Beggars Ride

One

There it was. Lying on a sidewalk on Madison Avenue in the Manhattan East Enclave. Almost it could have been a fallen twig overlooked by a defective maintenance ’bot. But it wasn’t a preternaturally straight twig, or a dropped laser knife, or a truncated black line drawn on the nanocoated concrete, going nowhere. It was a Change syringe.

Dr. Jackson Aranow picked it up.

Empty, and no way to tell how long ago it had been used. The black alloy didn’t rust or dent or decay. Jackson couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen one lying around outside. Three or four years, maybe. He twirled it between his fingers like a baton, sighted along it like a telescope, pointed it at the building and said “Bang.”

“Welcome,” the building said back. Jackson’s extended arm had brought him within sensor range. He put the syringe in his pocket and stepped into the security portico.

“Dr. Jackson Aranow, to see Ellie Lester.”

“’Alf a minute, sir. There you go, all cleared, sir. ’Appy to be of service, sir.”

“Thank you,” Jackson said, a little stiffly. He disliked affected accents on buildings.

The lobby was expensive and grotesque. A floor programmed with a yellow brick road whose bricks shifted every thirty seconds to a different path, all ending up at blank walls. A neon-green Venus with a digital clock in her belly, sitting on a beautiful antique Sheraton table beside the elevator. The elevator spoke in a high, singsong voice.

“Please to be welcome, sahib. I am being very happy you visit Memsahib Lester. Please to look this way, allow me humble retina scan… thank you, sahib. Wishing you every gracious thing.”

Jackson didn’t think he was going to like Ellie Lester.

Outside the apartment door, a holo of a black man materialized, wearing a faded calico shirt, barefoot. “Sho is glad you here, sir. Sho is. Miz Ellie, she waiting on y’all inside, sir.” The holo shuffled, grinned, and put a translucent hand on the opening door.

The apartment echoed the lobby: a carefully arranged mix of expensive antiques and ugly, outrageous kitsch. A papier-mâché rat eating her young atop an exquisite eighteenth-century sideboard. An antique television polished to a high gleam under a diamond-filament sculpture covered densely with dust. Faux, chairs, all dangerous angles and weird protuberances, impossible to sit on. “In an age of nanotech, even primitive nanotech,” said the latest issue of Design magazine, “the material presence of objects becomes vulgar, even irrelevant, and only the wit of their arrangement matters.” The two goldfish in the atrium were artfully dead, floating beside a small holo of a sinking Pequod.

Ellie Lester strode out of a side door. She was genemod for size, which gave Jackson her age: female children engineered to top six feet had been briefly fashionable in the late eighties, when material presence hadn’t yet been irrelevant. Now that Design had decided it was, Ellie compensated for her height with wit. Over her bare breasts she wore a necklace alternating glowing laser beads with nanocoated animal turds; her draped skirt was red, white, and blue. Jackson remembered that tonight was election night.

“Doctor, where the hell have you been? I called you ten minutes ago!”

“It took me four minutes to get a go-’bot,” Jackson said mildly. “And you did tell me that your grandfather was already dead.”

“Great-grandfather,” she said, scowling. “This way.”

She walked five paces ahead, which gave Jackson a good view of her long, long legs, perfect ass, asymmetrically cut red hair. He thought of pointing the Change syringe at her and whispering “Bang.” But he left the syringe in his pocket. Parody displays weren’t actually as witty or intriguing as Design thought.

Coward, jeered the Cazie in his mind.

They passed through room after grotesque room. The apartment was even larger than Jackson’s on Fifth Avenue. On the walls hung elaborately framed, programmed burlesques: the Mona Lisa laughing like a hyena, A Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte in frantic, dot-dissolving motion.

The dead man’s bedroom was much different, painted white and undecorated except for some small, predigital photographs grouped on one wall. A nursing ’bot stood silent beside the bed. The old man’s lips and cheek muscles had gone slack with death. Not genemod, but he might have been handsome once. His skin was deeply lined but nonetheless had the healthy look of all those who’d received the Change syringe, without spots or lumps or rough patches or anything else caused by either abnormal cells or toxins in the body. Neither existed anymore.

Neither did illness. The Cell Cleaner, half of the Change magic, saw to that. Nanomachinery, made of genetically modified self-replicating protein, occupied one percent of everyone’s cells. Like white blood cells, the tiny biocomputers had the ability to leave the bloodstream and travel freely through body tissues. Unlike white blood cells, the Cell Cleaners had the ability to compare indigenous DNA with nonstandard variations and destroy not only foreign substances but aberrant DNA variations. Viruses. Toxins. Cancers. Irregular bone cells. Furthermore, the Cell Cleaner spared a long list of preprogrammed substances that belonged in the body, such as essential minerals and symbiotic bacteria. Since the Change, no doctors carried antibiotics or antivirals. No doctor carefully monitored patients for infectious complications. No doctor needed diagnostic judgment. Jackson, who had graduated from Harvard Medical School the same year that Miranda Sharifi had supplied the world with Change syringes, wasn’t a specialist. He was a mechanic.

Jackson’s “practice” consisted of trauma, Change syringe injections of newborns, and death certifications. As a doctor, he was as obsolete as a neon-green Venus. A parody display.

But not at this moment.

Jackson unpacked his equipment from his medical bag and turned on the official medical comlink. Ellie Lester settled herself in the room’s only chair.

“Name of the deceased?”

“Harold Winthrop Wayland.”

Jackson circled the dead man’s skull with the cerebral monitor. No electrical activity, no blood circulation in the brain. “Citizen number and birth date?”

“AKM-92-4681-374. August 3, 2026. He was ninety-four.” She almost spat the age.

Jackson placed the dermalyzer on Wayland’s neck. It immediately uncoiled and spread itself in a dense net of fine synthetic neurons over his face, disappearing under the collar of his silk pajamas and reappearing over his feet. A crawling, probing cocoon. Ellie Lester looked away. The monitor showed ho break or other indication of intrusion anywhere on the skin, not even the smallest puncture wound. All feeding tubules were fully functional.

“When did you discover Mr. Wayland’s body?”

“Just before I called you. I went in to check on him.”

“And you found him as he looks now?”

“Yes. I didn’t touch him, or anything in the room.”

The dermalyzer web retracted. Jackson snaked the lung hose into Wayland’s left nostril. As soon as it touched the mucous membrane, the hose took over and disappeared down the bronchial tree into the lungs.

“Last lung expansion at 6:42 Eastern Standard Time,” Jackson said. “No evidence of drowning. Sample tissues secured. Now, Ms. Lester, tell me and for the record everything you can remember about the deceased’s behavior in the last few days.”

“Nothing unusual,” she said flatly. “He didn’t leave this room much, except to be led to the feeding room. You can access the nursing ’bot’s records, or take away the whole ’bot. I tried to check on him every few days. When I came in tonight, he was dead and the ’bot was on standby.”

“Without having signaled distress signs to the house system? That’s not usual.”

“It did signal. You can access all the house records and see for yourself. But I wasn’t home, and the connection to the comlink was malfunctioning. It still is—I didn’t touch it, so you could see.”

Jackson said, “Then how did you call me?”

“On my mobile link. I also called the repair franchise. You can access—”

“I don’t want any of your records,” Jackson said. He heard his own contemptuous tone, tried to modify it. The official link was still open. “But the police might. I only certify death, Ms. Lester, not investigate it.”

“But… does that mean you’re going to notify the authorities? I don’t understand. My great-grandfather clearly died of old age! He was ninety-four!”

“Many people are ninety-four now.” Jackson looked away from her eyes. Rich genemod brown, but flat and shiny as a bird’s. “Ms. Lester, what did you mean when you said that Mr. Wayland left this room only when the nurse ‘led him to the feeding area’?”

Her shiny eyes widened, and then she shot a look of sly triumph at the comlink. “Why, Dr. Aranow—didn’t you access your patient’s records on the way over here? I told you I’d authorized your access.”

“The go-’bot ride was short. I only live three blocks away.”

“But you had four minutes of idle waiting for a go-’bot!” From her chair she gazed at him with brow-raised triumph. He’d bet anything she wasn’t genemod for IQ.

He said calmly, “I did not access Mr. Wayland’s medical records. Why did the nurse have to lead him to your feeding room?”

“Because he had Alzheimer’s, Dr. Aranow. He’d had it for fifteen years, long before the Change. Because your much-vaunted Cell Cleaner can’t repair damage to brain cells, can it, Doctor—only destroy abnormal ones. Which left him with fewer every year. Because he couldn’t find the feeding room, much less take off his own clothes and feed. Because his mind was gone and he was a drooling, vacuous, empty shell. Whose damaged brain finally just gave up and killed his body, even if it had been senselessly Changed!”

She breathed hard. Jackson knew she was goading him, daring him to say it: You killed him. Then she’d probably sue.

He didn’t let himself be provoked. After marriage to—and divorce from—Cazie Sanders, Ellie Lester was a stupid amateur. He said formally, “The cause of death will, of course, have to be made by the medical examiner for the City of New York, after autopsy. This preliminary report is concluded. Comlink, off.”

He put the link in his bag. Ellie Lester stood up; she was an inch taller than Jackson. He guessed the autopsy would show one of the Chinese or South American inhibitors that simply make the brain forget what to do, make it stop sending signals to the heart to beat or the lungs to breathe. Or maybe the autopsy wouldn’t show it, if the drug was enough ahead of the detection technology. How had she delivered it?

She said, “Perhaps our paths will cross again, Doctor.”

He knew better than to answer. On his mobile he made the call to the cops and took a last look at Harold Winthrop Wayland. The wall screen came on. The house system must have been pre-set.

“…final election results! President Stephen Stanley Garrison has been reelected by a narrow margin. The most startling feature of the results, however, is the number of Americans casting ballots. Of ninety million eligible voters, only eight percent voted. This represents a drop of—”

Ellie Lester gave a sharp crack of laughter. “ ‘Startling.’ God, he’s a disease. Why would anyone bother to vote anymore?”

“Maybe as an act of witty parody,” Jackson said, and knew that by his saying it, she’d won after all. And it was no comfort that she was too stupid to recognize that.

She didn’t see him out. Maybe Design had decided that manners, too, were irrelevant. But as he left the dead man’s bedroom, he looked closely for the first time at the small framed photos on the wall. All but the last were predigital copies, faded and uneven in color. Edward Jenner. Ignaz Semmelweiss. Jonas Salk. Stephen Clark Andrews. And Miranda Sharifi.

“Yes, he was a doctor, too,” Ellie Lester said maliciously. “Back when you people were really necessary. And those are his heroes—four Livers and a Sleepless. Wouldn’t you know?” She laughed.

Jackson let himself out. The holo of the black man had been replaced by a naked Roman slave, heavily muscled, handsome but clearly not genemod. A Liver. The slave knelt as Jackson passed, lowered his eyes, and opened his mouth. Translucent manacles of holographic gold bound him to Ellie Lester’s doorknob.

“She’s the far end of a bell-shaped curve, I know that,” Jackson said to his sister Theresa. “So it shouldn’t bother me. Actually, it doesn’t bother me.”

“It bothers you,” Theresa said in her gentle voice. “And it should.”

They sat in the atrium of their apartment, having drinks before dinner, which would be old-fashioned mouth food. The atrium wall facing the park was a transparent Y-shield. Four stories below, Central Park rioted with autumn color under its invisible energy dome. The Manhattan enclaves had recently voted to restore modified seasons, although the vote had been close. Above the shield the November sky was the color of ashes.

Theresa wore a loose flowered dress that fell in graceful folds to her ankles; Jackson had the vague impression that it was out of fashion. Her face, without makeup, was a pale oval under her silvery blonde hair. She was twelve years younger than Jackson’s thirty.

Theresa was fragile. Not in her slender genemod body, but in her mind. Jackson’s private belief was that something had gone wrong during her embryonic engineering, as something sometimes did. Genemod was a complicated process, and once the zygote had become blastomeres, no further permanent engineering was possible. Not, at least, by anyone on Earth.

As a child Theresa had hated to go to school and had clung, weeping in a quiet and hopeless way, to her bewildered mother. She didn’t like to play with other children. For days she stayed in her room, drawing or listening to music. Sometimes she said she wanted to wrap herself in the music and melt into it until there wasn’t any more Theresa. Medical tests showed high reactivity in her stress-hormone response system: high cortisol levels, enlarged adrenal glands, the heart rate and gut motility and nerve-cell death associated with presuicidal depression. Her threshold for limbic-hypothalamic arousal was very low; she found anything new intensely threatening.

In an age of custom-engineered biogenic amines, nobody had to stay fragile. Throughout Theresa’s girlhood she had been on and off neuropharms to rebalance her brain chemistry. The Cell Cleaner would have made that problematic, since it destroyed everything in the body that it decided didn’t belong there, that didn’t match either the DNA patterns or approved set of molecules stored in its tiny, unimaginable, protein-based computers lodged in and between human cells. But by the time the Change brought the Cell Cleaner, it no longer mattered. At thirteen Theresa announced—no, that was too strong a word for Theresa, she never “announced”—she had said that she was finished with neuropharms “for good.”

By that time, their parents had both died in an aircar crash and Jackson was his sister’s guardian. Jackson had argued, reasoned, begged. It had done no good. Theresa would not be helped. She didn’t argue back; intellectual debate confused her. She simply refused to allow a medical solution to her medical problems.

However, at least she didn’t—Jackson’s secret fear—attempt suicide. She became even more reclusive and more elusive, one of those gentle pale women from an entirely different century. Theresa embroidered. She studied music. She was writing a life of the martyred Sleepless woman, Leisha Camden, of all irrelevant pursuits—another woman who had been entirely eclipsed by a different generation of far more ruthless females.

When the Change occurred, Theresa was the only person Jackson knew who refused the syringe. She could not ground-feed. She could become infected by viruses and bacteria, and did. She could be poisoned by toxins. She could get cancer.

Sometimes, in his darker moods, he thought that his sister’s elusive neurological frailties, so divorced from her intelligent sweetness, were the reason he’d become a doctor. Just lately it had occurred to him that Theresa’s frailties were also the reason he’d married someone like Cazie.

Watching his sister pour herself another fruit juice—she never drank sunshine, alcohol, or any of the synthetic endorphin drinks like Endorkiss—Jackson thought that it was wrong to have his life so shaped by a younger sister who was softly, stubbornly, unnecessarily crazy. That he was weak to have allowed it to happen. And that around Theresa what he felt was strong, probably in comparison, which was itself a weak way to look at it.

“People like Ellie Lester,” Theresa said, “they’re not whole.”

“What do you mean?” He didn’t really want to know—it might lead to another of Theresa’s tentative, tortuous discussions on spirituality—but the sunshine in his drink was pleasantly affecting him. His bones were starting to relax, his muscles to sway, the trees below to hum in a nondemanding harmonious background. He didn’t want to talk. Certainly not about the data he’d looked up on Ellie Lester when he got home, which included discovering that she would inherit control of her great-grandfather’s enormous fortune. Let Tessie babble instead. He would sit in the humming twilight and not listen.

But all Theresa said was, “I don’t know what I mean. I just know they’re not whole. All of them. All of us.”

“Ummm.”

“There’s something wrong inside us. I believe that, Jackson. I do.”

She didn’t sound as if she believed it. She sounded unsure as always, with her hesitant soft speech and loose flowered dress. It occurred to Jackson that in an enclave where dinner parties often ended up naked for communal feeding, he hadn’t actually seen the shape of his sister’s body for years.

But then Theresa spoke in a sudden rush. “I read something evil today. Actually evil. I sent Thomas into the library deebees, for my book. Because of something Leisha Camden wrote in 2045.”

Jackson braced himself. Theresa often sent her personal system, Thomas, trawling through historical databases, and she often misinterpreted what she found there. Or she became indignant over it. Or she cried.

“Thomas brought me a sentence from a famous doctor who knew Leisha. Hans Dietrich Lowering. He said, ‘There is no such thing as the mind. There is only a collection of electrical and physiological operations we collectively call the brain.’ He said that!”

Pity flooded Jackson. She looked so distressed, so ineffectually indignant, at this piece of old and nonstartling non-news. But his pity was laced with disquiet. As soon as Theresa had said the word “evil,” Jackson had a sudden flash of Ellie Lester, taller than he was, teeth bared in a fury that she could not allow into the official medical comlink. She had looked evil—an evil, beautiful giantess, and under the unwrapping of sunshine Jackson could admit what he had denied before: he had wanted her. Even though she was not really evil, only greedy. Not really beautiful, only obvious. And no more a giant than the sinking miniature holo of the Pequod beside the dead goldfish in the atrium pool.

He shifted uneasily on his chair and took another sip of his drink.

“It’s evil to deny the mind,” Theresa was saying. “Let alone the soul.”

“Tessie—”

She leaned forward, a pale insubstantial blur in the gloom, her voice close to tears. “It is evil, Jackson. We aren’t just sensors and processors and wiring, like ’bots. We’re humans, all of us.”

“Calm down, honey. It was just a sentence written a long time ago. Musty data in an old file.”

“Then people don’t believe it’s true anymore? Doctors don’t?”

Of course they did. Only Theresa could get this upset over a clichéd statement seventy-five years old, based on other clichés two hundred years old.

“Tessie, sweetheart…”

“We have souls, Jackson!”

Another voice: “Oh, Christ, not another babble-on about souls!”

She came in smiling, mocking, filling the large room with her larger, five-foot-three, utterly vital presence. Cazie Sanders. His ex-wife. Who refused to depart his life, the divorce she’d taken from him just one more thing she casually disregarded now that she had it. On the excuse that she was Theresa’s friend, Cazie came and went in the Aranows’ apartment as she pleased, took up and discarded the Aranows as she pleased, pleased herself always.

With her were two men Jackson didn’t know—was one of them her current lover? Both of them? One glance at the older man and Jackson knew he was on something stronger than sunshine or Endorkiss. Sleek, long, unmuscled, he had the deliberately androgynous body of a vid star, dressed in a rough brown cotton tunic like a pillowcase, already eaten into small holes by the feeding tubules on his skin. The younger man, whose genemod handsomeness uncomfortably reminded Jackson of Ellie Lester’s slave holo, wore an opaque holosuit that appeared to be made of thousands of angry, crawling bees. His mouth curved in a permanent sneer. Would Cazie actually sleep with either of these diseases? Jackson didn’t know.

It was difficult to explain why he’d married Cazie, but not very. She was beautiful, with her dark short curls, honey-gold skin, and elongated golden eyes flecked with pale green. But all genemod women were beautiful. Certainly Cazie wasn’t as lovely or loyal or kind as Theresa—who, next to her ex-sister-in-law, faded. Nearly disappeared, flickered weakly like a malfunctioning holo.

Cazie burned with some vital, ungenemod force, darkly intelligent, primal and erotic as driving rain. Whenever she’d touched him—feverishly, or languorously, or tenderly, with Cazie there was no predicting—Jackson had felt something iron and cold dissolve in his center, something he usually didn’t even know he was carrying around. He’d felt connected to nameless, powerful, very old longings. Sometimes during sex with Cazie, her fingernails raking him and his penis moving blind within her like a hot living missile, he would be amazed to hear himself weeping, or shouting, or chanting—another person entirely, the memory of which embarrassed him afterward. Cazie was never embarrassed. Not by anything. After two years of marriage, she had divorced Jackson for being “too passive.”

He had been afraid, during the messy weeks of her moving out, that nothing in his life would ever again be as good as those two years. And nothing had.

Looking at her now, dressed in a short green-and-gold drape that left one shoulder bare, Jackson felt the familiar tightening in his neck, his chest, his scrotum, a complex of desire, and rage, and competitiveness, and humiliation that he had somehow not been strong enough to swim in the dark currents of Cazie’s inner sea. He put down his drink. He needed his head clear.

“How are you feeling, Tess?” Cazie said kindly. She sat down, unasked, beside Theresa, who both shrank back minutely and put out one hand, as if to warm herself at Cazie’s glow. Their friendship was inexplicable to Jackson; they were so different. But once someone had come into Theresa’s life, she clung to that person forever. And Theresa brought out the protective, tender side of Cazie—as if Tess were a helpless kitten. Jackson looked away from his ex-wife, and then refused to allow himself that weakness, and looked back.

“I’m fine,” Theresa whispered. She glanced at the door. Strangers increased her agitation.

“Tess, these are my friends, Landau Carson and Irv Kanzler. Jackson and Theresa Aranow. We’re on our way to an exorcism.”

“To a what?” Jackson said. Immediately he wished he hadn’t. Irv drew an inhaler from a pocket of his consumable tunic and sniffed more of whatever was rearranging his neural chemistry. That was the problem with the more toxic recreational drugs: the Cell Cleaner busily removed them almost as soon as they entered the body, so users had to keep renewing every few minutes.

“An ex-or-cissssm,” Landau drawled in a phony accent. He was the one wearing bees. “Haven’t you heard of them? You must have heard of them.”

“Jackson never hears of anything,” Cazie said. “He doesn’t leave the enclave and go down and dirty among Livers.”

“I leave the enclave sometimes,” Jackson said evenly.

“I’m delighted to hear it,” Cazie said, helping herself to a glass of sunshine. The fingernail on her left ring finger was sheathed in a holo of a tiny chained butterfly frantically beating its wings.

“An ex-or-cisssm,” Landau said with exaggerated patience, “is simply nova. A genuine brain trot. You’d die laughing.”

“I doubt it,” Jackson said, and vowed that was the last thing he’d say to this toxin. He folded his arms across his chest, realized that probably made him look as stuffy as Cazie had implied, and unfolded them.

Landau said, “Surely you’ve heard of the Mother Miranda cults? They’re sort of a Liver religion—so typical. Miranda as the Virgin Mary, interceding with the Divine. And for what? Not salvation or grace or world peace or any of those dreary eternal verities. No—Mother Miranda’s followers are praying for immortality. Another Change. If the SuperSleepless could deliver the first syringes, goes this risible theology, then they can just as well go deliver another miracle that makes all the grubby little Livers go on forever.”

Irv laughed, a sudden bark like ice cracking, and sniffed again from his inhaler. Direct pleasure-center excitation, Jackson guessed, with hallucinogenic additives and a selective depressant to lower inhibition.

Cazie said, “God, Landau, you’re such an unoriginal snob. It’s not only Livers involved in the Mother Miranda cult. There are donkeys in it, too.”

Theresa shifted on her chair, a small agitated gesture that was the kinesthetic equivalent of a whimper. Jackson took her hand.

Landau said, “But it’s mostly Livers. Our newly self-sufficient, self-disenfranchised eighty percent. And Livers are the only ones who do exorcisssms.”

Theresa said, so low that at first Jackson thought nobody else heard her, “Exorcising what? Demons?”

“No, of course not,” Landau said. His bees buzzed fractionally louder. “Impure thoughts.”

Cazie laughed. “Not exactly. More like ideologically incorrect thoughts. It’s really a political check to make sure all the good little Mother Mirandites are convinced of her semi-divinity. They just call it an exorcism because they drive out wrong ideas. Then they all create yet another broadcast to beam up at Sanctuary.”

“Real brain-trot entertainment,” Landau said.

Jackson couldn’t help himself. “And this ritual is open to the public?”

“Of course not,” Landau said. “We’re crashers. Humble novices in search of some faith in our pointless and overprivileged lives.”

Theresa’s quiet agitation increased. Cazie said, “What is it, Tess?”

Theresa burst out, “You shouldn’t!” Immediately she shrank back into her chair, then stumbled to her feet. Jackson, still holding her hand, felt her fingers tremble. “Good night,” she whispered, and pulled free.

Cazie said, “Wait, Tessie, don’t go!” But Theresa fled toward her own room.

“Nice going,” Jackson said.

“I’m sorry, Jack. I didn’t think she’d react like that. It’s not real religion.”

“She’s religious? My condolences,” Landau said. “And in the immediate family, too.”

“Shut up,” Cazie said. “God, you bore me sometimes, Landau. Don’t you ever get tired of supercilious posturing?”

“Never. What else is there, really? And may I remind you, Cassandra dear, that you too are on your way to this ex-or-cisssm, hmmmm?”

“No,” Cazie snapped. “I’m not. Get out!”

“A sudden mood shift into anger! How exciting!”

Jackson stood. Landau touched a point on his chest; his bees buzzed louder. For the first time Jackson wondered if they were all holos, or if some of the bees were weapons. Certainly Landau would wear a personal Y-shield.

“Out!” Cazie screamed. “You heard me, you infection! Out!” Her dark eyes blazed; she looked as much a caricature as Landau. Was she posturing as well, amusing herself with the drama? Jackson realized he could no longer tell.

Landau stretched lazily, yawned ostentatiously, and rose to his feet. He drifted toward the door. Irv followed, sniffing his inhaler. He hadn’t said a single word.

When Cazie returned from slamming the apartment door, Jackson said quietly, “Nice friends you have.”

“They’re not my friends.” She was breathing hard.

“You introduced them as friends.”

“Yeah, well. You know how it is. I’m sorry about Tessie, Jack. I really didn’t know Landau was so stupid.”

If this humility was a posture, it was a new one. Jackson didn’t trust it, didn’t trust her. He didn’t answer.

Cazie said, “Should I go after Tess?”

“No. Give her some time.” But from behind him came Theresa’s soft voice; she must have heard the door slam and crept out.

“Did they leave?”

“Yes, pet,” Cazie said. “I’m sorry I brought them here. I didn’t think. They’re real asses. No, not even that—just assholes. Fragments. Partial people.”

Theresa said eagerly, “But that’s just what I was saying earlier to Jackson! There’s something… not whole about people now. Why, this afternoon Jackson saw—”

“I can’t discuss a confidential medical case,” Jackson said harshly, although of course he already had. Theresa bit her lip. Cazie smiled, humility already replaced by mockery.

“A murder, Jack? I can’t think what else they’d need you for that you can’t discuss. A little off your usual practice of the once-monthly accident and the twice-monthly newborn Change?”

He said evenly. “Don’t needle me, Cazie.”

“Ah, Jackson darling, why couldn’t you be so assertive when we were married? Although I really do think we’re better off as friends. But Tess, honey”—she turned back to his sister, suddenly kind again, while Jackson was left wanting to hit her, or convince her, or rape her—“you have a point. We donkeys are just coming apart since the Change. Joining Liver cults, or doing brain-deadening neuropharms, or marrying a computer program—did you hear about that? For dependability. ‘Your AI will never leave you.’ ” She laughed, throwing back her head. The dark curls danced, and her elongated eyes narrowed to slits.

Theresa said, “Yes, but… but we don’t have to be that way!”

“Sure we do,” Cazie said. “We’re bred to be forthrightly self-serving, even the best of us. Jackson, did you vote today?”

He hadn’t. He tried to look condescending.

“Did you, Tess? Never mind, I know you didn’t. The whole political system is dead, because everyone knows it isn’t where power is anymore. The Change took care of that. The Livers don’t need us, they’re managing quite well in their own lawless little ground-feeding pseudo-enclaves. Or they think they are. Which is, incidentally, why I’m here. We have a crisis.”

Cazie’s dark eyes sparkled; she loved crises. Theresa looked frightened. Jackson said, “Theresa, did you show Cazie your new bird?”

“I’ll get him,” Theresa said, and escaped.

Jackson said, “Who has a crisis?”

“Us. TenTech. We have a factory break-in.”

“That’s impossible,” Jackson said. And then, because Cazie usually had her facts straight, “Which factory?”

“The Willoughby, Pennsylvania, plant. Well, it’s not exactly a break-in yet. But somebody was just outside the Y-shield this afternoon with bioelectric and crystal equipment. The sensors picked them up. If you’d check your business net, Jack, you’d know that. But oh, I forgot—you were out investigating murders.”

Jackson kept his temper. Cazie had received a third of TenTech in the divorce settlement, since her money had kept the company afloat during the disastrous year when a nanodissembler plague had attacked the ubiquitous alloy duragem, and businesses had died like Livers. He said evenly, “Nobody got inside, did they? Nobody can breach security on a Y-energy shield. At least, not…”

“Not Livers, you mean, and who else would be out in the wilds of central Pennsylvania? I think you’re probably right. But that’s why we should go have a look. If it’s not Livers, who is it? Kids from Carnegie-Mellon, sharpening their datadipping skills? Industrial espionage by CanCo? SuperSleepless like—gasp!—Miranda Sharifi, obscurely interested in our little family-owned firm? What do you think, Jack? Who’s messing with our factory?”

“Maybe the biosensors are malfunctioning. Another failure like duragem.”

“Maybe,” Cazie said. “But I checked around. Nobody else is having sensor failure. Just us. So I think we better go have a look. Okay, Jackson? Tomorrow morning?”

“I’m busy.”

“Doing what? You’re not busy—that’s the trouble, none of us are busy enough. Here’s something to do, something that impacts our finances, something with actual substance. Come with me.”

She smiled at him, full voltage, her long golden eyes full of the sly pleading missing from her brash words. Jackson knew that later, when he lay in bed going over and over this conversation, he wouldn’t be able to re-create the compelling quality of her. Of her eyes, her body language, her tone. He would remember only the words themselves, without grace or subtlety, and so would curse himself for saying yes.

Cazie laughed. “Nine o’clock, then. I’ll drive. Meanwhile, I’m starving. Oh, Tessie, here you are. What a pretty little genemod bird. Can you talk, cage bird? Can you say ‘social dissolution’?”

Theresa held up the Y-energy cage and said, “He only sings.”

“Like most of us,” Cazie said. “Desperate discordant tunes. Jackson, I am hungry. And not for mouth food, either, tonight. I think we should keep Tessie company while she eats, and then you should invite me to dinner in your so-tasteful feeding ground.”

“I’m going out,” Jackson said quickly. Theresa looked at him in quick surprise, as quickly veiled. He never knew how much she knew, or guessed, about his feelings for Cazie. Theresa was so sensitive to distress; she must intuit that it would be impossible for Jackson to go calmly with Cazie to the dining room, take off most of his clothes, and lie on the nutrient-enriched soil while his Changed body absorbed everything it needed, in perfect proportions, through his feeding tubules. Jackson couldn’t do it. Although the lure was powerful. To lie there under the warm lights, their changing wavelengths carefully selected for a relaxing effect on the mind, to breathe the perfumed air, to turn on one elbow to talk casually to Cazie, to watch Cazie feed, lying on her stomach, her small firm breasts bared to the earth…

Impossible.

He waited until his erection had subsided before he stood and stretched with elaborate nonchalance. “Well, people are waiting on me. Good night, Cazie. Theresa, I won’t be late.”

“Be careful, Jackson,” Theresa said, as she always did, as if there could be any danger inside the Manhattan East Enclave, protected by a Y-shield from even unwanted weather. Theresa had not left the apartment in over a year.

“Yes, be careful, Jack,” Cazie mocked tenderly, and his heart caught when it seemed he heard regret mixed with the tenderness. But when he turned back, she was fussing again over Theresa’s bird, and didn’t even look at him.

There was tomorrow.

Damn tomorrow. It was a business trip, to find out what was going wrong at the Willoughby plant. He owned the damn company—or at least a third of it—he should check the factories’ printouts more, give orders to the AI running it, link with the TenTech chief engineer, check up on problems. He should be more responsible about his and Theresa’s money. He should…

He should do a lot of things.

He walked out into the cold November night, which under the dome felt like a warm September night, and tried to think up someplace he might actually want to go to dinner besides home.

Two

Lizzie Francy halted on the rough grass of the dark Pennsylvania field and put a warning hand on Vicki Turner’s arm. A cold wind blew. A hundred feet ahead the TenTech Y-energy cone factory loomed in the moonlight, a windowless foamcast rectangle, blank and featureless as a prison.

“No farther,” Lizzie said. “The security shield starts four feet ahead. See the change in the grass?”

“Of course not, I can’t see anything,” Vicki said. “How can you?”

“I was here in daytime,” Lizzie said. “We have to move, a little left… I left a marker. You’re shivering, Vicki—you cold?”

“I’m freezing. We’re all freezing. That’s the point of this whole illegal nocturnal burglary, isn’t it? God, I must be crazy to do this… How far left?”

“Right here. Don’t go any closer, the infrared detectors will pick us up.”

“Not me, I’m too cold. I’d register as rock. No, I don’t want your cape, you need it.”

“I’m not cold,” Lizzie said. She opened a gunny sack and started pulling out equipment.

“That’s your hormones surging. Pregnancy’s little Y-energy cones. All right, I’ll take the cape… How come your skin doesn’t eat clothes as fast as mine? Or does it just seem that way… Lizzie, baby, don’t get too excited. This isn’t going to work. Nobody, no matter how good a datadipper, can break into a Y-energy factory.”

“I can,” Lizzie said.

She grinned at Vicki. Vicki didn’t know. Vicki was smart, was educated, was a donkey, those people who used to run the world. Vicki had given Lizzie her first terminal, and taught her to use it. Lizzie owed Vicki everything. But Vicki didn’t know. Vicki was old, maybe even forty, and she’d grown up before the Change, when everything was different. Lizzie had spent the last five years on datanets, and she knew how good she was. There wasn’t anything she couldn’t dip (except of course Sanctuary, which didn’t count). It was Lizzie’s world now, and she could do anything. She was seventeen.

The two women unwrapped Lizzie’s equipment from more rough-woven sacking. Crystal library, system terminal, laser transmitter, full-body holosuits. Some of the equipment was jerry-fitted, some was stolen, all was old. Lizzie, her enormous belly pushing out the woven tunic already eaten into holes, worked at fitting the equipment together and aiming it at the building. Vicki, wrapped in Lizzie’s cape, suddenly chuckled. “I met Jackson Aranow once.”

“Who’s Jackson Aranow?”

“The owner of this factory we’re about to rob. Or at least his family is. Know your unwitting and unwilling patrons, I say. The Aranows are old-line conservative, stuffy, boring. And rich as Sanctuary.”

Lizzie looked up from the decryptions on her screen. “Really?”

“No, of course not really. God, don’t be so literal. Nobody’s as rich as Sanctuary.”

“Okay, we’re ready,” Lizzie said. She grinned, a flash of white teeth in the gloom. “You got your sack? Now remember, the shield will only be down for ten seconds before the system resets. You armed?”

“If you call this ‘armed,’ ” Vicki said, hefting the metal pipe she carried in her right hand. “Did you have to make it so heavy? If I’m going to die, I want to die light.”

“You’re not going to die. And you’re all but naked, isn’t that light enough?” Lizzie laughed, a low reckless giggle, and her fingers flew over her equipment. “Okay—now!”

A laser beam pierced the darkness, straight and hard-looking as a diamond-filament rod. It shot through the invisible energy shield to an exact, virtually indistinguishable site high on the building. A second beam followed. Multiple data addresses, their bioelectric molecules excited by the first laser array, absorbed additional energy from the second in a different region of the spectrum. The absorbed energy initiated a branching reaction, a sequential one-photon architecture—a set of wavelength keys fitted across the darkness into a self-repairing chromophore lock originally built of bacterial protein. The night filled with invisible information, some of it sent to other reception sites, farther relays, terminals in other states. There was nothing Lizzie could do about that; security systems, by their nature, alerted other systems. But the air shimmered briefly, and the Y-energy security shield dissolved.

In ten seconds it had reset itself into other codes, other patterns. Lizzie and Vicki, carrying their sacks, had already run across the rough grass and through the information failure.

It was all done in silence. No floodlights came on, no alarms sounded. Factories were fully automated, managed by systems based in distant enclaves, which the owners could consult and direct. Or not.

The first security ’bot skimmed toward the two women almost immediately, terrifyingly fast, a soundless metal shape speeding over the grass. Vicki pointed her EMF disrupter at it and it stopped, sank to the grass, and fell over. Vicki laughed, a little too wildly. “Die, impudent upstart!”

“Come on!” Lizzie urged. She scrambled a second security ’bot and raced for the factory doors.

They had locked, of course, when the Y-shield went down. Lizzie punched in the manual overrides, and held her breath. It had taken months to dip the TenTech security data, and even though she could do anything, somehow she had never quite found the resets for the manual overrides if the security breach had automatically reset them. She hoped that meant there weren’t any resets, that the designers were so arrogant or so cheap they’d gone with faith that the complex Y-system was enough, that no one could breach it. Except, of course, Sanctuary, who had no reason to try.

Sanctuary, and Lizzie Francy.

The doors opened, and Lizzie took a precious moment to squeeze her eyes shut in a brief prayer of thanksgiving to a God she didn’t believe in. Billy’s God, her mother’s God. Lizzie didn’t need Him. She’d done it.

Actually done it—broken into a donkey factory where energy cones were manufactured, to steal enough of them to take her tribe through the winter. They had everything else they needed, since the Change. A plastic polymer tarp for the feeding grounds. Water that no longer had to be clean. An abandoned soy-processing factory from before the Change, with more than enough space to house their tribe. A weaving ’bot that could easily turn out enough clothes and blankets for everyone, even young people whose bodies ate clothes fast. But they had no Y-cones, and winter in the Pennsylvania hills was cold. Now that donkeys no longer shipped things like cones and blankets in exchange for votes, tribes just had to take care of themselves. Nobody else would.

Lizzie opened her eyes. Another security ’bot darted from an alcove, and she zapped it with the disrupter. Hidden monitors were of course recording the break-in, but both she and Vicki were enveloped in head-to-foot holosuits. To the monitors, Lizzie appeared to be a twelve-year-old blonde girl eight months pregnant. Vicki was a redheaded male donkey dressed in a business suit. And all the infrared detectors would get were two heat patterns of human shape, female gender, a certain size and mass and metabolism—but not a certain identity.

It was so easy! Dart in, stuff seven or eight cones from the end of the line into their sacks, run back outside to wait for her equipment to fire a second laser array and bring down the shield for another ten seconds, dart back out. Pretty good for a Liver brat! She ran down the short corridor to the factory floor, her belly swaying from side to side like a bonga rhythm.

And stopped dead, in front of a place gone mad.

Two forklifts rolled across the floor. One lifted, stacked, sorted, and removed nothing at all—batches of empty air. The other carried a single packing case to the end of the robotic line, placed it there, received empty energy cones, carried the same case to the center of the factory and dumped the cones out. Then the forklift rolled through them, sending them clattering over the floor, while it carried the empty case back to the end of the line. The case was dented in a hundred places, folded in at one corner, missing both sealing flaps. It looked as if it had been through a war. On the line itself, robotic arms lifted the delicate cone innards fed to them from the sealed cold-fusion unit—and missed stuffing the power packs into the cones by six inches. The packs, crushed, dropped to the side of the line. The empty cones sailed on, to the waiting demented forklift at the end, which packed, transported, and spilled them before going back for more.

Vicki said, “What…”

“The ranging algorithms are messed up,” Lizzie said, with great disgust. “God, the waste… your owner friends must only check the output figures, not the quality control or even the—Vicki, it’s not funny!”

“Of course it is!” Vicki said. She doubled over with laughter, barely able to get the words out. “It’s… hysterical. The high-tech donkey world… it looks like a ’bot Holy War on Endorkiss… and… that stuffed shirt Jackson… Aranow…”

“We only have a few more minutes, and we need cones! Help me find the cones packed before this all went diseased, it can’t have been going on that long…”

“No? Look… at the dust on everything!” And she was off again, holding her belly, laughing like some crazy in a bedlam holo. Sometimes it seemed to Lizzie that she was the adult and Vicki, with her weird donkey humor, was the child. Then, other times, Vicki became the woman Lizzie remembered from her childhood: scary, knowing, poised, a being from that other world that ran the world. Why couldn’t people be as easy to dip as systems? Lizzie jabbed Vicki in the shoulder.

“Come on! Help me look!”

Vicki did. The two women raced to the packing crates stacked by one of the forklifts before (when?) they went crazy. Fortunately, the sealer ’bot must have malfunctioned as well: none of the crate flaps were fastened, which made it easier to yank them open. The first crate on the top tier was empty. So was the second. The third was stuffed with crushed energy packs, smeared against and around cone casings like smashed yolk on unsmashable eggshells. Lizzie marveled. What could have messed up the programming this bad?

“Vicki—time is running out! The laser array only fires once more, resets are paired but the next pair is random-generated, I couldn’t program for it—”

“Here!” Vicki said, no longer laughing. “This crate is good. Grab three or four cones—go! Go!”

They stuffed cones into their sacks, then ran for the corridor, dodging rolling empty cones from the forklift. At the corridor’s end, the factory doors were closed.

“What—Lizzie! They locked automatically!”

Lizzie clawed at the manual override, punching in various standard “open doors” codes. Nothing happened. The security system had reset the door closings, but not the openings. It made sense. If the shield was breached, let whoever had breached it go in—but not out.

Vicki said, “Can you get in and get the code?”

“Not before the shield collapses. That happens right… now.”

Lizzie slumped against the door. Slowly her body sank to the floor, like a rag doll, the sack of precious Y-cones clutched in her arms. She hadn’t done it, after all. She had failed—she, Lizzie Francy!—and now Vicki and she were trapped inside the cone factory, an impenetrable foamcast building. And even if they could get out of the building, they were stuck inside a ten-foot dirt moat around that building by a Y-energy shield that no molecule larger than air could get through. Trapped.

“Vicki.” she whispered, and she wasn’t the girl-genius datadipper, she was a scared seventeen-year-old girl clutching at an adult, “Vicki—what are we going to do, us?”

“We’re going to wait,” Vicki said matter-of-factly. She settled down beside Lizzie, her back also to the door. “Until somebody shows up.”

Lizzie reached out one hand to a patch of floor just beyond the door. She scraped her finger across the foamcast. It came up dusty. “And how long you think it’s been, you, since anyone was here, them?” She heard her speech sound Liver again, the way it did when she was upset. She hated that.

Vicki said, “Someone will come to check on the security breach. Some tech supervisor dispatched by TenTech. The dust isn’t significant—it doesn’t mean no one ever comes. The whole air filter system could have blown at the same time as the rest of the ’bots, and spewed all its accumulated dust back in again.”

Lizzie frowned. Arguing made her feel less hopeless. “But the ’bots been malfunctioning, them, for a long while. Look at all them ruined cones…”

“Not that long. We found the whole cones in the top tier of crates, remember.”

“And how do we know, us, that these cones even work?” Lizzie demanded. She sat up straighter, hauled one out of her sack, and turned it on. Immediately it radiated heat. She switched it to light, then both at once. “It works.”

“Well, good.”

“Maybe whoever comes will let us keep these few cones.”

Vicki just looked at her. The hopeless feeling washed back over Lizzie again. No, of course they wouldn’t let her keep the cones. They were donkeys. They would arrest her and Vicki for breaking in, and stealing, and whatever else they decided to, and Lizzie and Vicki would go to jail. Her baby would be born in jail. And the tribe wouldn’t have heat after all for the winter, and so would have to migrate south, like most other tribes had already done. Well, that wouldn’t be so bad, the weather was warm in the south and there weren’t so many people left after the awful Change Wars that there wasn’t room… but Lizzie’s mother and Billy wouldn’t go. Not if Lizzie were in jail here in the north. Would it be up here? Sometimes they sent people to distant prisons. The donkey cops could send her anywhere.

She said miserably, “They still control us, them, don’t they? Despite the Change. And the Cell Cleaner. And… everything.”

Vicki didn’t answer. She just sat there, a renegade donkey herself, living with Livers, watching the insane forklift lift and transport and stack empty air while damaged cones rolled past and clattered into corners.

They waited all night, sleeping a few hours on the factory floor. Toward morning a cone rolled into Lizzie and nudged her from fragmented dreams into fragmented wakefulness. She shoved the cone away and considered disabling the forklift. But why bother? She curled up tighter around the still-unfamiliar mass of her swollen belly. The factory floor was cold. Beside her, Vicki snored gently, but Lizzie couldn’t make sleep return.

She sat up. During the night more of her tunic had disappeared. The belt she wore tied under it, now riding high over her belly, was made of a nonorganic synthetic from before the Change. From it hung a pouch of the same material, holding her tools. If only she had a tunable lasersaw! A lasersaw would have cut them out of here in no time. But only donkeys had lasersaws. That had been true even during the Change Wars, when there’d been warehouse looting and fighting and what Vicki called “the monumental civil upheaval of a dying order.” Donkeys stayed in their impenetrable enclaves, and their lasersaws stayed right in there with them. Besides, a lasersaw wouldn’t get them through the outer security shield. Nothing but a nuclear weapon shattered that kind of Y-shield.

The factory lights had stayed on all night. Probably they were programmed to do that whenever the building detected human presence. In the soft glow the ’bots performed busily, doing everything wrong. Stupid machines.

But no stupider than Lizzie had been, her.

As long as she could remember, Lizzie had felt to herself like two people. One of them had always been asking questions, pestering her mother and Billy and later Vicki, tearing through the pathetic educational software at school, taking ’bots apart whenever she could, listening, listening, listening. There was so much she wanted to know. And until Vicki and the Change, no way to find it out. So when Vicki Turner had left the enclaves and come to live with Livers and given Lizzie a good terminal and crystal library, there was everything to learn. Lizzie—one of the two Lizzies—grew almost frantic, working the terminal every waking minute, trying to make up for lost time. And when she had—when she’d first learned how to use the Net, and then how to master it, and finally how to dip it for any information she wanted, anywhere—when she’d learned all that, it was like she was drunk. Drunk with power, drunk with doing. She’d designed the weaving ’bot for the tribe, and dipped unshielded warehouses until she found all the necessary parts to build it, and located the abandoned factory for their winter home, and gotten pregnant by a boy she’d never see again and didn’t need to. Lizzie Francy had decided she wanted a baby, just like she’d decided she wanted a weaving ’bot, so she got it. She could do that, she could do anything, and nobody better tell her otherwise, them!

But every minute, underneath, there was this whole other Lizzie that nobody saw. Who was scared all the time. Who knew she was going to mess up eventually, it was only a matter of time. And then everybody would know that she was really a fake, and couldn’t do anything right, and didn’t belong. This second Lizzie was frightened to datadip important corporations like TenTech, and afraid that once her baby was born she wouldn’t be able to take good enough care of it, and terrified that Vicki and Billy and her mother would somehow go away and leave her all alone. Alone with a baby. Which two other girls her age in the tribe, Tasha and Sharon, managed just fine, but which Lizzie Francy couldn’t. Because Lizzie—this other Lizzie—only wanted to curl up in a ball and stop being the person a whole tribe looked to for answers stolen from a Net she didn’t really own after all. Donkeys owned it. Just like they always had.

Sitting with her back against the cold foamcast wall, watching ’bots destroy Y-cones, she suddenly couldn’t take the two Lizzies inside. Both making her throat tight and her head hurt. I can do anything! I can’t do anything right! Both pressing on her chest. She had to get up, get away from them both.

She left Vicki sleeping. Vicki looked beautiful sleeping—she always looked beautiful. Genemod. Lizzie would never look like that. She was too short and her chin looked funny and her wiry black hair stuck out in all directions because she pulled at it while she was dipping. But Vicki was asleep and Lizzie wasn’t, so it was up to her to do something about their situation. Something, anything.

Restlessly she prowled the perimeter of the huge room, where fewer cones rolled underfoot. Past the main doors, that she had spent a futile hour last night trying to dip. Past the panel over the narrow air-filter ducts, which Vicki had pried open. The air-filter system had indeed blown with the rest of the programming. Lizzie’s bare feet smeared dirty tracks on the floor.

But then on the far wall she noticed something that, in her exhaustion and discouragement, she’d missed last night. Eight feet up from the floor, a metal panel about a yard square, the exact color of the gray foamcast wall.

Not storage, not way up there. Not the sealed Y-energy housing; that was clearly marked and anyway impenetrable. This panel didn’t look impenetrable, at least not from down here. Small bolts secured each corner.

Lizzie stalked the second forklift, busily lifting and sorting and packing empty air. When it rolled to a stop at the end of the assembly line for another nonexistent load, she climbed aboard its flat squat motor housing. It took her three minutes to reprogram the machine to carry her to the wall, lift her up seven feet, and stand motionless while she unbolted the nearly invisible panel, putting the bolts in her pouch. The panel, made of some light alloy, she set carefully behind her on her metal pedestal.

Behind the panel lay a foamcast indentation shaped like a squared funnel. About four feet deep, it narrowed at the far end to a square only eight or ten inches. The indentation hadn’t been on the building plans Lizzie had dipped while planning this raid. At the end of the funnel was another bolted panel.

She leaned into the indentation. But she couldn’t quite reach the small panel, especially over the awkward bulge of her belly. She heaved herself into the opening and crawled forward.

These bolts wouldn’t unscrew. If only she had a lasersaw! Doggedly she worked the bolts, but they wouldn’t loosen. Yet they weren’t nanofitted; the building was sixteen years old, too old for most nanotech.

Finally, in frustration, Lizzie whacked the panel with the butt of her screwdriver. “Damn it all to stinking hell!” Billy’s favorite oath.

“Awaiting instruction,” the panel said.

She stared. She’d never even considered that the thing might be a screen or voice-activated. Stupid, stupid. What if she’d damaged it by her pounding?

“Awaiting instruction,” the panel repeated.

“Run test sequence.” Find out what she was dealing with.

“Running test sequence.”

The lights in the factory turned off. Five seconds, ten, then back on. Next the noise of the robotic line ceased—a silence shocking as an explosion. Before the din started again she heard Vicki yell, “Hey! Lizzie?”

Lizzie, intently studying the small screen, didn’t answer. Elation ballooned in her. It was running the entire sequence—including the outer security shield. She knew what it was now. Part of the backup system, minimally accessible from the outside of the building for safety control but physically unreachable by any of the line ’bots—which, as Lizzie had just demonstrated, were all too easy to reprogram. Some of the old-style factory systems had experimented with all sorts of weird redundancies to take physical control back from mischievous disablers. If she could dip this auxiliary system, she could control the Y-shield from here.

And she would be able to dip the system. She was the unbeatable Lizzie Francy.

“Repeat test sequence,” she said, intending to call out to Vicki at the next silence. But right after the lights check, the little wall panel blanked. Then it flashed, without vocals, TEST SEQUENCE ABORTED. 65-B.

65-B. A standard industrial code for a microwaved master signal from a supervising, physically present source outside all systems. It was a common fail-safe for any process involving radiation. The entire operation could be halted by the right signal from a handheld remote at close range. Donkeys had arrived at the factory.

Lizzie backed out of her cramped hole eight feet above the floor. Her feet felt for the metal platform of the forklift. It wasn’t there.

Frantically she twisted her pregnant body until she faced outward. The forklift had rolled three feet away from the wall, probably as part of the machinery test sequence. Balancing precariously, Lizzie stretched out both arms full-length. She could just grasp the edge of the alloy panel resting on the forklift’s raised platform. But the panel wasn’t fastened to the forklift itself, and she couldn’t use it to pull the machine forward. And then suddenly the fork-lift came to life again and started to roll toward the line, returning to its normal work, and Lizzie was left with the alloy panel dangling from her fingers eight feet above the floor.

Below, the demented nonwork continued: ’bots assembled Y-energy works and then smashed them against misaligned cones; cone shells rolled across the floor; forklifts stacked air. From behind a pile of packing crates Vicki raced into view, yelling something over the din. Probably Lizzie’s name. And then the main doors, on the adjacent factory wall, sprang open and two donkeys walked in, a man and a woman, with drawn guns.

Immediately, not even thinking about it, Lizzie pulled the alloy panel back into place, holding it from the inside with her fingernails. Heart hammering, she cowered high inside the foamcast wall.

Interlude

TRANSMISSION DATE: November 4, 2120

TO: Selene Base, Moon

VIA: Toledo Enclave Ground Station, GEO Satellite C-1494 (U.S.), Satellite E-398 (France)

MESSAGE TYPE: Unencrypted

MESSAGE CLASS: Class D, Public Service Access, in accordance with Congressional Bill 4892-18, May 2118

ORIGINATING GROUP: “Roy L. Spath’s tribe,” Ohio

MESSAGE:

Mother Miranda! Blessed are the poor in spirit, them, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven! We are the poor, us, and we beg you for mercy! You gave us God’s gift, you, with them Change syringes, and we honor you! Blessed are thou amongst women! You gave us freedom from the Horsemen of Famine and Pestilence, and so now we ask you, us, for freedom from Death! Give us this day our immortal life, and send syringes that can Change us to live like you do, forever and ever world without end amen! Pray for us, you, that we have no hour of death! Thank you!

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

Three

Fifty miles from Willoughby, Cazie said, “The factory security shield’s down.”

Jackson glanced at his ex-wife, her face intent on the screen of her handheld mobile. The aircar flew on automatic and he had been half-asleep, secretly pleased with his ability to doze in her presence. That meant her effect on him was lessening—didn’t it? Or maybe it just meant he wasn’t used to being awake and in the air at 6:29 in the morning. In the east the sky was lightening, and in the pearly light Cazie’s profile looked pure and luminous. Theresa would say Cazie looked like a saint. At this thought, Jackson snorted.

She said, “You don’t believe me? Look for yourself.” She thrust the mobile at him.

He thrust it back. “I believe you. The program must be malfunctioning. Nobody can break into a Y-shielded factory.”

“God, Jackson, your faith in technology is touching. Especially for a scientist. The program is not malfunctioning. The shield went down for a thirty-second manually controlled test sequence. Not only that, it went down last night as well, that time triggered by an outside system with the proprietary aircar signal. I wonder why they collapsed the shield entirely, instead of just opening a car passage?”

“Nobody has the proprietary signal but you and me and the chief tech. Who, you told me, is in the Mexico complex this week.”

“He is. Somebody must have dipped the data banks. God, that dipper must be good. Maybe we can hire him. He’s in there now.”

“In there now?”

“Two human bodies recorded on infrared,” Cazie said. She was smiling, presumably at the drama. In the face of her enjoyment, Jackson felt ashamed to say he wasn’t keen on confronting two possibly armed intruders. Who were probably crazy. What could anybody want inside a cone factory? Cones were cheap: TenTech shipped all over the northeast (or so Cazie had told him); no donkey would break in just for the hell of it. Except kids, of course. It must be hotshot kids, counting datadipping coup.

He said, “What are they doing in there?”

“Jackson, infrared scans aren’t detailed enough to show what people are doing. I thought doctors were supposed to be good at machines.”

“I’m good at the machines I need to be good at. They don’t happen to include factory robotics.”

“Well.” said Cazie sweetly, “maybe you should broaden your horizons.”

Jackson folded his arms and resolved to say no more. Cazie could always make him feel like a fool. Well, this was her party. Let her run it.

She opened a passage through the shield for their aircar. His laser signal lit up the bioelectronic receiver high on the factory facade. The car landed on the ground in front of the main doors.

“Locked,” Cazie said, with relish. “There’s an off-line security redundancy. Evidently our young dippers aren’t that good.”

“Ummmmmm,” Jackson said, noncommittally.

She reached inside her shirt, a nonconsumable synthetic, and drew out two pistols. Grinning, she handed one to Jackson, who took it with what he hoped was lofty indifference. He didn’t like guns. Did Cazie remember that? Of course she did. Her IQ was genemod. She seldom forgot anything.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s reclaim the Alamo.”

“You shoot anybody and I’ll bring charges against you myself. I swear it, Cazie.”

“Good old Jackson. Champion of the underdog. Even when the underdog is overprivileged kids guilty of criminal trespass. Come on, let’s go.”

She unlocked the doors and strode down the corridor. Jackson hurried to catch up with her, so it wouldn’t look as if he was cowering behind. At the factory floor he stopped. The whole place had gone crazy. Robots malfunctioning, debris all over the floor… how long had this been going on? Why hadn’t the chief tech picked it up?

Cazie laughed. “Jesus Christ, look at it! Just look at it!”

“It’s not—”

“Funny? Of course it is. Wait… look over there.”

A man raced toward them. Jackson’s grip tightened on his gun, until he saw the man wasn’t armed. Then he saw it wasn’t even a man, but a woman or boy dressed in a head-to-toe holosuit of a man dressed in a brown business suit. The figure spotted them and stopped running.

Cazie raised her gun. “Come here. Slowly, and with your hands high in the air. Now.”

The figure put his hands over his head and walked slowly forward.

“Now turn off the holosuit,” Cazie said. “One hand only, moving slowly.”

The button was at his waist. The holosuit vanished and Jackson saw not the college kid he’d expected but a woman in her thirties, genemod, dressed in a skimpy homespun eaten into fresh-looking holes. Tall, violet eyes, small nose… Jackson was good with faces.

“I know you! We met years ago someplace… at some party… Diana Something.”

“Not anymore,” the woman said sourly. “Look, Jackson, this is all lovely and social, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a crisis on my hands just now.”

Cazie laughed. Her dark eyes shone with malicious pleasure. “You certainly do. Criminal trespass. How’d you pull it off? You don’t look like a dipper.”

“I’m not. But my friend is, and she’s lost someplace in here… she’s just a kid.”

“Ah, a kid after all,” Cazie said. “Well, let’s find her.” She did something with her mobile and all activity in the factory ceased. Robots froze in midmotion. The noise cut off. In the silence, Cazie yelled, “Yoo hoo, Diana’s young friend! Come out, come out, wherever you are! Allee allee oxen free!”

Diana smiled; Jackson had the impression it was in spite of herself. No one answered.

Cazie said casually, “Is your friend armed?”

“Only with hubris,” Diana said, and for half a minute Jackson wasn’t sure which of them had spoken. It was something Cazie might have said. Then Diana called, “Lizzie! Where are you? It’s all right, Lizzie, come on out. We’re not going to gain anything by postponing the inevitable. Lizzie?”

No answer.

“Lizzie!” Diana called again, and this time Jackson heard the note of fear. “This is Vicki! Come on out, honey!”

Behind them, something clattered to the floor. Jackson turned. Eight feet up the wall, a hole had appeared, framing a scared brown face and crouching body. The girl had wiry black hair sticking out in all directions. She looked about fifteen. And she wasn’t the donkey college dipper he’d expected; she was a Liver.

“Good God,” Cazie muttered.

Diana/Vicki—what the hell was her name?—called, “Lizzie? How did you get up there?”

“Programmed the forklift,” the girl said. Her voice was less scared than her face. Bravado? She glared at the three below her. “Send it back over.”

Nobody moved. Jackson saw that none of them knew how to do that—even Cazie could only manipulate the commands she knew, not reprogram on the spot. How come this girl could? A Liver?

Cazie put her mobile and gun in her pocket, walked over to the closest motionless forklift, and pushed it. Her face turned red; the machinery barely budged. Diana/Vicki and Jackson joined her. Together they hauled the cumbersome thing to under the hole in the wall. Nobody spoke. Through his annoyance Jackson suddenly felt weird—the three donkeys performing manual labor in the silent factory to rescue a criminal Liver. The whole situation was surreal.

He suddenly thought of something Theresa had once said to him: I never feel anyplace is really normal.

“Okay,” Diana/Vicki said when the forklift was against the wall, “come on down, Lizzie. And for God’s sake be careful.”

The girl was facing outward. Carefully, she turned herself in the narrow cubbyhole. As her bottom came into view, Jackson saw that she was mostly naked. Of course Livers didn’t seem to care that their bodies consumed their clothes, at least not the Livers who’d grown up since the Change. When they didn’t wear pre-Change synthetic jacks, they went half-naked in their wandering “tribes.” Sometimes it seemed to Jackson that Miranda Sharifi had reversed evolution, turning a stationary industrial population back into hunter-gatherer nomads. Who neither hunted nor gathered—at least, not food.

The girl in the wall stretched out her legs, feeling with her feet for the forklift behind her. She extended her body full-length, unrolling from the cubbyhole like a printout, and Jackson saw that she was heavily pregnant.

“Careful,” Diana/Vicki repeated.

As the girl’s toes touched the forklift, it began to roll away from the wall. No other machinery in the factory resumed operations.

Cazie grabbed for the forklift and tried to shove it back against the wall. After a moment of shock the other two sprang forward to help. It was too late. The forklift rolled back to its pointless duties as if the humans weren’t there. The girl screamed and tumbled eight feet to the foamcast floor.

She landed on her right arm. Jackson dropped beside her and restrained her from moving. His voice was level and calm. “Cazie, get my bag from the car. Now.”

She went immediately. Jackson said, “Don’t move. I’m a doctor.”

“My arm,” the girl said, and started to cry.

Jackson checked her pupil reaction: both pupils round, the same size, equally reactive to light. He didn’t think she’d hit her head. The arm was a compound radial fracture, the bone sticking whitely through the skin.

“It hurts, me…”

“Just lie still, you’ll be fine,” Jackson said, more confidently than he felt. He put a hand on her abdomen. The fetus kicked back, and he breathed out in relief.

Cazie returned with his bag. Jackson slapped a pain patch on the girl’s neck and almost instantly her face relaxed. The patch was a potent mixture of pain-nerve blockers, endorphins, and the highest legally allowable dose of pleasure-center stimulators. Lizzie began to grin idiotically.

He palpated her arm and asked her to shift her shoulders through a range of motion. She could. Her other limbs were undamaged. He bioscanned her neck, spine, and internal organs: no damage. The portable trauma unit imaged the fracture, guided the two pieces into alignment, and sprayed instacast from elbow to wrist and between two fingers for anchor. Jackson rocked back on his heels.

That was it. The cast, Cell Cleaner, and the girl’s own body would do the rest.

“Lizzie…” Diana/Vicki said, reminding Jackson that she was there. Her voice broke. Jackson looked at her. He had no idea what the relationship between them was, but on the older woman’s face was naked fear and love. It gave him a little shock. Could the girl be her daughter… an ungenemod Liver? From before the Change? It didn’t seem likely.

“Lizzie, are you all right?”

“Of course she’s not all right, her arm’s broken,” Cazie said tartly, at the same moment that Jackson said with professional soothing, “Everything’s under control.” Diana/ Vicki swept them both a look of scorn.

“Lizzie, honey?”

Cazie said sarcastically, “ ‘Diana, honey’? You have some explaining to do here, both of you. Public records show you changed your name to ‘Victoria Turner.’ It doesn’t say what you’re doing trespassing in my factory.”

Vicki, who’d been kneeling beside the dreamy girl, stood up and faced Cazie. Vicki was taller, older, wilder-looking in her eaten Liver tunic and cropped, sleep-matted hair. Her jaw hardened, and Jackson had the sudden impression that she had faced challenges that he couldn’t imagine. There was a nasty lift to her eyes as she squared off with Cazie.

To Jackson, it looked like an even match.

“What I’m doing ‘trespassing in your factory,’ ” Vicki said distinctly, “is seeing that an entire tribe doesn’t freeze this winter. Not that I would expect that to concern you.”

“You have no idea what does or does not concern me,” Cazie said coolly. “What should concern you is felony charges. Breaking and entering, criminal trespass.”

“Oh. I’m terrified. Look, Cazie Sanders, how long is your kind going to—”

“ ‘My’ kind? Unlike you, I suppose?”

“—going to go on blind to what’s happening all around you? The easy answers are over. No more trade goods, colored beads and energy cones, in return for the votes that keep your kind in power.”

“Oh, my God, recycled Marxism,” Cazie said scornfully. “Seize the means of production, right? And you two are the advance army.”

“I don’t think—”

“That’s obvious. Who are you, anyway? Some renegade donkey gone native among the Livers to feed her own ego? A white goddess among the savages, hmmm? Pathetic.”

Vicki looked at Cazie a long time. Her face changed. Then she said quietly, “Who am I? I’m the person who led the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency to arrest Miranda Sharifi. And then led the citizen legal fight to free her.”

It was the first time Jackson had ever seen Cazie at a disadvantage. Her small vivid face registered shock, disbelief, reluctant acceptance. Something about Vicki Turner compelled belief—the way she stood with her feet braced wearily apart, as if she’d been resisting strong winds a long time. Or the way she stood guard over Lizzie, lying on the floor in a glowing stupor from Jackson’s painkillers. Or maybe just Vicki’s face, full of a complex regret. Not the expression Jackson would have expected.

Vicki said quietly, “We still need Y-energy. It’s the only thing we do need from you. And we’ll try to take it, and you’ll try to stop us, and a lot more lives will be lost in the process. Just as in the Change Wars. Lives that might have gone on, with the Cell Cleaner, for a hundred years. You have the weapons, the enclaves, the sophisticated electronic security systems you’ve never let Livers learn. But they are learning, Cazie Sanders. I didn’t datadip your system—Lizzie did. There are a lot of young Lizzies out there, learning more every day. And we have the numbers on our side. There are ten of us for every one of you.”

She had said it—every donkey’s nightmare. The fear that rested under the frantic parties and disdainful fashions and stupid time-wasting social competition: Don’t look behind you. They may be gaining on us. There are a lot more of them than us.

“And you know the worst part?” Vicki said, still in that quiet deadly voice. “You can’t even see it. Not from stupidity, God knows. From willful blindness, for which you are going to deserve exactly the price you end up paying.”

“Oh, God, spare me the melodramatic rhetoric,” Cazie said. She had recovered from the unexpectedness of Vicki’s attack. “The law is perfectly clear. And you’re in violation of it.”

To Jackson’s surprise, Vicki smiled. “Law only works if the majority agree to let it. Don’t you know that? No, of course you don’t. You’re a simple binary code. On for your own interest, off for everybody else. You could be dipped by a child. And you were.”

Cazie said angrily, “Ad hominem sophistry isn’t argument.”

“You’re not a hominem. You’re not even a synonym. You’re redundant code in the human information, and you’re already obsolete.”

The woman was playing. Standing there, laughing at his ex-wife, this ragged renegade was playing with Cazie, with the situation. How much self-assurance did it take to play like that? Or was it not self-assurance but self-righteousness? Suddenly Jackson wasn’t sure he could recognize the difference.

Cazie said, “Defiant words. Not power.” She keyed her mobile, and a security ’bot came to life. It lifted itself off the littered factory floor and sped toward them. A faint shimmer marked the edges of the energy bubble it threw over Vicki.

“You are intruding on TenTech private property,” the ’bot droned. “You are being held immobile until further instruction.”

Vicki went on smiling. Jackson saw Cazie’s face darken.

“You are intruding on TenTech private property. You are being held—”

“Shut it off,” Jackson said, before he knew he was going to. Both women looked at him; it was clear that, absorbed in their battle, they’d forgotten he was there. Cazie smiled and keyed her mobile; the ’bot stopped reciting.

“No,” Jackson said. “I meant—turn it off completely. We’re not arresting her.”

“Oh, yes, we are,” Cazie said.

Reaction welled up in Jackson, a gush of pure hormones he couldn’t label. Or didn’t want to. It poured out in a single sentence, which even as he said it, he knew didn’t mean what the words said: “You don’t run TenTech.”

She said. “That’s exactly what I do. Who else? You? You never even look at the financial dailies, let alone the operational data. Leave this to me, Jack. Stick to your medical knowledge.”

His obsolete medical knowledge, she meant. Baiting him again, but this time not affectionately, which meant she felt cornered. Cazie cornered. Suddenly he loved the idea.

“I’m not leaving this to you, Cazie. I’m overruling you. Turn off the security bubble.”

She keyed her mobile. The ’bot started to move toward the entrance. Vicki, encased in the shimmering hollow energy field as if in a translucent box, was carried along toward the factory doors.

“Cazie. Turn the ’bot off.”

“Bring that stuffed and trussed child, Jack. We’re leaving.”

“Turn it off. I own TenTech, not you.”

“We each own a third of TenTech,” she said evenly. The ’bot continued to move toward the door, encapsulating Vicki.

Jackson said, “I’m voting Theresa’s third.” And just like that, just that easily, he reached out and took the mobile from Cazie’s hand before she knew he would. Or could.

“Give me that back!”

“No,” he said, and gazed at her steadily, and saw the storm coming. Despite himself, his own blood surged. God, she was beautiful… the most desirable woman he’d ever seen. She grabbed for the mobile in his right hand. He gripped her upper arm with his left hand and held her off easily. Why hadn’t he ever thought about how much stronger he was than Cazie? He should have gotten physically assertive with her years ago. His penis stiffened.

“I. Said. Give. Me. That. Now.”

“No,” Jackson said, smiling. Damn, he didn’t know the codes or he would turn it off himself. Well, he could figure it out. Or—strange thought—ask Lizzie. Cazie stood still, not struggling in his grip, her golden skin flushed with anger, the green-flecked eyes burning.

He had never felt such power over her.

Cazie bent her head toward his left hand, which was still clenched on her upper arm. Pain tore through him, surprising him into opening his fingers. Blood poured over them. She had bitten him. Below him, the girl on the floor said something.

“That’s your trouble, Jackson,” Cazie said. “You’re never prepared for the counterattack.”

Two long slashes slanted across the back of his hand. Clean slashes, not tooth-jagged, and deep. Cazie had retractable blades implanted between her teeth.

Venous blood pooled dark red on the floor beside Lizzie, who again said something. Jackson couldn’t take it in. Was he going into shock? No, no light-headedness or nausea, and the wound wasn’t serious. Cazie must be able to control the retraction of her blades. His shock was all emotional; no one was behaving consistently.

Including the girl on the floor. She looked up at him—dopey-eyed, in a smiling haze of neuropharms—from a sudden pool of water between her legs, and chuckled. “The baby’s coming.”

“Oh, Christ,” Cazie said. “All right, you fly the girl back to her ‘tribe,’ and I’ll stay here with Ms. Champion-of-the-Downtrodden until the cops arrive. There must be somebody in the Liver camp who can do whatever it is they do for childbirth.”

“That someone is me,” Vicki said, kneeling beside Lizzie, holding both her hands. Something in her tone moved Jackson. Or maybe he was moved by nothing more than his need to oppose Cazie on medical grounds, his only sure landscape.

“Ms. Turner’s right, Cazie. She needs to stay with the girl.”

“Charming maternal solicitude,” Cazie said. “So what do you want me to do, Jackson, arrest them both?”

“Neither. Not until this is over.”

“And you’re just going to deliver a baby here on the factory floor.”

“Of course not. She’s not going to deliver for hours yet.” Jackson’s hands probed gently. And found that the baby was a breech.

The Change, he reflected grimly, had not reversed certain key aspects of human evolution. The birth canal was still considerably narrower than an infant head, and the cervix still not designed for anything but headfirst delivery. And Lizzie, prima gravida, was only eight months along.

Still, it could have been worse. Jackson’s fetal dermalyzer showed a frank breech presentation—buttocks first, hips flexed, knees extended, feet up near the shoulders—rather than the more dangerous footling or complete breech. The head was flexed forward, ballottable in the fundal region. The fetus, a boy, weighed a viable 2800 grams, heart rate a steady 160, growth normal. The cord wasn’t prolapsed, and the placenta wasn’t previa; it would decently follow the birth, which, Jackson estimated, was still a few hours off. Although she was already five centimeters dilated. Halfway.

It could have been much worse.

“Lizzie,” Jackson said, “I’m going to lift you. We’re going to take you somewhere more comfortable.”

“Which is where?” Cazie said. “You’re not taking her—them—to the enclave!”

Lizzie said, without urgency, “I want to go home.” She didn’t look like a mother-to-be; she looked like a smiling, slumberous child. Jackson sighed.

“All right. We’ll take you home. But, Lizzie, listen to me, I’m going to stay there with you. The baby is upside down—do you understand? I’m going to stay with you so I can rotate him at the proper times.”

The girl looked up at him. In her drugged black eyes, Jackson was startled to see a flash of coherent relief. He had expected her to protest, however languorously, against having a donkey doctor attend her. Hadn’t she grown up with mechanical medunits, when politicians still supplied those? But maybe Lizzie was different from most Livers, because of this Vicki Turner. Or maybe Jackson didn’t know as much about Livers as he thought.

Cazie said, “You’re just going to walk into a Liver camp with nothing but a pistol? Accompanying a criminal that I’m damn well going to have arrested?”

Jackson stood, lifting Lizzie in his arms. She could walk, but pulling her upright would hasten delivery. He didn’t want to deliver a breech, even a frank breech, in an aircar. He faced Cazie. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. And you can come with me or not. Just as you choose.”

Cazie hesitated. In that moment of her hesitation, Jackson felt a surge of hope. Was that actually respect in her eyes? For him? Whatever it was, it vanished.

“It’s a two-person car, Jack.”

He’d forgotten that. “All right… I’ll take them both to their camp—three can squeeze into my car. You stay here and call for another car.”

“I’ll call for the cops, is what I’ll do.”

“Fine. Call for the cops. They can come to the camp, too. We’ll have a party.”

He carried Lizzie across the factory, now frozen except for the forklift Lizzie had reprogrammed, which went on lifting nothing. Had it resumed work because Lizzie had made an error? Maybe she wasn’t as good a dipper as Vicki claimed. Or maybe Cazie’s signal from the aircar had set up some kind of interference or override. Jackson didn’t know enough about industrial systems to guess. Behind him he heard Cazie on her comlink. “Police emergency, code 655, damn it, Robert, answer me…”

Vicki sat on the passenger seat cradling Lizzie on her lap. Two half-naked women in tattered clothes, wet from Lizzie’s burst water, hair matted, smelling of blood and sweat and dirt and amniotic fluid. It was close in the car.

Vicki had a mocking tendency to catch his thoughts. As the aircar lifted she said, “And when was the last time you played doctor to Livers, Doctor?”

He didn’t answer. The car flew through the passage he opened in the security shield. Lizzie said dreamily, “Another one’s coming. It’s so weird, I feel it but I don’t…”

Jackson looked at the aircar console. The interval between contractions had shortened: ten minutes. That fast. He speeded up. “Fly west,” Vicki said. “Follow that river…”

The “camp” turned out to be an abandoned soy-processing factory. Only Livers had ever eaten soy; now no one did, and all the soy franchises had gone bankrupt. The building was windowed gray foamcast, decayed and badly patched. All around stretched fields returning to weeds, bushes, saplings of maple and sycamore. Their scrawny branches were bare. Jackson had forgotten how ugly ungenemod nature was in November, especially in these high hills, or low mountains, or whatever they were.

He set the aircar down in front of the building’s main door, which had fallen—or been torn—off its hinges, and then clumsily wired back on. Inside, Jackson knew, the machinery would have long since been removed for retooling. Or looted during the Change Wars. Or vandalized. Nothing was less necessary now than large-scale agriculture.

The moment the aircar landed, they were surrounded. The horde—it seemed like a horde, even though Jackson counted only eleven people—shoved their faces against the windows, grimacing. Dressed in warmer clothes than Vicki and Lizzie, they nonetheless looked primitive: old synthetic jacks in garish colors over or under woven tunics; ungenemod faces with a weak chin or low beetling brow or too broad forehead or small squinty eyes. An older man was actually missing a front tooth. And this was post-Change. What had these people looked like before the Cell Cleaner?

“Lizzie!”

“It’s Lizzie and Vicki!”

“They’re back, them.”

“Lizzie and Vicki…”

Vicki said, “Release the door, Jackson.” How had she come to be the one in charge?

The horde threatened to spill into the car itself. Vicki handed Lizzie out; the girl grinned dopily as her all-but-naked belly tightened in another contraction. Jackson made himself climb out the other door. A young man—large, heavy, strong—glared at him. A teenage boy scowled and clenched his fists.

Vicki said, “He’s a doctor. Leave him alone, Scott. Shockey, you take Lizzie. Carry her carefully, she’s in labor.”

The boy said, “I don’t care, me, if he’s a doctor. What’d you bring one of them here for, Vicki? And where’s the cones, them?”

“Because Lizzie needs him. We didn’t get any cones.”

The crowd made a subverbal noise Jackson couldn’t interpret.

The inside of the building was dark—Jackson realized that the lights no longer worked, and the only illumination came from the plastic windows. It took his eyes a minute to adjust to the gloom. The room was large, although not as large as the Willoughby factory. Three sides of the perimeter had been divided into curtained cubicles made of shelving, of old furniture, of broken sections of foamcast, of dead and gutted machinery, even of roughly cut logs. Inside each cubicle were makeshift pallets and personal possessions. Through the south window Jackson saw a tent of clear flexible plastic, probably stolen, stretched four feet above the churned-up earth. A natural-light feeding ground.

In the open middle of the floor sprawled dilapidated sofas, chairs, tables, all surrounding a small portable Y-energy cone of the sort used on camping trips. This communal room was warmer than the outside, but nowhere near what Jackson thought of as room temperature.

Vicki said, “That’s the only cone still working in the camp, and it’s not designed for a space this big. Fires are problematic because it’s so hard to ventilate properly through foamcast, Although we have a design for a Franklin stove, which is our auxiliary plan to TenTech cones. Meanwhile, we share the one cone we have. You, of course, would simply have had it seized by the richest family among you.”

“You could have migrated south,” Jackson retorted.

“Safer here. Everybody else is migrating south for the winter. We’re not heavily armed.”

“Ooohhhhhh,” Lizzie said, in hazy appreciation. “Ooohhhhh… I feel another one coming…”

A handsome middle-aged black woman came running across the floor. “Lizzie! Lizzie!”

“It’s all right, Annie,” Vicki said. “Doctor, this is Lizzie’s mother.”

Lizzie’s mother didn’t even glance at him. She grabbed whatever portion of Lizzie, still carried in the enormous young man’s arms, she could reach, and held on tight. “You bring her in here, Shockey—careful, you! She ain’t no gunnysack, her!” Jackson saw Vicki smile, an unamused, turned-down smile. Some history between the two women. Three women. Shockey concentrated on maneuvering his swollen, limp, smiling burden into one of the sleeping cubicles.

Annie blocked the narrow passage with her ample body. “Thank you, Doctor, but you can leave now, you. We don’t need no help, us, with our own. ’Bye.”

“Yes, you do, Ms… You do. It’s going to be a breech birth. I have to rotate the fetus at the proper times to—”

“Ain’t no fetus, it’s a baby!”

Vicki said, “For God’s sake, Annie, get out of the way. He’s a doctor.”

“He’s a donkey, him.”

“If you don’t move, I’ll move you myself.”

Despite himself—the scowling boy had moved closer—Jackson felt a surge of impatience. Were Livers always threatening physical violence? It was tiresome. He said firmly, “Madam, I will move you if you don’t let me at my patient.”

“Why, Jackson,” Vicki said, “I didn’t know you had it in you.” Her tone, so much like Cazie’s, infuriated him. He pushed Lizzie’s mother aside and knelt beside Lizzie, who lay smiling on her bed A thin mattress of nonconsumable plastic, blankets of recycled plastic jacks. The only other furniture was a battered chest and a molded plastic chair that looked like it had once been used for target practice. The walls were hung with the kind of gaudy-colored metal-on-fake-wood art that Livers liked, depicting a scooter race on fluffy yam clouds. On the bureau lay a Jansen-Sagura terminal and crystal library, of the kind used by the most well-funded scientists. Jackson blinked at it.

Lizzie’s dark eyes were merry with cheating pain. “It don’t hurt at all, me. When Sharon had her baby, she hollered, her…”

“No meds for Sharon,” Vicki said. “No profit in it for donkeys.”

Jackson said, “You people shouldn’t have destroyed the warehouses.”

“Why not? You people had stopped shipping to them.”

He hadn’t come here to argue politics with a renegade donkey. Jackson reached inside his bag. “What’s that, it?” Annie said. She loomed over the bed like an avenging angel. A strong female odor came from her, musky and strangely erotic. Jackson thought about what it would have been like trying to maintain asepsis in these conditions. Before the Cell Cleaner.

“It’s a local muscle-relaxant patch. To expand the vaginal opening as much as possible and prevent tearing before I do the episiotomy.”

“No knife,” Annie said. “Lizzie’ll be just fine, her! You get out!”

Jackson ignored her. A hand gripped his shoulder and jerked him backward just as he applied the patch to Lizzie. Then Vicki grabbed Annie and the two women tussled until behind him Jackson heard a voice say, “Annie. You stop that, love.”

Lizzie still smiled at Jackson in drugged serenity, while her enormous belly stretched and contracted, shuddering with fleshy quakes. She held his hand. Jackson turned to see a stately black man, at least eighty years old in the strong and healthy mode eighty had become, leading Annie firmly from the cubicle. Behind the retreating Annie stood a whole crowd of Livers, silent and hostile.

He turned back to Lizzie.

“What can I do?” Vicki said briskly.

“Nothing. Stay out of the way. Lizzie, turn on your left side… good.”

It was another hour before he had to do the episiotomy. Through his quick, large cut—there would be no infant head out first to widen the passage—Lizzie smiled and hummed. The old man, Billy, had miraculously kept Annie quiet. There, but quiet.

“Okay, Lizzie—push.” This was the drawback of the neuropharms swarming through her system. They were selected to not cross the placental barrier, but they vastly reduced Lizzie’s need, or desire, to do anything as focused as pushing. “Come on, push… pretend you’re shitting a pumpkin!”

Lizzie giggled. The baby’s little ass presented itself, through his mother’s blood. Jackson waited until the infant’s umbilicus had passed the perineum, then grasped the baby’s hips and applied downward traction until the scapulae appeared. Carefully he rotated the baby so its shoulders were anterior-posterior. When the shoulders were delivered, he rotated the squirming small body back, for a facedown delivery, the least likely to cause head trauma.

“Push again, Lizzie, harder… harder…”

She did. The baby’s head finally squeezed out. No visible head trauma, good muscle tone, minimal ecchymosis and edema. Cradling the baby’s soft wet buttocks in his hand, Jackson felt his throat suddenly tighten. He checked the child with his monitor and then laid him, slimed with blood and vernix, on his mother’s chest. The cubicle was again full of people. Privacy was evidently not a Liver value. He delivered the placenta, cut the cord. And drew a Change syringe from his bag.

The entire crowd drew a collective breath: “Aaaahhhhhhhh…!” Jackson looked up in surprise.

Vicki said, in a voice completely different from any he’d heard from her, “You have one!”

“A Change syringe? Of course—” Then it hit him. “You don’t. Outside the enclaves.”

“Our birth rate is higher than yours,” she said wryly. “And our supply less. When the syringes just stopped appearing a few years ago, you donkeys scavenged and stockpiled them all.”

“So your children—”

“Get sick. Some, anyway. Could die. Don’t you know armed battles are being fought over the remaining syringes?”

He did, of course. But watching it on the newsgrids was different from seeing this crowd eye the syringe hungrily, from feeling their tension, smelling their desperate avidity. He said quickly, “How many unChanged children are in your… your tribe?”

“None yet. But we only had one syringe left, for Lizzie. Next pregnancy… How many syringes have you got, Jackson?”

“Three more…” He almost added with me, saw his mistake in time. “You can have them.”

He injected the baby, who predictably started yelling. Somewhere outside the cubicle, a man’s voice said harshly, “Donkey cops here, them!”

Vicki smiled at him. The smile surprised him: frank, weary, and yet somehow comradely, as if his delivering Lizzie’s baby and handing over the other syringes had changed things between Jackson and the Liver tribe. It took him a minute to realize the smile was a put-on. But she said softly, “You going to let that bitch arrest your patient, Jackson?”

Lizzie lay laughing maniacally over her baby—either the neuropharm company had put too much pleasure stimulant in the patch or Lizzie was especially maternal. The baby wailed loudly. People called and argued in the tiny space, some congratulating Lizzie, some threatening the cops (absurd—they’d be armed and shielded like fortresses), some demanding to know why there weren’t new Y-cones. The smell of packed-in humanity was overwhelming. Jackson looked at Vicki’s smile. He thought of Cazie’s anger, her mockery of him.

Vicki said, under cover of the din, “You told Cazie that you vote two thirds of TenTech stock—yours and your sister’s. You could drop the charges.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

She merely waved her hand to indicate all of it: the baby, the cold room, the ragged Livers, the arguing, the cops he knew must be standing beyond the wall of people who were biologically impervious to disease and hunger but not to cold or violence or other people’s greed. Suddenly he thought of Ellie Lester. Who thought that natives, second-class subjects, slaves—Livers—were ever so witty. Who thought that powerlessness was funny. Unlike Cazie, who merely thought it was boring.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll drop the charges.”

“Yes,” Vicki echoed, and stopped smiling, her eyes narrowing as she regarded him closely, as if wondering what use it might be possible to make of him next.

Four

Today, Theresa thought. Today’s the day.

Lying in bed in the early morning, she felt the familiar dark cloud descend over her mind. Heavy, queasy, hopeless. “The black dog that doesn’t let go,” somebody from old times had called it. “The dark woods than which death is scarcely more bitter.” That was “Dante”—she remembered that name. “The gnawing beast in the brain.” She didn’t remember that one. Thomas, her personal system, had found the quotes for her in some deebee, and now Theresa couldn’t forget them. Dogs, beasts, woods, clouds—she had lived with the darkness for so long she no longer needed names for it, yet she had them. Like the fear itself.

But today the queasy fear wouldn’t stop her. She wouldn’t let it stop her. Today was the day.

“Take a neuropharm,” Jackson always urged her. “I can prescribe… Tessie, it’s an imbalance in brain chemistry. No different from diabetes or anemia. You right the chemistry. You fix it.” And Theresa could never find the words to make him understand.

Because words weren’t important. Action was. She had come to see that only recently. When she had realized it, a deep shame had swept over her. How could she have been so self-indulgent, so pampering of her own weak soul? It had been over a year since she’d even left the apartment… and she’d never left Manhattan East Enclave. Never, her whole life. No wonder she was what Jackson called “clinically depressed.”

Today.

Jackson had gone with Cazie, very early, to check on a factory someplace. Theresa had heard him leave. She was uneasy whenever he left the apartment, but she tried very hard not to let him see that. It wouldn’t be fair. Jackson already stayed home too much for her sake. Hovered over her, worried about her. I can prescribe… He worried about her, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t see what he called a “brain-chemistry imbalance” really was. Only Theresa knew what it really was.

It was a gift. Her soul’s way of telling her that she had better change her ways and pay attention to what really mattered.

Theresa swung her feet over the side of the bed and waited for the daily anxiety to subside. If she let herself, she could stay in bed all day. It was so safe there. Instead, she walked into the sonar shower, took a thirty-second wash, and walked out again. In the bedroom she caught sight of herself naked in the long mirror on the west wall, and stopped.

She didn’t even look like everybody else. Her body was beautiful, she supposed—everybody was beautiful. But she somehow looked… not there. Pale hair and eyes, pale small face, pale skin—what had her parents been thinking of? A fairy. A ghost. An insubstantial holo, fuzzy at the edges. No wonder she didn’t belong anywhere, didn’t know even a single person who could understand her struggle for what it really was. Not even Jackson, loving brother though he was.

Even Jackson thought that Theresa had been born wrong. That she’d been damaged somehow during her in vitro genemod. Even Jackson couldn’t see the nature of the gift that Theresa had been handed. Because it was a gift, no matter what anyone said. Pain always was.

Pain meant that you had to change something, had to learn to think differently about the world. Seeds, Theresa imagined, felt tremendous pain when they burst their husks in the cold dark earth and began to push blindly toward a light they had never seen. Pain was what made you grow. No one seemed to understand that. Everyone she knew, as soon as they were in pain, did everything they could to make it go away. Medicine. Recreational drugs. Sex. Frantic parties. Which were all, when you got right down to it, the same thing. Distractions from pain. How come nobody else in this century thought like that? Only her.

“Each environment,” Jackson had said once, in the slow, careful way he always talked to her, “rewards different personality profiles. Ours rewards vivaciousness, aggressiveness coupled with the appearance of not caring, a certain careless cruelty… you’re not like that, Tess. You’re a different kind of person. Not a worse kind, just different. It’s all right to be different.”

Yes, it was. But only because she’d come to believe that her differentness had a point. The black cloud in her brain, the fear of everything new, the attacks of anxiety so strong that she sometimes couldn’t breathe—their point was to make Theresa break her lazy husk and push blindly toward the light. She believed that. Even though she’d never seen it and didn’t know quite what she was pushing toward. Even though sometimes she despaired that the light was even there But that was part of the gift, too. It made her question everything that happened around her, in case she missed a vital clue to what she was supposed to do next.

She hadn’t told Jackson that part. He already worried too much about her, and he wouldn’t understand anyway. That was actually funny—Jackson was the smart one, Theresa the one whose IQ modification hadn’t quite worked. Certainly she’d never been very good at school software. But Jackson wouldn’t understand that although he had been right about different personalities being rewarded in different cultures, he hadn’t taken the idea far enough.

Theresa had. She’d spent thousands of hours at her terminal, slowly and laboriously sending Thomas to search through the history deebees. And she’d found the place that would have rewarded who she was: the Age of Faith.

She should have been born Catholic. In the late Middle Ages, when men and women had been honored for devoting their lives to the uses of pain in the service of spiritual growth. She would have belonged. To enter an abbey, to have a reason for a cloistered life, joined with others in constant prayer… But she had been born into an age when no one she knew even believed in God. Including her.

Tears filled Theresa’s eyes. She dashed them away impatiently and moved away from the sight of her naked body in the mirror. It was stupid to cry. She had been born now, not then, and that must be part of the gift, too. She was meant to find another way, a different push toward the light she so often despaired of finding. And after months—years—of meditation and false starts, she had come to see what that way was.

She must go out.

Out of the apartment, out of the enclave. Jackson usually urged her not to watch the newsgrids because they made her feel so much worse, and until a few months ago Theresa had been glad to do what Jackson wanted. But lately she had watched holovid whenever Jackson wasn’t home, and although most of the news had of course been about donkeys, there had been glimpses of Livers, too. Between the stock market reports and enclave politics and even an occasional national report from Washington, which nobody seemed to think anymore was anywhere near as important as internal enclave affairs. Just glimpses of Livers, and those Livers were suffering. Not from hunger—not that, ever again. But from lack of things like energy cones and decent clothing and replacement parts for terminals. While people like Theresa and Jackson and Cazie and those loathsome friends Cazie had brought by last night had more things than they knew what to do with. That’s when shame had burned her.

And then Theresa had seen something on the holovid that made her know she was meant to go outside. There were Livers actually frying to organize into spiritual groups! And the news channel had shown where one of those groups was wintering. The holovid had been sneering, of course… but it had given district coordinates.

She dressed in one of her long, loose, flowered dresses. Theresa designed them herself, sending sketches and her measurements to a tailoring franchise that would still work in cotton. She found a warm coat—they didn’t have weather voting, outside—and an old pair of boots. But then she hesitated.

What should she take to give them? Energy cones, yes—she’d already ordered a dozen on the TenTech account, and the mail ’bot had delivered them last week. Theresa hadn’t understood the account very well. Usually Jackson took care of these things. She had used a “proprietary password” he’d once given her, but it must have been the wrong word because the system thought she’d wanted access to factory records. She’d mucked around in them awhile before realizing her mistake; she only hoped she hadn’t caused malfunctions in any system anyplace. After she’d found the household accounts, though, she’d been able to figure out how to order what she wanted. It gave her an odd sense of power, which she immediately distrusted. “Pride goeth before a fall.” Her mother used to say that.

Clothing. She should bring decent clothing. On the holovid the Livers wore these awful homespun things, or else jacks in truly terrible colors… but all her clothing was cotton or silk. That wouldn’t do. The Livers were all Changed, of course. They needed nonconsumables.

She went into Jackson’s room and looted his wardrobe. Shirts, pants, tunics, coats, farrells, shoes. He could always order more. And next trip she’d bring some nonconsumable women’s clothes.

What else? Oh! Money, of course. But how did that work, for Livers? They didn’t use money, or at least they hadn’t, before the Change. They’d all had meal chips and ID cards and the politicians had given them everything free in exchange for votes. Nobody voted anymore, except for enclave elections. Well, of course not… that’s why the Livers were in this position! They didn’t have any money to buy the things they needed. So most of them just went south, where they didn’t need heat or clothes, and fed out in the open, and got into stupid wars, and forgot civilization entirely. But not all of them. The ones Theresa was going to visit could surely use money. But how do you sign over credit to people who don’t have accounts?

She’d bring a handheld terminal. A mobile. Maybe they had some sort of group account for the organization, or something. Or maybe she could figure out how to set up one in their name, but with access to some of her money. That shouldn’t be too hard. People must set up accounts on the Net all the time. She could leave them the mobile.

She could do this. She really could. For the first time in her life, after so many false starts, she—Theresa Katherine Aranow—could actually be useful to something larger than herself.

The black cloud in her head didn’t lift. But it lightened a little, and Theresa smiled.

On her way out, she passed her main terminal. It was on, holding a screen of her book about one of the first Sleepless, Leisha Camden. Another false start. Theresa knew she wasn’t much of a writer; the book wasn’t very good. But she had wanted to write about Leisha, that outsider from her own people who’d fought so hard to keep Sleepless and donkeys from splintering into two armed camps. Leisha had tried to keep the Sleepless from withdrawing into armed retreat in Sanctuary. She’d tried to keep Sleepers from boycotting all corporations invested in by Sleepless. She’d tried to keep Miranda Sharifi from the same kind of isolation that had driven Miranda’s grandmother to treason.

Leisha had failed, at all of it. And then the Sleepless had engineered the SuperSleepless and everything got even worse. But Leisha had at least tried. What had driven Leisha, Theresa wondered, before she’d been murdered by outlaw Livers in a desolate Georgia swamp? Something must have driven Leisha. Some light she could see more clearly than Theresa had been able to do.

At the elevator to the roof, her arms filled with a load of Jackson’s expensive and perfectly tailored clothes, Theresa hesitated. It was so hard to go outside. So many new things… what if she had an attack? Maybe if she first watched a Drew Arlen concert, the one about taking risks…

Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer. There had been a period, several months long, during which Theresa had watched an Arlen concert two or three times each day. She’d let Arlen hypnotize her, with his subliminals and programmed graphic shapes that seized the unconscious mind, into a different kind of dreaming. Deep, personal, massaged into shape by Drew’s art of mass hypnosis and universal symbols to which he seemed to have easy access. The dream became whatever the listener wanted it to be, needed it to be, and the dreamer awoke cleansed and stronger. Like any other temporary drug.

No. Not today. She was not going to watch a Drew Arlen concert today, not use it like just another neuropharm. She could do this alone. She could. Today was the day.

“Good morning, Ms. Aranow,” the elevator said.

She let it swallow her.

“Why you doing this, you?”

“I wanted to… I saw you on the newsgrid. About your… the attempts you’re making to…” Theresa took a deep breath. The man wasn’t tall, but he was thick and bearded and sunburned and scowling. He stood too close to her. Three of them, two men and a woman, had run toward the car as soon as it landed, a respectful distance away from their building. What she hoped was a respectful distance. Her heart raced, and her breath snagged in her throat and wouldn’t come out. Oh, not now, not now… She breathed deeply. The air outside was colder than she’d expected, and grayer. Everything out here—air, trees, ground, faces—looked cold and gray and hard.

Theresa turned to the woman. Maybe a woman would be easier. “I know you’re trying to find… to do… the newsgrid said this was a ‘spiritual experiment.’ ” What the newsgrid had actually said was a “quasi-spiritual attempt at a completely irrelevant human delusion.”

The second man’s face softened. He was younger, maybe Theresa’s age, skinnier, unbearded. “You’re interested, you, in our ways?”

“Don’t be taken in, Josh,” the woman said sharply. “She’s donkey, her!”

“Let’s see, us, who she is,” said the first man. From his pocket he pulled a mobile—were Livers supposed to have those? “On. ID check. Aircar number 475-9886,” followed by code authorizations. How did he know those?

The terminal said, “Car registered to Jackson William Aranow, Manhattan East Enclave.” It added a citizen number and address. Theresa hadn’t known those were public.

“I’m Theresa Aranow… Jackson’s… sister.” She tried to breathe normally.

“And you brought us supplies, you,” the woman said. “Out of the goodness of your heart.”

“Yes,” Theresa whispered. “I mean, no, I don’t think… I’m that… good…”

“You all right, you?” the younger man said. Josh. Theresa slumped against the car and he touched her arm. She flinched.

“I’m… yes. Fine.”

“Josh, unload the supplies, you,” said the other man. “Might as well have them, us.”

Theresa made herself breathe normally. She had come this far. “Could I… please see what you’re doing here? Not in exchange for the supplies, but just because I’m… interested?”

The woman said, “We don’t need no spies, us,” at the same moment that Josh said, “You really interested? In bonding?”

“Shut up about that!” the woman snapped.

The two glared at each other. Theresa didn’t remember anything about “bonding” in the newsgrid. She shivered in a sudden gust of wind. It was so cold.

The older man made a sudden decision. “She can know, her. It’s time people knew. We’re doing what’s right, us, and it’s working, and we know that. We should spread the word, us.”

“Mike—” the woman began angrily.

“No, it’s time. And if a donkey’s really interested, her…” He eyed Theresa speculatively.

“I say no, me,” the woman said.

“I say yes, me,” Josh said. “Patty, grab some of those cones, you.”

Patty grabbed, with bad grace. Theresa pulled some of Jackson’s clothes from the car and walked with Josh toward the building, staying as far away from Patty and Mike as she could.

The building was a huge, flat, windowless rectangle. Maybe once a warehouse of some kind. They didn’t take her inside. Instead, they ducked in one by one to drop off their loads of cones and clothing. Then they led her around to the back of the building. Several more people followed, until there was a small crowd.

Behind the building a tent of clear plastic stretched over churned-up ground. The tent, held up at its center by spindly poles four feet high, sagged rapidly to edges held to the ground with temporary-looking stakes. Inside was a Y-cone, a feeding ground, and six naked people, in two groups of three each.

“See, you?” Josh said, not ungently. “Bonded groups, them. Feeding in harmony. That six months ago were enemies, them.”

“Not enemies,” Patty said sharply.

“Not friends,” Josh countered. “We had a lot of fighting, us. Like most tribes. It almost made us blow apart, us, go off alone… be isolated.”

“Which would mean, it, that we was denying our humanity,” Mike said. “Humans are meant to be together, us. Isolated, we ain’t whole.”

“Oh,” Theresa said. Was he right, this ragged healthy-looking Liver? Was that why her life had felt so empty—because she’d isolated herself? Disappointment seeped through her. It seemed too simple, too… easy. All those isolated ecstatic mystics she’d read about in her library, who saw visions and suffered for truth—they’d needed more than just more company! She searched for something to say that wouldn’t offend her hosts.

“How did you stop the fighting and… get to be so unified?”

“Bonding!” Josh said triumphantly. “It was given to us by Mother Miranda, her, and we took it, and now look!”

“Mother Miranda?” Theresa said. “Are you the same as those people who insist Miranda Sharifi develop an immortality drug?”

“No,” Mike said. “We don’t insist, us, on nothing. We don’t ask for nothing. But we took the gift, us, when we found it.”

The gift. “What gift?”

Josh answered, fervor in his voice. “At first we thought, us, it was more Change syringes. But the new syringes were red, them, not black, and there was a holo to play on our terminal. Miranda Sharifi telling us, her, that this was a gift to start with us, then later go to everyone. The gift of bonding. To make up for the isolation of the Change!”

“A holo of Miranda Sharifi,” Theresa repeated. Jackson had said that Miranda and her fellow Supers had nanobuilt themselves a lunar base, Selene, after Jennifer Sharifi got out of prison and threw Miranda out of Sanctuary. That had been over a year ago. How was Miranda sending new syringes from the moon?

“With a new Change,” Mike said. “Bonding. So we can’t ever be alone, us, again. So we have to develop the spiritual aspect of ourselves and get along together. In threes, like the Father and Son and Holy Ghost, them.”

Theresa looked again at the tented feeding ground. Three people at one end, two women and a man. Three at the other, a man and a woman and a young boy. Around her in the crowd people stood grouped in threes, some groups holding hands. Patty and Mike and Josh had imperceptibly moved from opposite sides of Theresa to form a small huddle facing her.

“A syringe,” she said. “It held a new drug, and you took it, and—”

Patty spoke directly to Theresa, looking her full in the face, smiling brutally. “And the drug made us one, it. We can’t move, us, too far away from each other. We are each other’s life!”

The crowd suddenly intoned, “We are the life and the way. We are the life and the blood. We are the life and the chosen.”

Josh said eagerly, “You see now, you? We’re a real community, us. The Change syringe divided people, everybody able to go off by hisself, them, to eat and be healthy and live, nobody needing anybody else. But the bonding syringe unites. If Mike or Patty or me get too far away from each other, us, we die.”

“Die?” Theresa faltered. “Really die?”

Patty said triumphantly, “Really die. And a bonded group did, them. In another tribe. I saw it, me. The fools didn’t believe Mother Miranda, and the Holy Ghost moved away, her, and in one night the other two died.”

“But… but what if you have a baby? Does the baby—”

“We got lots more red syringes, us,” Josh said. “A baby ain’t no problem. It just stay with its mother, him, until it’s old enough to bond with his own group.”

Theresa felt sick. They wanted so badly to have a reason to need each other, to be a community… but this. It must be done with pheromones. Jackson had explained pheromones to her. Chemicals given off into the air and smelled by other people, even if they didn’t realize. And the chemicals affected people’s behavior… Maybe without the new smell, some poison was set off in the bonded person’s body. But wouldn’t the Cell Cleaner destroy any poison? Wasn’t that what the Cell Cleaner was for? Of course, if Miranda Sharifi had really made them both… would Miranda Sharifi do that? Why?

A part of Theresa’s mind said softly, Because they remade human bodies in their own image. Now the Supers want to own human brains. No. That was Theresa’s own brain, the part that was so afraid of new experiences and new things, the part that never wanted to leave the apartment. Xenophobia. Inhibition. Agoraphobia. Novelty anxiety. Jackson had taught her the words. It was she who was mistaken, was blind, didn’t recognize a path up to the light when she saw it…

No. It wasn’t her. What these people were doing was wrong.

Her breath went ragged, her heart raced. She felt the attack coming—nausea, dizziness, the terror of not being able to breathe—and flailed one hand, as if she could physically ward it off.

Patty misinterpreted her gesture. “You don’t believe me, you? Then come see the holo!”

“No… I… please don’t…” Patty seized her arm and dragged her around the building and inside.

Livers were there, in threes, crowding close to her and breathing in her face and it was dark and her gorge rose and…

“Mother Miranda time!”

The holostage sprang to life. A pretty, meaningless swirl of color, and then Miranda Sharifi appeared, head and shoulders only, the background a plain dark recording booth designed for anonymity. Miranda wore a sleeveless white suit. A red ribbon held back her unruly black hair.

“This is Miranda Sharifi, speaking to you from Selene. You will want to know what this new syringe is. It’s a wonderful new gift, designed especially for you. A gift even better than the Change syringes were. Those set you free biologically, but also led to much isolation when you no longer needed each other for food and survival. It’s not good for man to be alone. So this syringe, this wonderful gift—”

Beyond the holostage, in a corner of the warehouse, Theresa saw an unChanged child.

About two, the child sat propped in a corner, thin flabby legs straight out. One side of its head was empty of hair, the skin eaten into circular patches oozing pus. Rheum trickled from its filmy eyes.

Theresa’s throat closed entirely.

“You, my chosen people, the first to know the life and the way—”

The child whimpered. A girl no older than Theresa darted forward and picked it up. A strong, healthy Liver girl, free of hunger and disease, who could stand by herself and see from clear eyes… Was the unChanged child… could it be in actual pain?

“—spiritual gift, the life and the way—”

She couldn’t breathe. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t breathe…

“—building on the work of the Change syringe I first gave you years ago when—”

… couldn’t breathe and she was going to die, this time she would really die…

“What’s the matter with the donkey, her?”

“What’s wrong, you?”

“Give her some room!”

“She’s dying, her!”

“People don’t die, them, you asshole! Holo’s done! Inject her!”

“There ain’t nobody, them, to be in her group…”

“Yes! The two new people, them! Cathy and Earl!”

“Inject them, all three! Inject them!”

The room spun crazily. It went black in a deep swooping wave, as if someone had jerked the far wall, and the wave rushed toward her in a minute it would take her… Put your head between your knees, Jackson’s voice said inside her head. Breathe deeply. Take a neuropharm… She doubled over. Two people pulled her upright, one on either side of her, her new bonded group… In the spinning room a syringe whirled into view, in somebody’s hand, bright red.

“No!” Theresa screamed. “No… d-d-don’t…”

“It’s all right, honey,” a woman’s voice said soothingly. Her coat was pulled off. “It don’t hurt. Just like another Change needle, you won’t hardly feel it, you. Mother Miranda says, her, that it just builds on the first Change…”

The red syringe swam closer to her arm. The room whirled and the dark wave washed over her… dizzy faint she was going to throw up… At the last minute she pulled the words somewhere out of herself.

“I’m… not… Changed!”

And the blackness took her.

Outside. She was lying on the ground outside, and it was cold. She wasn’t wearing her coat. She opened her eyes and the sunlight hurt them. People stood around her in groups, their ugly faces gazing down at her. In a group… Cathy and Earl and Theresa… She was bonded.

“She’s coming back, her.”

“Give her some room, damn it!”

“Don’t give the bitch nothing, us.”

“Theresa… you’re not bonded, you. We didn’t do it.” Josh, squatting beside her, not touching her. Theresa concentrated on her breathing. Sometimes the attacks came in twos, or even threes… The very thought made her heart race and her breath shorten.

“I said, me, that we didn’t bond you.”

Josh’s face was kind. How could that be, kindness from a Liver? He couldn’t understand what happened to her… not even Jackson understood. Theresa tried to breathe deeply.

Patty said, “It must be true. What we heard, us. That even the enclaves don’t have no more Change syringes.” Her tone was slyly pleased.

Theresa sat up. Home. She had to go home. Would they let her go home? What would they do to her? Tears filled her eyes.

“Oh, God, she’s crying, her,” Patty said. “Let the bitch go.”

Mike said, “No. Wait. She’s got a mobile. She knows entry codes we could use, us.”

“She don’t know nothing, her—look at her! She ain’t even Changed!”

“So? She’s got stuff in her head, she’s a donkey—”

Josh leaned close to her. Theresa flinched. His breath was sweet and warm but somehow alien. He said, very low, “Get up, you, while they’re arguing. Get in your car and go.”

She looked at him wildly. He nodded once, pulled her to her feet, and whispered something in her ear. Mike and Patty had started pushing each other, their faces contorted, their words coming out in spittle at the corners of their mouths. Theresa ran toward her car.

“Stop her!” Mike called. “Stop, you!”

Theresa lurched and fell. Her breath came hard, the ground shook and grasped… not again. Not another attack. She forced herself to her feet and looked back over her shoulder.

Patty and Mike were trying to chase her, but every time they got a few yards from Josh they stopped, ran back, and tried to pull him along. Josh made himself heavy and limp as rags. And Mike and Patty couldn’t chase Theresa without him.

She stumbled to the car and collapsed inside. “Door lock. Automatic… takeoff… Home coordinates.” The car lifted.

Below, she saw Patty slug Josh.

Theresa fell back against the seat, trying to control her breathing, trying to stop the world below from spinning into another of the sickening black waves. Home. She had to get home. She should never have left, should never have come out of the enclave, should never have thought she was strong enough or worthy enough to actually find out something about the light… She was just a defective overprivileged donkey… no, those people were wrong, that wasn’t the way, courting death to force you into community, no no no… Not like that. The answer wasn’t like that.

She closed her eyes. It shut out the spinning world, but it couldn’t shut out the thing scarier than that. The most terrifying thing she’d seen, in an afternoon of terror, inner and outer… Josh’s face, whispering a final sentence. Kind, regretful, horrifying. His words.

“You ain’t ready, you. Least, not yet.”

Theresa shuddered. She never would be ready, for that. Bound forever ten feet from two Livers, death if she left them… No. It was wrong. A dead end.

But what was Miranda Sharifi doing?

And what was Theresa going to do?

She was again alone with her empty life.

Interlude

TRANSMISSION DATE: December 1, 2120

TO: Selene Base, Moon

VIA: San Diego Ground Station, GEO Satellite C-988 (U.S.), Holsat IV (Egypt)

MESSAGE TYPE: Unencrypted

MESSAGE CLASS: Class B, Private Paid Transmission

ORIGINATING GROUP: San Diego Parents’ Coalition

MESSAGE:

Dr. Miranda Sharifi and Associates—

Knowing, as we do, that you firmly embody the principle that people are never more themselves than when they make choices for others, we approach you with a request. Your gift of Change syringes has transformed our lives. Thanks to your efforts, our children are healthier and stronger. But the supply of Change syringes in our enclave—as in the others—is dwindling. Soon it will be nonexistent. Children born after that must be vulnerable to disease, to accidental poisoning, to danger.

Dr. Sharifi, please don’t permit this to happen. Our children are so precious to us. They are all of our futures. You have been so compassionate and benevolent to your fellow beings that we, the parents of San Diego Enclave, ask you to be so again. We ask for more Change syringes for the children as yet unborn to us. Let this be, from your deep knowledge of humanity, your first scientific goal. We ask not for ourselves, but for the children.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

Five

They had been flying over Africa for less than half an hour when the plane began to descend. Jennifer Sharifi gazed out the window. In the pink dawn the outlines of a city blurred, as if the buildings might or might not actually be there. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, she thought, and didn’t smile.

“Atar,” Will Sandaleros said, and stretched as much as he could in the cramped confines of the four-seater Mitsu-Boeing. Two days ago Jennifer and he had come down from Sanctuary, their first time down in the four months since they’d returned from Earth to the Sleepless orbital. All signs of Miranda and the other Supers had been obliterated from Sanctuary. The friends convicted with Jennifer had also returned to Sanctuary, their shorter sentences long since finished: Caroline Renleigh and Paul Aleone and Cassie Blumenthal and the rest. Back to finish the fight for freedom.

But only Jennifer and Will had made this trip down to the international shuttleport in Madeira. They had gone directly to the Machado Hotel, built and owned by Sanctuary through a complex series of blind holding companies, a luxury business hotel guaranteeing unbreakable security for orbital and Terran executives. For two days they had stayed in their Y-shielded room while hotel staff—half Sleepless, half well-paid Norms—had determined the identity of all the agents, reporters, terrorists, and nuts inevitably trailing Jennifer Sharifi. Last night Jennifer and Will had left the Machado by an underground tunnel built along with the hotel, and so well shielded that only ten people in the world knew it existed. A car had taken them to the coast and the Mitsu-Boeing. Will, used to exercise, was restless after three days in vehicles and shielded rooms.

Jennifer was never restless. She had learned to sit completely still and retreat into her thoughts for hours, for days. For months. Will would have to learn, too. It was a necessary discipline to gather everything inside and bring it to a single point, like sunlight focused by a motionless magnifying glass. A burning point.

“They’ll be waiting?” she said over the back of the seat to the pilot. He nodded. His brown hair, gray eyes, stolid features, could have come from five different continents. He never spoke. Beside him the Sleepless bodyguard, Gunnar Gralnick, checked his weapons.

The plane landed on a dusty, unmarked landing field in the desert, Atar barely visible on the dawn horizon. The only building, a windowless foamcast rectangle curiously pristine and dustless under a Y-shield, might have existed anywhere in the world. The air was colder than Jennifer remembered, this close to the equator. But the sun wasn’t up yet. Later, the air would be hot.

Three men awaited them, dressed in light Arab robes. Nonconsumable synthetics, Jennifer saw. They were all Changed. In Africa, you never knew. The men had swarthy, sunburned skins, but light eyes: two green, one blue. The one with blue eyes had red hair, neither genemod nor fashion augment. Berbers.

“Welcome to Mauritania,” the oldest of the men said to Will, in nearly unaccented English. He did not glance at Jennifer. She had expected this. She said nothing. “I am Karim. This is Ali, and Beshir. Did you enjoy a good flight?”

“Yes, thank you,” Will said.

“No complications?”

“We were not followed.”

“We detected nothing at this end,” Karim said. “But it is best not to linger. Please follow me.”

The pilot remained with the plane. The other six climbed into a large aircar. Will and Jennifer in the back seat with Gunnar between them. They flew low, traveling deeper into the Sahara, which grew more sunlit every minute. Rocks, scrub vegetation, an occasional oasis, its green stopping with the irrigation system as abruptly as if sheared with scissors. Then no vegetation: just rock and sand. They landed beside a small foamcast building whose domed shield was half-buried in drifting sand.

The Arabs landed the car inside the dome, on hard-packed ground free of blowing sand. The building opened through retina scan. Jennifer noted. An underground German company had recently developed software to duplicate retina coding. The Berbers would need to update their security.

The elevator spoke briefly in Arabic. Will gave no sign he did not understand the language. Jennifer understood Arabic although she, too, gave no sign. But of course the Berbers knew what languages she spoke or understood. They knew everything about all three of their Sleepless visitors, everything in any data bank anywhere. Which was never the information most crucial to have. Sleepers never understood that.

Jennifer stood close to them, for the discipline, and made her hatred focus calmly, a controlled bum. For the discipline. The elevator—“The peace of Allah go with you”—might or might not be a piece of satirical programming. If satire, it was a weakness; satire indicated the ability to stand outside your own endeavors and mock them. If not satire, it indicated the strength of tradition.

Mauritania had a lot of traditions. Proud Berber nomads. Islam. Colonial oppression. Collapse and drought and plague and warfare and brutality, like all of Africa but more so. Mauritania had been the last country in Africa to outlaw slavery, less than two hundred years ago. The slavery had persisted, joined by newer outlaws and newer genetic and technological slaves. Mauritania had no government left to speak of; what did exist was easily bought.

The elevator stopped far underground. It opened directly into a conference room, all gleaming nanobuilt white walls and the fragrant smell of strong coffee. Doors led, presumably, to the labs and living quarters. On the gleaming teak table surrounded by comfortable chairs stood a silver coffee service. More chairs ringed the walls. A low side table held a holostage.

Jennifer took a chair at the side of the room, sitting with downcast eyes. This had been the result of negotiation, carried on through Will. The Berbers, shrewd businessmen in their unforgiving environment for three millennia, had adapted easily to being brokers for the international underground. They were less willing to adapt to female entrepreneurs. Had Jennifer been any other woman in the world, she would not have been allowed in the room at all.

Any other woman but one. Miranda, who had betrayed her people and made this interaction with Sleeper scum necessary in the first place.

Will and the Berbers sat at the polished teak table. Gunnar remained standing, back to the wall, between Jennifer and the elevator, so that he could survey everything.

“Coffee?” Karim asked.

“Yes, please,” Will said. “Where is Dr. Strukov?”

“He will join us in just a few minutes. We are a bit early.”

The coffee looked dark, rich, bitter. Jennifer’s mouth watered. She made the saliva stop. The three Berbers drank leisurely, not talking, seemingly completely at ease. But even Karim stiffened slightly when a door opened and Serge Mikhailovich Strukov entered.

The legendary Russian genius was huge, clearly genemod for size. His skin had the characteristic glowing health of the Changed. The syringes had, of course, been dropped in Ukraine as well as everywhere else on Earth, but how widely they were used wasn’t known; not only had Ukraine closed all its borders tight, but the weird antitechnology cults that had flourished there since the Limited Nuclear Wars had greatly slowed any use of the Net. What wasn’t on the Net couldn’t be dipped. Much of eastern Europe and western Asia was unknown even to Sanctuary.

But not Strukov. He was known everywhere, seen nowhere.

He had escaped from Ukraine at seventeen, ignorant of microbiology but, somehow, genemod for IQ. He never spoke of his parents, his background, his adolescence, or how he came to speak not only Russian but idiomatic Chinese and fluent, although accented, French. By twenty-two he had a Ph.D. in microbiology from the Centre d’Étude du Polymorphisme Humain in Paris. At thirty-one he won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on genetically modified excitotoxins in neural mitochondria. He never showed up in Stockholm to accept the prize. Three months later he walked out of his lab in Paris and disappeared.

Over the next decade, odd reports of Strukov surfaced on the underground Net: hints that he was working for the Chinese, for Egypt, for Brazil, always on biological warfare, always on genemod projects that never quite surfaced on the world newsgrids. Or never quite went away. A microbiologist in the San Francisco Bay Enclave declared that he recognized Strukov’s hand in a nasty piece of genemod sent him from a doctor in the Chilean conflict: a deadly retrovirus that destroyed memory formation in the hippocampus. A week later the microbiologist drowned in the Bay.

Strukov sat at the head of the table. Then, pointedly ignoring Will, he swiveled his chair to look directly at Jennifer. She didn’t raise her eyes to his, but he went on looking anyway: five seconds, ten. Fifteen seconds. She could feel the tension in the room shoot upward.

Finally Strukov turned back to the men at the table. He was smiling faintly. “What is it that Sanctuary desires next of me?” His English carried a heavy Russian accent, but the sentence structure was not Russian. Mentally translated from French, Jennifer guessed.

Will looked less composed than Strukov. “You’ve already been informed what we want.”

“I wish to hear your words.”

“We want,” Will said, a little too sharply, “for you to modify the genemod virus you’ve already developed. The trials we received aren’t satisfactory.”

“And why is it that Sanctuary, in possession of the most fine laboratories of the science in the solar system, yourself cannot modify this virus?”

“There are reasons,” Will said, “that we prefer not to.”

“I am able to guess. Sanctuary is run by the communal decision, isn’t it? And many of your people must be opposed to whatever it is you plan. Many more must be in ignorance of your plans. Also, your labs on Sanctuary are arranged for the genetic modifying of the embryos, and for the research into that area. You are not arranged for the creation and the delivery of the deadly viruses.”

Will said nothing. Strukov threw back his head and laughed, a great open laugh that filled the room. Karim smiled. Jennifer Sharifi and Will Sandaleros had gone to prison for trying to hold five American cities ransom with a deadly genemod virus.

Strukov said, “Twenty-eight years changes much, isn’t it? And not only in the microbiology. And yet, even so, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. You wish to try again this assault on the American government?”

“No,” Will said. “But what we do with the virus is our business. Yours, as we initially agreed, is to deliver it.”

“Piece of the cake,” Strukov said, clearly savoring the cliché. Karim laughed.

“Maybe not.” Will said. “You don’t yet know everything our modification requires.”

“Permit me, then, to show to you the modifications I already have created,” Strukov said. “Angelique, commencez. Le programme de démontrer.”

“Oui,” said the system. The holostage came to life. A three-dimensional model of the human brain, in light gray, surrounded by a ghostly outline of skull. Two almond-shaped areas the size of a baby’s thumbnail, located just behind the ears, suddenly glowed red.

“The right and left amygdalae,” Strukov said. “They rest themselves on the interior underside of the temporal lobes. Both amygdalae are in essentials identical. Angelique, ça va.”

The left amygdala suddenly expanded, filling the whole deck and replacing the brain. It became a complicatedly elaborated tangle of neurons, densely packed, with input and output nerves branching outward.

Strukov said, “The neurotransmitter of dominance in the amygdalae is glutamate. It is an interesting amino acid. Subtle metabolic changes can turn glutamate into an excitotoxin that kills neurons in the hypothalamus, a part of the brain one uses in memory formation. Poor transport of glutamate can kill neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Overstimulation of glutamate production leads to many chronic diseases of degeneration.”

Jennifer’s expression did not change. This was basic, common information. Strukov was overestimating her ignorance. Error? Or insult?

Will said, “But any metabolic changes that created a toxin would be dealt with by the Cell Cleaner. It would destroy toxins as fast as they were created. And overproduction is the result of faulty DNA coding that would be corrected by the Cell Cleaner as soon as it was detected.”

“True,” Strukov said. “This is why the diseases such as Huntington’s and ASL have disappeared themselves. Also the accidental poisoning. But the amygdala does more. Angelique, ça va.”

The holomodel changed to a cluster of a dozen magnified cells, long axons and dendrites curling close to each other. Structures in and on the cell membranes glowed yellow and orange.

“The yellow receptor sites are called AMPA receptors. The orange ones are NMDA receptors. AMPA receptors activate themselves in response to glutamate and cause the startle reaction.”

Suddenly the cell holo disappeared. In its place a laser cannon appeared, swiveled, and fired directly at Will. A blast of noise deafened everybody. Gunnar reacted instantly, throwing a Y-shield around Will and Jennifer, drawing his own gun. The laser cannon was only a holo. Strukov threw back his head and bellowed his huge laugh.

“Like that. You reacted with the fear: pulse, blood pressure, adrenaline rush, isn’t it? Your AMPA receptors lit up like the trees of Christmas.”

“I don’t appreciate being made part of your demonstration,” Will said stiffly. Jennifer watched.

“But it demonstrates the issue, yes? However, more exists here. The AMPA receptors that created your fear response clear themselves rapidly after the fear is finished. The neural reaction is temporary. You did not stay afraid after you realized that the cannon was not real. And your NMDA receptors did not activate themselves. Those receptors are different. What it is that activates them is a fear response of the high and prolonged stress. And then the NMDA receptors bond the experiences together. The neural pathways created in this fashion are permanent.”

“What do you mean, ‘bond experiences together’?”

“Watch. Angelique, ça va. This is real-time recording.”

The laser cannon was replaced by a large transparent Y-energy cage outlined by thin black plastic struts. The cage held two white mice. At the far end, the shield collapsed and a cat wearing a bright red collar rushed in. The cat pounced on one of the mice, which let out an agonized squeal. The cat bit down. Blood spurted from the mouse, which screamed at such a high pitch that Jennifer’s ears hurt. With one paw the cat reached out and carelessly, almost nonchalantly, raked its extended claws across the back of the other mouse cowering in a transparent corner.

“Now,” Strukov said. “A week later.”

The same cage, with the same mouse. Its back showed fresh scars. The same cat entered, wearing the same bright red collar. The mouse immediately showed intense fear, both cowering and baring its teeth. Evidently a Y-energy shield invisibly divided the cage in two: the cat could not advance more than halfway toward the mouse, which continued to exhibit fear.

“Three months later,” Strukov said. Same mouse, the scars further healed. A hand entered from the top of the cage, holding a bright red leather collar. Immediately the mouse exhibited intense fear.

“Now, this is merely the Pavlov response, yes? The mouse associates the collar with the fear. This is the same as a man in the combat, who twenty-five years later hears a loud noise and throws himself flat on the ground. The experience of the loud noise and the deadly danger are bonded in his brain, and the amygdala is the place this happens. But now it becomes interesting. The mouse’s amygdalae have both been removed.”

Same mouse. The cat entered. The mouse looked up, saw the cat, went back to sniffing aimlessly at its cage. It wandered toward the cat, which immediately pounced and killed it.

Will said, “No amygdala, no fear.”

“No remembered fear,” Strukov said. “The instinctive fear is still able to be induced, as for example throwing the mouse from a great height and monitoring its bioresponses on the way down. The fear of the falling is instinctive. But the remembered fear depends on the NMDA receptors in the amygdalae. They lay down a permanent neural pathway, the same as some drugs of the street, which in turn permanently alters the reaction. The organism cannot not feel the fear at the proper stimulus. Angelique, ça va.”

The cluster of amygdala neurons reappeared. Now glowing lines connected various yellow and orange receptor sites.

“In addition,” Strukov said, “I am able to make the process go the other way. With the correct viral modifications to trigger, injected into the blood or the cerebrospinal fluid, the natural excitatory transmitters such as glutamate—among many others—can be turned into the excitotoxins. Thus, the fear pathways can be created even without a prior experience. Of course, they are not memory-specific, since there has existed no memory. There is no input from the hippocampus. But the fear pathways are permanent, because they do not depend on the molecules remaining in the brain. The Cell Cleaner can come along two minutes after injection, but voilà! The NMDA pathways have already been forged.

“Also, the metabolic process that changes the neural structure is marvelously complex, and so the variations possible are marvelously varied. I am able to create the permanent reactions for the fairly specific fears, if the basic instinctual response is genetically encoded. Angelique, ça va.”

Another real-time recording; Jennifer could tell from the quality of the holo. An Arab teenage boy, not genemod for appearance: pimply, gangly, shuffling his feet. He sat in a small nondescript room, playing a game on a holo-terminal. Strukov entered the room and pressed a wall button. An entire wall dissolved, opening the room to a garden with an inviting stream and tall date palms. The boy turned ashen. His breathing raced and his chest rose and fell. In panic he whirled away from the garden and pushed his face against the opposite wall, trembling and moaning. “No no no no…”

“The agoraphobia,” Strukov said.

“Permanent?” Will asked.

“Probably. Unless he undertakes either the intense personal behavior modification or the corrective pharmacology. Which his Cell Cleaner will of course destroy unless it renews itself constantly. One will need either another genemod virus or many, many patches each week.”

“How hard would that be to create?”

Strukov shrugged. “For whom? For the usual doctors? Impossible. For a good research facility of the medicine? Difficult, but not impossible. For your granddaughter Miranda Sharifi and her SuperSleepless? Who can tell? Angelique, ça va.”

The display showed a young girl, eleven or twelve, not Arab, with uncombed hair and skinny arms. With her was a woman in her sixties, who sat placidly reading. The girl roamed restlessly around the room, touching the walls, windows, terminal, toys, but stopping to use nothing. Every few seconds she touched the woman, as if reassuring herself that the other was still there. Her face, ungenemod but pretty, crinkled in constant anxiety.

“The fear of the abandonment,” Strukov said with satisfaction. “She cannot bear to be alone by herself. Watch.”

The older woman rose from her chair, laid down her book, and said, “Nathalie, je vais à la cabinet de toilette.”

“Non, non, Émilie—s’il vous plaît!”

“Une minute, seulement, chérie.”

“Non! Vous ne sortez pas!”

The girl clutched desperately at Émilie. Gently the woman unwrapped her clinging arms. Nathalie threw her arms round Émilie’s legs, starting to cry. Émilie detached herself and went into a bathroom, closing and locking the door. Nathalie burst into loud sobbing and curled into the fetal position on the floor. Jennifer glimpsed the girl’s face. It was a mask of anxiety and fear.

After a few moments Émilie came out of the bathroom. Nathalie crawled over to her and again threw her arms around the older woman’s knees.

Strukov said, “The fear of being alone.”

Will said, “Does she have to be with this particular person?”

“But no,” Strukov said, smiling. “She is exactly the same with anyone in the room. She is comfortable and free of the anxiety only when the room holds many people, and all appear prepared to stay for many hours. Then, and only then, the fear of the abandonment is eased. Angelique, ça va—but this one you have already seen, isn’t it? You have decided against this.”

An American Liver town in early fall: trees blazed with color. Three ragged people stood close together on an empty nanopaved road. From their contorted faces and waving arms, they were arguing fiercely. One man shoved the other. The woman stalked away, shouting at them both over her shoulder, into a nearby woods. There was a close-up of her shocked face as two holosuited men grabbed her and forced her into a small aircar.

“They called it ‘the bonding,’ ” Strukov said mockingly. “But you know that better than me, isn’t it? You yourself made the holo the peasants have watched. After they saw it, they injected themselves with the red syringes, and so they became bonded. Now then, this is three hours since the woman is carried away.”

The abducted woman sat alone in a comfortable room. Abruptly she gasped, clutched her chest, and slid off her chair. Her eyes stared in death. The holo superimposed a robocam shot of the two men who had bonded with her, also dead.

“An electrical event in the heart,” Strukov said. “A very clean mechanism, very elegant. I like this technique to control your peasants. Render them very dependent on each other and their actions can be only very limited, yes? A good design. But you do not choose this design. You tell me, leave this attempt, give me something different.”

Will didn’t answer directly. “This whole range of fears you can induce permanently—the biochemistry dictates they’re all as pronounced as these two examples?”

“But no. These NMDA receptors have been strongly activated. They have created the neural pathways of the great strength. It is possible to create the lesser effects.”

Will said, “Is it possible for you to create them?”

“But of course. Angelique, ça va.”

The holostage switched to screen mode. Screen after screen of charts, equations, molecular diagrams, chemical formulas, tables of variables, and ion reaction schematics flashed past, as maliciously complex as the previous demonstrations had been simplistic.

Strukov said, “Much of the work on the fear and the anxiety has concerned itself with the synapses, the neurotransmitters, and the receptor subtypes. I have concerned myself more with the processes of the cellular stress inside the nerve cells, where the neuropeptides form themselves. Here is where the chemical reactions originate and conclude. Each pyramidal neuron receives as many as a hundred thousand contacts from those neurons to which they connect. One therefore begins with models of the nerve transmission.

“And with one other thing. There exist the peptides that form themselves only under the pathological conditions. It is possible to instigate a chain reaction of the complex amines, beginning inside a cell. Some amines in the chain are pathological; some are normal; some are the endogenous excitatory amino acids transformed into the excitotoxins. This chain, it has its beginning in the altered pathways of the amygdalae.

“From there, it extends itself through the central nerve nucleus to the interiors of the cells in many other places—in the brain, in the muscles, in the glands and the organs. The chain ends in affecting many bioamines, including the acetylcholine—look at this chart, here—the norepinephrine, the CRF, the glutamate, the critical gamma C—many many amines.

“Moreover, that chain will go on constantly, once begun by the triggering virus. And since the chain consists of the substances entirely created by the brain itself, the stupid Cell Cleaner does not attack them. It will destroy the virus, but by that time, it is too late. The chain has begun. And according to the stupid Cell Cleaner, the chain belongs there. According to the stupid Cell Cleaner, the chain is native.” Strukov laughed. “And so it is.”

Will said, “And all human brains will respond the same way to the initiating virus?”

Strukov shrugged. “Of course not. The people always differ in their response to anything that impacts the biogenic amines. Some will sicken. Some will respond too strongly. A few will not respond at all. But most will become what you have requested me to make them: inhibited, fearful of anything new, filled with the anxiety at any separation from the familiar. Like the babies with the stranger anxiety. In the essence, my chain reaction brings forward as primary a more primitive function of the brain, which human growth suppresses in favor of the more complex functions. I reverse that.”

Strukov looked directly at Jennifer and smiled. “I will, in its finality, turn your target population into a nation of the fearful children.”

Jennifer gazed back. She had to fight showing her revulsion for the huge bearded giant completely absorbed in his own genius, completely at ease with its demonstration on his own people. Jennifer had always known that Sleepers had no loyalty to their own, no moral sense. They would do anything to each other, if enough money was involved. Nor were they capable of distinguishing between the prison term served by Jennifer, a penalty borne of the Sleepers’ fear of her and of her own sense of moral obligation to safeguard her own, and the prison term that would be served by this brilliant vermin if his brain tampering was discovered by Sleeper authorities. Strukov was a disease. She would use a disease to protect her people, if she had to. But she would not give a disease the moral courtesy of tradition.

She stood, eyes meeting Strukov’s. “And you can deliver the triggering genemod virus by injection, without detection?”

“I have said so,” Strukov said, amused, as the three Arabs rose angrily to their feet. “The vector contains sixteen different proteins, five of which never before have existed. All will be destroyed by the Cell Cleaner long before any scientific authorities can isolate and culture them.”

Karim said to Will, “We had an agreement about who will speak at this meeting!”

“Injection will not do for us,” Jennifer said to Strukov.

He answered, smiling, “Your granddaughter remade the human body, and you will remake the human mind, isn’t it?”

“What we do is not your concern,” Jennifer said, at the same moment that Beshir said hotly to Will, “Control your wife!”

Strukov said, “Do you speak always in the first-person plural, Madame Sharifi? What delivery of the virus do you require? And on what schedule?”

“Two different delivery modes. One developed and tested as soon as possible, the other to follow a month later.”

“And those two modes of the delivery are…?”

She told him.

Six

Jackson woke to the sure knowledge that someone was moving around his bedroom in the dark.

A dream? No. The intruder was real. And not a ’bot. A dim human blur across the room, passing briefly in front of the semi-opaqued window. Theresa? She didn’t come into his room at night, and if she did, she’d turn on the light.

He lay still, simulating the deep breathing of sleep, and considered his choices. He could call for building security, but not even the neuropharm option would take effect before the intruder shot Jackson at the sound of his voice. He could roll off the bed, keeping it between himself and the window, and try to reach the personal security shield in the bottom dresser drawer. Or was it in the second-bottom drawer? He pictured himself fumbling naked through his socks and underwear, groping for the thing while the intruder politely waited. Yes, sure. He could lunge off the bed and try to tackle the intruder, counting on surprise to keep from getting shot.

In the seconds it took him to decide, the intruder said, “Lights on,” and the room lit up. “Hello, Jackson darling,” Cazie said.

She was naked, and covered with mud. It caked on her pubic muff, smeared across her full breasts, fell off in wet globs onto his white carpet. Immediately Jackson felt his penis stiffen. What if he’d made an idiot of himself by calling for security?

“God damn it. Cazie, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“You’re going to like what I’m doing. Jack. We’re going to a party. I left it just to come and get you.”

She moved closer to the bed, and he could see her green-flecked eyes. She was on something, and it was a hell of a lot stronger than Endorkiss. She caught his frown and held out the inhaler. “Want a whiff?”

“No!”

“Then let’s go to the party.” She yanked the blanket off Jackson’s bed. Mud from her hands smeared the non-consumable fabric. “Oh, look, you’re all ready! You always could get hard fast, Jack. I do like that. Come on, let’s go. They’re waiting.”

He yanked the blanket back from her, feeling like a fool. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh, yes, you are,” she purred. She let go of the disputed blanket, threw herself on top of him, and kissed him ferociously.

He couldn’t help himself. His arms went around her and his tongue shot into her open mouth. His cock felt ready to burst. Cazie laughed, her mouth still on his, and pushed him away. She was stronger than he remembered. Clumsily, still laughing, she rolled off the bed and started for the door.

“Not here, Jack. Come on, you don’t want to miss the party.”

“Cazie! Wait!” He heard her run lightly through the apartment and tell the front door to open. Jackson grabbed his pants and pulled them on. Barefoot and bare-chested, he ran after her, hoping they didn’t wake Theresa. Cazie had disappeared. Jackson yanked open the front door.

“Have a good evening, Dr. Aranow,” the door said to him. “Shall I cancel your wake-up call?”

“Yes,” Jackson said. “No. Cazie!”

She’d already gone into the elevator: it closed. As he watched helplessly, the door opened again. She stood there, naked and muddy and smiling, lowering the inhaler. “Come on in. Jack, the water’s fine.”

“Shall I wait, Dr. Aranow?” the elevator asked. “Or are you staying on this floor?”

Jackson stumbled into the elevator. Cazie laughed. “Sixth floor, please.”

“Cazie, you’re naked!”

“And you’re not. But we can fix that. Isn’t it lucky the party’s right in your building?” She reached out one hand, hooked it into the top of his pants, and pulled him toward her. She undid the single clasp he’d had time to fasten when the elevator stopped and the door opened.

“Sixth floor, Ms. Sanders,” the elevator said “Have a nice evening.”

“Cazie…”

“Come on, Jack! We’re late!” She ran down the hall, shedding mud. Cursing, Jackson followed.

He should go home right now.

The cheeks of her ass, smeared with mud, flashed alternately—left right left right… Her ass was firm but not so firm that it didn’t jiggle as she ran. Jackson followed.

The party was at Terry Amory’s. Jackson knew Terry, but not well. The door was open. Cazie led him through a pseudo-Asian minimalist decor to the dining room. “He’s here! Let the games begin!”

“And just in time,” Terry drawled. “We were going to start without you. Hello, Jackson. Welcome to the psychobank.”

Six naked people, three men and three women, lolled on a feeding ground the size of Jackson’s bedroom. Water had been churned into the custom-mixed organic loam; the resulting mud was thick, rich, and subtly perfumed. The wall program displayed earth tones, grays and tans and ochres, with dissolving and re-forming cave paintings. Stalactites—probably holos—hung from the ceiling. Two of the women sprawled carelessly across one of the men who, Jackson saw, was Landau Carson, tonight not wearing bees. Landau and Terry were the only people Jackson recognized.

The woman not lying on Landau, a tall, slim redhead with bright blue eyes, said to Jackson, “Well, take your pants off, darling. They don’t look very edible.”

Jackson considered leaving. But Cazie inhaled again from whatever was scrambling her brain. The little fool. Did she even know what was in the inhaler? Didn’t she know there were street drugs that did permanent damage to the brain, altering neural pathways before the Cell Cleaner had a chance to destroy them?

“Give me the inhaler, Cazie.”

To his surprise, she did, holding it meekly out to him. When he reached for it she shoved him into the feeding ground.

Fury tore through Jackson. Let her warp her brain. Let her fuck every single one of these diseases, of both genders. She was sick, less mentally healthy than Theresa, and with far less reason. Let her go to hell… He had hauled himself out of the mud to leave, when he saw the knives.

Twelve of them, stuck in an orderly blades-down row into a molded stand. The hilts were all shaped differently, ornamented with crudely carved animals that echoed the cave paintings of the wall programming. Throwing knives, but not well balanced. Deliberately.

“I’ve got the paint,” the redhead said. She sniffed from an inhaler. “Who’s first?”

“Neophytes first,” Cazie said. “First me and then Jackson.”

“Here,” Terry crooned, “let me assist you, as said Cro-Magnon to the Neanderthal. Ummmmmm, nice.” He dipped his hand in the pot and smeared paint the color of dried blood on both Cazie’s nipples. Then liberally on the fuzzy muddy mound between her thighs. Cazie smiled.

The redhead handed her a belt with a small dark button in the front. Fumbling, laughing, Cazie strapped it around her waist and pushed the button. Jackson saw the faint shimmer of a personal Y-shield spring around her.

Cazie slogged through the mud to the opposite side of the room. She stood flat against the wall, under a stalactite, arms straight at her side after one more whiff from the inhaler. Terry said, “Host’s prerogative, ladies and gentlemen,” and reached for the knife stand.

Jackson thought rapidly. If the shield was standard—and it looked like it was—a knife would not pierce it. Terry might aim for the painted areas of Cazie’s exposed body, but the exposure wasn’t real. It was just playacting, a fake thrill, the simulation of danger.

“Pleasure or pain?” Terry mused theatrically. His hand hovered over one knife after another. “Pain or pleasure? And for such a beautiful body, too… so full and ripe… pleasure or pain?” He chose a knife.

As Terry pulled it free of the stand. Jackson saw that the knife blade, too, was encased in the shimmer of a Y-energy shield. Sudden cold prickled the base of his spine.

The redhead sank into the mud on her belly, wriggled in the depression her body made, and rolled onto her back, streaked with mud. She raised herself on her elbows to get a better view of Cazie. Her conical breasts rose and fell with her breathing.

Terry threw the knife, and Cazie screamed.

Jackson scrambled forward across the mud. But Cazie wasn’t hurt; the knife was embedded in the dining-room wall and Cazie laughed down at Jackson. “Fooled you, darling!”

Before he could react, Terry threw another knife. Jackson saw it fly through the air—it was unbalanced, the knives were designed to be hard to make a hit with—and strike Cazie’s left breast, to the left of the painted nipple. The knife bounced off her shield and fell into the mud.

“No points!” the redhead said. “Bad, bad, bad aim, Terry darling.”

“One more throw,” said the man Jackson didn’t know. “Cazie’s friend, get out of the way, please. We can’t see, and some of us are too entangled to move.”

“I may never move again,” said one of the two women lying twisted around Landau Carson. “Oh, do that again, Landau.”

A third knife whistled through the air, missed Cazie, and embedded itself in the wall.

“Three strikes and you’re out, Terry,” Landau said. “I’m next.”

“As thrower?”

“Garrote the thought. As target, of course.”

Landau took Cazie’s place against the wall. Cazie flopped down in the mud on her belly and used her inhaler. Jackson watched the green-eyed redhead select a knife, with much dramatic deliberation, and hurl it at Landau’s genitals. It hit and bounced off into the mud.

“Uuummmmmmmm,” Landau said. “Nice.”

Cazie said, “You know you can’t feel it through your shield, Landau. Irina, three points.” She lifted the inhaler again. Her eyes were shiny.

Irina threw a second knife. It missed.

“Oh, don’t hiccup now,” Landau said. “Hit me, lover.”

She did. The third knife struck right above Landau’s erect cock. Everyone laughed and cheered. “Six points!” Terry called. “Irina, what do you choose?”

Irina gazed, smiling, at Landau. He looked back expectantly. Jackson felt the subtle shift in the room: a different kind of tension, tauter and hotter.

Irina said, “I choose to take the knife myself.”

Landau looked disappointed. But there was something else in the disappointment, Jackson thought, something incongruous. Relief? He looked again at the stand of knives, encased in their shimmering shields. Why shields?

“Wait,” Cazie said. “Don’t choose yet, Irina. Terry, help me, you slug.”

Cazie and Terry gathered the six thrown knives from the mud. As they squished through the thick sludge, Terry smeared a quick, proprietary glob across Cazie’s back. Suddenly Jackson knew that Terry had already had sex with Cazie, earlier. As part of the general mud-rolling foreplay to the knife game. Jackson’s chest constricted and burned.

“Okay, that’s all of them,” Terry said. “Irina, choose.”

Twelve knives, six gleaming and six muddy, stood phallic in their stand. Irina knelt before them in the mud, lips pursed, drawing out her moment of choice. The others watched, mud frosting their beautiful genemod bodies, faces keen and hot-eyed. Landau rubbed his fingers across his clavicle. One of the women caught her bottom lip between her teeth.

“This one,” Irina said.

She drew a clean knife, its hilt carved with a crude mammoth head. Irina’s thumb did something to the hilt. The shimmer of Y-shield disappeared.

“Pleasure or pain, pain or pleasure,” Landau chanted softly. “Pleasure or pain…”

Irina smiled at each face in turn. Then she drew the knife across the soft, mud-smeared flesh of her upper arm. Blood spurted out. A woman winced. Landau bared his teeth.

For a long moment no one moved. Then Irina collapsed onto the mud, facedown, writhing. Cazie grabbed her and pulled her to a sitting position.

“Pleasure!” Landau crowed.

Irina’s face transformed. Her head tilted back; her back arched; her whole body shuddered. Then she collapsed against Cazie, trembling. Her eyes closed.

“A strong dose,” Terry said. “Lucky Irina.”

Cazie laughed. Jackson couldn’t watch her. He half turned away, standing ankle-deep in mud.

It must be a selective nerve stimulator, going right to the pleasure center. Addictive, degenerative, illegal. Blood still dripped from Irina’s soft arm. The Cell Cleaner would take care of it: repair the cut faster than could the unaided body, destroy any infectious bacteria, consume the mud in the wound. No risk.

He said, “What’s on the ‘pain’ knives?”

Terry said, “Just that. The stimulator works directly on the brain.”

Landau said, “Very unpleasant. And it seems to last an eon.”

“You’re all sick,” Jackson said. “Every one of you.”

“Oh, dear,” Landau said. “More morality.”

“Jackson, it’s a party,” Cazie said. “Don’t be so grim.”

He gazed bleakly at her. Smiling back at him, tenderly cradling Irina. These people were biologically underaroused. Underarousal produced thrill-seeking behavior. He could recite the neurochemistry: deficient levels of monoamine oxidase, serotonin, and cortisol. Slow heart rate, low skin conductance, high threshold for nerve triggering. Excess of dopamine, imbalance of norepinephrine and alintylomase. Plus, of course, whatever imbalances they were creating with the inhalers.

Knowing the biochemistry didn’t modify his disgust.

“Come on, Cazie. We’re leaving. You and me. Now.”

She went on smiling at him, naked and covered with mud, the dreamily comatose Irina in her arms. She would refuse to go with him, of course. She had always refused anything he demanded. His mood shifted suddenly, to a fearful elation. She would refuse. And then, after seeing her like this, with these underaroused diseases… after this, he would be free of her. Finally. It would be over. He would be free.

“All right, Jackson,” Cazie said. “I’m coming.”

She laid Irina carefully on the mud and stood up, wiping a thick glob of mud off her wrist.

“Hey, Caz, you can’t go now!” Terry said. “The party’s just starting!”

“And I’m up next,” a woman said. “Who wants to throw?”

“Loser’s prerogative,” Landau said. “Since Irina didn’t choose me for the knife.”

“Cazie! Don’t go!”

“Good night,” Cazie said. “Tell Irina I’ll call her tomorrow.” She took Jackson’s hand. He dropped hers: bleakly, angrily, with trapped love.

She followed him meekly to the elevator, down the hall—they met no one, it was 3:00 A.M.—into the apartment. Into the shower. Jackson saw that she’d left her inhaler behind.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” Cazie said when they were both clean. “I didn’t think well. Of course you wouldn’t like such a party. It’s just that… I missed you.”

He stared at her, trying to maintain his disgust, knowing he failed. “You didn’t miss me. You just wanted more thrills. The only experiences you’ve ever thought worth having were intense thrills.”

“I know.”

“That’s not normal, Cazie. Normal people don’t need constant dangerous excitement to feel happy!”

“Then there are a hell of a lot of donkeys who aren’t normal. Not anymore. Hold me, Jack.”

He stood stiffly, not moving. She put her arms around him and pressed against him. His naked cock rose into her belly. Her soft breasts breathed gently into his chest.

“Oh, Cazie…” It was a groan, half desire and half defeat. “No…”

“I’ll be sweet,” she mumbled against his neck. “You’re so good to watch out for me…”

She did stay sweet. And tender, and gentle—a vulnerable Cazie, holding back nothing, giving everything. Afterward she fell asleep against his shoulder, curled into him like a child. The sheets were wet from the bodies they hadn’t dried after their shower, from the sweet juices of lovemaking.

Jackson lay awake in the dark, holding her, wishing that she hadn’t come with him from the party, wishing that she would never leave his bedroom, wishing that he were a different kind of person from what he was. More resolute. More able to sustain anger. More able to write her off.

There were neuropharms that would do that. Modify his neurochemistry, rebalance transmitters and hormones and enzymes. Less CRF. More testosterone. Less serotonin. Fewer dopamine reuptake inhibitors. More ADL.

Like the people at the party. Terry and Irina and Landau.

No.

He couldn’t sleep. After thrashing and turning for half an hour, he eased himself out of bed. He kissed Cazie’s cheek, put on a robe, and padded to the library.

“Caroline, messages, please.”

“Yes, Jackson,” said his personal system in the slightly formal voice he preferred. “You have four messages. Shall I list them in the order received?”

“Why not.” He poured himself a whiskey from the sideboard.

“Message from Kenneth Bishop, from Wichita. Subject: Willoughby plant.” The TenTech chief engineer. He had finally checked on the deranged factory. A week late. Maybe TenTech needed another chief. Christ, Jackson hated dealing with this shit.

“Message from Tamara Gould, from Manhattan. Subject: party.” The last thing Jackson wanted tonight was another party. Would Cazie want to go? If he took her, would Cazie stay with him a little longer?

“Message from Brandon Hileker, from Yale. Subject: class reunion.” Oh, God, had it been ten years since his B.A.? A reunion. And what do you do, Jackson? A doctor? Isn’t that a little… superfluous?

“Message from Lizzie Francy. Subject: baby project.” Baby? Project? What did that mean? Had something happened to the baby Jackson had delivered last week? Why call it a “project”? But, then, what did Jackson really know about what Livers called anything?

“Caroline, give me that message, please.”

Lizzie’s face formed on the wall screen. Unlike the last time he had seen them, Lizzie’s expression was alert and her hair neatly combed. Her black eyes sparkled. Her speech, he noted, sounded donkey, not Liver. Victoria Turner’s doing?

“This is Lizzie Francy for Dr. Jackson Aranow. Dr. Aranow, I’m calling because I need your help. It’s a project connected to the babies’ health—not just my baby that you delivered, but all babies in the tribe. And maybe other tribes.” She hesitated, and her voice changed. “Please call back. It’s really really important.” Another hesitation, then a curiously stiff little bow of the head. “Thank you.”

“End of message,” Caroline said. “Do you wish to reply?”

“No. Yes.” If the baby had had some kind of accident… “project”? “Record message.”

“Recording.”

“Dr. Jackson Aranow for Lizzie Francy. Please give me more details about your problem. Is the baby in need of medical attention? If so, then—”

To his surprise, Lizzie’s face in real-time interrupted his recording. It was 4:30 in the morning. What was she doing, overriding his personal system? And how was she doing it?

“Dr. Aranow, thank you for calling back! I—we—desperately need your help. Could you—”

“Is the baby all right?”

“The baby’s fine. See?” She enlarged the screen scope; he saw that she was nursing her infant son.

“Then why did you say this ‘project’ was for the baby’s health?”

“It is. But long-term. I didn’t know who else to ask. It’s a really important project!”

Jackson had the feeling he should hang up. Livers. It was always a mistake to get involved with them. Provide the basic necessities out of human charity, yes. Donkeys had tried to do that: it wasn’t the donkeys’ fault if Livers had rejected the social contract—goods for votes—that had provided for their needs. Beyond that, Livers were difficult. Uneducated, demanding, ungrateful, dangerous. And the sight of Lizzie’s full breast in her child’s mouth made him oddly uncomfortable. He thought of Cazie, asleep in his bed.

Lizzie said, “Did you ever hear of a woman named Ellie Sandra Lester?”

Jackson drew in a breath. “Yes,” he said. “Go on.”

Interlude

TRANSMISSION DATE: November 28, 2120

TO: Selene Base, Moon

VIA: Boston Ground Station, GEO Satellite 1453-L (U.S.), Luna City Ground Station

MESSAGE TYPE: Encrypted

MESSAGE CLASS: Class B, Private Paid Transmission

ORIGINATING GROUP: GeneModern, Inc., Boston, Massachusetts

MESSAGE:

Ms. Sharifi:

As we said in our previous two transmissions, GeneModern is interested in pursuing a commercial partnership with Selene Base in developing viable extensions of your patented product, the Cell Cleaner™. We believe that our research facilities, among the best in the world, have succeeded in duplicating some of the nonpatented aspects of your groundbreaking work in cellular biology (see attached documents). The rest remains not only proprietary but—let us be frank—beyond our current capabilities. What we can bring to a partnership with Selene is unparalleled manufacturing abilities, superb international distribution, and high-quality investment interest. The former two attributes may be more necessary to you than formerly, since your relocation at Selene. The latter would relieve you of the financial exposure your first venture must have entailed. In addition, our data security system, designed by Kevin Baker, ranks among the most excellent anywhere (see attached documents).

We believe that the ROI opportunities in a GeneModern/Selene partnership are without precedent. Therefore, GeneModern invites your earliest reply.

Yours very truly,

Gordon Keller Browne, CEO

GeneModern, Inc.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

Seven

Why didn’t you ask me?” Vicki said. “I could have helped you with this just as well as Jackson Aranow!”

“He’s a donkey,” Lizzie said. She hated it when Vicki was mad at her. Vicki was supposed to be Lizzie’s champion. That was her program.

“Lizzie, I’m a donkey,” Vicki said.

“But you don’t live, you, with donkeys. You don’t know anybody anymore. Dr. Aranow knows other donkeys, him.” Lizzie heard her speech sliding back, into Liver, which happened only when she was excited or upset. She rolled over onto her back and crossed her arms on her chest.

The two women lay under the feeding dome, having a late breakfast. They were alone except for Dirk, sleeping beside them on the warm, dry ground. Four feet above their heads the weak November sun was so magnified by the special plastic of the tent that the new Y-energy cones Dr. Aranow had sent from TenTech hadn’t even been turned on. Sunlight soaked into Lizzie’s skin; it seemed to her she could feel her body absorbing nutrients from the ground, energy from the air. She resented Vicki for interfering with this usually lovely feeling.

Lizzie said, “I thought Dr. Aranow might know about Harold Winthrop Wayland and Ellie Lester. And he did know.”

Vicki pushed her hair off her face and frowned. “Okay—what did Jackson say about Wayland? What information that I couldn’t have discovered for you just as competently?”

“That District Supervisor Wayland was dead, and so—”

“We already knew that!”

“—and the person who was supposed to notify the state government was his great-granddaughter. Ellie Lester.”

“Great-granddaughter? How old was the district supervisor?”

“I don’t know. But she’s his next-of-kin, and she should have notified the state so that they could arrange a special election to fill his position. And she didn’t.”

“Well, of course she didn’t,” Vicki said. “Why bother, when nobody votes anymore because the Livers are all moving around like nomads? Nomads don’t have voting addresses. Or district warehouses. No votes, no warehouses, no need for a district supervisor. It was always an entry political office, anyway. It conferred no power among donkeys themselves.”

Lizzie said stubbornly, “She was still supposed to tell the state capital they needed a special election.”

Vicki smiled. “I’m perpetually astonished by the rules you think should be honored and the ones you’re willing to break. No hobgoblins in your inconsistent mind.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Although… it is strange that the system wasn’t programmed to automatically advise the government of official deaths among elected officials. Then again, maybe it did advise Harrisburg. What else did Jackson Aranow say about Ellie Lester?”

Lizzie said, “Not too much. But he sounded… funny about her.”

“Funny how?”

“I don’t know. He also said that he’s going to help us.”

“We don’t need him.”

“Well, he’s coming anyway. This afternoon.”

“And is he again bringing the ferocious Cazie Sanders with him, for protection?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think,” Vicki said, “that if you felt such an overwhelming need to pick an additional champion among the donkeys, you could have done better than Jackson Aranow.”

Lizzie didn’t answer. She cradled Dirk, hoping he’d wake up and nurse. Dirk didn’t criticize her. And he was an unfailing delight: a calm, unfussy baby already starting to smile. Mama said it was gas, but it wasn’t gas—nobody got gas anymore. That was just Mama, poking at Lizzie’s pleasure, just like Vicki was doing. She, Lizzie, would never do that to Dirk.

She would never tell him he was wrong, never nag him, never let that hook in her voice that just snagged a child and unraveled all their plans. Lizzie was going to be a perfect mother. She wouldn’t make a single mistake with her precious son. When Dirk nursed, his dark blue eyes fastened unwaveringly on Lizzie’s face and his compact little body solid in her arms, she felt she could die from happiness. She kept him wrapped in nonconsumables, just so his little body wouldn’t ground-feed and so cut down her nursing time. She would never never let Dirk down. And she was going to make the world safer for Dirk—no matter how much Vicki poked at her plans.

Vicki said, “Speak of minor devils. Here comes an aircar.”

Dr. Aranow landed behind the building, beside the feeding ground. Lizzie and Vicki pulled on jacks, nonconsumables years old and a little tattered but still warm and bright. Jacks didn’t fade. Lizzie’s were marigold, Vicki’s turquoise. Vicki smiled as she pulled on her shirt, a smile that to Lizzie looked amused and superior. Sometimes Lizzie thought she didn’t like Vicki as much as she had when she was a child.

“Lizzie. Ms. Turner,” Dr. Aranow said, from just inside the door flap of the feeding tent.

“The good doctor,” Vicki said back, still smiling. Dr. Aranow flushed. Lizzie felt she’d missed something. She plunged right in.

“Dr. Aranow, we need your help. We have a plan, but we need you to carry it out.”

“So you said on comlink. How is the baby doing?”

“He’s wonderful, him.” Lizzie heard her own voice change tone, and saw the softened way both donkeys looked at her. She felt a little better about Vicki. “He nurses like a vacuum pump.”

“Good,” Dr. Aranow said. “I’d like to examine him in a bit.”

“What for?” Vicki said. “Infection? Diaper rash? Varicose veins?”

“There still exist structural and endocrinal deficiencies,” Dr. Aranow said stiffly. “The Cell Cleaner only eliminates malfunctions, it doesn’t build what isn’t there.”

Lizzie said, “But Dirk doesn’t have deficiencies, him!”

“No, I’m sure he doesn’t,” Dr. Aranow said soothingly. “Just routine. But first, what is this plan you need help with?”

“It’s… no, come someplace else,” Lizzie said. A small crowd was heading toward them, Tasha and Kim and George Renfrew and old Mr. Plocynski, while Scott and Shockey inspected the aircar. So far Lizzie hadn’t discussed her plan with anyone but Vicki. And what if her mother came out? Lizzie didn’t want to answer any questions from Annie.

“Whereplace else?” Vicki said. She was smiling again.

Dr. Aranow said, “Let’s get in the aircar and lift.”

“Nervous, Jackson?” Vicki said. “We’re not Luddites, you know. What you see on Shockey’s face isn’t rage, it’s envy.”

“Yes, the aircar, it,” Lizzie said. Would anyone stop her from getting into it with Dr. Aranow?

They didn’t. And it was a bigger car than last time; this one had four seats. Lizzie climbed in front with the baby, Vicki in back. In silence Dr. Aranow lifted the car, flew it a mile to the river—so fast!—and set down on the bank. Withered grass and the thick stems of dead asters. Gray rocks and cold water. On the opposite bank, a mangy-looking rabbit darted away. Lizzie wished the car had landed someplace else, but she was afraid to say so. Fear made her angry with herself, and she heard her words come out loud and bossy and Liver.

“District Supervisor Wayland is dead, him. We called his office and demanded he open a warehouse for us ’cause we’re staying, us, in one place over the winter. The program said we weren’t registered voters for Willoughby County and couldn’t get warehouse chips without being registered. So we said we’d register. Then the program said there was a three-month county residency requirement. So we listed ourselves and waited three months. That was up yesterday. Then we called back, and the program said Supervisor Wayland was unavailable.”

“ ‘Dead’ is pretty much unavailable,” Vicki said from the back seat. Lizzie ignored her.

“So I dipped a little to find out where the supervisor was. He wasn’t anyplace. Finally I checked the death deebee. He died a month ago. You were listed as the ‘certifying physician.’ ”

“Yes,” Dr. Aranow said. His face was blank.

“So then I dipped, me, to find out why Harrisburg wasn’t holding a special election, like they’re supposed to when an elected servant dies. And it turned out the state government didn’t know the district supervisor was dead.”

Dr. Aranow said, “I checked on this after your call. Everyone is claiming a systems malfunction.”

“Oh, yes, certainly,” Vicki said. “Let me guess, Jackson. In Wayland’s unexplained absence, no district services were authorized, costing nobody any money. Wayland’s great-granddaughter has control of his entire, not-inconsiderable fortune, which is quite a coincidence, considering that her house system is the one that developed the comglitch with Harrisburg.”

Dr. Aranow twisted in his seat to look at Vicki. “Do you know Ellie Lester?”

“No. But I know donkeys.”

“From the viewpoint of one who left? Like Lord Jim knowing the merchant marine?”

“More like Horatius knowing the Roman legions.”

What were they talking about? Lizzie had lost control of the conversation. She said loudly, “So I told Harrisburg they were supposed to hold a special election, and they said they planned to. On April first. There’s two candidates, and they both filed campaign speeches on Channel 63. But—”

Vicki interrupted. “Both speeches, naturally, make the same tired promises, the same meaningless avowals of providing consistent and reliable service. Meanwhile, there are exactly two hundred sixty registered voters for non-enclave elections in Willoughby County. Our tribe here, plus a few in the mountain enclaves that hold those donkeys who moved permanently out of Manhattan and into their summer places during the Change Wars. Fleeing the revolution. Workers unite, you have nothing to lose but your warehouses.”

Lizzie said, “So we—”

Vicki said, “The idea here, in part, is that you and your impeccable donkey credentials can discover the inside politics of these two candidates. For purposes of—”

Lizzie said, “I’m telling this!” so loudly that Dirk woke up and blinked. “Vicki… I’m telling this. It’s my idea. It’s mine.”

“I’m sorry, baby,” Vicki said, putting a hand on Lizzie’s shoulder. That was almost as bad.

“I’m not a baby. I told you that before!”

And then Vicki and Dr. Aranow exchanged a look, and Lizzie saw that they were both amused at her, and she was so angry she didn’t even care that it was the first time they’d looked like they agreed on something. Didn’t even care that it was good for the plan. They both thought she was still a baby. And they both were just damn well going to learn better. She was Lizzie Francy, she was the best datadipper in the country, she was a mother, and she was going to make the world a better place for her baby. By herself, if she had to. That would serve them right. Because her plan was going to work, and not even donkey laws could stop her this time.

She said icily, “We’re going to elect our own candidate, us, to district supervisor. Somebody from the tribe. A Liver.”

There, that was better. Dr. Aranow was looking at her like she’d really surprised him, her. Like she was somebody for even a donkey to notice!

But then his expression changed. He said gently—too gently, “But, Lizzie—even if you brought that off… even if you got a Liver elected to district supervisor… don’t you know that donkeys pay taxes by providing services out of their own money? In exchange for votes? That way they get—used to get—the power to make laws that suit them, and you people got the goods and services to stay alive. But if a Liver was elected—how would he fill a warehouse? You don’t have the money in the first place. You see, my dear—”

“Don’t talk to me like a baby, you son of a bitch!”

Dr. Aranow’s eyes widened. Behind her. Lizzie could hear Vicki shake with badly contained laughter. At that moment she hated them both. But at least she had Dr. Aranow’s attention. In her arms, Dirk stirred and whimpered. Lizzie lowered her voice, and the baby again drifted into sleep.

“I know more, me, than you do about it. Not all the warehouse supplies come from the politicians themselves. There’s a pool of tax money they all pay into, and it gets divided among the counties of Pennsylvania, and you can spend it on what you need. That money—I want it.”

“There, Jackson—not up on our governance procedures, are we,” Vicki murmured. “Medicine is such a demanding mistress.”

“I want those credits,” Lizzie repeated, because Dr. Aranow looked impressed for the first time. Or stunned. Was he stunned? Was it really so hopeless for a Liver to get elected? Again doubt attacked her. Maybe this couldn’t really work… Yes. It could. She would make it work.

Dr. Aranow said, “You? Personally? You want to run for district supervisor?”

“Not me.” Lizzie said. “I’m not old enough. You got to be eighteen.”

Dr. Aranow looked over his shoulder. “Ms. Turner?”

“Oh, certainly,” Vicki said. “A donkey gone native. Nobody in either camp would vote for me. But don’t look so terrified, Jackson… we’re not going to ask you to run.”

“Course not,” Lizzie said. “Billy Washington is going to run. Only he don’t know it yet, him.”

Dr. Aranow said, “Billy Washington? That elderly black man who pulled your mother off me when I was trying to deliver your baby?”

Vicki said, “You have a good memory for names. Almost a politician already.”

“Yes, that’s Billy,” Lizzie said eagerly. “My stepfather, him. He’ll do it, if I ask him. He’d do anything for me and Dirk.”

“The ‘plan for the health of babies,’ ” Dr. Aranow said. His mouth twisted. It wasn’t quite a smile. “I see. Well, your campaign should be quite interesting. What do you plan to do, register all the nomad Liver voters in Willoughby County at least three months before the election, promise them warehouse access if they vote for Mr. Washington, and just overwhelm the divided donkey candidates by sheer numbers?”

“Yes,” Lizzie said eagerly. “I know we can do it!”

“I’m not so sure. Both established political parties will mobilize their own voters, you know.”

“We figured that out. We’ll get all the voters lined up, but none of them will register until 11:30 P.M. on December thirty-first, the last day before the three-month deadline. It’ll be too late for the donkey candidates to get more people registered. They’ll never know what hit them.”

“And do the numbers indicate—”

“There are only four small enclaves in Willoughby County,” Lizzie said. Her confidence returned in a rush; this was data. “And they’re summer enclaves. The total of voters registered here even for internal enclave elections is only four thousand eighty. That’s all. We don’t know how many Livers are in the county right now, but more probably than we guess, in abandoned towns and farms and factories like ours. Staying out the winter. We can get them registered here, or reregistered here.”

“Out of their vast civic pride,” Vicki said. But Lizzie saw that she didn’t smile.

“Well,” he said, “good luck. But one question: How do you know I won’t just go tell everyone I know about this, so that more donkeys register in Willoughby before December thirty-first?”

“You won’t, you,” Lizzie said. The baby stirred in her arms and she shifted his solid little body. “We need you.”

“For what?” He looked nervous, and again Lizzie felt that rush of confidence. She could make a donkey nervous.

“Two things. We need you to find out about these two candidates. Susannah Wells Livingston and Donald Thomas Serrano. How their voters are split up, like.”

“Because,” Vicki said, “if one candidate is going to get one hundred percent of the vote, Lizzie will need to register a lot more people than if she can be confident the vote will be split up like cannibals and missionaries. Or if, say, one of the candidates should happen to be as dead as Harold Wayland.”

Dr. Aranow turned in his seat to face her. “You’re not taking any of this very seriously, are you?”

“On the contrary,” Vicki said, “this is how I sound when I’m serious. When I’m frivolous, I make pontificating speeches of great pretentiousness. Such as this one: There’s a way of looking at history that traces all enormous events back to the nature of key personalities shaped by very limited environments. This theory says that Napoleon, Hitler, Einstein, and Ballieri changed the world so profoundly precisely because of the strictures or hardships of their childhoods.”

“Who’s Napoleon?” Lizzie asked. “Or… what name did you say? Ballieri?”

“You don’t know who Ballieri was?”

“No.”

“Lewis Ballieri? Last century?”

“No! And I don’t care, me!” Why couldn’t Vicki behave like normal people? But if she had… If she had, she’d never have come to live with Livers, and Lizzie wouldn’t ever have gotten… She thrust that line of thought away from her.

Vicki said to Dr. Aranow, “I prove my point.”

Lizzie changed her grip on Dirk and leaned toward the doctor. “There’s a second thing that we need you for, us.”

“What’s that?”

She couldn’t read his expression; his face never seemed to change. She drew in a deep breath. “We need your aircar.”

“My aircar?”

“To borrow. We need to go look for other Livers, us, and we can’t contact them by comlink because the link might be dipped. Our plan has to be secret. So we need to cover the county by air to find everybody’s tribes in all the mountains and valleys, and then visit them. Vicki can drive. She knows how. Please. We just need it, us, for a few weeks. And when Billy is elected, we’re going to use the tax credits to get Change syringes as well as Y-cones. It’s for the babies.”

Dr. Aranow sat silent. Outside the car, the wind picked up, whipping the cold river into small frothy waves. A crow landed on a gray rock, cawing. Finally Dr. Aranow said gently, “Lizzie… You can’t get Change syringes through a warehouse. What few are left are not for sale, at any price. Every donkey organization in the country has been trying to reach Miranda Sharifi at Selene to beg for more… didn’t you know that? Selene never answers. Electing Billy Washington to district supervisor of Willoughby County won’t change that.”

“Then we’ll get the old-fashioned ’bot medunits for the babies,” Lizzie said. Her arms tightened on Dirk. What if he hadn’t been Changed, what if she had to worry all the time about infections and bad water and worms… For the first time, Lizzie glimpsed what motherhood must have been like for her own mother. Why, Annie must have been afraid every single minute that something would happen to Lizzie! How could parents live like that, them? Lizzie shuddered.

Dr. Aranow said, “I don’t think—”

“Yes, you do,” Vicki interrupted, and her voice had changed yet again, to something Lizzie hadn’t heard in a long time. Vicki was talking to the doctor like she used to talk to Lizzie herself when she was a child, small and sick. “In fact, you probably think too much, Jackson. But this time—don’t. Just act. You’ll feel better if you do this one thing for the Livers. Without first worrying it to death. And it will cost you so little.”

“Don’t try to bully me, Ms. Turner.”

“I’m not. I’m only trying to present our case—Lizzie’s case—in all its aspects. You’re an aspect now. You didn’t ask to be, but you are. If you say no, that’s just as much a statement as if you’d said yes. There’s no fence to sit on here. The choices are yours. All I’m trying to do is articulate that.”

Vicki’s eyes locked with Dr. Aranow’s. Lizzie wondered if Vicki was going to bring up Mrs. Aranow, or whatever her name was—the woman that Vicki said was the doctor’s ex-wife. She still owned him, Vicki said. Lizzie didn’t see how that could be—your family owned you, maybe, and your tribe, but not somebody who’d chosen to leave your tribe. Why, that would be like saying that Harvey could influence Lizzie’s decisions just because he was Dirk’s father! The world didn’t work like that. Still, if mentioning Mrs. Aranow would help the doctor choose against the donkeys… but maybe Lizzie better leave this to Vicki. Vicki was the donkey, after all. Although no one in the tribe would dream of holding it against her.

Vicki said, in a different voice, “Don’t you ever wish, Jackson, that the class war had turned out differently? That both sides weren’t paying the price we are?”

To Lizzie, the words made no sense. What price were the donkeys paying? Donkeys were public servants, they did the work of running things so the Livers could enjoy themselves—or, they used to do that. Now they had so much less work to do. Didn’t they like that? How had they paid any sort of price for not supplying warehouses and medunits and food lines and all the other things? It saved them money and work. Vicki wasn’t making sense.

But Dr. Aranow was gazing straight ahead now, through the car window. Lizzie had the feeling he wasn’t seeing the river or the fields or the cold woods. He was seeing some other place, some other people besides her and Vicki. Who?

“All right,” Dr. Aranow said. “On one condition. Not this car. I don’t want it spotted and traced and my system jammed with irate messages from people who used to be my friends. I’ll furnish you with an aircar leased to some nonexistent company in another state.”

“Oh, thank you, Doctor!” Lizzie said. She leaned over and kissed Dr. Aranow on the cheek. Her motion pushed her breast into Dirk’s face, and sleepily he started to suck. When he discovered cloth between his mouth and her nipple, he whimpered and screwed up his face. Lizzie opened her shirt and gave him her breast.

She’d done it. She’d managed to people-dip an aircar.

She said, “And you’ll find out, you, about the other candidates? Please?”

“Why not.” He didn’t sound as happy as Lizzie had hoped.

“Cheer up, Jackson,” Vicki said. “Commitment only hurts while the first rope goes on.”

“You’re quite a pastoral philosopher, aren’t you? Could part of this deal be that you just stop lecturing me?”

“But you like it so much. Look at Cazie.”

“Vicki,” Lizzie said. But then the doctor smiled. It wasn’t a very sweet smile, but it was a smile. He wasn’t mad at Vicki for her nasty comment. Why not? Lizzie would never understand donkeys.

But she didn’t have to. He’d promised to do it. Lizzie had won.

Now all she had to do was convince Billy. But that would be easy—Billy had never denied her anything, not in her whole life.

“No,” Billy said.

“No? No?”

“No, I won’t, me.”

“But… but it’s for Dirk!”

Billy didn’t answer. He and Lizzie sat on a fallen log in the November woods, their coats open to an afternoon that had suddenly turned warm. Billy loved the woods. Before the Change he was the only one in East Oleanta who used to go off into the woods by himself, just to be alone with trees. Now more people did, but Billy was still the only one who’d go in winter for days at a time. Or as many days anyway as Annie’d let him. And just when Annie got to grumbling and complaining about his absence—just at that very minute, it always seemed to Lizzie—Billy would come home again. Walking into camp with the strong walk he had since the Change, not the old-man shuffle from before. There’d be wet leaves stuck to Billy’s jacks, and twigs in his hair, and Annie would squeal when Billy hugged her because he hadn’t shaved in so long. But she’d hug back, hard and tight, before she started scolding and grumbling again.

Lizzie had known that Billy would be in the woods, checking his rabbit traps, and she had followed his tracks in the mud. When Billy wanted to hide, nobody could track him, but his time he hadn’t bothered. Lizzie had left Dirk with Annie. Now she wished she’d brought the baby. Maybe Dirk would have changed Billy’s stubborn old mind.

Billy was too old, him. That was the trouble. Even if the old people were healthy and strong since the Change, they were still old in their brains. They thought old. Lizzie made herself calm down to reason with Billy.

“Why won’t you run for district supervisor, you? Don’t you see that it will help us get all the things we need, us, like more ’bots and medunits for any more babies and better boots? Don’t you see that?”

“I see that, me.”

“Well, then, why don’t you run for election? It will work, Billy!”

“Not if I run, me.”

Lizzie stared at him. The old man broke a branch off a dead maple and poked at the ground with it.

“Lizzie, you see this dirt? It should be frozen, it, by this time in November.”

“What’s that got to do with—”

“Wait. The reason the ground ain’t frozen is ’cause we had us a mostly warm autumn. Nobody could predict that, them. It just happened. But we didn’t know it would happen, so we got all ready, us, for a hard winter. All the blankets and jacks we could scrounge, caulking the tribe house airtight, them cones you and Vicki got us from TenTech.”

Lizzie waited. There was no use rushing Billy, him. He always did what she wanted, but it sometimes took him a long time to get there.

“We prepared, us, for the hardships we could see coming, even if they didn’t come. Anything less is just stupid. Right, dear heart?”

“Right,” Lizzie said. Billy’s stick continued to poke at the ground.

“If you and Vicki do this donkey election, you got to see coming what you can, you, and prepare for it. Donkeys ain’t stupid, and they don’t play as fair as the weather. Where Livers be concerned, us, donkeys are always cold.”

Not Vicki or Dr. Aranow, Lizzie wanted to say, but she didn’t interrupt.

“If I run for district supervisor, me, we’ll lose. Nobody will vote for me, them. Not just no donkeys—no Livers neither, outside our tribe. Just like they wouldn’t vote for you or Annie. We was the first ones who got Changed. Who tracked down Miranda Sharifi in her underground lab and demanded, us, that she help you when you was so sick. Who actually saw Miranda and talked to her.”

“But those are all good things, them!”

“Yes. But they all different things, them. Different from most folks. And most folks don’t like too much different. It makes them uneasy, them. Don’t you listen on the talk channels in the county, you?”

Lizzie didn’t. She had too many more important, more interesting deebees to explore, without listening to the endless intertribe gossip and rumors and tiny plans on local comlinks. Somebody said, them, that a friend heard on a donkey channel in New York that some folks in Baltimore got a scooter track powered up and running… Then if you’re from Glen’s Falls, you, do you know my second cousin Pamela Cantrell, she’s oh five foot six with… We got a feeding ground, us, big enough for…

“People talk, them,” Billy said. “And even with the Change, people don’t trust ideas and plans that feel too different from what they’re used to. Maybe because of the Change. We already had so much new, us. And here you come with another new idea, maybe a dangerous idea, if you get donkeys mad at you. If different-type folks like me are running for public servant, too—well, everybody’s gonna be so uneasy, them, they won’t vote for me.”

“But—”

“Besides,” Billy went on in his gentle voice, “we’re the family, us, who got Miranda arrested by the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency, even if we didn’t mean to and even if they let her go, them. Miranda Sharifi. No, Lizzie, dear heart, ain’t nobody gonna vote in a donkey election for me. Or Annie or you or Vicki. Nobody, them.”

“Then who?” Lizzie cried. “Who would they vote for, them?”

“Somebody that ain’t too unfamiliar.” Billy stood. “Somebody who used to be a mayor, maybe. Livers are used to a mayor, them, being sort of part of the government.”

This was true. Lizzie considered. The mayors of the Liver towns—when there’d been settled towns—had always been Livers talking donkey. They’d been the ones to talk on the comlinks, back when each town only had one, before the Change Wars. The mayor had been laughed at and teased for working like a donkey when everybody else just enjoyed themselves, even though mayors then hadn’t worked as hard as everybody did now. Still, the mayor had been considered son of dumb to do it at all; a real aristo Liver didn’t serve—they were served. By donkeys. Or so everyone Lizzie knew had thought then.

But a mayor was a familiar person to negotiate with donkeys. To report something broken, to present voter demands to newly elected public servants, to send for police or game wardens or techs when they’d been needed. Maybe Billy was right. Maybe Willoughby County Livers would be more likely to vote for somebody who used to be a mayor. But would a mayor agree to run for election?

“You know any leftover mayors, Billy? Our tribe doesn’t have any, us.”

Billy smiled down at Lizzie, still sitting on the log. “Yes, we do, us. Don’t you know? That’s what comes of dipping all your fancy data instead of talking to people.”

A little flame warmed Lizzie. Billy was proud of her ability to datadip. Billy had always been proud of her, even when she’d been a little girl piecing together broken ’bots, trying to learn without any real system.

“Who’s a mayor, Billy?”

“Who was a mayor.”

“Okay—who was a mayor, them?”

“Shockey,” Billy said, and Lizzie felt her mouth open into a round “O.” Billy smiled. “Ain’t it surprising what people, them, turn up in what places? That’s the biggest thing the Change taught me, dear heart. The biggest thing. We just don’t ever know, us. Hardly nothing.”

“It’s not at all surprising,” Vicki said. “Here, take Dirk, he wants to nurse.”

Lizzie took the baby. The familiar warmth ran through her at just getting her arms around him. She scrunched into a sitting position against the foamcast wall of her cubicle and opened the shirt of her marigold jacks. Dirk’s hungry little mouth fastened onto her nipple like a heat-seeking missile. The thrill, half mommy and half sexy, ran through her body, from nipple to belly to crotch. Lizzie was still a little ashamed of that thrill—it didn’t seem right to get heated up from her own baby! But it happened every time, and she finally settled for just keeping the feeling to herself. But it increased her irritation with Vicki, sitting there beside Lizzie on Lizzie’s pallet, looking like she knew everything. Vicki had never birthed and nursed a baby.

Lizzie said, “Well, I was surprised, and so was Billy. Shockey! He just doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d been a mayor anyplace.”

Vicki smiled. “What kind of person do you think goes into politics?”

“Somebody like Jack Sawicki was. Interested in helping his village, and not caring if people made fun of him sometimes. Shockey gets mad if you tease him even a little, and I don’t think he ever wanted to help other people in his life.”

Vicki said innocently, “Is that why you’re backing this daring political venture? Because you have a burning desire to help other tribes in Willoughby County?”

“Of course I—” Lizzie began, and stopped. Vicki smiled again.

“Lizzie, honey, the people who go into politics are ninety-nine percent exactly like Shockey. They want personal gain, and they want power, and they want to make the world wag their way. Just as you want warehouse goods and power over tax money for yourself and your tribe. The only difference between—”

“But I don’t want it for myself! I want it for Dirk and Billy and Mama and—”

“Really? If Billy and Annie went south tomorrow, and if the ever-beneficent Jackson Aranow hand-delivered any goods you wanted to you, and also set up a credit account in Dirk’s citizenship number, would you just drop this kingmaker scheme entirely? Hmmmm?”

Lizzie said nothing.

“I didn’t think so. There’s nothing wrong with that, Lizzie—with looking out for your own self-interest. As long as that’s not all you’re looking out for. Someone I once knew told me—”

Here we go again, Lizzie thought. She shifted Dirk, sucking greedily, to a more comfortable position.

“—that there were five states that any human relationship could exist in. Any relationship—an international treaty conference, a marriage, a police department, whatever. Only five possible states. One, healthy negotiation from a basically allied position. Two, complete detachment, without any mutual-aid pacts or significant interaction. Three, dominance-and-dependence, like the Livers used to be with the donkeys. Four, covert struggle for dominance, without much outbreak of actual fighting. Or, five, actual war. As long as you try to stay within the election laws, you’re in a covert struggle for your own interests. Nothing wrong with that. But so is Shockey, only more crudely than most politicians. I’ll bet he was only mayor of his old town briefly, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bet on it. As John Locke once pontificated—”

“Isn’t there anything you don’t think you already know, you!”

Vicki looked at her. Lizzie dropped her eyes to the baby, then raised them angrily to Vicki. Well, it was true. Vicki was always telling her things Like Vicki knew everything and Lizzie was some kind of datadumb… Liver.

“Actually,” Vicki said quietly, “I hardly know anything, which is peculiarly startling when you consider that just a few years ago I thought I understood it all.”

“I’m sorry,” Lizzie muttered. Was she sorry? She didn’t know. Lately Vicki confused her, and she used to think Vicki was so wonderful… nothing was the same, it.

“Don’t be sorry.” Vicki stood, stretching the kinks out of her legs. “Here’s looking at you, Karl Marx.”

“What?”

“Nothing, dear heart. I’ll see you at dinner, okay?”

“Okay,” Lizzie mumbled. She watched Vicki stroll out of Lizzie’s cubicle and disappear around the battered plastic upended table that formed one of its walls. Vicki didn’t look back, Lizzie hugged Dirk, wishing she hadn’t said that about Vicki knowing everything. Vicki’d been so good to Lizzie when Lizzie was just a kid, her. But… Vicki did act like she knew everything. Every idea that came up, every plan or… Why was Vicki like that? Because she was a donkey?

Lizzie reached upward, trying not to disturb the baby, until her fingers groped at the top of her chest of drawers. She pulled down her terminal. “Library search.”

“Ready,” the system said.

“Three-sentence definitions of two things. First—‘Here’s looking at you.’ Second—‘Carl Marks.’ ”

“ ‘Here’s looking at you,’ was a famous line from a pre-holo entertainment recording titled Casablanca. It was said as a drinking toast by the male lead to the female lead. In the 2090s the phrase enjoyed a renewed vogue as an ironic expression roughly meaning ‘I guess you won that contest.’

“ ‘Karl Marx’ was a political theorist whose writings were used by many twentieth-century revolutionaries as a basis for rebellion. He advocated a socialism that included collective ownership of the means of production. The mechanism he foresaw for achieving this was class warfare.”

“System off,” Lizzie said.

“System off.”

Class warfare. Was that what she, Lizzie, was asking for? Was that what Vicki really felt about Lizzie? And Billy and Annie and… Dirk?

A sour taste filled Lizzie’s mouth. She swallowed, but it didn’t go away. She’d been going to ask Vicki to go with her to explain the plan to Shockey. Maybe now she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d just go alone, if that was the way Vicki felt.

The baby had finished feeding and had fallen asleep again. Lizzie hugged him close and bent over to smell his sweet, clean baby smell. But even then the sour taste in her mouth and nose didn’t go away.

She found Shockey with Sharon and Sharon’s baby, nine-month-old Callie, fishing by the river in the mild weather. Sharon and Shockey wore winter jacks with the coats unbuttoned. Lizzie saw that Sharon’s shirt was unbuttoned as well. So that’s how it was.

Callie sat on the riverbank in a blue plastic clothes basket, turning a grimy plastic duck over and over in her fat little fists. She was a pretty baby, with Sharon’s soft brown hair and big eyes, but when she caught sight of Lizzie, she screwed up her face to cry and looked frantically around for her mother. Annie said babies got this way at Callie’s age. They got shy of strangers and nervous about new things. Callie would outgrow it, Annie said. Well, Lizzie didn’t spend a lot of time with Sharon but she wasn’t exactly a stranger, either; they belonged to the same tribe. She hoped Dirk didn’t go through a stage like this when he was older. She moved out of Callie’s line of sight.

Sharon and Shockey bent over their fishing lines. Sharon giggled and guided Shockey’s hand from his line to her open shirt.

“Hello!” Lizzie said loudly.

“Hey. Liz,” Shockey said, straightening. “If we catch anything, us, want to share a real meal for a change?”

There was nothing wrong with the words. The tribe ate by mouth often: berries or nuts, roasted rabbit, wild apples. Sometimes Lizzie got a longing in her mouth that nothing but the sharp bite of wild onions would satisfy. The Change just meant that nobody had to bother with getting food; not that they couldn’t. There was nothing wrong with Shockey’s offer of fish. It was the way he said it—his eyes bold on Lizzie, his mouth half smiling, half sneering, his hand still on Sharon’s bare breast. Sex bareness was different from eating bareness; it should be private. And Shockey acted like he owned Sharon. Well, he didn’t own Lizzie.

But she made herself smile. “Sure, if you catch anything, you. But that’s not why I’m here. I have an offer, me, to make to you.”

Shockey’s smile widened and his dark eyes blinked slowly. Lizzie said quickly, “Billy told me you used to be mayor of a town someplace.”

Shockey’s smile vanished. “Yeah? So what? Somebody had to be mayor, them.”

“You’re right, you,” Lizzie said. She looked levelly into Shockey’s face. “And somebody still does.”

Sharon said, “We don’t need no mayors, us, anymore.”

“But we need a district supervisor, us. Harold Winthrop Wayland is dead.”

Sharon’s voice scaled upward. “Shockey ain’t no donkey, Lizzie Francy, and don’t you forget it, you!”

“Of course he ain’t,” Lizzie said. “He’s a Liver, him—that’s the whole point.”

“What whole point?” Sharon said, so loudly that Callie, alarmed, looked up from her rubber duck. “Livers don’t work, them, at no jobs like district supervisor!”

“A district supervisor controls the warehouse distrib. Willoughby County ain’t got no supervisor, us, so there ain’t nothing in the warehouse. But if we elect one of our own, then—”

“Then there still ain’t nothing in the warehouse! Dip your brain, you, for a change, instead of donkey nets! Shockey can’t put no goods in no warehouse!”

“Yes, he could,” Lizzie said. She was suddenly tired of talking Liver to this stupid girl. She’d known Sharon all her life, and Sharon had always been stupid. “There’s a tax pool of credit from the state, collected from corporate taxes, that’s divided up between all the counties. A credit base that donkey taxes add to. But if we can get enough Livers registered and get Shockey elected, he can use Willoughby’s share to stock a warehouse for us.”

“But if he—”

“Shut up, Sharon, and let Shockey talk.” Lizzie hoped this would make Shockey mad—the hint that Sharon was controlling him. But Shockey wasn’t mad. His bold eyes, under heavy brows, had a faraway look, and his hand moved from Sharon to stroke his dark beard. Both women stared at him.

Finally he said, “Yeah.”

“ ‘Yeah’?” Sharon shrieked.

“Shut up, Sharon. Yeah, I’ll do it, Liz.” Abruptly he swooped down on the baby and lifted her high above his head. “How about it, Callie—you want, you, to see your big buddy a district supervisor?”

The baby squealed happily. Apparently little Callie didn’t consider Shockey a “stranger.” Sharon sulked. But Lizzie, watching, thought that Shockey wasn’t seeing either of them. His eyes gazed at something else, and he smiled the same half sneer as when he offered Lizzie the fish. What was it Vicki’d said? In her list of kinds of human relationships? A covert struggle for dominance, without much outbreak of actual fighting…

“Liz, you just tell me what to do first. I’m all ready, me, and I’m all yours.”

Eight

When the security alarm sounded, Theresa was sitting in her new study, working at a terminal.

She had made the study from a maid’s room in the middle of the apartment’s upper floor, unused probably since before house ’bots. Theresa had chosen it because it had no window, only a skylight set small and high on the wall and angled into an airshaft, from which she could see nothing but a patch of artificial sky. She’d had the building ’bot clean the room and paint it white, and she had moved in a terminal and an old-fashioned, inflexible chair. The only other thing in the room were the printies.

They were tacked on every wall, full-color flat printouts of whatever holoscenes she selected from the newsgrids. In one, three abandoned Liver children huddled together, dead, in a snowbank, their frozen and well-fed faces smooth with Cell Cleaner health.

In another, a baby lay in its grieving Liver mother’s arms. The mother, who looked about fifteen, was clearly Changed. The baby’s face was ravaged by some disease; its skin had turned mottled and pulpy, and blood oozed from its closed eyes. The camera had caught the mother with one cupped palm upraised, empty of a Change syringe.

In a wide-angle shot from an aerial camera, a shimmering Y-shield enclosed a beautiful valley in the Ozarks. The entire valley. One rich donkey lived there, a former financier whom no one had seen since the Change, when he gave a press conference exulting that now he would never need to have contact with another human being again.

In a small printie on the far wall, four emaciated adults, elbows like chisels, ate meager bowls of mush and drank water under a cross wood-burned with the words THE DAILY BREAD HE MEANT FOR US. Malnutrition marked their bowed legs and thin hair. All four smiled beatifically at the camera, smiles with missing teeth and swollen gums.

A large printie behind the terminal stand showed Miranda Sharifi’s face, overlaid with a blue veil, three lilies, and an open prayer book. Beside it an equally large printie showed the same holo, overlaid with gravestones and coffins and black candles and implements of torture along with the words WHEN IMMORTALITY, BITCH?

The pictures went on. Two donkey children lying naked and laughing on the corpse of a slaughtered deer sliced open from breast to tail, body-feeding directly on the blood and flesh. Another diseased Liver child, in a French town where there had been no Change syringes for four years. An ad for Endorkiss, the colors glowing and seductive, in which three incredibly perfect donkey bodies ground-fed quietly, their faces blissful, nobody looking at anyone else and clearly not needing to.

Jackson had not seen the room. Theresa went there only when he wasn’t home, and she’d asked Jones, the house system, to admit no one but herself to this room. Of course, Jackson probably knew how to override that, but even if he could, maybe he wouldn’t. Jackson wouldn’t understand the room. He would think it was a medical problem, like what he called Theresa’s “neurochemical anguish.” He wouldn’t see that the room was necessary.

The system in front of Theresa was in screen mode, its flat energy “surface” divided in half vertically by a thick black line. Above the line was a quote in severe dark blue letters: “ ‘Even an animal can get lost in unfamiliar terrain, but only men and women can lose themselves.’ Christopher Caan-Agee, 2067.” Below was the last paragraph Theresa had written in her book on Leisha Camden:

Leisha had a friend. His name was Tony Indivino. Tony was much angrier than Leisha about a lot of things. It didn’t seem right to Tony that some people had so much money and others had so little. Leisha had never thought about that before Tony made her think. Leisha wrote later that Tony said to her, “What if you walk down a street in a poor country like Spain and you see a beggar? Do you give him a dollar? What if you see a hundred beggars, a thousand beggars, and you don’t have as much money as Leisha Camden? What do you do? What should you do?” Leisha didn’t know answers to Tony’s questions.

Theresa studied her paragraph. She said to her personal system, Thomas, “Put ‘important’ before ‘friend.’ ” It did, changing the “a” to “an.” Leisha studied her sentence again. Then she looked at the sentence above: Even an animal can get lost in unfamiliar terrain, but only men and women can lose themselves. She said, “Thomas, bring me the second quote in my list.”

Thomas brought up the words, reading them aloud in its rich male voice: “ ‘But man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make the angels weep.’ William Shakespeare, 1564-1616.”

“The next quote.”

“ ‘Man’s unhappiness comes, as I construe, of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the finite.’ Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881.”

Again Theresa read her own paragraph, with “important” inserted before “friend.” Then she listened again to Carlyle’s sentence.

Why was it so hard to write a book? She could see so clearly what she needed to say about Leisha Camden, could feel it so clearly. She could even talk about it, at least with Jackson. But when she sat down in front of the terminal, the words she spoke were stiff and cold and it would be better if she never tried to show the world at all why Leisha Camden mattered, why a life given to something as large as keeping Sleepless and Sleepers as one people mattered Even if Leisha had failed. Despite Leisha’s efforts, the Sleepless had gone to Sanctuary. The country had gone into a long bitter divide. Jennifer Sharifi had gone to prison. And Leisha had gone to her death in a Georgia swamp, murdered by Livers who despised Sleepless even more than Theresa despised herself.

But Leisha had at least tried. And so saved herself from what the rest of them had become. No, Theresa had to write this book about Leisha. She had to. But why was it so hard to find words as wonderful as Thomas brought back when she sent him out on a quote search?

Theresa rubbed tears from her cheeks and looked again at the printies around the walls… most ignorant… like an angry ape plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make the angels weep.

“Take a neuropharm,” Jackson would say. “I can custom order you one that—”

“Building security has been breached,” the house system said loudly from Theresa’s terminal. “This is not a drill, Ms. Aranow. Repeat, building security has been breached and this is not a drill. What would you like me to do?”

Breached? How could building security be breached? There were Y-shields, there were locks… What should she do? Jackson was gone somewhere with Cazie. Theresa didn’t know what to tell the system. It wasn’t supposed to be breachable.

She said, “Lock all the doors!”

“They are always locked, Ms. Aranow.”

Of course they were. Theresa thought wildly. “Show me the breach!”

Prose, hers and Carlyle’s, disappeared from the screen. It went holo and transmitted a wide-angle view of the building foyer. People—Livers!—pushed toward the elevator, which said, “I’m sorry—this elevator opens only for authorized residents and guests.” A man with a handheld terminal did something to it and the elevator door opened.

Theresa stood, knocking over her chair. Her heart thudded. Five Livers, four men and a woman, people with squat foreheads or knobbly chins or hairy ears or thick necks, dressed in old winter jackets. In her building. Their faces were focused and intent, and one had a mobile. Where had he gotten it? The Change Wars? But those were over years ago… weren’t they? What should she do?

“What… what should I do, Jones? Is there a standard security procedure?”

“A standard intruder-repellant sequence exists, in escalating stages. Shall I begin it? Or do you wish to speak to the unauthorized intruders first?”

“No! No… I… what do they want?”

“Shall I put front-door visual and audio through to Thomas?”

“No… yes. And start the intruder-repellent sequence!”

“All levels, on automatic?”

“Yes!”

The display stage showed the corridor outside the apartment door. Three of the people, including the woman, now held guns. Theresa felt her throat close and she gasped for breath. No, not now, not now… The Livers weren’t shouting. The one with the mobile spoke calmly but loudly, in their street talk: “—get for our kids, us, more Change syringes. That’s all we want, us. We won’t hurt nobody. I tell you again, me, that all we want is more Change syringes, we know you got them. Dr. Aranow, you’re a doctor, you—”

“Go away!” Theresa called. The words came out strangled, unable to force themselves past her panic attack. She tried again. “Go away! No Change syringes here! My brother doesn’t keep them at home!” Which wasn’t true. There were sixteen Change syringes in the house safe.

“What? Is that Dr. Aranow, you? Open the door!”

“No,” Theresa whimpered. She couldn’t breathe.

“Then we’re coming in, us!”

The front door clicked open. The security procedure… why wasn’t Jones responding? What had these people had time to do to Jones… and how did they know how to do it? Theresa wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth. Jones said, “You are unauthorized intruders. If you don’t leave immediately, this system will activate its bio-based defenses.”

“Wait, Elwood, don’t—”

“I knocked out the defenses, them. Come on!”

“But you—”

“The syringes—”

“Activating now,” Jones said, and abruptly the holostage was full of a dark yellow gas, coming from everywhere at once. And it was everywhere. Theresa’s study was suddenly full of it Gasping for air, she drew gas into her lungs and—

—and her arms and legs fell off.

Theresa tumbled to the floor. She could see her arms and legs lying beside her, clearly detached… But, no, they couldn’t be hers, because there was no blood. They were somebody’s else’s arms and legs… the intruders’? But how had they gotten as far as her upper-floor study, without their legs? How odd! But interesting, actually. Although maybe they weren’t the intruders’ arms and legs. But, then, whose could they be?

She pushed the nearest leg away from herself. Really, the disgusting thing shouldn’t be lying around on the floor. Where was the cleaning ’bot? Perhaps it was broken…

As she shoved the stray leg hard, Theresa was astonished to feel her own body jerk. Now, what was that all about? Nothing seemed normal today. Although Jackson always said that normal was a huge warehouse… he must be right, if “normal” had to include arms and legs that weren’t even hers cluttering up her study.

Theresa grasped a detached arm and tried to throw it across the room. Again her torso jerked, and pain tore through her shoulder, which didn’t make sense. And how had the intruder dressed his arm in one of Theresa’s flowered sleeves? He must have gone first to her bedroom, changed clothes, and then come in here to fall apart. Maybe Leisha had sent him. Yes, that would make sense—Leisha was always compassionate to Livers. Compassionate and unafraid.

“Theresa!” someone called. “Tess!”

Although now that she thought of it. Theresa wasn’t afraid either. Really, she was very calm. Jackson would be proud of her. She was staying calm and thinking what to do. First, get the cleaning ’bot to clear up these extra arms and legs off the floor. Then, notify the enclave police about the intruders. Third, figure out what made Thomas Carlyle’s sentences so good, so that she could write ones just as good. Or so her personal system could. Yes, that made sense—she would ask her system to duplicate Carlyle’s prose. After all, they both were named Thomas.

“Tess! Where are—oh, my God!”

Theresa looked up. Cazie stood over her, wearing a Y-shield helmet with air filter. Cazie seemed to have all her arms and legs. This was interesting… how had Cazie hung on to hers when both Theresa and the intruders hadn’t been able to? Fourth on her list would be to ask Jackson about this. It was probably a medical problem.

“Here, breathe deep… hold still, Tessie, just breathe as deep as you can, the gas only needs a few minutes to leave your body… just breathe…”

There was something over her head, although it must be made of Y-energy because through it Theresa could still see Cazie. Cazie looked so concerned… but she needn’t, really. Theresa was fine. Jackson would be proud of how fine she was, staying calm in an emergency, breathing normally, making a rational list of what to do and what order to do it in… But she should speak the list to Thomas. That way she would be sure to remember everything on it. Thomas could write it down.

She crawled toward her terminal to do this. “Breathe deep.” Cazie said again, but before Theresa could, everything went black.

She awoke on the living-room sofa. Jackson and Cazie stood over her. Cazie said, “How do you feel, Tessie?”

“I… there were Livers…”

“Gone now. No, don’t get upset, Tess, it’s all right. Enclave security has them all, and nobody was hurt. It won’t happen again.”

“But how… what…”

Jackson sat beside her and took her hand. “They dipped the building entry codes, Theresa. Nobody knows how they got into the enclave. But all our systems have been reprogrammed—building, elevator, and Jones. Cazie’s right, it won’t happen again.”

His voice sounded hollow. He was lying to her.

Cazie said, “Nothing was stolen. Maybe they didn’t even intend to steal anything but Change syringes. They knew Jackson was a doctor. Other medical types were breached, too. The cops will take care of the whole thing. Nobody was hurt.”

“But there were arms and legs all over the floor!” Theresa cried. She could see them, horrible detached limbs… she shuddered and gasped. “And my arms and legs—”

“Easy, Tess,” Cazie said. “It’s all right now. There weren’t any arms and legs on the floor, and yours are all right, too. It was just the system biodefense. Why didn’t you put on your mask when you activated it?”

“You’re upsetting her,” Jackson said. “She didn’t know. Tess, it’s all right now, we’re right here. You don’t need to think about it anymore.”

“But…” Theresa said. Her fingers tightened and loosened on Jackson’s, tightened and loosened. “But tell me… what did I breathe in? Please tell me, Jackson.”

Jackson said reluctantly, “It was a gas that acts directly on the parietal cortices, inducing anosognosia. The parietal cortices control how the mind perceives the sensations and movements of the body. In anosognosia the mind is incapable of recognizing its own limbs, and also incapable of recognizing that anything is wrong. So the victim invents elaborate scenarios to explain the perceived limb paralysis. It makes a good security method to incapacitate without increasing the anger and panic that can lead to reckless response. And it doesn’t harm anyone.”

“The arms and legs on the floor were your own,” Cazie said. “The Livers never got past the foyer.”

Jackson said, “You just breathed a temporary neuropharm. Even without the Cell Cleaner, it doesn’t last long. You might have a tingling in your limbs for a while, but it’s not harmful.”

A neuropharm. She had breathed in a neuropharm, and become a different person. A person without arms and legs, a person who thought other people’s arms and legs cluttered the floor, a person who hadn’t been upset by that but rather had planned a calm list of ways to deal with it. Not Theresa. Someone else entirely.

She looked up at Jackson, and for the first time she could remember, Theresa didn’t want him close. “You… you made me somebody else.”

“No, I didn’t, the house system—”

“But you want me to take neuropharms always. To be somebody different from me.”

“Theresa, you can’t compare—” he began, but she interrupted him.

“That’s not the answer. I don’t know what is, but not that.” She let go of Jackson’s hand and struggled to stand.

Cazie said, “Tess, honey, you’re not really being fair to Jack. He just—”

“I know what he just,” Theresa said, and somehow she left them there, Jackson looking stricken and Cazie rueful. Staggered to her room really, her walk was so unsteady, her arms and legs did tingle and once she thought they might buckle under her.

But at least they were her own.

The building sat on the side of a mountain high in the Adirondacks. Theresa landed the car, which of course flew on automatic, on an artificially flat stretch of nanopaved ground that she assumed was a parking lot, although no other cars rested on it. Then she stood for a long time in the cold just gazing up at the Sisters of Merciful Heaven.

The convent, not foamcast but built of genuine stone, blended into the mountain. Gray rock, scantily covered with withered ivy vines that matched the withered winter vegetation growing at angles on the steep ground. It was the first donkey building Theresa could remember ever seeing, even in newsgrids, that wasn’t surrounded by the faint shimmering bubble of a Y-shield. Only snow, heaped in clean drifts. A little wind skirled the light powder around Theresa’s legs, and she shivered. She started toward the door.

It was opened by a middle-aged woman, not a security system or a ’bot. A woman—a sister?—dressed in a straight gray robe of what looked like cotton. Cotton. A consumable. The sight almost overcame Theresa’s usual shrinking from strangers. She clutched her two hands tightly together and forced herself not to step back.

“I’m… Theresa Aranow. I called…”

“Come in, Ms. Aranow. I’m Sister Anne.” She smiled, but Theresa couldn’t smile back. Her face felt too tight. “I’m the one you talked to on comlink. Come with me to where we can talk.”

She led Theresa through a gloomy stone foyer and opened a heavy wooden door. Sound flowed out.

“Oh! What… What is it?”

“The sisters, singing vespers.”

Theresa stopped, transfixed. She had never heard singing like that. Not from any sound system, ever. A glorious outpouring of sound, without instruments—just human voices, every one genemod for musical ability, raised in fervent ardor. She couldn’t make out the words, but the words didn’t matter… it was the passion that mattered. Passion for something unseen but—but what? Felt. The passion…

Sister Anne said gently, “You said on comlink you were not raised Catholic. Have you heard vespers sung before?”

“Never!”

“Well, neither have most Catholics. Or what passes for Catholics now. Come in here, where we can talk.”

Theresa followed her into a small, white-walled room furnished only with a desk, terminal, and three chairs. Wooden chairs. She blurted, “You’re not Changed. Any of you.”

“No,” Sister Anne said, smiling. “We must eat, and drink, and depend on our own efforts and His grace for our daily bread.”

“Is it… is it…” She was trembling. But she made herself get the words out, because they were so important to her. “Is it a spiritual discipline?”

“It is. Suppose, Ms. Aranow, you start by telling me why you’re here.”

“Why I’m here.” Theresa looked at the nun. Theresa had had Thomas do background. Sister Anne was fifty-one years old, had entered this semi-cloistered order at seventeen, was one of only eight hundred forty-nine Sisters of Merciful Heaven left in the world. Born Anne Grenville Hart in Wichita, Kansas, she had inherited three million dollars from her mother, cofounder of a bakery franchise, Proust’s Madeleines. The entire three million had been donated to the order. Why was Anne Grenville Hart here? But Theresa couldn’t ask that. Obediently, she tried to answer the sister’s question, knowing even before she began that the answer would be inadequate, wouldn’t really say at all what Theresa could never find words for in the first place.

“I’m here because I… I’m looking for something.” And waited to be asked what. The unanswerable question, which would only lead to stammering and muddled words and puzzled looks from the sister, growing more impatient, until Theresa collapsed into hopeless silence.

But Sister Anne said, “And you’ve looked everywhere else you could think of, couldn’t find it, and so have tried here, in desperation. Even though you can’t begin to define what you’re looking for, and are afraid it isn’t the Catholic conception of God at all.”

“Yes!” Theresa gasped. “How… how did you know?”

“You’re not the first to come to us,” Sister Anne said serenely, “and you won’t be the last. But I think you may be different from most. Ms. Aranow, why aren’t you Changed?”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t? You mean, there is some physical difficulty?”

“No, no, I mean I just… can’t.”

“You’re afraid of making your own life too automatic. In physical need, you think, begins spiritual questing. Its roots and wellspring.”

“Yes!” Theresa gasped. “Oh, yes! Only…”

“Only what, Ms. Aranow?” Sister Anne leaned forward on her chair, a chair of hard mellowed natural wood that her unChanged body would not consume molecule by molecule until the solid had been turned into a holed skeleton of itself. Sister Anne’s chair would stay a chair. Sister Anne’s expression was as warm as Jackson’s and Cazie’s but different somehow, not… not what? Not careful with Theresa, not pitying, not condescending. Sister Anne didn’t think that Theresa Aranow was weak, or crazy.

The words spilled out. Looking at the calm, understanding face, Theresa’s fear of strangers somehow disappeared and the words tumbled out, tidal-waved out, unstoppable.

“I’ve always wanted something, looked for something, my whole life… only I don’t have any idea what it is! And nobody else has ever seemed to need it, or to even know what I’m talking about, even good people that I know are good people. People I love. They look at me like I’m crazy… actually, I am crazy. I’m depressed, agoraphobic, and severely neurologically inhibited. I haven’t left our apartment in over a year except once and that was—nobody else I know feels like this. I want there to be something… large. Larger than myself. Something in the universe to hang on to, to give my life some kind of meaning… I’m a fraud, you know, agreeing with you that I’m unChanged because I don’t want things too automatic. They are automatic for me. I’m rich, and I have a loving brother who stands between me and the world, and I never have to worry or struggle for anything, certainly not my daily bread, which is delivered and cooked and served by ’bots that—while most of the people in this country are out there without safety or enough Y-cones or medical care for their children who are born without enough Change syringes… Not that I think the Change is a good—I’m confused about the Change. I know it. But the reason I’ve always been different is that I want something nobody can have—Jackson says nobody can have it because it doesn’t exist. I want the truth! The truth that is real and solid and you can use to help you figure out how to live your life and what that life is supposed to mean. Oh, I know there’s no such thing as that kind of truth—absolute truth—and it’s stupid and naive to go looking for it… but I did. I tried to, anyway. I had Thomas help me search through Christianity and Zen and Yagaiism and Hinduism and the Text of the Scientific Change… I’m not very smart, Sister, something may have gone wrong with my in vitro fertilization and maybe I don’t understand much of what Thomas brought me. But I did try. And it seems to me that those beliefs all contradict each other, all say different things, and if so, how can they all be true? And then they also contradict themselves internally, with different parts of their own beliefs that don’t fit with each other, or don’t fit with what I see all around me in the world, so how can any of them be true? They’re not! But then I’m left with nothing except this longing, and nobody else I know seems to feel it so I end up so alone I think I’ll die. I’ve seriously thought of suicide. But what that would do to Jackson, who already feels so responsible for me… I can’t. I can’t. It wouldn’t be right. Only… how do I know what’s ‘right’ if I can’t find out what’s true? And so I go on living in this… this void, and sometimes the emptiness is so big and dark and thick I feel that I’ll suffocate, or that I’m so lost I can’t ever be found… can’t find myself, I mean, except that myself isn’t what I want! It’s too small, to find nothing but myself!”

Theresa stopped, gasping. What had she been saying? Pouring out all that to this stranger, this poised woman whom she didn’t even know, like some sort of whining baby…

“You are right in your search,” Sister Anne said, “but wrong in your conclusions.”

She spoke with utter conviction. And yet Theresa felt confused; she didn’t think she’d stated any conclusions, hadn’t been able to come to any. Wasn’t that the problem?

“I don’t understand, Sister.”

“How old are you, Ms. Aranow?”

“Eighteen,” she said, and waited for the smile. It didn’t come.

“You say the beliefs you’ve examined—from Yagaiism to Zen—all contradict each other, as well as being either internally inconsistent or inconsistent with your observed experience, and therefore all cannot be true. That is your error.”

“What?” Theresa cried. “What’s my error?”

“They are all true. Every last one of every belief you named. Plus atheism, Druidism, cannibalism, and devil worship.”

Theresa gaped at her.

“The fact is, my lost child, that truth is not so simple. It is solid, and large, and bright enough to banish the darkness—but it is not simple.”

“I don’t understand,” Theresa faltered. She had a sudden picture of Cazie watching Sister Anne from the corner of the white-walled room: Cazie with her head tilted, her golden eyes scornfully bright, smiling at them both. Always smiling. Irony, Tessie. Don’t lose your irony.

“Everything is true, under difference circumstances. Men are good, and men are sinful. God is all-powerful, and God cannot choose for each soul. Love is greater than justice, and justice greater than love. How else could the Church have changed over more than two millennia, and still be the Church? Sometimes heretics must be rooted out and destroyed, and sometimes heretics must be embraced, and sometimes heretics are we ourselves. All of it is true. But humankind cannot see all of truth at once, and so in each age we see what we can. There are fashions in truth, as in all else. And under the fashions, the largeness abides.”

“But, Sister… but if everything is true…”

“Then the task of the searcher is to set aside the egotism of perception and see as much of God as each can.”

The egotism of perception. Theresa struggled with the concept. “You mean… we can’t see it all, so we must trust the rest is there? On faith?”

“That’s part of it. But there’s more involved. We must literally set aside the smallness of our perceptions—the limits of our perceptions—and see what was hidden to us before.”

“But how?” And then, more quietly, “How?”

Sister Anne stood and walked to the door. She opened it and the glorious sound swept back into the room: thirty, fifty voices raised in song, ardent and pure, a rush as heady and perfumed as the smell of summer nights. Theresa closed her eyes and leaned forward, as if the singing were a physical stream and she lowering herself into it.

“Like that,” Sister Anne said.

Irony is always the best defense against self-delusion, Cazie said.

“It’s also the best defense against the risk of any genuine feeling,” Sister Anne said quietly, and Theresa’s eyes flew open and her heart sped, until she realized she must have spoken Cazie’s words aloud.

Theresa stood, too, although she couldn’t have said why. Vespers rose and fell around her, a sea of sweet sound, palpable and powerful as a rush of fresh water. Again her heart sped, but this time without any risk of an attack. Her breathing was calm and deep. Yes, something said inside a deep part of her mind. Yes yes yes!

The nun watched her closely. “Very few people actually belong in this order, Ms. Aranow.”

Theresa said, “I do,” and it seemed to her she had never spoken with such confidence in her life. It was over, then: the uncertainty, the lostness, the tremendous fear. Above all, the fear. Of the strange, the alien, the different. Over. She was home.

Sister Anne smiled; to Theresa, her smile blended with the glory of the music, was the music. “I think maybe you do. Would you like to have the preliminary blood and cerebral-spinal tests now?”

Theresa smiled back. “Tests?”

“To use as an eventual base for your customized neuropharms.”

“My… what?”

“We customize the mix for each postulant, of course. Our lab, which we share with the Jesuits in Saranac Lake, is as advanced at this work as any in the world. Your mix will match anything available in Boston or Copenhagen or Brasilia, for any purpose.”

Theresa said woodenly, “I don’t take neuropharms.”

“You have never taken any like these, certainly. For this purpose, with this result. Not yet.”

“I don’t take them at all.” Dizziness rushed over her, displacing the music. She reached for the back of the chair with both hands.

“I see,” Sister Anne said. “Just as you are unChanged. But, Theresa, they are not the same thing. Neuropharms for the greater glory of God… What did you think I meant when I said we set aside the egotism of perception? That’s a cortical-thalamic function.”

“I don’t know what I thought,” Theresa mumbled. The dizziness grew worse. She clutched the back of the chair.

“Our neuropharms modify activities in the mammillothalamic tract, cortical association areas, and dorsomedial nucleus—no different from modifying biochemistry through fasting or frenzied prayer in other ages. We merely break down the neural barriers to increased levels of attention, perception, and integration of various conscious states. To better know and glorify God.”

“I have to leave now,” Theresa gasped. The room whirled, and her throat closed. She couldn’t breathe. There was no air…

“But, my child—”

“I have… to go! I’m… sorry!”

She stumbled through the open door of the room. Vespers rose around her, stronger as she staggered blindly along the corridor: glorious, fervent, heartbreaking. Theresa yanked at the convent door; it wouldn’t open. She couldn’t talk to order it open. Gasping, she beat on the wood, until someone she couldn’t see through the whirling confusion, someone behind her, opened the door for her and she fell through.

The door closed, cutting off the music.

When she could breathe again, Theresa sat for a long time in her car. Then she lifted it and flew south.

The first tribe she came to had housed itself for the winter in the remains of a pre-Change-Wars Liver town. The three undestroyed buildings were Liver colors: fuchsia, mint, and bright red. Behind the red building stretched a huge sheet of heavy plastic over churned-up earth: a feeding ground. Beyond it lay a pile of broken machines, scooters and ’bots and what looked like water pipes. People, made small and nonthreatening by the aircar’s height, stopped moving and looked up, hands shading their eyes against the cold winter sun. Theresa couldn’t see their faces.

She didn’t try to go down to them, or even to lower her altitude. Instead she powered down the window and dropped out the package of Change syringes. Sixteen of them, all that Jackson had had left in the house safe. The syringes were wrapped in nonconsumable flowered dress cloth. The cloth might tear when it landed, but nothing could shatter Miranda Sharifi’s Change syringes.

As soon as the packet hit ground, Livers ran toward it. Theresa didn’t wait. She flew south, back to Manhattan East, knowing she was a hypocrite. She didn’t believe Change syringes were good for people, but she was giving them to Livers for their children. She didn’t believe neuropharms could be the path to meaning, but the Sisters of Merciful Heaven felt that their lives were meaningful whereas she, Theresa, felt her life was shit. She believed that pain was a gift, a signpost to the soul, but she let herself be fed by ’bots and coddled by Jackson and protected by bio-weapon security systems, so that she didn’t have to fear too much pain.

And all the while Cazie rode with her in the front seat of the car, scornful and concerned and impatient and loving and dangerous, saying Irony, Tessie. Don’t lose your irony.

I never had any to lose. Tess thought, and opaqued the car’s windows so she didn’t have to see outside. So she could put her head in her hands and wonder what, if anything, could be left for her to try next.

“You did what?” Jackson said. He spoke very slowly, as if his words were slippery and he had to keep a firm hold on them.

“I gave them to a tribe of Livers,” Theresa said.

“You gave all the rest of my Change syringes to a tribe of Livers? What tribe?”

“I don’t know. Just a random tribe.”

“Where?”

“I don’t remember.”

Jackson laced his fingers together tightly. “Why?”

“Because they need them. Or their babies will get sick and die.”

“But, Tessie, I needed them, too. For babies born to my patients… did you know they were the last syringes I had?”

“Yes,” she whispered. She had never seen her brother like this. So quiet. No, that wasn’t right, Jackson was usually quiet. But not like this.

“Theresa. I need the tools of my trade to help people. I need syringes. And Miranda Sharifi isn’t providing any more… you know that. Every doctor in the country is running out of Change syringes. And can’t get any more. How am I supposed to help my newborn patients without the syringes?”

“You can doctor them, Jackson.” She’d had time to think about this; she was calmer than when she’d first arrived home. A little calmer. “The people in our enclave have you. Those Liver babies out there don’t have anything. And I wanted—” She stopped.

Jackson said, with a choking noise in his voice, “You wanted to give them something.”

“I need to give somebody something!” Theresa cried.

Jackson turned away, toward the window. He stood with his back to her, looking out at the park. Theresa took a step toward him, halted. “Don’t you see, Jackson?”

“I see,” he said, which made her feel a little better, even though he didn’t turn around.

“And you can help the people in our enclave, too,” Theresa said. “You can help them the way you went to school to learn to do. After all, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

But this time Jackson didn’t answer her at all.

Interlude

TRANSMISSION DATE: January 5, 2121

TO: Selene Base, Moon

VIA: AT&T Comlink Satellite 4, Holsat 643-K (China)

MESSAGE TYPE: Unencrypted

MESSAGE CLASS: No class. Not a legal transmission

ORIGINATING GROUP: Not identified

MESSAGE:

You give us Change syringes so we become dependent on you non-humans. Then you withdraw the syringes so we’ll starve and sicken. What’s that but genocide? You think no one knows what you’re really doing. Not so, bitch. There are groups all over America that know what’s really going on. What your plan is. Weaken us, control us, and then attack. It won’t work. Some of us, undeluded by the fucking cowards that call themselves our government, will be waiting for you to come down from your hiding place. Sleepers are stronger than you think, and we value our God-given and Constitution-given freedoms. Too many Americans have died the past 350 years for us to let our freedoms go without a fight.

Remember that.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

Nine

On December 31, Jackson sat in his apartment watching newsgrids he didn’t really want to see, and resisting the idea of going to Willoughby County on this last day of legal voter registration for the April special election.

“Yesterday’s bloody conflict in San Francisco’s Bay Enclave may have lasted less than an hour,” said the handsome genemod journalist over holos of the attack, “but the aftermath continues. Enclave Police Chief Stephanie Brunell expressed both outrage and puzzlement at that attack, allegedly motivated by a search for Change syringes, by the terrorist group calling itself Livers For Control. Police investigation is concentrating on how both Y-shield and biodefense security systems could have been overridden by the underground group—”

By datadipping, you dips, Jackson thought. But nobody wanted to believe that, because it meant you had to believe Livers were capable both of learning to manipulate sophisticated computer systems and of seizing power. And so much donkey effort—decades of effort—had gone into ensuring otherwise. Rotten educational software. Lavish handouts of material goods. Simple government-funded amusements that simply distracted. A political agenda that convinced those at the bottom that because they didn’t have to work, they were actually at the top. Jackson changed the channel.

“—Year’s Eve celebration at the Mall Enclave in the nation’s capital. Warmed to a summery seventy-two degrees in deference to this season’s stunning bare-breasted evening gowns, the Mall itself has been transformed for the sight of this most lavish gala. President and Mrs. Garrison will divide their time between dancing at—” He changed the channel.

“—of the match. International chess champion Vladimir Voitinuik, here pondering his fourth move against challenger Guillaume—” He changed the channel.

“—heading rapidly toward the Florida coast where, unfortunately, a great many so-called Liver tribes have chosen to winter. Although Hurricane Kate occurs late in the tropical hurricane season, winds of up to a hundred thirty miles per hour…”

Robocam of terrified Livers, many almost naked, trying to dig safety ditches with shovels, sticks, even pieces of metal from what looked like broken ’bots. A close-up of a child being blown away from its screaming mother—

“Jackson?” Theresa said. He hadn’t heard her pad, barefoot, into the room. Quickly he offed the newsgrid.

“Jackson, I need to ask you something.”

“What, Theresa?” She looked terrible. She’d lost even more weight. Anorexia nervosa had all but disappeared since the Change—feeding directly, the body knew what it needed—but Jackson thought that Theresa, unChanged, was on the verge of it. Below the hem of her loose flowered dress he could see the long light outline of her tibiae, and above the neckline her clavicle stood out against the pale floaty mass of her dry hair like twigs against cloud. He despaired of what a proper workup would show. Deficiencies in bone density, white and red blood count, cerebrospinal transmitters, metabolic processes—nothing in balance. Cardiac, cortical, and even cellular-level stress clean off the scale. Plus biogenic amines the body produced only under pathological conditions—the kinds that signaled accelerated nerve-cell death and permanent changes in the neural architecture.

“Tessie… you need to eat more. I’ve told you. You promised.”

“I know. I will. But I get so wrapped up in my book… I do think it’s going better. Some of the paragraphs almost say what I feel. What Leisha feels. Felt. But now could you recommend a good program on Abraham Lincoln? Something not too hard, but clear about his life and politics?”

“Abraham Lincoln? Why?” But the second after he said it, he knew.

“Leisha Camden wrote a book about Lincoln. I think, from what Thomas told me, that it was considered important. And I know hardly anything about President Lincoln.”

Theresa had never been interested in history—had never, in fact, gone past the primary-grades software. Jackson said, “Why not just use the Camden book, then?”

His sister blushed. “It’s not adapted. And when I had Thomas read it to me… well, I think I need something easier. Will you help me?”

“Of course,” he said gently. And then, because he couldn’t help himself, “How is your book on Leisha going?”

“Oh, you know.” She swiped vaguely at the air with one hand. “There’s always a gap between the book in your head and the one in the page.”

It sounded like something Thomas had found for her in an indexed quotation program. She was fond of those. Did they give her the illusion of understanding? His heart ached with pity. “Try Clear and Present Software. Their hypertext explains things well. I don’t remember the exact title you need, but Thomas can find it for you.”

“Thank you, Jackson.” She smiled at him, looking fragile as spun glass. “Thomas can find it. Clear and Here Software?”

“Clear and Present.”

He could see the knobby calcaneus in her bare heel, uncushioned by flesh, as she left the room.

Jackson sat in front of the empty wall screen for several minutes. Syringe wars. Attacks on enclaves. Desperate Livers. Theresa. Abraham Lincoln. He remembered a speech of Lincoln’s, floating up from the mental flotsam of his own schooldays: The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

Nobody believed that anymore. Nobody he knew.

Except Lizzie Francy.

He landed his car a couple hundred feet from the tribe building, remembering how, nearly two months ago, scruffy Liver young men had been all over it. Now, of course, one of those scruffy young men was supposedly a candidate for public office.

Someone sauntered toward the car. Vicki Turner. Jackson rolled down the window. Cold winter air gusted in.

“Dr. Jackson Aranow. What an honor. I would have expected you to be at a New Year’s Eve party somewhere. Have you come to share the final push toward democratic voter registration? Or to satisfy yourself that we actually went through with it, instead of just giving up in typical Liver fashion after our initial burst of ephemeral enthusiasm?”

Jackson frowned, “I’m here to see how the project is going.”

“Such non-evaluative language. Your med school psych professors would be proud of you. Actually, we’re on our way to try one more time with a particularly recalcitrant group of non-registrants. Perhaps you could give us a lift.”

“Ms. Turner—I checked on your credit rating. It’s rotten, presumably as a result of your arrest by the GSEA and the subsequent… unpleasantness. But I don’t believe for a minute that you don’t have accounts stashed under other names in other places. Why not just buy your… your tribe an aircar?”

“You’re wrong, Jackson. I don’t have money stashed anywhere. I spent it all.”

“On what?”

She didn’t answer, smiling at him faintly, and suddenly Jackson knew. On the Change Wars. Whatever part Vicki Turner had played in that struggle to convince Americans that the syringes were not a Sleepless plot to enslave Livers, to convince Americans to stop killing each other over radical changes in biology, to convince Americans to stop attacking Washington because, now, they could—whatever Vicki had done, it really had cost her all her credit. And she didn’t regret it.

He blurted, “You make me feel ashamed.”

For an instant, her face softened, and he saw something behind the brittle mask, something wistful and a little lonely. Then she smiled as before. “Then you can atone for your deep civic shame by giving us a surreptitious lift to these reluctant voters.”

Jackson didn’t answer. In that instant of unwitting vulnerability, she had again reminded him of Cazie. And he had again reminded himself of a bumbling dolt.

Lizzie and Shockey walked toward the car. Lizzie carried Dirk, well wrapped against the cold. Shockey wore screaming yellow jacks and a lime coat, with antique soda-can jewelry in his ears. On his right shoulder sat an odd lump. As he got closer, Jackson saw that it was a red, white, and blue flower, made of layers of plant-dyed rough-spun cloth wired together into a rosette.

Vicki murmured, “…and they never even heard of Jacobins.” But the affectionate look she gave Lizzie was real.

Shockey said, “Doctor. Coming along, you, for the last big push? You might learn something.”

“True. Doctor,” Vicki said. “We are, after all, making startlingly new political history with our grass-roots movement toward democracy.”

“Damn right,” Shockey said. The young man seemed to expand, raising the rosette on his broad shoulder another two inches. Hot air, Jackson thought.

Lizzie almost danced with excitement. Her black hair stood out in more directions than Jackson imagined possible. “If we can get these people to agree to register tonight, Dr. Aranow, we’ll have ninety-three percent Liver participation. Four thousand four hundred eleven Liver voters in the county for the winter. Now, you said that Susannah Wells Livingston wasn’t a real candidate, just someone to run against Donald Thomas Serrano, and Serrano would get the vote of nearly every registered donkey. That’s four thousand eighty-two votes. Even if we can’t convince this tribe to register, we should still win.”

“I should still win,” Shockey said.

“All right—you should still win,” Lizzie said. Jackson saw that she was too elated to bother arguing with Shockey. “We’re going to do it!”

Jackson glanced at Vicki. She nodded. “You tell them, Jackson. Maybe she’ll listen to you.”

“Lizzie…” Jackson said, and stopped. He hated to puncture her. How long had it been since he’d seen genuine enthusiasm, for anything constructive? “Lizzie, getting the edge in number of voter registrations won’t guarantee you a win. There’s three months before the actual April first election. In three months, Donald Serrano is going to do everything in his considerable power to convince your Liver voters to vote for him. And every single donkey politician is going to help him, including Sue Livingston. Because if you win, it will set a potentially devastating precedent for electing outsiders to government.”

“We’re not outsiders, us!” Shockey flashed.

“To the donkey political establishment, you are. They do not want you and your kind making decisions that affect them and their kind. Not even the tiny peripheral decisions that a district supervisor gets to make. They want to keep you out. And they’ll try to do that by buying the votes of every legally registered voter in Willoughby County. With Y-cones and music systems and medunits and luxury foods and scooters, and every other material pleasure they can offer right now and you can only promise to try to obtain, maybe, in the future.”

Lizzie scowled over the sleeping baby. “And you think we’ll fall for that? Be bought like that?”

Jackson said quietly, “You were bought like that for nearly a hundred years.”

“But no more! We’re different now, us! Since the Change! We don’t need you no more!”

“Which is why we want you to give us a ride now,” Vicki said. “Earn your keep. Jackson. Lizzie, Shockey, get in the car.”

They did. Vicki gave him directions, and the four flew in silence for several minutes over rough country littered with the debris of winter. Wind-fallen branches, withered scrub, soggy dead leaves, dells of deep snow. Finally Jackson said, “Do you want me to land right by their… camp? Or shouldn’t they see a donkey associated with this Liver enterprise?”

“No,” Lizzie said, surprising him. “You come, too. These particular people, they should see you.”

The tribe, like so many, had passed the winter in an abandoned food-processing plant. Jackson guessed this one had once processed apples from the gone-wild orchards covering the low hills. No one came out to meet them. Lizzie, carrying the still sleeping Dirk, led the way around to the back of the building, where, under the usual plastic-tent feeding ground, lunch was in progress.

Sixty or seventy Livers lay or sat naked on the churned-up ground, soaking in both nutrients and sun. For a second Jackson flashed on Terry Amory’s party that Cazie had taken him to. But there was no danger of confusing the two. These Livers were—well, Jackson hated to admit it because it echoed the worst kind of dehumanizing bigotry—the Ellie Lester kind. But it was the truth. The Livers were repulsive.

Hairy backs, sagging breasts, flabby bellies and thighs, graceless proportions, faces with features too squished together or too spread apart or not well matched to each other. It didn’t even matter that everyone’s Cell Cleaner skin was smooth and healthy and blemish-free. Since his internship had ended, Jackson had seen mostly perfect genemod bodies. Now he remembered how purely ugly most of humanity was in comparison.

Vicki murmured by his ear, “Kind of a shock, isn’t it? Even for a physician. Welcome to homo sapiens. ‘The aristocrat among the animals,’ as Heinrich Heine remarked.”

Lizzie said, without preamble, “We’re back, us, to talk to you some more about this here election. Janet, Arly, Bill, Farla—you listen, you.”

“Do we got any choice, us?” said a flabby, grinning, naked middle-aged woman with buttocks like deflated balloons. “Lizzie, you hand me that there sweet baby.”

Lizzie handed over Dirk and stripped off her clothes. Shockey and Vicki, with complete unself-consciousness, followed. Vicki grinned at Jackson. “When in Rome…”

He wasn’t going to let her—let any of them—intimidate him. He stripped off his jacket and shirt.

“Oooooh, nice,” the middle-aged woman said, and laughed at Jackson’s discomfiture. “But, Lizzie, tell us, you, why you brought this pair of donkeys, them, along with your so-called candidate.”

“Ain’t nothing so-called about me, Farla,” Shockey said good-naturedly. “I’m the next Willoughby County district supervisor, me.”

Farla grinned. “Sure you are.”

Jackson was having trouble. He stood slowly unfastening his pants… as slowly as he could. Livers were used to communal feeding nudity. So were donkeys—but ground feeding, done in softly lit and perfumed private feeding rooms, was very often sexual. Here, young men like Shockey were relaxed naked. Comfortable. Flaccid. Jackson, for no good reason he could discover, had an erection.

“Go on, Jackson,” Vicki said softly. “Unveil the genemod family lavaliere.”

He turned to her angrily—why did she always try to make things worse?—and immediately things were worse. Her naked body was dizzyingly beautiful. Smaller breasts than Cazie’s but higher, narrower waist, slim hips, and long legs… Her pubic hair was reddish-blonde, a pretty light fuzz, a veil over…

“Oh, my,” Vicki said. “Your family got their money’s worth.” And then, a moment later in a different voice, “Come on, Jack. Laugh. It’s funny, don’t you even see that?”

He laughed hollowly, trying to exaggerate the hollowness, trying for irony. He knew he failed.

Lizzie was giving her pitch. “If you all register, you, between 11:15 and 11:50 tonight, like we told you, then no other donkeys can register themselves for the election. We got enough Livers to win. If we win, us, we can get the tax pool money and stock the warehouse at the county seat with whatever we need. You going to tell me, you, there ain’t stuff you need?”

“Course there is,” said a small, scowling, elderly man. “And hell. I’d vote for you, Shockey. You been a mayor, you. ’Sides, I can remember when not all candidates was donkeys, them, long before you kids was even born. But what I want to know, me, is what price the donkeys going to make us pay for electing one of our own.”

Shockey said. “Ain’t going to be no price.”

“Ah, son, there’s always a price. They always make a price, them.”

Shockey bristled. “Like what, Max? What could the donkeys do to us, them?”

“What couldn’t they do, them? They got weapons, police, they can change the goddamn climate, I hear, me—at least a little ways. We’re better off, us, the way we are. We got everything we really need, and we don’t attract no attention.”

“But that way things will never change, them!” Lizzie cried. “We’ll never get anyplace!”

The old man said, “Just as well. You keep your eyes on the sky, you, you’re bound to stumble over the rocks.”

“But—”

“But they got donkeys with them,” another man said suddenly. “They ain’t just Livers, them, stumbling along with the rest of us.”

Lizzie said, “Vicki and Dr. Aranow aren’t—” but Vicki interrupted her. Vicki looked right at the man.

“That’s right. They have donkeys with them. I’m Victoria Turner, formerly with the GSEA. And this is Dr. Jackson Aranow, a physician, and owner of TenTech, a major corporation. Lizzie’s not fighting alone. Any paybacks the donkeys try for beating them in the election, Dr. Aranow and I have the resources to counter.”

Jackson stared. The man said bluntly, “Why? Why you on Lizzie’s side, you?”

“My side,” Shockey said, scowling.

“Because,” Vicki said, “I believe in this country.” She reached over to the pile of Shockey’s discarded clothing and tore the red-white-and-blue rosette off the jacket shoulder. She held it out to the man: with overt sincerity, with cynical irony, with what Jackson finally perceived to be a protective camouflage over genuine belief. But Vicki didn’t believe this election could really succeed—she’d said as much. She must believe in some deeper political commitment, of which this was only a first necessary defeat.

The man snorted. But he took the rosette. The older man, Max, grinned. Farla said abruptly, “All right, Shockey, tell us, you, what you gonna do if we elect you.”

Someone in the crowd giggled. “Yeah, Shockey. Make a campaign speech, you.”

“Well, I will, me! Now you Livers listen, you! Everybody!”

“ ‘Let arms yield to the toga,’ ” Vicki murmured. “Jackson, get comfortable. The people speak.”

It was dark before they left Farla’s tribe. The debate went on all afternoon and early evening, as much, Jackson suspected, out of relish for the fighting as desire for information. People shouted and insulted and threatened and blustered. They moved indoors after feeding, to the dark, warm den of battered chairs, sleeping cubicles created by makeshift partitions, craft projects and skinned rabbits, and an expensive terminal with a label from one of TenTech’s subsidiaries. Stolen? Vicki grinned at him. Y-cones kept the huge depressing place warm—were the cones some of the ones he’d sent Lizzie’s tribe from TenTech? Maybe Shockey, too, understood the value of voter bribery.

At sunset, Dirk grew fussy. “He should be home,” Lizzie said finally. “Grandma Annie’s gonna get worried, her. Dr. Aranow, drive us home, please.”

Jackson could see that the others were impressed by Lizzie’s ordering him around. He had become a campaign asset. Plus public transportation—without his aircar they would have faced a long cold walk over the mountains. No… without his aircar, they wouldn’t have stayed so late, or argued so hard. Vicki grinned at him.

“I’m so excited,” Lizzie said in the car. “Just a few more hours! Dirk, hush, sweet baby. Hush, dear heart. A few more hours and four thousand four hundred eleven—at least!—Willoughby County Livers’ll register all at once!”

Shockey said, “You’re sure, you, that all them bumpkins know the on-line procedure, them?”

“Sam Bartlett and Tasha Herbert told all the tribes twice. Everybody knows what to do. It will work.”

And, to Jackson’s faint surprise, it did. At 11:00 P.M., everyone except small sleeping children gathered around Lizzie’s terminal. She’d programmed a running tally sheet: WILLOUGHBY COUNTY VOTERS, divided into two columns: LIVERS and DONKEYS. The number under DONKEYS, in glowing three-dimensional Univers Gothic, remained constant. Every time the other tally added another hundred voters, an American flag flashed, music played, and a tiny figure pressed a ballot button on a tiny voting net. The entire display sent out holo streamers ending in simulated fireworks.

Behind Jackson’s left shoulder, Vicki said, “Sort of a blend of New Year’s Eve, Scooter All-Stars, and Tammany Hall.”

“Get ready, everybody!” Shockey said. “It’s 11:48!”

Jackson watched the screen. Suddenly the LIVER number jumped, then jumped again, passing the DONKEY number. Flags flashed. People cheered, almost drowning out “Sometimes a Great Nation.” Annie Francy said, “Oh, my dear Lord.” The numbers jumped again, then again, and then came so fast that they looked animated, while projected holo fireworks exploded and all around him Livers screamed and hugged each other and jumped up and down.

Midnight, LIVERS: 4,450. DONKEYS: 4,082.

“We did it, us!” Shockey yelled.

“Hooray for the next district supervisor of Willoughby County!”

“Shock-ey! Shock-ey!”

Shockey was lifted up by his feet and walked around the floor on his hands—some Liver triumphant ritual, Jackson assumed. All at once, he felt very tired. His mobile rang.

“Jackson, answer me. Now.”

Cazie. How had she heard about this so damn fast? It was only 12:06. Did she just happen to be monitoring obscure voter registrations, or did she have a flag program to alert her to unusual political ripples? Suddenly Jackson wanted to talk to her. He was going to enjoy this. He moved to a relatively quiet corner and stood facing the wall, holding the small screen so Cazie couldn’t see the room.

“Cazie. What are you doing up so early?”

“Where are you, Jackson?”

“With friends. Why?”

“Willoughby County, Pennsylvania, has just registered an additional four thousand four hundred fifty voters minutes before the registration deadline. They’re Livers. Plus, a petition was filed to run a third candidate for Ellie Lester’s vacant position as district supervisor.”

Jackson said, “You mean Harold Winthrop Wayland’s position?”

“He was senile; his granddaughter ran the office. To, I might add, TenTech’s considerable advantage. District supervisor, as you know, does more than stock warehouses, behind the scenes the office controls—no, you probably don’t know. But, Jackson, this is serious. Certain people anticipated something like this, that’s why I found out about it immediately. It can’t be allowed to become a trend. Livers in office. Jesus Fucking Christ.”

“The voter registration was legal, wasn’t it?”

Cazie ran her hand through her dark curls. “That’s the problem. It is legal. It’s too late to register more donkeys—and we can’t jig the program directly, the media will be all over this one. Just because it’s a story. I’ve called Sue Livingston and Don Serrano and their campaign programmers, and I think you should be at our meeting, too. If only because TenTech is potentially affected. Do you know how deeply we’re invested in county and state bonds, just to give one aspect of the situation?”

“No,” Jackson said slowly, “I don’t.”

“Well, I’ll brief you. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bring you in on the political side of the company at all, but this time—Jackson, you’ve just never realized how important the political side is. TenTech is political connections!”

“I thought TenTech was a corporation for manufacturing necessary goods.”

Cazie sighed. “You would. Anyway, the meeting is at nine in the morning. My place.”

Jackson said nothing. Behind him, the celebratory roar had muted to a happy babble. He felt someone’s eyes on him, turned, and saw Vicki three feet away, unabashedly listening.

“Jack?” Cazie’s image said on the mobile’s small screen.

Vicki said softly, “If you don’t tell her you helped us, she’ll probably never know.”

“Jack? Are you still there?”

Vicki said, “You can just go to work again for the other side, protecting TenTech’s political tentacles. And losing… what? Do you think you’d be losing anything, Jackson?”

“Jack!”

Jackson lifted the mobile. He angled the lens so that Cazie could see the tribe building, then Vicki, then himself. “I’m here, Cazie, at Willoughby. And, yes, tomorrow morning I’ll be at that meeting, to disentangle TenTech interests from voter results. But not to undo the voter results.”

Cazie gasped. Jackson broke the link before she could speak and instructed the mobile to disregard all calls for the next six hours. He turned to Vicki. “But I want you to know that if I’m not a vote-tamperer, neither am I a political reformer. I’m a doctor.”

She said, “The situation doesn’t require a doctor.”

“And do you always just become whatever the situation requires? No personal choice?”

“That’s right. I’m just a bunch of brain chemicals responding to stimuli.”

He said, “You don’t believe that.”

“No. I don’t. But do you?” she said, and walked away.

Having had, he noticed, the last word.

The Livers sat in rows now on scarred chairs, interrupting as Lizzie and Shockey and Billy Washington planned aloud. Jackson scanned the slouching bodies—misproportioned, ungraceful, uneducated, contentious, rude. Dressed—barely—in tasteless garish free-issue plastic and homespun rags. Shouting stupid suggestions at each other motivated by greed, or unrealistic expectations, or orneriness, or a complete ignorance of governmental structure.

He left the political meeting and went home.