Beggars Ride

Ten

Jennifer sat at her desk in Sanctuary, drawing with a black calligraphy pen. It was amazing how relaxing she found this trivial art, using not a drawing program but actual ink, on paper. She allowed herself twenty minutes twice a day to draw whatever she chose, whatever came into her mind. A means of focusing your attention? Sanctuary’s communications chief Caroline Renleigh had said, which merely showed how little Caroline understood her. Jennifer’s attention did not need focusing. The drawing was a refreshing break in relentless attention.

Her office, at the cylindrical orbital’s arbitrarily designated “south” end, shared dome space with the Sanctuary Council chamber. To the “north,” farms and living domes and labs and parks made a pleasant, orderly vista that curved gently into the sky. To the “south.” the office abutted the transparent, super-tough plastic sealing the orbital. Jennifer’s desk faced space.

When she was younger, she had kept her console turned away from that blackness. In her office, at Council meetings, Jennifer had always faced Sanctuary, and its soft artificial sun. She had come, over the long years in prison on Earth, to understand that this was unallowable weakness. Now she placed her chair so that she always confronted space. Sometimes she faced a void, with stars too far for even Sleepless technology: the unreachable escape. Sometimes she faced Earth, oppressively filling the window, reminding her of why her people needed escape. Jennifer contemplated both views. For the discipline.

She could take her people no farther from the enemy. The moon, yes—but Miranda had gone there, with her traitors. The genemod generation who were supposed to be the way around genetic regression to the mean, ensuring that the Sleepless continued to expand their superiority over Sleepers. And who instead had betrayed their creators and loving parents, sending them to prison for treason.

Mars was colonized by several nations, but most ambitiously by the New Empire of China, powerful and dangerous. Sleepless there received a bullet in the back of the head.

Titan belonged to the Japanese. They were spreading to the other moons of the solar system as well. More reasonable than the New Empire, they nonetheless had never taken well to ethnic outsiders. In one generation—or two, or three—they might turn against a Saturn- or Jupiter-orbit Sanctuary, just as the United States had turned against the original Sanctuary, on Earth. And then Jennifer’s great-great-grandchildren would have to dance the whole bloody dance again.

No, she could take her people nowhere else but this orbital, this fragile haven of titanium and steel, built even before nanotechnology. Nor could she challenge Earth directly. She had tried that, and failed, and spent twenty-seven years in prison. When you had an enemy that hounded and reviled and murdered your people, an enemy that you could neither fight nor flee, then you must operate underground. Use cunning. Stealth. Turn the enemy’s own weakness against him, and arrange it so he never knew what robbed him of his effectiveness. There was no overt triumph that way, but Jennifer had learned that she could do without overt triumph. Provided that she gained what was most important: safety for her people. That was her responsibility.

Responsibility, self-control, duty. The moral virtues, without which no accomplishment was possible, and no greatness. They had forgotten those virtues on Earth. Strukov, the classic mercenary, betrayed his own kind every time he engineered pathological viruses for money. The aristocrats of the New Empire of China settled Mars, but left their own poor to struggle in the genemod-virus hell that warring factions had made of West China. And the American donkeys, who kept Sanctuary legally and financially tethered to the United States for the huge taxes the orbital paid, had abandoned their own morals to pursue empty pleasures in the Y-sealed enclaves.

That left space.

Sanctuary orbital, the last bastion of responsibility to one’s own. Of responsibility, self-control, duty. Of a morality that was able to look beyond the pleasure of the moment, the individualistic needs of any one person, to the needs of the community. The rest of the world had forgotten that “community” had a biological base as well as a social one. A human being belonged not only to those communities he chose, professional and geographical, but to that into which he was born. His first obligation must be loyalty to the community that had nurtured him, or the entire chain of nurturing generations broke down. And that loyalty must be a choice, not a mindless dogma. That was, finally, what it meant to be fully human: not the pack loyalty of wolves, but that people could choose other than their pack—and choose not to. The moral choice.

The Sleepers, dazzled by the technology that should be servant and not master, had forgotten that kind of morality. Too bad for the Sleepers. They would destroy themselves. It was Jennifer’s task to make sure they were incapable of destroying Sanctuary first.

She completed her ink drawing. An intricate geometric figure, the lines and angles as precise as if she’d used a protractor. She always drew geometric figures. But there were four minutes left in her drawing time. She started another figure at the bottom of the page.

“Jennifer? Something here you should see.” Paul Aleone, Vice President of Finance for Sharifi Enterprises, stood in the doorway. Paul, like Caroline Renleigh, had been one of the twelve Sleepless behind the plan to force the United States to allow Sanctuary to secede. He, too, had been betrayed by his own grandchildren, had been convicted, had served ten years in Allendale Federal Prison. He could be trusted. Jennifer swiveled her chair to fully face him, and smiled.

“Look,” Paul said, handing her a sheaf of printouts. Genemod handsome, he still moved with the lightness of a young man. But, then, he was only seventy. “Caroline’s newsgrid program flagged these among the Earth channels. The flag was ‘Billy Washington.’ He’s the Liver who—”

“I remember who he was,” Jennifer said. Sanctuary always monitored the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency data banks, of course, along with most other governmental agencies. Billy Washington, his wife Annie Francy, and her child had been the first guinea pigs for Miranda’s biological experiments. Along with a donkey GSEA agent in such deep cover that not even Sanctuary had been able to find out who he or she was.

Paul said, “The program also flagged ‘Lizzie Francy,’ Washington’s stepdaughter. She’s now seventeen. She and her so-called tribe are trying to elect a candidate to governmental office.”

“A Liver candidate?” Jennifer scanned the printouts. Although they reflected the usual Sleeper sensationalism, she was able to discern the facts under the bombast. Livers in Willoughby County, Pennsylvania, had registered to vote—something Livers used to do faithfully, but did no longer since Miranda Sharifi had turned eighty percent of civilization back into nomads who followed neither game nor herds, but merely the sun. These Pennsylvania voters planned to elect their own candidate to county office in a special election April 1. A Liver candidate.

Jennifer sat motionless, considering. Paul said, “In terms of our interests, there are two ways to look at this. One is that the more dissension among the Sleepers, the more attention they’ll devote to struggling with each other and the less attention they could ever devote to us—no matter what we choose to do. The other, negative view is that Livers in power creates a second entity we have to protect against, and an unknown and less predictable one than the Sleeper aristocracy. And those newsgrids do seem to assume that Liver power is a possibility. Even allowing for their hysterical exaggerations.”

Jennifer glanced again at the printout headlines:

THE THREAT TO EFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT: “WE WANT TO RUN THINGS THE LIVER WAY FOR A CHANGE” SAYS PA CANDIDATE FOR DISTRICT SUPERVISOR

LETTING THE CHILDREN RUN THE ORPHANAGE: A REVERSAL OF FOURTEENTH-AMENDMENT PRIORITIES

LEGAL OLIGARCHY: A GOVERNMENT WHOSE BIOLOGICAL TIME HAS FINALLY COME?

HOW DID IT HAPPEN? INDEPENDENT COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE PA CAMPAIGN OUTRAGE

“LET MY PEOPLE GO”—THE INAPPROPRIATE FORMULA THAT MASKS GOVERNMENTAL DISASTER

“TIME TO RECONSIDER VOTER REGISTRATION TESTS,” DECLARES MAJORITY LEADER BENNETT

Paul said, “I ran the probabilities through an Eisler significance program. If this Liver candidate wins the election, the system effects come out far more far-reaching than one county. It has an event index of 4.71. A Liver win stands an eighty-seven percent chance of becoming the nucleus of a fundamentally transformed system.”

“Can he win?” Jennifer said.

“No.”

“Money?”

“Of course. The donkey candidates will buy the election.”

“Then our concern is…”

“A test site.” Paul ran his hand through his hair, still thick and glossy brown. Sanctuary men wore their hair short and simply cut; so did Sanctuary women. Jennifer’s long black hair was an anomaly. She kept it in a knot low on her neck; Will said it made her look like a Roman matron. This was one of the few things Will had said lately that pleased her.

Paul continued, “I know we’d planned on testing Strukov’s compound on a donkey enclave. After all, they’re the target population. But using this Liver tribe may be even better. We’ve had nothing to do with the election, neither incumbent nor challenger. No one would have reason to think us involved.”

“But don’t the Liver voters winter in widely scattered places? Delivery of the compound would be much more difficult.”

“Not really,” Paul said. “Willoughby County is mostly hills and low mountains. The winter climate is tedious. There are only twenty-one Liver camps in the county. All of them have plastic-tented feeding grounds, easily penetrated by drones. And none of them have any kind of radar, which of course the donkey enclaves do. There’s a map on the last page of the printout.”

Jennifer studied the map, and then the page of Eisler equations. She nodded. “Yes. I see. If the Livers lose this election, the system effects are negated?”

“Everything is as it was before. And then we can go ahead with the enclaves.”

“Yes. Go ahead. This will make an interesting little pre-test, as well as averting a large-scale systems change.”

Paul nodded. “We want as few variables as possible for the big campaign. I’ll advise Robert. He’s handling the delivery negotiations. He’ll have a report for you by the end of the week.”

“Not Arab, Russian, French, or Chinese. And no one who is known to have ever before worked, however remotely, with Strukov.”

“These men are Peruvian.”

“Good. La Guerra de Dios?”

“No. Freelancers.”

“And Strukov has agreed to work with them?”

“He has. Although only with his procedures, his locations, his security team.”

“Naturally,” Jennifer said. “Schedule a meeting with Robert.”

“For you and me and Caroline?”

“Also Barbara, Raymond, Charles, and Eileen. I want everyone to know everything the others do.”

Paul nodded, less happily, and left. He didn’t understand, Jennifer thought. Paul would rather apportion knowledge according to each individual’s contribution, as if it were money. Why was it so hard for some of them—Paul, even Will—to grasp the moral principle of this? Sanctuary was a community. Those who led the community must act from responsibility, duty, loyalty. And no one could owe one-third less loyalty or duty than the others. Therefore, all twelve of the people who were going to make Sanctuary safe from the United States must share equally in the risks, the planning, and the knowledge. Anything less was to act not from morality, but from a desire for rank. That was what the Sleepers did. The immoral ones.

Jennifer swiveled her chair back to face her office window. It was full of stars: Rigel, Aldebaran, the Pleiades. Suddenly she remembered something she’d once said to Miranda, so long ago, when Miri had been just a little girl. Jennifer had lifted Miri to the window in the Sanctuary Council, and a meteor had streaked past. Miri laughed and reached out her fat little arms to touch the beautiful lights in the sky. “They’re too far for your hand, Miri. But not for your mind. Always remember that, Miranda.”

Miranda had not remembered. She had used her mind, yes, but not to reach outward, upward. Instead, she’d used her boosted intelligence—which Jennifer Sharifi had given her—to wallow in the muck and dirt of Sleeper biology. For the benefit of the Sleepers who had betrayed Sanctuary. As had Miranda herself.

“The friend of my enemy is likewise my enemy,” Jennifer recited aloud. Beyond the window, Earth moved into view. Sanctuary orbited over Africa, another place the Sleepers had ruined.

Her screen brightened. Caroline again. But this time the communications chief looked shaken. “Jennifer?”

“Yes, Caroline?”

“We have some… new data.”

“Yes? Go ahead.”

“Not on link,” Caroline said. “I’ll come to you. Immediately.”

Jennifer didn’t allow her composure to slip. “As you wish. Can you say what the new data concern?”

“They concern Selene.”

The screen blanked. While she waited for Caroline, Jennifer wiped the nib of her calligraphy pen. Her twenty minutes were long since up. Looking down, she saw that while thinking about Miranda she had gone on drawing, not even aware of what her hand sketched. On the thick white paper, outlined and crosshatched, were the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes of a human brain.

Interlude

TRANSMISSION DATE: February 12, 2121

TO: Selene Base, Moon

VIA: Lyons Ground Station, Satellite E-398 (France), GLO Satellite 62 (USA)

MESSAGE TYPE: Unencrypted

MESSAGE CLASS: Not Applicable; Foreign Transmission

ORIGINATING GROUP: Unnamed group, Ste. Jeanne, France

MESSAGE:

Nous sommes les gens d’une petite ville en France qui s’appelle Ste. Jeanne. Nous n’avons plus de seringues de la santé. Maintenant, ici, il n’y a pas beaucoup d’enfants qui ne sont pas changés, mais que ferons-nous demain? S’il vous plaît, Mademoiselle Sharifi, donnez-nous plus de seringues de la santé. Que somme-nous obligés faire pour vous persuader? Nous sommes pauvres, mais vous aurez les remerciements. Commes les riches, nous aimons les enfants, and nous avons peur de l’avenir.

S’il vous plaît, n’oubliez-nous pas!

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

Eleven

You can’t,” Lizzie said to the sullen Liver. Jackson, standing seventy-five yards away in a stand of oak still tattered with last year’s withered leaves, wore zoom lenses and a receiver the size of a pea. He watched Lizzie’s face struggle not to set itself into ridges of disapproval. She smiled the most hollow smile he’d ever seen.

The man said, even more sullenly, “Shockey said, him, that I can.”

“Shockey said you can?”

“Yeah.”

“Just a minute, please,” Lizzie said. She walked away from the man, who stood just outside his tribe’s feeding area, the usual stretched plastic tent. Inside, twenty naked Livers were having lunch. It seemed to Jackson that every time he checked on Lizzie’s tribe, he ended up watching naked Livers have lunch. This time, however, three donkey reporters with cameras stood outside the enclosure, fully clothed, recording the meal. More robocams hovered inside. This particular group of Livers, unlike some other tribes in Willoughby County, was enjoying its temporary notoriety. Jackson noted that two of the women had gold barrettes in their hair. Another, he suddenly saw, wore a necklace with what looked to the zoom like a diamond. More trouble.

Lizzie walked up to Jackson, who was disguised as a Liver. In the last three weeks he’d grown a scraggly beard. He wore baggy blue jacks, a battered hat pulled low over his forehead, and the heaviest boots he’d ever had on in his life. The ground was a sea of mud; it had rained for two days straight, a hard-driving late March rain that threatened to resume. Jackson’s boots were caked with mud. He’d walked with Lizzie over a mountain to this tribe; Livers didn’t use aircars, and he was passing as a Liver. So far, none of the swarming reporters had noticed him. He felt ridiculous.

Lizzie leaned close to him in despair and whispered, “He says Shockey said it was all right for them to accept the scooters!”

“Well, do you think Shockey really said it?” Jackson asked. His own opinion was yes. Shockey hadn’t seemed to grasp Lizzie’s idea that if the Livers were going to vote for their own candidate on April 1, they couldn’t accept material objects or credit accounts from the other two candidates on March 25. “Reparations,” Shockey called them, and where had he even learned the word? “Bribes,” Lizzie said, and she was right.

Lizzie chewed her bottom lip. “Harry Jenner says Shockey told him to accept the gifts, make no real promises, and then just vote for Shockey anyway.”

That was the way donkeys had done it for decades. Jackson said as much to Lizzie.

“But it isn’t right,” she said, and he was suddenly impatient. For her, so invested in this innocent, doomed legal revolution. For himself, standing here in the concealing shade of trees that didn’t offer much shade because it was only March, itching in his nonporous synthetic jacks caked with mountain mud.

“The important thing is,” he said, “will Harry and his tribe actually vote for Shockey after accepting scooters and jazzy clothes and perfumed soaps and diamond necklaces? Or will they vote for the candidate giving them all this loot?”

“Diamond necklaces?” Lizzie said blankly.

“That girl closest to the plastic, the one with the long brown hair, is wearing a diamond necklace. Tiffany, I believe.”

“Oh, my dear Lord.”

Jackson smiled. Lizzie would be upset to know that in moments of stress, even when she didn’t talk Liver, she sounded like her mother, the formidable Annie. Jackson didn’t tell her. In the last three months, hanging around this ridiculous campaign, he’d become fond of Lizzie. She was an odd combination of toughness and vulnerability. Sometimes, she even reminded him of Theresa.

Which was not nearly reason enough to have gotten involved in this quixotic project. So why was he?

“Look, Lizzie, it’s six days until the election. You’ll just have to trust Harry Jenner and all the rest of them that they’ll vote for Shockey despite the… gifts.” Gifts. Bribes. Reparations.

“Do you think they’ll vote for Shockey?” Her black eyes pleaded.

“Actually,” he said slowly, “I do. I think the hatred left over from the Change Wars is stronger than Liver greed.” Or Liver gratitude. Livers were exactly the opportunists that donkeys had made them.

“That’s what Vicki says, too,” Lizzie said.

Jackson didn’t want to discuss Vicki, who’d been left behind to keep order in “campaign headquarters,” and who was so much a part of Shockey’s tribe that she didn’t have to stand here in the mud dressed like something she was not. We don’t need the adverse effect of your known presence, she’d said to Jackson, and you don’t need the adverse effect on your, ah, medical career. Yeah. Right.

“Okay,” Lizzie said. “I won’t tell them to give back the scooters and other things. But I will tell them again how much they need to vote for Shockey!”

“Well, do it now. That reporter is starting to look interested in you again. And in me.”

“See you back at camp.”

“Right,” Jackson said, and tramped off back through the woods.

After a few miles, he was hot enough to open his jacket, and then to remove it. The hat he kept on; reporters with no better story to pursue had used aircars and zoom cams to record this campaign. Which was, depending on the newsgrid channel, an outrage against common sense, a threat to what remained of civil order, an unimportant footnote to political history, or a cosmic joke. Sometimes all at once.

Even to Susannah Wells Livingston and Donald Thomas Serrano. Last week Jackson, a spy in the enemy camp, had attended a fund-raiser for Don Serrano. He’d learned that the donkey candidate wasn’t really worried. “I’ve spread around all kinds of ‘benefits’ to my constituency,” Serrano told him. “Since when can’t you buy a Liver?” Jackson had just nodded. Wasn’t that exactly what he himself had believed, until Lizzie Francy tumbled into his life from eight feet up a factory wall?

The election, however, was not a cosmic joke to Cazie. To avoid her, Jackson had temporarily moved out of his apartment and, under another name, into a hotel in Pittsburgh Enclave. Not a luxury hotel, the place served mostly techs, those marginal donkeys whose parents had been able to afford only limited genemods, usually for appearance. Techs worked for a living but never ran anything. Jackson came and went quietly among them. He talked to Theresa, the only person with his physical address, daily, on what he hoped was a sufficiently shielded link. That Cazie couldn’t find him gave Jackson an odd satisfaction, almost as great as the satisfaction of knowing she was looking.

It took him three hours to hike back to Lizzie’s tribe. The late afternoon sun slanted over the mountaintops, dark green with pine and white with lingering patches of snow. The other “voter checking teams” would be straggling in as well, after arduous trips to check the loyalty of the other voters.

So why was he involved in all this? Because Cazie hated it? Not reason enough, not nearly enough.

Because he was sick of his life, his class, his pointless activities? Not reason enough.

Because babies without Change syringes were dying across the country? This election wouldn’t help those suffering infants. Even if Livers won every goddamn election for the next six years and controlled every political office from President to game warden, ungenemod carpetbaggers in their own appalled capitals, it wouldn’t create more Change syringes. Only Miranda Sharifi and the Supers could do that. And they had not. They didn’t even answer the transmissions to Selene, city of exile under the surface of the moon.

Jackson stopped in the shadow of a huge fragrant pine, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and braced himself for the hallucinogenic-holo reality of “campaign headquarters.”

It started a quarter mile before the camp, with the candidate.

“Who the hell are you?” the girl said. She raised her face from Shockey’s, who chivalrously had chosen to lie underneath, separated from the mud by a blanket of blaring orange. The girl, naked from waist to expensive boots, sat astride him. She didn’t move off when Jackson bumbled over a slight rise between the trees and into their barely hidden dell.

Jackson dropped his eyes—not to avoid looking at her, but vice versa. He’d already seen her. Maybe seventeen, with genemod green eyes and long black hair. A donkey girl, slumming. Jackson was supposed to be a Liver; how would a Liver react? Jackson shuffled his feet, as if embarrassed, and kept his eyes on her boots. They were calf-high, Italian leather undoubtedly nanocoated so her feet wouldn’t consume them, caked with mud. Above them the girl’s perfect thighs prickled with goose bumps. The March air was cool.

She said slyly, “You a reporter?”

Not genemod for IQ, clearly. Jackson mumbled, “No, I’m not, me.”

Shockey had recognized him. He pulled the girl back toward himself. “Just a gawker, him, Alexandra. Come gawk instead at me.”

She giggled. “In this position?” But she kissed him. Shockey kept his eyes open and glared at Jackson: Go away.

He did, wondering if Alexandra was a thrill seeker, a political distraction, a professional bribe, or an attempt at scandal. Jackson hadn’t seen any robocams. Still… hadn’t Vicki Turner warned Shockey? Some of his constituents wouldn’t be pleased to see their Liver candidate, the antidote to donkey corruption, rolling around in the concupiscent mud with a donkey who looked like Alexandra.

Jackson turned, cupped his hands, and yelled. “Shockey! Company coming, you! Sharon and the baby!” Maybe that would do it.

At the camp, only two reporters roamed around. One was interviewing Scott Morrison, a buddy of Shockey’s. “We’re going to win this here election, us. And next year we’ll take the goddamn presidency!”

“I see you’re wearing a gold chain,” the reporter said smoothly. “A contribution from Citizens For Serrano, perhaps?”

“It’s an heirloom,” Morrison said solemnly. “From my great-grandmother, her. She was a flat-screen actress.”

“And the scooter beside you?” The robocam whirred; the reporter didn’t bother to hide his sneer.

“Also left over from Great-grandmama.”

What had happened to Vicki?

A group of Livers whom Jackson had never seen before slouched sulkily outside the plastic-tented feeding ground. Travel-stained, dirty. The tribe got a few such groups each week. Coming from beyond Willoughby County, they’d seen the fuss on the newsgrids. Some groups looked thoughtfully interested. Some were contemptuous of Livers willing to soil themselves with the donkey work of politics. Some had just heard about the scooters and jewelry and wine from the “non-candidate-affiliated citizen groups for Serrano.” Already one scooter had been stolen. Tribe members stuck together now in clumps, which was why all of them were within filming distance of the feeding ground. Except, of course, the candidate, who was enjoying the benefits of fame on his back in the woods.

Where the hell was Vicki?

Annie bustled out of the building, with Dirk in her arms. She saw Jackson, scowled ferociously, and then remembered she wasn’t supposed to know him. Immediately she looked disdainfully away, like a fastidious duchess ignoring a dead fish. Her gaze landed on another party of slumming donkey kids, sneering from the safe shadow of a flashy aircar. Two of the kids carried inhalers. The second reporter was interviewing them; fortunately, Jackson was too far away to hear the conversation.

And then another car landed, and Cazie leaped out with the new TenTech chief engineer.

Jackson turned his back. Purposefully he strode toward the building and ducked inside.

What was she doing here? Since the meeting a few months ago about TenTech’s political connections, of which Jackson had understood about half, he’d had Caroline, his personal system, do some research. TenTech had a diversified portfolio, but much of it Caroline couldn’t trace through legal deebees, even with Jackson’s access codes. Jackson had never paid much attention to TenTech. His father had done that until he died, then his father’s attorney had managed most of it while Jackson was in medical school; when he’d married Cazie, she had gradually taken over, and Jackson had been glad to let her. Where was TenTech’s money, and why was so much of it seemingly connected to the state of Pennsylvania, when TenTech was incorporated in New York? Cazie seemed to have a lot of personal friends in various Pennsylvania corporations and government agencies. Jackson had finally, without telling Cazie, hired an independent accountant, who had yet to report back to him. Maybe Cazie had detected the accountant’s inquiries.

Or maybe she came just to look for him.

He cracked the door, peering from dimness into sunlight. Cazie stood talking with Billy Washington. Lizzie’s stepfather. At least it was Billy, the sanest person in the tribe. Cazie couldn’t follow Jackson into the camp building; Vicki had insisted that no outsiders, under any circumstances, be allowed inside. She’d installed a primitive scanning system; if anyone not carrying a sensitized chip tried to pass the door, an alarm sounded. It was a simple system to fool, but so far no one had bothered. Jackson fingered the chip in his pocket.

Cazie’s dark curls gleamed in the spring sunshine. Her high white boots and severe black suit looked fresh and trim. Gesturing at Billy, she flung up on arm, and her full right breast lifted, trembled, fell.

What was she doing here? What was he doing here? Through the cracked door, Jackson saw Shockey stroll in from the woods. The donkey beauty wasn’t with him. Sharon stormed toward Shockey across the withered grass, her face furious. Annie yelled at a reporter. Billy left Cazie, started toward Annie, and was waylaid by a sneering slummer who ventured away from his aircar long enough to thrust his inhaler under Billy’s nose. Billy reeled. Scott Morrison lunged at the donkey kid, tackling him. Both robocams zoomed in on the fight. The candidate jumped another donkey teenager, and Sharon screamed. Annie, still carrying Dirk, rushed to Billy, now smiling emptily. Dirk began to wail. Sharon went on screaming. Cazie threw back her head and laughed, an ugly sound that somehow carried over the other din. She mouthed something at the TenTech engineer, and Jackson read the words on her lips: “The American political process in action.”

He closed the battered building door.

All of them were fools. Jackson had been a little surprised to find that so many Livers stuck doggedly to voting for Shockey, even as they accepted bribes from the other side. Shockey would clearly win the election. But in the long run, he was afraid, it would make no difference whatsoever. Shockey would win not because Livers were in the power ascendancy, but because the donkeys had taken this campaign only half seriously. They’d used the carrot but not the stick, spreading around their baubles and assuming the problem was solved. When, on election day, they learned it wasn’t, they would retire the carrots. Liver camps were unprotected, untechnological, unarmed. The next Liver candidate for any public office would lose. Jackson was assisting at an historical fluke, an unrepeatable improbability for which he was risking all status with his own people. Which made him the biggest fool of all.

Somewhere in the building, someone was weeping.

He made his way through the gloom, past the decrepit communal furniture, through the maze of makeshift walls of boards, upended sofas, broken shelving, strung homespun curtains. The sobbing grew louder. He passed the tribe’s weaving ’bot, patiently turning out yards of ugly dun cloth from whatever raw organic materials were dumped into the hopper. The ’bot hummed softly. Behind them, in the farthest of the ramshackle cubicles against a windowless wall, Jackson found them.

A boy, facing away from Jackson, bent over almost double. The boy’s back was thin and, through the holes in the clothing, deeply freckled. Vicki stood beside the boy, one arm around his skinny shoulders, almost holding him up. When the two turned, Jackson saw that the boy huddled over a baby in his arms.

Vicki said somberly, “I was just coming to look for you.”

Jackson reached for the baby. He saw immediately that it was dying, probably of some mutated microorganism that had already destroyed the immune system. The infant’s mouth was patchy with candidiasis. Its skin was mottled with subcutaneous hematomas. The wasted little cheeks stretched tightly over the small skull. Jackson heard the baby’s lungs labor to keep breathing. On its neck stuck two patches, blue and yellow: broad-spectrum antibiotics and antivirals. Vicki always carried them. They wouldn’t help; it was far too late.

The boy gasped, “You the doctor? This is my daughter, her. Can you give her a Change syringe? We didn’t have none in my tribe… no place else neither… I heard, me, about this place…”

“No,” Jackson said, “I don’t have any more syringes.” Vicki stared at him, stunned. Clearly she had expected a different answer, not of course knowing that Theresa had cleaned out Jackson’s meager supply.

The boy said, “You don’t have no syringes, you? Really?”

“Really,” Jackson said.

“But ain’t you a doctor… a donkey doctor?”

Jackson didn’t answer. No one else spoke. The silence stretched on, painful. Finally Jackson nodded, miserably, and then shook his head. He couldn’t meet the young father’s eyes.

The boy didn’t argue, or explode, or even start sobbing again. In the slump of his thin shoulders Jackson saw resignation: the boy hadn’t actually expected real help. He’d never had it. He’d come here because he hadn’t known what else to do.

Vicki said tightly, “Will you do what you can, Jackson?”

She had already fetched his bag from its pocket in the tribal junk. Jackson went through futile motions. When he’d finished, the boy said, “Thank you, Doctor,” and Jackson’s humiliation was complete.

“Come with me,” Vicki said, and he followed her, basely glad to go, not caring where. Livers had come in from outside and sat talking animatedly in the communal chairs. Vicki led him around the maze of cubicles, through a curtain stretched between a wall and a long upended table.

“No one will come here, Jackson.”

“Where’s that baby’s mother?”

Vicki shrugged. “You know how it is. They get pregnant so easily, nothing can go wrong in their bodies, everyone raises the kids tribally. Anyone who doesn’t want to be bothered with an infant doesn’t have to be.”

“Then it’s wrong. This new social organization the Change has created—it’s all wrong.”

“I know.”

“You know? I thought you were the biggest advocate of what Miranda Sharifi gave the world!”

“I’m the biggest advocate of adjusting to it. So far, we haven’t done that.”

He hadn’t ever seen her like this: somber, straightforward, unprotected by amused detachment. He didn’t like it. She was unsettling, like this. To escape her eyes, he looked around the cubicle, and realized it must be hers. The cubicle held nothing different from any other tribe member’s: pallet on the floor, scarred bureau cluttered with handmade jewelry, clothes hanging on pegs. Nothing as expensive or incongruous as the Jansen-Sagura terminal and crystal library in Lizzie’s cubicle. Yet the small space looked donkey, not Liver. In the colors, muted and harmonious. In the arrangement of furniture. In the single spray of willow, placed in a black clay bowl with an almost Oriental spareness and grace.

She said, “Did you realize you were crying, holding that baby?”

He hadn’t. He swiped at his wet cheeks, disliking her for having noticed, at the same time that he was grateful for her not exposing his tears to the Livers laughing in the middle of the building.

He said, because he had to say something, “They suffer. Not here, in this tribe, but other places without as many resources they live so—”

“The poor have always lived in a different country from the rich. In every age, and no matter how physically close their houses were.”

“Please don’t lecture me on—”

“Look at this, Jackson.” She opened her top bureau drawer, pulled out a holo recorder, and said to it, “Play recording three.” When she handed it to Jackson, he took it.

The miniature screen replayed a newscast. From a donkey channel, the tone hovered somewhere between bemusement and contempt. The program, no more than two minutes long, interviewed one of a group of doctors in Texas, who had set up a Y-shielded clinic just outside the Austin Enclave to treat unChanged Liver children. “It’s necessary,” said a tired-looking young physician who needed a haircut. “They’re in pain. What Miranda Sharifi is letting happen here is criminal.” The recorder stage went dark.

Vicki snorted. “ ‘What Miranda is letting happen.’ We still don’t take responsibility.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” he snapped. “Sometimes you use ‘we’ for Livers, sometimes for donkeys.”

“So what? Jackson, there are more and more unChanged kids. They need doctors.”

He saw again the weary face of the physician in the holo, the security shield around the clinic, the Livers who had attacked his apartment building while Theresa was there. Despite his fondness for the irrepressible Lizzie, he didn’t want to practice among Livers. It wasn’t what he had trained for.

“Compassion is a lot easier to feel than act on, isn’t it?” Vicki said. “But not nearly as satisfying in the long run. Believe me, I know.”

He said dryly, “I haven’t yet seen you when you thought you didn’t.”

Vicki laughed. “You’re right.” She leaned over and kissed him.

It caught Jackson by surprise. What was she doing? Surely she wasn’t kissing him just because he’d been crying over a Liver kid… was she? She didn’t seem the—but then all thought left him. Her lips were soft, thinner than Cazie’s, her body taller and less rounded. Her mouth clung briefly, pulled away, returned. Jackson pulled her to him and a shock went through his torso, sweeping downward from his mouth through his chest to end with a sharp pleasurable jolt in his penis. He tightened his arms around her.

Vicki pulled away. “Give a clinic some thought,” she said. “Between your other worries, of course. Here she comes.”

Jackson became aware that an alarm was sounding, had been sounding just beyond the edge of his attention. Over it he heard Cazie yelling, “Jackson! I know you’re in here someplace! Jack, damn it, I want to talk to you!”

Vicki smiled. Very deliberately she drew back her curtain and called, “Over here, Cazie. We’re over here.”

Cazie strode through the ridiculous maze of shabby furniture. She took in the scene all at once: Jackson beside Vicki’s bed, Vicki standing with one hand gracefully holding back the curtain, Jackson’s face flustered and Vicki’s sly. Cazie stood very still.

“We’re finished here,” Vicki cooed. “See you later, Jackson.” She winked at him.

He was afraid to meet Cazie’s eyes.

April 1, election day, was wet. When Jackson woke in a stuffy cubicle in the tribe building in Willoughby County, he heard the rain clattering on the roof.

He had not planned to be here. But yesterday he’d hiked into a barrage of robocams and reporters, two of whom had tried to pin him against the building wall to identify him. They’d been close enough to see his genemod eyes. He’d shoved them off and escaped into the building, where Lizzie insisted that if he didn’t want to be recognized, he should stay all night. Vicki was gone to another tribe. Jackson was just as glad.

He lay on the hard pallet of nonconsumable fabric, staring in the dim gloom at two walls made of foamcast, one of what appeared to be discarded sheet metal braced with broken chair rungs, and one of dun homespun curtain. Hanging on the sheet metal was a handworked sampler in lavender yam and crimson: WELCOME STRANGER. From this he deduced that he had been put in the tribe’s guest room.

He stood up, stretched, pulled on his pants, and followed the general morning noise to the center of the cavernous building.

“Morning!” Lizzie sang. Her black eyes sparkled. She wore outdoor clothes and hiking boots. Dirk lay in a turquoise plastic box on the floor, waving his fat fists and trying to capture his bare toes. “Today’s the day!”

“Where’s Shockey?” Jackson asked. He badly wanted a cup of coffee, which he was not going to get.

“At breakfast. So’s nearly everybody else who wants to be naked on the newsgrid. Are you hungry?”

“No,” Jackson lied.

“Good. This would be a good time to get you away, before the reporters really arrive. Most of them went home for the night, and the rest are at the feeding ground. Polls are open from nine to noon. I’m going to duck out the back way to meet Vicki at your car, and then we’re both going to check on the Wellsville tribe. Want to come?”

“If you’re meeting at my car, I guess I’m walking with you that far. Did you eat, Lizzie?”

“I can’t. I’m too excited. Oh, Mama, here’s Dirk—I nursed him already.”

Annie emerged from her cubicle, frowned at Jackson, and picked up her grandson. The frown wasn’t serious. Annie was uneasy around donkeys, but she’d softened toward Jackson when she realized he disliked Vicki. Did he dislike Vicki? He hadn’t seen her in the last week, since he’d kissed her. He didn’t want to see her. Or Cazie. Or even Lizzie. He wanted to find his car, fly home, and have a cup of coffee.

He knew he was lying to himself.

“Morning, Annie,” he said. “Are you headed out for breakfast?”

“Not with them cameras, me,” she sniffed. “Billy, he went to fetch us some good soil and bring it inside. We’ll eat, us, in decent privacy, thank you very much.”

Lizzie hid a grin. She grabbed Jackson’s hand and led him to a small door, so far undetected by the robocams, cut by Billy in the back of the building and hidden behind weeds and bushes. The door was so low that Lizzie and Jackson had to crawl through on hands and knees. Foamcast didn’t cut easily.

“Lizzie, where did Billy get a tunable lasersaw to cut this door with?”

Lizzie grinned back over her shoulder. “I found a way to dip one. Just last month. But I’m not going to tell you how.”

They escaped into the rain, which had lessened to a drizzle. Even so, Jackson was wet and cold by the time they reached the aircar, which was disguised under an opaqued Y-shield. Vicki sat on the shield, smearing mud across it with her jacks-covered rump.

“Morning, Lizzie, Jackson!”

“Vicki! How is everything at Max and Farla’s camp?”

“Fine. Everybody up, dressed in their best clothes and finest jewelry, gathered around the terminal and ready for political immortality.” She smiled at Jackson, who smiled thinly back.

“Fifteen minutes till the poll opens,” Lizzie said. “I guess I’m going to vote at Wellsville.”

Vicki said, “Let’s do it here.”

“Here? How?”

“I’m sure Jackson has a comlink in the car capable of official channels. Don’t you, Jackson? We can sit right here in a donkey vehicle and elect the first Liver politician in decades.”

Lizzie laughed. “Let’s do it!”

Vicki said, “Jackson?”

He looked at all three of their mud-stained, rain-soaked clothing, and decided he must be nuts. “Sure, why not?”

“Oh, I’m so excited!” Lizzie burbled.

He unlocked the car and they crowded in. Jackson activated the comlink, asked for the official government channel, and accessed the polling program. At nine o’clock he looked at Lizzie.

She leaned solemnly forward. “Lizzie Francy, Citizen ID CLM-03-9645-957, to vote in the special election for district supervisor of Willoughby County, Pennsylvania.”

“Citizen number verified. Please place your left eye against the icon for retina scan.” She did. “Verified. The registered candidates for district supervisor of Willoughby County are Susannah Wells Livingston, Donald Thomas Serrano, and Shockey Toor. For which candidate do you vote?”

Lizzie said clearly, “For Shockey Toor.”

“One vote for Shockey Toor. Officially recorded.”

“I did it!” Lizzie breathed. “Vicki, you next.”

Vicki voted. Jackson, not registered in Willoughby County, felt his chest tighten. Lizzie would have her win, but it was the only one the Livers would get. She had no idea the forces that the established power structure could bring to bear once they took a threat seriously. He looked out at the dreary rain-soaked woods. A bedraggled chipmunk darted by.

“Quick!” Lizzie said. “Get a running total!”

“Lizzie, it’s only 9:03!”

“Okay, then, get a newsgrid channel.”

Vicki did. Channel 14 was covering the story. Jackson gazed at a robocam shot of the tribe’s familiar feeding ground, now empty. Everyone must have gone inside to vote.

A voice intoned, “Here on special election day in Willoughby County, Pennsylvania, citizens are voting for district supervisor in an unusual election. One of the three candidates is unused to public office—and perhaps unfitted for it as well. This is the election that has sparked a national debate on the question of who is best suited to serve the public, how voters are registered, and what safeguards the politically innocent have a right to expect against the politically opportunistic. For the first time, our camera is being allowed to hover at the open door of this… ‘community’… to watch its members line up to vote.”

The robocam zoomed toward the building door and adjusted for the dim light within. A wide-angle lens showed the tribe’s terminal at one end of the large communal space, on a table covered with a red, white, and blue cloth. At the other end, the tribe lined up to move forward, one at a time, and vote. A hundred sixty-two Livers shuffled forward, carrying babies, holding hands.

“There’s Mama with Dirk!” Lizzie squealed. “And Billy. And Sharon with Callie. Shockey must have already voted, he wanted to go first.” A moment passed. “Why do they all look like that?”

Jackson leaned closer to the screen.

Lizzie said, “Why do they look so… weird?”

The robocam shifted to zoom. Sharon Nugent, Franklin Caterino, Norma Kroll, Scott Morrison—face after face looked strained, unsure. Brows furrowed, eyes dropped, breathing grew rapid as people glanced toward the camera. Sharon huddled closer to her elderly mother, and then Sam Webster moved closer to both.

“What’s going on!” Lizzie cried. “Where’s Shockey?”

The camera found him crouched in an old lawn chair in a dim corner. Shockey’s hands clasped tightly on his lap. When he raised his eyes to the voters, his face clenched. Jackson could swear Shockey trembled.

Someone swung shut the building door from inside.

“In violation of their pre-election agreement, the Livers have just excluded our camera,” the newscaster said with strong displeasure. “We switch you now to another tribal polling site in the county… No, this building appears to be shuttered as well.”

Vicki said, “Turn it off. Switch to the running totals.”

It was 9:17. Jackson found the graphic on the governmental channel, a silent unadorned chart:

As they watched, two more votes registered for Donald Thomas Serrano.

“It’s cheating, them!” Vicki cried. “We saw people vote for Shockey!”

“We saw people vote,” Vicki said. “We can’t really see for whom.”

“It has to be cheating!”

Jackson thought rapidly. The results made no sense. But Vicki was probably right that the system wasn’t cheating; no one would dare. A system rigged against a Liver candidate today could be rigged against a donkey candidate next time. And the newsgrids would hire top datadippers to find the tinkering. No. Something else was happening.

What? Why?

“Fly home,” Lizzie said. “Oh, go quick!”

Jackson exchanged looks with Vicki, lifted the car, and flew back. During the short ride they watched Donald Thomas Serrano capture virtually every vote. Everybody voted early, like dutiful citizens. Jackson landed the car beside the reporters’ vehicles; no one paid any attention until Lizzie emerged. She ignored all questions and comments, running toward the front door. Jackson and Vicki trailed behind, stony.

The door was locked.

Lizzie spoke the overrides and flung herself inside.

“Lizzie!” Annie said. “Why you running, you? What happened?” Annie clutched Dirk, who began to wail.

“What happened?” Lizzie cried. “Shockey’s losing! Nobody’s voting for him.”

Annie took a step backward and dropped her eyes. Annie… who always met insubordination with frowns and commands. She shifted Dirk upright to her shoulder. The baby saw his mother and Vicki and quieted, until he glimpsed Jackson. Immediately he began to cry again, burying his head in Annie’s shoulder.

Vicki said evenly, “Annie, did you vote?”

Annie shrank back and mumbled, “Yes.”

“Did you vote for Shockey?”

Mutely, in distress, Annie shook her head no.

Lizzie cried, “Why not?” while Dirk continued to wail every time he raised his head from his grandmother’s shoulder and caught a fresh glimpse of Jackson.

Annie tightened her grip on the baby. “I didn’t… Shockey ain’t, him… I’m sorry, honey, but it’s just too… we’re better off, us, with somebody who knows, them, what they’re doing.”

Jackson stood very still. Annie’s manner reminded him of something, something he was too confused to get into focus. In a minute he would remember. Across the vast communal area, now empty of voters, Billy Washington emerged from his and Annie’s cubicle. The stately old man took a few hesitant steps, stopped, looked at Annie, took a few steps more, and dropped his eyes. Jackson saw his hand tremble, saw him force himself to move forward.

Theresa. They were all—Billy, Annie, even Dirk—acting like Theresa.

Even Shockey. Today crouching in his lawn chair, nervous and afraid; yesterday full of swaggering innocent corruption, fucking the slumming donkey girl in the woods…

The donkey girl sniffing at her inhaler.

“Get out,” he said rapidly to Vicki and Lizzie. “Now. Get out of the building right away. Vicki, take Annie.”

She looked startled but didn’t protest: it must be his tone. Vickie grabbed Annie by the arm and hauled her toward the door. “No, no,” Annie said. “No, please. I don’t want to go out there, please…”

“Come on,” Jackson said, grabbing Annie’s other arm and hauling her along.

Lizzie said, “What? What is it?” but she followed.

Outside Dirk looked over Annie’s shoulder at the outdoors and screamed louder. Lizzie snatched him. Jackson hustled them all, Annie coatless, through the rain toward his car. Robocams descended and reporters in their vehicles, watching the election results, looked up. Jackson shoved Annie into the car and lifted it.

“Okay,” Vicki said. “What was it?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Jackson said. “A neuropharm, I think. Gaseous. Only…” Only Annie’s Cell Cleaner should now be working overtime, clearing her body of foreign molecules as soon as she was no longer breathing them in. Instead Annie continued to shrink and tremble, and Dirk to scream and cling to his mother. And if the neuropharm was in the building, he and Vicki and Lizzie would have breathed it. But Lizzie looked furious, Vicki alert, and Jackson himself didn’t feel trembly or anxious. So if not in the building…

He landed the car and twisted to look at the rear seat. “Annie, did you have breakfast in the feeding ground?”

Annie shook her head and folded her hands together tightly. Her eyes darted from side to side, and her chest rose and fell rapidly.

“Did Billy breakfast in the feeding ground?”

“He… he went there, him, to bring in some fresh soil for us… privacy…”

“But you never went in the feeding ground this morning?”

Annie drew a deep breath. “I… later. When no reporters there, and everybody else gone inside, them… the sun came out a bit and… Dirk needs sun, him. We just sat there, us, with our clothes on… we didn’t…” She trailed off and looked out the window, her pretty plump face terrified. “Please, Doctor, take… take me home…”

Like Theresa. Jackson said, “Breathe steadily, Annie. Here, put on this patch.”

“No, I… what is it?” Annie shook her head.

Jackson said, “Vicki, put the patch on her.”

He watched closely. Annie—Annie!—didn’t struggle.

She cringed against the car window, and put up one hand in a feeble, warding-off gesture that Vicki, wide-eyed, ignored. Vicki slapped the patch on Annie’s neck. Annie whimpered.

After a few minutes, she sat up a little straighter, but her hands remained clasped tightly together, her body tense. “Now can we go home? What’s going on here, Doctor? Please… take us home!”

Jackson closed his eyes. The patch was one he carried for Theresa, who would never use it. It triggered the release of biogenic amines that prompted the body to create ten different neurotransmitters. Those neurotransmitters calmed anxieties about, and lowered inhibitions to, stimuli perceived as threatening. The patch was moderating Annie’s symptoms a little—but it was not eradicating them.

He said, “Vicki, put a patch on Dirk. No, wait—don’t.” Dirk’s blood and brain should by now be clear of anything he’d breathed in at the camp, but he nonetheless continued to act like a severely inhibited baby in the throes of full-blown stranger anxiety. And Dirk was not usually shy. Why wasn’t the neuropharm wearing off?

Vicki said, “It was in the feeding ground, wasn’t it? Lizzie, did you go in there this morning?”

Lizzie demanded, “What’re you talking about, you? Did somebody do something to Dirk?”

Vicki said, “I didn’t feed at the other tribe, either. Too excited. Why isn’t the Cell Cleaner undoing the effects on Dirk?”

“I don’t know,” Jackson said, at the same moment that Lizzie cried, “What effects? What happened to my baby?” and Annie reached across the seat to tap Jackson’s shoulder and say tremulously, “If anybody hurt this child, them…”

Vicki ignored them all and flicked on the terminal.

“Donald Serrano,” Vicki said. “He found a way to win the election, without anybody thinking that it was anything but the material bribes they’ve been spreading around.”

“No,” Jackson answered. “We don’t know how to do this.”

“Do what?” Lizzie cried.

He raised his voice to answer over Annie’s fear, Lizzie’s alarm, Dirk’s fussing. “How to create neuropharms that aren’t cleared immediately by the Cell Cleaner. The medical journals, my med-school friends who went into research… everybody’s looking for that. A patentable hallucinogen or synthetic endorphin or other pleasure drug that doesn’t have to be inhaled every few minutes… For God’s sake, get out of the car, Vicki. I can’t hear myself think.”

Jackson and Vicki climbed out. Jackson locked the doors against Annie’s fearful questions, Lizzie’s attempts to follow. He stood in the drizzle, water trickling down the back of his neck, and tried to organize his thoughts. “Nobody in the medical establishment is anywhere near that kind of breakthrough. And if they were, it wouldn’t be used on a penny-ante election like this. It would be worth billions.”

“Then who?” Vicki said. “Miranda Sharifi?”

“But why? Why would the Supers do it?”

“I don’t know.”

The car shuddered. Jackson looked down at Lizzie pounding angrily at the inside of the rain-streaked windows. Looked at an Annie only slightly restored to tolerance for new situations, and then only for as long as the neuropharm in the patch lasted. Looked at the baby acting like a small Theresa, with Theresa’s timidity and pervasive fear of anything new, anything risky, any departure from what she’d always done.

Such as electing a Liver to political office.

Vicki demanded. “Who, Jackson? Who’s capable of doing this, at multiple sites? And how?”

“I don’t know,” Jackson said. But it had to be Miranda, nobody else had such advanced neurobiology… but it couldn’t be Miranda. She didn’t make people less capable!

Did she?

It had to Miranda. It couldn’t be Miranda.

A whole population of Theresas.

“I don’t… know.”

Twelve

Lizzie clutched Dirk close, and tried to pretend it was for the baby’s sake. She had never seen anything like this. Dr. Aranow had taken them into Manhattan East Enclave, just flown through the Y-shield like it didn’t exist and landed on the roof of his apartment block. Only it wasn’t an apartment block that Lizzie, growing up in the Liver town of East Oleanta and on the road ever since, would have recognized. She didn’t recognize the roof as a roof. It was beautiful. Bright green genemod grass, beds of delicate flowers, benches and strange statues and stranger ’bots she itched to take apart. But she wouldn’t take them apart. She wouldn’t even touch them. She wasn’t smart enough. She was just a dumb Liver who had fucked up: lost the election and failed her tribe and somehow brought harm she didn’t understand to her baby.

“This way,” Dr. Aranow said, leading them across the roof that wasn’t. The air was warm and cloudless.

“ ‘Oh what is so rare as a day in June,’ ” Vicki said, which didn’t make sense because this was April. Vicki wasn’t smiling, but she didn’t look as confused as Lizzie felt. Well, of course, Vicki had once lived this way. How could she have left it to come live in East Oleanta? Lizzie felt obscurely ashamed; she never imagined Vicki had left this. Lizzie remembered the times she’s lectured Vicki about the world, and the memory made Lizzie writhe. She didn’t know enough to lecture donkeys. She didn’t know anything at all.

And yesterday, she’d known everything. Just yesterday.

Dr. Aranow had taken Annie back to the camp. Now he led Lizzie, Dirk, and Vicki into an elevator which said. “Hello, Dr. Aranow.”

“Hello. My apartment, please. Is my sister home?”

“Yes,” the elevator said. “Ms. Aranow is home.” It stopped, and the door opened directly into the most wonderful room Lizzie had ever seen. Long and narrow, with smooth white walls, floors of shining silver-gray stone dotted with carpets, a perfect little table with roses on it—only they weren’t exactly roses, they had odd silver-gray leaves and a bewitching smell—and a painting lit by an unseen source. Lizzie didn’t know what to make of the painting. Two naked women feeding on the grass, and two men dressed in stiff old-fashioned nonconsumable clothes. The men must not be hungry.

“The original Manet, of course,” Vicki said, but Dr. Aranow didn’t answer. He strode ahead, and when they followed, Lizzie realized that the wonderful white room with the roses had been only a hallway.

Inside the apartment was another hallway, and then a real room. It stopped her cold. A Y-shield made up one wall, looking down on a green, green park. The other walls shimmered with subtly shifting grays and whites—programmed screens, they had to be. Was the park a program, too? The chairs were white and soft, the tables all polished, there were strange plants inside the tables… and a girl, sitting on a hard wooden chair and eating food by mouth from some kind of ’bot with a flat top like another shining table.

“Theresa,” Dr. Aranow said, and even in Lizzie’s chagrined absorption in her surroundings—she knew nothing, nothing at all!—Lizzie could hear the careful gentleness in his voice. “Theresa, don’t be alarmed, I’ve just brought some people here for a business meeting.”

The girl shrank back in her chair. No older than Lizzie herself, she looked frightened and uneasy… about Lizzie and Vicki? That didn’t make sense. The girl had a cloud of silvery-blond hair and was very skinny, dressed in a strange loose flowered dress that Lizzie would have sworn looked consumable. How could that be? The dress had no holes.

“This is Vicki Turner,” Dr. Aranow said, “and Lizzie Francy, and Lizzie’s son Dirk. This is my sister, Theresa Aranow.”

Theresa didn’t answer. Lizzie thought she trembled and breathed faster. This was a donkey, and yet unlike Vicki, unlike the reporters, unlike the donkey girls who had liked fucking Shockey when he was a candidate, Theresa looked… looked…

Theresa looked like Shockey and Annie and Billy looked now.

A glance passed between Vicki and Dr. Aranow, something Lizzie couldn’t interpret, and Vicki said softly, “Ms. Aranow, would you like to see the baby?”

Theresa’s weird fear seemed to fade a little. “Oh, a baby… yes… please…”

Dr. Aranow took Dirk from Lizzie—fortunately, he was asleep now—and laid him in Theresa’s arms. Theresa looked at him with total delight, and then, to Lizzie’s amazement, started to cry. No sobbing, just pale lightless tears rolling down her pale cheeks.

“Could I… Jackson, could… I hold him while you have your meeting?”

“Of course,” Vicki said, and Lizzie felt a minute of resentment. Dirk was her baby, this girl, this donkey Theresa who lived surrounded by everything and now wanted Lizzie’s baby, too—Theresa hadn’t even asked Lizzie if she could hold Dirk. And from her looks, Theresa was a weakling. She wouldn’t last three minutes using her wits to keep a whole tribe supplied with datadipped goods.

“We’ll be right there in the dining room, Theresa,” Jackson said, and took both Vicki’s and Lizzie’s arms.

The dining room wasn’t a feeding ground, but a table with twelve tall chairs, motionless serving ’bots, and still more huge, strange-looking plants that must be genemod. One wall cascaded with water—not programming, real water. The polished table was bare. Lizzie’s stomach suddenly growled.

She said, and it came out angry for some reason, “Don’t you even have a feeding ground?”

“Yes,” Dr. Aranow said distractedly, “but we’d better… are you hungry? Jones, breakfast for three, please. Whatever Theresa was having.”

“Certainly, Dr. Aranow,” the room said.

“Caroline, on, please.”

Lizzie didn’t see any terminal, but a different voice said, “Yes, Dr. Aranow.”

Vicki said, “You have a Caroline VIII personal system. I’m impressed.”

“Caroline, call Thurmond Rogers at Kelvin-Castner. Tell him it’s a priority call.”

“Yes, Dr. Aranow.”

He turned to Vicki. “Thurmond is an old friend. We graduated together from medical school. He’s a staff researcher at Kelvin-Castner Pharmaceuticals, his department’s fair-haired wonder. He’ll help us.”

“Help us do what?” Vicki said, but Lizzie didn’t hear the answer. In the other room, Dirk cried. Lizzie rushed back to him. Theresa held the baby helplessly, rocking him and crooning, while Dirk wailed in fear and tried to squirm off her lap.

Lizzie took him. All at once she felt better about Theresa. Dirk buried his face in his mother’s shoulder and clung to her. Lizzie said, “Don’t feel bad. It’s just because he doesn’t know you.”

“Is he… is he shy with… strangers?”

“Not until this morning!”

The two girls looked at each other. Lizzie saw suddenly how they must look: Theresa genemod beautiful and elegant in her pretty dress, Lizzie with mud and wet leaves clinging to her dirty jacks, in her hair, smeared across her baby’s face. But Theresa was the one who was afraid. Lizzie pulled a twig out of Dirk’s hair.

“Something happened this morning,” she said impulsively to Theresa. “Dr. Aranow said there might have been a neuropharm released into our feeding ground. It made everybody scared of anything new. Even of voting for Shockey! And we worked so hard! Damn it to fucking hell!”

Theresa cringed. But she said, “Scared of anything new? You mean, like… like me?”

So that was what was wrong with this girl. She’d breathed a neuropharm like the one Annie and Billy and Dirk had breathed. But… Dr. Aranow said he didn’t know what the neuropharm was, it was something no Sleepers could invent, so how could Theresa have…

“I have to go back,” she said abruptly. “Dr. Aranow’s calling a research place.” She carried Dirk back to the dining room.

The table held dishes of mouth food, although Lizzie hadn’t seen a ’bot go past. Strawberries, huge and succulent, bread with fruit and nuts baked on top, fluffy scrambled eggs; Lizzie hadn’t had an egg since last summer. Her mouth filled with sweet water. The next second, she forgot the food.

A section of the programmed wall had deepened into a holostage recess. Lizzie had never seen such technology. A man as old as Dr. Aranow, with a handsome face and bright chestnut hair, said, “It sounds incredible, Jackson.”

“I know, Thurmond, I know. But believe me, I knew these people before, the behavioral change is both radical and sudden—”

“How could you know Livers that well? They’re not patients, are they? Aren’t they Changed?”

“Yes. It doesn’t matter how I know them. I’m telling you, the change appears neuropharmaceutical, it does not wear off after inhalation stops, and it is not accompanied by gastrointestinal distress or blackout. You want to see this, Thurmond. And I need you to see it.”

The holo drummed its fingers on a desktop. “All right. I’ll sell it to Castner—if I can. Bring two specimens in, the baby and an adult.”

Specimens?

“When?” Dr. Aranow said.

“Well, I can’t… oh, hell, this afternoon. You’re sure, Jackson, that the behavioral effect doesn’t wear off when inhalation ceases? Without that, it’s not worth my time to—”

“I’m sure. This could be valuable to you, Thurmond.”

“Do you want to draw up a percentage contract, if the commercial possibilities pay out? Our standard split—”

“That can wait. We’ll be there in a few hours. Alert your security system. Me and three Livers who—”

“Three?”

“The baby’s mother has to come, and she didn’t breathe in the neuropharm, so there’ll be two adults.”

“All right. Make ’em take a bath first.”

Jackson glanced sideways at Vicki. This Thurmond Rogers—this stupid fucking donkey who thought Livers didn’t even wash—said sharply, “Are they there with you now, Jackson? In your house?”

Vicki stepped in front of the holostage. She held a strawberry daintily in upraised fingers. Her jacks were as muddy as Lizzie’s, and older. Her genemod violet eyes gleamed. “Yes, Thurmond, we’re here now. But it’s all right, we deloused.”

Thurmond said. “Who are you?”

Vicki smiled sweetly and nibbled on her strawberry. “You don’t remember me, Thurmond? At Cazie Sanders’s garden party? Last year?”

“Jackson—what’s going on here? She’s a donkey, why is—”

“There’ll be five of us coming to Kelvin-Castner,” Vicki said. “I’m the baby’s nanny. See you later, Thurmond.” She moved away.

Thurmond said, “Jackson…”

“Noon, then,” Dr. Aranow said hastily. “Thanks, Thurmond. Caroline, that’s all.”

The holostage went dark. Lizzie watched Dr. Aranow and Vicki watch each other. Shifting Dirk to other shoulder—he was getting heavy—Lizzie waited for Vicki to yell at Dr. Aranow for letting Thurmond Rogers call them “specimens,” or for Dr. Aranow to yell at Vicki for fucking up his phone call. But instead all Dr. Aranow said was, “You met Thurmond Rogers with Cazie?”

“No,” Vicki said, “I never saw him before in my life. But now he’ll surf his brains, wondering where that garden party was.”

“I doubt it.”

“I don’t,” Vicki said. “You really don’t know how this is played, do you, Jackson?”

“I didn’t think we were playing.”

“Well, certainly not about the neuropharm. Who’s our adult specimen, by the way? Lizzie, don’t just stand there glaring and drooling. If you’re hungry, have some strawberries. Genemod and exquisite.”

Lizzie wanted to say no—how come Vicki was still bossing everybody else around, even in Dr. Aranow’s house? But she was too hungry. Sullenly she sat in one of the beautiful carved chairs, Dirk clinging to her shoulder, and helped herself to everything she could reach.

Dr. Aranow said, “We’ll fly back to camp and get Shockey.”

“Why Shockey?” Vicki said. “Billy breathed in the neuropharm, too, and he’d be much more cooperative. Or even Annie.”

“No. Billy’s too old. And I already put a patch on Annie, changing the original conditions. Thurmond won’t consider them ideal subjects. Also, Shockey’s behavioral changes seemed the most pronounced… it has to involve the amygdalae.”

“The what?” Lizzie said, to remind them she was there. Dirk fretted and she shifted him on her lap to feed him a strawberry.

Dr. Aranow said, “It’s a part of the brain that affects fear and anxiety about—what’s wrong with Dirk?”

Dirk screamed on Lizzie’s lap. He pushed with his small feet and drew his chubby arms in toward his body. His face contorted. He twisted in her arms, trying to get down, trying frantically to escape. In his wailing was the note of pure animal fear as Lizzie held out to him something new in his experience, something he’d never seen before: a ripe red perfect strawberry.

“He’s asleep,” Vicki said. “Come on, Lizzie.”

“Come on where?” She didn’t want to leave Dirk. He lay on Dr. Aranow’s living room floor on a soft multicolored blanket Vicki had taken off one of the white sofas. Dirk had screamed and thrashed so much Dr. Aranow had finally put a little patch on his neck. Just to make Dirk sleep, he said. Lizzie sat in the sofa, which had fitted itself around her rump in a comfortable way, and scowled at Vicki. Dr. Aranow hadn’t wanted to go alone to get Shockey. Lizzie didn’t know what Vicki had said to him to make him agree, or why Vicki wanted to stay behind, or how Lizzie was going to cope for the rest of her life with a child terrified of a strawberry. She was exhausted.

“I want to talk to Theresa,” Vicki said. “And don’t you want to dip the systems here? Aranow has a Caroline VIII.”

A Caroline VIII. Lizzie had only heard about them. Suddenly she wanted to be in that system more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. She could dip that system. She could understand that system. Unlike everything else that had suddenly erupted in her life.

“Dirk’s fine, the patch will last for hours. Come on. Lizzie. Let’s establish a beachhead.”

Lizzie didn’t know what a beachhead was, and didn’t ask. But she followed Vicki as far as the dining room, within earshot of Dirk. Mouth food still covered the table.

“Jackson’s system will be voice-cued,” Vicki said, and Lizzie laughed and reached for a plate.

“Do you really expect that to stop me?”

“Apparently not. See you later. I’m going to look for Theresa.”

Lizzie ate hungrily. Everything tasted so good! Even the dishes were beautiful, made of some thin material edged with gold. And the glasses. And the silverware. After Lizzie had eaten all she could hold, she glanced furtively around. Quickly she slipped a silver teaspoon into the pocket of her jacks.

Then she began on the house system, Jones. As she expected, it contained direct, laughably protected access to Jackson’s personal system. Amateurs. Everything about Jackson was open to Lizzie’s hearing.

And everything about Theresa.

Lizzie’s eyes sparkled. If Vicki couldn’t find Theresa, or couldn’t get her to talk, Lizzie could already know everything about Theresa from her personal system. Then, when Vicki said she hadn’t been able to learn thus-and-so, Lizzie could casually drop the information. She would actually know more about the situation than Vicki.

Theresa’s personal system, Thomas, yielded up calendar files, medical files (had Theresa really been on all these medicines when she was a kid? and what were they?), credit accounts—Lizzie noted the numbers and access paths to those. Wall-programming selections, library requests, comlink calls (almost none—didn’t Theresa have any friends?). Orders to Jones, dress designs, didn’t she have a diary file? No, but there was a book she was speaking.

Lizzie snorted. The donkey nets were awash with books. Of all the uses for a system, that seemed to her the dumbest. Who wanted to listen to stuff that never happened, or happened a long time ago and was all over? The present had too much stuff in it to absorb as it was. Lizzie quick-tasted the file, until she caught the words, “Change syringe.”

She stopped tasting. “Thomas, read me that section.”

The system said, “ ‘Leisha Camden never saw the Change syringes that Miranda made. Leisha was already dead. Everybody thinks Leisha would have liked the Change syringes, because she told Tony Indivino that she would give much money to poor beggars in Spain. Everybody thinks Leisha would like anything that gives poor beggars like Livers a way to get food. But I don’t think Leisha would like the Change syringes. She understood that people need food but they need other things more, like a meaning in life.’ ”

Poor beggars like Livers? Lizzie had never begged for anything in her life! What she wanted she went out and got, or dipped off the Net. “Thomas, summarize file contents.”

“This file is a book spoken by Theresa Aranow. She began the file on August 19, 2118. It is a life of Leisha Camden, 2008-2114, the twenty-first Sleepless genetically engineered in the United States. The book traces Leisha Camden’s entire life, starting with her birth in Chicago, Illinois, at the—”

“Enough. File links?”

“One. To newsgrid file 65. Restricted.”

Restricted? A newsgrid file? But those were public to begin with. “Where is the file restricted to?”

“To the printer in Theresa Aranow’s study.”

It took Lizzie three minutes to dip the restriction. “Display on closest screen.”

The dining room wall colors dissolved. In their place were pictures with writing under them—horrible pictures, one after another, each displayed for thirty seconds before it dissolved into the next. Lizzie couldn’t read the writing, but she recognized the pictures. She’d just never seen so many of them in one place.

Babies with their bellies swollen and mottled. Babies with blood streaming from their eyes. Babies lying still, eyes glazed and scrawny arms limp. Babies shriveled as dried apples, their mouths open on swollen, toothless gums. UnChanged babies, unprotected against disease or starvation… so many unChanged babies.

Lizzie stumbled back into the living room. Dirk lay asleep on the bright blanket, which—Lizzie now noticed—his chubby little legs were consuming. His rosy mouth made little sucking motions in his sleep.

She went back to the dining room and looked at more pictures. UnChanged babies sick. UnChanged babies dying. UnChanged babies dead… all Liver babies. Lizzie closed her eyes. How many UnChanged babies were there in the United States? If she hadn’t had a syringe for Dirk… Why wasn’t anybody doing anything about this?

And why did Theresa Aranow—rich, genemod, protected, safe—care about these Liver babies?

Lizzie realized the answer to that one. Theresa’s fear of anything new. Her few friends. The mouth food. The blanket Dirk was consuming. Theresa herself was unChanged.

But how could that be? Theresa was a donkey. And she was Lizzie’s age. There had been plenty of Change syringes even two years ago. Were there still plenty for donkeys? Maybe in some places. Lizzie didn’t really know. None of it made sense.

The system said in Jones’s stiff voice, “Ms. Aranow, Dr. Aranow is in the elevator.” At the same time, Lizzie heard Vicki coming back to the dining room.

Immediately Lizzie blanked the system—she didn’t know why. But Vicki shouldn’t see these pictures. Which was stupid because Vicki was her closest friend in the whole world, Lizzie owed Vicki everything, and besides Vicki kept up with news all the time and probably already knew all about it. But Vicki was still a donkey. Lizzie didn’t want her to see these pathetic, horrible unChanged Liver babies. Not in this rich donkey house.

“I couldn’t find Theresa,” Vicki said crossly. “Or rather, I suspect I did find her, hidden away in a room on the upper floor, but I couldn’t dip the lock. Why didn’t you come with me? And what’s that noise?”

“Dr. Aranow’s back.”

“Alone? Where’s Shockey? Did you get the access codes?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go greet the troops on the upholstered battlements.”

“In a minute,” Lizzie said. “I just… just want a bit more bread.”

“You metabolically versatile glutton,” Vicki said, and left the room.

“Thomas,” Lizzie said softly, “personal message mode for Theresa Aranow. Urgent.”

“Go ahead.”

“I saw the pictures of the Liver babies. You have to find Miranda Sharifi and make her give us some more Change syringes. You’re a donkey, you have all this money, you can get to Miranda, you, in ways we can’t, us…” Lizzie trailed off. How should she sign it? Why sign it at all? What the hell did she think she was doing, begging help from a donkey girl who was too much of a coward to leave her own apartment?

“Thomas, cancel urgent personal message.”

“Personal cancel code, please?”

No time. Jackson and Vicki walked toward the doorway.

“Thomas, close.” The wall blanked.

“Let’s go, Lizzie,” Dr. Aranow said wearily. “This won’t be bad, I promise. Some behavioral recording, a brain scan, and then they’ll put you briefly to sleep for tissue samples. It won’t hurt.”

“Where’s Shockey?”

“In the car. He wouldn’t leave it, even with a tranq patch on. Get the baby and we’ll go.”

“Are Billy and my mother all right?”

“Yes. No. They’re the same as when you saw them.”

Vicki said, “How did you get Shockey to come with you?”

“Not easily. He cried.”

Lizzie tried to picture Shockey crying. Big, rough, bold-eyed Shockey. “Didn’t anybody try to stop you?”

“Yes. Sort of. Billy did, with a few others. But I just started acting very strange, and they all got even more frightened and backed away. I grabbed Shockey and tranqued him and dragged him along. Crying.” Dr. Aranow ran his hand through his hair. Lizzie hadn’t known a donkey could look so worn-out and… well, upset.

Vicki said, more gently than Lizzie had ever heard her be with anyone beside Dirk or Lizzie herself, “You should sleep, Jackson.”

He laughed shortly. “Oh, yes. That would solve everything. Come on, Lizzie, Thurmond Rogers is waiting.”

Lizzie said, before she knew she was going to say anything, “Not until I have a bath. And Dirk, too.”

“You can’t—”

“Oh, yes, I can. And I will, me.”

Vicki smiled at her. It took Lizzie a moment to figure out why. Vicki thought she was having a bath to give Dr. Aranow time for the sleep he needed. Fuck that. She wanted a bath before she faced Thurmond Rogers and his snooty corporation. She and Dirk both. Vicki could show up looking like a piece of the woods, but that was different. Vicki was a donkey.

It seemed to Lizzie that she’d never before realized everything that meant.

“All right, all right,” Dr. Aranow said. “Have a bath. Just be quick about it.”

“I will,” Lizzie promised. She would, too. She was as worried about Annie and Billy as anyone. She would wash herself and Dirk as fast as she could.

And maybe she could dip whatever parts of the system were on-line in the bathing room.

Interlude

TRANSMISSION DATE: April 3, 2121

TO: Selene Bose, Moon

VIA: Chicago Ground Station #2, GEO Satellite 342 [Old Charter] (USA)

MESSAGE TYPE: Unencrypted

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

ORIGINATING GROUP: American Medical Association

MESSAGE:

An Open Letter to Miranda Sharifi—

We, the physicians of the American Medical Association, would like to once more collectively request that, as a humanitarian act, you make available to the peoples of the world your proprietary medical substance, Cell Cleaner™. As doctors, all of us witness weekly the personal suffering and social disorder caused by the abrupt lack of this pharmaceutical. It is nothing short of tragic. The long-term consequences for our country—which is also yours—are the gravest possible.

Please reconsider your decision to withhold the means of alleviating such great suffering.

Margaret Ruth Streibel,

President, AMA

Ryan Arthur Anderson,

Vice President, AMA

Theodore George Milgate,

Secretary, AMA

… and the 114,822 members of the American Medical Association

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

Thirteen

The drone came in low over the trees, no faster than a bird and with no greater mass. The tiny camcorder on its front showed the enclave below, leisurely growing larger. Jennifer Sharifi, alone in her office on Sanctuary, leaned toward the screen.

She had opaqued the office wall facing deep space. For this moment, she wanted no competition from the stars. Just as she wanted no company, not even her husband Will. Especially not Will. The rest of the project team was watching the test from the Sharifi Labs. It seemed to Jennifer that she had earned this personal indulgence.

The California enclave came in closer and closer. Sixteen Liver camps so far, but those had been only trials. This was the first donkey enclave to be penetrated with Strukov’s virus, and the first to test the correspondingly more sophisticated delivery drone created by Jennifer’s Peruvian contractor. To infect Livers, all one needed to do was puncture a plastic tent. Y-shielded enclaves were a much different matter. The California enclave was a comparatively easy first step.

“Fifty-eight minutes,” said an uninflected voice from a different terminal wedged into a corner across the room. Jennifer didn’t turn around.

The north California enclave was small, originally a vacation colony clinging to the Pacific coast. Four hundred seventy donkeys lived under a Y-shield that extended a quarter mile over the ocean and well into the ground beneath it. Under the invisible dome were lush genemod gardens, a dazzling and artificial beach, nanobuilt houses of fantastic dimensions and luxuries, and only minor weaponry. During the Change Wars, security had been augmented, but not defense. Why would there ever be any heavy-duty attack on a small vacation enclave of mostly retired people? Thieves couldn’t penetrate the Y-shield. Nothing else was necessary.

But the enclave liked birds. Gulls, condors, woodpeckers, swallows, more exotic engineered seabirds. And there was no reason to fear birds—Livers didn’t have the technology for biological warfare, and weren’t capable of stealing it, or of understanding it if they did. Everybody knew that. Sixty feet above ground the shield admitted birds.

The drone flew slowly through the shield, as slowly as a bird. None of the inhabitants noticed it. Slowly the drone descended, its zoom camera displaying increasingly more detail. The last picture transmitted came from forty feet above a fashionably purple garden: violet-watered swimming pool, masses of violet flowers, even the stems and leaves subtly blending shades of lavender, mauve, lilac, orchid, heliotrope. A genemod plum-colored rabbit turned its violet eyes upward to the sky. The lens showed the dark soft pupils of its eyes, like ink on tinted satin.

The drone exploded soundlessly. A fine mist blanketed a much larger area than would have seemed possible. At the same moment, all remnants of the probe itself dissolved into its component atoms. Artificial breezes inside the enclave, joined by natural ones from the ocean, spread the mist farther. The enclave was always seventy-two degrees; windows in the luxurious homes were open to the flower-scented air. On a screen to Jennifer’s right, a chime sounded.

“Ms. Sharifi, you have a call from Dr. Strukov.”

Jennifer turned toward the screen. Before she could say she would accept the call, Strukov’s holo was there, wordlessly proving the superiority of his overrides. Jennifer let no reaction show on her face.

“Good morning, Ms. Sharifi. Of course you watched the transmission?”

“Yes.”

“Without flaw, isn’t it? I trust the payment has wired itself to Singapore.”

“It has.”

“Good, good. And the schedule of delivery remains unaltered?”

“Yes.” More test enclaves, better shielded, working up to military and government targets. Those, of course, would be the hardest to penetrate, and the most crucial. If Strukov could infect the federal enclaves of Brookhaven, Cold Harbor, Bethesda, New York, and the Washington Mall, and the military bases in California, Colorado, Texas, and Florida, he could infect anything.

The door to her office opened, closed. Against her express wishes. Will said to Strukov’s image, “Very good, so far. But of course there’s no proof yet that this version of your virus will work.”

She never could teach Will the tactical advantage to not revealing rivalry.

Strukov said, “But yes, it will work.” His smile showed perfect teeth. “Or perhaps you doubt the mechanisms of the delivery. Of course, that responsibility belongs not to me, but to your Peruvian engineers. Perhaps you should discuss your concerns about that technology with your so brilliant granddaughter, Miranda Sharifi?”

Jennifer said, “That’s all, Dr. Strukov.”

“À bientôt, madame.”

“I don’t trust him,” Will said after the comlink broke.

“There is no reason not to,” Jennifer said calmly. She was going to have to think again about Will Sandaleros as partner and husband. If he could not contain his dislike and jealousy…

“He still won’t release a virus sample to Sharifi Labs for analysis. And our geneticists can’t come up with a congruent speculative model. The biochemistry is so damn indirect…”

“We asked for indirect effects,” Jennifer said. She spoke to her screen. “Newsgrid mode. Channel 164.” It was the most reliable of the donkey stations, broadcasting from New York.

“I just don’t trust him,” Will repeated.

“Fifty minutes,” said the terminal in the corner.

“—outbreak of fighting among Livers in Iowa,” said the newsgrid. “Security officers have assured all channels that there is no danger to the Peoria Enclave, or to the shielded agri-areas of southern Illinois. Robocam monitoring of the fighting shows several Liver camps to be involved, possibly banded together. The cause, as elsewhere in the country, seems to be the shortage of Change syringes among those unfortunate Liver camps that—”

Jennifer concentrated on the images, transmitted unedited except for rapid-rotation selection among a number of cams. A daylight attack—yesterday?—by thirty or forty Livers on one of their squalid little “camps.” The resident Livers sat naked under the clear tarp from which they constructed their feeding grounds. Why hadn’t they gone south for the winter, like so many others? It didn’t matter. The second group of Livers, dressed in old government-issued synthetic clothing and a bizarre assortment of homespun consumables, rushed into sight and opened fire. People screamed, blood spurted in red jets against the low tarp. A baby shrieked before it was shot.

Jennifer froze the image and studied it. The attackers were armed with AL-72s, a military assault weapon. That meant either they had donkey allies or they’d been able to datadip a federal or state armory somewhere, probably the latter. Their dippers were getting bolder. And as they acquired more knowledge and more weapons, they became more potentially dangerous to not only donkeys but to Sanctuary’s financial holdings in the United States, and conceivably, to Sanctuary itself.

“—another group of Doctors for Human Aid have already left for the tri-county area from—”

“Forty minutes,” said the terminal in the corner.

Jennifer changed newsgrid channels with metronomic regularity, two minutes for each. Of course, flag programs compiled hourly summaries for her. But it was important to keep personally informed as well, for those nuances of tone that the compilations could not pick up.

A Liver raid on the Miami Enclave; thirty Change syringes stolen, fifty-two people dead. More pictures of unChanged babies in Texas, dying of some unnamed virus or toxin. President Garrison, declaring a state of emergency, which the all-but-self-governing enclaves would ignore. More broadcasts to Selene, pleading with Miranda for additional Change syringes. Another bizarre religious cult in Virginia, this one notable for being made up of donkeys rather than Livers. They believed that Jesus Christ was preparing the Earth for the return of angels from the Orion Nebula.

Jennifer watched composedly, not allowing her emotions to show. What was Miranda doing? Miranda had given the Change to the enemy… why was she now withdrawing it?

Inconsistent people were dangerous. You could not anticipate how to block their actions.

“Thirty minutes,” said the terminal in the corner.

“Jennifer, it’s time for the second penetration,” Will said. His voice was high and tight. Jennifer turned off the newsgrid.

This time the target was a less rich enclave, outside the main dome of St. Paul, Minnesota. The enclave housed mostly techs, who kept the machines of the city running and programmed. Techs, skilled and genemod, were part of the donkey economy, although never decision-makers. The drone camera showed rows of small neat houses under an energy dome, genemod lawns and flowers, a playground and a church and community center. The Y-shield did not admit birds. Techs were not much interested in birds.

Nonetheless, the second drone flew through the shield as easily as the first had flown into the opulent retirement enclave by the Pacific. Soundlessly the drone dissolved, and soundlessly the viral mist floated down over houses and playground.

Techs worked for a living. They couldn’t be rendered as fearful as Livers or they would refuse to leave their small enclave and would not report to work. But Strukov, learning from the sixteen Liver beta-tests, had refined his product. This version was subtler.

But just as difficult to pin down with biochemical analysis. Not even Sharifi Labs had succeeded. The virus initiated the manufacture and release of a biogenic amine natural to the brain, which in turn caused the manufacture and release of another, which affected multiple receptor sites and caused further electrochemical reactions… it was a long and twisted skein of cerebral events. The end result would be that the techs, without realizing it directly, would simply come to prefer the familiar. Routines they already knew, faces they saw every day, tasks they were used to. The old friend, the known line of thought, the conventional attitude, the incumbent politician. It would just feel too unsettling to initiate, or learn, or change.

And then Jennifer Sharifi and the rest of her people would be safe. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t know.

Safe. Was that actually possible? There had been times, in Allendale Federal Prison, when she’d despaired of ever feeling safe again, or of ever making her people safe. Her previous efforts to safeguard Sleepless had been both crude and naive. Sanctuary, removed from Earth but vulnerable, as all orbitals were vulnerable. Financial power, necessary but not sufficient for protection. Finally, secession from a corrupt government, through terrorism that had only called such blatant attention to itself that it had been bound to fail.

This time would be different. No threats of biological warfare. No demands for freedom. No worldwide broadcasts to try to make the enemy see what they were incapable of seeing. No. This time, stealth and stasis. Freeze the world into biological inhibition, but so subtly that they would never even recognize it. Will was right—they’d never know what hit them.

Except for twenty-seven people.

Those twenty-seven, if they so chose, probably could stop her. As they had once before. That they hadn’t interfered yet perhaps meant that their own complex and devious goals dovetailed with hers to a certain point… could that be true? What was Miranda doing?

Whatever it was, Jennifer would not let it wreck her own plans. Could not let it.

That was the most painful part: Jennifer’s lack of real choice. Miranda was her granddaughter; Nikos and Christina the grandchildren of her oldest friend; Toshio Ohmura her great-nephew by marriage. She could not, without pain, simply turn her back on them. That was what Sleepers did: destroyed kinship ties, destroyed community itself, with no sense of loss. That deadened self was what Jennifer fought against.

Still—there was no choice. Not if she was going to make her people safe.

She felt Will’s hands on her shoulders. “Jenny—it’s time,” he said, and she thought he’d spoken the words earlier, but suddenly she couldn’t remember. She hadn’t heard the terminal in the corner. For a moment the room blurred. She closed her eyes.

“Thirty seconds,” said the terminal in the corner. Jennifer forced herself to open her eyes. Her screen had brightened. No drone-mounted camera, this time. The hidden monitor was a mile away, showing only empty desolate landscape, and, on zoom, the faint shimmer of a Y-shield. No, not a Y-shield but something else entirely, designed by genius, unduplicated by anyone else anywhere. Something no drone could penetrate, ever.

“Twenty seconds.”

Will’s hands tightened on her shoulders. She thought of shrugging the hands off, but somehow she couldn’t move. She couldn’t think. Her mind, that precision tool, felt clogged with confusion, vaporizing out of the new data Caroline Renleigh had brought her about Selene. Selene, where the traitor Miranda Sharifi hid from the world.

Her granddaughter Miranda. Richard’s daughter. Richard, her son, who had chosen to side with Miranda’s treachery against his own mother. Richard, who was there with Miranda now.

“Ten seconds.”

She couldn’t remember Richard as a baby. She had been so young, and so involved in creating Sanctuary, and she had not yet trained herself to the discipline of remembering everything. It was Miranda’s babyhood that she recalled. Miranda, with her dark eyes and unruly black hair, laughing at the stars as Jennifer held her to the window in this very room. Miranda.

Miri—

“No!” Jennifer cried, and her cry blotted out the calm voice of the terminal in the corner.

“It’s over, Jenny,” Will said softly. “It’s over.” But Jennifer was crying, sobbing so hard she barely heard the system add, “New Mexico operation complete.” Later, she would resent that she had sobbed, and resent Will for seeing it. It was a disgrace to her own discipline, but now she cried like a two-year-old because it shouldn’t have to be this way, the choices shouldn’t have to be so hard. The terrible choices of war.

Miri—

Will held her as if she were a frightened child, and even through her sobbing and resentment and her inexcusable weakness she knew that as long as he, with his despised kindness, still did this for her, she was going to keep Will Sandaleros around.

Fourteen

Light on her face woke Theresa, and she cried out.

A moment later, she remembered where she was. Slumped on the window seat at the end of the upper-floor hallway—since last night? All night? She’d only meant to sit down a minute, look out at the park, escape her study for a little while.

Painfully she uncramped her body from the narrow seat. Her back ached, her neck felt stiff, her mouth tasted horrible. How long since she’d slept, before last night? How long since she’d eaten? She had lost track. Jackson hadn’t been home for days. Theresa had been alone, locked in her study, watching the news grids and printing pictures for her wall. Pictures of dying unChanged babies, of adults fighting each other savagely for nonexistent Change syringes, of raids for Y-cones, for furniture, for terminals, on dipped enclaves in Oregon, in New Jersey, in Wisconsin… Theresa had watched it all.

I am come to bear witness to the destruction of worlds. Thomas had found her the quote. Theresa had stared at it until her eyes blurred. Then she had stared at the newsgrids some more. Then she had stared at the message on her system, the message that should not have been there:

I saw the pictures of the Liver babies. You have to find Miranda Sharifi and make her give us some more Change syringes. You’re a donkey, you have all this money, you can get to Miranda, in ways we can’t—

The message had been spoken, of course, but Theresa had asked Thomas to write it out. Then Theresa had stared at it, sleepless, for however many days it had been since Jackson was home. At first she’d tried to pretend that the message was a mistake, a fluke, one of the thousands of messages people all over the country were composing to beam up to Selene, and that it had leaked onto Theresa’s personal system through some weird Net error. But even while she told herself that, Theresa knew she wasn’t crazy enough to believe it.

Too bad.

The message was from that girl that Jackson had brought home, the Liver girl with the baby made fearful by neuropharms, and the message was intended for Theresa. Jackson always wanted her to face facts; those were the facts. The message was for her.

Of course, that didn’t mean she had to do anything about it.

She had been staring at the message, away from it, at the newsholos of the dying babies, away from them, at the walls of her study, away, for two days. Or three. Until last night she’d suddenly thought that if she didn’t get out of that room, she would go crazy. Crazier. And she’d stumbled to the window seat, and looked down at the night-lighted park and up through the enclave dome at the stars, and she’d started to sob until she couldn’t stop. For no reason, no reason at all…

Take a neuropharm, Jackson said in her mind. Tessie, it’s biochemical, you don’t have to feel this way…

“Fuck off,” Tessie said aloud, for the first time in her life, and started to cry again.

No. Enough of that. She had to pull herself together, take a bath, eat something… She had to return to her study. Babies were dying, little children being scarred and disfigured by horrible diseases, mothers like that girl Lizzie holding babies writhing in pain… Why couldn’t she forget about it? Other people did! Just push it out of her mind, stay out of her stupid study…

Take a neuropharm, Tessie.

“Ms. Aranow,” Jones said, “you have a priority-one call.”

“Tell them I’m dead.”

“Ms. Aranow?”

It could only be Jackson. She mustn’t worry him. She mustn’t… shouldn’t… couldn’t…

“Ms. Aranow?”

“Say I’m coming, Jones.”

Theresa climbed off the window seat. Her head swam. Leaning against the wall until her vision cleared, she felt her knees wobble. She locked them and took the call in the bathroom, where she wouldn’t have to send her image, it wasn’t Jackson.

“Tess? Where’s visual?” Cazie, looking crisp and fierce in a severe black suit.

“I just got out of the shower.” Cazie knew that Theresa didn’t like her body on display.

“Oh, sorry. Listen, where’s Jackson?”

“Isn’t he with you?” Theresa said.

“You know quite well he’s not with me; I can hear it in your voice. Don’t play games with me, Tess. Where did he take those Livers?”

“I don’t… which Livers?”

Cazie’s face changed. This, Theresa thought, must be the face that Jackson saw when he and Cazie fought: high, sharp cheekbones sprung out of soft skin, eyes as hard as the marble floor beneath Theresa’s bare feet. Theresa shrank back a little against the sink.

“Tell. Me. Theresa. Where. Jackson. Is.”

Theresa squeezed her eyes shut.

“You won’t tell me. All right, I’m coming over there now.”

“No! I’m… I’m on my way out!”

“Oh, right. When was the last time you went out? Ten minutes, Tess.” The screen blanked.

Panic seized Theresa. Cazie would get it out of her, Cazie could get anything out of her, she’d tell Cazie that Jackson had taken Lizzie and the others to Kelvin-Castner in Boston… Jackson had said not to say anything. To anyone. Especially not to Cazie. But Cazie was on her way… Theresa would order Jones not to let her in.

Cazie would know the overrides. For the apartment, for the building. For Theresa’s mind.

All right, then—Theresa wouldn’t be here when Cazie came.

The moment the thought came, Theresa knew it was right. She needed to leave before Cazie arrived. Also, she needed to do what the message on her system told her to do—get to Miranda Sharifi and make her give out more Change syringes. You’re a donkey, you have all this money, you can get to Miranda, you, in ways we can’t—Theresa had spent two days (three?), she now saw, trying to push what she had to do out of her mind. And it hadn’t worked—it never did. Ignoring the summons to pain only made the pain worse. The summons was a gift, she’d somehow overlooked that, and not acting on the gift had only made her crazy.

Crazier.

But not now.

Quickly, with a smoothness that surprised her, Theresa darted from the bathroom. No time for a shower now. But shoes—she’d need shoes. And a coat. It was April outside the enclave—wasn’t April cold? She grabbed shoes and coat. “The roof,” she told the elevator. “Please.”

And it wasn’t just her muscles that suddenly worked smoothly. Her mind did, too, in efficient autonomous plans that amazed herself. To get to Miranda Sharifi, Theresa needed to start at the last place Miranda had been seen on Earth. That was the Liver compound where people bonded in threes, where Patty and Josh and Mike could never be alone again because they were forced to be with each other. Miranda had been there, leaving a tape explaining the new red syringes. To use the new syringes, you had to be Changed. That’s what Josh had said. So Miranda might have also left more Change syringes there than anywhere else. Or, she might even have come back, or sent somebody else back, to bring more, after the fighting broke out over Change syringes. If bonding was Miranda’s latest plan for people, then surely Miranda would monitor the place (places?) she was testing it. Even Theresa knew that much about how science worked.

On the roof, she blinked in the bright warm sunshine. Her heart speeded up, and her breath caught in her throat. Outside the enclave, the last time she’d tried that she’d blacked out, the panic had been so bad, seizure after seizure…

But Cazie was coming here. If Theresa didn’t leave, she’d have to see Cazie.

Theresa closed her eyes, bent over from the waist to put her head between her knees, and breathed deeply. After a few moments, the panic lessened. Or maybe it didn’t; maybe it just seemed less because facing a camp full of wild, bonded Livers was less scary than facing Cazie Sanders in a rage.

Maybe that was how people made themselves face dangerous things. By running away from things more dangerous.

In the bright sunshine, walking through the roof garden toward the aircars, Theresa whimpered. Then she climbed into the car and retrieved from its memory the district coordinates for the camp of the biochemically bonded Livers, trying to breathe evenly and deeply, trying not to give in to the chemistry of her own mind.

The Livers hadn’t moved camp. Theresa was afraid they might have gone somewhere else—Livers did that—but from the air she could see small human figures moving around in groups of three. How far away could they get from each other before they died? Theresa couldn’t remember the exact distance.

She landed, breathing deeply and evenly, but this time no one came running toward the car. Instead, all the triads immediately vanished into the building and closed the door.

She forced herself to get out of the car and walk toward the building, then around it. Under the plastic tarp of the feeding ground sat three naked people who hadn’t noticed the aircar: two women and a man. When they saw Theresa their faces froze, and then she saw the kind of look she usually only saw in the mirror.

They were afraid. Of her. Like Lizzie’s baby had been afraid. This camp had been infected just like Lizzie’s had.

“Hello? Is Josh here?” Josh had been kind to her, before.

The three people stood, huddled close together, and clutched each other’s hands. In a naked tangle they inched toward the flap of plastic that served as the feeding-ground door. Theresa moved in front of the flap, and they halted.

“I want to speak to Josh. And Patty and Mike.”

The names seemed to reassure at least one of the triad. The older woman took a step forward, still holding both her partners’ hands, and said fearfully, “Do you know Jomp, you?”

Jomp. It took Theresa a minute to realize this was Josh-Mike-Patty. She felt a flicker of distaste.

“Yes. I know Josh, and I’m here to see him. Take me to him, please.”

Despite the pounding in her chest, Theresa marveled at herself. She sounded like Cazie. Well, no, maybe not. But at least like Jackson.

The woman hesitated. She was about thirty, small and fair, with a bony face and short hair as pale as Theresa’s own. “Jomp are inside, them. I’ll go in, me, and get them.”

“You might not come back,” Theresa said. “I’m going with you.”

“No! No, no. You stay here, you.”

Theresa merely stepped aside. The triad squeezed past her. As they left the warmth of the sun-magnified enclosure, their naked skin dimpled and goose-bumped. Theresa watched them pull on the jacks dumped in a pile on a wooden shelf, before she moved closer to the fair-haired woman, who shrunk back.

“It’s all right. I won’t hurt you, any of you. I just… want to see Josh. He’ll remember me.” Would he? “What’s your name?”

“We’re Peranla, us.” It came out in a whisper.

Peranla. Percy-Anne-Laura. Or Pearl-Andy-Lateesha. Or… it didn’t matter.

But it should.

“Peranla, I’m going with you to see Josh.”

The triad stopped moving. Almost they stopped breathing. What if they went into a seizure, like Theresa did when she got too frightened? What would Theresa do then? But they didn’t. After a minute they moved in their huddle past Theresa and broke into a clumsy group run around the corner of the factory. Theresa ran after them.

“Open the door! It’s Peranla, us! Open up!”

The door opened, and Peranla tumbled inside. Theresa, astonished at herself, squeezed in with them.

Her eyes took a minute to accustom themselves to the gloom. Over a hundred people, grouped in threes, staring at her. The triads pulled closer together and looked uneasy, but nobody looked terrified. Even Peranla looked less anxious than they had outside. Of course. When Theresa was at home, with familiar people among familiar things, she was less frightened, too. Safer.

Her heart quickened and her throat tightened around her windpipe. “Is… Josh here? Josh?”

“You better leave, you,” said an old man. Several other people nodded.

“Josh? Jomp?”

He came forward slowly, dragging Patty and Mike by the hand. Mike scowled faintly, but Patty, whom Theresa remembered as a scary bitch, trembled and hid her head in Mike’s shoulder. That calmed Theresa’s breathing.

Maybe being the least scared person in a group was almost the same as not being scared at all.

“Josh, I’m Theresa Aranow. I was here last fall. I brought you clothes and Y-cones. You told me about the bonding here, and… and the red syringes.”

Josh nodded, without meeting her eyes.

“And the holo, Josh. You showed me a holo of Miranda Sharifi. She was explaining the new syringes, the ones that she left with you to cause bonding.”

Mike growled, “It don’t having nothing to do with you.”

“I want to see the holo again, Josh. Please. You’ve all seen it lots of times, haven’t you?”

Josh nodded again. Patty looked up from Mike’s shoulder.

“Well, then,” Theresa said as firmly as she could, “you can see it again. Just like you always do. And I’ll watch, too.”

“Okay,” Josh said. “Everybody, you—it’s Miranda time. We are the life and the blood, us.”

“We are the life and the blood,” the crowd responded raggedly, and Theresa could feel relief running over them, clear as falling water. This was a known routine: comforting, safe. The triads moved and jiggled, settling down in front of an ancient holostage in what Theresa would bet were the same places they always sat. After a minute, she sat beside Josh, nearest to the door.

“On,” Mike said. “Miranda time.”

The holostage sprang to life. A pretty, meaningless swirl of color, and then Miranda 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—”

Something was wrong with the holo.

Since her first visit to this camp five months ago, Theresa had spent weeks, months, watching newsholos. They replayed at night behind her eyelids. This one was subtly wrong. The voice was Miranda’s and words were synchronized with Miranda’s moving lips, but not with her body. No, that wasn’t it. Her body didn’t move very much. That was it. The stiffness of Miranda’s body on certain words, plus her movements on others… the rhythm was wrong. And the rhythms in the words, too… Theresa had perfect pitch. She heard the very slight flattening in the wrong places. The holo had been created, not recorded.

Which meant that Miranda had not given this message. Or these red syringes.

Theresa glanced around. The Liver faces were rapt, almost as if they were watching a Lucid Dreamer concert. There must be subliminals in the holo. She lowered her eyes and listened to the rest of the message without watching the visuals.

If the bonding syringes weren’t from Miranda, then who were they from?

Maybe the same people who made the neuropharm these people had breathed in. The neuropharm that made people so afraid of new things. But why?

Jackson had said that nobody except SuperSleepless could create such neuropharms. Nobody but Miranda Sharifi knew enough about the Cell Cleaner to make something that wouldn’t be destroyed by the Change nanos in everybody’s body. Everybody’s but Theresa’s.

“—be together in a new way, a way that creates community, that roots that community in biology itself—”

Doubt grabbed Theresa. What did she know about “biology itself,” or community, or SuperSleepless? Who was she to decide that this recording wasn’t really Miranda? Theresa was a crazy, fearful, unChanged person who had seizures whenever anything got too unfamiliar, who had left her apartment only three times in the last year, who was afraid to go home because her ex-sister-in-law, who was also her only friend, was looking for her. Theresa didn’t know anything.

Except every recorded detail of the life of Leisha Camden.

And with that realization, Theresa knew what she was going to do.

She stood up just as the recording ended. All around her Livers gazed misty-eyed and smiling at their bonded triads. Without which they would die. Wicked, wicked. It wasn’t bonding, it was bondage.

“Give me the holo cartridge, Josh,” Theresa said as firmly as she could manage. She tried to sound like Leisha Camden when Leisha gave orders. Nobody knew Leisha’s life better than Theresa; nobody knew Leisha herself better.

A hundred misty faces stared at her.

“I’m taking it. I need it. I’ll bring it back.” Leisha, decisively telling Jennifer Sharifi that Sanctuary was wrong. Or Leisha telling Calvin Hawke that his anti-Sleepless movement was finished. Leisha: calm, firm, cool. Theresa started, knees shaky, toward the holostage.

“You leave our Miranda-time holo alone, you!” somebody said.

“I’m sorry. I can’t. I need it.” Theresa reached the terminal. But she wasn’t Theresa, she was Leisha. That was the trick. Be Leisha, feel like her. If Theresa could watch a newsgrid and feel what the mother of a dying unChanged baby felt—could feel like she was that mother—then she could be Leisha Camden. It was no different. No different…

Now people stood up, some milling fearfully in tight groups of three, some starting toward her. Mike hesitated, then he and Josh moved in, dragging Patty with them. Mike’s trowel-shaped head was lowered into his neck, his eyes were terrified. For a second, through her own trembling vision, Theresa saw them all as they must look from the outside: four wide-eyed freaks jittering around each other, smelling of fear. No, don’t think like that, don’t see yourself from the outside, see yourself as Leisha. She was Leisha Camden.

“Don’t stop me.” Theresa quavered. Mike broke stride for a moment, then continued toward her.

“I mean it!”

“Mike,” Patty whimpered, “don’t… you can’t…”

Mike whispered, “She can’t take our holo, her… she can’t have it…” He grabbed Theresa’s arm.

The vertigo started, blackness swooping over her brain. Theresa tried to push the vertigo away—Leisha had never fainted!—along with Mike’s hand. She couldn’t. She wasn’t Leisha, calm and firm and cool, she couldn’t ever be Leisha, that was more self-control than she could ever have. Even though being Leisha had seemed to work for a few minutes, Theresa wasn’t Leisha—

Then be somebody not calm and cool.

“Let go of that fucking holo or I’ll tie you in naval knots!” Theresa yelled, and the words were Cazie’s.

Mike dropped her arm and stared at her.

“Get out of my fucking way!”

Part of the crowd drew back; the rest surged timidly forward. Murmurs rose, within and among triads: “Don’t let her take it, us”… “Stop her, you”… “What right does she got”…

In a minute they would overcome their fear and grab her again. No—grab Cazie. She was Cazie. And these people’s brain chemistry now made them afraid of anything unfamiliar, anything they weren’t used to.

“I’m going to cry!” Theresa screamed at top volume. “I’m going to melt the floor! There is nanotech you’ve never seen that lets me do that, I can do that! All I have to do is sing!” She started singing, some song her nanny used to sing to her, only it was too gentle so she started jumping up and down and then spinning around, screaming the words and then changing them to the kinds of obscenities Cazie used when she was mad at Jackson for not doing what Cazie wanted. “You poor deluded son of a bitch, your vision about reality is so limited you don’t see even a fraction of it, let alone a fraction of me, you lack irony Jackson goddamn it to Liver hell can’t you even see that! You pathetic cosseted baby, you’d think you… get the fuck out of my way!”

They did. The crowd shrank back, and some children started to cry. Triads clutched at each other. Screaming, singing, jumping, cursing, whirling, Theresa moved to the door, the cartridge in her hand, while a hundred people—but there must be ninety-nine, right, or a hundred two—looked at her with the same anxious dread Theresa saw daily in the mirror.

She made it outside just before her own nerve broke.

Still, she was able to stumble to the aircar. “Lift!” she gasped at it. “Home…” and then her breath caught and the seizure started and all she could do while it lasted was try to breathe, the car flying itself away from the Liver camp where no small figures sixty feet below came out of the building to watch her leave.

Just before reaching Manhattan East, Theresa gained control of herself. She leaned back against the seat of the car and tried to think.

She couldn’t go home. Cazie might still be there. She had the car fly to the first large empty place, which turned out to be a deserted scooter-race field, and set down where she could see in all directions. She sat clutching the holo cartridge of Miranda and breathing as evenly and deeply as she could.

What had just happened?

She had been Cazie. It had only been pretending, of course, but she had been able to pretend powerfully enough to hold off her fear for a little while, and behave in a way she never could have otherwise. But how could that be? Holo actors, of course, pretended to be other people all the time, so they could be convincing in stories… but Theresa wasn’t a holo actor. And she certainly wasn’t anything like Cazie. Her brain chemistry was different, was damaged somehow so that she was always afraid and anxious and what Jackson called “severely inhibited in the face of novelty”… Had pretending to be somebody else actually changed her brain chemistry for a few minutes? But how could that be?

She could ask Thomas to find out.

But right now, she had to decide where to go, if she didn’t go home. Only she wanted to go home. She didn’t know how long this weird borrowed brain chemistry would last, and she wanted her own things around her, her pink bedroom and her crocheted blanket and Thomas. But if Cazie was there…

If Cazie was there, Theresa would just become somebody who could tell Cazie this wasn’t a good time to talk. Somebody who could say, “I’m sorry, but I’m tired and I need to sleep now.” Even if Theresa could only pretend to be that person for a minute. A minute might be enough, surely she could be somebody else for another minute… Leisha Camden. Leisha had always been calm and firm. Theresa would be Leisha Camden, calmly arguing the case for Sleepless rights with other lawyers, and Cazie would…

Cazie would override Theresa and chew her into tiny bits.

Theresa couldn’t be Leisha Camden in front of Cazie. It would be like propping yourself up with drinking straws in front of a hurricane. But maybe she could be Leisha Camden in front of herself. Pretend to have Leisha’s brain for just a minute, while she thought where to go and what to do. Leisha, who met problems head-on, trying to use reason to solve them…

If Leisha wanted to find out what was known about the fake holo of Miranda, she would go to the place most likely to know. Wherever it happened to be. Even Selene. But Selene wasn’t answering messages, and even if Theresa could nerve herself to space travel… but she couldn’t. She knew that. But maybe she wouldn’t have to go quite as far as Selene.

Theresa’s grip tightened on the holo cartridge. Could she really do this, even if she was pretending to be Leisha? Fly to an airport, hire a plane all by herself… no, it was too hard. Her breathing got ragged just thinking about it.

Then she thought about going home—and trying to avoid telling Cazie where Jackson was.

Theresa put her hands over her face, then straightened. She wasn’t Theresa Aranow, she was Leisha Camden. And thinking that would make her feel different, so her brain chemistry would shift just a little… She was Leisha Camden. She was.

“Manhattan East Airfield. Automatic coordinates,” she said to the car, and her voice did sound subtly different to her own terrified ears.

As the car lifted, Theresa had another thought. Take a neuropharm, Jackson always said. And Theresa never would, because she had been afraid of losing her special gift of pain, and the place it was supposed to lead her. She had always been afraid of using neuropharms to become somebody else.

Despite herself, Theresa laughed. It came out as a whimper.

She wondered who she would actually find, being whom else, in New Mexico.

The hardest part, it turned out, was hiring the pilot.

Theresa walked into Manhattan East’s airfield building on Lexington Avenue. It was a sleek old-fashioned building with wall programming entirely in shifting metals. People hurried past her toward various terminals or various doors. A group of men and women dressed in formal sarongs, laughing and joking. A man in a black holosuit, carrying a remote and a sheaf of printouts. A pleasant-faced elderly woman traveling alone. Theresa had just worked up enough nerve to speak to the woman when a round featureless robocam the size of a human head floated up to her.

“You’ve been standing still for two minutes, ma’am. May I help you with anything?”

“Oh, yes,” Theresa blurted to the floater. “I need… I want to hire a private plane. With a pilot. To fly the plane to… to New Mexico.”

“Our charter-plane booking service can be contacted from any customer terminal, ma’am. If there’s anything else I can—”

“But I don’t know how!”

“Excuse me, ma’am, while I run self-diagnostics.” The robocam whirred softly. “My programming shows no error in sensory functioning. You are a genemod adult?”

“Yes. I’m… I’m an adult. But I still don’t know how to use a customer terminal.” She could feel color flame in her face.

“Would you like me to demonstrate the system?”

“Oh, yes. Please.”

The robocam led her to a row of terminals. Theresa could at least recognize a credit-retina scan. She stood docilely against the screen until a pleasant low voice said, “Welcome to Manhattan East Airfield. Ms. Aranow. Desired flight number?”

The robocam said, “Charter plane service, please.”

“Certainly,” the system said.

Rows of writing appeared on the terminal. Theresa felt her color return; she was such a slow reader. But the robocam said, “Where do you wish to go, Ms. Aranow? And when do you wish to leave?”

“To New Mexico. Near Taos. And I want to leave right now. With… with a…” How did one ask for a pilot who wasn’t too scary? Theresa took a despairing step backward.

“Third flight requirement not understood. Please repeat,” the customer terminal said.

“Flying with somebody safe!”

“Three pilots with triple-A safety ratings are available within the next thirty minutes for domestic charter. Rush charges apply. Flying records displayed. Do you wish comlink with any of these three?”

The flying records were more small printing. But there were also pictures: three genemod-attractive faces. But not, somehow, donkey. No, of course not—these were techs. “That one. The woman. A comlink, yes.”

The pilot came on-line immediately. She looked in her late thirties, a strong face without makeup, all the beauty in the firm austere planes. Her voice, too, was firm and austere. “Ms. Aranow? You wish a pilot for an immediate flight to New Mexico?”

“Yes. No, I… don’t know.”

The pilot’s image leaned forward, studying the image of Theresa. “You don’t know?”

“No. Yes, I mean, I do know. I’m not going, I don’t need a pilot. It was a mistake.” She stumbled away from the terminal. The calm, strong voice stopped her.

“Ms. Aranow, the floater beside you will lead you directly to my plane. We can take off immediately. If you are ill, I can sent a go-’bot for you.”

“No, I… all right. I’m coming.”

She fixed her eyes on the floater, willing herself to see that and nothing else. Just a round gray ball, it wasn’t scary, just follow it without thinking… like Cazie would.

No, Cazie wouldn’t. Cazie would be flying her own plane to New Mexico.

All right, forget Cazie, she couldn’t be Cazie, but she needed to be somebody else because she, Theresa, couldn’t do this by herself, she could feel herself slipping into panic, who could she be, she hardly knew anyone but Leisha and Cazie…

And Jackson. Take a neuropharm, Tessie. All right, she was Theresa on a neuropharm. She was somebody who was chemically calm, someone who believed the world made sense—

“Hello, Ms. Aranow. I’m Pilot First Class Jane Martha Olivetti.”

Theresa was there already. The plane loomed beside them, even though Theresa didn’t remember riding the air field maglev from Manhattan East, or crossing the tarmac. Only now did she realize that the field was unshielded, or only peripherally shielded; this was real weather. Cold April wind. She shivered as she climbed into Pilot Olivetti’s plane.

“There are tranquilizer patches in the green box on that rack,” the pilot said in her calm voice. “EndorKiss in the red, HalluFun in the yellow. Sleep-Ease in the brown.”

Theresa looked longingly at the brown box. But most patches, Jackson said, were prepared for Changed bodies. He’d warned her not to use anything not adjusted for her unChanged chemistry.

“No, thank you. Just… just a blanket.” She was shivering, even though the plane was heated.

Somewhere over hills still topped with snow, Theresa fell asleep naturally. She woke when the pilot said, “Ms. Aranow, this is Taos. Do you want to set down here or at some private airfield?”

“Do you know where the airfield is for… for La Solana? Where Leisha Camden once lived?”

Pilot Olivetti turned in her seat and stared at Theresa. “Of course. There used to be crowds of reporters and tourists going there all the time. And lately, people wanting to talk to Richard Sharifi about sending messages to his daughter. But it won’t do you any good to go there—Richard Sharifi never comes out. The most you’ll get is the standard recorded message.”

Theresa closed her eyes. What had she been thinking? Of course she wasn’t the first one to try to contact Miranda through La Solana. Probably everybody in the world had already tried—politicians and important people like that. And if Richard Sharifi didn’t see them, there was no reason he would see Theresa Aranow. She was a fool.

What would Cazie do?

“We’re here now,” she said to the pilot. “Go to La Solana.”

Pilot Olivetti shrugged and spoke to the plane.

Theresa saw the compound long before they reached it. A pale blue semi-ovoid on the desert floor, it shone as featureless and perfect as a robin’s egg. Terry Mwakambe, Miranda Sharifi’s most gifted practical physicist, had designed the shield for Leisha. There was nothing like it anywhere on Earth, except around the deserted island of Huevos Verdes, where Miranda and her people had created the Change syringes.

The shield wasn’t Y-energy, but something else—Theresa didn’t know what. It extended under the ground as well as through the air. Nothing with any DNA content not stored in the security banks got through the blue dome: not birds or worms or microbes. Nor did anything unaccompanied by DNA that was stored in the data banks: not ’bots or missiles or rocks. The shield also kept out all but a narrow range of radiation. And nothing that wasn’t nuclear could destroy the shield itself.

Theresa walked from the plane to the half-buried robin’s egg. Desert sun hit her uncovered head. A small wind stirred the incredible pile of rubble heaped against the shining blue. Stacks of holo cartridges. A child’s doll. A tattered American flag. Plastic flowers, bloody handkerchiefs, the bleached skull of some animal, wrecking tools, each bent and twisted. And a sealed, tiny coffin. Theresa’s gorge rose. Was it just symbolic, or did the coffin hold somebody’s unChanged baby, dead of a disease that could have been cured by more Change syringes?

A section of blue wall shimmered into a huge screen, ten feet square. It held the image of a man who appeared to be in his forties, although Theresa knew he was actually seventy-seven. The dark eyes above the heavy black beard looked weary.

“This is Richard Sharifi, Miranda Sharifi’s father. There is no admittance to La Solana under any circumstances. If you wish to speak a message for Miranda Sharifi, tell the recorder when you want it to start. All messages for Miranda will be beamed to Selene daily. No physical object you leave outside these walls will ever be retrieved or examined. Thank you.” The image disappeared.

That was it. Theresa clasped her hands in front of her. “Recorder start.”

“Recorder on.”

“My name is Theresa Aranow. You don’t know me. I’m… I’m not anybody. But there are babies dying from not being Changed—”

She stopped. Richard and Miranda Sharifi already knew that. What could she say that might interest them, convince them… of what? That people needed help? Who was she to think she could help anyone? Some days she could barely get out of bed in the morning.

But not this day. She tried again.

“I’m not anybody. I’m not even Changed. I wanted… I needed to keep what I am because I’m not normal for a donkey, and if I lose that then I lose Theresa. I lose… the way I’m supposed to be, to find what… I’m looking for.”

Something was happening inside her. The rush of competence she’d felt when she was being Cazie returned, only not because she was being someone else. Because she was being the most real, bedrock Theresa. The words rushed out the same way they had when she’d talked to Sister Anne at the convent for the Sisters of Merciful Heaven.

“I could be Changed, and maybe it wouldn’t matter. I’m expensive like I am, I know. I have to eat real food. I have to have a house kept free of germs. I have to have clean water. All those things cost money, and if I didn’t have so much money, and if my brother wasn’t a doctor, then it would be wrong for me not to be Changed because I would be such a burden on everybody else. But I do have money, and I do have Jackson, and so it would be wrong for me to arrange things so I don’t hurt. I have to hurt. Everybody needs to hurt in some way, or they get… sloppy. No, that’s not the word. Miranda—”

She was talking directly to Miranda, who wasn’t even on Earth, but that didn’t matter. Theresa rushed on.

“Miranda, I don’t know the word for how people get when they can’t feel hurt and alone. But something happens to them. When they take those kinds of neuropharms all the time they get so they can’t feel themselves, and then pretty soon they can’t feel other people either. They get like Cazie’s friends, and maybe even Cazie herself… I don’t know. Cazie is good underneath. But she did so many inhalers to cover up her hurt that pretty soon she couldn’t see Jackson’s hurt, and then pretty soon after that she couldn’t see Jackson at all. He’s just another piece of furniture in her life, or another ’bot.

“People have to hurt. They have to let themselves feel the hurt. They have to make themselves stand it, and not take it away with EndorKiss or neuropharms or sex or making money… it’s the only way we know we should do something different. That we should keep on looking harder, inside us and also inside everybody else… You can’t just go around the pain, you have to go through it to get to the place on the other side where your soul is… oh, I don’t know! I’m not smart enough to know! Something went wrong in my embryonic genemod, I’m not smart like Jackson or Cazie… but I do know that you have to give us more Change syringes, so babies can live long enough to even feel their own hurt and start to learn from it. Maybe you shouldn’t have given us the Change syringes at all. But you did, and now the Livers can’t survive without them because we donkeys just dumped them all, and we control the resources. So you have to give us more Change syringes so those children even live long enough to look for what matters.

“But there’s something else wrong, too. There’s a camp in New York—the state, not the city—that has a new kind of Change syringe. Red ones. And it’s doing something to those Livers. They’re bonding by pheromones or something in threes, so that if they go far from each other, they die. Really die. And the syringes came with a holo cartridge that has you in it, explaining the syringes are another gift from Miranda Sharifi. The Livers believe that. Only it’s wrong. The holo is a fake, and the new syringes just make it even harder for people to feel their own individual hurt and see each other. The triads are all blurred together in a blob, they’re not real people anymore, they have the comfort of never feeling alone but unless they can feel alone how can they ever feel their own hurt and then start to go through it to—”

“What new syringes?” Richard Sharifi said.

Theresa blinked. The image on the shimmering blue wall was real-time. Richard Sharifi’s sad dark eyes stared at her steadily, waiting for an answer.

“The… the new syringes somebody left at the… the camp in the mountains in New York, at… at…” She couldn’t remember the coordinates. “Red syringes, and there was a holo of Miranda that wasn’t really Miranda…”

Richard Sharifi turned his head. He frowned and said, “No—” His huge image abruptly shrank, until Theresa was looking at a screen no more than three inches square. On it Richard Sharifi was replaced by a plain woman with wild dark hair held by a red ribbon.

“Theresa. This is Miranda Sharifi.”

Theresa gasped, “Are you… are you sending from Selene?”

“Please tell me everything you can about this new syringe and holo cartridge left with the Liver tribe. Start at the beginning, go slow, and don’t leave anything out. It’s very important.”

A second three-inch-square image appeared—Richard Sharifi again, scowling fiercely. He said, “You should know that we have scanned you, your plane, and the area for any recording equipment. Your pilot is not observing you, and even if she were, this screen at that distance is too small for even the most powerful Sleeper zoom lenses to see. If you state to anyone that this conversation ever occurred, your chances of being believed are very low. Your medical records indicate—”

“Unnecessary, Daddy,” Miranda said, and now she was scowling, too. The tiny image of Richard Sharifi disappeared.

Theresa blurted, “You’re not at Selene at all, are you? You’re here…”

“Tell me everything about the new syringes, Theresa. Starting with how you happened to be in a Liver camp. No, don’t panic—I can’t send help out to you. Breathe deeply, look at this screen, Theresa, look at it—”

She did, gasping for air, through waves of panicky blackness. Around Miranda shimmered subtle shapes and colors, what were they, she felt a little calmer… Subliminals. Theresa breathed.

“Those… those are like a Drew Arlen concert!”

An expression of pain, complicated and deep, passed over Miranda’s face. “Tell me about the new syringes.”

Theresa did, growing calmer as she talked. Miranda listened without ever blinking her dark eyes. Dark like her father’s, too dark to be Cazie’s… But Theresa wasn’t pretending to be Cazie. She wasn’t even pretending to be Leisha Camden. She was Theresa Aranow.

“Miranda… turn off the subliminals. Please. I can… can do this. I think.”

For the first, and last, time, Theresa saw Miranda Sharifi smile.

When she was done talking, Theresa said, “But if you didn’t make the new syringes, who did? Jackson said we donkeys don’t have any biotech like that, that sophisticated—”

“Here’s what I want you to do, Theresa. Listen carefully, I want you to go home, and tell nobody about your visit here, or the new syringes. Not even Jackson. Also—this is very important—don’t speak anything about this into any terminal. Not even if you think it’s completely freestanding.”

Theresa put out her hand, but stopped short of the tiny image on the blue wall. Her fingers hung suspended. Hot wind stirred the rubble of weathered offerings at her feet.

“Miranda—why did you stop the Change syringes?”

“We made a mistake. We didn’t intend—our goal was to make the Livers free of donkey domination. Autotropic. We didn’t know they… you… would so quickly regress to infantile dependence. And now none of us know what the next step should be, because we can’t find the equations to predict outcomes with any degree of accuracy. We’re all here trying so hard…” The holo image shuddered. Miranda raised her hands, let them fall helplessly. “An enormous mistake. When I see the newsgrids of babies dying, of unChanged children suffering, when those pleas are rebeamed from Selene… We thought we could control it all for you! Like your ‘gods.’ We thought… we forgot…”

Theresa finished the sentence. “You forgot to look hard enough inside yourselves.”

“Yes,” Miranda whispered. “We did. And we caused chaos.”

“But you only meant to—”

“And now we’re trying desperately to find a way out of that chaos, a scientific solution you can synthesize yourselves, without us, the right substance… a solution you can control, and won’t pervert. But, Theresa, we don’t think like you, or react like you, or feel like you.”

It was a plea. Theresa saw that Miranda—Miranda Sharifi!—hurt with a depth of pain Theresa could only imagine. She caught her breath. The two women stared at each other, and something passed between them that, it seemed to Theresa, she had never shared with anyone else in her life, not even Jackson.

She said softly, “Yes, you do. You feel exactly like me.”

Miranda didn’t smile. “Perhaps. Go now, Theresa. We’ll take care of the new syringes that destroy even more freedom than we already destroyed.”

The blue shimmering wall went blank.

Dazed, Theresa returned to the plane. The pilot waited, watching a newsgrid. She blanked the screen as Theresa climbed in. La Solana was already out of sight when Theresa finally spoke.

“Do you know how long it takes for a message to get to the moon and back? By the fastest way?”

The pilot glanced at her quizzically. “You mean, if you decided to transmit to Luna City and they answered immediately?”

“Yes. Isn’t there a… a lag when people are speaking to each other? Of a few seconds, at least?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.” Of course, that was human technology. Jackson said the Supers had all sorts of technology that humans didn’t. We don’t think like you, or react like you…

“Oh, my God!” Pilot Olivetti said.

“What? What is it?”

The plane suddenly leaped forward with an acceleration that crushed Theresa against the back of her seat. Then the sky filled with blinding light. The pilot cried out.

The light faded; moments later the plane shuddered as if it would come apart. Roaring assaulted Theresa’s ears. The plane righted, and flew on.

The brilliant light was behind her. But the sun was ahead, to the southeast… how could that bright a light be where the sun wasn’t? Theresa turned to look out the rear window, and saw the top of the mushroom cloud rising above the horizon.

“We took two hundred forty rads,” Pilot Olivetti gasped, looking at her screens. “Ms. Aranow… prepare to be very sick.”

“But… but what happened?”

“Someone took out La Solana. With a nuclear weapon. Minutes earlier, and we would be dead.”

“But… why?”

“How should I know? But God, if Selene retaliates…” She turned on the newsgrid.

Theresa put her head in her hands. Selene couldn’t retaliate. Nobody was at Selene. Miranda Sharifi and all her SuperSleepless had been in La Solana—we’re all here trying so hard to find a solution—and now they were all dead. They would never give more Change syringes to save dying children, or find a solution to humans’ being so dependent on the syringes, or stop whoever was making Jomp and the other triads even more dependent and afraid. Somebody had bombed La Solana to kill Richard Sharifi, or to destroy Miranda’s old home, or to attract attention to some cause of their own. The SuperSleepless were all dead.

And Theresa was the only person on Earth who knew it.

Interlude

TRANSMISSION DATE: April 4, 2121

TO: Selene Base, Moon

VIA: Lubbock Enclave Ground Station, Satellite S-65 (Israel)

MESSAGE TYPE: Unencrypted

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

ORIGINATING GROUP: “the Carter tribe,” Texas

MESSAGE:

To Miranda Sharifi,

The Carter family ranched West Texas for 250 years, us. We stick together. Now there’s no more ranching, it, but we still stick together. I’m Molly Carter, me. I got six kids, seventeen grandkids, twenty great-grandkids, more on the way. But we got no more Change needles for the new great-grandkids. I’m asking you, me, to please send us more.

My son Ray Junior is taking this cartridge, him, to a radio place in Lubbock to send to you in space.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

Fifteen

Nothing, Jackson thought, was ever what you expected.

When he’d taken Shockey, Lizzie, Dirk, and Vicki to Kelvin-Castner Pharmaceuticals, he expected a difficult ordeal. He expected panic after panic from the Livers over being in an environment that would have been strange and unsettling to them even before they’d breathed in whatever neuropharm had made them so anxious and fearful of anything new. He visualized physical struggles with Shockey to provide tissue samples, and hysterical protest from Lizzie when samples were taken from Dirk. He counted on Vicki to help with these hypothetical struggles. Then, he expected, he and Thurmond Rogers would have a long intense talk about the implications of a drug that was not subject to the Cell Cleaner. The tissue analysis would be a top priority for Rogers, so the report would come swiftly.

None of that had happened.

Instead, his aircar had been met on the roof of Kelvin-Castner, inside the Boston Harborside Enclave, by two high-quality security ’bots. The ’bots had efficiently grabbed everyone but Jackson and fitted them with breathers that had instantly knocked them out. Even Vicki. The ’bots had then loaded the four unconscious people onto floaters and, ignoring Jackson’s protests, guided them down an elevator to a lab. Here more ’bots had stripped Shockey, Lizzie, and the baby and had taken samples: saliva, cerebrospinal fluid, blood, urine, feces, and cells from every organ. The samples were extracted with the long nanobuilt needles, their walls only a few atoms thick, of state-of-the-art biopsy. Next had come the scans, everything from skin conductance to brain imaging under various stimuli. No actual person appeared. It was clear to Jackson that this procedure had already been in place.

How long had Kelvin-Castner been abducting research samples from Livers who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, protest?

Jackson protested. “Thurmond, I want to talk to you!” But all Jackson had gotten was a bland, prerecorded holo: “Hi, Jack. Sorry I can’t attend to you personally, but I’m in the middle of something I can’t leave. If you want anything to eat or drink while the samples are being taken, just ask the room system. I’ll call you when I have anything to report. My regards to your sister.”

“Thurmond, damn it… room system on!”

“Room system on,” the room said. Needles so thin they were barely visible descended simultaneously into the naked bellies of Shockey, Lizzie, and Dirk. Vicki, still clothed, lay on her floater in the corner, breathing whatever her mask supplied her with.

“Give me a priority link to Thurmond Rogers!”

“I’m sorry—this system can provide only recording capability and dietary orders.”

“Then link me to the building system!”

“I’m sorry—this system can provide only recording capability and dietary orders.”

“This is a medical emergency. Give me the emergency system.”

“I’m sorry—this system—”

“System off!”

He could record a blistering message for Rogers. He could remove Vicki’s breathing mask and see if she could dip the system. But it was Lizzie who was the dipper, not Vicki, and Lizzie at the moment had a thin flexible probe down her throat, taking cell samples from her bronchial tree. So Jackson did nothing, fuming and pacing for an hour, refusing even to sit in the room’s one comfortable chair, out of either anger or ludicrous self-flagellation.

When Kelvin-Castner had taken all the human pieces it wanted, the security ’bots took Shockey, Lizzie, Vicki, and the baby back to the roof, efficiently loaded them into Jackson’s car, stripped off their breathing masks, and floated away. A minute later their lungs cleared and they woke up.

“Well.” Lizzie said, “what are we waiting for? Aren’t we going inside?” And Dirk had cowered against his mother’s neck, wailing in fear because the world held more than his mother.

Jackson flew back to the camp, and the three Livers disappeared inside. Vicki said, “I’m not happy about this, Jackson. You should have revived me. I had questions of my own, you know.”

“You wouldn’t have got any answers.”

“Nonetheless.” She scowled at him. “Promise me you won’t go back to Kelvin-Castner, or even talk to Rogers, without including me. Lizzie’s system can multilink us.”

“I don’t think—”

“I do. Promise me.”

And Jackson—out of weariness or resignation or consideration or something—had promised.

Since then, nothing had happened. Four days passed, and Thurmond Rogers neither contacted Jackson nor returned his calls. Theresa spent all her time in the upper-floor study that Jackson wasn’t supposed to know about, not appearing even for meals. She left periodic messages for Jackson that she was all right. Jackson paced and fidgeted and forgot to eat, until his body rebelled and he fell asleep naked in the feeding room while his body absorbed the nutrients it needed.

The fourth day, very early in the morning, Cazie called. Jackson didn’t answer. He rolled over in his darkened bedroom so that his back faced the wall screen, and let the message record.

“Jackson, come on-link. I know you’re there.”

All of a sudden Jackson was annoyed. Why did she always assume she knew everything about him?

“Listen,” Cazie said, “we need to talk. I just received a private message from an old friend of mine, Alexander Castner of Kelvin-Castner Pharmaceuticals. I think I introduced you once, at some party—do you remember him?”

Slowly Jackson turned over in bed to stare at the screen. In the lower right corner, under Cazie’s face, glittered the encryption signal. She was sending to him on a heavily shielded link.

“Alex is contacting several major investment players, very privately. Kelvin-Castner is onto something really big. Something they want to develop very quickly… Alex thinks his firm can get an entirely new pharmaceutical system to the patent stage before anybody else. Get this—it bypasses the Cell Cleaner to effect permanent pharmacodynamic processes. The applications in the pleasure market alone are staggering. You could eliminate inhalers!

“But Alex doesn’t know who else is working on this, or how close they are to applying for a patent, so he has to move as fast as possible. He needs massive commitments of capital, talent, computer time. Jack, TenTech should get in on this, early and hard. It’s the kind of opportunity that could move us into the International Fifty. I’ve pulled together some preliminary figures for you—and for Theresa, too, of course. But we need to commit soon, today if possible—damn it. Jackson, answer the link!”

Jackson climbed slowly out of bed. In the dark he pulled on yesterday’s clothes.

“All right,” Cazie said, “maybe you’re not there. But where are you? I already called that ridiculous woman at your pet Liver camp, Vicki What’s-her-name, and she said you weren’t there. If you’re spending the night with somebody, when you call in for your messages, please contact me on a shielded line at my office at TenTech. If you don’t—”

“You’ll run me to earth anyway,” Jackson finished for her.

“—I’ll run you to earth anyway, darling. This is too big to let go.”

Jackson left the apartment. In the east, the sun was just beginning to stain the sky pink. The real, actual sun—at the moment the Manhattan East dome was clear. He strode through the roof garden, with its theatrically unfurling morning glories and trumpet lilies, toward his car. He couldn’t remember ever being this angry in his life.

Vicki waited for him outside the tribe building, a solitary figure in the pearly April cold.

“The charming Cazie called here first,” she said as she got into his car. “I figured something was happening, and I knew you’d remember your promise to take me with you to Kelvin-Castner.”

“How did you know that?” Jackson said grimly.

“Because I knew that somewhere deep down you were capable of looking like you do now. Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Kelvin-Castner is trying to create a patentable drug-delivery system out of what they’ve learned from Shockey’s and Dirk’s brain scans and tissue samples. They’re less interested in finding an antidote for the inhibition anxiety than in the commercial possibilities for the pleasure market of something that bypasses the Cell Cleaner. They’ve asked TenTech for massive investment.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Vicki said, almost admiringly. “Your ex-wife sure picks up the scent fast, doesn’t she? Is she part bloodhound?”

“Do you think we should take Lizzie with us?” Jackson asked. “If they deny us entrance, I can’t datadip, and neither can you.”

“And neither can Lizzie in the half second before the security ’bots hit her. Be realistic, Jackson. She’s not a SuperSleepless.”

Jackson lifted the car. Vicki said, “Don’t you even want to know what I told Cazie when she called here?”

“No.”

“I told her that as far as I knew, you were off fucking Jennifer Sharifi now that she’s out of jail and since she just happens to have the same coloring as Cazie herself.”

Despite himself, Jackson smiled.

Nothing prevented the car from landing on the roof of Kelvin-Castner. To Jackson’s surprise, nothing even prevented him and Vicki from descending the elevator to Kelvin-Castner’s top-floor lobby. The lobby was endless baroque variations of a double-helix motif, a precise centimeter over the line into vulgar. Jackson remembered Ellie Lester.

A hostess holo flickered into place a yard in front of him. She was a middle-aged blonde with coffee-colored skin, attractive but serious enough to be reassuring. “Welcome to Kelvin-Castner. How can I help you?”

Jackson said, “Jackson Aranow to see Thurmond Rogers.”

“I’m afraid Dr. Rogers is off-site today. Would you like to record a message?”

“Then let me talk to Alexander Castner.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Castner’s schedule doesn’t permit him time for unscheduled appointments. Would you like to record a message?”

Jackson said to Vicki, “We should have brought Lizzie after all.”

“Wouldn’t have helped. The second she accessed anything the security system would gas us all. I mean, it’s a neuropharm company, isn’t it?”

Of course it was. Jackson wasn’t thinking clearly. Anger did that. He’d have to be more careful.

Vicki said pleasantly to the hostess holo, “I would like to record a message for Mr. Castner. Or perhaps he’d prefer to have this one real-time. Please tell Mr. Castner that this is Dr. Jackson Aranow of TenTech, Cazie Sanders’s firm. That’s ‘Aranow,’ ‘TenTech.’ ‘Sanders’—I’m sure one of those names is in your priority flagging programs as of yesterday. Tell Mr. Castner that Dr. Aranow has retained legal counsel to sue for the tissue samples, plus all resulting patents, taken from citizens Shockey Toor and Dirk Francy while they were unadvised by attorneys. Counsel has already received sworn depositions of all events, plus full knowledge of our current visit. A cease-work injunction from a federal judge against K-C is possible, as is considerable industry attention, which Mr. Castner might find premature. Also tell Mr. Castner that Dr. Aranow and his sister control the voting stock of TenTech, and that no investment commitment can possibly be forthcoming without both their cooperation. Have I engaged your priority flagging programs?”

The holo beamed at Vicki. “Yes, my priority flagging is engaged and transmitting. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thank you. We’ll just wait here for Mr. Castner’s reply. Or possibly Dr. Rogers’s.”

“Dr. Rogers is off-site today.” the hostess said. She was still beaming.

“Of course he is,” Vicki said. She sank onto a sofa covered in a double-helix paisley print and patted the seat beside her. “Sit down, Jackson. We have to allow a little time for them to hold a council of war to determine who fucked up by contacting Cazie when Rogers was ripping you off.”

Jackson said, “We’re probably being overheard.”

“I certainly hope so.”

He sat down and said in a low voice, “Where did you learn to do that?”

Vicki’s face grew suddenly weary. “You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Another time. Ah, such a prompt response. Five points for efficiency.”

A wall screen glowed and the image of Thurmond Rogers appeared, smiling stiffly. “Jackson. How are you? I just got in and the building system informed me you were here, and there was some sort of mix-up about not talking to you. Sorry.”

Vicki murmured, “Oh, those computer glitches.”

“I was going to call you this morning,” Rogers continued. A lump of flesh at the collar of his lab coat worked up and down. “We have a preliminary report on the changes in your subjects’ brains.”

Jackson said, “Then come out and give it to me. In person. I’m not going to assault you, Thurmond.”

The image laughed uncomfortably. “Of course not. But I strained my back getting out of my car, and until the Cell Cleaner takes care of it. I’d just as soon not move.”

Jackson said evenly, “Then we’ll come to you.”

“Let me start by telling you what tests we ran on your subjects, and the results. We found… is that necessary?”

Vicki had taken a recorder out of the pocket of her jacks and aimed it at Rogers’s image. She said, “Absolutely. Let the record read that Dr. Rogers has sealed himself in to the K-C biohazard labs because he’s found out something truly alarming about this new neuropharm, and he’s taking not the teeniest risk that it might somehow reach his own highly expensive and educated brain. Am I right, Dr. Rogers?”

Rogers looked at her with loathing. “As I started to say, we’ve run exhaustive analyses on the subjects’ medical scans and tissue samples. What we found, Jackson, is only preliminary, but extraordinary. The subjects breathed in a genemod airborne molecule, probably an engineered virus. The molecule itself is unavailable for analysis, having broken down sometime after it reached the brain. We’ve been able to trace its path, and make very rough guesses at a partial composition from its pharmacodynamic effects.”

Rogers took a deep breath. It seemed to calm him, although the lump of flesh still worked up and down at his collar. Jackson wondered what he’d mixed into the air of his office. “The molecule, whatever it was, apparently was designed to affect multiple neural sites as both agonist and antagonist, targeted—”

Vicki interrupted, “And in English comprehensible to lawyers, those terms would mean…”

“Jackson, is this necessary?”

“Apparently so,” Jackson said.

Rogers stared stonily at Vicki. “An ‘agonist’ activates specific neural receptors, causing them to change biochemistry. An ‘antagonist’ blocks other receptor subtypes.”

“Thank you,” Vicki said sweetly. Jackson had the sudden impression she’d already known that, and was making Rogers jump through hoops.

Rogers continued, “The molecule seems to have had high-binding affinity for receptor or receptors in the amygdaloid complex. JEM scans show high recent blood-supply activity there, in areas of the limbic, and in the right temporal area of the cerebral cortex. Apparently the molecule caused a very complex cascade effect, in which the release of certain biogenic amines caused the release of other chemicals, and so on. We’ve already identified changes in the folding of twelve different peptides, and that’s probably only the beginning. There are also changes in the timing of synchronous neural firings.”

Jackson said, “Does the sum of your changes point to permanent changes in the NMDA receptors?”

“I’m afraid it does. The changes seem to include alteration of amine creation, including the presence of amines that only appear under pathological conditions. Plus changes in receptor composition, neurotransmitter processes in synapses, and even internal cellular response. Although those particular findings are especially preliminary. There’s also significant cell death of the kind mapped for trauma or prolonged stress. The neural architecture itself has been rewired.”

Jackson was on his feet and pacing before he knew it. “What data matches do you get for the neural maps?”

“I’m coming to that. The subjects both showed high and invariant heart rate, even while asleep. High skin conductance. Marked stress at the cellular level. Cerebrospinal fluid, urine, saliva, blood—everything shows consistent neurotransmitter breakdown products. The map is of a low threshold of limbic-hypothalamic arousal, high chronic stress, strong inhibition rooted in permanent changes in the primary efferent pathway from the amygdalae.”

Vicki said again, “English, please.”

It was Jackson who answered her. “The neuropharm—whatever it is—has given Shockey and Dirk the biochemistry of someone born severely inhibited. Afraid of anything new, fearful of separation from familiar people, unwilling to alter known routines because doing that produces painful anxiety.”

Vicki said, “Sharon’s baby… little Callie…”

“Yes. It’s normal for babies to have stranger anxiety and novelty inhibition at around six to nine months. But then maturation mutes the stranger anxiety, as complex brain functions suppress more primitive ones. But this… this is a regression to the inhibition of the most severely inhibited toddler. Permanently. And without altering DNA or relying on the ongoing presence of foreign chemicals, both of which the Cell Cleaner would destroy. A natural, pronounced fear of anything new or different.”

Like Theresa, Jackson thought but didn’t say aloud. A camp full of Theresas. A nation full of Theresas? Were more tribes infected?

“But why?” Vicki said.

Rogers looked at her with distaste. “The role of the nervous system is to generate behavior. Obviously someone is experimenting with this kind of behavior.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I don’t have an answer,” Rogers said. “What do you expect in four days? Each neuron in the brain can receive up to a hundred thousand contacts from the other neurons they’re wired to in pyramid. Plus, there are receptor sites on other organs beside the brain; there are immense individual variations in neural architecture and drug response; there are—”

“All right, all right,” Vicki said, “The real question is, what can you do? Can you create a neuropharm to reverse the effects?”

“Jackson,” Rogers said, “tell your friend that it’s a hell of a lot easier to damage living organisms than to reverse damage. Tell her—”

“—that you had no trouble seeing a fast way to exploit the so-called damage,” Vicki struck in. “Study how the neural architecture can be permanently altered to bypass the Cell Cleaner, then adapt it to profitable pleasure drugs. Isn’t that what you told Cazie Sanders, hhmmmm? So you must see at least a possibility of finding loopholes in this supposedly unalterable biochemistry.”

Jackson said, “She’s right. Thurmond, and you know it. Kelvin-Castner should be looking for ways to counteract this.”

“We will, of course,” Rogers said. “But the enclaves have defenses against missile delivery of biologicals. And individual buildings can be made self-circulating. So can air masks. We might not want to move too precipitously on a counteractive. For the overall civic good.”

It took Jackson’s breath away. Rogers was saying that donkeys would probably not be affected by the inhibiting neuropharm, if they were careful. Only Livers. And Livers who were inhibited, afraid of novelty, terrified of separation from the familiar—such Livers would be a much reduced threat. They wouldn’t attack enclaves looking for Change syringes. They wouldn’t attack enclaves at all. They would just live their inhibited, frightened lives in quiet desperation, out of sight and mind of donkeys, until the next generation’s unChanged susceptibility to disease killed most of them off.

Vicki said softly, “You son of a bitch.”

Rogers grimaced; Jackson guessed he’d let his anger carry him away, and now regretted it. “I don’t, of course,” Rogers said, “speak in any official capacity for Kelvin-Castner. I don’t possess that authority.”

Vicki said, in that same soft deadly tone, “And I’m sure as well that Kelvin-Castner—”

“Wait,” Jackson said. “Wait.”

They both looked at him: one real person, one holo image, He tried to think. “The real question here is who. Who created this neuropharm? For what reason?”

“That should be obvious,” Rogers said. “It’s extremely subtle and advanced biochemistry. The most likely candidate is the SuperSleepless. Miranda Sharifi already remade human bodies; now she’s after human minds.”

“For what reason?”

Rogers said angrily, “How can we know? They’re not human.”

Jackson ignored that. “Wait. You said the biochemistry is very advanced. So advanced that it had to be the Supers? Or just advanced beyond what the known scientific establishment can achieve now, without absolutely being beyond normal human capacity?”

The holo image was silent.

“Answer carefully. Thurmond. This is vitally important.”

Rogers said reluctantly, “It’s not absolutely beyond normal humans with what we already know about the brain. But it would take a combination of genius, luck, and massive resources. The easier explanation is Miranda Sharifi. Occam’s razor.”

“—isn’t the only way to shave,” Vicki said. “All right, you’ve laid out the basics. Now give us printouts of your actual data.”

Rogers said, “That’s proprietary to Kelvin-Castner.”

“If we—”

Jackson interrupted her. “No. That’s all right, Thurmond. We don’t need your data. It’s replicable from anyone in Lizzie’s tribe. Or maybe by now other tribes as well.”

Tribes of Theresas. Afraid of the unfamiliar, reluctant to deal with strangers, unwilling to do things differently from however they were doing them when they breathed in the neuropharm. Unwilling to change. Who would want this neuropharm to exist? Any powerful donkey group, governmental or private, with a vested interest in protecting the status quo. Which could mean almost any powerful donkey group that existed. Lizzie’s tribe had been the first because of her demented, public attempt to win an election. They wouldn’t be the last.

Thurmond Rogers’s image watched Jackson keenly. “You’re right, of course, Jack. Anyone can replicate our data. Which is why we need to move so fast on getting a molecule to patentability. Cazie is seeing Alex Castner at 8:30, along with a few other potential major players. I can provide you with a suite to clean up a little and the loan of a business suit in your—”

“Yes, thanks,” Jackson said. Beside him, Vicki went still. Jackson took her hand. “Something for my… friend, too. Although she’ll wait in the suite.”

“Of course,” Rogers said. He looked much happier. He had Vicki figured out. Jackson could almost hear Rogers’s thoughts: Not my taste but actually rather pretty underneath and Jackson always did like acerbic women he married Cazie Sanders didn’t he—Vicki mercifully said nothing until the hostess holo had shown them to a discreet conference room with a discreet bedroom and bath beyond a discreet door.

“Not in the bioshielded part of the building that Rogers was in,” she commented, randomly opening closets. Inside hung both business clothes and bathrobes. “What do you want to bet Rogers only attends the meeting in holo?”

“Could be,”

“Although this is a nice enough suite at that.” She pressed against Jackson and breathed directly into his ear, so low that no listening device could have caught it. “What are you going to do?”

It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see the monitors; they were there, He put his arms around her and whispered back, “Let Cazie commit investment funds.”

“Why?”

“Only way to find out what they do.”

She nodded against his shoulder. It was disturbing holding her in his arms. She didn’t feel like Cazie. She was taller, less rounded. Her skin felt cooler. She smelled different. Jackson had an erection.

He released Vicki and turned away, pretending to be busy examining clothing in a closet. When he turned back, he expected to see her smiling sardonically, poised to make some cutting comment. But she wasn’t. She stood quietly, somehow forlornly, in the middle of the room, and her face had softened into an expression that on anyone else he would have called wistful.

“Vicki…?”

“Yes, Jackson?” She raised her eyes to his and he saw with a shock that they were wide with naked need.

“Vicki…!…”

His mobile spoke. “Moonquake from Theresa Aranow. Repeat, moonquake from Theresa Aranow.”

“Moonquake” was the family code, left over from childhood, for a high-emergency call. Theresa had never used it before. Jackson opened the mobile. Her image was there, in some kind of small open cabin… it looked like a plane. But that was impossible. Theresa couldn’t ride a plane.

“J-Jackson!” she gasped. “They’re dead!”

“Who? Who’s dead, Theresa?”

“Everyone in La Solana! Richard Sharifi!” Suddenly Theresa pulled herself together. “Richard Sharifi. He was in the compound, or at least his recorded image was still there… La Solana—”

Behind him, Vicki snapped, “Terminal on! Newsgrid! Channel 35!” A wall screen brightened.

“—nuclear detonation at La Solana, the heavily shielded New Mexico compound that is home to Miranda Sharifi’s father. Richard Keller Sharifi. No group has claimed credit for the bomb, which of course violates national and international nuclear bans. The White House has issued a statement of outrage, followed by the Pentagon’s immediate dispatching of defense ’bots programmed for minute analysis of the radioactive rubble for any clue as to the bomb’s composition, origin, or means of delivery. The energy shield around La Solana was developed by—”

Theresa said, “I’m flying home, Jackson.”

“Tess, hold on, you sound funny, you don’t sound like yourself—”

“I’m not,” Theresa said. Her eyes opened very wide and for a moment she smiled. It was the most unsettling thing Jackson had seen in an unsettling day.

Theresa added, in a voice not at all her own, “The pilot says we took two hundred forty rads,” and then the screen blanked.

“Jesus Christ,” Vicki said softly. “Will she… is that enough to kill her?”

“Probably not, but she’s going to be very sick. I’ve got to go.”

“What about Cazie?”

“To hell with her,” Jackson said, and saw Vicki smile, and knew—just as Vicki did—that he didn’t mean it. Not yet. But maybe someday he would. And meanwhile, Cazie couldn’t actually commit major investment capital without his consent or Theresa’s. Which was, at least, better than nothing.

Although nothing like enough.

Sixteen

When Lizzie awoke, Vicki was still gone.

It was easy to know who was in camp and who wasn’t. Everyone gathered at the same time for breakfast under the feeding tarp, and everybody lay or sat in the same place. Some people—Norma Kroll. Grandma Seifert, Sam Webster—even lay in the same position. Day after day. The tribe talked softly as they fed, and then they left the feeding ground in the same order, and set about the same tasks. Bringing fresh soil, with unused nutrients in it. Cleaning out the building. Tending the children, who played the same games with the same toys in the same places. Making things of wood or cloth, or getting the wood or cloth in the forest or from the weaving ’bot. Day after day.

Lunch at the same time, in the same places.

Naps for the children, crafts or holo-watching or water-fetching or cards or exercise. Dinner, in the same places under the tarp. The same stories at night, when the unseasonably cold April kept everyone inside. Would they still stay inside in June, in August, just because it had been the routine in April?

“I can’t stand it,” Lizzie had said to her mother. Annie replied, “You always was too impatient, you. Enjoy this time, Lizzie. It’s safe and peaceful. Don’t you want peace, you, for your baby?”

“Not like this!” Lizzie shouted, but Annie just shook her head and went back to the wall hanging she was making of woven cloth, pebbles, and dried flowers. When it was done, Lizzie thought in despair, she’d make another one. At ten o’clock she and Billy would go to bed, because ten o’clock was their bed time. They probably made love the same nights each week. Certainly Shockey and Sharon, in the cubicle next to Lizzie’s, did. Tuesday and Saturday nights, Sunday afternoon.

At least when Vicki had been in camp, there’d been someone else to talk to. Vicki was tense, agitated, frustrated, unpredictable. Vicki was real. She paced through the wood paths, mud clinging to her boots, talking out her fear and her hope. Sometimes it seemed to Lizzie that Vicki couldn’t tell one from the other.

“We have to wait on Jackson,” Vicki had said, smacking one fist into her opposite palm. “Much as I hate doing it, he and his spectacularly obnoxious researcher friend, Thurmond Rogers, are the only way we’re going to get to the medical roots of this, Lizzie. It’s a medical problem, and it can be fought best with a medical model. Somehow the brain chemistry’s been shifted, and we—”

“Wait,” Lizzie said. “Wait.”

Vicki looked at her.

“It’s not just a medical problem, it.” She heard her own shift into Liver language and hated it. Wouldn’t she ever learn? “It’s political, too. Somebody’s doing this, them! It just didn’t happen all by itself!”

“Yes, of course, you’re right. But we can’t deal directly with the cause—we tried that with the election, remember? The best we can hope for is to manipulate the results. Come on, Jackson… call!”

And apparently Jackson eventually had, because now Vicki was gone. To Jackson’s wonderful house in Manhattan East? To Kelvin-Castner in Boston? Lizzie didn’t know.

But the worst was Dirk.

“Look, Dirk, a chipmunk!”

That afternoon she’d carried him a little way into the raw spring woods, dressed in his warm winter jacks, his fringe of dark bangs falling across his forehead under the bright red hood. The whole tiny walk, Dirk buried his head in Lizzie’s shoulder and refused to look up. Gently she forced him to raise his eyes.

“Look at the chipmunk! Scamper scamper!”

The small creature stopped twenty feet away, looked at them inquisitively, and sat on its hind legs, fluffy tail curled upward behind it. It lifted a nut and began to nibble, its head bobbing comically over its small upraised paws. Dirk looked and began to scream in terror.

“Stop it! Stop it, damn it!” Lizzie screamed in turn, and was immediately appalled and frightened. What was she doing? Dirk couldn’t help it! She cradled him tight and ran back to the building. Annie looked up from her wall hanging.

“Lizzie! Where’d you take that child, him?”

“For a fucking walk!” She was angry all over again, now that Dirk, in his familiar surroundings, stopped crying. On the floor he saw the blocks Billy had made for him, the blocks he always played with at this time of the afternoon, and kicked for Lizzie to put him down.

Annie said, “You watch your language, you. Here, come to Grandma, Dirk, this is our block time, isn’t it? Come to Grandma.”

The baby stopped crying. Happily he began to pile blocks on top of each other. Annie smiled at him from her chair.

Despair took Lizzie.

“Where are you going now, child?” Annie said. “Sit down, you, and talk with me.”

“I’m going back outside.”

Alarm filled Annie’s dark eyes. “No, stay here, you. Lizzie, sit here with Dirk and me…”

Lizzie bolted out the door.

The sun had come out from behind gray clouds. She began walking aimlessly, anywhere to get away from the placid, safe routine behind her. Which would go on day after day after day, until everybody died.

Striding the path up the mountain, she kicked at twigs fallen in the winter winds. Would the path just become more and more unused, if it wasn’t part of anyone’s routine to walk on it? Would the neuropharm spread? Maybe she, Lizzie, would get infected if it came back a second time. And she wouldn’t even mind, that was the worst of it. She’d be like Annie, grateful for safety and peace.

Lizzie stopped and punched a birch sapling. No. She was eighteen years old, and she couldn’t just give up. She never had, not in her whole life. There had to be something she could do about this. There had to be.

But what?

She couldn’t look for some antidote to the neuropharm; Jackson and Vicki and Thurmond Rogers were already doing that. She couldn’t start another election; the way everybody was now, there was even less chance than before that she could get people to vote a Liver into power. This had all worked out pretty well for the donkey candidate!

Was that why it had happened? Had Donald Thomas Serrano arranged for the safety-first neuropharm so that a donkey would win the election? But Jackson had said this was a completely new kind of neuropharm, one that the Cell Cleaner didn’t eliminate because it must get the body to permanently change the proteins the body itself made. No one would waste a new neuropharm like that on a dinky election for Willoughby County district supervisor.

Unless they were just testing it? Unless who was just testing it?

This was getting her nowhere! She was just too stupid to figure anything out. Who did she think she was, Miranda Sharifi?

She was Lizzie Francy, that’s who. The best datadipper in the country. Maybe in the whole goddamn world!

All right, she jeered at herself, if she was such a hotshot dipper, why wasn’t she dipping? Why was she standing here in the April woods punching baby trees when she should be doing the one goddamn thing she knew how to do? She should, first, protect herself against getting the neuropharm, by finding a place to live apart from the tribe. There were all kinds of abandoned cabins up here in the mountains. Other tribes wouldn’t be back from the south until the weather warmed up in a few months. She would be safe enough. She could take a spare Y-cone and her terminal, and spend eighteen hours a day searching the Net for answers.

Without Dirk?

Lizzie’s stride faltered. She couldn’t take him. If she did, he’d spend his whole time wailing in fear of the new surroundings. And she’d spend her whole time caring for him. Nobody had told her, when she’d so blithely gotten pregnant, how much sheer time a baby took. Especially one that was crawling and putting everything in his mouth. She couldn’t take Dirk. She’d have to leave him with Annie and the tribe, where he belonged until she could somehow find out what she needed to do to help cure him.

And she would find out. Because she was Lizzie Francy. They—whoever they were!—were not going to defeat her!

At a headlong run Lizzie started back to the camp.

She found a foamcast cabin about two miles from the camp. It looked like it had once belonged to a family of Livers, the kind of stubborn people who before the Change Wars had lived alone on the side of a mountain rather than in a government-supported town. When they’d left, they’d taken or burned for heat everything in the cabin. There was no furniture, no plumbing. Lizzie didn’t need them. The door still closed snugly and the plastic windows were intact. There was a stream in the woods.

She cleared out the wildlife living in corners: a raccoon, a snake, newly hatching spiders. She moved in a Y-cone, her bedding, and a plastic water jug. Then she sat cross-legged on her bedding, back against the plain foamcast wall, and talked to her terminal.

She started, because she had to start somewhere, with Donald Serrano. The new Willoughby County district supervisor was running his office the same way as had the dead Harold Winthrop Wayland. Nothing in Lizzie’s careful tracings of Serrano’s financial holdings or personal records led, even indirectly, to a drug company. If that link existed, Serrano had hidden it better than Lizzie could dip. She didn’t think the link existed.

Next she tried the major biotech companies. This was much trickier. She didn’t want any dipping traced back to her. It took weeks of slow, painstaking work to break all the security codes and get into the deebees. She used phantom searchers, which she constructed in other people’s systems chosen at random. The searchers in turn constructed elaborate programs of clones, worms, encryptions, and blind alleys. Lizzie secreted the files thus pirated in yet other randomly chosen systems, and accessed them only through phantoms. She was very, very careful.

But once she had the information, another problem arose: she didn’t have the scientific background to know what she was looking at. It did help that she knew what she was looking for: any line of development for neuropharms that changed the brain’s permanent reactions in the direction of greater fear. A few companies were working on long-lasting pleasure drugs that could evade the Cell Cleaner; nobody, as far as Lizzie could tell, was succeeding.

She paid special attention to Kelvin-Castner. Their data banks were full of esoteric reports on what was being done with Dirk’s and Shockey’s tissue samples. Every day, it seemed, more researchers joined the team. More equipment paid for, more interim reports filed, more lab notes she couldn’t read. The doctors were doing something at Kelvin-Castner, something big and growing bigger exponentially. TenTech was funding some of it. But whether it was just more pleasure-drug research or whether K-C was trying to find a counteragent to the fear neuropharm, Lizzie simply couldn’t tell. She didn’t have the science.

Every day she trudged down the mountain to see Dirk for a few minutes. There was never any message for her from Dr. Aranow on the camp terminal, telling her what was going on.

Why should he tell her? She was nobody.

She turned next to dipping other Liver camps. This was both easier and harder. The temporary camps, always moving, usually had one or two young people who could exploit a terminal. Some dipped extensively and deeply; some merely scanned other camps’ postings. There were few patterns to look for. On the other hand, almost no Liver users knew how to cover their electronic tracks. The data was disorganized, massive, and ragged, but it wasn’t encrypted.

She wrote programs to access and analyze dozens of different kinds of data, looking for… what? How could you use the Net to notice fear of new things? If people were afraid of new areas, they simply didn’t access them. How did you find an absence of subsets of people, across a whole continent?

Slowly, her probability programs began yielding patterns.

A Liver camp in someplace called Judith Falls, Iowa, dipped the accounts of nearby donkey warehouses at exactly the same time every day, for exactly the same duration. The repetitious pattern had not existed before April.

A tribe roaming across Texas sent greetings to exactly the same list of distant relatives in exactly the same order, with essentially the same wording, on the same days every week. Starting April 3.

A town, apparently pre-Change Wars and still occupied by the same people in northern Oregon, datadipped only on Thursday afternoons. Each Thursday, some dipper—whose technique wasn’t bad, Lizzie noted approvingly—broke into the same nearby biotech data banks. As near as Lizzie could follow the dipper’s tracks, he or she was checking various inventories for Change syringes. There never were any.

Sitting cross-legged on her pallet, Lizzie pulled at her hair. The cabin door stood wide open; spring had given way to an early, abrupt summer, even though it was only May. The scent of wild mint blew in on a warm breeze. Birds, nesting, sang in the leafing trees. Lizzie ignored it all.

Suppose that these Liver camps had been infected with the neuropharm, just like Lizzie’s camp. Suppose that was why they showed repeated actions—safe, routine actions. Suppose further that they were test sites, too. What good did knowing this do her? Lizzie couldn’t travel to Iowa or Texas or Oregon to investigate these camps. And even if she could—so what? She might find that other Livers were lab rats, too. Like her Dirk. But knowing that wouldn’t help change anything.

Her neck and back ached from sitting so long, and her left foot was asleep.

She had to figure out something else to try. All right, forget the Livers who’d been infected and the drug companies that might have made the drug. Who else? Who wanted everything to stay exactly the same? Donkey politicians, yes. Shockey’s non-election had proved that. But how to find out which politicians could create such a political weapon? No monitor and flagging programs, no Leland-Warner decision algorithms, and no probability equations had yielded anything significant. So now what?

Follow the money. Something Vicki always said. But she’d tried to do that, through the drug-company investments, and gotten nowhere. Or nowhere she could understand. So now what?

Don’t start with the end product, the neuropharm, and follow it to the money. Start with the money, and follow it to the neuropharm.

But that was impossible. Lizzie could dip the records of the world’s major banks—or most of them, anyway—but she often couldn’t follow the transactions she uncovered. She lacked the financial sophistication. And not once had she been able to change anything in any bank records. Well, she didn’t need to do that now. The problem was something else: the sheer volume of daily transfers of money around the Earth, Moon, Mars, and orbital accounts. How was she supposed to tell which ones had anything to do with a secret neuropharm developed who-knew-where by who-knew-who? It was impossible.

She couldn’t follow the drug development. She couldn’t follow the money. All right, then—try again. If those camps in Iowa and Texas and Oregon were test sites for the neuropharm, the people who tested would want to know the results. They’d be observing, probably by robocam. Maybe by high-zoom, low-orbit satellite.

Which meant they would also be observing her tribe.

A shiver ran over Lizzie. Were stealth probes, disguised by Y-shields, observing her “hiding place” in the mountain cabin? Did they watch her go back and forth to see Dirk every day? Was someone amused at the idea that Lizzie thought she could escape infection that easily, if they decided they wanted her infected? Worse—was someone, despite all her care, following her electronic footsteps as she datadipped day and night?

She got up, stamped her sleeping foot, and went to the door of the cabin. She looked, stupidly, up at the bright blue sky. Of course there was nothing to see. The fresh scent of mint made her remember that she hadn’t bathed of washed her hair in days. She smelled like something hit by a maglev train.

She went back inside and sat on her dirty pallet, staring at her terminal.

It didn’t have radar capability, especially not if the probes were actually in orbit, and actually stealth. Visual monitoring was beyond her. But she could detect a ground-source data stream within a mile or so radius. If there were implanted transmitters of any kind monitoring the camp, she could find them if she just moved her terminal to various points around the woods. Unless, of course, the theoretical hidden probes found her first and stopped sending.

On the third night, she found it. A steady data stream, heavily encrypted, from a source in a thick pine tree forty yards away from the tribe building. It had a clear scan of the feeding ground. Lizzie wasn’t sure what the data were; she couldn’t dip the stream. That itself was scary.

But even if she couldn’t break the coding—and she tried!—she could at least determine where the data stream went. It beamed itself upward, undoubtedly to a relay satellite in orbit. From there, its destination was theoretically so scrambled it was unknowable. But not to Lizzie. Relay data were old news to her.

She worked at the problem an entire morning, while warm rain pattered on the roof and her heart ached to hold Dirk. Eventually, as she knew she would, she dipped the transmission data.

She gasped and glanced wildly around, although of course there was nobody to see. Then, heart pounding as badly as Dirk’s whenever she took him away from his blocks, she shut down her entire system. She even closed and locked the Jansen-Sagura terminal. Sitting cross-legged, staring at nothing at all, she tried to think about implications, and meanings, and safeguards. And couldn’t.

The observations about her tribe were indeed being transmitted to orbit. To Sanctuary.

“I have to find Dr. Aranow,” Lizzie said to Billy Washington, because she had to tell somebody. She’d found Billy where he always was in the early afternoon, fishing in the creek.

“No, you best stay here, you,” Billy said, but more mildly than Annie would have. Individual biochemical differences, Dr. Aranow had said. People reacted differently, sometimes very differently, to any drug.

“I can’t stay here, Billy. I have to find Dr. Aranow and Vicki.”

“Speak up, you. I can’t hardly hear you.”

“No, I’m not going to speak louder, Billy.” The monitor was a quarter mile away, but Lizzie wasn’t taking chances. “How can I get to Manhattan East Enclave?”

“Manhattan? You can’t, you. You know that.”

“I don’t believe that. You know a lot more than you let on, Billy. You talked to strangers all the time, before we settled here for the winter.” She saw the alarm flickering in his eyes at the mention of strangers. “The gravrail doesn’t run, it, I checked, but there must be some way!”

Something tugged on his line. Billy pulled it out of the creek, but the line was empty and the bait gone. He stuck another worm on his hook. “You got a baby now, Lizzie. You got no business, you, going off someplace dangerous when you got Dirk to take care of.”

“How can I get to Manhattan East?”

“You can’t, you.”

Even before the neuropharm, Billy had been stubborn.

When Lizzie said nothing, the old man finally said, “You got to talk to Dr. Aranow, you, then call him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

Because anything that went out over her terminal would be overheard by Sanctuary. She couldn’t say that. Billy, the neuropharmed Billy, would have heart failure. “I just can’t, Billy. Don’t ask me questions.”

Again he looked alarmed. Billy jerked up his line, even though there had been no tug, and looked at his worm. He put the line back in the water.

“Billy, I know that you know. How can I get to Manhattan East?”

“You got no business even—”

“How?”

Light sweat filmed Billy’s cheeks. Lizzie fought down her impatience. By now Annie would have been in full-blown panic. So would Shockey, that once-swaggering braggart. Individual chemical differences.

Finally Billy said, “A man, he told me last fall, him, that the gravrail tracks east of the river go directly into Manhattan East. But you can’t get through the enclave shield, Lizzie. You know that, you!”

“What river? Where?”

“What river? We only got but one, us. The one this here creek flows into.”

Only got but one. What didn’t exist in Billy’s world since the neuropharm just didn’t exist. And yet, once, he’d probably been the only one in camp to explore any larger geography.

“How many days’ walk?” Lizzie said.

Now he did start to panic. He put a trembling hand on her arm. “Lizzie, you can’t go, you! It’s too dangerous, a young girl alone, and besides you got Dirk…”

His breathing accelerated. Suddenly Lizzie remembered how Billy had been when Lizzie was a child, before the Change, when Billy’s heart had been clogged and weak. He’d gotten gasping and dizzy, just like this. Love flooded her, and compassion, and exasperation. “Okay, Billy, okay.”

“Promise me, you… promise me you won’t… go alone!”

“I promise,” Lizzie said. Well, she wouldn’t go alone. She’d take her terminal, plus the personal shield Vicki had left with her.

“Okay,” Billy said. His breathing eased. He’d always trusted her word. In a few more minutes, he was absorbed again in his fishing.

Lizzie watched him. His dark eyes, alert in their sunken face, watched the water. He’d taken off his hat so his nearly bald head, fringed with gray curls above his ears, could absorb the soft sunlight. The hat hung on a tree branch. Every day at this time he must make the decision to leave the hat on or take it off. Every day he must place the plastic bucket for fish in the same place on the grass. Every day he must dig the same number of worms, methodically baiting the hook in the same way until the worms were gone. Every day.

What was Jennifer Sharifi doing?

Lizzie didn’t know. She could datadip as well as anybody in the country, but Jennifer Sharifi was a Sleepless. Not a Super like Miranda, but still a Sleepless. And she had all the money in the world. She was changing the people Lizzie loved, tacking them down to one place and one routine, like they were so many programmed ’bots. Lizzie wasn’t going to be fool enough to think she knew why, or what to do about it. Jennifer Sharifi had once tried to force the United States to let Sanctuary secede, and had held five cities hostage to a terrorist virus that could kill everyone in those cities, and had gone to jail for longer than Lizzie’s whole life. Lizzie knew when she was out of her depth. She needed help.

It was almost a relief to finally admit it. Almost.

She left that night, skirting the hidden transmitter by walking in a wide circle down the mountain. She stayed away from the old broken roads—that was where Sanctuary would expect people to walk, wasn’t it, and so would logically set their monitors? Walking through the woods in the dark, keeping the creek in sight, wasn’t easy. Terminal in her backpack, she made slow progress. She couldn’t have done it at all if a full moon hadn’t shone brightly, aided by what looked like millions of stars. Struggling through the brush, Lizzie tried to stay under trees, in case Sanctuary was using high-resolution space imaging.

Later on, she would wear Vicki’s personal shield, and let herself be wrapped in a clear protective energy field that would keep her from being scratched by brambles, stung by insects, frightened of every noise in the brush. But not now. Not until she was farther away from camp. Personal shields set up a detectable field.

Sanctuary couldn’t monitor the entire state, could they?

By morning she’d reached the place where the creek joined the river. She was exhausted. She crawled under a windfall of brush that shielded her from sight from above but still let the bright morning sun slant in. Taking off her clothes, Lizzie fed. Then she gratefully turned on the personal shield and slept all day.

When she awoke toward dusk, she wasn’t alone. It was summer; tribes of Livers that had spent the winter in the warm south were now roaming back. This tribe sounded small and familial: Lizzie heard several babies crying. Changed or unChanged? She didn’t emerge from her hiding place to look. Her biggest danger was not starvation, nor sickness, nor accident. It was others of her own kind. Not all tribes were small, or familial.

At night she started off again. It was much easier wearing the personal shield. Billy had taught her a lot about hiding in the woods—or out of them—and that would help, too.

She’d worry about Manhattan East when she got there.

Interlude

TRANSMISSION DATE: April 20, 2121

TO: Selene Base, Moon

VIA: Mall Enclave Ground Station, GEO Satellite C-1494 (U.S.)

MESSAGE TYPE: Encrypted

MESSAGE CLASS: Class A, Federal Transmission

ORIGINATING GROUP: Internal Revenue Service

MESSAGE:

Dear Ms. Sharifi:

The Internal Revenue Service is in receipt of your personal federal tax return for 2020, which was filed electronically from Selene Base, Moon. However, the return is unsigned. For electronic returns, a manual signature rendered by digital pen or equivalent technology is required by federal law. Therefore, I am attaching electronic Form 1987A for your signature.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Madeleine E. Miller

Madeleine Elizabeth Miller

District Commissioner, Internal Revenue Service

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

Seventeen

Jennifer Sharifi followed Chad Manning into the conference room of Sharifi Labs on Sanctuary. A large U-shaped table arched around three walls, backed by eighteen chairs. In the center of the U, a clear plastic panel, unshatterable by anything short of nuclear detonation, was set into the orbital floor. As Sanctuary orbited, the view beneath the floor changed from black space brilliant with stars to the huge blue-and-white eyeball of the Earth. The panel opaqued automatically whenever the sun flashed into too bright view. Around the edges of the panel curled a decorative border of Arabic design, intricate interlocking geometrics copied from ancient weavings at Kasmir. The border was programmed to change colors to complement the view. It turned the solar system into a rug under Sanctuary’s feet.

“Door close,” Dr. Manning said. In the large empty room his voice echoed faintly. “Sit down, Jennifer.”

“I’d rather stand, thank you. What is it you wish to show me?”

Chad pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket. That alone was significant: his information, whatever it was, wasn’t on-line, not even in the heavily shielded programs of the neuropharm project. And yet Chad Manning was not, as Jennifer well knew, a particularly suspicious person. She knew everything there was to know about Dr. Chad Parker Manning.

Chief scientist for Sharifi Labs, he was the only one of the project team who had not been sent to prison at the same time as Jennifer, for the original attempt to make Sanctuary safe. The inclusion of one outsider on the team had been inevitable. The geneticists imprisoned for treason had lost too much time incarcerated, in a field that still changed rapidly every few years. And the project had to be run from Sharifi Labs: the labs had the equipment for checking Strukov’s claims, for detailed analyses of Strukov’s results before Jennifer committed the next huge section of her fortune to the Sleeper renegade. There was no way the secret team could not include Sharifi Labs’ chief scientist.

Robert Day, Sanctuary’s business manager and another imprisoned hero of the original attempt to free Sanctuary, had chosen Manning from among the Sleepless scientists. Robert had been released from prison ten years before Jennifer. He’d had time to investigate thoroughly, recruit slowly, be completely sure. Dr. Chad Manning was not the scientific genius that Serge Strukov was. A generation produced only one such genius. But as a scientist, Chad was solid, methodical, completely capable of dogging Strukov’s scientific footsteps—even if Chad could never have ventured along those same paths first. Just as important, he was completely committed to safeguarding Sanctuary by whatever means became necessary. Jennifer trusted him.

“I’ve been playing with Strukov’s virus,” Chad said. “In simulation, of course. And I found something.”

“Yes? What sort of something? And is there a reason we’re not looking at your simulations?”

“I destroyed them. These are the printouts. Although of course I can re-create the sims if you want to check them.”

He unfolded the sheaf of papers. Chad Manning’s parents had made him genemod handsome on a fairly uncommon template: sensitive and delicate. He had a thin face, high sharp cheekbones, pale skin, and the long flexible fingers of a violinist. The fingers trembled as he handed the papers to Jennifer.

“The first pages are biochemical equations, models… I can go through each of them for you if you like, afterward. Look now at the last page.”

Jennifer did. Two identical computer-sketched drawings of protein folds. Below them, a probability equation. The variables were written out by hand.

“The difference is very subtle,” Chad said, and she heard the strain in his voice. “See, there—on the farthest left segment. The chromosomal difference is only a few amino acids.”

Now Jennifer saw the two drawings weren’t identical after all. One small area of one protein fold differed from the other.

“What’s most important is that to discover this, you have to be really following an unlikely simulated trail,” Chad said. His agitation was growing. “I just sort of stumbled over it. It’s not a common mutation, and it’s on one of Strukov’s proteins that you wouldn’t expect to do this… but, Jennifer, look at the equations.”

The protein folds conveyed little to Jennifer—she was not a microbiologist. But the math was a standard probability equation. The probability of the protein-fold mutation occurring spontaneously within a year’s time, given Chad’s variables for replication and infection rates, was 38.72 percent.

She said composedly, “What effect would this protein fold have on the virus?”

“It will make it viable outside the human body. And thus transmissible.”

“In other words, instead of having to breathe in the virus, which is then destroyed by the Cell Cleaner but not before it sets off the cascade reaction of natural amines—”

“Instead of having to breathe it in, the virus would become transmissible from person to person. It could survive on skin, clothing, hair, in body folds—”

“For how long?” Jennifer asked.

“Unknown. But certainly a few days. And in this form it can enter the body through skin punctures or orifices… an infected person can infect others. For at least a few days. That couldn’t happen with the previous foldings. Every virus not breathed in from the first strike died a few minutes later. Or, if it was breathed in, it was destroyed anyway by the Cell Cleaner.”

Jennifer didn’t allow her puzzlement to show on her face. “But, Chad—that’s what we’ve intended all along, isn’t it? The second mode of delivery that Strukov is supposed to give us is just that: transmissible by human contact. Why do you consider this a problem?”

“Because if the virus mutates naturally, before Strukov is ready to release his transmissible form, he can’t control it.”

Jennifer waited. She still didn’t fully understand Chad’s agitation, but she didn’t say so. Never reveal how much you don’t understand, not even to allies. She waited.

Chad said, “There are two problems. No, three. If the virus mutates before we’re ready, we’ll no longer control its spread. The drone delivery schedule—as you know!—was carefully drawn up to avoid attracting scientific or military attention as long as possible. That will no longer be in our control.”

“It already isn’t,” Jennifer said. “Kelvin-Castner Pharmaceuticals happened to stumble across a Liver test site. You know that.”

“True. But they aren’t bringing in the CDC or Brookhaven. At least, not yet. Second, as soon as a virus becomes viable outside the body, it means places like Kelvin-Castner can study the original proteins, not just the secondary effects on the brain. That will give them a big jump forward on finding a vaccine. Or even a reverser.”

“But you said finding those would be very difficult, even after the virus is directly transmissible—”

“Oh, it will,” Chad said. “It will. But we don’t want to give the Sleepers any edge at all. Third, if the virus can mutate this way, with a 38.72 percent probability, and I only found it by accident… what else might it do? And does Strukov know?”

“Don’t tell him,” Jennifer said swiftly. “And don’t ask him. There’s no way to tell if his answer was the truth.”

Chad nodded. Jennifer, pondering, studied the clear panel beneath her feet. Stars, cold and remote and sharp… but up close, she reminded herself, they were very messy aggregations of violent collisions.

“I want the rest of the team to know about this, Chad. Although you did right to show it to me first, and to destroy the simulations.” Sanctuary had its own teenage datadippers. Ordinarily, Jennifer was pleased by that. They were the next generation of systems scientists, and the more ingenious their technique, the better. But not this time. “We have to design a new delivery schedule. A much more rapid one.”

“Will the Peruvians be able to accelerate the hardware manufacture?”

“I don’t know. That’s the real difficulty.” Strukov, Jennifer was sure, could handle any shift in plans on his end. “I’ll get Robert and Khalid on it.”

“All right,” Chad said. Jennifer could see that he had calmed down. Her calm had infected him. As it was supposed to.

He held the door of the conference room for her, but Jennifer shook her head. “I will stay here awhile.”

Chad nodded and closed the door.

Jennifer gazed at the bordered floor panel. Earth was sliding into view. Clouds over the Pacific Ocean. So beautiful. So treacherous, so morally diseased. But so beautiful.

A sudden desire came over her to once again see Tony Indivino’s grave, in the Allegheny Mountains of New York. Tony Indivino, whom she had loved when she was young, as she’d never loved since. Tony, killed by the Sleepers, but not before he’d conceived of Sanctuary, the safe haven for them all…

Jennifer destroyed the thought. Tony was dead. What was dead no longer existed. What no longer existed must not be allowed to control the living, even momentarily. To allow that was to risk maudlin and ineffective sentimentality.

Tony was dead. No one who was dead mattered to Jennifer any longer.

No one.

“I think you should read the reports,” Will said. “At least once.”

“No,” Jennifer said. She moved slightly farther away from his body in their bed. “And I asked you not to bring up the subject again.”

“I know what you asked,” Will said evenly.

“Then please respect my request.”

Will raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. “You run the neuropharm project, Jennifer. That means you should be aware of every factor. The aftermath of La Solana is a factor. The FBI-CIA team has determined that the bomb came in on a trajectory from the Rocky Mountain site, as we expected. They’re analyzing every molecule of matter up there. You should at least monitor the reports we’ve dipped to—”

Jennifer got out of bed. In one fluid motion she put on a pale austere robe. She left the bedroom.

“Jennifer!” Will called after her, and now she heard his anger, that regrettable anger that weakened Will so much as a project member, as an ally. As a man. “Jennifer—you can’t go on pretending La Solana wasn’t real! It happened!”

Yes, it happened, Jennifer thought, closing the bedroom door on Will’s voice. Past tense. It was over. There was no reason to think about it anymore. What was over was no more real now than what had never existed. There was no difference.

Their small sitting room—all personal dwellings on Sanctuary were small—was dark. “Lights on,” Jennifer said. Lately, she didn’t care for the dark. Sometimes she thought she glimpsed a figure at the edges of dark rooms, a short thick body with masses of unruly dark hair held by a red ribbon. The figure wasn’t real, of course. It didn’t exist.

Therefore, it never had.

Eighteen

Theresa was very sick. But if she had been Changed, she would have been ever sicker. Jackson found he couldn’t appreciate the irony.

Theresa had been exposed to 240 rads. As soon as Jackson raced back from Kelvin-Castner to their apartment, he scrubbed as much of it as possible out of her system. He didn’t send her to a hospital; the enclaves no longer had hospitals worthy of the name. Not necessary.

Jackson ordered the equipment he needed by emergency comlink; it reached his apartment at the same time he did. Theresa was hysterical.

“Sssshhhh, Tessie, it’s going to be all right. Hang on, sweetheart, it’s okay, just help us as much as you can.”

“Dead!” Theresa cried, over and over. “Dead… dead… dead…”

“No, you’re not going to die. Sssshhhh, Tessie, hush…” But he couldn’t calm her.

“Sedate her,” Vicki said, struggling to hold Theresa’s flailing arms. “Jackson… it’s kinder.”

He did. Then he and Vicki worked on Theresa’s limp body. He pumped out the contents of her stomach and sent specialized robotic scouring tubes down her esophagus and bronchial tree, up her rectum, into her nose and ears and vagina and across her retinas. He and Vicki scrubbed every inch of Theresa’s skin with a chemical compound. Vicki cut Theresa’s long fair hair and shaved off the stubble. For that, Jackson left the room. He stood in the hallway and pounded his fists on the wall.

When he returned, Vicki was kind enough not to look directly at his face.

He inserted an endotracheal tube; the lining of her airway was going to slough and swell, and she would need mechanical help in breathing. Next came an injection to make her sweat as much as possible. An IV laced with nutrients and electrolytes. When he and Vicki were done, they stood over Theresa’s form lying on her bed, covered with a cotton sheet. Invasive monitors fed to a central terminal, supplemented by green, texture monitor patches dotting her skin. She looked. Jackson thought despairingly, like a skinny plucked moldy sparrow.

Vicki said, “I’ll stay, Jackson. You can’t nurse your sister through this alone.”

“I ordered a nursing ’bot, with radiation-sickness software. It’ll be here soon. It had to be shipped from Atlanta.”

“No substitute for people.”

“Do you know anything about radiation sickness?” he said, more harshly than he intended.

“You’ll teach me.”

“But Lizzie and Dirk—”

“—don’t need me,” she finished. “Lizzie can manage fine. And at least nothing novel and innovative is going to happen at the camp.”

Jackson didn’t smile. He barely heard her. “If Theresa were Changed—”

“I guessed that she wasn’t,” Vicki said. “But why not?”

He ignored the question. “If she were Changed, this would actually be worse. When Miranda Sharifi designed the Cell Cleaner, she didn’t take into account radiation sickness. Well, she couldn’t cover everything. The Cell Cleaner roots out aberrant DNA. That’s how come it catches tumors so early. But Theresa…” He couldn’t finish.

Vicki did it for him. “Is going to be a mass of mutated aberrant DNA. Jackson, I’m so sorry. Where’s the tech pilot?”

“Went home herself, I guess.”

“Then let’s hope she’s related to a doctor, too.”

He looked at Vicki angrily. “I’m not a roving humanitarian, damn it! The pilot isn’t my patient.”

Vicki didn’t answer. But she touched his shoulder briefly before saying, “I’m going to get some sleep. You watch her now and I’ll relieve you in a few hours.”

“Ask the house system to wake you up. Its name is Jones, and the guest-program entry word is ‘Michelangelo.’ ”

“I know,” Vicki said, and Jackson didn’t think to ask her how she knew.

After an hour, he called the Manhattan East Airfield and sent a message to the tech pilot who had flown Theresa Aranow. He appended a file on treating radiation sickness.

Then he pulled a chair close to his sister’s bed and watched her sleeping face while it was still whole.

Vicki crept into the room in the middle of the night and said gently, “Let me sit with her.”

Jackson had been half dozing. He had dreamed fitfully. Huge blobs attacked him, trying to engulf his head… he realized they had been Theresa’s T-cells, being mobilized to fight her own body. He sat up in his chair and said groggily, “No… I’ll stay here.”

“Jackson, you look like shit. Go to bed. Nothing is going to change before morning.”

But Theresa was already changing. Radiation bums across her pale skin, sores inside her mouth and on her tongue.

“Jackson—”

“I’ll stay.”

She pulled up a chair and sat beside him. Some minutes—hours?—later, he woke to find himself stumbling along the hallway to his bedroom, Vicki tugging him along. He didn’t remember falling asleep or waking up. She dumped him fully clothed, on his bed, and instantly he sank into restless dreams.

The next time he woke, Cazie was shaking his shoulder, looming over him like a Greek Fury.

“Jackson! I’ve left you a dozen top-priority messages from K-C—what’s the matter with you? Don’t you realize how important this deal is? And even if you don’t, can’t you at least do me the courtesy of answering once in thirty-six hours even if you’re sulking? God, I can’t believe that you—”

“I’d rather you didn’t disturb Jackson,” Vicki said sweetly from the doorway of Jackson’s bedroom.

Cazie turned slowly. Her honey-colored skin paled, making the flecks in her eyes more brilliantly green.

“Jackson needs his sleep.” Vicki continued in that same voice of sweet reason. “So it might be better if you left now.”

Cazie had recovered herself, always a dangerous mood. “I don’t think so… Diana, isn’t it? Or Victoria? True, Jack looks pretty well done in—you must have given him quite a workout. I’m sure he enjoyed it. But we have grown-up items to discuss now, so if you’ve already been paid, the building system can call you a go-’bot. Now, Jack, if you like, I’ll wait in your study while you shower.”

Vicki only smiled.

Suddenly Jackson was sick of them both. He heaved himself off the bed. “Don’t be so stupid, Cazie. Theresa is sick. I don’t have time to think about Kelvin-Castner until she’s out of danger.”

Cazie’s face changed. “Sick? Seriously? With what? Jackson, a Change syringe—”

“Not this time. It’s radiation sickness.” He pushed past her and strode to Theresa’s room. Cazie ran after him.

His sister lay quietly asleep; no change in her monitor readings. Cazie saw Theresa and gasped. “What… Jack!”

“She was in range of the nuclear explosion that took out La Solana.” By now it must be on all the newsgrids. Cazie always watched newsgrids.

“Tess? Went to New Mexico? That’s impossible!”

“I would have said so.”

“Oh, my God, Jack… I’ll stay here and help you nurse her.”

This was Cazie at her most genuine, Cazie at her most lovable. She gazed at Theresa with affection and pain. Jackson said, “Vicki’s nursing her just fine,” and was immediately too wretched to relish his own cruelty.

“All right,” Cazie said humbly. She laid one tentative hand on the very edge of Theresa’s bed.

Jackson closed his eyes. “Tell me what you want to do about Kelvin-Castner.”

“It can wait,” Cazie said in a low voice.

“No, it can’t. And there’s nothing I can do for Theresa this minute anyway. Tell me.”

“If you… all right. I want to commit five hundred million dollars initially, more on a rolling schedule with go/ no-go achievement targets. I sent you the proposed target schedule. We own fifteen percent of gross profits on this project only, with roughly standard liabilities and exposure. The ROI and long-term interlocks—”

“No, not those things. Don’t tell me those things. What is K-C going to do?”

“Race to get a patentable delivery molecule based on the Liver tissue samples and brain alterations. The first computer models are already running. There are hundreds of possibilities to check on, of course, maybe thousands. But if we get the patentable model, we can use it as the basis of an incredible number of Cleaner-resistant pharmaceuticals. The preliminary applications team has already started brainstorming.”

Cleaner-resistant. Jackson had never heard the term before. Maybe the “preliminary applications team” had just brainstormed it.

He took a last look at Theresa’s readings and then led Cazie out of Theresa’s room. The nursing ’bot floated closer to the bed.

In the hallway, Jackson said, “I’ll vote to invest the funding, and commit Theresa’s votes, too, on one condition. The first line of research—the first, Cazie, with majority allocation of talent and resources—goes to a counteragent for the original neuropharm that affected the Livers. A reverser that will restore their cerebral biochemistry to previous functioning. Without the stranger anxiety and the inhibition toward novelty and all the fucking fear. Is that agreed?”

Cazie hesitated only a moment. “Agreed.”

“You can get Alex Castner to agree?”

“Yes.” She sounded confident. Jackson wondered suddenly if she was sleeping with Castner. Or with Thurmond Rogers.

He said, “Get it in a contract and send it to me. And I’ll want constant recorded progress reports on the counteragent, plus lab records.”

“No problem.”

“And put in the contract that I’m officially informed the very minute there’s any breakthroughs, of any significant kind at all, on any aspect of the entire project.”

“You got it. The contract will be at your apartment tomorrow morning. We can record the voting commitment right now. Yours in person, Theresa’s by proxy. But, Jack—” Her voice trembled. “How bad is Tessie? Will she… will she…”

“She won’t die.” Jackson looked at Cazie. Her eyes, raised to his from her shorter height, filled with sudden tears. “Tess will recover. It’ll take a long time, but she’ll recover.”

“Long term…?”

“Long term, she’s going to have to take the Change syringe. It’s the only thing that’ll keep her from eventual cancers.”

“But there aren’t any more syringes. Unless you—”

“Of course I have one for Theresa. In my father’s private safe. I’ve always kept one for Theresa.”

Cazie’s face showed sudden understanding. Of what it had cost him as a doctor to do that, as the public health crisis grew—to watch babies dying and know he could save one more of them. She stepped forward and put her arms around him, and he let her. Her full breasts were soft against his chest. The top of her head fit familiarly under his chin. He was so tired.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Vicki disappear around the corner of the hallway.

Theresa developed oozing sores over her skull, face, and body. Her tissues swelled until, if she hadn’t been on heavy painkillers, the pressure of the soft bed would have been agony. Her firm small breasts turned into ulcerated bags with cracked and bleeding nipples.

She couldn’t talk. Her mouth, her tongue, her gums, became as much a mass of ulcers as her radiation-burned body. Sometimes, rising briefly to consciousness, she tried to mumble around the endotracheal tube. Her swollen eyes looked urgently into Jackson’s. “Ennh… de-de-” He always sedated her. He couldn’t stand it.

“Patient’s progress within normal limits,” the nursing ’bot said pleasantly several times a day. “Do you wish for detailed readings?”

“For God’s sake, Jackson, get some sleep,” Vicki said, equally often. “You look like something Miranda Sharifi’s lab team threw away.”

“M-M-M-M… de… de,” Theresa tried. He increased the sedative.

Twice a day, as per contract, lab records arrived from Kelvin-Castner, reams of raw data. Jackson read only the summaries, hastily spoken by Thurmond Rogers. “Jack, we’ve developed computer models of the most likely protein foldings for the initial molecule, based on most-probable receptor-site responses. Unfortunately, there are six hundred forty-three level-A possible foldings, so the testing is going to take some time and we thought of—”

“That’s enough, Caroline,” Jackson told his system. “File the reports by date, speaker, and… whatever else fits best-retrieval protocol.” And leave me alone.

“Yes, Dr. Aranow,” Caroline said.

“Jack, how is Tess?” Cazie’s image said daily, more than daily, he didn’t know how often because he never linked with her calls. Once he heard Cazie’s voice in another room, talking with Vicki. With Vicki? Conflict, sparring, dueling? He didn’t go in.

Theresa lost flesh she couldn’t afford to lose. Her already thin body grew skeletal, arms and legs like wire clothes hangers, knees and elbows chisel-sharp. Her sores oozed and wept.

The progress reports from Kelvin-Castner, Thurmond Rogers told him daily, didn’t seem to progress. The computer models weren’t panning out. The algorithms didn’t, upon investigation, apply. There were possibilities only, tentative hypotheses later disproved, unsatisfactory animal-testing results. They needed a breakthrough, Thurmond Rogers explained in messages that Jackson watched only until he had their gist. The breakthrough would come, Rogers said. It hadn’t yet, however. “After all, we’re not Miranda Sharifi and Jonathan Markowitz,” Rogers added testily.

“Patient’s progress within normal limits,” the nursing ’bot said.

“Sleep. Your sanity is consumable, you know,” Vicki said.

“Possibly a decapeptide, triggering cell response in—”

“De… ded… mmmm…”

“How is she, Jack? How are you? Answer me, damn it—”

After a month, Theresa still had radiation bums on her face and body. Her muscles had atrophied. Her sores stopped oozing. Jackson wanted her to eat, even though she wouldn’t have any real appetite for weeks yet. To eat, she had to come off sedation.

He and Vicki propped Theresa up against her pillows. Beside the bed, Vicki placed a huge bouquet of genemod flowers, pink and yellow and a deep subtle orange. Then she discreetly left the room. The nursing ’bot prepared a liquid protein, with a straw, that smelled of raspberries. Theresa had always liked raspberries.

“Jack… son.”

“Don’t try to talk, Tessie, if it hurts. You’ve been sick, but you’re going to be fine. I’m right here.”

She stared at him fuzzily. Her head was completely hairless, scabbed, burned. But slowly her pale blue eyes cleared.

“M-M-Mir…”

“I said don’t talk, honey.”

“M-Mir…”

He gave in. “Let me help. ‘Miranda Sharifi.’ You went out to La Solana to research your book about Leisha Camden, right? To talk to Miranda’s father, because he once knew Leisha?”

Theresa hesitated. The hairless pathetic head nodded slightly. She winced as the back of her skull scraped the soft pillow.

“De… ed.”

“Richard Sharifi is dead. Somebody bombed La Solana, and he was vaporized.” Jackson saw the question in her eyes. “No, the government doesn’t know who set off the bomb. It was apparently a drone ground-launched from the New Mexico mountains. No group has claimed credit, nobody’s been arrested, and if the FBI has leads, they aren’t making them public. And Selene Base hasn’t retaliated, or even made any public comment.”

“Not… at… Selene.”

“What’s not at Selene? Tess, honey, don’t try to talk anymore, I can see how it’s hurting you. All this can wait until you—”

“De-ed. Miranda.”

Jackson gently held Theresa’s hand. “Miranda Sharifi is dead? You can’t know that, honey.”

“Talked… to her. Me. Saw… her.”

“You saw Miranda Sharifi?” He glanced at the monitor. Theresa’s temperature, skin conductance, and brain scan were normal; she wasn’t hallucinating. “Honey, you couldn’t have. Miranda’s at Selene. On the moon.”

“No!”

“She’s not? She was at La Solana? Tess—how could that be?”

Theresa glared at him, watery blue eyes in a hideously deformed head. Then tears started to fall. Jackson saw her wince where their salt touched her skin. “Dead! Dead!”

“Tess, oh, don’t—”

“If she says she saw Miranda and Miranda’s dead, then it’s probably true,” Vicki’s voice said behind him. “She knows what she saw. And it’s the only motive that makes sense for bombing La Solana without taking credit or making demands.”

Theresa looked past Jackson, at Vicki standing in the doorway. Theresa nodded, a tremendous effort. Then her eyes closed and she was asleep.

Jackson whirled on Vicki. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

“Better than you do, probably.” Vicki’s face contorted and she left the room.

Jackson didn’t follow her. He gazed down at Theresa, who lay propped up, her poor mouth fallen open. Gently Jackson settled her flat on the bed.

He walked the length of the apartment, through the Y-shield onto the terrace. It was apparently dusk; Jackson had lost track of the hours, the days. The trees and flowerbeds in the park below bloomed in full-summer genemod glory. He thought it must be sometime in May.

Theresa said that Miranda Sharifi was dead.

And the rest of the SuperSleepless, too? Maybe. They had usually stayed together, in a pack of their own kind. Maybe because that was the only way they could find anyone who understood them. Or maybe just for simple protection. They stayed together, and hid, and then used all their technology to make the world think they were hiding someplace else, as yet another added protection.

And if Theresa was right, none of it had helped. The haters had gotten them anyway.

The treetops below danced in a sudden breeze. Standing at the very edge of the terrace, Jackson could hear the leaves rustle, smell their cool moisture. In the southeast, just below the moon, a bright planet shone steadily. Probably Jupiter. Or a holo of Jupiter, voted in by the enclave weather committee. Let’s add a planet to the dome programming this month. The children can learn to use the sky-tracking software.

Jackson saw again the printouts of unChanged Liver children on Theresa’s study wall. Dying in bloat and putrefaction from lack of the sanitation nobody needed to practice anymore, or lack of Change syringes, or lack of medical attention.

And now there never would be any more Change syringes. People and groups and governments could send endless messages or even expeditions to Selene, and it wouldn’t matter. Unless the Supers had left a huge cache of syringes somewhere for posthumous discovery, there would be no more Changing for this next generation. Or the next. Or the next. Not even for donkey children with sky-scanning software. The biochemistry/nanotech was too far beyond normal humanity, even genemod humanity. You couldn’t get to the industrial revolution when you’d only just invented the wheel.

Jackson put both hands on the terrace railing and leaned over. From the street four stories below came the soft sound of a woman’s laughter, followed by a man’s, smooth and tenor. Jackson couldn’t glimpse either of them. The air smelled of mint and mown grass and roses.

Eden, Theresa had once said of Central Park, during her religious phase. She’d been twelve, and had wanted to become a nun.

Eden. For how long?

There were probably syringes hoarded, family by family, throughout the enclaves—one or two here, more there. Newborns would be injected, secretly, before outsiders knew the syringes existed and could steal them. When the hoarded syringes were all gone, the birth rate would drop even further than it had, as parents secure in the Change contemplated the disease and food needs of unChanged infants. Finally, people would have babies anyway, because people always did. Then medicine would revive from a coma feverish with research on pleasure drugs, and donkeys would get along about as well as they always had, behind their Y-shields, which would expand every year as the need grew to put more land under agriculture, under dairy farms, under soysynth factories, under tougher security shields. But the enclaves would adapt. They had all the technology to do so. No expulsion from Eden here.

And the Livers? No need to ask what would happen there. It was already happening. Famine, death, disease, war. And, eventually, they would relearn subsistence-survival skills. Or, if the neuropharm inhibiting tolerance for novelty continued to spread, they wouldn’t learn. They’d just cling to old routines designed for Changed bodies that the new generation didn’t have. And the donkeys, embittered by the Change Wars and all too aware that Livers had already been economically unnecessary for at least three generations, would do nothing.

Genocide by universal inaction. The Lord doesn’t help those who are cerebrochemically incapable of helping themselves. Who are too terrified of change to let anyone else anywhere near them. And who just lost their last extraterrestrial champions.

Jackson breathed deeply of the sweet, artificial air, and closed his eyes.

“Jackson.” Vicki said behind him. “Theresa’s calling for you.”

“In a minute.”

To his surprise, he felt Vicki’s arms creep around him from behind. Her cheek rested against his back. His shirt grew wet. He remembered that while he’d been thinking of the dead SuperSleepless as mostly a source of Change syringes, Vicki had had some kind of unexplained personal history with them.

He said, not turning around, “You met Miranda Sharifi.”

“I met her, yes. Twice.”

“What lunatic killed them?”

“Too many candidates to enumerate. The world is full of the disgruntled and the disgusted.”

“Yeah. All kinds of losers who resent the winners.”

“I’m not sure Miranda was ever a winner,” Vicki said. “Not ever. But she and her kind were our one shot at forced radical evolution. Only Sanctuary could have created them, and Sanctuary will never do it again.”

And then Jackson saw it. His hands tightened on the railing. The air suddenly smelled noxious. “Jennifer Sharifi killed them. In retaliation for sending her and her co-conspirators to prison almost thirty years ago.”

“Yes,” Vicki said. “Probably. But the Justice Department will never be able to prove it.”

She let Jackson go and stepped away from him. “It’s up to you, Jackson.”

He turned to face her. “Up to me? What the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t think Kelvin-Castner is really aiming their research at a cure for the neuropharm, do you? They don’t expect it to filter into the enclaves, because they know it’s some other donkey group that must have made it in the first place. In order to render the Livers no political or physical threat, without the nasty business of actually having to wipe them all out. Unless you hold K-C to your contract, they’ll just roar ahead with the commercial applications and drag their feet on the counterdrug you contracted for.”

“The daily lab records—”

“Have been carefully examined by you, right? Bullshit. You’ve hardly looked at them.”

He was silent, trying to take it in.

“I looked at them,” Vicki said, “for all the good it did me. I’m not trained; to me they’re just rows of charts, gibberish of equations, and models of incomprehensible substances. Jackson, you’re going to have to live on top of Kelvin-Castner if you care about a counteragent. You.”

“Theresa—”

“—is healing. Dirk and Billy and Shockey aren’t. After all”—she raised both hands, palm up, in a humble pleading gesture Jackson had never seen from her and hadn’t thought her capable of—“after all, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

“I’m not a medical researcher!”

“You are now,” Vicki said. And then suddenly, shockingly, she smiled. “Welcome to personal evolution.”

There were weeks of reports. Each day the number of primary researchers grew, starting at seventeen and escalating to an incredible two hundred forty-one at ten different sites around the country. Everyone had sent copies of everything to Jackson: every recorded conference, every procedure, every speculation, every version of every electronic model. Variances in absorption rate, bioavailability, protein binding, receptor-subtype mechanisms, efferent nerve equations, Meldrum models, gangloid ionization, ribosome protein synthesis, Cell Cleaner interaction rates—no one person could possibly have processed it all. As he tried, Jackson began to suspect that was the point.

He also began to suspect that some of what he’d been sent was bogus. But he didn’t have the time, the expertise, or the patience to determine exactly what.

Sitting at the terminal in his study, scanning printouts, he realized that the only way to wade through all of this was by using programs written to search for specific patterns, specific lines of research. Or possible research. Or maybe a direction that research could go, perhaps. Such customized programs didn’t exist. And Jackson, no software expert, couldn’t write them. Let alone dip the records he suspected he wasn’t getting from Kelvin-Castner.

“Send for Lizzie,” he told Vicki, wearily.

“Lizzie? She doesn’t know anything about brain-chemistry research.”

“Well, neither do I. Or at least, not enough. Call her and tell her I’ll send a car for her right away. She’s going to have to help me write specialized intent-software. If she can’t do that, she can at least dip K-C’s closed records. God knows she’s good enough at dipping. I don’t want to bring in an outside dipper who might resell the information. At least, not yet.”

Vicki’s eyes gleamed. “All right. And, by way of information, Jones says that Cazie is on her way up to see you.”

Jackson looked up from the toppling piles of printouts all over his antique Aubusson. Vicki’s face was carefully neutral. Once more he could feel her arms around him, warm and solid, beside the terrace railing.

Maybe help from Lizzie wasn’t the only way through.

He said quietly, “Cazie. She’s been here regularly, hasn’t she? To see Theresa.”

“This time she wants to see you.”

“How do you know?”

Vicki smiled sourly. “I know.”

And then Cazie was there, striding into his study as if she owned it, electric blue dress rustling and dark curls swirling, a vivid presence igniting the dim room to a dangerous glow that seemed capable of consuming the nonconsumable plastic printouts. Cazie scowled. “Jack! If I could see you alone…”

Vicki murmured, “Only if you can see past yourself,” and left the room.

Jackson stood, for the fragile advantage of height.

“How are you. Jack?”

“I’m fine.” He waited. This was going to be it, then. It really was. He wondered if Cazie realized.

“And Tessie?”

“She’s progressing right on schedule.”

Cazie’s smile was genuine. “I’m so glad! Our Tessie… remember how we used to think of her as the child we hadn’t yet had? Unearned sentiment, but not totally false.” She moved a step closer to him. He could smell her perfume, like flowers in animal heat.

Jackson said, “Kelvin-Castner isn’t developing the counteragent. And I can prove that you know it.”

It was his only real shot—catch her by surprise, counting on the fact that she didn’t expect duplicity from him, or unsubstantiated accusations, or lies. She trusted him, even though she’d always let him know he couldn’t trust her. He was Jackson: solid, honest, dazzled by her. Easy to fool. Easy to control.

He watched closely. She was good—just a slight widening of the huge gold-green eyes, an involuntary change in the shining pupils. It was enough. Jackson suddenly felt punched in the stomach.

Cazie said evenly, “That’s not true, Jack. You’ve been sent the lab reports every day.”

“They’re faked. All the effort in understanding the permanence factor is going toward its use as a basis for a pleasure drug.”

“You haven’t had time for that kind of analysis. And even if you had, you’re wrong. Come over to K-C and see for yourself. Thurmond will show you—”

“—actual experiments. Yes, I don’t doubt it. A few kept for show. Cazie… how could you? You know what this new neuropharm did to the Livers in Vicki’s camp. What it could do everywhere. No one able to adapt, to modify their daily routines. When the Change syringes are all gone and kids can’t count on the Cell Cleaner to zap every harmful organism they pick up, or on trophoblastic tubules to feed them, nobody will be able to innovate enough to relearn how! Within a generation—”

“Oh, God, Jack, you’ll never change, will you? You just gaze at your tiny specialty, the sacred medical model, and never even glance at the larger picture. Look up—literally! The Livers don’t exist all by themselves, some little helpless endangered lizards alone on a barren desert! They have Miranda Sharifi as guardian angel. With a whole host of SuperSleepless seraphs and cherubs. Miranda will fly out of Selene when she’s goddamn good and ready, burn a few bushes and hand down a counteragent, and that’ll be that. K-C doesn’t have to do anything for Livers. And there’s no reason why we should.”

“Well, there’s the little fact that you promised me.”

Cazie looked at him. God, she was beautiful. The most desirable woman he’d ever known. Beautiful, smart, tender when she felt like it. His wife—once, anyway—with everything Jackson had once thought that word meant. Something under his ribs twisted sharply. It physically hurt to know that he’d never hold her in his arms again.

“Jack—”

“Tell Thurmond Rogers, my old university pal, that I’m moving into Kelvin-Castner. Immediately. With a datadipper and a lawyer. I’m going over every report personally, visiting every lab in the biohazard complex, fucking haunting him with consultant experts. And if—”

“You can’t bring outsiders into K-C! Nondisclosure—”

“—if I don’t find substantial, scientifically valid progress, daily, toward a counteragent to the inhibition neuropharm. I’m tying up K-C in contract-violation lawsuits that will prevent old Alex from getting a patent until the millennium. Even if I bankrupt TenTech in the process.”

Cazie stared at him. It seemed to Jackson that suddenly she stood behind a Y-shield, invisible but unbreakable. His shield, or hers? Bleakly, he realized that it no longer mattered which.

She had always been quick. She said softly, “You’re through with me this time, aren’t you, Jack? For good.”

“Tell Rogers what I said.”

“Something’s changed in you. You really would sacrifice TenTech for this quixotic gesture. Why?”

“Because you’re incapable of seeing that it’s not a gesture.”

She said, not moving, “I never pretended to be anything besides what I am, Jack.”

He said painfully, “No. You never did.”

Suddenly Cazie threw back her head and laughed, a high full laugh with no hint of hysteria. Jackson felt something then, a quick flash of old fear—I can’t let her go—and felt just as clearly the moment it died, leaving him empty.

She said lightly, “I’m going to visit Theresa now.”

He stood there after she left, waiting. Now Vicki would come in, with some sardonic, provocative remark. That was how it went: he quarreled with Cazie, Vicki listened at doors, then she came in and poked the wound. That was how it went.

But this wasn’t just another routine quarrel with Cazie. And in a few minutes Vicki did come in, but not to poke. She was pulling a sweater over her head, her hair made wild by her roughness, her eyes not focused on him at all.

“I’m taking your car, Jack. Lizzie’s gone.”

“Lizzie? Gone where?”

“Annie doesn’t know. But Lizzie left the camp a week ago and hasn’t called since. Two strangers, genemod, came looking for Lizzie right after she’d gone. Annie was terrified of them, of course.”

“A week—listen, Vicki, I can’t go with you, I have to go to Kelvin-Castner—”

That distracted her for just a moment; the cold determination on her face lifted and her eyes gleamed. For just a moment.

Jackson finished, “—but I can let you have a gun. A Larsen-Colt laser that—”

“You don’t have any weapons comparable to what I can get,” Vicki said with the same efficient coldness, and left Jackson staring after her as she left the study cluttered with printouts he hadn’t yet read.

Interlude

TRANSMISSION DATE: May 13, 2121

TO: Selene Bose, Moon

VIA: Dallas Enclave Ground Station, GEO Satellite C-1867 (U.S.), Satellite E-643 (Brazil)

MESSAGE TYPE: Encrypted

MESSAGE CLASS: Class C, Private Paid Transmission

ORIGINATING GROUP: Gregory Ross Elmsworth

MESSAGE:

Ms. Sharifi—Undoubtedly you know who I am; I wouldn’t insult your intelligence by suggesting otherwise. The people of the United States chose to reject my bid for the presidency, but that does not mean that I still don’t stand ready to serve this great country of ours any way I can. I therefore am prepared to offer you one billion dollars—a third of my private fortune—in return for a complete scientific explanation of your Change syringes, sufficient for commercial duplication. I will make this information, without charge, freely available to all pharmaceutical companies in the United States. Although your own fortune is of course large, I can’t believe you will be indifferent to my offer.

Addresses and encryptions to reach my lawyers are attached.

Let history fondly recall both of us.

Sincerely,

Gregory Ross Elmsworth

Gregory Ross Elmsworth

Elmsworth Enterprises International, Inc.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received