemod dog with some self-awareness but afraid of a flower? Isn’t that a little cruel?”

“It’s supposed to be an ultra-pampered beastie. Actually, Katous is a beta-test prototype for the foreign market. Allowable under the Special Exemption Act for Economic Recovery, Section 14-c. Non-Agricultural Domestic Animals for Export.”

“I thought the President hasn’t signed the Special Exemption Act.” Congress had been wrangling over it for weeks. Economic crisis, unfavorable balance of trade, strict GSEA controls, threat to life as we know it. All the usual.

“He’ll sign it next week,” Stephanie said. I wondered which of her lovers had influence on the Hill. “We can’t afford not to. The genemod lobby gets more powerful every month. Think of all those Chinese and EC and South American rich old ladies who will just love a nauseatingly cute, helpless, unthreateningly sentient, short-lived, very expensive lapdog with no teeth.”

“Short-lived? No teeth? GSEA breed specifications—”

“Will be waived for export animals. Meanwhile I’m just beta-testing for a friend. Ah, here’s Hudson.”

The ’bot floated through the French doors with a fresh pitcher of vodka scorpions. Katous scrambled away, his four ears quivering. His scramble brought him sideways against a bank of flowers, all of which tried to wrap themselves around him. One long flaccid petal settled softly over his eyes. Katous yelped and pulled loose, his eyes wild. He shot across the terrace.

“Help!” he cried. “Help Katous!”

On that side of the terrace I had planted moondust in shallow boxes between the palings, to make a low border that wouldn’t obstruct the view of the Bay. Katous’s frightened flight barreled hirr into the moondust’s sensor field. It released a cloud of sweet-smelling blue fibers, fine as milkweed. The dog breathed them in, and yelped again. The moondust cloud was momentarily translucent, a fragrant fog around those enormous terrified eyes. Katous ran in a ragged circle, then leaped blindly. He hurled between the wide-set palings and over the edge of the terrace.

The sound of his body hitting the pavement below made Hudson turn its sensors.

Stephanie and I ran to the railing. At our feet the moondust released another cloud of fibers. Katous lay smashed on the sidewalk six stories down.

“Damn!” Stephanie cried. “That prototype cost a quarter mil-lioo inR D!”

Hudson said, “There was an unregistered sound from the lower entranceway. Shall I alert security?”

“What am I going to tell Norman? I promised to baby-sit the T.üng and keep it safe!”

“Repeat. There was an unregistered sound from the lower entranceway. Shall I alert security?”

“No, Hudson,” I said. “No action.” I looked at the mass of bloody pink fur. Sorrow and disgust swept through me: sorrow for Katous’s fear, disgust for Stephanie and myself.

“Ah, well,” Stephanie said. Her perfect lips twitched. “Maybe the IQ did need enhancing. Can’t you just see the Liver tabloid neadines? DUMB DOG DIVES TO DEATH. PANICKED BY PENILE POSY.” She threw back her head and laughed, the red hair swinging in the breeze.

Mercurial, David had once said of Stephanie. She has intrigu-ingly mercurial moods.

Personally, I’ve never found Liver tabloid headlines as funny as everyone else seems to. And I’d bet that neither “penile” nor “posy” was in the Liver vocabulary.

Stephanie shrugged and turned away from the railing. “I guess Norman will just have to make another one. With the R D already done, it probably won’t bankrupt them. Maybe they can even take a tax write-off. Did you hear that Jean-Claude rammed his writeoff through the IRS, for the embryos he and Lisa decided not to implant in a surrogate after all? He discarded them and wrote off the embryo storage for seven years as a business depreciation on the grounds that an heir was part of long-term strategic planning, and the IRS auditor actually allowed it. Nine fertilized embryos, all with expensive genemods. And then he and Lisa decide they don’t want kids after all.”

I gazed at the throwaway pile of pink fur on the sidewalk, and then out at the wide blue Bay, and I made my decision. In that moment. As quickly and irrationally as that.

Like most of the rest of my life.

“Do you know Colin Kowalski?” I asked Stephanie.

She thought briefly. She had eidetic recall. “Yes, I think so.

Sarah Goldman introduced us at some theater a few years ago. Tall, with wavy brown hair? Minimal genemod, right? I don’t remember him as handsome. Why? Is he your replacement for David?”

“No.”

“Wait a minute — isn’t he with the GSEA?”

“Yes.”

“I think I already mentioned,” Stephanie said stiffly, “that Norman’s company had a special beta-test permit for Katous?”

“No. You didn’t.”

Stephanie chewed on her flawless lower lip. Actually, the permit is pending. Diana—”

“Don’t worry, Stephanie. I’m not going to report your dead violation. I just thought you might know Colin. He’s giving an extravagant Fourth of July party. I could get you an invitation.” I was enjoying her discomfort.

“I don’t think I’d be interested in a party hosted by a Purity Squad agent. They’re always so stuffy. Guys who wrap up genetic rigidity in the old red-white-and-blue and never see that the result looks like a national prick. Or a nightstick, beating down innovation in the name of fake patriotism. No thanks.”

“You think the idealism is fake?”

“Most patriotism is. Either that or Liver sentimentality. God, the only thing bearable about this country comes from genemod technology. Most Livers look like shit and behave worse — you yourself said you can’t stand to be around them.”

I had said that, yes. There were a lot of people I couldn’t stand to be around.

Stephanie was on a political roll, the kind that never made it to campaign holovids. “Without the genemod brains in the security enclaves, this would be a country of marching morons, incapable of even basic survival. Personally, I think the best act of’patriotism’ would be a lethal genemod virus that wiped out everybody but donkeys. Livers contribute nothing and drain off everything.”

I said carefully, “Did I ever tell you that my mother was a Liver? Who was killed fighting for the United States in the China Conflict? She was a master sergeant.”

Actually, my mother had died when I was two; I barely remembered her. But Stephanie had the grace to look embarrassed. “No. And you should have, before you let me give that tirade.

But it doesn’t change anything. You’re a donkey. You’re genemod. You do useful work.”

This last was either generous or bitchy. I have done a variety of work, none of it persistently useful. I have a theory about people who end up with strings of short-term careers. It is, incidentally, the same theory I have about people who end up with strings of short-term lovers. With each one you inevitably hit a low point, not only within the purported “love” affair or fresh occupation, but also within yourself. This is because each new lover/job reveals fresh internal inadequacy. With one you discover your capacity to be lazy; with another, to be shrewish; with a third, to engage in frenzied hungry ambition that appalls you with its pathetic nee-diness. The sum of too many careers or too many lovers, then, is the same: a composite of personal low points, a performance scat-tergram sinking inevitably to the bottom right quadrant. All your weaknesses stand revealed. What one lover or occupation missed, the next one will draw forth.

In the last ten years, I have worked in security, in entertainment holovids, in county politics, in furniture manufacture franchises (more than one), in ’bot law, in catering, in education, in applied syncography, in sanitation. Nothing ventured, nothing lost. And yet David, who was after Russell who was after Anthony who was after Paul who was after Rex who was after Eugene who was after Claude, never called me “mercurial.” Which is certainly indicative of something.

I hadn’t reacted to Stephanie’s jibe, so she repeated it, smiling solicitously. “You’re a donkey, Diana. You do useful work.”

“I’m about to,” I said.

She poured herself another drink. “Will David be at this Colin Kowalski’s party?”

“No. I’m sure not. But he’ll be at Sarah’s campaign fund-raiser on Saturday. We both accepted weeks ago.”

“And are you going?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I understand. But if David and you are really finished with each other—”

“Go after him, Stephanie.” I didn’t look at her face. Since David moved out, I’d lost seven pounds and three friends.

So — say I joined the GSEA because I was jilted. Say I was jealous. Say I was disgusted with Stephanie and everything she represented. Say I was bored with my life at that extremely boring moment. Say I was just looking for a new thrill. Say I was impulsive.

“I’m going to be out of town for a while,” I said.

“Oh? Where are you going?”

“I’m not sure yet. It depends.” I gave a last look over the railing at the smashed, semi-sentient, pathetic and expensive dog. The ultimate in American technology and values.

Say I was a patriot.

The next morning I flew down to Colin Kowalski’s office in a government complex west of the city. From the air, buildings and generous landing lots formed a geometric design, surrounded by free-form swaths of bright trees bearing yellow flowers. I guessed the trees were genemod to bloom all year. Trees and lawn stopped abruptly at the perimeter of the Y-field security bubble. Outside that charmed circle the land reverted to scrub, dotted by some Livers holding a scooter race.

From my aircar I could see the entire track, a glowing yellow line of Y-energy about a meter wide and five twisting miles long. A platform scooter shot out of the starting pod, straddled by a figure in red jacks that, at its speed and my height, was no more than a blur. I had been to scooter races. The scooter’s gravs were programmed to stay exactly six inches above the track. Y-cones on the bottom of the platform determined the speed; the sharper the tilt away from the energy track, the faster the thing could go, and the harder it became to control. The driver was allowed only a single handhold, plus a pommel around which he could wrap one knee. It must be like riding sidesaddle at sixty miles per hour — not that any Liver would ever have heard of a sidesaddle. Livers don’t read history. Or anything else.

Spectators perched on flimsy benches along the scooter track. They cheered and screamed. The driver was halfway through the course when a second scooter shot out of the pod. My car had been cleared by the governmet security field, which locked onto my controls and guided me in. I twisted in my seat to keep the scooter track in view. At this lower altitude I could see the first driver more clearly. He increased the tilt of his scooter, even though this part of the track was rough, snaking over rocks and repressions and piles of cut brush. I wondered how he knew the second scooter was gaining on him.

I saw the first driver race toward a half-buried boulder. The veliow line of track snaked over it. The driver threw his weight toward center, trying to slow himself down. He’d waited too long. The scooter bucked, lost its orientation toward the track, and flipped. The driver was flung to the ground. His head hit the edge :: the boulder at over a mile a minute.

A moment later the second scooter raced over the body, its energy cones a perfect six inches above the crushed skull.

My car descended below the treetops and landed between two beds of bright genemod flowers.

Colin Kowalski met me in the lobby, a severe neo-Wrightian atrium in a depressing gray. “My God, Diana, you look pale. What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said. Scooter deaths happen all the time. Nobody tries to regulate scooter races, least of all the politicians who pay for them in exchange for votes. What would be the point? Livers choose that stupid death, just as they choose to take sunshine or drink themselves to oblivion or waste their little lives destroying the countryside marginally faster than the ’bots can clean it up. Envirobots used to be able to keep up, when there was enough money. Stephanie was right about one thing: I don’t care what Livers do. Why should I? Whatever my mother might have done forty years ago, today Livers are politically and economically negligible. Ubiquitous, but negligible. It was just that I had never seen a scooter death that close before. The crushed skull had looked no more substantial than a flower.

“You need fresh air,” Colin said. “Let’s go for a walk?”

“A what?” I said, startled. I’d just had fresh air. What I wanted was to sit down.

“Didn’t the doctor recommend easy walks? In your condition?” Colin took my arm, and this time I knew better than to say My what? The old training returns fast. Colin was afraid the building wasn’t secure.

How could a government complex under a maximum-security Y-field not be secure? The place would be multishielded, jammed, swept constantly. There was only one group of people who could even remotely be suspected of developing monitors so radically undetectable—

I was surprised at myself. My heart actually skipped a beat. Apparently I could still feel an interest in something besides myself.

Colin walked me past a lovely meditation garden out to an expanse of open lawn. We walked slowly, as befitted someone with my condition, whatever it was.

“Colin, darling, am I pregnant?”

“You have Gravison’s disease. Diagnosed just two weeks ago, at the John C. Fremont Medical Enclave, from your repeated complaints of dizziness.”

“There’s no complaint files in my medical records.”

“There are now. Three complaints over the last four months. One misdiagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Your medical problems are one reason David Madison left you.”

Despite myself, I flinched at the sound of David’s name. Some locales are full of gleaming skyscrapers built on infertile, treacherously shifting ground. Japan, for instance. And then there are places like the Garden of Eden — lush, warm, vibrant with color — where only bitterness is built. Whose fault? The Garden dwellers, obviously. They certainly couldn’t claim deprived childhoods.

Nothing is more bitter than to know you could have had Eden, but turned it into Hiroshima. All by your two unaided selves.

Colin and I walked a little farther. The weather under the dome was mild and fresh smelling, without wind. Colin’s hand on my arm felt pleasant. Stephanie was wrong; he was handsome, even if his looks weren’t genemod. Thick brown hair, high cheekbones, a strong body. Too bad he was such a prig. Religious reverence for one’s own job, even if the job is worth doing, is a sexual turnoff. I could picture Colin inspecting his naked lovers for GSEA violations. And then turning them in.

I said, “You’re rushing ahead, darling. Why the medical record changes? I haven’t even said I’m willing to play.”

“We need you, Diana. You couldn’t have contacted me at a better time. Washington has cut our funds again, a ten percent drop from—”

“Spare me the political lecture, Col. What do you need me for?”

He looked slighty offended. A prig. But of course his funds had been cut. Everybody’s funds had been cut. Washington is a binary system; money can only go in and out. More was going out than was coming in. Lots more: supporting a nation of Livers was expensive when the U.S.A no longer held the only world patents for the cheap Y-energy that had made it possible in the first place. Plus, aging industrial machinery, long kept underrepaired, was breaking down at an accelerating rate. Even Stephanie, with all her money, had complained about that. The public sector must feel it even more. And deficit spending had been illegal for nearly a century. Didn’t Colin think I knew all that?

He said stiffly, “I didn’t mean to lecture. I need you for surveillance. You’re trained, you’re clean, nobody will be tracking your moves electronically. And if they do come to anybody’s attention, Gravison’s disease is the perfect cover.”

This was true, as far as it went. I was “trained” because fifteen years ago I’d taken part in an unrecorded training program so secret its agents had never actually been used for anything. Or at least I hadn’t, but, then, I’d dropped out before the end. Claude had come along. Or maybe it had been somebody else. Colin Kowalski had also been in that program, which marked the start of his government career. I was clean because nothing about the program appeared in anybody’s data banks, anywhere.

But there was something Colin wasn’t telling me, something slightly wrong in his manner. I said, “Who, specifically, is it that I won’t come to the attention of?” but I think I already knew.

“Sleepless. Neither Sanctuary nor that group on Huevos Verdes. La Isla, I mean.”

Huevos Verdes. Green Eggs. I bent over and pretended to adjust my sandal, to hide my grin. I’d never heard that Sleepless had a sense of humor.

I said, through rising excitement, “Why does Gravison’s disease provide the perfect cover? What is Gravison’s disease?”

“A brain disorder. It causes extreme restlessness and agitation.”

“And immediately you thought of me. Thank you, darling.”

He looked annoyed. “It often leads to aimless travel. Diana, this isn’t a joking matter. You’re the last of the underground agents who we’re positive doesn’t show up on any electronic record anywhere before Sanctuary cultured these so-called SuperSleepless on their protected orbital. Well, it’s not protected anymore. We’ve got it crawling with GSEA personnel. The labs we dismantled completely; Sanctuary will never pull those dangerous genemod tricks again. And that treasonous Jennifer Sharifi and her revolutionary cell will never get out of jail.”

Colin’s words struck me as understatement: a peculiarly gray-toned, governmental sort of understatement. What he’d called Jennifer Sharifi’s “dangerous genemod tricks” had been a terrorist attempt to use lethal, altered viruses to hold five cities hostage. This incredible, daring, insane terrorism had been an attempt to coerce the United States into letting Sanctuary secede. The only reason Sanctuary hadn’t succeeded was that Jennifer Sharifi’s granddaughter Miranda, from God-knows-what twisted family politics, had betrayed the terrorists to the feds. This had all happened thirteen years ago. Miranda Sharifi had been sixteen years old. She and the other twenty-six children in on the betrayal had supposedly been so genetically altered they don’t even think like human beings anymore. A different species.

Exactly what the GSEA was supposed to prevent.

Yet here the twenty-seven SuperSleepless were, walking around alive, a fait accompli. And not even “here” — a few years ago the Supers had all moved to an island they’d built off the coast of Yucatan. That was the word: “built.” One month it was international ocean, no “there” there, the next month there existed a genuine island. It wasn’t a floating construct, like the Artificial Islands, but rock that went all the way down to the continental shelf, which was not especially shallow at that point. Luckily. Nobody knew how the Sleepless had developed the nanotechnology to do it. A lot of people passionately wanted to know. Nanotechnology was still in its infancy. Mostly, nanoscientists could take things apart, but not build them. This was apparently not true on La Isla.

An island, says international law, which predates the existence of people who can create one, is a natural feature. Unlike a ship or an orbital, it doesn’t fall under the Artificial Construct Tax Reform Law of 2050, and it doesn’t have to be chartered under a national flag. It can be claimed by, or for, a given country, or can be assigned to it as a protectorate by the UN. The twenty-seven Supers plus hangers-on settled on their island, which was shaped roughly like two interlocking ovals. The United States claimed La Isla; the potential taxes on SuperSleepless corporate businesses were enormous. However, the UN assigned the island to Mexico, twenty miles away. The UN was collectively unhappy with Americans, in one of those downward cycles of international opinion. Mexico, which had been getting fucked over by the United States regularly for several centuries, was happy to receive whatever monies La Isla paid to leave the inhabitants strictly alone.

The Supers built their compound under cover of the most sophisticated energy fields in existence. Impenetrable. Apparently the Supers, with their unimaginably boosted brainpower, weren’t geniuses at only genemodification; they included among their number geniuses at everything. Y-energy. Electronics. Grav tech. From their island, officially if unimaginatively named La Isla, they have sold patents throughout a world market on which the U.S. can offer only the same tired recycled products at inflated prices. The U.S. has 120 million nonproductive Livers to support; La Isla has none. I’d never before heard it called Huevos Verdes. Which translated as “green eggs” but in Spanish slang meant “green testicles.” Fertile and puissant balls. Did Colin know this?

I stooped to pick a blade of very green, genemod grass. “Colin, don’t you think that if the Supers wanted Jennifer Sharifi and their other grandparents out of prison, they’d get them out? Obviously the successful counterrevolutionaries want the senior gang right where you’ve got them.”

He looked even more annoyed. “Diana, the SuperSleepless are not gods. They can’t control everything. They’re just human beings.”

“I thought the GSEA says they’re not.”

He ignored this. Or maybe not. “You told me yesterday you believed in stopping illegal genemod experiments. Experiments that could irrevocably change humanity as we know it.”

I pictured Katous lying smashed on the sidewalk, Stephanie laughing above. Cookie! Please! I had indeed told Colin that I believed in stopping genetic engineering, but not for reasons as simple as his. It wasn’t that I objected to irrevocable changes to humanity; in fact, that frequently seemed to me like a good idea. Humanity didn’t strike me as so wonderful that it should be forever beyond change. However, I had no faith in the kinds of alterations that would be picked. I doubted the choosers, not the fact of choice. We’d already gone far enough in the direction of Stephanie, who considered sentient life-forms as disposable as toilet paper. A dog today, expensive and nonproductive Livers tomorrow, who the next day? I suspected Stephanie was capable of genocide, if it served her purposes. I suspected many donkeys were. There were times I’d thought it of myself, although not when I genuinely thought. The nonthought appalled me. I doubted Colin could understand all this.

“That’s right,” I agreed. “I want to help stop illegal genemod experiments.”

“And I want you to know that I know that under that flip manner of yours, there’s a serious and loyal American citizen.”

Oh, Colin. Not even boosted IQ let him see the world other than binary. Acceptable/not acceptable. Good/bad. On/off. The reality was so much more complicated. And not only that, he was lying to me.

I’m good at detecting lies. Far better than Colin at implying them. He wasn’t going to trust me with anything important in this project, whatever it was. I was too hastily recruited, too flip, too unreliable. That I had left my training before its completion was de facto unreliability, disloyalty, unacceptability for anything important. That’s the way government types think. Maybe they’re right.

Whatever surveillance Colin gave me would be strictly backup, triple redundancy. There was a theory for this in surveillance work: cheap, limited, and out of control. It started as a robot-engineering theory but pretty soon carried over into police work. If there are a lot of investigators with limited tasks, they won’t cohere into a single premature viewpoint about what they’re looking for. That way, they might turn up something totally unexpected. Colin wanted me for the equivalent of a wild card.

I didn’t mind. At least it would get me out of San Francisco.

Colin said, “For the last two years the Supers have been entering the United States, in ones and twos, heavily disguised both cosmetically and electronically. They travel around to various Liver towns or donkey enclaves, and then go home, to La Isla. We want to know why.”

I murmured, “Maybe they have Gravison’s disease.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I said, have you made any progress penetrating Huevos Verdes?”

“No,” he said, but then he wouldn’t have told me if they have. The sexual innuendo he missed completely.

“And who will I be keeping under surveillance?” The excite-ment was a little bubble in my throat now, still surprising. It had been a long time since anything had excited me. Except David, of coure, who had taken his sexy shoulders and verbal charm and sense of superiority to hold in readiness for plunking down temporarily in the middle of some other woman’s life.

He said, “You’ll be following Miranda Sharifi.”

“Ah.”

“I have full ID information and kit for you in a locker at the gravrail station. You’ll pass as a Liver.”

This was a slight insult; Colin was implying my looks weren’t spectacular enough to absolutely mark them as genemod. I let it pass.

Colin said, “She’s only made one trip off the island herself. We think. When the next one happens, you go with her.”

“How will you be sure it’s her? If they’re using both cosmetic and electronic disguises, she could have different features, hair, even brain-scan projection all masking her own.”

“True. But their heads are slightly misshapen, slighty too big. That’s hard to disguise.”

I knew that, of course. Everybody did. Thirteen years ago, when the Supers had first come down from Sanctuary, their big heads had given rise to a lot of bad jokes. The actuality was that their revved-up metabolism and altered brain chemistry had caused other abnormalities, the human genemod being a very complex thing. Supers are not, I remembered, an especially handsome people.

I said, “Their heads aren’t that big, Colin. In some lights it’s even hard to tell at all.”

“Also, their infrared body scans are on file. From the trial. You can’t move the position of your liver, or mask the digestive rate in your duodenum.”

Which are both pretty generic anyway. Infrared scans aren’t even admissible in court as identity markers. They’re too unreliable. Still, it was better than nothing.

All of this was better than the nothing with David. The nothing of Stephanie. The something of Katous. Thank you, lady.

Colin said, “The trips off Huevos Verdes are increasing. They’re planning something. We need to find out what.”

“Si, senor,” I said. He wasn’t amused.

We’d walked nearly to the perimeter of the security bubble.

Beyond its faint shimmer, a body pod had arrived for the dead scooter racer. I could just see some Livers loading him into the pod, at the very edge of my range of genemod-enhanced vision. The Livers were crying. They got the body into the pod, and the pod started down the track. After fifteen feet there was a sudden grinding sound and the pod stopped. Livers pushed. The pod didn’t move. The funeral machinery, like so much other more important machinery lately, had apparently broken down.

The Livers stood staring at it, bewildered and helpless.

I walked with Colin inside Building G-14 looking dizzy, as a victim of Gravison’s disease occasionally should.

Two

When I found out, me, about the rabid raccoon, first thing I did was run straight down to the cafe to tell Annie Francy. I ran all the way, me. That ain’t so easy no more. All I could think was maybe Lizzie was already safe, her, with Annie in the kitchen, maybe Lizzie wasn’t in the woods. Maybe.

“Run, old man! Run, old fuck!” a kid yelled from the alley between the hotel and the warehouse. They stood there, the stomps, when the weather was nice. The weather was nice. I forgot, me, that they’d be there, or I’d of gone around the long way, by the river. But this afternoon they was too lazy, them, or too splintered, to chase me. I didn’t tell them shit about the raccoon.

At the servoentrance to the cafe, where only ’bots supposed to go, I pounded, me, as hard as I could and the hell with who heard. “Annie Francy! Let me in!”

The bushes to my right rustled and I almost keeled over, me. The coons come there for the stuff that drops off the delivery ’bots. But it was only a snake. “Annie! It’s me — Billy! Let me in!”

The low door swung open. I crawled through on hands and knees. It was Lizzie, her, who figured out how to get the servoentrance to open without no ’bot signal. Annie could no more do that than grow leaves.

They were both there. Annie was peeling apples and Lizzie was tinkering with the ’bot that was supposed to peel apples. Which ain’t worked in a month. Not that Lizzie could fix it. She was smart, her, but she was still only eleven years old.

“Billy Washington!” Annie said. “You’re shaking, you! What happened?”

“Rabid raccoons,” I gasped. My heart was going, it, like a waterfall. “Four of them. Reported on the area monitor. By the river, where Lizzie… Lizzie goes to play…”

“Ssshhhh,” Annie said. “SSShhhh, dear heart. Lizzie’s here now. She’s safe, her.”

Annie put her arms around me where I sat panting on the floor like some humping bear. Lizzie watched, her, with her big black eyes wide and sparkly. She probably thought a rabid raccoon was interesting. She ain’t never seen one, her. I have.

Annie was big and soft, a chocolate-colored woman with breasts like pillows. She wouldn’t tell me, her, how old she was, but of course all I had to do was ask the terminals at the cafe or the hotel. She was thirty-five. Lizzie didn’t look nothing like her mother. She was light-skinned and skinny, her, with reddish hair in tight braids. She didn’t have no hips or breasts yet. What she had was brains. Annie worried about that a lot. She couldn’t remember, her, a time when we was just people, not Livers. I could remember, me. At sixty-eight, you can remember a lot. I could remember, me, a time when Annie might of been proud of Lizzie’s brains.

I could remember a time when being held by a woman like Annie would of meant more than panting from a bad heart.

“You all right, dear heart?” Annie said. She took her arms away and right away I missed them. I’m an old fool, me. “Now tell us again, real slow.”

I had my breath back. “Four rabid raccoons. The area monitor was wailing like death. They must of come down, them, from the mountains. The monitor showed them by the river, moving toward town. The biowarnings was flashing deep red. Then the monitor quit again and this time nothing couldn’t get it started again. Jack Sawicki kicked it, him, and so did I. Them coons could be anywhere.”

“Did the warden ’bot get sent to kill them, it, before the monitor quit?”

“The warden ’bot’s broke too.”

“Shit.” Annie made a face. “Next time I’m voting, me, against Samuelson.”

“You think it’ll make any difference? They’re all alike. But you keep Lizzie inside, you, until somebody does something about them coons. Lizzie, you stay inside, you hear me?”

Lizzie nodded. Then, being Lizzie, she argued. “But who, Billy?”

“Who what?”

“Who will do something about them raccoons? If the warden ’bot’s broke?”

Nobody answered. Annie picked up her knife, her, and went back to peeling apples. I settled myself more comfortable against the wall. No chairs, of course — nobody’s supposed to be in the cafe kitchen except ’bots. Annie broke in, her, for the first time last September. She didn’t bother the ’bots while they prepared food for the foodbelt. She just took a bit of sugar here, some soysynth there, some of the fresh fruit from the servobin shipments, and cooked up things. Delicious things — nobody could cook like Annie. Fruit cobblers that made your mouth fill with sweet water just to look at them. Meat loaf hot and spicy. Biscuits like air.

She added them, her, right onto the foodbelt cubbies going out into the cafe, to be clicked off on people’s meal chips. Fools probably didn’t even notice, them, how much better her dishes tasted than the usual stuff going round and round on the belt day and night. And of course with the holoterminal going full blast, and the dance music playing all the time, nobody would of heard her and Lizzie back here even if they was blowing up the whole damn kitchen.

Annie liked to cook, she said. Liked to keep busy. I sometimes thought, me, that for somebody trying so hard to bring up Lizzie to be a good Liver, Annie herself was more than a little bit donkey. Of course I didn’t say that, me, to Annie. I wanted to keep my head.

Annie started to hum, her, while she peeled apples. But Lizzie don’t give up on questions. She said again, “Who will do something about them raccoons?”

Annie frowned. “Maybe somebody’ll come to fix the warden ’bot.”

Lizzie’s big black eyes didn’t blink. It’s spooky, sometimes, how she can stare so hard without never blinking. “Nobody came to fix the peeler ’bot. Nobody came to fix the cleaner ’bot in the cafe. You said yesterday, you, that you didn’t think the donkeys would send nobody even if the mainline soysynth ’bot broke.”

“Well, I didn’t mean it, me,” Annie said. She peeled faster. “That breaks and nobody in this town eats!”

“They could share, them. Share the food that people took off the foodbelt before it broke.”

Annie and I looked at each other. Once I saw a town, me, where a cafe broke down. Six people ended up killed. And that was when the gravrail worked regular, so people could leave, them, for another town in the district.

“Yes, dear heart,” Annie said. “People could share, them.”

“But you and Billy don’t think they would, them.”

Annie didn’t answer. She don’t like to lie to Lizzie, her. I said, “No, Lizzie. A lot of people wouldn’t share, them.”

Lizzie turned her bright black eyes on me. “Why wouldn’t they share?”

I said, “ ‘Cause people out of the habit of sharing, them. They expect stuff now. They got a right to stuff — that’s why they elect politicians. The donkey politicians pay their taxes, them, and the taxes are the cafes and warehouses and medunits and baths that let Livers get on with serious living.”

Lizzie said, “But people shared more, them, when you was young, Billy? They shared more then?”

“Sometimes. Mostly they worked, them, for what they wanted.”

“That’s enough,” Annie said sharply. “Don’t you go filling her head with what’s past, Billy Washington. She’s a Liver. Don’t go talking, you, like you was a donkey yourself! And you, Lizzie, don’t you talk about it no more.”

But nobody can’t stop Lizzie when she’s started. She’s like a gravrail. Like a gravrail used to be, before this last year. “School says I’m lucky, me, to be a Liver. I get to live like an aristo while the donkeys got to do all the work, them. Donkeys serve Livers, Livers hold the power, us, by votes. But if we hold the power, us, how come we can’t get the cleaner ’bot and the peeler ’bot and the warden ’bot fixed?”

“Since when you been at school?” I joked, trying to derail Lizzie, trying to keep Annie from getting madder. “I thought you just played, you, down by the river with Susie Mastro and Carlena Terrell. You’re an agro Liver, you!”

She looked at me, her, like I was a broken ’bot myself.

Annie said shortly, “You are lucky, you to be a Liver. And you say so if anybody asks you.”

“Like who?”

“Anybody. You shouldn’t go to school so much anyway. You don’t never see the other children, you, going so much. Do you want to be a freak?” She scowled.

Lizzie turned to me. “Billy, who’s going to do something about them rabid raccoons if nobody fixes the warden ’bot?”

I glanced at Annie. I got to my feet, me, puffing. “I don’t know, Lizzie. Just stay inside, you, all right?”

Lizzie said, “But what if one of them raccoons bites somebody?”

I had the sense, me, to stay quiet. Finally Annie said, “The medunit still works.”

“But what if it breaks?”

“It won’t break.”

“But what if it does?”

“It won’t!”

“How do you know?” Lizzie said, and I finally saw, me, that this was some sort of private scooter race between mother and daughter. I didn’t understand it, me, but I could see Lizzie was ahead. She said again, “How do you know, you, that the medunit won’t break too?”

“Because if it did, Congresswoman Land would send somebody, her, to fix it. The medunit is part of her taxes.”

“She didn’t send nobody to fix the cleaning ’bot. Or the peeler ’bot. Or the—”

“The medunit’s different!” Annie snapped. She hacked at an apple so hard that pulp flew off the table I stole for her from the cafe.

Lizzie said, “Why is the medunit so different?”

“Because it just is! If the medunit breaks, people could die, them. No politician is going to let Livers die. They’d never get elected again!”

Lizzie considered this. I thought, me, that the scooter race was over, and I breathed more easy. Lately it seemed like they fought all the time. Lizzie was growing up, her, and I hated it. It made it harder to keep her safe.

She said, “But people could die from rabid raccoons, too. So how come you said District Supervisor Samuelson probably won’t send nobody to fix the warden ’bot, but Congresswoman Land would send somebody to fix the medunit ’bot?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it — she was so smart, her. Annie scowled at me and right away I was sorry I laughed. Annie snapped, “So maybe I was wrong, me! Maybe somebody’ll fix the warden ’bot! Maybe I don’t know nothing, me!”

Lizzie said calmly, “Billy said too, him, that nobody would fix it. Billy, how come you—”

I said, “Because even donkeys don’t got the money, them, that they used to have to pay taxes with. And too much stuff gets broke nowadays. They got to make choices, them, about what to fix.”

Lizzie said, “But why do the donkey politicians got less money for taxes, them? And how come more stuff gets broke?”

Annie flung her peeled apples into a belt dish and dumped dough on them like it was mud.

“Because other countries make cheap Y-energy now. Twenty years ago we was the only ones, us, who could make it, and now we’re not. But the stuff breaking—”

Annie burst out, “You believe them lies politicians say on the grids? Land and Samuelson and Drinkwater? Pisswater! All lies, every time one of them opens their mouth, them, it’s lies — they just want to get out of paying their rightful taxes! The taxes we earned, us, with our votes! And I told you not to fill up the child’s head with them secondhand donkey lies, Billy Washington!”

“Ain’t lies,” I said, but I hated having Annie mad at me worse than I hated having her mad at Lizzie. It hurt my heart. Old fool.

Lizzie saw it. She was like that, her: all pushing and pushing one minute, all sweetness the next. She put her arms around me. “It’s all right, Billy. She ain’t mad, her, at you. Nobody’s mad at you. We love you, us.”

I held her, me. It was like holding a bird — thin bones and fluttery heart in your hand. She smelled of apples.

My dead wife Rosie and me never wanted kids. I don’t know, me, what we was thinking.

But all I said out loud was, “You don’t go outside, you, until them rabid raccoons are killed by somebody.”

Annie shot me a look. It took me a minute to figure out she was afraid, her, that Lizzie was just going to start all over again:

killed by who, Billy? But Lizzie didn’t start. She just said, sweet as berries, “I won’t, me. I’ll stay inside.”

But now it was Annie who couldn’t let it go. I don’t understand mothers, me. Annie said, “And you stay away from school for a while, too, Lizzie. You ain’t no donkey, you.”

Lizzie didn’t answer.

Annie only wanted what was best for Lizzie. I knew that, me. Lizzie had to live in East Oleanta, join a lodge, go to scooter races, hang around the cafe, choose her lovers here, have her babies here. Annie wanted Lizzie to belong. Like an agro Liver, not some weird fake-donkey freak nobody would want. Any mother would. Annie might sneak, her, into the kitchen of the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe to do some cooking, but she was still all Liver, all the way through.

And Lizzie wasn’t.

A long time ago, when I was in school myself, me, and the country was different, I learned something. It’s fuzzy now, but it keeps hanging in my head. It was from before donkeys and Livers. Before cafes and warehouses. Before politicians paid taxes to us, instead of the other way around. It was from back when they were still making Sleepless, and you could read about them in newspapers. When there was newspapers. This thing was a word about genemod, but it meant something that wasn’t genemod. Was natural. Lizzie learns at school that donkeys are inferior, them, because donkeys have to be made genemod so they can be put to work providing all the things Livers need. But this word wasn’t about the kind of natural that makes us Livers superior to donkeys. It was about a different kind of natural, a kind that happens by itself but makes you different from other natural Livers around you. The word explained why Lizzie asked so many donkey questions, her, when she wasn’t no donkey and didn’t have no donkey genemods, although the word was in her genes. How could that be? Like I said, I was fuzzy, me, about the word, and about how it worked. But I remembered it.

The word was throwback.

I watched Lizzie watch her mother put the apple dish on the foodbelt. It went under the flash heater and out through the wall into the cafe. Somebody would choose it, them, on their Senator Mark Todd Ingalls meal chip. Annie went on to cooking something else. Lizzie sat on the floor, her, with the pieces of the broken peeler ’bot. When her mother wasn’t looking she studied each one, her, figuring out how it might go together, and when she grinned at me, her black eyes sparkled and darted, shiny as stars.

That night we had a meeting, us, in the cafe, to talk about the rabid raccoons. Forty people, not counting kids. Paulie Cenverno actually seen one of the sick raccoons, hind legs twitching like it was splintered, mouth foaming, down near the State Senator James Richard Langton Scooter Track on the other side of town from the river. Somebody said, them, that we should put chairs in a circle to make a real meeting, but nobody did. At the other end of the cafe the holoterminal played and the dance music blasted. Nobody danced but the holos, life-sized smiling dolls made of light, pretty enough to be donkeys. I don’t like them, me. Never did. You can see right through the edges.

“Turn down that music so we can hear ourselves talk, us!” Paulie bawled. People slouching at the tables near the foodbelt didn’t even look up, them. Probably all doing sunshine. Paulie walked over, him, and turned down the noise.

“Well,” Jack Sawicki said, “what are we going to do, us, about these sick coons?”

Only a few people snickered, them, and they were the dumbest ones. Like Annie said: somebody has to serve at meetings, even if serving is donkey work. Jack is mayor, him. He can’t help it. East Oleanta ain’t big enough to have a regular donkey mayor — no donkeys live here and we don’t want none. So we elected Jack, us, and he does what he has to do.

Somebody said, “Call County Legislator Drinkwater on the official terminal.”

“Yeah, call Pisswater!”

“District Supervisor Samuelson’s got the warden franchise, him.”

“Then call Samuelson!”

“Yeah, and while you’re at it, you, make another town protest that the goddamn warehouse don’t distribute, it, but once a week now!” That was Celie Kane. I ain’t never seen her not angry.

“Yeah. Rutger’s Corners, they still got distrib, them, twice a week.”

“I had to wear these jacks two days in a row!”

“I got sick, me, and missed a distrib, and we run out of toilet paper!”

Next election, District Supervisor Aaron Simon Samuelson was a squashed spider. But Jack Sawicki, he knew, him, how to serve a meeting.

“Okay, people, shut up now. This is about the sick coons, not about warehouse distrib. I’m going, me, to just call up our donkeys.”

He unlocked the official terminal. It sits way in the corner of the cafe. Jack pulled his chair, him, right up close to it, so his belly almost rested on his knees. A few stomps from the alley gang swaggered into the cafe, carrying their wooden clubs. They headed, them, for the foodbelt, laughing and smacking each other, drunk on sunshine. Nobody told them to shut up. Nobody dared.

“Terminal activate,” Jack said. He didn’t mind, him, talking donkey in front of us. None of this fake shit about I don’t carry out orders I give them I’m an agro Liver, me. Jack was a good mayor.

But I’m careful, me, not to tell him so.

“Terminal activated,” the terminal said. For the first time I wondered what we’d do if the thing was as broke as Annie’s apple-peeler ’bot.

Jack said, “Message for District Supervisor Aaron Simon Samuelson, copy to County Legislator Thomas Scott Drinkwater, copy to State Senator James Richard Langton, copy to State Representative Claire Amelia Forrester, copy to Congresswoman Janet Carol Land.” Jack licked his lips. “Priority Two.”

“One!” Celie Kane shouted. “Make it a one, you bastard!”

“I can’t, Celie,” Jack said. He was patient, him. “One is for disasters like attack or fire or flood at the Y-plant.” That was supposed to make us smile. A Y-plant can’t catch fire, can’t break down no way with its donkey shields. Can’t nothing get in, and only energy can get out. But Celie Kane don’t know how to smile, her. Her daddy, old Doug Kane, is my best friend, but he can’t do nothing with her neither. Never could, not even when she was a child.

“This is a disater, you shithead! One of them coons kills a kid of mine, and I’ll tear you apart myself, Jack Sawicki!”

“Hey, stay together, Celie,” Paulie Cenverno said. Somebody muttered “Bitch.” The door opened and Annie came in, her, holding Lizzie’s hand. The stomps at the foodbelt were still shouting and shoving.

The terminal said, “Please hold. Linking with District Supervisor Samuelson’s mobile unit.” A minute later the holo appeared, not life-sized like on the HT, but a tiny, eight-inch-high Samuelson seated at his desk and dressed in a blue uniform. He looked, him, about forty, but of course with donkey genemods you can’t never tell. He had thick gray hair and big shoulders and crinkly blue eyes — handsome, like all of them. A few people shuffled their feet, them. If voters don’t watch the donkey channels, then the only people they ever see not dressed in jacks are Samuelson’s techs at the warehouse distrib twice a week. Once a week, now.

Suddenly I wondered, me, if that was Samuelson. Maybe the holo was just a tape. Maybe the real Samuelson was someplace dressed up for a party, or in jacks — if donkeys ever wore jacks, them — or even naked, him, taking a shit. It was weird to think about.

“Yes, Mayor Sawicki?” Samuelson said. “How can I serve you, sir?”

“There’s at least four rabid raccoons in East Oleanta, Supervisor. Maybe more. The area monitor picked them up, it, before it broke. We seen the coons, right in town. They’re dangerous. I told you, me, two weeks ago that the game warden ’bot broke.”

Samuelson said, “Game warden duties have been franchised to the Sellica Corporation. I notified them, sir, as soon as you notified me.”

But Jack wasn’t taking any of that shit. Like I said, me, he was a good mayor. “We don’t care, us, who’s supposed to do the job! It’s your responsibility that it gets done, Supervisor. That’s why we elected you, us.”

Samuelson didn’t change expression. That’s when I decided, me, that he was a tape. “I’m sorry, mayor, you’re quite right. It is my responsibility. I’ll take care of it right away, sir.”

“That’s what you said two weeks ago. When the warden first broke, it.”

“Yes, sir. Funding has been — yes, you’re quite right, sir. I am sorry. It won’t be neglected again, sir.”

People nodded at each other: damn right. Behind me Paulie Cenverno muttered, “Got to be firm, us, with donkeys. Remind ’em who pays the votes.”

Jack said, “Thank you, Supervisor. And one more thing—”

“Hey!” a stomp screamed at the other end of the cafe, “The foodbelt stopped, it!”

Dead silence fell.

The holo of Samuelson said sharply, “What is it? What’s the problem?” For a minute he almost sounded, him, like a person.

The stomp screamed again, “Fucking thing just stopped, it! Ate my meal chip and stopped! The food cubbies don’t open, them!” He yanked at all the plasticlear cubby doors, and none budged, but of course they don’t never budge, them, unless you put your chip in the slot. The stomp slammed on them with his club, and that didn’t help neither. Plasticlear don’t break.

Jack ran, him, across the cafe, his belly bouncing under his red jacks. He stuck his own meal chip into the slot and pressed a cubby button. The chip disappeared, it, and the cubby didn’t open. Jack ran back to the terminal.

“It’s broke, Supervisor. The goddamn foodbelt’s broke, it — eating chips and not giving out no food. You got to do something real quick. This can’t go no two weeks!”

“Of course not, Mayor. As you know, the cafe isn’t part of my taxes — it’s funded and maintained by Congresswoman Land. But I’ll notify her myself, immediately, and a technician will be there from Albany within the hour. Nobody will starve within an hour, Mayor Sawicki. Keep your constituents calm, sir.”

Celie Kane shrilled, “Fixed like the warden ’bot, you mean? If my kids go hungry even a day, you mule bastard—”

“Shut up,” Paulie Cenverno told her, murderously low. Paulie don’t like to see donkeys abused to their faces. He says, him, that they got feelings too.

“Within one hour,” Jack said. “Thank you for your help, Supervisor. Dialogue over.”

“Dialogue over,” Samuelson said. He smiled at us, him, the same smile like on his election holos, chin up and crinkly eyes bright. The holo pushed a button on his desk. The picture disappeared. But something must of gone wrong because the voice didn’t disappear, it, only it sounded all different. Samuelson still, but no Samuelson we never seen or heard campaigning, us: “Christ — what next! These morons and imbeciles — I’m tempted to just — oh!” The terminal yelped and went dead.

A woman at a far table screamed. The stomp with the biggest wooden club had grabbed her food, him, and was eating it. Jack and Paulie and Norm Frazier charged over, them, and jumped the kid. His buddies jumped back. Tables crashed over and people started running. Somebody had just changed HT channels, and a scooter race in Alabama roared by, life-size. I grabbed Annie and Lizzie and shoved them to the door. “Get out! Get out!”

Outside, the Y-lights made Main Street bright as day. I could feel my heart banging but I didn’t slow up, me. Angry people got no sense. Anything could happen. I panted, me, alongside Annie, she running with those big breasts bouncing, Lizzie running quick and quiet as a deer.

In Annie’s apartment on Jay Street I collapsed, me, on a sofa. It wasn’t none too comfortable, not like sofas I remembered from when I was young, the soft ones you kept around long enough to take the shape of a person’s body.

But on the other hand, plastisynth don’t never get vermin.

Lizzie said, her eyes bright, “Do you think a donkey will come, them, to fix the foodbelt in an hour?”

I gasped, “Lizzie… hush, you.”

“But what if in an hour no donkey don’t come to—”

Annie said, “You be quiet, Lizzie, or you’ll wish them donkeys will come to fix you! Billy, you better stay here, you, for tonight. No telling what them fools at the cafe might do.”

She brought me a blanket, one of those she’d embroidered, her, with bright yarns from the warehouse. More embroideries hung on the wall, woven with bits of pop can the young girls make jewelry out of, with torn-up jacks, with any other bright thing Annie could find. All the Jay Street apartments look alike. They was all built at the same time about ten years ago, when some senator came up from way behind and needed a big campaign boost. Small rooms, foamcast walls, plastisynth furniture from a warehouse distrib, but Annie’s is one of the few that looks to me like a home.

Annie made Lizzie go to bed. Then she came, her, and sat on a chair close by my sofa.

“Billy — did you see, you, that woman in the cafe?”

“What woman?” It was nice, her sitting so close.

“The one standing, her, off by the back wall. Wearing green jacks. She don’t live, her, in East Oleanta.”

“So?” I snuggled under Annie’s pretty blanket. We get travelers sometimes, us, though not as many as we used to, now that the gravrail don’t work so regular. Meal chips are good anyplace in the state, they come from United States senators, and it didn’t used to be hard to get an interstate exchange chip. Maybe it still ain’t. I don’t travel much.

“She looked different,” Annie said.

“Different how?”

Annie pressed her lips tight together, thinking. Her lips were dark and shiny as blackberries, them, the lower one so full that pressing them together only made it look juicier. I had to look away, me.

She said slowly, “Different like a donkey.”

I sat up on the sofa. The blanket slid off. “You mean genemod? I didn’t see, me, nobody like that.”

“Well, she wasn’t genemod pretty. Short, with squinchy features and low eyebrows and a head a little too big. But she was a donkey, her. I know it. Billy — you think she’s a FBI spy?”

“In East Oleanta? We ain’t got no underground organizations, us. All we got is rotten stomps that want to spoil ilfe for the rest of us.”

Annie kept on pressing her lips together. County Legislator Thomas Scott Drinkwater runs our police franchise. He contracts, him, with an outfit that has both ’bots and donkey officers. We don’t see them much. They don’t keep the peace on the streets, and they don’t bother, them, about thefts because there’s always more in the warehouse. But when we have an assault, us, or a murder, or a rape, they’re there. Just last year Ed Jensen was gene-fingered for killing the oldest Flagg girl when a lodge dance got too rough. Jensen got took, him, up to Albany, for twenty-five-to-life. On the other hand, nobody never stood trial for the bow-shooting of Sam Taggart out in the woods two years ago. But I think we had a different franchise, us, back then.

FBI is a whole other thing. All them federal outfits are. They don’t come to Livers unless something donkey is threatened, and once they come, them, they don’t let go.

“Well,” Annie said stubbornly, “all I know, me, is that she was a donkey. I can smell them.”

I didn’t want to argue, me. But I didn’t want her to worry, neither. “Annie — ain’t no reason for FBI to be in East Oleanta. And donkeys don’t have big heads and squinchy features, them — they don’t let their kids get born that way.”

“Well, I hope you’re right, you. We don’t need no visiting donkeys in East Oleanta. Let them stay, them, in their places, and us in ours.”

I couldn’t help it. I said, real soft, “Annie — you ever hear of Eden?”

She knew, her, that I didn’t mean the Bible. Not in that voice. She snapped, “No. I never heard of it, me.”

“Yes, you did. I can tell, me, by your voice. You heard of Eden.”

“And what if 1 did? It’s garbage.”

I couldn’t let it go, me. “Why’s it garbage?”

“Why? Billy — think, you. How could there be a place, even in the mountains, that donkeys don’t know about? Donkeys serve everything, them, including mountains. They got aircars and planes to see everything. Anyway, why would a place without donkeys ever come to be? Who would do the work?”

“ ’Bots,” I said.

“Who would make the ’bots?”

“Maybe us?”

“Livers work? But why, in God’s name? We don’t got to work, us — we got donkeys to do all that for us. We got a right to be served by donkeys and their ’bots — we elect them! Why would we want to go, us, to some place without public servants?”

She was too young, her. Annie don’t remember a time before the voting came on HT and the franchises made cheap ’bots and the Mission for Holy Living was all over the place, them, contributing lots of money to all the churches and explaining about the lilies of the field and the sacredness of joy and the favor of God to Mary over Martha. Annie don’t remember, her, all the groups for all the kinds of democracy, each showing us how in a democracy the common man was the real aristo and master of his public servants. Schools for democracy. Irish-Americans for Democracy. Hoosiers for Democracy. Blacks for Democracy. I don’t know, me. The ’bots took over the hard work, and we were happy, us, to give it to them. The politicians started talking, them, about bread and circuses, and calling voters “sir” and “ma’am” and building the cafes and warehouses and scooter tracks and lodge build-ings. Annie don’t remember, her. She likes to cook and sew and she don’t spend all her time at races and brainie parties and lodge dances and lovers, like some, but she still ain’t never held an ax in her hand and swung it, or a hoe or a hatchet or a hammer. She don’t remember.

And then suddenly I knew, me, what an old fool I really was, and how wrong. Because I did swing heavy tools, me, on road crews in Georgia, when I was just a few years older than Lizzie. And when I wasn’t being an ass I could remember, me, how my back ached like it was going to break, and my skin blistered under the sun, and the blackflies bit, them, on the open sores where they’d bit before, and at night I was so tired and hurting, me, I’d cry for my mother into my pillow, where the older men couldn’t hear me. That’s the work we did, us, not some quiet clean assembling of donkey ’bots. I remembered the fear of losing that lousy job when there wasn’t no Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe, no Senator Mark Todd Ingalls meal chip, no Senator Calvin Guy Winthop Jay Street Apartment Block. The fear was like a knife behind your eyes when the foreman come over, him, on a Friday to say, “That’s it, Washington. You through,” and all you wanted to do was take that knife out from behind your eyes and drive it hard through his heart because now how you going to eat, pay the rent, stay alive. I remembered, me, how it was, all in a second after I opened my big mouth to Annie.

“You’re right,” I said, not looking at her. “There ain’t no Eden for us. I should go home now, me.”

“Stay,” Annie said kindly. “Please, Billy. In case there’s trouble at the cafe.”

Like anybody could break into a foamcast apartment. Or like a broke-down old man could be any real help to her or Lizzie. But I stayed.

In the darkness I could hear, me, how Annie and Lizzie moved in their bedrooms. Walking around, laying down, turning and settling into sleep. Sometime in the night the temperature must of dropped because I heard the Y-energy heater come on. I listened, me, to their breathing, a woman and a child, and pretty soon I slept.

But I dreamed about dangerous raccoons, sick and full of death.

Three

I never get used to the way other people don’t see colors and shapes. No. That’s not right. They see them. They just don’t see them, in the mind, where it matters. Other people can’t feel colors and shapes. Can’t become colors and shapes. Can’t see through the colors and shapes to the trueness of the world, as I do, in the shapes it makes in my mind.

That’s not it either.

Words are hard for me.

I think words were hard even before the operation that made me the Lucid Dreamer.

But the pictures are clear.

I can see myself as a dirty, dumb, hungry ten-year-old, traveling alone halfway across the country to Leisha Camden, the most famous Sleepless in the world. I can see her face as I ask her to make me “be somebody, me.” I can see her eyes when I boasted, “Someday, me, I’m gonna own Sanctuary.”

Sanctuary, the orbital where all the Sleepless except Leisha Camden and Kevin Baker had exiled themselves. My grandfather, a dumb laborer, had died building Sanctuary. And I thought, in my pathetic ten-year-old arrogance, that I could own it. I thought that if I learned to talk like donkeys and Sleepless, learned to behave like them, learned to think like them, I could have what they had. Money. Power. Choices.

When I picture that child now, the shapes in my mind are sharp and small, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The shapes are the pale lost gold of remembered summer twilight.

Miranda Sharifi will inherit a controlling interest in Sanctuary stock. When her parents, Sleepless, eventually die. If they ever do. “What belongs to me belongs to you, Drew,” Miranda said. She has said it several times. Miranda, a SuperSleepless, often explains things to me several times. She is very patient.

But even with her explanations, I don’t understand what Miri and the Supers are doing at Huevos Verdes. I thought I did eight years ago, when the island was created. But since then there have been a lot more words. I can repeat the words, but I can’t feel their shapes. They’re words without solid form: Auxotrophes. Al-losteric interactions. Nanotechnology. Photophosphorylation. Law-son conversion formulas. Neo-Marxist assisted evolution. Most of the time I just nod and smile.

But I am the Lucid Dreamer. When I float onstage and put a raucous Liver crowd into the Lucid Dreaming trance, and the music and words and combination of shapes flow from my subconscious through my Super-designed hardware, I touch their minds in places they didn’t know they had. They feel more deeply, exist more blissfully, become more whole.

For at least the length of the concert.

And when the concert’s over, my audience is subtly changed. They might not realize it. The donkeys who pay for my performances, considering them bread-and-circus occult trash for the masses, don’t realize it. Leisha doesn’t realize it. But I know I’ve controlled my audience, and changed them, and that I am the only one in the world with that power. The only one.

I try to remember that, when I am with Miranda.

Leisha Camden sat across the table from me and said, “Drew — what are they doing at Huevos Verdes?”

I sipped my coffee. On a plate were fresh genemod grapes and berries, with small buttery cookies smelling of lemon and ginger. There was fresh cream for the coffee. The library in Leisha’s New Mexico compound was airy and high-ceilinged, its light, earthy colors echoing the New Mexico desert beyond the big windows. Here and there among the monitors and bookshelves stood stark, graceful sculptures by artists I didn’t know. Some sort of delicate, old-fashioned music played.

I said, “What’s that music?”

“Claude de Courcy.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Her. A sixteenth-century composer for the lute.” Leisha said this impatiently, which only showed how tense she was. Usually the shapes she made in my mind were all clean and hard-edged, rigid, glowing with iridescence.

“Drew, you’re not answering me. What are Miri and the Supers doing at Huevos Verdes?”

“I’ve been answering you for eight years — I don’t know.”

“I still don’t believe you.”

I looked at her. Sometime in the last year she had cut her hair; maybe a woman got tired of caring for her hair after 106 years. She still looked thirty-five. Sleepless didn’t age, and so far they didn’t die, except through accidents or murder. Their bodies regenerated, an unexpected side effect of their bizarre genetic engineering. And the first generation of Sleepless, unlike Miranda’s, hadn’t been so complexly altered that physical appearance couldn’t be controlled. Leisha would be beautiful until she died.

She had raised me. She had educated me, to the limits of my intelligence, which might once have been normal but could never compare to the genemod-boosted IQ of donkeys, let alone Sleepless. When I became crippled in a freak accident, at the age of ten, Leisha had bought me my first powerchair. Leisha had loved me when I was a child, and had declined to love me when I became a man, and had given me to Miranda. Or Miranda to me.

She put both palms flat on the table and leaned forward. I recognized what was coming. Leisha was a lawyer. “Drew — you never knew my father. He died when I was in law school. I adored him. He was the most stubborn human being I ever met. Until I met Miri, anyway.”

The spiky pain-shapes again. When Miri came down from Sanctuary thirteen years ago, she came to Leisha Camden, the only Sleepless not financially or ethically bound to Miri’s horror of a grandmother. Miri came to Leisha for help in starting a new life. Just as I once had.

Leisha said, “My father was stubborn, generous, convinced he was always right. He had boundless energy. He was capable of incredible discipline, manic reliance on will, complete obsessive-ness when he wanted something. He was willing to bend any rules that stood in his way, but he wasn’t a tyrant. He was just implacable.

Does that sound like anybody you know? Does that sound like Miri?”

“Yes,” I said. Where do they get all these words, Leisha and Miri and the rest of them? But these particular words fit. “It sounds like Miranda.”

“And another thing about my father,” Leisha said, looking directly at me. “He wore people out. He wore out two wives, one daughter, four business partners, and, finally, his own heart. Just wore them out. He was capable of destroying what he passionately loved just by applying his own impossible standards toward improving it.”

I put down my coffee cup. Leisha put her palms flat on the table and leaned toward me.

“Drew — I’m asking for the last time. What is Miri doing at Huevos Verdes? You have to understand — I’m scared for her. Miri’s not like my father in one important way. She’s not a loner. She’s desperate for a community, growing up the way she did on Sanctuary, with Jennifer Sharifi for a grandmother… but that’s not the point. Or maybe it is. She yearns to belong the way only an outsider can. And she doesn’t. She knows that. She put her grandmother and that gang in jail, and so the Sleepless have rejected her. She’s so superior to the donkeys they can’t accept her on principle; she’s too much of a threat. And the idea of her trying to find common ground communicating with Livers is ludicrous. There’s no common language.”

I looked carefully away, out the window, at the desert. You never see that clear crystalline light anywhere else. Like the air itself, the light is both solid and yet completely transparent.

Leisha says, “All Miri has, outside of you, is twenty-six other SuperSleepless. That’s it. Do you know what makes a revolutionary, Drew? Being an outsider looking in, coupled with the idealistic desire to create the one true, just community, coupled with the belief that you can. Idealists on the inside don’t become revolutionaries. They just become reformers. Like me. Reformers think that things need a little improvement, but the basic structure is sound. Revolutionaries think about wiping everything out and starting all over. Miri’s a revolutionary. A revolutionary with Su-perintelligent followers, unimaginable technology, huge amounts of money, and passionate ideals. Do you wonder that I’m scared?

“What are they doing in Huevos Verdes?”

I couldn’t meet Leisha’s eyes. So many words pouring out of her, so much argument, so many complicated definitions. The shapes in my mind were dark, confused, angry, with dangerous trailing cables hard as steel. But they weren’t Leisha’s shapes. They were mine.

“Drew,” Leisha said, softly now, the outsider pleading with me. “Please tell me what she’s doing?”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

Two days later I sat in a skimmer speeding over the open sea toward Huevos Verdes. The sun on the Gulf of Mexico was blinding. My driver, a freckled kid of about fourteen whom I’d never seen before, was young enough to enjoy skimming water. He edged the gravboat’s nose downward to just touch the ocean, and blue-white spray flew. The kid grinned. The second time he did it, he suddenly turned his head to make sure I wasn’t getting wet, sitting in my powerchair in the back of the skimmer. Clearly he’d forgotten I was there. Sudden guilt and the new angle changed his face, and I recognized him. One of Kevin Baker’s greatgrandchildren.

“Not wet at all,” I said, and the kid grinned again. A Sleepless, of course. I could see that now in the shape of him in my mind: compact and bright-colored and brisk-moving. Born owning the world. And, of course, no security risk for Huevos Verdes.

But with their defenses, Huevos Verdes wouldn’t be risking security even if passengers were being ferried by the director of the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency.

I had worked hard to understand the triple-shield security around Huevos Verdes.

The first shield, a translucent shimmer, rose from the sea a quarter mile out from the island. Spherical, the shield extended underwater, cutting through the rock of the island itself, an all-enveloping egg. Terry Mwakambe, the Supers’ strangest genius, had invented the field. Nothing else like it existed anywhere in the world. It scanned DNA, and nothing not recorded in the data banks got through. Not dolphins, not navy frogmen, not seagulls, not drifting algae. Nada.

The second shield, a hundred yards beyond, stopped all nonliving matter not accompanied by DNA that was stored in the data banks. No unmanned ’bot vessel carrying anything — sensors, bombs, spores — passed this field. No matter how small. If there wasn’t a registered DNA code accompanying it, it didn’t get through. We skimmed through the shield’s faint blue shimmer as if through a soap bubble.

The third shield, at the docks, was manually controlled and visually monitored. The registered DNA had to be alive and talking. I don’t know how they checked for a drugged state. Nothing touched us, at least nothing I felt. The design was Terry Mwa-kambe’s. The monitoring was shared by everybody, in shifts. The paranoia was Miri’s. Unlike her grandmother, she didn’t want the Supers to secede permanently from the United States. But like her grandmother, she’d nonetheless constructed a defended refuge that government officials couldn’t touch. A sanctuary. She’d just done it better than Jennifer Sharifi had.

“Permission to dock,” the freckled kid said seriously. He gave a little half-mocking salute and grinned. This was still an adventure for him.

“Hi, Jason,” Christy Demetrios said. “Hello, Drew. Come on in.”

Jason Reynolds. That was the kid’s name. I remembered now. Kevin’s granddaughter Alexandra’s son. Something about him tugged at my memory, a nervous quick shape like a string of beads. I couldn’t remember.

Jason docked the boat expertly — they all did everything expertly — and we went ashore, Jason with quick bounds and me in my powerchair.

A hundred feet of genemod greenery, flowers and bushes and trees, all of it part of the project. Plants grew right to the water’s edge. When the sea threatened, a Y-shield switched on, capable of protecting even the most fragile genemod rose from a hurricane. Beyond the garden, the compound walls rose abruptly, thin as paper, stronger than diamonds. Miri told me they were only a dozen molecules thick, constructed by second-generation nano-machines that had themselves been made from nanomachines. In my mind I saw the walls’ glossy whiteness, to which no dirt could adhere, as hot dark red motion, thick and unstoppable as lava.

Nothing here was stoppable.

“Drew!” Miri ran to meet me, wearing white shorts and a loose shirt, her masses of dark hair tied back with a red ribbon. She had put on red lipstick. She still looked more like sixteen than twenty-nine. She threw her arms around me in my chair, and I felt the quick beating of her heart against my cheek. Super metabolism is revved up a lot higher than ours. I kissed her.

She murmured into my hair, “This time was too long. Four months!”

“It was a good tour, Miri.”

“I know. I watched sixteen performances on the grid, and the performance stats look good.”

She nestled into my lap. Jason and Christy had discreetly vanished. We were alone in the bright, newly created garden. I stroked Miri’s hair, not wanting to hear just yet about performance stats.

Miri said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I kissed her again, this time to keep from looking at her face. It would be blinding, white hot with love. It always was, when she saw me. Always. For thirteen years. He was capable of complete obsessiveness, Leisha had said about her father. He just wore people out.

“I miss you so much when you’re away, Drew.”

“I miss you, too.” This was true.

“I wish you could stay longer than a week.”

“Me, too.” This was not true. But there were no words.

She looked at me, then, a long moment. Something shifted behind her eyes. Carefully, so as not to hurt my crippled legs, she climbed off my lap, held out her hands, and smiled. “Come see the lab work.”

I recognized this for what it was: Miri offering me the best she had. The most valuable present in the world. The thing I desperately wanted to be part of, even though I wouldn’t understand it, because not to be part of it was to be unimportant. Insignificant. She was offering me what I needed most.

I couldn’t do less.

I pulled her back onto my lap, forced my hands to move over her breasts. “Later. Can we be alone first…”

Her face was the curving shape of joy, too bright to be any color at all.

Miri’s bedroom, like every other bedroom at La Isla, was spartan. Bed, dresser, terminal, an oval green rug made of some soft material Sara Cerelli had invented. On the dresser was a green pottery vase of fragrant genemod flowers I didn’t recognize. These people, who could command all luxury, rarely indulged in any. The only jewelry Miri ever wore was the ring I had given her, a slim gold band set with rubies. I had never seen the other Sleepless wear any jewelry at all. All their extravagances, Miri had told me once, were mental. Even the light was ordinary: flat, without shadows.

I thought of the library in Leisha’s New Mexico house.

Miri unbuttoned her shirt. Her breasts looked the same as they had at sixteen: full, milky, tipped with pale brown aureoles. She pulled down her shorts. Her hips were full, her waist chunky. Her pubic hair was bushy and wiry and the same black as the hair on her head, where it was confined by a red ribbon. I reached up and pulled the ribbon free.

“Oh, Drew, I’ve missed you so much…”

I hoisted myself from my powerchair to her narrow bed, and then pulled her on top of me. Her breasts spread over my chest: soft on hard. On tour or not, I exercised my upper body fanatically, to make up for my crippled legs. Miri loved that. She liked to feel my arms crush her against me. She liked my thrusts to be hard, definite, even ramming. I tried to give her that, but this time I stayed soft.

She looked at me questioningly, brushing the wild black hair back from her face. I didn’t meet her eyes. She reached down and took me in her hand, massaging gently.

This had happened only a few times, all of them recent. Miri massaged harder.

“Drew…”

“Give me a minute, love.”

She smiled uncertainly. I tried to concentrate, and then not to concentrate.

“Drew…”

“Shhhh… just a minute.”

The gray shapes of failure snapped their teeth in my mind.

I closed my eyes, pulled Miri closer, and thought of Leisha. Leisha in the New Mexico twilight, a dim golden shape against the sunset. Leisha singing me to sleep when I was ten years old. Leisha running across the desert, slim and swift, tripping in a kangaroo-rat hole and twisting her ankle. I had carried her back to the compound, her body light and sweet in my eighteen-year-old arms. Leisha at her sister’s funeral, tears making her eyes reflect all light, naked to sorrow. Leisha naked, as I had never seen her …

“AAhhhhhh,” Miri crooned triumphantly.

I rolled us both over, so that I was on top. Miri preferred it that way. I thrust hard, then harder. She liked it really rough. Eventually I felt her shudder under me, and I let myself go.

Afterward, I lay still, my eyes closed, Miri curled against me with her head on my shoulder. For a brief piercing moment I remembered how love was between us a decade ago, in the beginning, when just the touch of her hand could turn me shivery and hot. I tried not to think, not to feel any shapes at all.

But making a void in the mind is impossible. I suddenly remembered the thing that had tugged at my mind about Jason Reynolds, Kevin Baker’s great-grandson. Last year, the kid had nearly drowned. He had taken a skimmer out on the Gulf straight into Hurricane Julio. Huevos Verdes had found him only because Terry Mwakambe had developed some esoteric homing devices, and Jason had been brought back from death only by using on him some part of the project that hadn’t even been tested yet.

When he revived, Jason admitted knowing the hurricane was coming. He wasn’t trying to commit suicide, he said earnestly. Everyone believed him; Sleepless don’t commit suicide. They’re too much in love with their own minds to end them. With all of them hanging over his bed, his parents and Kevin and Leisha and Miri and Christy and Terry, Jason had said in a small voice that he hadn’t known the sea would get quite that rough quite that fast. He just wanted to feel the boat get pitched around a lot. He just wanted to watch the huge, angry sky, and feel the rain lash him. He, a Sleepless, just wanted to feel vulnerable.

Miranda whispered, “Nobody ever makes me feel like you do, Drew. Nobody.”

I kept my eyes closed, pretending to sleep.

In the late afternoon we went to the labs. Sara Cerelli and Jonathan Markowitz were there, dressed in shorts, barefoot. One of the requirements of the project was that at no stage did anything need to be sterile.

“Hello, Drew,” Jon said. Sara nodded. Their concentration on their work made closed, muddy shapes in my mind.

A blob of living tissue sat in a shallow open tray on a lab bench, connected to machines by slender tubes and even more slender cables. Dozens of display screens ringed the rooms. Nothing on any of them was comprehensible to me. The tissue in the tray was flesh-colored, a light dun, but no particular form. It looked as if it could change shape, oozing into something else. On my last visit, Miri had told me it couldn’t do that. No Sleepless are squeamish. I’m not either, but the shapes that crawled in and out of my mind as I looked at the thing were pale and speckled and smelled of dampness, although diamond-precise on their edges. Like the nanobuilt walls of Huevos Verdes.

I said, stupidly, “It’s alive.”

Jon smiled. “Oh, yes. But not sentient. At least not. . .” He trailed off, and I knew he couldn’t find the right words. It should have made a bond between us. It didn’t. Jon couldn’t find the right words because any words that he picked would be too easy, too incomplete, for his ideas — and still too hard for me to follow. Miri had told me that Jon, more than any of the others except Terry Mwakambe, thought in mathematics. But it was the same with all of them, even Miri: her speech was a quarter beat too slow. I had caught myself talking like that only a month ago. It had been to Kevin Baker’s four-year-old great-grandson.

Miri tried. “The tissue is a macro-level organic computer, Drew, with limited organ-simulation programming, including nervous, cardiovascular, and gastrointestinal systems. We’ve added Strethers self-monitoring feedback loops and submolecular, self-reproducing, single-arm assemblers. It can … it can experience programmed biological processes and report on them minutely. But it has neither sentience nor volition.”

“Oh,” I said.

The thing moved a little in its tray. I looked away. Miri saw, of course. She sees everything.

She said quietly, “We’re getting closer. That’s what it means. Ever since the breakthrough with the bacteriorhodopsin, we’re getting much closer.”

I made myself look at the thing again. Faint capillaries pulsed below the surface. The pale, damp shapes in my mind crawled, like maggots over rock.

Miri said, “If we pour a nutrient mixture into the tray, Drew, it can select and absorb what it needs and break it down for energy.”

“What kind of nutrient mixture?” I had learned enough on my last visit to be able to ask this question.

Miri made a face. “Glucose-protein, mostly. There’s still a way to go.”

“Have you solved the problem of getting nitrogen directly from the air?” I had memorized this question. It made a tinny, hollow shape in my mind. But Miri smiled her luminous smile.

“Yes and no. We’ve engineered the microorganisms, but tissue receptivity is still foundering on the Tollers-Hilbert factor, especially in the epidermal fibrils. And on the nitrogen receptor-mediated endocytosis problem — no progress.”

“Oh,” I said.

“We’ll solve it,” Miri said, a quarter beat too slow. “It’s just a matter of designing the right enzymes.”

Sara said, “We call the thing Galwat.” She and Jon laughed.

Miri said quickly, “For Galatea, you know. And Erin Galway. And John Gait, that fictional character who wanted to stop the motor of the world. And, of course, Worthington’s transference equations…”

“Of course,” I said. I had never heard of Galatea or Erin Galway or John Gait or Worthington.

“Galatea’s from a Greek myth. A sculptor—”

“Let me see my performance stats now,” I said. Sara and Jon glanced at each other. I smiled and held out my hand to Miri. She grasped it hard, and I felt hers tremble.

(Quick, fluttery shapes filled my mind, fine as paper. A dozen molecular levels thick. They settled on a rock, rough and hard and old as the earth. The fluttering grew faster and faster, the fine light paper grew red hot, and the rock shattered. At its heart was frozen milky whiteness, pulsing with faint veins.)

Miri said, “Don’t you want to see Nikos’ and Allen’s latest work on the Cell Cleaner? It’s coming along much faster than this! And Christy and Toshio have had a real breakthrough in error-checking protein-assembler programming—”

I said, “Let me see the performance stats now.”

She nodded once, twice, four times. “The stats look good, Drew. But there’s a funny jag in the data in the second movement of your concert. Terry says you need to change direction there. It’s rather complicated.”

“Then you’ll explain it to me,” I said evenly.

Her smile was dazzling. Again Sara and Jon glanced at each other, and said nothing.

The first time Miri showed me how the Supers communicated with each other, I couldn’t believe it. It was thirteen years ago, right after they came down from Sanctuary. She had led me into a room with twenty-seven holostages on twenty-seven terminal desks. Each had been programmed to “speak” a different language, based on English but modified to the thought strings of its owner. Miri, sixteen years old, had explained one of her own thought strings to me.

“Suppose you say a sentence to me. Any single sentence.”

“You have beautiful breasts.”

She blushed, a maroon mottling of her dark skin. She did have beautiful breasts, and beautiful hair. They offset a little the big head, knobby chin, awkward gait. She wasn’t pretty, and she was too intelligent not to know it. I wanted to make her feel pretty.

She said, “Pick another sentence.”

“No. Use that sentence.”

She did. She spoke it to the computer, and the holostage began to form a three-dimensional shape of words, images, and symbols linked to each other by glowing green lines.

“See, it brings out the associations my mind makes, based on its store of past thought strings and on algorithms for the way I think. From just a few words it extrapolates, and predicts, and mirrors. The programming is called ‘mind mirroring,’ in fact. It captures about ninety-seven percent of my thoughts about ninety-two percent of the time, and then I can add the rest. And the best part is—”

“You think like this for every sentence? Every single sentence?” Some of the associations were obvious: “breasts” linked to a nursing baby, for instance. But why was the baby linked to something called “Hubble’s constant,” and why was the Sistine chapel in that string? And a name I didn’t recognize: Chidiock Tichbourne?

“Yes,” Miri said. “But the best part—”

“You all think this way? All the Supers?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Although Terry and Jon and Ludie think mostly in mathematics. They’re younger than the rest of us, you know — they represent the next cycle of IQ reengineering.”

I looked at the complex pattern of Miri’s thoughts and reactions. “You have beautiful breasts.”

I would never know what my words actually meant to her, in all their layers. Not any of my words. Ever.

“Does this scare you, Drew?”

She looked levelly at me. I could feel her fear, and her resolution. The moment was important. It grew and grew in my mind, a looming white wall to which nothing could adhere, until I found the right answer.

“I think in shapes for every sentence.”

Her smile changed her whole face, opening and lighting it. I had said the right thing. I looked at the glowing green complexity of the holostage, a slowly turning three-dimensional globe jammed with tiny images and equations and, most of all, words. So many complicated words.

“We’re the same, then,” Miri said joyfully. And I didn’t correct her.

“The best part,” Miri had burbled on, completely at ease now, “is that after the extrapolated thought string forms and is adjusted as necessary, the master program translates it into everybody else’s thought patterns and it appears that way on their holostage. On all twenty-seven terminals simultaneously. So we can bypass words and get the full ideas we’re each thinking across to each other more efficiently. Well, not the full ideas. There’s always something lost in translation, especially to Terry and Jon and Ludie. But it’s so much better than just speech, Drew. The way your concerts are better than just unassisted daydreaming.”

Daydreaming. The only kind of dreaming SuperSleepless knew anything about. Until me.

When a Sleepless went into the lucid dreaming trance, the result was different from when a Liver did. Or even a donkey. Livers and donkeys can dream at night. They have that connection with their unconscious, and I direct and intensify it in ways that feel good to them: peaceful and stimulated both. While lucid dreaming, they feel — sometimes for the first time in their lives — whole. I take them farther along the road into their true selves, deeper behind the waking veil. And I direct the dreams to the sweetest of the many things waiting there.

But Sleepless don’t have night dreams. Their road to the unconscious has been genetically severed. When Sleepless go into a lucid dreaming trance, Miri told me, they see “insights” they wouldn’t have seen before. They climb around their endless jungle of words, and come out of the trance with intuitive solutions to intellectual problems. Geniuses have often done that during sleep, Miri said. She gave me examples of great scientists. I have forgotten the names.

Looking at the complex verbal design on her holostage, I could feel it in my mind. It made a shape like a featureless pale stone, cool with regret. Miri would never see this shape in my mind. Worse, she would never know she didn’t see it. She thought, because we both saw differently from donkeys, that we were alike.

I had wanted to be part of what was happening at Huevos Verdes. Already, even then, I could see that the project would change the world. Anyone not an actor in the project could only be acted on.

“Yes, Miri,” I said, smiling at her, “we’re the same.”

On a worktable in yet another lab, Miri spread out the performance stats from my concert tour. The hard copy was for me; Supers always analyzed directly from screens or holos. I wondered how much had been left out or simplified for my benefit. Terry Mwa-kambe, a small dark man with long wild hair, perched motionless on the open windowsill. Behind him the ocean sparkled deep blue in the waning light.

“See, here,” Miri said, “midway during your performance of ‘The Eagle.’ The attention-level measurements rose, and the at-titudinal changes right after the performance were pretty dramatic in the direction of risk taking. But then the follow-up stats show that by a week later, the subjects’ attitudinal changes had eroded more than they did for your other performance pieces. And by a month later, almost all risk-taking changes have disappeared.”

When I give a concert, they hook volunteer fans to machines that measure their brain wave changes, breathing, pupil variations — a lot of things. Before and after the concert the volunteers take virtual-reality tests to measure attitudes. The volunteers are paid. They don’t know what the tests are for, or who wants them. Neither do the people who administer the tests. It’s all done blind, through one of Kevin Baker’s many software subsidiaries, which form an impenetrable legal tangle. The results are transmitted to the master computer at Huevos Verdes. When the stats say so, I change what and how I perform.

I have stopped calling myself an artist.

“ ‘The Eagle’ just isn’t working,” Miri said. “Terry wants to know if you can compose a different piece that draws on subconscious risk-taking imagery. He wants it by your broadcast a week from Sunday.”

“Maybe Terry should just write it for me.”

“You know none of us can do that.” Then her eyes sharpened and her mouth softened. “You’re the Lucid Dreamer, Drew. None of us can do what you do. If we seem to be … directing you too much, it’s only because the project requires it. The whole thing would be impossible without you.”

I smiled at her. She looked so concerned, filled with so much passion for her work. So resolute. Implacable, Leisha had said of her father. Willing to bend anything that stood in his way.

She said, “You do believe that we know how important you are, Drew? Drew?”

I said, “I know, Miri.”

Her face broke into shards of light, like swords in my mind. “Then you’ll compose the new piece?”

“Risk taking,” I said. “Presented as desirable, attractive, urgent. Right. By a week from Sunday.”

“It’s really necessary, Drew. We’re still months away from a prototype in the lab, but the country…” She picked up another set of hard copy. “Look. Gravtrain breakdowns up eight percent over last month. Reports to the FCC of communications interruptions — up another three percent. Bankruptcies up five percent. Food movement — this is crucial — performing sixteen percent less efficiently. Industrial indicators falling at the same dismal rate. Voter confidence in the basement. And the duragem situation—”

For once her voice lost its quarter-beat-behind slowness. “Look at these graphs, Drew! We can’t even locate the origin of the duragem breakdowns — there’s no one epicenter. And when you run the data through the Lawson conversion formulas—”

“Yes,” I said, to escape the Lawson conversion formulas. “I believe you. It’s bad out there and getting worse.’

“Not just worse — apocalyptical.”

My mind fills with crimson fire and navy thunder, surrounding a crystal rose behind an impenetrable shield. Miri grew up on Sanctuary. Necessities and comforts were a given. All the time, for everybody, without question or thought. Unlike me, Miranda never saw a baby die of neglect, a wife beaten by a despairing and drunk husband, a family existing on unflavored soysynth, a toilet that didn’t work for days. She didn’t know these things were sur-vivable. How would she recognize an apocalypse?

I don’t say this aloud.

Terry Mwakambe jumped down from the windowsill. He hadn’t said a single word the whole time we’d been in the room. His thought strings, Miri said, consisted almost entirely of equations. But now he said, “Lunch?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Lunch! The one tie between Terry Mwakambe and Drew Arlen: food. Surely even Terry and Miri must see the joke, standing here in this room, this building, this project. . . Lunch!

Neither of them laughed. I felt the shape of their bewilderment. It was a rain of tiny, tear-shaped droplets, falling on everything, falling on the apocalypse in my mind, falling on me, light and cold and smothering as snow.

Four

One night in another lifetime Eugene, who came before Rex and after Claude, asked me what the United States reminded me of. That was the sort of question to which Gene was given: inviting metaphorical grandiosity, which in turn invited his scorn. I replied that the United States had always seemed to me like some powerful innocent beast, lushly beautiful, with the cranial capacity of a narrow-headed deer. Look how it stretches its sleek muscles in the sunlight. Look how it bounds high. Look how it runs gracefully straight into the path of the oncoming train. This answer had the virtue of being so inflatedly grandiose that to object to it on those grounds became superfluous. It was beside the point that the answer was also true.

Certainly from my gravrail I could see enough of the lush, mangled carcass. We’d come over the Rockies at quarter speed so the Liver passengers could enjoy the spectacular view. Purple mountain majesties and all that. Nobody else even glanced out the window. I stayed glued to it, savoring all the asinine superiority of genuine awe.

At Garden City, Kansas, I changed to a local, zipping through gorgeous countryside at 250 miles an hour, crawling through crappy little Liver towns at nothing an hour. “Why not justly to Washington?” Colin Kowalski had said, incredulous. “You’re not supposed to be pretending to be a Liver, after all.” I’d told him I wanted to see the Liver towns whose integrity I was defending against potential artificial genetic corruption. He hadn’t liked my answer any better than Gene had.

Well, now I was seeing them. The mangled carcass.

Each town looked the same. Streets fanning out from the grav-rail station. Houses and apartment blocks, some pure foamcast and some foamcast added onto older buildings of brick or even wood. The foamcast colors were garish, pink and marigold and cobalt and a very popular green like lobster guts. Aristocratic Liver leisure did not confer aristocratic taste.

Each town boasted a communal cafe the size of an airplane hangar, a warehouse for goods, various lodge buildings, a public bath, a hotel, sports fields, and a deserted-looking school. Everything was plastered with holosigns: Supervisor S. R. ElectMe Warehouse. Senator Frances Fay FamilyMoney Cafe. And beyond the town, barely visible from the gravrail, the Y-energy plant and shielded robofactories that kept it all going. And, of course, the scooter track, inevitable as death.

Somewhere in Kansas a family climbed onto the train and plunked themselves down on the seats across from me. Daddy, Mommy, three little Livers, two with runny noses, everybody in need of a diet and gym. Rolls of fat bounced under Mommy Liver’s bright yellow jacks. Her glance brushed me, traveled on, reversed like radar.

“Hey,” I said.

She scowled and nudged her mate. He looked at me and didn’t scowl. The cubs gazed silently, the boy — he was about twelve — with a look like his daddy’s.

Colin had warned me against even trying to pass for a Liver; he said there’d be no way I could fool Sleepless. I’d said I didn’t want to fool Sleepless; I only wanted to blend into the local flora. He said I couldn’t. Apparently he was right. Mommy Liver took one look at my genemod-long legs, engineered face, and Anne Boleyn neck that cost my father a little trust fund, and she knew. My poison-green jacks, soda-can jewelry (very popular; you made it yourself), and shit-brown contact lenses made not a bit of difference to her. Daddy Son weren’t so sure, but, then, they didn’t really care. Breast size, not genescan, was on their mind.

“I’m Darla Jones, me,” I said cheerfully. I had a lock-pocket full of various chips under various names, some of which the GSEA had provided, some of which they knew nothing about. It’s a mistake to let the agency provide all of your cover. The time might come when you want cover from them. All of my identities were documented in federal databases, looking as if they had long pasts, thanks to a talented friend the GSEA also knew nothing about. “Going to Washington, me.”

“Arnie Shaw,” the man said eagerly. “The train, it break down yet?”

“Nah,” I said. “Probably will, though, it.”

“What can you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Keeps things interesting.”

“Arnie,” Mommy Liver said sharply, interrupting this mild conversational excursion, “back here, us. There’s more seats.” She gave me a look that would scorch plastisynth.

“Plenty of seats up here, Dee.”

“Arnie!”

“ ‘Bye,” I said. They walked away, the woman muttering under her breath. Bitch. I should let the SuperSleepless turn her descendants into four-armed tailless guard dogs. Or whatever they had in mind. I leaned my head against the back of the seat and closed my eyes. We slowed down for another Liver town.

As soon as we left it, the littlest Shaw was back. A girl of about five, she crept along the aisle like a kitten. She had a pert little face and long dirty brown hair.

“You got a pretty bracelet, you.” She looked longingly at the soda-can atrocity on my wrist, all curling jangles of some lightweight alloy bendable as warm wax. Some besotted voter had sent it and the matching earrings to David when he was running for state senator. He’d kept it as a joke.

I slipped the bracelet off my wrist. “You want it, you?”

“Really?” Her face shone. She snatched the bracelet from my outstretched fingers and scampered back down the aisle, blue shirt-tail flapping. I grinned. Too bad kittens inevitably grow up into cats.

A minute later Mommy Liver loomed. “Keep your bracelet, you. Desdemona, she got her own jewelry!”

Desdemona. Where do they ever hear these names? Shakespeare doesn’t play at scooter tracks.

The woman looked at me from very hard eyes. “Look, you keep, you, to your kind, and we keep to ours. Better that way all around. You understand, you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and popped out my lenses. My eyes are an intense, genemod violet. I gazed at her calmly, hands folded on my lap.

She waddled away, muttering. I caught the words, “These people…”

“If I find I can’t pass for a Liver,” I’d told Colin, “I’ll pass for a semi-crazy donkey trying to pass for a Liver. I wouldn’t be the first donkey to go native. You know, the working-class person pathetically trying to pass for an aristo. Hide in plain sight.”

Colin had shrugged. I’d thought he already regretted recruiting me, but then I realized that he hoped my antics would draw attention away from the real GSEA agents undoubtedly heading for Washington. The Federal Forum for Science and Technology, popularly known as the Science Court, was hearing Market Request no. 1892-A. What made this market request different from numbers 1 through 1891 was that it was being proposed by Huevos Verdes Corporation. For the first time in ten years, the Super-Sleepless were seeking government approval to market a patented genemod invention in the United States. They didn’t have a fish’s chance on the moon, of course, but it was still pretty interesting. Why now? What were they after? And would any of the twenty-seven show up personally at the Science Court hearing?

And if anybody did, would I be able to keep him or her under surveillance?

I gazed out the train window, at the robo-tended fields. Wheat, or maybe soy — I wasn’t sure what either looked like, growing. In ten minutes, Desdemona was back. Her face appeared slowly between my outstretched legs; she’d crawled along the floor, under the seats, through the mud and spilled food and debris. Desdemona raised her little torso between my knees, balancing herself with one sticky hand on my seat. The other hand shot out and closed on my bracelet.

I unfastened it and gave it to her again. The front of her blue jacks was filthy. “No cleaning ’bot on this train?”

She clutched the bracelet and grinned. “It died, him.”

I laughed. The next minute the gravrail broke down.

I was thrown to the floor, where I swayed on hands and knees, waiting to die. Under me machinery shrieked. The train shuddered to a stop but didn’t tip over.

“Damn!” Desdemona’s father shouted. “Not again!”

“Can we get some ice cream, us?” a child whined. “We’re stopped now!”

“Third time this week! Fucking donkey train!”

“We never get no ice cream!”

Apparently the trains didn’t tip over. Apparently I wasn’t going to die. Apparently this shrieking machinery was routine. I followed everyone else off the train.

Into another world.

A fever wind blew across the miles of prairie: warm, whispering, intoxicating. I was staggered by the size of the sky. Endless bright blue sky above, endless bright golden fields below. And all of it caressed by that blood-warm wind, impregnated with sunlight, gravid with fragrance. I, a city lover to equal Sir Christoper Wren, had had no idea. No holo had ever prepared me. I resisted the mad idea to kick off my shoes and dig my toes into the dark earth.

Instead I followed the grumbling Livers along the tracks to the front of the train. They gathered around the holoprojection of an engineer, even though I could hear his canned speech being broadcast inside each car. The holo “stood” on the grass, looking authoritative and large. The franchise owner was a friend of mine; he believed that seven-foot-high swarthy-skinned males were the ideal projection to promote order.

“There is no need to be alarmed. This is a temporary malfunction. Please return to the comfort and safety of your car, and in a few moments complimentary food and drinks will be served. A repair technician is on the way from the railroad franchise. There is no need to be alarmed—”

Desdemona kicked the holo. Her foot passed through him and she smirked, a pointless saucy smile of triumph. The holo looked down at her. “Don’t do that again, kid — you hear me, you?” Des-demona’s eyes widened and she flew behind her mother’s legs.

“Don’t be so scaredy, you — it’s just interactive,” Mommy Liver snapped. “Let go, you, of my legs!”

I winked at Desdemona, who stared at me sullenly and then grinned, rattling our bracelet.

“—to the comfort and safety of your car, and in a few moments complimentary food—”

More people approached the engine, all but two complaining loudly. The first was an older woman: tall, plain-faced, and angled as a tesseract. She wore not jacks but a long tunic knitted of yarn in subtle, muted shades of green, too uneven to be machine-made. Her earrings were simple polished green stones. I had never before seen a Liver with taste.

The other anomaly was a short young man with silky red hair, pale skin, and a head slightly too large for his body.

The back of my neck tingled.

Inside the cars, server ’bots emerged from their storage compartments and offered trays of freshly synthesized soy snacks, various drinks, and sunshine in mild doses. “Compliments of State Senator Cecilia Elizabeth Dawes,” it said over and over. “So nice to have you aboard.” This diversion took half an hour. Then everyone went back outside and resumed complaining.

“The kind of service you get these days—”

“—vote next time, me, for somebody else — anybody else—”

“—a temporary malfunction. Please return to the comfort and safety of—”

I walked over the scrub grass to the edge of the closest field. The Sleepless-in-inadequate-disguise stood watching the crowd, observing as pseudocasually as I was. So far he had taken no special notice of me. The field was bounded by a low energy fence, presumably to keep the agrobots inside. They ambled slowly between the rows of golden wheat, doing whatever it was they did. I stepped over the fence and picked one up. It hummed softly, a dark sphere with flexible tentacles. On the bottom a label said CANCO ROBOTS/ LOS ANGELES. CanCo had been in the Wall Street Journal On-Line last week; they were in trouble. Their agrobots had suddenly begun to break down all over the country. The franchise was going under.

The warm wind whispered seductively through the sweet-scented wheat.

I sat on the ground, cross-legged, my back to the energy fence. Around me adults settled into games of cards or dice. Children raced around, screaming. A young couple brushed past me and disappeared into the wheat, sex in their eyes. The older woman sat by herself reading a book, an actual book. I couldn’t imagine where she’d gotten it. And the big-headed Sleepless, if that’s what he/she was, stretched out on the ground, closed his eyes, and pretended to sleep. I grimaced. I’ve never liked self-serving irony. Not in other people.

After two hours, the server ’bots again brought out food and drinks. “Compliments of State Senator Cecilia Elizabeth Dawes.

So nice to have you aboard.” How much soysynth did a Liver gravrail carry? I had no idea.

The sun threw long shadows. I sauntered to the woman reading. “Good book?”

She looked up at me, measuring. If Colin had sent me to the Science Court in Washington, he probably had sent some legitimate agents as well. And if Big Head was a Sleepless, he might have his own personal tail. However, something in the reading woman’s face convinced me it wasn’t her. She wasn’t genemod, but it wasn’t that. You can find donkey families who refuse even permitted genemods, and then go on existing very solidly corporate but on the fringe socially. She wasn’t that, either. She was something else.

“It’s a novel,” the woman said neutrally. “Jane Austen. Are you surprised there are still Livers who can read? Or want to?”

“Yes.” I smiled conspiratorally, but she only gave me a level stare and went back to her book. A renegade donkey didn’t arouse her contempt, or indignation, or fawning. I genuinely didn’t interest her. I felt unwitting respect.

Apparently I didn’t know as much about the variety of Livers as I’d thought.

The sunset ravished me. The sky turned lucid and vulnerable, then streaked with subtle colors. The colors grew aggressive, followed by wan and valedictory pastels. Then it grew cold and dark. An entire love affair, empyrean, in thirty minutes. Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David.

No repair technician appeared. The prairie cooled rapidly; we all climbed back onto the train, which turned on its lights and heat. I wondered what would have happened if those systems — or the server ’bots — had failed as well.

Someone said, not loudly and to no one in particular, “My meal chip, it came late from the capital last quarter.”

Pause. I sat up straighter; this was a new tone. Not complaint. Something else.

“My town got no more jacks. The warehouse donkey says, him, that there’s a national shortage.”

Pause.

“We’re going, us, on this train to get my old mother from Missouri. Heat blower in her building broke and nobody else took her in. She got no heat, her.”

Pause.

Someone said, “Does anybody know, them, how far it is to the next town? Maybe we could walk, us.”

“We ain’t supposed to walk, us! They supposed to fix our fucking train!” Mommy Liver, exploding in rage and saliva.

The quiet tone was over. “That’s right! We’re voters, us!”

“My kids can’t walk to no next town—”

“What are you, a fucking donkey?”

I saw the big-headed man gazing from face to face.

The holo of the tall swarthy engineer appeared suddenly inside the car, standing in the center aisle. “Ladies and Gentlemen, Morrison Gravrail apologizes once more for the delay in service. To make your wait more enjoyable, we are privileged to present a new entertainment production, one not yet released to the holo-grids, compliments of Congressman Wade Keith Finley. Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer, in his brand-new concert ‘The Warrior.’ Please watch from the windows on the left side of the gravrail.”

Livers looked at one another; instantly happy babble replaced rage. Evidently this was something new in breakdown diversions. I calculated the cost of a portable holoprojector capable of holos big enough to be seen from windows the length of a train, plus the cost of an unreleased vid from the country’s hottest Liver entertainer. I compared the total to the cost of a competent repair team. Something was very wrong here. I knew nothing about Hollywood, but an unreleased concert from Drew Arlen must be worth millions. Why was a gravrail carrying it around as emergency diversion to keep the natives from getting too restless?

The big-headed man quietly watched his fellow travelers press their faces to the left windows.

A long rod snaked from the roof of the car behind ours, which sat in the center of the train. The rod rose at an obtuse angle to the ground and extended almost to the wheat field. Light fanned from the end of the rod downward, forming a pyramid. Everyone went “Ooooohhhhh!” Portable projectors never deliver the clarity of a good stationary unit, but I didn’t think this audience would care. The holo of Drew Arlen appeared in the center of the pyramid, and everyone went “Oooooohhhhhh” again.

I slipped out of the train.

In the dark and up close, the holo looked even stranger: a fifteen-foot-high, fuzzy-edged man sitting in a powerchair, backed by miles of unlit prairie. Above, cold stars glittered, immensely high. I unfolded a plasticloth jacket from the pocket of my jacks.

The holo said, “I’m Drew Arlen. The Lucid Dreamer. Let your dreams be true.”

I’d seen Arlen perform live once, in San Francisco, when I’d been slumming with friends. I was the only person in the Congressman Paul Jennings Messura Concert Hall not affected. Natural hypnotic resistance, my doctor said. Your brain just doesn’t possess the necessary fine-tuned biochemistry. Do you dream at night?

I have never been able to recall a single one of my dreams.

The pyramidal light around Arlen changed somehow, flickered oddly. Subliminal patterns. The patterns coalesced slowly into intricate shapes and Arlen’s voice, low and intimate, began a story.

“Once there was a man of great hopes and no power. When he was young, he wanted everything. He wanted strength, him, that would make all other men respect him. He wanted sex, him, that would make his bones melt with satisfaction. He wanted love. He wanted excitement. He wanted, him, for every day to be filled with challenges only he could meet. He wanted—”

Oh, please. Talk about crudely tapping into basic desires. And even some donkeys called this stomp an artist.

The shapes were compelling, though. They slid past Arlen’s powerchair, folding and unfolding, some seemingly clear and some flickering at the very edge of conscious perception. I felt my blood flow more strongly in my veins, that sudden surge of life you sometimes get with spring, or sex, or challenge. I was not immune to subliminals. These must have been wicked.

I peered into the gravrail car. Livers stood motionless with their faces pressed to the glass. Desdemona watched with her mouth open, a small pink pocket. Even Mommy Liver’s face hinted at the young girl she must have been on some forgotten Liver summer night decades ago.

I turned back to Arlen, still spinning his simple story. His voice was musical. The story was a sort of pseudo-folk tale without subtlety, without resonance, without detail, without irony, without art. The words were merely the bare bones over which the graphics shimmered, calling forth the real meaning from the watchers’ hypnotized minds. I’d been told that each person experienced a Drew Arlen concert differently, depending on the symbols freed and brought forward from whatever powerful childhood experiences stocked each mind. I’d been told that, but I hadn’t believed it.

I walked along the outside of the train, in the dark, scanning the Liver faces behind the windows. Some were wet with tears. Whatever they were experiencing, it looked more intense than anything I had felt in the Sistine chapel, at Lewis Darrell’s King Lear, during the San Francisco Philharmonic’s Beethoven festival. It looked more intense than sunshine, or even nervewash. As intense as orgasm.

Nobody regulated Lucid Dreaming. Arlen had a host of shoddy imitators. They never lasted long. Whatever Drew Arlen was doing, he was the only person in the whole world who knew how to do it. Most donkeys ignored him: a manipulative con artist, having as much to do with real art as those holos of the Virgin Mary that suddenly “manifested” during religious festivals.

“. . . leaving that home he loved,” Aden’s low, musical voice said, “walking away alone, him, into a dark forest…”

Nobody regulated Lucid Dreaming. And Drew Arlen, as the whole world knew, was Miranda Sharifi’s lover. He was the only Sleeper who went in and out of Huevos Verdes at will. The GSEA followed him constantly, of course, along with enough reporters to fill a small town. It was only his concerts they didn’t take seriously.

I walked back along the gravrail and climbed into my car. The big-headed man was the only one not pressed to the windows. He lay stretched out on a deserted seat, sleeping. Or pretending to sleep. In order not to be hypnotized? In order to better observe the effects of Aden’s performance?

The concert wore on. The warrior took the usual risks, won the usual triumphs, exulted the usual exultations. Simplistic power-trip ideation. When it ended, people turned to each other with emotional hugs, laughing and crying, and then spilled out onto the cold prairie toward the holo of Drew Arlen. It sat, fifteen feet high, a handsome crippled man in a powerchair smiling gently down on his disciples. The surrounding shapes had vanished, unless they were flickering subliminally, which was possible. A few Livers stuck their hands into the holo, trying to touch what had no substance. Desdemona danced inside the pyramid and laid her head against the blanket over Aden’s knees.

Daddy Liver said abruptly, “I bet we could walk, us, to the next town.”

“Well. . .” somebody said. Other voices chimed in.

If we follow the track, us, and stay together—”

“See if any of the roof lights are portable—”

“Some people should stay, them, with the old people.”

The big-headed man watched carefully. That’s the moment I was sure. The entire gravrail breakdown in this techno-forsaken place had been a setup, to gauge the effect of Aden’s concert.

How? By whom?

No. Those weren’t the right questions. The right question was: What was the effect of Aden’s concert?

“You stay here, then, Eddie, with the old people. You, Cassie, tell the people in the other cars. See who wants, them, to go with us. Tasha—”

It took them ten minutes of arguing to get organized. They pried the roof lights off six cars; the lights were portable. People who stayed gave extra jackets to people who left. The first group was just starting down the rail when a light flashed in the sky. A second later I could hear the plane.

The Livers turned silent.

The plane held a single gravrail technician, flanked by two security ’bots, the no-fucking-around kind that both projected a personal safety shield and carried weapons. The crowd watched in silence. The tech’s handsome, genemod face looked strained. Techs are a strained group anyway: genemod for appearance, but without the IQ and ability enhancements, which cost prospective parents a lot more money. You find them repairing machinery, running warehouse distribs, supervising nursing or child-care ’bots. Techs certainly aren’t Livers, but although they live in the enclaves, they aren’t exactly donkeys either. And they know it.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the tech said unhappily, “Morrison Gravrail, Incorporated, and Senator Cecilia Elizabeth Dawes apologize for the delay in repairing your train. Circumstances beyond our control—”

“And I’m a politician, me!” someone yelled bitterly.

“Why do we vote, us, for you scum?”

“Better tell the Senator she lost votes, her, on this here train!”

“The service we deserve—”

The tech walked resolutely toward the engine, eyes down, paced by his ’bots. I caught the faint shimmer of a Y-energy field as he passed. But a few of the Livers — six or seven — glanced down the track, stretching away in the windy darkness, their eyes bright with what I would have sworn was regret.

It took the tech all of thirteen minutes to fix the gravrail. Nobody molested him. He left in his plane, and the train started up again. Livers played dice, grumbled, slept, tended their cranky children. I walked through all the cars, searching for the big-headed man. He had vanished while I was watching the Livers’ reaction to the donkey tech. We must have left him behind, on the windy prairie, in the concealing dark.

Five

Every once in a while I need, me, to go off in the woods. I didn’t used to tell nobody. But now when I go, two-three times a year, I tell Annie and she fixes me up some raw stuff from the kitchen, apples and potatoes and soysynth that ain’t been made into dishes yet. I stay out there alone, me, for five or six days, away from all of it: the cafe and holodancers and blasting music and warehouse distribs and stomps with clubs and even the Y-energy. I build fires, me. Some people ain’t left East Oleanta in twenty years except to go by gravrail to another town just like it. The deep woods might as well be in China. I think they’re scared, them, of hearing themselves out there.

I was supposed to leave for the woods the morning after the cafe kitchen broke and we talked, us, to Supervisor Samuelson on the official terminal. But I sure wasn’t leaving Annie and Lizzie without food, and I sure wasn’t going no place, me, that had rabid raccoons and a broken warden ’bot.

Lizzie stood by my couch in her nightshirt, a bright pink blot on my morning sleep. “Billy, you think, you, that kitchen is fixed yet?”

Annie came out from her bedroom, yawning, still in her plas-ticloth nightdress. “Leave Billy alone, Lizzie. You hungry, you?”

Lizzie nodded. I sat up, me, on the sofa, with one arm shielding my eyes from the morning sun at the window. “Listen, Annie. I been thinking, me. If they do get that kitchen fixed, we should start taking all the food we can, us, and storing it here. In case it breaks again. We can take right up to the meal chip limit every day — Lizzie and you don’t ever hardly do that and me neither, some days — and then raw stuff from the kitchen. Potatoes and apples and stuff.”

Annie pressed her lips together. She ain’t a morning person, her. But it felt so good to be waking up at Annie’s place that I forgot that, me. She said, “The food would rot in just two-three days. I don’t want, me, to have a lot of half-rotten stuff around here. It ain’t clean.”

“Then we’ll throw it out, us, and get some more.” I spoke gentle. Annie don’t like things to be different than they’ve always been.

Lizzie said, “Billy, you think, you, that kitchen is fixed yet?”

I said, “I don’t know, sweetheart. Let’s go look, us. Better get dressed.”

Annie said, “She got to go, her, to the baths first. She stinks. Me, too. You walk us, Billy?”

“Sure.” What good did she think an old wreck like me’d be against rabid coons? But I’d of walked Annie past them demons she believes in.

Lizzie said, “Billy, you think, you, that kitchen is fixed yet?”

There wasn’t no raccoons near the baths. The men’s bath was empty except for Mr. Keller, who’s so old I don’t think even he remembers if he’s got a first name, and two little boys who shouldn’t of been there alone, them. But they were having themselves a wonderful splashing time. I liked watching them, me. They cheered up the morning.

Mr. Keller told me the cafe kitchen was fixed. I walked Annie and Lizzie, sweet-clean as berries in the dew, to get our breakfast. But the cafe was full, it, not just with Livers eating but of donkeys making a holo of Congresswoman Janet Carol Land.

It was her, all right. No tape. She stood in front of the foodbelt, which offered the usual soysynth eggs, bacon, cereals, and breads, plus some fresh genemod strawberries. I don’t like genemod strawberries, me. They might keep for weeks, but they never taste like them little wild sweet berries that grow on the hillsides in June.

“. . . serving her people with the best she has, no matter the need, no matter the hour, no matter the emergency,” said a handsome donkey into a camera ’bot. “Janet Carol Land, on the spot to serve East Oleanta — on the spot to serve you. A politician who deserves those memorable words from the Bible: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’!” some days — and then raw stuff from the kitchen. Potatoes and ^x apples and stuff.”

“JTJTnie pressed her lips together. She ain’t a morning person, her. But it felt so good to be waking up at Annie’s place that I forgot that, me. She said, “The food would rot in just two-three days. I don’t want, me, to have a lot of half-rotten stuff around here. It ain’t clean.”

“Then we’ll throw it out, us, and get some more.” I spoke gentle. Annie don’t like things to be different than they’ve always been.

Lizzie said, “Billy, you think, you, that kitchen is fixed yet?”

I said, “I don’t know, sweetheart. Let’s go look, us. Better get dressed.”

Annie said, “She got to go, her, to the baths first. She stinks. Me, too. You walk us, Billy?”

“Sure.” What good did she think an old wreck like me’d be against rabid coons? But I’d of walked Annie past them demons she believes in.

Lizzie said, “Billy, you think, you, that kitchen is fixed yet?”

There wasn’t no raccoons near the baths. The men’s bath was empty except for Mr. Keller, who’s so old I don’t think even he remembers if he’s got a first name, and two little boys who shouldn’t of been there alone, them. But they were having themselves a wonderful splashing time. I liked watching them, me. They cheered up the morning.

Mr. Keller told me the cafe kitchen was fixed. I walked Annie and Lizzie, sweet-clean as berries in the dew, to get our breakfast. But the cafe was full, it, not just with Livers eating but of donkeys making a holo of Congresswoman Janet Carol Land.

It was her, all right. No tape. She stood in front of the foodbelt, which offered the usual soysynth eggs, bacon, cereals, and breads, plus some fresh genemod strawberries. I don’t like genemod strawberries, me. They might keep for weeks, but they never taste like them little wild sweet berries that grow on the hillsides in June.

“. — . serving her people with the best she has, no matter the need, no matter the hour, no matter the emergency,” said a handsome donkey into a camera ’bot. “Janet Carol Land, on the spot to serve East Oleanta — on the spot to serve you. A politician who deserves those memorable words from the Bible: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’!”

Land ^railed. She was a looker, her, the way donkey women are when they’re not young: fine soft skin and pink lips and hair in pretty silver waves. Too skinny, though. Not like Annie. Who pressed her dark-berry lips together like she was going to squeeze cider with them.

Land said to the handsome man, “Thank you, Royce. As you know, the cafe is the heart of any aristo town. That’s why when a cafe malfunctions, I move heaven and earth to get it operable again. As these good citizens of East Oleanta can attest.”

“Let’s talk to some of them,” Royce said, showing all his teeth. He and Land walked to a table where Jack Sawicki sat, him, looking’ cornered. “Mayor Sawicki, what do you think of the service Con-gresswoman Land provided your town today?”

Paulie Cenverno looked up, him, from where he ate at the next table. With him was Celie Kane. Annie’s lower lip trembled itself into a half-grin, half-wince.

Jack said miserably, “We’re awful happy, us, that the foodbelt’s fixed, and we—”

“When you fuckers gonna get them rabid raccoons killed?” Celie demanded.

Royce’s face froze, it. “I don’t think—”

“You better think, you, and think hard about them coons, or you and the Congresswoman gonna be thinking about new jobs!”

“Cut,” Royce said. “Don’t worry, Janet, we’ll edit it.” His smile looked like it was foamed onto his face, but I saw his eyes, me, and I looked away. My fighting days are over, unless I have to fight for Annie or Lizzie.

Royce took the Congresswoman’s elbow, him, and steered her toward the door. Celie shrilled, “I mean it, me! It’s been days now and you guys done shit! ‘Public servants!’ You ain’t nothing but—”

“Celie,” Jack and Paulie both said.

Land broke free of Royce. She turned back, her, to Celie. “Your concern for your town’s safety is natural, ma’am. The warden ’bot and any sick wildlife are not in my jurisdiction — they fall to District Supervisor Samuelson — but when I return to Albany I’ll do everything in my power to see that the problem is solved.” She looked straight into Celie’s eyes, real steady, and it was Celie who looked away first, her.

Celie didn’t say nothing. Land smiled, her, and turned to her crew, ^think we’re done here, Royce. I’ll meet you outside.” She walked to the door, back straight, head high. And the only reason I ever saw anything different was because of where I stood, me, sideways to the door, between Annie and any trouble. Congress-woman Land reached the door and she was a smiling pretty cocksure politician, her. Then she went through the door and she was a woman with tired, tired eyes.

I glanced at Annie to see if she saw. But she was clucking at Celie Kane. Annie might of grinned, her, at Celie’s balls, but deep down inside Annie don’t approve of sassing public servants. They can’t help being donkeys. I could almost hear her say it, me. /

Lizzie said in her clear young voice, “That Congresswoman can’t really help get the warden ’bot fixed in Albany, can she? She was just pretending, her.”

“Oh hush,” Annie said. “You never will learn, you, when to keep your mouth quiet and when not.”

Two days later, two days of everybody staying inside, us, and no warden ’bot tech from Albany, we made a hunting party. It took hours of talk that went around and around in dizzies, but we made it. Livers ain’t supposed to have no guns, us. No warehouses stock a District Supervisor Tara Eleanor Schmidt .22 rifle. No political campaigns give away a Senator Jason Howard Adams shotgun or a County Legislature Terry William Monaghan pistol. But we got them, us.

Paulie Cenverno dug up his granddaddy’s shotgun, him, from a plastisynth box behind the school. Plastisynth keeps out damn near everything: dirt, damp, rust, bugs. Eddie Rollins and Jim Swikehardt and old Doug Kane had their daddies’ rifles, them. Sue Rollins and her sister, Krystal Mandor, said they’d share a family Matlin; I didn’t see, me, how that could work. Two men I didn’t know had shotguns. Al Rauber had a pistol. Two of the teenage stomps showed up, grinning, not armed. Just what we needed, us. Altogether, we were twenty.

“Let’s split, us, into pairs, and set out in ten straight lines from the cafe,” Jack Sawicki said.

“You sound like a goddamn donkey,” Eddie Rollins said in disgust. The stomps grinned.

“You got a better idea, you?” Jack said. He held his rifle real tight over his bulging green jacks.

“We’re Livers,” Krystal Mandor said, “let us.go where we want, us.”

Jack said, “And what if somebody gets shot, them? You want the police franchise down on us?”

Eddie said, “I want to hunt raccoons, me, like an aristo. Don’t give me no orders, Jack.”

“Fine,” Jack said. “Go ahead, you. I’m not saying another goddamn word.”

After ten minutes of arguing we set off in pairs, us, in ten straight lines.

I walked with Doug Kane, Celie’s father. Two old men, us, slow and limping. But Doug still knew, him, how to walk quiet in the woods. Off to my right I heard somebody whooping and laughing. One of the stomps. After a while, the sound died away.

The woods were cool and sweet-smelling, so thick overhead that the floor wasn’t much overgrown. We stepped, us, on pine needles that sent up their clean smell. White birches, slim as Lizzie, rustled. Under the trees moss grew dark green, and in the sunny patches there was daisies and buttercups and black-eyed Susans. A mourning dove called, the calmest sound in the whole world.

“Pretty,” Doug said, so quiet that a rabbit upwind didn’t even twitch its long ears.

Toward noon, the trees got skimpier and the underbrush thicker. I smelled blackberries somewheres, which made me think of Annie. I figured, me, that we come at least six hard miles from East Oleanta. All we seen was rabbits, a doe, and a mess of harmless snakes. No coons. And any rabid coons out this far, killing them wouldn’t do the town no good anyway. It was time to turn back.

“Gotta … sit down, me,” Doug said.

I looked at him, me, and my skin turned cold. He was pale as the birch bark, his eyelids fluttering like two hummingbirds. He dropped the rifle, him, and it went off — old fool had the safety off. The bullet buried itself in a tree trunk. Doug clutched his chest and fell over. I’d been so busy, me, enjoying air and flowers and I ain’t even seen he was having a heart attack.

“Sit down! Sit down!” I eased him onto a patch of some kind of ground cover, all shiny green leaves. Doug lay on his side, him, breathing hard: whoooo, whoooo. His right hand batted the air but I knew, me, that his eyes didn’t see nothing. They were wild.

“Lay quiet, Doug. Don’t move, you! I’ll go get help, me, I’ll make them bring the medunit…”

Whoooo, whoooo, whoooo… then the breathing noises stopped.

I thought: He’s gone. But his bony old chest still rose and fell, just shallow and quiet now. His eyes glazed.

“I’ll bring the medunit!” I said again, turned, and nearly fell myself, me. Staring at me from not ten feet away was a rabid coon.

Once you seen a animal gone rabid, you don’t never forget it. I could see, me, the separate specks of foam around the coon’s mouth. Sunlight from between the trees sparkled on the specks like they was glass. The coon bared its teeth, it, and hissed at me, a sound like I never heard no coon make. Its hindquarters shook. It was near the end.

I raised Doug’s rifle, me, knowing that if it come for me there was no way I was going to be fast enough.

The coon twitched and lunged. I jerked up the rifle, me, but I never even got it to shoulder height. A beam of light shot out from some place behind me, only it wasn’t light but something else like light. And the coon flipped over backwards, it, in mid-lunge and crashed to the ground dead.

I turned around, me, very slow. And if I seen one of Annie’s angels, I couldn’t of been more surprised.

A girl stood there, her, a short girl with a big head and dark hair tied back with a red ribbon. She wore stupid clothes for the woods: white shorts, thin white shirt, open sandals, just like we didn’t have no deer ticks or blackflies or snakes. The girl looked at me somber. After a minute she said, “Are you all right?”

“Y-yes, ma’am. But Doug Kane there — I think his heart. . .”

She walked over to Doug, her, knelt, and felt his pulse. She looked up at me. “I want you to do something, please. Drop this on the dead raccoon, right on top of the body.” She handed me a smooth gray disk the size of a coin. I remember coins, me.

She kept on looking at me, not even blinking, and so I did it. I just turned my back, me, on her and Doug both, and did it. Why? Annie asked me later, and I didn’t have no answer. Maybe it was the girl’s eyes. Donkey, and not. No Janet Carol Land facing no camera with well done good and faithful servant.

The gray disk hit the coon’s damp fur and stuck. It shimmered, it, and in a second that coon was cased in a clear shell that went right down to the ground and, it turned out, sliced through an inch underground. Maybe Y-energy, maybe not. A leaf blew against the shell and slid right off. I touched the shell. I don’t know, me, where I got the nerve. The shell was hard as foamcast.

Made out of nothing.

When I turned back the girl was putting something, her, in her shorts pocket, and Doug’s eyes were coming clear. He gasped, him.

“Don’t move him yet,” the girl said, still not smiling. She didn’t look like she smiled much. “Go get help. He’ll be safe until you get back.”

“Who are you, ma’am?” It came out squeaky. “What did you do to him, you?”

“I gave him some medicine. The same injection the medunit would have given him. But he needs a stretcher to be carried back to your town. Go get help, Mr. Washington.”

I took a step, me, right toward her. She stood up. She didn’t seem afraid, her — just went on looking at me with those eyes with no smile. After seeing the coon, it came to me that she had a shell, too. Not hard like the coon’s, and maybe not away from her body neither. Maybe close on it like a clear glove. But that was why she was out in the woods in shorts and flimsy sandals, and why she wasn’t bit up, her, by no blackflies, and why she wasn’t afraid of me.

I said, “You… you’re from Eden, ain’t you? It’s really here someplace, in these woods, it’s really here…”

She got a funny expression on her face. I didn’t know, me, what it meant, and it came to me that I could better guess what a rabid coon was thinking than what this girl was.

“Go get help, Mr. Washington. Your friend needs it.” She stopped, her. “And please tell the townspeople … as little as you feel you can.”

“But, ma’am—”

“Uuuhhhmmmm,” Doug moaned, not like he was in pain, him, but like he was dreaming.

I stumbled back to East Oleanta as fast as I could, me, puffing until I thought we’d have two heart attacks for the medunit. Just beyond the scooter track I met Jack Sawicki and Krystal Mandor, hot and sweaty, them, straggling back to town. I told them, me, about old man Kane’s collapse. They had to make me start over twice. Jack set off, him, by the sun — he’s maybe the only other good woodsman East Oleanta’s got. Krystal ran, her, for the med-unit and more help. I sat down, me, to catch my breath. The sun was hot and blinding on the open field, the lake sparkled down past town, and I couldn’t find no balance no place in my mind.

Maybe I never did. Nothing ever looked the same to me after that day.

The medunit found Doug Kane easy enough, skimming above the brush on its gravsensors, smelling me and Doug’s trail in the air. Four men followed, them, and they carried Kane home. He breathed easy. That night near everybody else in town gathered, us, in the cafe. There was dancing and accusing and yelling and a party. Nobody had shot no raccoons, but Eddie Rollins shot a deer and Ben Radisson shot Paulie Cenverno. Paulie wasn’t hurt bad, him, just a graze on the arm, and the medunit fixed him right up. I went to see Doug Kane, me.

He didn’t remember no girl in the woods. I asked him, me, while he lay on his plastisynth sleeping platform, propped up on extra pillows and covered with an embroidered blanket like the one Annie made for her sofa. Doug loved the attention, him. I asked him, me, real careful, not exactly saying there was a girl in the woods, just hinting around the edges of what happened. But he didn’t remember nothing, him, after he collapsed, and nobody who went to bring him home mentioned finding any raccoon in a hard shell.

She must of just picked up the whole shell, her, safe as houses, and just walked off with it.

The only person I told, me, was Annie, and I made sure Lizzie was nowhere near. Annie didn’t believe me, her. Not at first. Then she did, but only because she remembered the big-headed girl in green jacks in the cafe two nights before. This girl had a big head too, her, and somehow to Annie that meant all the rest of my story was true. I told Annie not to say nothing to nobody. And she never did, not even to me. Said it gave her the willies, her, to think of some weird outcast donkeys living in the woods with genemod machinery and calling it Eden. Blasphemous, almost. Eden was in the Bible and no place else. Annie didn’t want to think about it, her.

But I thought about it, me. A lot. It got so for a while I couldn’t hardly think about nothing else. Then I got a grip on myself, me, and went back to normal living. But the big-headed girl was still in my thoughts.

We didn’t have no more trouble that whole summer and fall with rabid raccoons. They all just disappeared, them, for good.

But machines kept breaking.