Beggars and Choosers

Six

The first person I saw at Science Court, walking up the broad shallow white stone steps that were supposed to evoke Socrates and Aristotle, was Leisha Camden.

Paul, who came before Anthony and after Rex, and I used to enjoy intellectual arguments. He enjoyed them because he won; I enjoyed them because he won. This was, of course, before I understood how deeply rooted, like a cancer, was my desire to lose. At the time the arguments seemed amusing, even daring. The people Paul and I knew considered it rather bad form to debate abstract questions. We donkeys, with our genemod intelligence, were all so good at it — like showing off the fact that you could walk. No one wished to appear ridiculous. Much better to publicly enjoy body surfing. Or gardening. Or even, God help us, sensory deprivation tanks. Much better.

But one night Paul and I, daring nonconformists right up to our banal end, debated who should have the right to control radical new technology. The government? The technocrats, mostly scientists and engineers, who were the only ones who ever really understood it? The free market? The people? It was not a good night. Paul wanted to win more than usual. I, for reasons connected to a gold-eyed slut at a party the night before, was not quite as eager as usual to lose. Things got said, the kinds of embarrassing things that don’t go away. Tempers ran high. My paternal grandfather’s teak desk required a new panel, which never quite matched the others. Intellectual debate can be very hard on furniture.

In a subtle way, I blame the Sleepless for Paul’s and my breakup. Not directly, but a desastre inoffensif, like the final small program that crashes an overloaded system. But, then, for the last hundred years, what haven’t we blamed on the Sleepless?

They even caused the creation of the science courts: another desastre inoffensif. A hundred years ago, nobody ever made a decision that is was acceptable to engineer human embryos to be Sleepless. Genemod companies just did it, the way they did all those other embryonic genemods in the unregulated days before the GSEA. You want a kid who’s seven feet tall, has purple hair, and is encoded with a predisposition for musical ability? Here — you got yourself a basketball-playing punk cellist. Mazel tov.

Then came the Sleepless. Rational, awake, smart. Too smart. And long-lived, a bonus surprise — nobody knew at first that sleep interfered with cell regeneration. Nobody liked it when they found out. Too many Darwinian advantages piling up in one corner.

So, this being the United States and not some sixteenth-century monarchy or twentieth-century totalitarian state, the government just didn’t outlaw radical genetic modifications outright. Instead, they talked them to death.

The Federal Forum for Science and Technology follows due process. A jury composed of a panel of scientists, arguments and rebuttals, cross-examination, final written opinion with provision for dissenting opinions, the whole ROM. Science Court has no power. It can ony recommend, not make policy. Nobody on it can tell anybody to do or not do anything about any thing.

But no Congress, president, or GSEA board has ever acted contrary to a Science Court recommendation. Not once. Not ever.

So I had all the force majeure of the status quo on my side that furniture-wrecking night when I declared that the government should control human genetic modification. Paul wanted absolute control by scientists (he was one). We both were right, as far as actual practice. But of course practice didn’t matter; neither did theory, really. What we’d really wanted was the fight.

Did Leisha Camden ever wreck furniture or put her fist through walls or hurl antique wineglasses? Watching her walk into the white-columned Forum building on Pennsylvania Avenue, I thought not. Washington in August is hot; Leisha wore a sleeveless white suit. Her bright blonde hair was cut in short, shining waves. She looked composed, beautiful, cool. She reminded me, probably unfairly, of Stephanie Brunell. All that was missing was the pink huge-eyed, doomed little dog.

“Oyez, oyez,” the clerk called, as the technical panel filed in. And then they get huffy when the press calls it “science court.” Washington is Washington, even when it’s rising to its feet for Nobel laureates.

There were three of them this time, on an eight-person panel: heavy artillery. Barbara Poluikis, chemical biology, a diminutive woman with hyperalert eyes. Elias Maleck, medicine, who radiated worried integrity. Martin Davis Exford, molecular physics, looking more like an overage ballet dancer. Nobody, of course, in genetics. The United States hasn’t won there in sixty years. The panelists had been agreed to by the advocates for both sides. Panelists were presumed to be impartial.

I sat in the press section, courtesy of credentials from Colin Kowalski, credentials so badly faked that anybody who checked them would have to conclude they’d been faked by me, the person incapacitated by Gravison’s disease, and not by some competent agency. There was a lot of press, live and robotic. Science Court goes out on various donkey grids.

After the panel sat down, I stayed standing — very gauche — to scan the spectators for Livers. There might have been one or two in the gallery; the room was so big it was hard to tell. “Please sit down,” my seat said to me in a reasonable voice, “others may have trouble seeing over you.” That I could believe. In my bright purple jacks and soda-can-and-plastic jewelry I was one of a kind in the press box.

In the front of the chamber, behind a low antique-wood railing and an invisible high-security Y-shield, sat the advocates, expert testimony, panel, and VIPs. Leisha Camden sat next to amateur advocate Miranda Sharifi, who had suddenly appeared in Washington from God-knows-where. Not from Huevos Verdes. For days the press had been watching the island with the avidity of moonbase residents monitoring dome leaks. So from what geographical forehead had Miranda Sharifi sprung, helmeted to do battle for her corporation’s product?

She had refused a professional lawyer to argue her case. She’d even refused Leisha Camden, which had caused much snickering in the press bar. Apparently they felt a SuperSleepless was inadequate to convincingly present the technology her own people had invented. I never ceased to be amazed at the stupidity of my fellow IQ-enhanced donkeys.

I studied Miranda carefully. Short, big-headed, low of brow. Thick unruly black hair tied back with a red ribbon. Despite the severe, expensive black suit, she looked like neither a Liver nor a donkey. I saw her furtively wipe the palms of her hands on her skirt; they must be damp. I’d seen pictures of the notorious Jennifer Sharifi, and Miranda had inherited none of her grandmother’s coolness, height, or beauty. I wondered if she minded.

“We’re here today,” began moderator Dr. Senta Yongers, a grandmotherly type with the perfect teeth of a grid star, “to determine the facts concerning Case 1892-A. I would like to remind everyone in this chamber that the purpose of this inquiry is threefold. First, to identify agreed-upon facts concerning this scientific claim, including but not limited to its nature, actions, and replicable physical effects.

“Second, to allow disagreements about this scientific claim to be discussed, debated, and recorded for later study.

“And third, to fulfill a joint request from the Congressional Committee on New Technology, the Federal Drug Administration, and the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency to create a recommendation for the further study, for the licensing within the United States, or for the denial of Case 1892-A, which has already been awarded patent status. Further study, I may remind you, allows the patent’s developers to solicit volunteers for beta testing of the patent. Licensing is virtually equivalent to federal permission to market.” Yongers looked around the chamber gravely over the tops of her glasses — a currently fashionable affectation for donkeys with perfect vision — to emphasize the seriousness of this possibility. This is important, folks — you could get Case 1892-A dumped square in your laps. As if anybody here didn’t already realize that.

I looked back at Miranda Sharifi, holding a thick printout bound in black covers. It was clear to me that the Sleepless are a different species from donkeys and Livers. I mention this only because of the large number of people to whom it is, inexplicably, not clear. Miranda undoubtedly understood everything in that stupendously complex printout, which was, after all, in her own field, and at least partly of her own devising. But she probably also understood everything important in my field (all my purported fields, pathetic kitchen gardens that they were). Plus everything important in art history, in law, in early-childhood education, in international economics, in paleolithic anthropology. To me, that added up to a different species. Donkeys have brains fully adapted to their needs, but then so did the stegosaurus. I was looking at a multi-adapted mammal.

Feeling spiny, I watched a grid journalist in front of me flick a finger to direct his robocam to zoom in on the legend carved across the chamber’s impressive dome: THE PEOPLE MUST CONTROL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. A nice journalistic touch, that. I approve of irony.

“The chief advocate for Case 1892-A,” continued Moderator Yongers, “is Miranda Sharifi, of Huevos Verdes Corporation, the patent holders. Chief opposition is Dr. Lee Chang, GSEA Senior Geneticist and holder of the Geoffrey Sprague Morling Chair in Genetics at Johns Hopkins. The following stipulations have already been agreed to by both sides — for details please consult the furnished hard copy, the master screen at the front of the chamber, or channel 1640FORURM on Govnet.”

The “furnished hard copy” was four hundred pages of cell diagrams, equations, genenome tables, and chemical processes, all with numerous journal citations. But in front was a one-page list somebody had prepared for the press. I would bet my purple jacks that its simplifications had been paid for in hours of screaming by technical experts who didn’t want their precious facts distorted just so they could be understood. But here the simplified distortions were, ready for the newsgrids. Washington is Washington.

“Pre-agreed upon by both sides,” read Moderator Yongers, “are the following nine points:

“One — Case 1892-A describes a nanodevice designed to be injected into the human bloodstream. The device is made of genetically modified self-replicating proteins in very complex structures. The process which creates these structures is proprietary, belonging to Huevos Verdes Corporation. The device has been named by its creators the ‘Cell Cleaner.’ This name is a registered trademark, and must be indicated as such whenever used.”

Always good to have your commercial bases covered. I scanned the faces of the Nobel laureates. They showed nothing.

“Two — Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to leave the bloodstream and travel through human tissue, as do white blood cells. Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner also has demonstrated the capacity to penetrate a cell wall, as do viruses, with no damage to the cell.”

No problem there — even I knew that the FDA had already licensed a batch of drugs that could do those things. I switched my contact lenses to zoom and saw Miranda Sharifi’s hand steal into Leisha Camden’s. Bad move — every grid journalist and online watcher could see it, too. Didn’t Miranda know any better than to show signs of weakness to the enemy? How had she brought down the entire pseudo-government of Sanctuary, anyway?

“Three — Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner occupies less than one percent of a typical cell’s volume. Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to be powered by chemicals naturally present in cells.”

Yongers paused and looked challengingly around the room; I didn’t know why. Did she expect any of us to challenge what eight scientists had already stipulated? The Cell Cleaner could have been powered by gerbils on treadmills for all any of us laymen could prove. But only under laboratory conditions, of course.

It was already clear where the opposition would attack.

“Four — Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to replicate at slightly slower than the rate at which bacteria replicate — about twenty minutes per complete division. Under laboratory conditions, this replication has demonstrated the capacity to occur for several hours using only those chemicals normally found in human tissue plus those chemicals contained in the fluid of the original injection. Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to stop replicating after several hours, and to then replicate only to replace damaged units.”

Go forth and multiply, but only to a predetermined point. Too bad the whole human race hadn’t done that. The history of the previous century — and the cataclysmically Malthusian one before that — might have been entirely different. God forgot the “off” switch. Huevos Verdes didn’t.

“Five — The Cell Cleaner contains a proprietary device referred to in Case 1892-A as ‘biomechanical nanocomputing technology.’ Under laboratory conditions, this technology has demonstrated the capacity to identify seven cells of the same functional type from a mass of cells of varying functional types, and to compare the DNA from these seven cells to determine what constitutes standard DNA coding for that type of cell. Furthermore, the Cell Cleaner is said to be able to enter subsequent cells and compare their DNA structure to its determined standard.”

If that was true — and there was no way the opposition would have agreed to it if there were the slightest doubt — it was astounding. No other biotech firm on Earth could do that. But I noticed the careful wording: “is said to be able.” Stipulations were supposed to be demonstrated fact. Why were mere claims by Huevos Verdes allowed in at this point? Unless they were necessary prerequisites to something that had been demonstrated.

“Six — Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to destroy any cells whose DNA does not match what it has determined to be standard coding.”

Bingo.

Even the journalists looked excited. In Washington.

“Seven — Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to thus destroy each of the following types of abberrant cells: cancerous growths, precancerous dyspla-sia, deposits on arterial walls, viruses, infectious bacteria, toxic elements and compounds, and cells whose DNA has been altered by viral activity resulting in DNA splices. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that under laboratory conditions, such dissembled cells can be handled by normal bodily-waste-removal mechanisms.”

Cancer, arteriosclerosis, chicken pox, herpes, lead poisoning, tourista, cystitis, and the common cold. All gone, dissembled and washed away by your own team of customized internal cleaning ladies. I felt a little dizzy.

But what the hell could those “laboratory conditions” have been like?

The spectators buzzed loudly. Moderator Yongers glared at us until the room quieted.

“Eight — Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to avoid destroying certain bacterial cells even though their ‘genetic fingerprint’ does not match the host tissue’s DNA. These cells include, but are not limited to, bacteria normally found in the human digestive tract, vagina, and upper respiratory tract. It is noted for the record that Huevos Verdes Corporation attributes this selectivity in dissembling non-standard DNA to preprogramming the protein nanocomputer to recognize symbiotic bacterial DNA.”

Kill off the harmful, spare the useful. Huevos Verdes was offering the world’s first immune-system enhancer with computerized Darwinian morality. Or maybe Arthurian morality: Replace ‘Might makes right’ with ‘Right makes life.’ I suddenly pictured legions of little Cell Cleaners in shining white armor, and I had to grin. The journalist in the next seat shot me an edgy look.

“Nine — No significant studies have been carried out concerning the Cell Cleaner’s performance or effects inside whole, living, fully functional human beings.”

There it was: the inevitable spoiler. Without long-term studies of its effects on real people, Huevos Verdes had no more chance of marketing Case 1892-A than of marketing powdered unicorn horn. Even if the Science Court permitted further study, I was not going to have my own private Cell Cleaner anytime soon.

I sat exploring how I felt about that.

Another buzz swept over the audience: disappointment? Satisfaction? Anger? It seemed to be all three.

“The following points,” Moderator Yongers said, raising her voice, “are in dispute,” The chamber quieted.

“One — The Cell Cleaner will cause ho harm to healthy human cells, tissues, or organs.”

She stopped. That was it — one point in dispute. But that point, her face clearly said, was everything. Who wanted a cleaned, repaired, dead body?

“The first opening argument will be presented by the opposition. Dr. Lee?”

There was another printout to summarize Dr. Lee’s points, which was fortunate because he couldn’t. Every sentence came trailing clouds of evidence, qualifiers, and equations, all of which he clearly considered glory. The technical panel listened closely, taking notes. Everybody else consulted the printout. It summarized his windy points:

In dispute: “The Cell Cleaner will cause no harm to healthy human cells, tissues, or organs.”

In rebuttal: There is no way to assure that the Cell Cleaner will not cause harm to healthy cells, organs, or tissues.

• Laboratory tests do not necessarily predict the effects of biosubstances on live, functional human beings. See CDC Hypertext File 68164.

• No partial-being studies have included the effect of the Cell Cleaner on the brain. Brain chemisty can behave much dif-ferently from grosser body tissue. See CDC Hypertext File 68732.

• The long-term effects submitted cover only two years. Many biosubstances reveal erratic side effects only after longer time periods. See CDC Hypertext File 88812.

• The list of so-called “pre-programmed symbiotic bacterial DNA” that the Cell Cleaner will not destroy may or may not be congruent with a complete list of useful foreign organisms in a living, functional human being. The human body includes some ten thousand billion billion protein parts interacting in intensely complex ways, including hundreds of thousands of different kinds of molecules, some only partially understood. The so-called “pre-programmed list” could leave out vital organisms which the Cell Cleaner would then destroy, possibly causing tremendous functional upset, including death.

• Over time, the Cell Cleaner itself might develop repli-cation problems. Since it introduces what is in essence com-peting DNA into the body, it displays the potential to become an artificially induced cancer. See CDC Hypertext File 4536.

I wondered at the quirk in the printing program that had made the word “cancer” darker than the rest.

Dr. Lee took the entire rest of the morning for his opening argument, which seemed shut pretty tight to me. At no point did I question his sincerity. The argument seemed to go like this: The Cell Cleaner couldn’t be proved safe without a decade — at least — of tests on real, whole human beings. (I decided not to look up “partial-being studies.” I didn’t really want to know.) It was, however, inhumane to subject real human beings to such risks. There was therefore no way to prove the Cell Cleaner safe. And if it was unsafe, the potential for widespread disaster was spectacular.

Including, in the curious phrasing of the printout, “tremendous functional upset, including death.”

Therefore, the opposition would recommend that the Cell Cleaner not be licensed, not be approved for further study within the United States, and be placed on the Banned List of the International Genetic Modification Advisory Council.

Apparently we had already left the fact-finding stage and were well into the political-recommendation stage. Washington is Washington. Facts are political; politics is a fact.

It was a quarter to twelve when Dr. Lee finished. Moderator Yongers leaned over her bench. “Ms. Sharifi, it’s nearly time to break for lunch. Would you prefer to postpone your opening statement until this afternoon?”

“No, Madame Moderator. I’ll be brief.” Why hadn’t Leisha Camden told Miranda to leave off the red hair ribbon? It gave her an Alice-in-Wonderland youthfulness that was a liability. Her voice was calm and dispassionate.

“The patent you are considering today is the greatest life-saving medical development since the discovery of antibiotics. Dr. Lee speaks of the dangers to the body if the Cell Cleaner nanoma-chinery fails, or is inaccurately programmed, or produces unknown side effects. He does not mention the people who will die premature or painful deaths without this innovation. You would rather keep one person from dying with the Cell Cleaner than have hundreds of thousands die without it. That is morally wrong.

“You are morally wrong, all of you. The whole purpose of this so-called scientific Forum is to protect drug company profits at the expense of the sick and dying. You are moral Fascists, using the strength of government to harm those already weak and powerless, in order to keep them powerless and so keep yourselves in power. And I except none of you from these charges, not even the scientists, who conspire with profit and power and so deliver science to them.

“With the Cell Cleaner, Huevos Verdes offers you life. Even though you do not deserve to live. But Huevos Verdes does not distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving when it offers a product. You do, every time your regulations stifle genetic or nanotech research, every time that lost research deprives someone of life. You are killers, all of you. Political and economic mercenaries, no better at judging true science than the jungle animals whose morality you emulate. Nonetheless, Huevos Verdes Corporation offers you the Cell Cleaner, and I will prove to you here its essential safety, even though I’m not sure any of you has the capacity to understand the science I will explain.”

And Miranda Sharifi sat down.

The panel looked stunned, as well they might. More interestingly, Leisha Camden also looked stunned. Evidently this was not what she’d expected to hear her protegee say. She whispered frantically into Miranda’s ear.

“I have never heard such unprofessional bullshit!” Martin Davis Exford, Nobel laureate in molecular physics, on his feet behind the panelists’ table. His powerful voice outshouted everyone else. Maroon veins pulsed below the surface of his neck.

“I deeply resent, Ms. Sharifi, your perversion of this Forum. We’re here to determine scientific fact, not indulge in ad hominem attacks!”

A journalist in fashionable yellow stripes yelled from the front row of the press box, “Ms. Sharifi — are you trying to lose this case?”

Slowly I turned my head in his direction.

“Hey, Miranda, look this way!” a Liver-channel reporter, his robocam floating beside him. “Smile pretty!”

“Order, please! Order!” Moderator Yongers, her glasses gone, banging her metal water pitcher since she had no gavel because of course this wasn’t really a court.

“Smile, Miranda!”

“—an outrage to professional discourse and—”

“Please sit down,” said several seats, “others may have trouble seeing over you. Please sit—”

“I will have order in this Forum!”

But the pandemonium grew. A man broke from the public section and charged down the inclined aisle toward the Forum floor.

I had a clear view of his face. It twisted with the terrible rigidity of hate, a rigidity that no amount of reason can relax and that takes years to calcify. Miranda Sharifi’s insults today hadn’t created that face. The man ran toward her, pulling something from his jacket. Seventeen robocams and three security ’bots zoomed toward him.

He hit the invisible Y-energy shield in front of the participants’

tables, and spread-eagled against it with an audible crack of skull or other bone. Dazed, the man slid down the shield exactly as down a brick wall. A security ’bot dragged him away.

“—restore order to these proceedings now—”

“A smile, Miranda! Just one smile!”

“—unwarranted assumption of moral superiority, and contempt for United States law, when in reality—”

“—and it looks, newsgrid viewers, as if the fracas were deliberately created by Miranda Sharifi for hidden Huevos Verdes motives about which we can only—”

Miranda Sharifi never moved.

Eventually Moderator Yongers, having no real choice, recessed for lunch.

I pushed my way to the front of the chaotic Forum chamber, trying to shadow Miranda Sharifi, which was of course impossible. The Y-shield stood between us, and spectacularly built bodyguards muscled her and Leisha Camden out a rear door. I caught sight of them again on the roof, having knocked over four people to get there. They climbed into an aircar. Several other cars followed in close pursuit, but I was convinced it wasn’t going to do any of them — reporters, GSEA, FBI, rogue geneticists, whoever — any good. They weren’t going to learn any more than I had.

What had I learned?

The journalist in yellow stripes was right. Miranda Sharifi’s performance had just ensured that Case 1892-A was dead. She had insulted not only the intellectual and technical competence of eight scientists, but their characters as well. I had cursorily researched three of those scientists, the Nobel laureates, and I knew they were not venial sellouts but people of integrity. Miranda must know that, too. So — why?

Maybe, despite any research she’d done, she genuinely believed all Sleepers were corrupt. Her grandmother, a brilliant woman, had believed it. But somehow I didn’t think Miranda did.

Maybe she believed the five non-laureate scientists, mediocrities with good political connections, would inevitably outvote the impartial laureates. But if so, why alienate her three potential allies? And why agree to seating the five mediocrities in the first place? All panelists had been agreed upon by both sides.

No. Miranda Sharifi wanted to lose this case. She wanted a decision against the Cell Cleaner.

But maybe I was being too anthropomorphic. Miranda Sharifi was, after all, completely different from me. Her mental processes were different, which included her motives. Maybe she’d alienated the panel to … what? To make it harder to obtain official approval for the patent. Maybe she only valued victory if it was hard won. Maybe making everything as difficult as possible was part of some Sleepless Code of Honor, built upon the fact that things came so easily to them. How the fuck would I know?

All this ratiocination translated itself into self-disgust. Despite the heat, it was a gorgeous day in Washington, one of those clear-blue-sky-and-golden-light afternoons that seem to have blown in from some more favored city. I walked along the mall, attracting attention: the crazy donkey dressed like a gone-native Liver. Drug dealers and lovers and gravboarding teenagers left me alone, which was just as well. I was having one of those brief, sharp self-questionings that leave you both enervated and embarrassed afterwards. What was I doing skulking around in these silly plastic clothes, trying to manufacture some difficult personal meaning-fulness out of following around people who were clearly my superiors?

For the Sleepless were my superiors, and in more than intelligence. In discipline, in sheer sweep of vision. In the enviable certainty that accompanies purpose, even if I didn’t know what that purpose was, whereas all I had was an aimless, drifting alarm about where my country was headed. An alarm set off by a semi-sentient pink dog hurling over a terrace railing. When I thought of that now, it sounded silly.

I couldn’t even define where I thought my country ought to head. I could only impede, not propel, and I wasn’t even sure what I was impeding. It was sure as hell more than Case 1892-A.

I didn’t know what the Sleepless were trying to do. Nobody knew. So what made me so damn sure I should be stopping them from doing it?

On the other hand, nothing I had done so far, or seemed likely to do in the near future, had had the slightest effect on Miranda Sharifi’s plans. I had not reported on her to the GSEA, not kept her under constant surveillance, not even reached a coherent conclusion about her in the private and unsought-after recesses of my mind. I was completely irrelevant. So there was nothing for me to regret, nothing to agonize over doing or not doing, nothing to change. Zero, whatever you multiply or divide it by, is still zero. Somehow this failed to cheer me up.

The next four days were a letdown. People primed for scientific theater — I include myself — instead received hours of incomprehensible graphs, tables, equations, explanations, and holomodels of cells and enzymes and such. Much time was given to the tertiary and quaternary structure of proteins. There was a spirited and incomprehensible debate on Worthington’s transference equations as applied to redundant RNA coding. I fell asleep during this. I was not alone. Fewer people showed up each day. Of those who did, only the scientists looked rapt.

It didn’t seem fair, somehow. Miranda Sharifi had told us we were looking at the greatest medical breakthrough in two hundred years, and to most of us it looked like alchemy. THE PEOPLE MUST CONTROL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. Yes, right. How do churls make decisions about wizardry we can’t understand?

In the end, they rejected it.

Two of the Nobel laureates wrote dissenting opinions, Barbara Poluikis and Martin Exford. They favored allowing beta testing on human volunteers, and didn’t rule out possible future licensing. They wanted the scientific knowledge. You could see, even through the formal wording of their brief, joint opinion, that they panted for it. I saw Miranda Sharifi watching them carefully.

The majority opinon did everything but print copies of itself on the American flag. Safety of United States citizens, sacred trust, preservation of the identity of the human genome, blah blah blah. Everything, in fact, that had led me to join the GSEA the day Katous hurled himself off my balcony.

At some deep level, I still believed the majority opinion was right. Unregulated biotech held the potential for incredible disaster. And nobody could really regulate Huevos Verdes biotech because nobody could really understand it. SuperSleepless intelligence and American patent protection combined to ensure that. And if you can’t regulate it, better to keep it out of the country entirely.

Nonetheless, I left the courtroom profoundly depressed. And immediately learned that my ignorance about cellular biology was not my only, or worst, ignorance. I’d thought I was a cynic. But cynicism is like money: somebody else always has more of it than you do.

I sat on the steps of the Science Court, my back to a Doric column the thickness of a small redwood. A light wind blew. Two men paused in the shelter of the column to light sunshine pipes; I’d noticed that Easterners like it smoked. In California, we preferred to drink it. The men were genemod handsome, dressed in the severe sleeveless black suits fashionable on the Hill. Both ignored me. Livers noticed instantly that I wasn’t one of them, but donkeys seldom looked past the jacks and soda-can jewelry. Sufficient grounds for dismissal.

“So how long do you think?” one man said.

“Three months to market, maybe. My guess is either Germany or Brazil.”

“What if Huevos Verdes doesn’t do it?”

“John, why wouldn’t they? There’s a fortune to be made, and that Sharifi woman is no fool. I’m going to be watching the investment trends very carefully.”

“You know, I don’t even really care about the investment factor?” John’s voice was wistful. “I just want it for Jana and me and the girls. Jana’s had these growths on and off for years… what we’ve got now only restrains them so far.”

The other man put a hand on John’s arm. “Watch Brazil. That’s my best guess. It’ll be quick, quicker than if we’d licensed it here. And without all the complications of every blighted Liver town clamoring for it for their medunit, at some undoable cost.”

Pipes lighted, they left.

I sat there, marveling at my own stupidity. Of course. Turn down the Cell Cleaner for American development, make huge political capital from your “protection” of Livers, save a staggering amount of credits from not offering it to your political constituency, and then buy the medical breakthrough for yourself and your loved ones overseas. Of course.

The people must control science and technology.

Maybe Dr. Lee Chang was right. Maybe the Cell Cleaner would run amok and kill them all. All but the Livers. Who would then rise up to establish a just and humane state.

Yes. Right. Desdemona’s mommy and the other Livers I’d seen on the train controlling biotech that could eventually alter the human race into something else. The blind splicing genes, blindly. Right.

Inertia, first cousin to depression, seized me. I sat there, getting colder, until the sky darkened and my ass hurt from the hard marble. The portico was long since deserted. Slowly, stiffly, I got my body to its feet — and had my first piece of luck in weeks.

Miranda Sharifi walked down the wide steps, keeping to the shadows. The face wasn’t hers, and the brown jacks weren’t hers, and I had seen her and Leisha Camden climb into an aircar, which took off two hours ago, pursued by half of Washington. This Liver had pale skin and a large nose and short dirty-blonde hair. So why was I so sure this was Miranda? The big head, and the tip of red ribbon that I, zoom-lensed, saw peeking from her back hip pocket. Or maybe it was just that I needed it to be her, and the “Miranda” who took off with Leisha Camden to be a decoy.

I groped in my pocket for the mid-range infrared sensor Colin Kowalski had given me and surreptitiously aimed it at her. It went off the scale. Miranda or no, this person had the revved metabolism of a SuperSleepless. And no GSEA agents in sight.

Not, of course, that I would see them.

But I refused to give in to negativity. Miranda was mine. I followed her to the gravrail station, pleased at how easily all my old training returned. We boarded a local train traveling north. We settled into a crowded, malodorous car with so many children it seemed the Livers must be breeding right there on the uncleaned floor.

We stopped every twenty minutes or so at some benighted Liver town. I didn’t dare sleep; Miranda might get off someplace without me. What if the trip lasted days? By morning I had trained myself to nap between stops, my unconscious set like an edgy guard dog to nip me awake each time the train slowed and lurched. This produced very strange dreams. Once it was David I was following; he kept shedding his clothes as he danced away from me, an unreachable succubus. Once I dreamed I’d lost Miranda and the Science Court had me on trial for uselessness against the state. The worst was the dream in which I was injected with the Cell Cleaner and realized it was in fact chemically identical with the industrial-strength cleaner used by the household ’bot in my San Francisco enclave, and every cell in my body was painfully dissolving in bleach and ammonia. I woke gasping for air, my face distorted in the black glass of the window.

After that I stayed awake. I watched Miranda Sharifi as the grav train, miraculously not malfunctioning, slid through the mountains of Pennsylvania and into New York State.

Seven

There was a latticework in my head. I couldn’t make it go away. Its shape floated there all the time now, looking a little like the lattices that roses grow on. It was the dark purple color that objects take on in late twilight when it’s hard to see what color anything really is. Miri once told me that nothing “really” is any color — it was all a matter of “circumstantial reflected wave-lengths.” I didn’t understand what she meant. To me, colors are too important to be circumstantial.

The lattice bent around and met itself to form a circle. I couldn’t see what was inside the circle, even though the lattice had diamond-shaped holes. Whatever was inside remained completely hidden.

I didn’t know what this graphic was. It suggested nothing to me. I couldn’t will it to suggest anything, or to change form, or to go away. This hadn’t ever happened to me before. I was the Lucid Dreamer. The shapes that came from my deep unconscious were always meaningful, always universal, always malleable. I shaped them. I brought them outward, to the conscious world. They didn’t shape me. I was the Lucid Dreamer.

I watched Miri’s final day in Science Court on hologrid in a hotel room in Seattle, where I was scheduled to give the revised “The Warrior” concert tomorrow afternoon. The robocams zoomed in close on Leisha and Sara as they climbed into their aircar on the Forum roof. Sara looked exactly like Miri. The holomask over her face, the wig, the red ribbon. She even walked like Miri. Leisha’s eyes had the pinched look that meant she was furious. Had she already discovered the switch? Or maybe that would come in the car. Leisha wouldn’t take it well. Nothing frustrated her more than being lied to, maybe because she was so truthful herself. I was glad I wasn’t there.

Spiky red shapes, taut with anxiety, sped around the purple latticework that never went away.

Sara/Miri closed the car door. The windows, of course, were opaqued. I turned off the newsgrid. It might be months before I saw Miri again. She could slip in and out of East Oleanta — she had, in fact, come to Washington from there — but Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer in his state-of-the-art powerchair, followed everywhere by the GSEA, could not. And even if I went to Huevos Verdes, Nikos Demetrios or Toshio Ohmura or Terry Mwakambe might decide a shielded link with East Oleanta was too great a risk for just personal communication. I might not even talk with Miri for months.

The spiky red shapes eased a little.

I poured myself another scotch. That slowed down the anxiety-shapes sometimes. But I tried to be careful with the stuff. I did try. I could remember my old man, in the stinking Delta town where I grew up:

Don’t you lip me, boy! You ain’t nothing, you, but a shit-bottomed baby!

I ain’t no baby, me! I’m seven years old!

You’re a shit-bottomed teatsucker, you, who ain’t never gonna own nothing, so shut up and hand me that beer.

I’m gonna own Sanctuary, me, someday.

You! A stupid bayou rat! Laughter. Then, after thinking it over, the smack. Whap. Then more laughter.

I downed the scotch in a single gulp. Leisha would have hated that. The comlink shrilled in two short bursts. Twice meant the caller wasn’t on the approved list but Kevin Baker’s comlink program had nonetheless decided it was somebody I might want to see. I didn’t know how it decided that. “Fuzzy logic,” Kevin said, which made no shapes in my mind.

I think I would have talked to anybody just then. But I left off the visual.

“Mr. Arlen? Are you there? This is Dr. Elias Maleck. I know it’s very late, but I’d like a few minutes of your time, please. It’s extremely urgent. I’d rather not leave a message.”

He looked tired; it was three in the morning in Washington. I poured myself another scotch. “Visual on. I’m here, Dr. Maleck.”

“Thank you. I want to say right away this is a shielded call, and it’s not being recorded. Nobody can hear it but us two.”

I doubted that. Maleck didn’t understand what Terry Mwa-kambe or Toshio Ohmura could do. Even if Maleck’s Nobel had been in physics and not medicine, he wouldn’t have understood. Maleck was a big man, maybe sixty-five, not genemod for appearance. Thinning gray hair and tired brown eyes. His skin fell in jowls on either side of his face but his shoulders were square. I felt him as a series of solid navy cubes, unbreakable and clean. The cubes hovered in front of the unmoving lattice.

“I’m not sure exactly where to begin, Mr. Aden.” He ran his hand through his hair and the navy cubes took on a reddish tinge. Maleck was very tense. I sipped my drink.

“As you undoubtedly know by now, I voted against allowing further development of the Huevos Verdes patent claim in the Federal Forum for Science and Technology. The reasons for my vote are stated clearly in the majority opinion. But there are things that a public document can’t contain, things I want permission to inform you about.”

“Why?”

Maleck was blunt. “Because I — we — have no way to talk to Huevos Verdes. They accept messages but not two-way com-munication. You represent the only path by which I can convey information directly to Ms. Sharifi about genetic research.” The shapes in my mind rippled and twisted. I said, “How did you leave any messages for Huevos Verdes? How’d you get the access code to leave any messages?”

“That’s part of what I want to tell you, Mr. Arlen. In five minutes two men will request access to your suite. They want to show you something approximately half an hour from Seattle by plane. The purpose of my call is to urge you to go with them.” He hesitated. “They’re from the government. GSEA.”

“No.”

“I understand, Mr. Arlen. That’s the purpose of my call — to tell you this isn’t a trap, or a kidnapping, or any of the other atrocities you and I both know the government is capable of. The GSEA agents will take you outside the city, keep you about an hour, and return you safely, without implants or truth drugs or anything else. I know these men personally — personally — and I’m willing to stake my entire professional reputation on this. I’m sure you’re recording my call on your end. Send copies to anyone you like before you so much as open your hotel door. You have my word you will return safe and unaltered. Please consider what that’s worth to me.”

I considered. The man filled me with shapes I hadn’t felt in a long time: light, clean shapes, without any hidden agenda. Nothing like the shapes at Huevos Verdes.

Of course, Maleck might be completely sincere and still be used.

Somehow the glass of scotch, my fourth, was empty.

Maleck said, “If you want to take extra time to call Huevos Verdes for instructions—”

“No.” I lowered my voice. “No. I’ll go.”

Maleck’s face changed, opened, growing years younger and hours less tired. (A light cleansing rain falling on the navy cubes.)

“Thank you,” he said. “You won’t regret it. You have my word, Mr. Aden.”

I would bet anything that he, an eminent donkey, had never seen any of my concerts.

I cut off the link, sent off copies of the call to Leisha, to Kevin Baker, to a donkey friend I trusted in Wichita. The link shrilled. Once. Even before I answered it Nikos Demetrios appeared on visual. He wasted no words, him.

“Don’t go with them, Drew.”

There was another glass of scotch in my hand. It was half empty. “That was a shielded call, Nick. Private.”

He ignored this. “It could be a trap, despite what Maleck says. They could be using him. You should know that!”

Impatience had crept into his voice, despite himself: the stupid Sleeper had overlooked the obvious once again. I saw him as a dark shape with a thousand shades of gray, undulating in subtle patterns I would never understand.

“Nick, suppose — just suppose — that I wanted, me, to talk to somebody private, somebody who I don’t want you listening to, somebody who isn’t, them, no part of Huevos Verdes? Somebody else?”

Nick stared. I heard then, me, how I was talking. Liver talk. My glass was empty again. The hotel system said politely, “Excuse me, sir. There are two men requesting access to your suite. Would you like visuals?”

“Nah,” I said. “Send the men in, them.”

“Drew—” Nick began. I blanked him. It didn’t work. Some sort of SuperSleepless override. Wasn’t there anything they couldn’t do, them?

“Drew! Listen, you can’t just—” I disconnected the terminal from the Y-energy power unit.

The GSEA agents didn’t look like GSEA agents. I guess they never do, them. Mid-forties. Donkey handsome. Donkey polite. Probably donkey smart. But if they thought, them, in donkey words, at least the words would come one at a time, not in bunches and clusters and libraries of strings.

Snow fell on the purple lattice, cool and blank.

“You guys like a drink, you?”

“Yes,” one said, a little too fast. Going along with me. But he felt, him, almost as solid, almost as clean, as Maleck. That confused me. They were GSEA, them. How could they feel unhidden?

“Changed my mind,” I said. “Let’s go now, us, wherever you’re taking me.” I powered my chair toward the door. It hit the jamb, it, and hurt my legs.

But on the hotel roof, the cold sobered me. Some, anyway. Cars landed, bringing home early party-goers; it was just a little after midnight. Seattle was built on hills and the hotel was on top of a big one. I could see way beyond the enclave: the dark waters of Puget Sound to the west, Mount Rainier white in the moonlight. Cold stars above, cold lights below. Liver neighborhoods at the bases of the hills, except along the Sound, which was waterfront land too good for Livers.

The GSEA aircar, armored and shielded, took off to the east. Pretty soon there were no more lights. Nobody spoke. I might have slept, me. I hope not.

Don’t bother your Daddy, Drew. He’s asleep.

He’s drunk, him.

Drew!

Drew! Nick said on the comlink. Huevos Verdes said. Miranda Sharifi said. Drew, do this. Give this concert. Spread this subconscious idea. Drew—

The lattice curled in my mind, floating like swamp gas in the bayou where my Daddy finally drowned, him, dead drunk. Some kids found him, long after. They thought the thing in the water was a rotten log.

“We’re here, Mr. Arlen. Please wake up.”

We had landed on a pad somewhere in wild, dark country, dense and wooded, with huge outcroppings of rock that I slowly realized were parts of mountains. My head pounded. One of the agents turned on a portable Y-lamp and cut the car’s lights. We got out. I realized for the first time I didn’t know their names.

“Where are we?”

“Cascade Range.”

“But where are we?”

“Just another few minutes, Mr. Arlen.”

They looked away while I pulled myself into my chair. It floated on its gravunit six inches above a narrow dirt track that led from the landing pad into thick woods. I followed the agents, who carried the lamp. The blackness on either side of the track, under the trees, was like a solid wall, except for rustlings and distant, deep hoots. I smelled pine needles and leaf mold.

The track ended at a low foamcast building hidden by trees, a building too small to be important. No windows. An agent had his retina scanned and spoke a code to the door and it opened. The inside lit up. An elevator filled the interior, and that too had retinal scanner and a code. We went underground.

The elevator opened on a large laboratory crowded with equipment, none of it running. The lights were low. A woman in a white lab coat hurried through one of many side doors. “Is that him?”

“Yes,” an agent said, and I caught his quick involuntary glance to see if the Lucid Dreamer minded not being recognized. I smiled.

“Welcome, Mr. Arlen,” the woman said gravely. “I’m Dr. Car-mela Clemente-Rice. Thank you for coming.”

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, even lovelier than Leisha. Hair so black it looked blue, enormous eyes of a clear navy, flawless skin. She looked about thirty but, of course, might have been much older. Donkey genemods. She was wreathed with the wispy shapes of sorrow.

She held her hands lightly clasped in front of her. “You’re wondering why we brought you here. This isn’t a GSEA installation, Mr. Arlen. It’s an outlaw gene facility we discovered and captured. Setting up the law-enforcement operation took an entire year. The trial of the scientists and technicians working here took another year. They’re all in prison now. Ordinarily the GSEA would dismantle an outlaw lab completely, but there are reasons we couldn’t dismantle this one. As you’ll see in a minute.”

She unclasped her hands and made a curious gesture, as if she were pulling me toward her. Or pulling my mind toward her. The navy-blue donkey eyes never left my face.

“The… beasts working here were creating illegal genemods for the underground market. One of the underground markets. These facilities exist across the United States, Mr. Arlen, although fortunately most of them aren’t as successful as this one. The GSEA expends a lot of money, time, manpower, and legal talent putting them out of business. Follow me, please.”

Carmela Clemente-Rice led the way back through the same side door. We followed. A long white corridor — how big was this underground place? — was lined with doors. She led me through the first one and stepped aside.

There were two of them, male and female, both naked. They had the dreamy, unfocused expressions of heavy users, but somehow I knew they didn’t exist on drugs. They just existed. Both of them were masturbating with a dreamy nonurgency that matched their expressions. The woman had one hand in the vagina between her legs, the other in the one between her breasts. But her other vaginas, between her eyes and on each palm, had also gone labile, their tissues swollen and flushed. The man fondled both his gigantic erect penis and his vagina, and I saw that he had pushed what looked like a food utensil of some kind up one asshole.

“For the sex trade,” Carmela Clemente-Rice said quietly behind me. “Underground genetic embryonic engineering. There’s no way we can undo it, no way we can raise their IQs, which are about 60. All we can do is keep them comfortable, and out of the market they were designed for.”

I powered my chair out of the room. “You’re not showing me anything I don’t already know about, lady,” I said, more harshly than I intended. The sex slaves made bruised, painful shapes in my mind. “This stuff has been around for years, long before Hue-vos Verdes existed. Huevos Verdes doesn’t quarrel with the GSEA outlawing it and shutting it down. Nobody sane argues in favor of this kind of genetic engineering.”

She didn’t answer, just led me down the corridor to another door.

Four of them this time, in a much larger room, with the same dreamy expressions. These weren’t naked, although their clothes were odd: jacks clumsily hand-sewn to fit around the extra limbs and the deformities. One had eight arms, one four legs, another three pairs of breasts. Judging from its body shape, the extra organs on the fourth must have been internal. Pancreases, or livers, or hearts? Could the genes be programmed to grow extra hearts?

“For the transplant market,” Carmela said. “But then, you probably already knew about that, too?”

I had, but didn’t say so.

“These are luckier,” she continued. “We can remove the extra limbs and return them to normal bodies. In fact, Jessie is scheduled for surgery on Tuesday.”

I didn’t ask her which one was Jessie. The scotch made nauseous burbles in my stomach.

In the next room the two people looked normal. Dressed in pajamas, they lay asleep on a bed covered with a pretty chintz spread. Carmela didn’t lower her voice.

“They’re not sleeping, Mr. Arlen. They’re drugged, heavily, and will be for most of the rest of their lives. When they’re not, they’re in intense and constant pain. It’s caused by a tiny geno-mod virus designed to stimulate nerve tissue to an unbearable degree. The virus is injected and then replicates in the body — sort of like the Huevos Verdes Cell Cleaner. The pain is excruciating, but there’s no actual tissue damage, so theoretically it could continue for years. Decades. It was designed for the international torture market, and there was supposed to be an antidote to be administered. Or withheld. Unfortunately, the gene engineers working here had gotten only as far as the nanotorturer, not the antidote.”

One of the drugged pair — I saw now that it was a girl, barely past puberty — stirred uneasily and moaned.

“Dreaming,” Carmela said briefly. “We don’t know what. We don’t know who she is. Mexican maybe, kidnapped, or sold on the black market.”

“If you think that the research at Huevos Verdes is anything like—”

“No, it’s not. We know that. But the—”

“Everything researched and created from nanotechnology at Huevos Verdes is done with only the pubic benefit in mind. Everything. Like the Cell Cleaner.”

“I believe that,” Dr. Clemente-Rice said. She kept her voice low and controlled; I could feel the effort that cost her. “The Huevos Verdes applications are completely different. But the basic science, the breakthroughs, are similar. Only Huevos Verdes has gone much further, much faster. But others could close that gap if they had, for instance, the Cell Cleaner to dismantle and study.”

I stared at the sleeping girl. Her eyelids were puckered. My mother’s eyelids had done that, at the end of her life, when the bone cancer finally got her.

I said, “I’ve seen enough.”

“One more, Mr. Arlen. Please. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t so urgent.”

I turned my chair to study her. She was a series of sharp pale ovals in my mind, with the same clean truthfulness as Maleck and the GSEA agents. Probably they had all been picked for just that quality. Then I suddenly realized who Carmela reminded me of: Leisha Camden. A weird pain shot through me, like a very thin lance.

I followed her through the last door in the corridor.

There were no genomod people in this room. Three heavy-duty shields shimmered from floor to ceiling, the kind that can keep out anything not nuclear. Behind them grew tall grass.

Carmela said softly, “You said that Huevos Verdes works only on genemods and nanotechs that are designed for the public benefit. So was this. It was commissioned by a Third World nation with terrible recurrent famines. The grass blades are edible. Unlike most plants, their cell walls are constructed not of cellulose but of an engineered substance that the human system can convert to monosaccharides. The grass is also amazingly hardy, fast-growing, self-seeding, and efficient in using nutrients from poor soils and water from arid ones. The engineers who developed it estimated that it could furnish six times the food of the most concentrated current farming.”

“Furnish food,” I repeated, idiotically. “Food…”

“We planted it in a controlled and shielded ecosphere of fifty ecologically diverse acres,” Carmela continued, her hands jammed into the pockets of her lab coat, “and within three months it had wiped out every other plant in the ecosphere. It’s so well fitted to thrive that it outcompeted everything else. Humans and some mammals can digest it; other animals cannot. The other plant eaters all starved, including so many larval insects that the insect population disappeared. The amphibian, reptile, and bird populations went with them, then the carnivorous mammals. Our computers figure that, given the right wind conditions, this grass would take about eighteen months to be the only thing left on Earth, give or take a few huge trees with extensive root systems that weren’t quite done dying.”

The grass rustled softly behind its triple shield. I felt something on my shoulders. Carmela’s hands. She turned my chair to face her, then immediately lifted her hands.

“You see, Mr. Arlen, we don’t think Huevos Verdes is evil. Not at all. We know Ms. Sharifi and her fellow SuperSleepless believe not only in the good of their research but in the good of the rest of us. We know she believes in the United States, as defined in the Constitution, as the best possible political arrangement in an imperfect world. Just as Leisha Camden did before her. I’ve always been a great admirer of Ms. Camden. But the Constitution works because it has so many checks and balances to restrain power.”

She licked her lips. The gesture wasn’t sexual; she was in such deadly earnest that I could feel her whole body dry and tense with strain.

“Checks and balances to restrain power. Yes. But there are no checks on Huevos Verdes. No restraints. No balances, because the rest of us simply can’t do what SuperSleepless can do. Unless they do it first. Then some of us could copy some of the tech, maybe, and adapt it. Some of us like the people who worked here”

I said nothing. The deadly, food-rich grass rustled.

“I can’t tell what you’re thinking, Mr. Arlen. And I can’t tell you what to think. But I — we — just wanted you to see all sides of the situation, with the hope you’ll think about what you’ve seen, and talk about it with Huevos Verdes. That’s all. The agents will take you back to Seattle now.”

I said, “What will happen to this grass?”

“We’ll destroy it with radiation. Tomorrow. Not so much as a strand of DNA will be left, and none of the records, either. It only existed this long so we could show it to Ms. Sharifi, or, failing that, to you.”

She led me back to the elevator, and I watched her body, taut with unhappiness and hope, walk gracefully between the narrow white walls.

Just before the elevator door opened I said to her, or maybe to all three of them, “You can’t stop technological progress. You can slow it down, but it always comes anyway.”

Carmela Clemente-Rice said, “Only two nuclear bombs have ever been dropped on Earth as an act of wartime aggression. The science was there, but the applications were left unused. By cooperation or restraint or fear or force — the applications were stopped.” She held out her hand. It was damp and clammy, but something electric ran from her touch to mine. The navy-blue eyes beseeched me.

Just as if / held actual power over what Huevos Verdes did.

“Good-bye, Mr. Arlen.”

“Good-bye, Dr. Clemente-Rice.”

The agents, good as their word, returned me to my hotel room in Seattle. I sat down to wait to see who would arrive from Huevos Verdes, and how long it would take.

It was Jonathan Markowitz, at five in the morning. I’d had three hours’ sleep. Jonathan was perfect. His tone was civil and interested. He asked about everything I’d seen, and I described everything to him. He asked a lot of other questions: Did I experience any temperature changes, no matter how slight, at any point in the corridor? Did I ever smell anything like cinammon? Did the light have a greenish tinge? Did anyone ever touch me? He didn’t argue against anything Carmela Rice-Clemente had told me. He treated me like a member of the team whose loyalty was unquestioned, but who might have been tampered with in ways I couldn’t understand. He was perfect.

And all the while I could feel the shapes he made in my mind, and the picture: a man lifting heavy rocks, the rocks mindless and sullen gray.

As Jonathan left, I said brutally, “They should have sent Nick. Not you. Nick doesn’t bother to hide it.”

Jonathan looked at me steadily. For a minute he said nothing, and I wondered what impossibly complex and subtle strings formed in that Super brain. Then he smiled wearily. “I know. But Nick was busy.”

“When can I see Miranda? Has she left Washington yet for East Oleanta?”

“I don’t know, Drew,” he said, and the shapes in my mind exploded, spattering the lattice with red.

“You don’t know if she’s left, or you don’t know when I can see her? Why not, Jon? Because I’m tainted now? Because you don’t know what Carmela Rice-Clemente might have done to me when she put her palms on my shoulders, or when I shook her hand? Or because you can’t control what I’m really thinking about the project?”

Jonathan said quietly, “It was my impression you’d accepted not seeing Miri. Without too much regret.”

That stopped me.

Jonathan went on, “You have an important role, Drew. We need you. We don’t. . . The computer projects a steeply rising curve in the general social breakdown, due to the unexpected duragem situation. We have to accelerate the project. Kevorkel’s equations. Mitochondrial regression. DiLazial urban engineer-ing.”

And that was how my anger ended. In a bunch of words from SuperSleepless shorthand. I didn’t understand the words, and didn’t understand how they went together, and didn’t understand why I was being told them. I couldn’t answer, and so I stood there, mute and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, while Jonathan quietly left.

Did he say words from his string because he thought they were so basic that even the Liver Sleeper Drew, him, would understand? Or did they just slip out because Jonathan was upset, too? Or did he say them because he knew I wouldn’t understand, and what better way to put me in my place?

I’m going to own Sanctuary, me, someday.

You! A stupid bayou rat! Whap.

I had to sleep. My concert was in less than five hours. I rolled into bed, still in my clothes, and tried to sleep.

# * #

On the way to the Seattle KingDome, the aircar broke down.

We had left the enclave and were above the Liver city, which from the air looked like a lot of small Liver towns, organized in blocks around cafes and warehouses and lodge buildings. The Senator Gilbert Tory Bridewell KingDome was twenty years old; somebody had told me it was named for some historical site. It sat well outside the enclave, of course, a huge foamcast hemisphere with a shielded landing pad that now we might not reach.

The car bucked, back to front, and listed to the left. An ocean liner rolling, a toxic dump swelling in sickly pink bubbles. My stomach rose.

“Jesus H. Christ,” the driver said, and began punching in override codes. I didn’t know how much he could actually do; aircars are robomachinery. But maybe he did know about it. He was a donkey.

The car rolled, and I fell against the left door. My powerchair, folded into traveling size, slammed against me. The car gave a little buck and I thought I’m going to die.

Warm blood-red shapes filled my mind. And the lattice disappeared.

“Christ Christ Christ,” the driver said, punching frantically. The car bucked again, then righted. I closed my eyes. The lattice in my mind disappeared. // wasn’t there.

“Okay okay okay,” the driver said in a different voice, and the car limped down onto the landing pad.

We sat there, safe, while figures rushed toward us from the KingDome. And the lattice reappeared in my mind. It had disappeared when I thought I was going to die, and now it was back, still closed tightly around whatever was hidden inside.

“It’s the lousy gravunits,” the driver said, in the same pleading voice he’d said okay okay okay. He twisted in his seat to look directly into my eyes. “They cut costs on materials. They cut costs on robotesting. They cut costs on maintenance because those lousy robounits break. The whole franchise’s going under. Two crashes in California last week, and the newsgrids paid to keep them quiet. I’m never riding in one of these things again. You hear me? Never again.” All said in the same low, pleading voice.

In my mind he was a crouching, black, squashed shape in front of the purple lattice.

“Mr. Arlen!” a woman cried, throwing open the aircar door. “Are y’all okay in there?” Her Southern accent was thick. Sallie Edith Gardiner, freshman congresswoman from Washington State, who was paying for this concert for her Liver constituents. Why did a congresswoman from Washington State sound like Mississippi?

“Fine,” I said. “No damage.”

“Well, it’s just shockin’, is what it is. Has it really come to that? That we can’t even make a decent aircar any more? Do you want to postpone the concert a bit?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” I said. The accent wasn’t Mississippi after all; it was fake Mississippi. She was all flaking gilded hoops in my mind. I thought suddenly of Carmela Clemente-Rice, clean pale ovals.

Why had the lattice in my mind disappeared when I thought I was going to die?

“Well, the truth is, Mr. Arlen,” Congresswoman Gardiner said, chewing on her perfect bottom lip, “a tiny delay for you might be a good idea anyway. There’s a little problem with the gravrail comin’ in from South Seattle. And just a tiny problem with the security ’bot system. We have techs workin’ on it now, naturally. So if you come this way we’ll go to a place you can wait…”

“My system was installed onstage yesterday,” I said, “if you can’t guarantee security for it—”

“Oh, of course we can!” she cried, and I saw she was lying. The aircar driver climbed out and leaned against the car, muttering under his breath. His prayerful pleading had finally turned to anger. I caught falling apart and fucking societal breakdown and can’t support so many fucking people before Congresswoman Gardiner threw him a look that would rot plastisynth. She hadn’t asked if he was hurt. He was a tech.

“Your wonderful equipment will be justfine,” Congresswoman Gardiner said. Fahn. “And we’re all lookin’ forward so much to your performance. You come this way, please.”

I powered my chair after her. She wouldn’t watch the performance. She’d leave after she introduced me and the grid cameras had their fill of her. Donkeys always left then.

But it didn’t happen that way.

I sat in my chair in an anteroom of the KingDome for two hours. I might have slept. People came and went, all telling me everything was fine. The lattice in my mind snaked in long slow undulations. Finally the congresswoman came in.

“Mr. Arlen, “I’m afraid we have an unpleasant complication. There’s been a just terrible accident.”

“An accident?”

“A gravrail crashed comin’ from Portland. There are … a number of Livers dead. The crowd heard about it, and they’re upset. Naturally.” Natchally. Her voice sounded upset, but her eyes were resentful. The first big event she’d sponsored since her election, and a lot of inconsiderate Livers had to go die and ruin it. An unpleasant complication. I would have bet a quarter million credits against her reelection.

“We’re goin’ to go ahead with the concert anyway, unless you object. I’m goin’ to introduce you in about five minutes.”

“Try drawing out your vowels slightly less,” I said. “It would be at least a little more authentic.”

I had underestimated her. Her smile didn’t waver. “Then five minutes is all right with you?”

“Whatever you say.” The lattice in my head was shaking now, as if in a high wind.

They had built a floating gravplatform at one end of the arena, with a wide catwalk to the upper room where I waited. The grav-train had crashed; the aircar had faltered. I knew that gravdevices didn’t really manipulate gravity, but magnetism; I didn’t understand how. What were the odds of three magnetic devices failing me in an evening? Jonathan Markowitz would know, to the twentieth decimal.

“—one of the premier artists of our times—” Congresswoman Gardiner broadcast from the stage. Tahms.

Of course, it might not have been the gravunit itself that failed in the train. A gravrail might have hundreds of different moving parts, thousands, for all I knew. What were they all made of?

“—with deep gratitude for the opportunity to bring y’all the Lucid Dreamer, I—”

I. I. I. The donkeys’ favorite word. In Huevos Verdes, at least they said we. And meant more than just the SuperSleepless.

Pale green grass rippled in front of the purple lattice. Grew over it, through it, around it. Took it over. Took over the world.

I clasped my hands hard in front of me. I had to perform in two minutes. I had to control the images in my mind. I was the Lucid Dreamer.

“—understandably grieved about the tragedy, but grief is one of the emotions the Lucid Dreamer—”

“What the fuck do you know about grief, you?” someone unseen screamed, so loud I jumped. Somebody in the audience had a voice magnifier as powerful as my own sound system. From where I sat I couldn’t see the audience, only Congresswoman Gardiner. But I heard a low rumble, almost like the Delta in flood.

“—pleased to introduce—”

“Get off, you bitch!” The same magnified voice.

I powered my chair forward. Halfway across the catwalk the congresswoman passed me, her head high, her lips smiling, her eyes burning with anger. There was no applause.

I powered my chair to the center of the floating platform and put my lenses on zoom. The KingDome was only half full. People stared at me, some sullen, some uncertain, some wide-eyed, but nobody smiling. I hadn’t ever faced anything like this. They were balanced on an edge, right between an audience and a mob.

“That a donkey chair you sit in, Arlen, you?” the magnified voice shrieked, and I identified its owner when several people turned to him. A man pushed him, hard; another glared; a third moved protectively in front of the heckler and stared hard-eyed at the platform. Somebody down front called faintly, unmagnified, “The Lucid Dreamer ain’t no donkey, him. You shut up!”

I said, so softly that everyone had to quiet to hear, “I’m no donkey, me.”

Another rumble went up from the audience, and in my mind I saw water flooding the Delta where I was born, the water not fast but relentless, unstoppable, rising as steeply as any Huevos Verdes curve of social breakdown.

“People are dead, them, in the lousy donkey trains nobody bothers to keep up!” the magnified voice cried. “Dead!”

“I know,” I said, still softly, and the lattice stopped shaking as my mind filled with slow, large shapes, moving with stately grace, the color of wet earth. I pressed the button on my chair and the concert machinery began to dim the stage lights.

I was supposed to give “The Warrior,” designed and redesigned and redesigned again to encourage independent risk taking, action, self-reliance. Stored in the concert machinery were also the tapes and holos and subliminals for “Heaven,” the most popular of my concerts. It led people to a calm place inside their own minds, the place all of us could reach as children, where the world is in perfect balance and we with it, and the warm sunlight not only falls on our skin but goes all the way through to the soul and draws us in to blessed peace. It was a concert of reconciliation, of repose, of acceptance. I could give that. In ten minutes the mob would be a yielding pillow.

I began “The Warrior.”

“Once there was a man of great hope and no power. When he was young he wanted everything…”

The words quieted them. But the words were the least of it, were unimportant, really. The shapes were what counted, and the way the shapes moved, and the corridors the shapes opened to the hidden places in the mind, different for each person. And I was the only one in the world who could program those shapes, working off my own mind, whose neural pathways to the unconscious had been opened by a freak illegal operation. I was the Lucid Dreamer.

“He wanted strength, him, that would make all other men respect him.”

No one at Huevos Verdes could do this: seize the minds and souls of eighty percent of the people. Lead them, if only deeper into themselves. Shape them. No — give them their own shapes.

“Do you understand what it is you do to other people’s minds?” Miri had asked me in her slightly-too-slow speech, shortly after we met. I had braced myself — even then — for equations and Law-son conversion formulas and convoluted diagrams. But she had surprised me. “You take people into the otherness.”

“The—”

“Otherness. The reality under the reality. You pierce the world of relativities, so that the mind glimpses that a truer absolute lies behind the fragile structures of everyday life. Only glimpses it, of course. That’s all even science can really give us: a glimpse. But you take people there who couldn’t ever be scientists.”

I had stared at her, strangely frightened. This wasn’t the Miri I usually saw. She brushed her unruly hair away from her face, and I saw that her dark eyes looked soft and far away. “You really do that, Drew. For us Supers, as well as the Livers. You hold aside the veil for just a glimpse into what else we are.”

My fright deepened. She wasn’t like this.

“Of course,” she added, “unlike science, lucid dreaming isn’t under anybody’s control. Not even yours. It lacks the cardinal quality of replicability.”

Miri saw my face, then, and realized her last words were a mistake. She had ranked what I do second… again. But her stubborn truthfulness wouldn’t let her back down from what she did in fact actually believe. Lucid dreaming lacked cardinal quality. She looked away.

We had never spoken of the otherness again.

Now the Liver faces turned up to me, open. Old men with deep lines and bent shoulders. Young men with jaws clenched even as their eyes widened like the children they had so recently been. Women with babies in their arms, the tiredness fading from their faces when their lips curved faintly, dreaming. Ugly faces and natural beauties and angry faces and grieving faces and the bewildered faces of people who thought they’d been running their lives and were just now discovering they weren’t even on the Board of Directors.

“He wanted sex, him, that would make his bones melt with satisfaction. He wanted love.”

Miri was probably already in the underground facility at East Oleanta, and I was too cowardly to admit that I was glad. Well, I’d admit it now. She was safer there than at Huevos Verdes, and I didn’t have to see her. Eden. The carefully programmed sublim-inals on the cafe HTs throughout New York’s Adirondack Mountains called it “Eden.” Not that the Livers knew what this new Eden meant. I didn’t either, not really. I knew what the project was supposed to do — but not what it would ultimately mean. I’d been too cowardly to admit my questions. Or admit that even SuperSleepless confidence might not add up to automatic Tightness.

Pale, deadly grass waved in my mind.

“Aaaaaaahhh,” a man sighed, somewhere close enough that I could hear him over the low music.

“He wanted excitement, him.”

A man in the sixth or seventh row wasn’t watching me. He glanced around at everybody else’s rapt face. He was first puzzled, then uneasy. A natural immune to hypnosis — there were always a few. Huevos Verdes had isolated the brain chemical necessary to respond to lucid dreaming, only it wasn’t a single brain chemical but a combination of what Sara Cerelli called “necessary prerequisite conditions,” some of which depended on enzymes triggered by other conditions … I didn’t really understand. But I didn’t need to. I was the Lucid Dreamer.

The unaffected man shuffled restlessly. Then settled down to listen anyway. Afterwards, I knew, he wouldn’t say much to his friends. It was too uncomfortable, being left out.

I knew all about that. My concerts counted on it.

“He wanted every day to be filled with challenges only he could meet.”

Miri loved me in a way I could never love her back. It burned, that love, as hard as her intelligence. It was the love, not the intelligence, that had made me never say to her directly, “Should we go ahead with the project? What proof do we have that this is the right thing to do?” She would tell me, of course, that proof was impossible, and her explanation of why not would contain so many things — equations and precedents and conditions — that I wouldn’t understand it.

But that wasn’t the real reason I’d never pushed my doubts. The real reason was that she loved me in a way I could never love her, and I had wanted Sanctuary since I was six years old and discovered that my grandfather died building it, a grunt worker before Livers were taken care of by a vote-hungry government. That was why I had turned my mind, so much weaker than hers, over to Huevos Verdes.

But now there was the pale grass, growing over the lattices in my mind, growing over the world.

“He wanted—”

He wanted to belong to himself again.

The shapes slid around my chair; the subliminals flickered in and out of my audience’s consciousness. Their faces were completely unguarded now, oblivious to each other and even to me, as the private doors of their minds swung briefly open. To the desires and fearlessness and confidence that had been buried there for decades, under the world that needed order and conformity and predictability to function. This was my best concert of “The Warrior” yet. I could feel it.

At the end, almost an hour later, I raised my hands. I felt the usual outpouring of holy affection for all of them. “Like a pope or a lama?” Miri had asked, but it wasn’t like that. “Like a brother,” I’d answered, and watched her dark eyes deepen with pain. Her own brother had been killed on Sanctuary. I’d known my answer would hurt her. That was a kind of power, too, and now I felt ashamed of it.

But it was also the turth. In a moment, when the concert ended, these Livers would go back to being the same whining, complaining, ineffectual, ignorant people they’d been before. But for this instant before the concert ended, I did feel a brotherhood that had nothing to do with likeness.

And they wouldn’t go completely back to what they had been. Not completely. Huevos Verdes’s computer programs had verified that.

“…back to his kingdom.”

The music ended. The shapes stopped. The lights came up. Slowly the faces around me dissolved into themselves, first blinking wide-eyed, then laughing and crying and hugging. The applause started.

I looked for the man with the voice magnifier. He wasn’t standing in his same place in the crowd. But I didn’t have to wait long to find him.

“Let’s go, us, to that gravtrain crash — it’s only a half-mile away. There’s still folks hurt there, them, more than there are med-units — I saw, me! And not enough blankets! We can help, us, to bring the injured here… Us!” Us. Us. Us.

There was confusion in the crowd. But a surprising number of Livers followed the new leader, burning to do something. To be heroes, which is the true hidden driver of the human mind. Some people started organizing a hospital corner. Others left, but from behind the now-opaqued shield that let me watch them without being seen, I observed even the departing Livers donating spare jackets and shirts and blankets for the aid of the wounded. Congresswoman Sallie Edith Gardiner bustled over the catwalk toward me.

“Well, Mr. Arlen, that was just marvelous—” Mahvelous.

“You didn’t watch it.”

She wasn’t listening. She stared at the activity in the King-Dome. “What’s all this now?”

I said, “They’re getting ready to help the survivors of the gravrail crash.”

“Them? Help how?”

I didn’t answer. All of a sudden I was very tired. I’d had only a few hours’ sleep, and I’d spent the previous night viewing man-made horrors.

Like this woman.

“Well, they can all just stop this nonsense right now!” Raht now.

She bustled away. I watched a little longer, then went to find my driver — who had, of course, vowed to never drive an aircar again. But that was before the gravrail crash showed that nothing else was any better. Still, I’d find some way back to Seattle. And to the airport. And to Huevos Verdes. And from there to East Oleanta. There were things I had to ask Miranda, critical things, things I should have asked a long time ago. And I was going to say them. I, Drew Arlen. Who had been the Lucid Dreamer long before I met Miranda Sharifi.

Eight

The floor of the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel was covered in leaves. It was late August — no leaves falling yet, them. That meant these leaves were left over from last year, blowing into the hotel last October and November and lying around ever since, without no ’bot to clean them out. I hadn’t been nowhere near the hotel, me, all those months. But I was now.

The funny thing was that for a few days I didn’t even notice the leaves, me. I didn’t notice nothing. My head was a fog, it, and I stumbled toward the hotel HT on its red counter and didn’t see nothing else. Lizzie was too sick.

The HT turned on when I come near, like it’d been doing for the past four days. “May I help you?”

I put both hands, me, on the counter. Like that would help. “I need the medunit, me. An emergency.”

“I’m sorry, sir, the County Legislator Thomas Scott Drinkwater Medical Unit is temporarily out of service. Albany has been notified, and a technician will shortly—”

“I don’t want Albany, me! I want a medunit! My little girl’s sick bad!”

“I’m sorry, sir, the County Legislator Thomas Scott Drinkwater Medical Unit is temporarily out of service. Albany has been—”

“Then get me another medunit, you! It’s an emergency! Lizzie’s coughing her guts up, her!”

“I’m sorry, sir, there’s no medunit immediately available, due to the temporary inoperability of the Senator Walker Vance Morehouse Magnetic Railway. As soon as the railway is repaired, another medical unit can be rushed in from—”

“The gravrail ain’t inaccessible, it’s busted!” I screamed at the HT. I would of busted it with my bare hands if it’d helped. “Let me talk to a human being!”

“I’m sorry, your elected officials are temporarily unavailable. If you wish to leave a message, please specify whether it’s intended for United States Senator Mard Todd Ingalls, United States Senator Walker Vance—”

“Off! Turn the hell off!”

Lizzie’d been sick, her, for three days. The gravrail had been down for five. The medunit had been out for who knows how long — nobody’d got sick, them, since Doug Kane’s heart attack. The politicians had been assholes as long as anybody could remember.

Lizzie was sick bad. Oh sweet Jesus Lizzie was sick bad.

I squeezed my eyes shut, me, and my head swung down, and when I opened my eyes what did I see? Leaves, that no cleaning ’bot had swept out in nearly a year, and that nobody else didn’t bother with neither. Dead leaves, brittle as my old bones.

“There’s a HT with override at the cafe,” a voice said. “The mayor can contact your county legislator directly.”

“You think, you, I ain’t tried that? Do I look that stupid?” I was relieved, me, to yell at somebody, I didn’t care who. Then I saw it was the donkey girl dressed like a Liver, the one who got off the train a week ago. She was the only person, her, staying in the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel. Since the gravrail breakdowns got worse, there ain’t much traveling. Nobody knew why this donkey was in East Oleanta, and nobody knew why she dressed like a Liver. Some people didn’t like it, them.

I didn’t have no time to talk to a crazy donkey. Lizzie was sick bad. I shuffled back through the leaves to the door, only where was I supposed to go, me? Without no medunit. . .

“Wait,” the donkey said. “I heard you, me. You said—”

“Don’t try to talk like no Liver when you ain’t one! You hear me, you!” I don’t know where I got the anger to yell at her like that. Yes, I do. Lizzie was sick bad, and the donkey was just there, her.

“You’re quite right. No point in unnecessary subterfuge, is there? My name is Victoria Turner.”

I didn’t care, me, what her name was, although I remembered her telling somebody else it was Dark Jones. I’d left Lizzie gasping and clawing for breath, her little face hot as a bonfire. I broke into a run, me. The leaves under my boots whispered like ghosts.

“Maybe I can help,” the donkey said.

“Go to hell!” I said, but then I stopped, me, and looked at her. She was a donkey, after all. She must be here, her, for something, just like that other girl in the woods last summer, the one that saved Doug Kane’s life, must of been there for something. I couldn’t guess for what, but I wasn’t no donkey. Still, sometimes donkeys could do things, them, that you didn’t expect.

The girl stood. Her yellow jacks had a tear in them, like everybody’s since the warehouse just stopped opening up for distrib, but they was clean. Jacks don’t get dirty or creased — dirt don’t stick to them somehow, or it washes off easy. But the girl wasn’t really no girl, her. When I looked closer I saw she was a woman, maybe as old as Annie. It was the genemod violet eyes and that body that made me think, me, that she was a girl.

I said, “How can you help?”

“I won’t know till I see the patient, will I?” she said, crisp and no nonsense. That made sense, at least. I led her, me, to Annie’s apartment on Jay Street.

Annie opened the door. I could hear Lizzie coughing, her, a sound that pretty near tore my own guts out. Annie pushed her big body out into the hall and pulled the door closed behind her.

“Who’s this? What are you bringing her here for, Billy Washington? You, get lost! We already seen, us, how much help you donkeys are when everything’s going wrong!”

I never saw Annie so mad. Her lips pressed together like they’d been mortared, and her ringers curled into claws like she was going to rake this Victoria Turner across her genemod donkey face. Victoria Turner looked at Annie coolly, her, and didn’t step back an inch.

“He brought me because I may be able to help the sick child. Are you her mother? Please step back so I can try.”

I stepped back, but then forward again because it hurt me, Annie’s face. It was furious and scared and exhausted. Annie hadn’t left Lizzie, her, to sleep or wash, not in two days. But Annie was used to letting donkeys solve her problems, and that was on her face. too. Along with iust the start of hone. Annie wanted something to hit and something to trust, her, and I thought I was both of those things, but here was this Victoria Turner and she was better, her, for both.

Annie reached behind herself and opened the door. Lizzie lay on the couch where I usually sleep. She was burning up, her, but Annie tried to keep a blanket on her. Lizzie kept kicking it off. There was water and food from the cafe, but Lizzie hadn’t taken any, her. She tossed and cried out, and sometimes her cries didn’t make no sense. She threw up just once, but she coughed all the time, great racking coughs that tore my heart.

Victoria Turner put her hand on Lizzie’s forehead, and her violet eyes widened. Lizzie didn’t seem to know, her, that anybody was there. She gave another cough, a small one, arid started moaning. I felt despair start in my bowels, the kind you feel when there’s no hope and you don’t see how you can bear it. I hadn’t felt that kind of despair, me, since my wife Rosie died, twelve years ago. I never thought I’d have to feel it again.

Victoria Turner took a scarf out of her pocket and knelt by Lizzie. She didn’t seem at all afraid, her. One of the thoughts I’d had in the night, God forgive me, was: Is this sickness catching? Could Annie get it, her, and die too? Annie…

“Cough for me, sweetheart,” Victoria Turner said. “Come on, cough into the scarf.”

In a few minutes, Lizzie did, her, though not because she was asked. Big slimy gobs of stuff from her tortured lungs, greenish gray. Victoria Turner caught it, her, in the scarf and looked at it closely. Me, I had to look away. That was Lizzie’s lungs coming up, Lizzie’s lungs rotting themselves away.

“Excellent,” Victoria Turner said, “green. It’s bacterial. Now we know. You’re in luck, Lizzie.”

Luck! I saw Annie curve her claws again, her, and I even saw what for: This donkey was enjoying this, her. It was some kind of exciting. Like a holovid story.

“Bacterial is good,” Victoria Turner said, looking up at me, “because the medication can be far less specific. You have to tailor antivirals, at least grossly. But wide-spectrum antibiotics are easy.”

Annie said roughly, “What’s Lizzie got, her?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. But this will almost surely take care of it.” From another pocket she drew a flat piece of plastic, tore it open, and slapped a round blue patch on Lizzie’s neck.

“But you should force more water down her. You don’t want to risk dehydration.”

Annie stared, her, at the blue patch on Lizzie’s neck. It looked like the ones the medunit put on, but how did we really know, us, what was in it? We didn’t really know nothing.

Lizzie sighed and quieted. Nobody said nothing. After a few minutes, Lizzie was asleep.

“Best thing for her,” Victoria Turner said crisply. I saw again, me, that she liked this. “Not even Miranda Sharifi herself could equal the benefits of sleep.”

I remembered, me, hearing that name, but I couldn’t think where.

Annie was a different woman, her. She gazed at Lizzie, sleeping peacefully, and at the patch, and Annie seemed to shrink and calm down, both, like a sail collapsing. She looked at the floor, her. “Thank you, doctor. I didn’t realize, me.”

Dr. Turner looked surprised, her, then she smiled. Like something was funny. “You’re welcome. And maybe in return you can do something for me.”

Annie looked wary, her. Donkeys don’t ask Livers to do favors, them. Donkeys pay taxes to us; we give votes to them. But we don’t tell each other, us, more than we got to, and we don’t ask things of each other. That ain’t the way it’s done.

But, then, donkey doctors don’t go wandering around East Oleanta dressed in torn yellow jacks neither. We ain’t even seen a doctor in East Oleanta, us, since a new plague broke out four years ago and a doctor came from Albany to vaccinate everybody with some new stuff the medunit didn’t have.

“I’m looking for someone,” Dr. Turner said. “Someone I was supposed to meet here, but we apparently got our data confused. A woman, a girl really, about this tall, dark hair, a slightly large head.”

I thought, me, of the girl in the woods, and quick tried to look like I wasn’t thinking of nothing at all. That girl came from Eden, I was sure of it, me — and Eden don’t got nothing to do with donkeys. It’s about Livers. Dr. Turner was watching close, her. Annie shook her head, cool as ice, even though I knew she probably remembered that other girl, the big-headed one she said she saw at the town meeting when Jack Sawicki called the district supervisor about them rabid racoons. Or maybe it was the same big-headed girl — I hadn’t thought, me, about that before, me. How many big-headed maybe-donkey girls did we have running around the woods near East Oleanta? Why did we have any?

Annie said, polite but not very, “How’d you miss your friend? Don’t she know, her, where you are?”

“I fell asleep,” Dr. Turner said, which explained nothing. She said it funny, too. “I fell asleep on the gravrail. But I think she might be around here someplace.”

“I never saw nobody like that, me,” Annie said firmly.

“How about you, Billy?” Dr. Turner said. She probably knew my name, her, even before Annie said it. She’d been in East Oleanta for a week, her, eating at the cafe, talking to whoever would talk to her, which wasn’t many.

“I never saw nobody like that, me,” I said. She stared at me hard. She didn’t believe me, her.

“Then let me just ask something else. Does the name ‘Eden’ mean anything to you?”

A gust of wind could of blown me over.

But Annie said cool as January, “It’s in the Bible. Where Adam and Eve lived, them.”

“Right,” Dr. Turner said. “Before the Fall.” She stood up and stretched. Her body under the jacks was too skinny, at least by me. A woman should have some softness on her bones.

“I’ll come back to look in on Lizzie tomorrow,” Dr. Turner said, and I saw, me, that Annie didn’t want her to come back, and then that Annie did. This was a doctor. Lizzie slept peaceful, her. Even from by the door, she looked cooler to me.

When the doctor left, Annie and I looked at each other, us. Then Annie’s face broke up. Just went from solid flesh creased with worry to a mess of lines that didn’t have nothing to do with one another, and she started to cry, her. Before I even thought about it I put my arms around her. Annie clung back, hard, and at the feel of her soft breasts against my chest, I went a little crazy. I didn’t think, me. I just raised her face to mine and kissed her.

And Annie Francy kissed me back.

None of your grateful-daughter crap, neither. She cried and pointed to Lizzie and kissed me with her soft berry lips and pushed her breasts against me. Annie Francy. I kissed her back, my mind not even working, it — the words only came later — and then it was like we just met instead of knowing each other for years, instead of me being sixty-eight and Annie thirty-five, instead of everything breaking down and East Oleanta coming apart like it was. Annie Francy kissed me like I was a young man, me — and I was. I ran my hands, me, over her body, and I led her into the bedroom, leaving Lizzie sleeping peaceful as an angel, and I closed the door. Annie was laughing and weeping, the way I forgot, me, that women can do, and she lay her big beautiful body on the bed with me like I was thirty-five, too.

Annie Francy.

If that donkey doctor in yellow jacks had come back then and asked me again where Eden was — if she’d of done that, I could of told her, me. In this room. On this bed. With Annie Francy. Here.

We slept till morning, us. I woke up before Annie. The light was pale gray, thin. For a long time I just sat, me, on the edge of the bed, looking at Annie. I knew this was a one-time thing. I could feel it, even before she fell alseep, in that little space of time when we held each other afterwards. I could feel it, me, in her arms, and in the set of her neck, and in her breathing. What I needed, me, was the words to tell her that it was all right. That this was more than I expected, me, although less than I dreamed. I wasn’t going to tell her that part. You always dream more.

But Annie didn’t wake, her, and so instead I went to check on Lizzie. She was sitting up, her, looking woozy. “Billy — I’m hungry, me.”

“That’s a good sign, Lizzie. What you want to eat, you?”

“Something hot. I’m cold, me. Something hot from the cafe.” Her voice was whiny and she smelled awful but I didn’t care, me. I was too glad to her her cold, when just yesterday she’d been burning up, her, with fever. That donkey doctor really was as good as a medunit.

“Don’t go waking your mother, you. Just sit there until I get your food. Where’s your meal chip, Lizzie?”

“I don’t know, me. I’m hungry.”

Annie must of taken Lizzie’s meal chip, her. I could get enough food on mine. I don’t eat all that much anymore, me, and this morning I felt I could live on air.

There wasn’t nobody in the cafe, them, except for Dr. Turner.

She sat eating her breakfast and watching a donkey channel on the hologrid. She looked tired, her.

“Up early, you,” I said. I got myself a cup of coffee and a bun, and Lizzie some eggs and juice and milk and another bun. Annie or I could reheat the eggs on the Y-energy unit, us. I sat down, me, next to Dr. Turner, just to be sociable for a minute. Or maybe to think what to say to Annie. Dr. Turner stared at the eggs like they was a three-day-dead woodchuck.

“Can you actually eat those, Billy?”

“The eggs?”

“ ‘Eggs.’ Soysynth stamped out and dyed, like all the rest of it. Haven’t you ever tasted a real, natural egg?”

And the weird thing was, the minute she said that, her, I remembered what a real egg tasted like. Fresh from the chicken, cooked by my grandmama two minutes and served with strips of hot toast with real butter. You dipped the toast into the egg and the yellow yolk coated it, and then you ate them together, hot. All those years and at that minute I remembered it, me, and not before. My mouth filled with sweet water.

“Look at that,” Dr. Turner said, and I thought she still meant the egg but she didn’t, her, she’d turned back to the hologrid. A handsome donkey sat at a big wood desk, talking, like they always do. I didn’t understand all the words:

“—if even a possibility of an escaped self-replicating dissembler… not verified… duragem… government should put the facts before us … emphasize restricted to certain molecular bonds and these are nonorganic… very important distinction… dura-gem… GSEA… underground facility… understaffed in current difficult economic climate… duragem…”

I said, “Sounds like the same old stuff to me.”

Dr. Turner made a sound, her, in the back of her throat, a sound so strange and so unexpected I stopped eating, me, with my plastisynth fork halfway to my mouth. I must have looked a moron. She made the sound again, and then she laughed, her, and then she covered her face with her hand, and then she laughed again. I ain’t never seen no donkey behave like that before, me. Never.

“No, Billy — this isn’t the same old stuff. It’s definitely not. But it might all too easily get to be the same new stuff, in which case we should all worry.”

“About what?” I ate faster, me, to bring Lizzie her food still hot. Lizzie was hungry, her. A good sign.

“What the hell is this shit?” a stomp kid asked, the second he stepped through the cafe door. “Who’s playing this donkey crap, them?” He saw Dr. Turner, him — and he looked away. I could of sworn he didn’t want no part of her, which was so weird — stomps don’t back off shoving nobody, them. I stopped eating, me, for the second time and just stared. The stomp said loudly, “Channel 17,” and the hologrid switched to some sports channel, but still the stomp didn’t look at Dr. Turner. He got his food, him, off the belt and went to sit at a far table in the corner.

Dr. Turner smiled a little. “I tangled with him two nights ago. He got grabby. He doesn’t want it to happen again.”

“You armed, you?”

“Not like you think. Come on, let’s go see how Lizzie is doing this morning.”

“She’s doing just fine, her,” I said, but Dr. Turner was already standing up, and it was clear she was going with me. I couldn’t think of no reason she shouldn’t, except that I still didn’t know, me, what words I was going to say to Annie about what happened last night. A little cold lump was growing in me that maybe Annie would think, her, that I shouldn’t come around no more. Because of being embarrassed — her or me or us. If that happened, I wouldn’t have no more reason to go on dragging around this old body with its old-fool head.

Lizzie was sitting up on the couch, her, playing with a doll. “Mama went to get water to wash me,” she said. “She said I can’t go to the baths yet, me. What did you bring me to eat, Billy?”

“Eggs and bun and juice. Now don’t you overdo, you.”

“Who’s this?” The black eyes were bright again, them, but Lizzie’s face still looked thin and drawn. I got scared all over again, me.

“I’m Dr. Turner. But you can call me Vicki. I gave you some medicine last night.”

Lizzie studied the situation, her. I could see that smart little mind going. “You from Albany, you?”

“No. San Francisco.”

“On the Pacific Ocean?”

Dr. Turner looked surprised, her. “Yes. How do you know where it is?”

“Lizzie goes to school a lot,” I said, fast in case Annie came in and heard, “but her mother ain’t crazy about that.”

“I worked, me, through all the high school software. It wasn’t hard.”

“Probably not,” Dr. Turner said dryly. “And so now what? College software? With the location of the Indian Ocean?”

I said, “Her mama don’t—”

“There ain’t no college software in East Oleanta,” Lizzie said, “but I already know, me, where the Indian Ocean is.”

“Her mama really don’t—”

“Can you get me some college software?” Lizzie said, her, soft but not scared, just like it was an everyday thing to ask donkeys for work they’re supposed to do for our benefit. Or something. Lately I wasn’t so sure, me, that I knew who was studying and working for who.

“Maybe,” Dr. Turner said. Her voice had changed, her, and she looked at Lizzie real hard. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“Better.” But I could see Lizzie was tiring, her.

I said, “You eat, and then lie down again. You been very sick, you. If that medicine—” The door opened behind me and Annie came in.

I couldn’t see her, me, but I could fed her. She was warm and soft and big in my arms. Only that wasn’t ever going to happen again. Dr. Turner was watching, her, with that sharp donkey stare. I fixed my face and turned around. “Morning, Annie. Let me help you with them buckets.”

Annie looked at me, and then at Lizzie, and then at Dr. Turner. I could see she didn’t know, her, who to get stiff with first. She chose Lizzie. “You eat that food and lie down, Lizzie. You been sick.

“I’m better now,” Lizzie said, sulky.

“She’s better now, her,” Annie said to Dr. Turner. “You can leave.” It wasn’t like Annie to be so rude, her. She was the one believed even donkeys have their place.

“Not just yet,” Dr. Turner said. “I’m going to talk to Lizzie first.”

“This is my home!” Annie said, between pressed-together lips.

I wanted to say to Dr. Turner, She ain’t mad at you, her, she’s confused at me, but there ain’t no way to say that to a donkey doctor dressed in torn yellow jacks standing in a living room that ain’t even yours and that you’re afraid you’re about to get tossed out of yourself for loving in the wrong way. No way to say that.

Lizzie said, “Please let Vicki stay, Mama. Please. I feel better, me, when she’s here.”

Annie set down the two buckets of water she carried. She looked ready to explode, her. But then Dr. Turner said, “I do need to examine her, Annie. To make sure the medication is the right one. You know that if the medunit were working it would check her every day and sometimes change the dosage. A live doctor isn’t any different.”

Annie looked ready to cry. But all she said was, “She got to get washed first, her. Billy, bring this water into Lizzie’s bedroom.”

Annie dragged up Lizzie and half carried her to the bedroom, ignoring Lizzie’s squawk: “I can walk, me!” I followed with the water, set it down, and came back out. Dr. Turner had picked up Lizzie’s doll. It was plastisynth, from the warehouse, with black curls and green eyes and a genemod face, but Annie had sewn it jacks from a pair she ripped up, and Lizzie had made it soda-can jewelry.

“Annie doesn’t want me here.”

“Well,” I said, “we don’t get many donkeys, us.”

“No, I imagine not.”

We stood in silence. I didn’t have nothing to say to her, or her to me. Except one thing. “Dr. Turner—”

“Call me Vicki.”

I knew, me, that I wasn’t going to do that. “What you watched, you, on that donkey channel, the stuff you said wasn’t more of the same old government shit — what was it? What’s happening?”

She looked up from the doll, then, more sharp than before. “What do you think it meant?”

“I don’t know, me. I don’t know those words. It sounded like just more worry over the economy, more excuses why the government can’t get things working right, them.”

“This time it’s not an excuse. Maybe. Do you know what a dissembler is?”

“No.”

“A molecule?”

“No.”

“An atom?”

“No.”

Dr. Turner shook Lizzie’s doll. “This is made of atoms. Everything is made of atoms. They’re very tiny pieces of matter. Atoms clump together into molecules like… like snow sticking together into a snowball. Only there’s all kinds of atoms, and they stick together in different ways, so you get different kinds of matter. Wood or skin or plastic.”

She looked at me hard, her, trying to see if I understood. I nodded.

“What holds molecules together are molecular bonds. Sort of a … an electrical glue. Well, dissemblers take those bonds apart. Different kinds of dissemblers take different kinds of molecular bonds apart. Enzymes in your stomach, for instance, break the bonds on food so you can digest it.”

I heard Lizzie laugh, her, behind the bedroom door. It was a tired kind of laugh, and the worry about her started up in my gut again. And in another few minutes Annie would come out. I didn’t know, me, what to say to Annie. But I knew what Dr. Turner was saying was important — I could see it on her donkey face — and I tried, me, to listen. To understand.

“We can make dissemblers, and have for years. We use them for all kinds of things: disposing of toxic waste, recycling, cleaning. The dissemblers we make are pretty simple, and each one can only break one kind of bond. They’re made out of viruses, mostly — that means they’re genemod.”

“Could a … dissembler break bonds, it, that cause rabies?”

“Rabies? No, that’s a complex organic condition that — why do you ask, Billy?” Her look was sharp again.

“No reason.”

“No reason?”

“No.” I stared her down, me.

“Anyway,” she said, “the making of dissemblers is very carefully controlled by the GSEA. The Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency. Naturally they have to control anything that can go around dissembling things. But the GSEA is constantly ferreting out and busting illegal genemod operations, run outside the law for profit or even pure research, creating things without proper controls. Including dissemblers. A lot of them are self-replicating, that means they can reproduce themselves like small animals—”

“Animals? Sex?” I could feel, me, the surprise on my face.

She smiled. “No. Like… algae on a pond. But GSEA-approved dissemblers have built-in clocking mechanisms for control. After a certain number of replications, they stop reproducing. Illegal ones sometimes don’t. Now there are rumors — still just rumors — that an ilegal replicator without a clocking mechanism is loose. It attacks the molecular bonds of an alloy called duragem that’s used in many machines. Many machines. It—”

I suddenly saw. “It’s causing all these breakdowns, it. The gravrail and the foodbelt and the warden ’bot and the medunit. My God, some crazy donkey germ is breaking everything!”

“Not exactly. Nobody knows yet. But maybe.”

“You people are doing it to us again!”

She stared at me, her. I said, “You take everything, you, away from us and call it aristo Living, and then you wreck the what’s left!”

“Not me,” she said, hard. “Not the government. The government is what kept all of you alive after you became utterly unnecessary to the economy. Rather than just eliminate seventy percent of the population the way they did in Kenya and Chile. Donkey genemod science could do that, too. But we didn’t.”

The bedroom door opened and Lizzie came out, cleaned up, leaning on Annie. Lizzie laid on the couch and said, “Tell me something, Vicki.”

“Tell you what?” Dr. Turner said. She was still mad, her.

“Anything. Anything I don’t know, me. Anything new.”

Dr. Turner’s expression changed again. For a second she almost looked afraid, her. Annie said, “Can I see you a minute, Billy?”

This was it, then. Annie was ready, her, to send me away. I followed her into Lizzie’s bedroom. She shut the door.

“Billy, what we did, us, last night…” She didn’t look at me. I couldn’t help her, me, even if I’d of wanted to. My throat was too closed up. And I didn’t want to.

“Billy, I’m sorry. I behaved, me, like a fool. It just been too long. I didn’t mean to make you … I can’t. . . Can we just go back, us, to the way we was before? Friends? Partners, sort of, but not. . .” She raised her beautiful chocolate eyes to me.

I felt light, me, filled with light, like I might float off the floor. She wasn’t going to send me away. I could stay, me, with her and Lizzie. Just like we were before.

“Sure, Annie. I understand, me. We won’t never talk about it again.”

She let out a long sigh, her, like she’d been holding it in since last night. Maybe she was. “Thank you, Billy. You’re a good friend, you.”

We went back out to Lizzie, who was listening hard to Dr. Turner talk donkey talk. Here was more trouble.

“. . . isn’t like that, Lizzie. The basic principle of the computer is binary, which just means ‘two.’ Tiny switches, too small to see, with two positions: on and off. They make a code.”

“Like base two in math,” Lizzie said eagerly, but underneath her eagerness she was tired so deep, her, she could hardly keep her eyes open.

Annie said sharply, “She has to sleep now, her. Is the examination done, Doctor?”

“Yes,” Dr. Turner said, standing up. She looked bewildered, her; I didn’t see no reason why. “But I’ll come back this afternoon.”

“Medunit don’t see people twice a day,” Annie said.

“No,” Dr. Turner said, still looking bewildered. She stared at Lizzie, who was already asleep, her. “That’s a remarkable child.”

“Bye, doctor,” Annie said.

Dr. Turner ignored her. She stood quiet, her, but tensed up inside, like she was making some kind of important decision. “Billy — listen to what I’m going to tell you. Stockpile whatever you can from the food line here in this apartment. And if the warehouse reopens, stockpile blankets and jacks and — oh — toilet paper and soap and whatever else occurs to you. And buckets for water — lots of buckets. Do it.” She said it like nobody else but her could of thought of all that. Like / couldn’t of thought of it.

Annie said, “Folks start stockpiling, them, there ain’t going to be enough for everybody else.”

Dr. Turner stared at Annie bleakly. “I know, Annie.”

“Ain’t right.”

The doctor said softly, “A lot of things ain’t right.”

“So you telling us, you, to make it more not right?”

Dr. Turner didn’t answer. I had the weird feeling, me, that she didn’t have an answer. A donkey without an answer.

With a last look at Lizzie, Dr. Turner left. Annie said, “I don’t want her around here no more! She can just leave Lizzie alone!”

I could of told Annie, me, that wasn’t going to happen. Not from the look in Lizzie’s tired, sick eyes when the donkey doctor was telling her about that computer code. This was what Lizzie’d been looking for, her, all her life. Looking in the school software that Dr. Turner talked down, and in the East Oleanta library when we still had one, and in taking apart the apple peeler ’bot in the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe kitchen. This. Somebody who could tell her, them, what that smart little throwback mind wanted to know. And Annie wasn’t going to be able to stop it. Annie didn’t know that, her, but I did. Lizzie was already nearly twelve years old, her, and ain’t nobody been able to really stop her from anything since she was eight.

But I didn’t say nothing, me, to Annie. Not then. Annie watched Lizzie sleep with her whole heart in her eyes, and I couldn’t say nothing, because I was too busy, me, watching them both.

That afternoon, though, I did hunt up Jack Sawicki, me, and ask him for a terminal password. He gave it to me, him, without asking too many questions. We go back a long way, Jack and me, and besides he had his hands full. A technician actually arrived, her, from Albany to fix the medunit. And there was supposed to be a big all-lodge dance that night in the cafe. Three lodges combined, them, to give the party. There was a dance jam, and betting games, and some kind of bare-breasted beauty contest, and most of the young people in town were going, which meant testing all the security ’bots. Especially since the gravrail was running again, it, and word of the dance might of traveled to other towns. Jack didn’t even ask, him, why I wanted the password.

I walked, me, to the hotel. Dr. Turner wasn’t around. It had turned cool for August; maybe she went for another walk in the woods, looking for Eden. She wasn’t going to find it. I had looked, me, and there wasn’t nothing nowhere near where Doug Kane had keeled over beside that rabid raccoon. No place that big-headed girl could of come from.

I said to the hotel HT, “Newsgrid mode. Password Thomas Alva Edison.” Jack don’t want the whole town knowing the hotel HT can go newsgrid; you’d have every Tom, Dick, and Harry in here, them, who want to watch a different channel than the HT at the cafe or the lodge houses.

“Newsgrid mode,” the HT said cheerfully. It’s always cheerful, it. “What channel, please?”

“Some donkey channel.”

“What channel, please?”

I tried different numbers, me, until I found a donkey newsgrid. Then I sat and watched, me, for an hour, trying to remember the words Dr. Turner explained. Molecular bonds. Dissemblers. Alloy. Duragem. Only the newsgrid didn’t use those words, it, except for “duragem.” Instead it used words like “proposed epicenter” and “replication rate equations” and “Stoddard equations for field failure curves” and “manual replacement efforts falling behind incident rate.” I watched anyway, me. After an hour I got up and said, “Information mode.”

I went home, me, and got Lizzie’s and Annie’s meal chips. When nobody in the cafe was near the foodbelt, I took everything the chips would give me and put it all in a clean covered bucket and carried it home. Lizzie was still asleep, her, holding her doll. I went to the warehouse, which was opened again after a new shipment came on the gravrail, and got two more buckets, three blankets, and three sets of jacks on all our chips. Plus a new door lock, flowerpots, and a suitcase. The tech there looked at me funny, him, but didn’t say nothing. I filled all the buckets with clean water, one at a time, and lugged them, me up the stairs to Annie’s apartment. At the end my back ached and I was panting like the old fool I was.

But I didn’t stop, me. I rested for ten minutes and then borrowed Annie’s broom. I took it down to the hotel. People were carrying plasticloth banners into the cafe to decorate for the dance. They laughed and joked, them; a young girl flashed her breasts. Getting ready for tonight’s contest. A few strangers checked themselves into the hotel on their New York State chips. They chattered on about the dance. Dr. Turner was still gone, her.

I took Annie’s broom, me, and swept all the dead leaves out of the hotel lobby, all the leaves left by the broken cleaning ’bot that wasn’t never going to get fixed now because it wasn’t all that important compared to other breakdowns, all the leaves that had died, them, since last year, before all the breakdowns started and the rabid coons first come to East Oleanta.

Nine

When I left Seattle for Huevos Verdes, it was on a plane from Kevin Baker’s corporate fleet. Kevin’s reasons for not following the rest of the Sleepless to Sanctuary, unlike Leisha’s, were not idealistic. He was Sanctuary’s financial liaison with the rest of the planet. I figured that a Sleepless plane was the least likely in the world to crash from duragem dissembler damage. The plane would have been checked and rechecked compulsively; the Sleepless do safety very well. “Because we’ve had so little of it,” Kevin said somberly when I phoned him and begged the use of plane and pilot. I was not interested at that moment in the social problems of the Sleepless. Kevin had never liked me, and I’d never asked him for any favors before. But I did now. I was going to force a showdown at Huevos Verdes, learn some important answers. Maybe Kevin knew that. You never know how much they know.

The unceasing lattice, closed tight, swayed in my mind.

“There’s just one thing, Drew,” Kevin said, and I thought I saw the shades and shapes of apology flit across his face on the vidscreen. Like all his generation of Sleepless, he looks a handsome thirty-five. “Leisha insists on going with you.”

“How did Leisha even know I was going to Huevos Verdes? As far as she knows, I’m on a concert tour!”

“I don’t know,” Kevin said, which may or may not have been true. Maybe Leisha had her own electronic spies in my hotel room, or at the Seattle concert. Although it was hard to imagine she and Kevin could do that without Huevos Verdes knowing. Maybe the Supers did know, and tolerated Leisha’s information system.

Maybe Leisha just knew me so well that she guessed what I was feeling. Maybe she had some kind of probability program predicting what I would do, what any Norm would do. You never know what they know.

“And if I say no to Leisha?” I said.

“Then no plane,” Kevin said. He didn’t meet my eyes. I saw that he felt he owed her this, for old debts, things that had happened before I was born. I saw, too, that there was just the slightest sign of puffiness along his jaw, the very beginning of a sag to his handsomeness. He was 110 years old. Flat, low shapes slid through my mind, the color of tarnished silver. Kevin was not going to change his mind.

Before Huevos Verdes, the plane went to Atlanta, to drop off something very secret and very industrial, in which I was not interested at all. Before that, it landed in Chicago to pick up Leisha. There were no reporters. The GSEA agents must have been there, of course, somewhere, but I didn’t see them. Leisha climbed on board with a lawyerly briefcase and a small green overnight case, her golden hair blowing in the brisk wind off Lake Michigan. She wore white pants, sandals, and a thin yellow shirt. I stared straight ahead.

“I have to go with you, Drew,” Leisha said with no hint of apology. This was her straight-forward, reasonable voice. It made me feel like a kid again, being chided for flunking out of the expensive donkey schools she’d sent me to. Schools no Liver could have succeeded in — or so I’d told myself at the time. “I love Miranda, too, you know. And I have to know what you and she and the other Supers are up to. Because if it’s what I think it is…”

A hint of anger had crept into her voice. Leisha would feel entitled to anger, just for being excluded from knowledge. I didn’t answer her.

Miri once told me that there were only four important questions you could ask about any human being: How does he fill up his time? How does he feel about how he fills up his time? What does he love? How does he react to those he perceives as either inferior or superior to him?

“If you make people feel inferior, even unintentionally,” she had said, her dark eyes intense, “they will be uncomfortable around you. In that situation, some people will attack. Some will ridicule, to ‘cut you down to size.’ But some will admire, and learn from you. If you make people feel superior, some will react by dismissing you. Some by wielding power — just because they can — in greater or lesser ways. But some will be moved to protect and help. All this is just as true of a junior lodge clique as of a group of governments.”

I had wondered how she could possibly know anything about junior lodge cliques. But, admiring her and wanting to learn, I hadn’t said anything.

“I only want to protect you and Miranda, Drew,” Leisha said, “and to help any way I can.”

I looked out the plane window, at the sunlight reflected blind-ingly on the metal wings, until the shapes behind my eyelids blotted out the ones in my mind.

The plane, which had been so carefully checked for duragem-dissembler contamination in Seattle, must have become contaminated in Atlanta. It went down over upcountry Georgia.

It was the KingDome all over again, except that this pilot didn’t pray or curse or moan, and we were flying at twenty thousand feet. The sky was a hazy blue, with clouds below that blocked any view of the ground. The plane listed to the left, just slightly, and I saw the flesh on the back of the pilot’s neck change from light brown to a mottled maroon. Leisha looked up from her briefcase. Then the plane righted and I could feel my mind, which had clenched into a tight hard shape like constipation, open again.

But the next moment the plane lurched again, and began to shudder. The pilot spoke to his console in low, urgent orders, simultaneously punching in manual commands. The plane nosedived.

The pilot pulled it up so hard I was thrown against Leisha. Her bright hair filled my mouth. Her briefcase hurled forward, against the back of the front seat. The briefcase said, “For maximum utility, please hold this unit steady.” A long, thin, thread spun itself in my mind.

Leisha grabbed the back of the front seat and pulled herself off me. “Drew! Are you all right?”

The plane dropped. The pilot stayed with it, issuing orders in a monotonous voice controlled as machinery, manipulating the manual. Leisha’s briefcase said, “This unit is deactivating,” in a clear high voice like a trained soprano. Leisha’s hand groped to check my restraints. “Drew!”

“I’m all right,” I said, thinking, This is not all right. The thread spun itself out, stretching tauter and tauter.

We plunged through the clouds. There was a shrieking high in the air, almost sounding above us, as if it were coming from some entirely different machinery. Then the plane hit flat on its belly on marshy ground. I felt the hit in my teeth, in my bones. Leisha, thrown once more against me, said something very low, a single word; it might have been “Daddy.”

The second the plane smashed into the ground, the sides lifted. But it couldn’t have been the same second, I thought later, because nobody would design crash equipment that way. But it seemed only a second until the sides lifted and the passenger restraints sprang free. Leisha pushed me out of the plane, the same moment I caught the acrid smell of smoke.

I dropped on my belly into four inches of water covering mucky ground. Leisha splashed down beside me, falling to her knees. Without my powerchair I felt myself flailing, a desperate fish, holding myself above water on my elbows. I crawled forward, pulling myself with my upper arms through the muck and away from the plane dragging my useless legs behind.

Leisha staggered to her feet and tried to lift me. “No, run!” I screamed, as if the smoke billowing out from the plane blocked sound and not sight. “Not without you,” she said. I could feel the plane behind me, a bomb. I screamed, “I can go faster on my own!” Maybe it was true.

She kept on tugging at my body, though I was far too heavy for her. The smoke thickened. I didn’t hear the pilot climb out — was he hurt? My left palm slipped in the mud and I fell face first into it. Frantically I tried to get back up on my hands and drag myself forward. “Run!” I screamed again at Leisha, who wouldn’t leave. Hopeless, hopeless. She wasn’t strong enough to carry me, and the plane was going to blow.

The thread snapped. The lattice in my mind, as in Seattle, disappeared.

Someone ran toward Leisha from the other side of the plane. The pilot? But it wasn’t. The man tackled Leisha and she fell on top of me. Once more my face was pushed into the mud. Then I heard a faint pop. When I fought my eyes free of the mud, I saw the air around the three of us shimmering. A force shield. Y-energy. How strong was it? Could it withstand—

The plane exploded in light and heat and blinding color.

I fell back into the muck, pinned under Leisha. The world rocked and I saw a tiny black water snake, terrified at the intrusions into its swamp, dart forward and bite me on the cheek. The snake started as a thin thread, then became a blur of close motion, and then the world went black as its shiny scales and I didn’t know if the thread held or not.

He was a GSEA agent. When I came to, three of them stood around me in a circle, like the ring of doctors around my bed decades ago, when I was crippled. I lay on my back on a patch of relatively dry, spongy ground at the edge of the shallow lake. Leisha sat a little way off, her back against a custard-apple tree, her head bent forward on her knees. Across the swamp, Kevin Baker’s plane burned, its smoke rising in billowy clouds.

“Leisha?” I heard myself croak. My voice sounded as alien as everything else. Only it wasn’t alien at all. I recognized the heaviness of the muggy air, the whine of insects, the scummy pools and waxy-white ghost orchids. And over everything, the gray dripping beards of Spanish moss. I had been raised in upcountry Louisiana. This was — had to be — Georgia, but much of the swampy country is the same. It was I who had become the alien.

“Ms. Camden will be all right in a moment,” an agent answered. “Probably just a concussion. There’s help on the way. We’re GSEA, Mr. Arlen. Lie still — your leg is broken.”

Again. But this time I felt no pain. There were no nerves left to feel pain. I raised my chin slightly, feeling the pull in my stomach muscles. My left leg lay bent at a sharp, unnatural angle. I lowered my chin.

The shapes slithering through my mind were gray and indistinct on the outside, spiked within. They had a voice. Can’t do anything right, can you, boy? Who d’you think you are — some goddamn donkey?

I said aloud, like a little boy, “A snake bit my cheek.”

A second man bent to squint at my face. It was covered with mud. He said, not harshly, “There’s a doctor on the way. We’re not going to move you until she gets here. Just lie still and don’t think.”

Don’t think. Don’t dream. But I was the Lucid Dreamer. I was. I had to be.

Leisha’s voice said thickly behind me, “Are we under arrest? On what charges?”

“No, of course not, Ms. Camden. We’re happy to be able to assist you,” said the man who had squinted at my cheek. The other two agents stood blank-faced, although I saw one of them blink. You can convey contempt with a blink. Leisha and I consorted ” with, assisted, Huevos Verdes. Gene manipulators. Destroyers of the human genome.

I saw Carmela Clemente-Rice standing beside the lattice in my mind, a clean cool shape, vibrating softly.

“You are Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency,” Leisha said. It wasn’t a question. But she was a lawyer: she waited for an answer.

“Yes, ma’am. Agent Thackeray.”

“Mr. Arlen and I are grateful for your assistance. But by what right—”

I never found out what legal point Leisha had been going to make.

Men dressed in rags burst from behind trees, through tangled vines, from the mucky ground itself. One moment they weren’t there, the next they were — that’s how it felt. They hollered and shrieked and whooped. Agent Thackeray and his two comtemp-tuous deputies didn’t even have time to draw their guns. Lying flat on my back, I saw the ragged men foreshortened as they raised pistols and fired at what seemed like, but couldn’t have been, point-blank range. Thackeray and the two agents went down, the bodies twitching. I heard somebody say, “Hail, yes, she’s an abomination, that there’s Leisha Camden,” and a gun fired again: once, twice. The first time, Leisha screamed.

I jerked my head toward her. She still sat with her back against the custard-apple tree, but now her upper body leaned forward, gracefully, as if she had fallen asleep. There were two red spots on her forehead, one below the other, the higher spot matting a strand of bright blonde hair that had somehow escaped the mud. I heard a long low moan and I thought “She’s alive!” — the thought a desperate bright bubble — until I realized the moan was mine.

The man who had said “Hail, yes” leaned over me. His breath blew in my face; it smelled of mint and tobacco. “Don’t you worry none, Mr. Arlen. We know you ain’t no abomination against nature. You’re safe as houses.”

“Jimmy,” a woman’s voice said sharply, “Here they come!”

“Well, Abigail, y’all are ready for ’em, ain’t you?” Jimmy said in a reasonable voice. I tried to crawl toward Leisha. She was dead.

Leisha was dead.

A plane droned overhead. The medical team. They could help Leisha. But Leisha was dead. But Leisha was a Sleepless. Sleepless didn’t die. They lived, on and on, Kevin Baker was 110. Leisha couldn’t be dead—

The woman called Abigail stepped off the high ground into the swamp. She wore hip-high waders and tattered pants and shirt, and she carried a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, ancient in design but gleaming with spit and polish. The medical plane folded its wings for a grav-powered landing. Abigail aimed, fired, and blew it into a second torch in the swamp.

“Okay,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “That’s it. Come on y’all, make tracks, they’ll be all over here in no time. Mr. Arlen, I’m sorry this is going to be a rough ride for y’all, sir.”

“No! I can’t leave Leisha!” I didn’t know what I was saying. I didn’t know—

“Sure you can,” Jimmy said. “She ain’t going to get no deader. And you ain’t none of her kind anyways. You’re with James Francis Marion Hubbley now. Campbell? Where you at? Carry him.”

“No! Leisha! Leisha!”

“Have a little dignity, son. You ain’t no child bawlin’ after its mama.”

A huge man, fully seven feet high, picked me up and swung me over his shoulder. There was no pain in my leg but as soon as my body struck his, red fire darted up my spine to my neck and I screamed. The fire filled my mind, and the last view I ever had of Leisha Camden was of her slumped gracefully against the custard-apple tree, enveloped in the red fire of my mind, looking as if she had just fallen quietly asleep.

I woke in a small, windowless room with smooth walls. Too smooth — not a nanodeviance from the smooth, the perpendicular, the unblemished. I didn’t realize at the time that I noticed this.

My mind filled with grief, welling up in spurts, geysers, rivers of hot lava the color of the two spots on Leisha’s forehead.

She really was dead. She really was.

I closed my eyes. The hot lava was still there. I beat on the ground with my fists, and cursed my useless body. If I could have moved to shield her, to put myself between her and the ragged gunmen…

Not even trained GSEA agents had been able to shield her. Or themselves.

I couldn’t hold back my tears, which embarrassed me. The lava had swamped the furled lattice in my mind, buried it, as it was burying me. Leisha…

“Now, y’all stop that, son. Keep a little dignity. Ain’t no woman sired by man worth that kind of carry in’ on.”

The voice was kind. I opened my eyes, and hatred replaced the hot lava. I was glad. Hatred was a better shape: sharp, and cold, and very compact. That shape would not bury me. I looked at the concerned face of James Francis Marion Hubbley looming over me, and I let the cold compact shapes slide through me, and I knew that I was going to stay alive, and stay alert, and stay in control of myself, because otherwise I might not be able to kill him. And I knew I was going to kill him. Even if that meant his was the last face I ever saw.

“That’s better,” Hubbley said genially, and sat down on a tree stump, hands on his knees, nodding encouragingly.

It really was a tree stump. The walls snapped into sharp focus, then, and I knew what kind of place I was in. I had seen the same kind of walls with Carmela Clemente-Rice, and at Huevos Verdes. This was an underground bunker, dug out of the earth by the tiny precise machines of nanotechnology, plastered over with alloy by other tiny precise machines. Eating dirt and laying down a thin layer of alloy were not hard, Miri had told me once. Any competent nanoscientist could create nonorganic mechanisms to do that. Corporations did it all the time, despite government regulations. It was only organic-based replicating nanotechnology that was hard. Anyone could dig a hole, but only Huevos Verdes could build an island.

But Hubbley didn’t look like a scientist. He leaned forward and smiled at me. His teeth were rotten. Wisps of graying hair hung on either side of a long, bony face with .deeply sunburned skin and pale blue eyes. An odd lump under the skin disfigured the right side of his neck. He might have been forty, or sixty. He wore cloth rags, not jacks, of a streaky dull brown, but his boots, whole and high, were almost certainly from some goods warehouse someplace. I had never seen him before, but I recognized him. He belonged to the backwater South.

In most of the country, the donkey-run District Supervisor This Warehouse or Congressman That Cafe had forced out all independent businesses. Livers could get everything they needed for free, so why pay for it? But in the rural South, and sometimes in the West, you still found hardscrabble businesses, weedy motels and chicken farms and whorehouses, getting poorer and poorer over forty years but hanging on, because damn it the gov’mint don’t have no business runnin’ our lives, them. Such people didn’t mind much being poor. They were used to being poor. It was better than being owned by the donkeys. They took handicrafts or chickens or beans or other services in trade. They disdained jacks and medunits and school software. And wherever these pathetic business held on, so did criminals like Hubbley. Stealing, too, was outside the gov’mint, and so a mark of pride.

Hubbley and his band would rob warehouses, apartment blocks, even gravrails, for what they absolutely needed. They would hunt in the deep swamps, and fish, and maybe grow a little of this and that. There would be a still someplace. Oh, I knew Jimmy Hubbley, all right. I’d known him all my life, before Leisha took me in. My daddy was a Jimmy Hubbley without the independence to break free from the system he cursed until the day free government whiskey — not even home-distilled — killed him.

And this was the man that had killed Leisha Camden.

The shapes of hatred have great energy, like robotic knives.

I said, “This is an illegal genemod lab.”

Hubbley’s face creased into a huge grin. “That’s exactly right! Y’all are sharp, boy. Only this is just a bitty little outstation, where Abigail can see to her equipment and we can pick up supplies. And this place ain’t used by the gene abominators no more. Y’all are visitin’ the Francis Marion Freedom Outpost, Mr. Arlen. And let me say we’re honored to have y’all. We all seen all your concerts. You’re a Liver, all right. Livin’ with the donkeys and the Sleepless ain’t harmed you at all. But then that’s the way with the true blood, ain’t At?”

There was something wrong with his speech. I fumbled, then got it. He didn’t talk like a Liver — none of what Miri called “intensifying reflexive pronouns” — but he didn’t talk like a donkey, either. There was something artificial about his sentences. And I’d heard this kind of speech before, but I couldn’t remember where.

I said, to keep him talking, “The Francis Marion Freedom Outpost? Who was Francis Marion?”

Hubbley squinted at me. He rubbed the lump on the side of his neck. “Y’all never heard of Francis Marion, Mr. Arlen? Really? An educated man like you? He was a hero, maybe the biggest hero this here country ever had. Y’all really never heard of him, sir?”

I shook my head. It didn’t hurt. I realized then that my leg had been set. I was on painkillers. A doctor must have seen me, or at least a medunit.

“Now I don’t want to make y’all feel bad,” Hubbley said earnestly. His long bony face radiated regret. “Y’all’s our guest, and it ain’t right to make a guest feel bad about his ignorance. Especially ignorance he cain’t help. It’s the school system, a sorry disgrace for a democracy, that’s entirely to blame here. Entirely. So don’t you fret, sir, about ignorance that just ain’t your fault.”

He had killed Leisha. He had killed the GSEA agents. He had kidnapped me. And he sat there concerned about my feeling bad over not knowing who Francis Marion was.

For the first time, I realized I might be dealing with a madman.

“Francis Marion was a great hero of the American Revolution, son. The enemy called him the ‘Swamp Fox.’ He’d hide in the swamps of South Carolina and Georgia and just swoop down on them British, hit ’em when they was least expectin’ it, and then melt back into the swamp. Couldn’t never catch him. He was fightin’ for freedom and justice, and he was usin’ nature to help him. Not hinder.”

I had his speech now.

Once Leisha and I had spent a whole night watching ancient movies about a civil rights movement. Not civil rights for Sleepless but a movement before that — a hundred years earlier? — about blacks or women. Or maybe Asians. I was never too good at history. But I had to do a paper for one of the schools Leisha kept trying to get me through. I don’t remember the history, but I remember that Leisha searched for old movies adapted for decent technology because she thought I wouldn’t read through the assigned books. She was right, and I resented that. I was sixteen years old. But I liked the movies. I sat in my powerchair, pleased because it was 3:00 A.M. and I wasn’t sleepy, I was keeping up with Leisha. I still thought, at sixteen, that I could.

All night we watched sheriffs in groundcars busting up places where voters registered in person — this was even before computers. We watched old women sit at the backs of buses. We watched black Livers denied seats in cafes, even though they had meal chips. They all talked like James Francis Marion Hubbley. Or, rather, he talked like them. His speech was a deliberate creation, a reenactment of an earlier time: history as far back as it was electronically available. Maybe he thought they talked like that in the American Revolution. Maybe he knew better. Either way, it was disciplined and deliberate.

He was an artist.

Hubbley said, “Marion was puny, and none too firm in his education, and bad-tempered, and given to black moods. His knees were made wrong, right from the day his mother bore him. The British burned his plantation, his men deserted him whenever they got a hankerin’ after their families, and his own commandin* officer, Major General Nathanael Greene, wasn’t none too fond of him. But none of that slowed down Francis Marion. He did his duty by his country, his duty as he saw it, whether all hail busted out or not.”

I said, forcing the words out, “And what are you imagining is your duty by your country?”

Hubbley’s eyes gleamed. “I said y’all was sharp, son, and you are. Y’all got it right off. We’re doin’ our same duty as the Swamp Fox, which is to fight off foreign oppressors.”

“And this time the foreign oppressors are anybody genemod.”

“Y’all got that right, Mr. Arlen. Livers are the true people of this country, just like Marion’s army was. They had the will to decide for themselves what kind of country they wanted to live in, and we got the will to decide for ourselves, too. We got the will, and we got the idea of what this glorious nation ought to look like, even if it don’t look like it right now. We. Livers. And y’all don’t believe it, hail, just look at the mess the donkeys made of this great country. Debt to foreign nations, entanglin’ alliances that sap us dry, the infrastructure crumblin’ in our faces, the technology misused. Just like the British misused the cannons and guns of their day.”

My hip began to throb, distantly. The painkiller wasn’t quite strong enough. I had heard all this before. It was nothing more than anti-research hatred, dressed up as patriotism. They had gotten Leisha after all, the haters. I couldn’t stand to look at Hubbley, and I turned my head away.

“Course,” he said, “you cain’t stop genetic engineering. And nobody should stop it. We sure aren’t, or we wouldn’t have let go this here duragem dissembler.”

I turned my head slowly to stare at him. He grinned. His pale blue eyes gleamed in his sunburned face.

“Don’t look like that, son. I don’t mean me personally, Jimmy Hubbley. Or even this brigade. But y’all didn’t think this duragem dissembler got loose by accident, did you?”

That’s when I noticed the walls, nanotech perfect. And I saw again Miri’s printouts, unable to pinpoint a single source for the dissembler leak.

Hubbley said, serious again, “There’s a lot of us. Y’all need a lot of people to make a revolution. We got the will to decide what kind of country we want to live in, and we got the idea. The technology.”

I choked out, “What technology?”

“All of it. Well, maybe not all. But a lot. Some nonorganic nano, some low-level organic nano.”

“The duragem dissembler… How did you…”

“Now, y’all will learn that in good time. For today, just know that we did. And it’s going to bring down the false government, same as the Revolution brought down the British. We capture the technology we need, like Marion captured guns right from the enemy. Why, in 1781, right on the Santee River—”

“But you killed the GSEA agents—”

“Genemod,” Hubbley said briefly. “Abominations against nature. Hail, using nanotech to fight the good fight — that ain’t no different than using the cannon of General Marion’s time. But to use it on human beings — that’s a whole different war, son. That ain’t right. People ain’t things, and shouldn’t be treated like things, with their parts altered and retrofitted and realigned. They ain’t vehicles, nor factories, nor robots. The donkeys done been treating people like things way too long in this country. Liver people.”

“But you can’t just allow organic genetic engineering on microorganisms and expect that it won’t happen on people, too. If you allow one—”

“Hail, no.” Hubbley stood and flexed his legs. “It ain’t the same thing at all. It’s all right to kill germs, ain’t it? Even to kill animals to eat? But it ain’t all right to kill human beings. We make that distinction just fine in our laws about killin’, don’t we? What in hail thinks we cain’t make them in our laws about genemod engineering?”

I said, before I knew I was going to, “You can’t hide from the GSEA!”

Hubbley gazed at me mildly from those watery blue eyes. “Huevos Verdes does, don’t it?”

“That’s different. They’re Supers—”

“They ain’t gods. Or even angels.” He stretched his back. “Fact is, Mr. Arlen, we been hidin’ from the GSEA for nearly five years now. Oh, not all of us. The enemy has killed quite a few good soldiers so far. And we inflicted our casualties, too. But we’re still here. And the duragem dissembler’s out there bringin’ the whole war to a hastier conclusion.”

“But you can’t hide from Huevos Verdes!”

“Well, that’s tougher to call. But the fact is, I suspect we’re not. I suspect Huevos Verdes knows a whole lot more about us than the GSEA. Stands to reason.”

Miranda had never said. Not to me. Jonathan had never said, nor Christy, nor Nikos. Not to me. Not to me.

“Up till now, we ain’t been strong enough to take on Huevos Verdes as well, so it’s been a good thing they’ve kind of ignored us. But it’s all different now. Not even Huevos Verdes can stop the way this government’s losing control, now that the duragem dissembler is beyond stopping.”

“But—”

“That’s enough for now,” Hubbley said, not unkindly. “We got to get movin’ now. Those agents’ deaths’ll cause all hail to bust loose. The company ought to be just about ready to go, and y’all are goin’ with us. But don’t y’all worry none, Mr. Arlen — they’ll be plenty of time for you and me to talk. I know all this is new to you, because y’all did have a faulty education. And y’all been spendin’ time with Sleepless, who ain’t even human no more. But y’all will learn better. Cain’t help it, once you see the real war up close. And we owe you that. You been a real help to us.”

I only stared at him. A sickening flood of shapes swept to the edge of my mind, a wave poised to flow over me, swamp me.

“I’ve been—”

“Well, of course,” Hubbley said, in what felt like genuine astonishment. “Didn’t you already guess that? Your last concert, ‘The Warrior,’ has been leavin’ people feelin’ far more independent and ready to fight with will and idea. Y’all done that, Mr. Arlen. It probably warn’t what y’all intended, but that’s what’s been hap-penin’. Since y’all began giving The Warrior,’ our recruitment’s up three hundred percent.”

I couldn’t speak. A door opened and Campbell loomed over me.

“Hail,” Hubbley said, “two months ago we even got a cell of genemod scientists who joined us voluntarily, without no torture or nothing. You been making all the difference in the world, son.

“And now, we really got to move out. Campbell will carry you. If that hip starts to hurtin’ too much, y’all be sure to holler. We got more painkillers, and where we’re going, there’s a doctor. We sure don’t want you to suffer, not with all the help you been givin’ us, Mr. Arlen, sir. You been on the right side. It just takes some folk a little longer than others to know it.

“Handle him careful, Campbell. . . there. Here we go.”

Campbell carried me across the swamp for about two hours, as near as I could tell. It’s hard to be certain about the time because I kept blacking out. He had slung me over his shoulder like a sack of soy, but I could tell he was trying to be gentle. It didn’t help. We walked single file, about ten of us, led by Jimmy Hubbley. Hubbley knew the swamps. His people sometimes walked on narrow ridges of semi-firm land with mucky pools on either side, the kind of quicksand that as a child I had seen swallow a man in less than three minutes. Other times we sloshed through brackish water alive with turtles and snakes. Everybody wore hip-high waders. They kept close to dense tangles of vines, under gray moss dripping from trees. That wouldn’t make any difference, of course, as soon as the GSEA brought in a tracking ’bot, which does ten times better than the best hound at picking up pheromones, not only following their trail but analyzing their content. I expected to be back with the GSEA in two hours.

Then I saw that the last person in line was the woman, Abigail, who had blown up the rescue plane with a rocket launcher. She had left that at the outstation. Instead she carried a curved, dull-colored machine like a metal bow, holding it above her head, parallel to the ground. I knew what it was: a Harrison Pheromone Obliterator. It released molecules that homed in on any molecular traces of humans and neutralized them. It was classified military equipment, which I happened to know about only through Huevos Verdes, and there was no way the Francis Marion Freedom Outpost could have one. But they did.

For the first time, I began to believe Jimmy Hubbley that his movement was not made up of isolated fanatics.

Abigail was pregnant. With her arms raised above her head, I could clearly see the curve of her belly under her jacks, maybe five months along. As she walked she hummed to herself, a happy tuneless little song. Her thoughts looked miles and landscapes away.

The swamp got thicker and hotter. Branches scratched my face where I hung, helpless, over Campbell’s shoulder. Snakes as thick as a man’s wrist slithered into shallow pools. A log heaved up, slid beneath black water, and disappeared in a row of hissing bubbles. Alligator.

I closed my eyes. The humid air was thick with the waxy-white scent of ghost orchids, growing on the trunks of pop-ash trees. They weren’t parasites. They lived on air.

Insects sang and stung, a constant cloud.

“Well, here we are,” Jimmy Hubbley said. “Mr. Arlen, sir, how are y’all faring?”

I didn’t answer. Every time I looked at him, my mind filled with the shapes of hatred, cold and rotating like knives. Leisha was dead. Jimmy Hubbley had killed Leisha Camden. She was dead. I was going to destroy him.

He didn’t seem to care that I didn’t answer. We had halted under an enormous bay tree hung with gray moss. Other trees crowded close. An ancient fallen cypress had half crumbled into pulp, covered with the sucking tendrils of a strangler fig. In the murky half-light I saw a striped lizard scuttle down a vine. On the other side of the bay tree was a dark-green expanse of moss, soft and even as an enclave lawn. The place smelled heavily of jungle rot.

“Now, son, this next part might look a little disconcertin’ to y’all. It’s real important that y’all remember you’re in no danger. That, and to take a real deep breath, close your mouth, and hold your nose. And I’ll tell you what — I’ll go first, just to reassure y’all. In the ordinary way, Abby would go first, but this time I will. At least in part out of deference to the bride.”

He grinned at Abigail, flashing his broken teeth. She smiled back and lowered her eyes, but a minute later I caught her shoot a hooded glance at one of the other men, hard and meaningful as a grenade. Jimmy Hubbley didn’t see it. He gave a rebel yell and jumped into the expanse of moss.

I gasped, which sent unexpected pain through my left side. Jimmy sank immediately to his waist in black, jellylike muck that lay beneath the moss. His only hope now was to stay absolutely still and let Campbell pull him out. But instead he gave a jaunty little wiggle of his upper shoulders, one hand holding his nose, the other nonchalantly clamped to his side. He stayed motionless for maybe ten seconds, and then something sucked him down into the muck. His chest disappeared, and then his shoulders, and then his head. The moss, lightly spattered with muck, closed over him.

My heart hammered against my lungs.

Abigail went next. She shoved her Harrison Pheromone Ob-literator into a plastisynth pouch and sealed it. Then she jumped onto the moss and dissappeared.

“Hold your nose, you,” Campbell said — the first words he had spoken.

“Wait. Wait. I—”

“Hold your nose, you.” He threw me out over the muck.

My left side screamed. My feet hit the moss first, but there was no feeling there, had been no feeling there for decades. It wasn’t until I’d sunk to my waist that I felt the clammy muck, sucking against me like feces, cool after the hot air. It smelled of rot, of death. Black shapes flooded my mind and I struggled, even while a part of me knew I must hold absolutely still, there was no help unless I held absolutely still, Leisha… Somebody chuckled.

Then something grabbed me from below, something incorporeal but powerful, like a wind. It sucked me down. The muck rose above my shoulders, and then to my mouth. It covered my eyes, filling the world with the same fecal shapes as my mind. I went under.

For the third time, as I expected death, the purple lattice disappeared.

And then I was lying on the floor of an underground room, while gloved hands seized me and dragged my mucky body. Pain spasmed my left side. Someone wiped my face. The hands stripped my clothes from me and thrust me naked into a sonar shower, and the muck dropped from my head and clothing in dry, scaly flakes that were in turn sucked into a vacuum at the shower’s floor. Someone slapped a medpatch on my spine, and the pain disappeared.

“Y’all can have a real shower, too, if y’all want,” Jimmy Hub-bley said kindly. “Some folks need one. Or think they do.” He stood before me already dressed in clean jacks, not at all raggedy, indistinguishable from any other Liver except by his uncared-for teeth.

Abigail emerged from the water shower, unself-consciously naked, drying her hair. Her pregnant belly waggled slightly from side to side. A bell rang, high and sweet, and Campbell was sucked down onto the landing stage, which I saw now extended only a few feet under a low overhang. Two men immediately pulled Campbell off the stage, wiping his eyes and nose. Campbell stood, covered with the shiny muck, and lumbered into the sonar shower.

“Take off them gloves, boys, and help Mr. Arlen, here. Joncey, y’all just have to take your eyes off your lovely bride.”

One of the two men reddened slightly. Hubbley seemed to think this was funny, breaking into a guffaw, but I felt in my mind the shapes of Joncey’s anger. He said nothing. Abigail went on coolly drying her hair, her face expressionless. Joncey and the other man seized me under the armpits, carried me between them out of the sonar shower, and set me down in the middle of the room. Joncey handed me a set of clean jacks.

“What size boots you wear, you?” He was younger than Abigail, with black hair and blue eyes, handsome in a rough way that had nothing to do with genetic egnineering.

I said, “I’d like my own boots back.” They were Italian leather. Leisha had given them to me. “Put them in the sonar shower.”

“Better you wear our boots, you. What size?”

“Ten and a half.”

He left the room. I dressed. The lattice was back in my head, closed tight as one of Leisha’s exotic flowers.

She was really dead.

Joncey returned, with a pair of boots and a wheelchair. It wasn’t even grav-powered; it had actual wheels that apparently you turned by hand.

“An antique,” Jimmy Hubbley said. “Sorry, Mr. Arlen, sir, that here thing is the best we can do on such short notice. But y’all just give us a little time.”

He beamed at me, obviously expecting some surprise that this underground bunker was well enough equipped that an unexpected crippled captive could be provided with a wheelchair. I didn’t react. A faint disappointment shimmered over his face.

I had his shape, then. He wanted to be admired. James Francis Marion Hubbley. And he didn’t even know that at least two of his followers, Abigail and Joncey, already resented him.

How much?

I would find out.

Joncey and the other man lifted me into the wheelchair. I pulled on the Liver boots. Dressed, seated instead of flopping on the floor like a fish, I felt less hopeless. Leisha was dead. But I was going to destroy the bastards who’d killed her.

I studied the room. It was low, no more than six and a half feet high; Campbell had to stoop. Corridors radiated off in five directions. The walls were nanotech smooth. I knew from Miranda that the weak point of any shielded underground bunker is the entrance. That’s what’s most likely to be detected by GSEA experts. The lab in East Oleanta had an elaborate entrance shield created by Terry Mwakambe; no chance the GSEA would get through that. But these people were not Supers. They would have no more advanced technology than the government did. I guessed, however, that the swamp-pool entrance was a use of technology that the government hadn’t yet thought of, adapted by some crazy scientist who’d grown up in swamp country, and that it was virtually undetectable. So far.

How far did the underground tunnel system extend? With nanodiggers, additional construction could be going on even now, miles from here, without much disturbance on the surface. Hub-bley had said his “revolution” had been in progress for over five years.

And these people had loosed the duragem dissembler on the country. Without the GSEA ever figuring out that it was not Hue-vos Verdes.

Or did the GSEA know that, and nonetheless leak to the press that the Supers were responsible? Because it was all right to blame Sleepless, but embarrassing to admit you couldn’t catch a bunch of Livers with captured or renegade nanoscientists on their side.

I didn’t know. But I did know that in a war this advanced, these tunnels would contain terminals. Miri had made me memorize override codes for most standard programming. And even if the programming wasn’t standard, Jonathan Markowitz had made me memorize, over and over, access tricks that would get through to Huevos Verdes. And Huevos Verdes monitored everything. There had to be a way to reach them. All I needed was a terminal.

If Huevos Verdes monitored everything, wouldn’t they know about the underground movement?

They must know. I remembered Miranda bending over printouts at Huevos Verdes: “We can’t locate the epicenter of the duragem problem.” But the Supers must have at least been aware that the dissembler was being released by some nationwide, organized group. Their intelligence was too good not to know it.

And Miranda hadn’t told me.

“Are you hungry, you?” Joncey said. He spoke to Abigail, now dressed in green jacks, but Hubbley answered.

“Hail, yes. Let’s have at it, boys.”

He pushed my chair himself. I let him, passive, feeling the shapes in my mind hard as carbon-fiber rods. We all went down the left-hand tunnel, passing several closed doors. Eventually everyone else went through one door, Hubbley and I through another. A small white room was furnished with wood — not plas-tisynth — table and chairs. On the wall hung a large holo portrait of a big-nosed, dark-eyed soldier in some sort of antique uniform.

“Brigadier General Francis Marion himself,” Hubbley said, with satisfaction. “I always eat separate from the troops, Mr. Arlen. It makes for better morale. Did y’all know, sir, that General Marion was a fanatic on cleanliness? God’s own truth. He dry-shaved any soldier who didn’t appear neat and clean on parade, and he himself drank vinegar and water every day of his life, pretty near, for his health. Drink of the Roman soldiers. Did you know that, sir?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. My hatred for him burned cold, sleek shapes in my mind. The room held no terminal.

“As early as 1775 one British general wrote, ‘Our army will be destroyed by damned driblets’ — and Francis Marion was the damndest driblet those poor redcoats ever saw. Just like this war will be won by damned driblets, sir.” Hubbley laughed, exposing his brown teeth. His pale eyes crinkled. He never took them off me.

“Will and idea, son. We got them both. Will and idea. You know what makes the Constitution so great?”

“No,” I said. A young boy entered, dressed in turquoise jacks, his long hair tied back with a ribbon. He carried bowls of hot stew. Hubbley paid him as much attention as a ’bot.

“What makes the Constitution so great is it brought the common man into the decision-making process. It let us decide what kind of country we want. Us, the common man. Our will, and our idea.”

Leisha had always said that what made the Constitution so great was its checks and balances.

She was dead. She was really dead.

“That’s why, sir,” Hubbley continued, “it’s so all-fired necessary that we take back this great country from the donkey masters who would enslave us. By driblets, if necessary. Yes, by God, by driblets.” He attacked his stew with gusto.

“In fact, preferably by driblets,” I said. “You wouldn’t like this war nearly as much if you fought it aboveground, in the courts.”

I had expected to make him angry. Instead he laid down his spoon and squinted thoughtfully.

“Yes, I do believe y’all are right, Mr. Arlen. I do believe y’all are right. We each have our God-given temperament, and mine is for fighting in driblets. Just like General Marion. Now, that’s a real interesting insight.” He went back to spooning stew.

I tasted mine. Standard Liver soy base, but with chunks of real meat added, gamy and a little tough. Squirrel? Rabbit? It had been decades since I’d had to eat either.

“Not that the Constitution don’t have its own limits,” Hubbley continued. “Now y’all take Abigail and Joncey. They understand exactly what those limits need to be. They’re manipulatin’ gene combinations in the right way: through human procreation.” He dragged out the last two words, savoring each syllable. “Some of Joncey’s genes, some of Abby’s, and the final shuffle in God’s hands. They respect the clear line in the Constitution between what is God’s and what is man’s to manipulate.”

I needed to know everything I could about him, no matter how nutty, because I didn’t know yet what I would need to kill him. “Where in the Constitution does it draw that line?”

“Ah, son, don’t they teach you nothin’ in them fancy schools? It oughtn’t be allowed, no, it ought not. Why, right there in the Preamble, it announces clear as daylight that ‘We the People’ are writin’ the thing ‘in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,’ and et cetera. What’s a perfect union about letting donkeys control the human genome? It just drives people farther apart. What’s Justice about not letting Joncey and Abby’s babe start life on an equal footin’ with a donkey child? How does that make for domestic tranquility? Hail, it makes for envy and resentment, that’s what it makes for. And what on God’s green earth is the ‘common defence’ if it ain’t the defence of the common people, the Livers, to have their kids count just as much as a genemod babe? Abby and Joncey are fightin’ for their own, just like natural parents everywhere, and the Constitution gives ’em the right to do that right there in its first sacred paragraph.”

I had never heard anyone use the word ‘babe’ before. He sat there spooning his wretched stew, Jimmy Hubbley, as artificial and as sincere as anyone I had ever met.

Intellectual arguments confuse me. They always have. I felt the helpless feeling rise in me, the one I’d always had arguing with Leisha, with Miranda, with Jonathan and Terry and Christy. The best I could answer, out of confusion and hatred, was, “What gives you the right to decide what’s right for 175 million people?”

He squinted at me again. His apologetic voice returned. “Why, son — ain’t that what your Huevos Verdes was doin’?”

I stared at him.

“Sure it is. Only they cain’t decide for common people, ’cause they ain’t. Clearly. Not like us. Not like him.” He waved his spoon at the portrait of Francis Marion. Stew dribbled off the spoon onto the table.

“But—”

“Y’all need to examine your premises, son,” he said very gently. “Will and idea.” He went back to eating.

The boy returned, carrying two mugs. Still-brewed whiskey. I left mine untouched, but I made myself eat the stew. I might need my strength. Hatred shone in me like suns.

Hubbley talked more about Francis Marion. His courage, his military strategy, his ways of living off the land. “Why, he wrote to General Horatio Gates to send him supplies because ‘we are all poor Continentals without money.’ Poor Continentals! Ain’t that a great one? Poor Continentals! And so we are.” He drained his whiskey. So much for vinegar and water.

I choked out, “The GSEA will stop you. Or Huevos Verdes will.”

He grinned. “You know what the Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton of His Majesty’s army said about Francis Marion? But as for this damned old fox, the Devil himself could not catch him.”

I said, “Hubbley — you aren’t Francis Marion.”

Immediately he grew serious. “Well, of course not, son. Anybody can see that, so clear it don’t hardly need commentin’ on, does it, except by somebody crazy. Clear as day I’m not Francis Marion. I’m Jimmy Hubbley. What’s wrong with you, Mr. Arlen? You feelin’ all right?”

He leaned across the table, his bony face creased with concern.

I could feel my heart thud in my chest. He was impenetrable, as impenetrable as Huevos Verdes. After a moment he patted my arm.

“That’s all right, Mr. Arlen, sir, y’all just a little shocked by events is all. Y’all will be fine in the mornin’. It’s just real upsettin’, discoverin’ the truth after all this time of believin’ falsehoods. Perfectly natural. Now don’t you worry none; y’all be fine in the mornin’. You just sleep, and please excuse me, I got a council of war to attend to.”

He patted my arm again, smiled, and left. The boy wheeled my chair to a bedroom with a single bed, a chemical toilet, and a deadbolt on the door that could only be unlocked from the outside.

In the morning the doctor came to check me. He turned out to be the small man who had helped Joncey at the landing stage.

Joncey was with him. I saw that Joncey was guarding him; apparently the doctor was not here of his own Will and Idea. But he was allowed to roam the underground compound, which meant he probably knew where the terminals were.

“Leg looks good,” he said. “Any pain in your neck?”

“No.” Joncey leaned against the doorjamb, smiling. The smile deepened and I glimpsed Abigail pass by in the corridor. Joncey stepped away from the door. Giggles and a tussle.

I said, quickly and very low, “Doctor — I can get us out of here, if you can get me to a terminal. I know ways to call for help that will override anything they can possibly have—”

His small face wrinkled in alarm. Too late I realized that, of course, he was monitored. Hubbley’s people would overhear everything he heard or said.

Joncey came back and the doctor hurried off by his side, interested only in staying alive.

The lattice in my mind had circled tighter than ever, a huddled closed shape, hiding whatever was inside. Even the diamond patterns on its outer surface looked smaller. Angry, ineffective shapes flopped sluggishly around it, like beached fish.

Hubbley left me to my sour shapes until midmorning. When he opened my door he looked stern. “Mr. Arlen, sir, I understand y’all want to get to a terminal and set your friends at Huevos Verdes on us.”

I stared at him with open hatred, sitting in my antique wheelchair.

He sighed and sat on the edge of my cot, hands on his long knees, body bent earnestly forward. “It’s important that y’all understand, son. Contactin’ the enemy in wartime is treason. Now I know y’all ain’t a regular soldier, leastways not yet, y’all are more like a prisoner of war, but just the same—”

“You know Francis Marion never talked like that, don’t you?” I said brutally. “That kind of speech only dates from maybe a hundred fifty years ago, from movies. It’s phony. As phony as your whole war.”

He didn’t change expression. “Why, of course General Marion didn’t talk this way, Mr. Arlen. Y’all think I don’t know that? But it’s different from how my troops talk, it’s old-fashioned, and it ain’t neither donkey nor Liver. That’s enough. It don’t matter how truth gets expressed, long as it does.”

He gazed at me with kindly, patient eyes.

I said, “Let me wheel my chair around the compound. I’m not going to learn your truths locked in this room. Give me a guard, like the doctor has.”

Hubbley rubbed the lump on his neck. “Well — could do, I suppose. It ain’t like y’all are going to overpower anyone, sittin’ in that chair.”

The shapes in my mind abruptly changed. Dark red, shot with silver. Hubbley’s people didn’t do very deep background checks. He didn’t realize I’d trained my upper body with the best martial arts masters Leisha’s money could buy. She’d wanted to give me an outlet for my adolescent anger.

What else didn’t he know? Leisha, unable to alter my non-Sleepless DNA, had nonetheless done what she could for me. My eyes had implanted corneas with bifocal/zoom magnification; my arm muscles had been augmented. Probably these things counted as abominations, crimes against the common humanity in the Constitution.

I tried to look wistful. “Can I have Abigail for my guard?”

Hubbley laughed. “Won’t do y’all no good, son. Abby’s goin’ to marry Joncey in a couple of months. Give that baby a real daddy. Abby’s got a whole lot of lace around here someplace, for a weddin’ dress.”

I saw Abigail in her waders and torn shirt, firing a rocket launcher at the rescue plane. I couldn’t picture her in a wedding gown. Then it came to me that I couldn’t picture Miranda in one either.

Miranda. I had hardly thought of her since Leisha’s death.

“But I’ll tell you what,” Hubbley said, “seein’ as y’all are so starved for feminine company, I’ll assign a woman to guard you. But, Mr. Arlen, sir—”

“Yes?”

His eyes looked grayer, harder. “Keep in mind that this is a war, sir. And grateful as we are for the help your concerts gave us, y’all are expendable. Just keep that in mind.”

I didn’t answer. In another hour the door opened again and a woman entered. She was, must have been, Campbell’s twin. Nearly seven feet tall, nearly as muscled as he was. Her short shit-brown hair was plastered flat around a sullen face with Campbell’s heavy jaw.

“I’m the guard, me.” Her voice was high and bored.

“Hello. I’m Drew Arlen. You’re…”

“Peg. Just behave, you.” She stared at me with flat dislike.

“Right,” I said. “And what natural combination of genes produced you?”

Her dislike didn’t deepen, didn’t waver. I saw her in my mind as a solid monolith, granite, like a headstone.

“Take me to whatever your cafe is, Peg.”

She grasped the wheelchair and pushed it roughly. Beneath her green jacks, her thigh muscles rippled. She outweighed me by maybe thirty pounds; her reach was longer; she was in superb shape.

I saw Leisha’s body, light and slim, slumped against the custard-apple tree, two red holes in her forehead.

The cafe was a large room where several tunnels converged. There were tables, chairs, a holoterminal of the simplest, receive-only kind. It showed a scooter race. No foodbelt, but several people were eating bowls of soystew. They stared frankly when Peg wheeled me in. At least half a dozen faces were openly hostile.

Abigail and Joncey sat at a far table. She was actually sewing panels of lace together — by hand. It was like watching someone make candles, or dig a hole with a shovel. Abigail glanced at me once, then ignored me.

Peg shoved my chair against a table, brought me a bowl of stew, and settled down to watch the scooter race. Her huge body dwarfed the standard-issue plastisynth chair.

I watched the race, while observing everything through the zoom area of my corneas. Abby’s lace was covered with a complex design of small oblongs, no two the same, like snowflakes. She snipped out an oblong and presented it, laughing, to Joncey. Three men played cards; the one whose hand I could see held a pair of kings. After a while I said to Peg, “Is this how you spend all your days? Contributing to the revolution?”

“Shut up, you.”

“I want to see more of the compound. Hubbley said I could if you take me.”

“Say ‘Colonel Hubbley,’ you!”

“Colonel Hubbley, then.”

She seized my chair hard enough to rattle my teeth and shoved it along the nearest corridor. “Hey! Slow down!”

She slowed to an insolent crawl. I didn’t argue. I tried to memorize everything.

It wasn’t easy. The tunnels all looked the same: featureless white, nanoperfect, lined with dirt-resistant alloy and identical white, unmarked doors. I tried to memorize tiny bits of dropped food, boot scuffs. Once I saw a small oblong bit of lace half caught under a door, and I knew Abigail must have come that way. Peg pushed me like a ’bot, impassive and tireless. I was losing track of what I’d tried to memorize.

After three hours, we passed a cleaning ’bot, whirling up the things I had used as markers.

In the whole tour, I saw only two open doors. One was to a common bath. The other was only opened for a moment, then closed, allowing the fastest glimpse of high-security cannisters, rows and rows of them. Duragem dissemblers? Or some other nonhuman-genome destruction that Jimmy Hubbley thought ought to be unleashed on his enemies?

“What was that?” I said to Peg.

“Shut up, you.”

An hour later, we returned to the commons area. Lunch was still in progress. Peg shoved me to an empty table and plunked another bowl of stew in front of me. I wasn’t hungry.

A few minutes later Jimmy Hubbley sat down with me. “Well, son, I hope y’all are satisfied with your tour.”

“Oh, it was great,” I said. “I saw all kinds of contributions to the revolution.”

He laughed. “Oh, it’s happenin’, all right. But y’all ain’t goin’ to provoke me into showing y’all before I’m ready. Time enough, time enough.”

“Aren’t you afraid your troops will get restless, doing nothing like this? What did General Marion do with his men between battles?” I put down my spoon; I hated him too much to even pretend to eat in his presence. God, I wanted a drink.

He seemed surprised. “Why, Mr. Arlen, sir, they don’t ordinarily do nothin’. This here’s Sunday, the Sabbath. Come tomorrow, we go back to regular drill. General Marion knew the value of a day for rest and recuperation of the human spirit.”

He looked around with satisfaction at the desultory gambling, scooter watching, slumped figures probably on sunshine. Only three faces in the whole damn room showed any real animation.

Joncey and Abigail, smiling at each other, Abby still sewing on billowing patterned lace. And Peg.

“Eat your stew, son,” Hubbley said kindly. “Y’all will need food to keep your strength up.”

I left my spoon where it lay. “No,” I said. “I won’t.” Of course he didn’t understand that. But Peg, with animal alertness, caught something in my tone. She looked at me hard, before she went back to watching Jimmy Hubbley, her sullen face transformed by awe and respect and the hopeless, longing love of an ordinary person for one clearly as far above her as a god.