Beggars and Choosers

Thirteen

I was underground with the Francis Marion Freedom Outpost for two months, throughout September and October. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to hide for days, weeks, months, from the GSEA. The Outpost was a bunch of nuts; what possible chance could they have of evading the government after killing three GSEA agents, murdering Leisha Camden, and blow-ing up an agency rescue plane? None. Nada. It wasn’t possible. That’s what I would have believed.

Nor did I believe it was possible to hide from Huevos Verdes. Daily, hourly, I expected them to come for me.

The shapes in my head were thin and fragile, like nervous membranes. Vulnerable. Uncertain. These shapes swam around the immobile green lattice like spooked fish. Sometimes they had faces, or the sketches effaces, on the uncertain shapes. Sometimes the faces were mine.

At 5:00 A.M. of my second day underground an alarm had sounded. My heart had leapt: their defenses were breached. But it was reveille.

Peg slouched in, sullen. She wheeled me to a common bath, dumped me in, pulled me out. I didn’t reveal that I could easily have done this for myself. She wheeled me to commons, jammed with people hastily eating, so many people that some gulped their food standing up. Then she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and thrust it at me angrily.

“Here. Yours.”

It was a printout of a schedule, headed ARLEN, DREW, TEMPORARY ASSIGNMENT COMPANY 5. “I’m assigned to Company 5. Is that your group, Peg?”

She snorted in derision and wheeled me around so hard I nearly tumbled out of the chair.

Company 5 assembled in a huge barren underground room: a parade ground. I didn’t see Joncey, Abigail, or anyone else I recognized. For two hours twenty people did calisthenics. I did intentionally feeble imitations in my chair. Peg grunted and sweated.

Next came two hours of holo instruction on weapons — pro-pellant, laser, biological, grav — I was amazed Hubbley let me see this, and then I wasn’t. He didn’t expect me to ever have the chance to tell anyone.

As the holo explained weapon charging, care, and use, the twenty members of Company 5 practiced with the real thing. I was ten feet away from wresting a gun from Peg and shooting her dead. She didn’t seem bothered by this, although I saw a few others glance at me, hard-eyed. Probably Peg didn’t object because these were Hubbley’s orders. Perhaps this was the way that Francis Marion had converted his prisoners of war.

Lunch, then more physical training, then a holo on living off the land. Incredibly, it came from the Government Document Office. I fell asleep.

Peg kicked my chair. “Political Truth, you.”

She pushed me closer into the company, who sat on the floor in a semicircle, facing the holostage. Everyone sat straight. I could feel taut shapes grow tauter in my mind. The atmosphere prickled and thickened. We were in for something more interesting than the Government Document Office.

Jimmy Hubbley came in and sat with the company. Nobody addressed him. Another holo began.

It had the deliberately grainy texture reserved for real-time unedited filming. There’s no way to alter any part of it without destroying the whole thing. It’s the same holo-creation technique I use in my concerts, although my equipment compensates for the graininess with deliberately softened edges, like a dream. But it’s important to people to see a real-life concert, not some patched together and edited version afterwards. They need to know it’s really me.

This holo had really happened.

It showed the underground, including James Hubbley, capturing the duragem dissembler in an outlaw lab. The captured inventors were then forced to manufacture dissemblers in huge quantities, which were stored in small canisters completely dissolvable once opened. None had been released until the canisters had been stockpiled all over the United States. Then the clocked dissembler had been released simultaneously everywhere, so no source could be traced. I was looking at information the GSEA would give its collective life to know.

The original outlaw lab had been located in Upstate New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, near a small town called East Oleanta.

I sat quietly, letting the shapes in my mind overwhelm me. There was no use fighting them. Miranda had always said East Oleanta had been chosen at random for the Huevos Verdes project, picked by a computer-generated random program to avoid the GSEA deductive-locale programs. That’s what she had told me.

You’re a necessary part of the project, Drew, A full member.

“Okay,” Jimmy Hubbley said, when the holo had finished, “now who can tell me why we all see this here holo over and over again like this, pretty near every damn day?”

A young girl said fervently, “Because we share knowledge, us, equally. Not like the donkeys.”

“That’s fine, Ida.” Hubbley smiled at her.

A man said in a deep, upcountry voice, “We need, us, to know the facts so’s we can make good decisions about our country. The idea of an America for real human Americans. The will to get us there.”

“That’s fine,” Hubbley said. “Don’t it sound fine, soldiers?”

Someone said hesitantly, “But don’t that mean, it, that we should ask everybody in the whole country what they think? For a vote?”

There was a little stir in the room.

“If they had all the knowledge we do, Bobby, then it sure would mean that,” Hubbley said earnestly. Light shone in his pale eyes. “But they don’t know all the things we do. They ain’t had the privilege of fightin’ for freedom on the front lines. Specifically, they ain’t seen the holo of the captured lab. They don’t know what weapons we got on our side now. They might think this here revolution is hopeless, not knowing that. But we know better. So we got the obligation to decide for them, and to act in the best will of all our fellow Americans.”

Heads nodded. I could see how special they felt, Ida and Bobby and Peg, deciding so selflessly in the best interests of all Americans. Just as Francis Marion had done.

I heard Miranda’s voice in my head: They can’t possibly understand the biological and societal consequences of the project, Drew, any more than people of Kenzo Yagai’s time could foresee the social consequences of cheap ubiquitous energy. He had to go forward and develop it on the basis of his best informed projections. And so do we. They can’t really understand until it happens.

Because they were norms. Like Drew Arlen.

There was a long silence. People shifted from ham to ham or sat preternaturally still. Eyes darted at each other, then away. I could feel my own back straighten. All this tension was not over some holo they had seen “pretty near every damn day.”

Hubbley said, “I said they don’t know what we got, and I meant they don’t know what we got. But they’re sure the hail going to find out. Campbell, bring him in.”

Campbell entered from one of the many corridors, half dragging a naked, handcuffed Liver. The man was a sorry sight, barely five and a half feet to Campbell’s seven and looking even shorter as he futiley resisted being dragged. He was hunched over, his bare heels scraping the floor. He didn’t make a sound.

Hubbley said, “Is the robocam ready?”

Someone behind him said, “I just turned it on, Jimmy.”

“Good. Now, y’all know this film is the kind that cain’t be edited without self-destructin’. And you watchers out there, y’all know it too. Son, look at me when I’m talkin’.”

The captive raised his head. He made no effort to cover his genitals. I saw with a shock that his lack of height wasn’t due to bad Liver genes; he was a boy. Thirteen, maybe fourteen, and genemod. It was there in the bright green eyes, the sharp handsome line of his jaw. But he wasn’t donkey. He was a tech, those offspring of borderline families who can’t afford full genetic modification, including the expensive IQ boosters, but who aspire to be more than Livers. They buy their children the appearance mods only, and the kids grow up — early — to provide those services halfway between robots and donkey brains. My roadies were techs. At Huevos Verdes, you could argue, Kevin Baker’s grandson Jason, a Sleepless, was nonetheless a tech.

The boy looked terrified.

Hubbley said, not to the boy, “What did General Francis Marion’s young lieutenant call him?”

Peg answered fervently, “ ‘An ugly, cross, knock-kneed, hooknosed son of a bitch’!”

“Y’all see, son,” Hubbley explained kindly to the boy, “General Marion warn’t genemod. He was just the way his Lord made him. And he became the greatest hero this country ever had. Curtis, what did General Marion say was his policy when he was too outnumbered to attack the enemy directly?”

A man to my left said promptly, “ ‘Yet I pushed them so hard as in a great measure to break them up.’ ”

“Absolutely right. ‘Pushed them so hard as to break them up.’ And that’s just what we’re doin’, you watchers out there. Pushin’ y’all. This here man is a captured enemy, a worker in a genemod clinic. Parents take their innocent unborn babies to this place and turn them into something that ain’t human. Their own children. To some of us this is damn near inconceivable.”

I wanted to say that in vitro genetic modification happened before there was a ‘babe,’ that it was done to the fertilized egg in artificial biostasis. But my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. The tech boy stared straight ahead, seeing nothing, like a rabbit caught in bright lights.

“Now, y’all might think that this boy is too young to be held accountable for his actions. But he’s fifteen years old. Junie, how old was Francis Marion’s nephew Gabriel Marion when he was killed fightin’ the enemy at Mount Pleasant Plantation?”

“Fourteen,” a female voice answered. From my chair, I couldn’t see her face.

Hubbley’s voice grew confidential. He leaned forward slightly, “Y’all out there see, don’t y’all? This is war. We mean it. We got the Idea what kind of country we want to live in, and we got the Will to get there. No matter what the personal cost. Earl, tell all our watchers out there at the GSEA about Mrs. Rebecca Motte.”

A man dressed in purple jacks stood awkwardly, his arms dangling loose at his side. “On May 11—”

“May 10,” Hubbley said, with a brief frown. He didn’t want any inaccuracies in his uneditable tape. Earl, rattled, took a deep breath.

“On May 10 General Marion and his men attacked Mount Pleasant Plantation, them, ’cause the British had took it for a headquarters. They made the lady and her kids move, her, into a log cabin. Her name was Mrs. Rebecca Motte. The house was too well fortified for direct attack, it, and so the general decided, him, to shoot flaming arrows and set it on fire. But they didn’t have no good bow and arrows. Lighthorse Harry Lee, who was working with General Marion, he went, him, to tell Mrs. Motte they had to burn her house down. And she went into the cabin and come out with beautiful bow and arrows, real donkey stuff. And she said, her, about her house, ‘If it were a palace, it should go.’ ” Earl sat down.

Hubbley nodded. “Genuine sacrifice. A genuine patriot, Mrs.

Rebecca Motte. You hear that, son?”

The tech didn’t appear to hear anything. Was he drugged? Leisha had always warned me against believing history’s more colorful stories.

“We cain’t never stop resistin’ all you enemies of America. And you watchers are the worst, just like traitors and spies is always the worst in any revolution. They pretend to be on one side while plottin’ and workin’ for the other. GSEA agents are all traitors, pretendin’ to safeguard the purity of human beings while actually permittin’ all kinds of abominations. And then handin’ over this great country to those same abominations, the donkeys, just like we Livers didn’t realize y’all would let us starve if you could. And in fact y’all are. Joncey, what did General Marion say in his speech to the men before they attacked Doyle at Lynche’s Creek?”

Joncey’s voice, so much stronger and at ease than Earl’s, recited, “ ‘But, my friends, if we shall be ruined for bravely resisting our tyrants, what will be done to us if we tamely lie down and submit to them?’^›:

I turned around. The room was full of people, all the “revolutionaries” from other “companies.” Staring at the young tech, I hadn’t even heard them come in. Neither, I was convinced, had he.

Hubbley said, “This here boy is a traitor. Workin’ in agenemod clinic. He’s goin’ to die like a traitor, and y’all out there remember that he ain’t the only one today, or tomorrow, or the day after that. Abby?”

Abigail came out of the crowd. She carried a featureless gray canister, no bigger than her closed fist.

“Abby,” Hubbley said, “what did General Marion do with goods confiscated from the enemy?”

She turned to speak directly to the robocam. “Every metal saw the brigade could find, them, they hammered into a sword.”

“That’s exactly right. And this here—” he hoisted the canister high above his head ” — is a saw. It ain’t even been concocted in some illegal gene lab. This here comes straight from the biggest traitor of all: the so-called United States government.” He turned the canister around. I saw stamped on it PROPERTY OF U. S. ARMY. CLASSIFIED. DANGER.

I didn’t believe it. Hubbley had painted the words on. I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t even know as yet what the canister held. This ragtag bag of so-called revolutionaries had delusions, dreams, pathetic wishes … I didn’t believe it.

The lattice in my mind sighed, as if wind soughed through. “Okay, Abby,” Hubbley said, “do it.”

Abby, her back to me, did something I couldn’t see. The shimmer of a heavy-duty Y-energy shield appeared around the naked tech, a domed and floored hemisphere six feet in diameter. The canister was inside the shimmer.

The boy wasn’t drugged after all. Immediately he started screaming. The sound couldn’t carry through the shield, which was the kind nothing got through, not even air. The boy beat his fists against the inside and screamed, his open mouth a pink cave, his eyes round with terror. There was faint down on his upper lip, like a fledgling bird, and scarcely more on his groin.

Jimmy Hubbley looked disgusted. “He lives causin’ death and then cain’t even die like a man … do it, Abby.”

Whatever Abby did, I couldn’t see. The canister glowed briefly, then dissolved into a gray puddle.

“This here is your metal saw you made to cut us up with,” Hubbley said, “but we made it a sword. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Matthew 26:52. Y’all already know what this stuff does.

But for them that don’t—” he looked directly at me ” — I’ll repeat it. This here’s one of your own genemod abominations. It takes apart cell walls, cells of livin’ human beings. Like this.”

The boy had stopped beating against the shield. He was still screaming, but his mouth was changing shape. He was dissolving. It wasn’t the same as when someone had acid poured on him — I had seen that once, in the days before Leisha took me in. Acid burns away the flesh. The boy’s flesh wasn’t burning, it was breaking up, like ice in springtime. Bits of skin fell to the dome floor, exposing red flesh, and then bits of that fell. He went on screaming, screaming, screaming. I felt my stomach heave, and the shapes in my mind heaved, too, around the ever-closed lattice.

It took the boy almost three minutes to die.

Hubbley said, very softly, “General Marion ended his Lynche’s Creek speech this way: ‘As God is my judge this day, that I would die a thousand deaths, most gladly would I die them all, rather than see my dear country in such a state of degradation and wretchedness.’ As God is my judge, watchers.” His pale eyes in their bony, sunburned face looked directly outward, filled with light.

Then everyone moved. The robocam must have been turned off. The shapes in my mind were tarry, foul. I had done nothing to save the boy. I hadn’t even tried to speak up. I had not tried to get myself on the uneditable tape, to provide the watchers some clue about where this abomination was taking place … I had done nothing.

“That’s a wrap,” Jimmy Hubbley said, clearly pleased with himself. “That’s old-time movie talk, it means the filmin’ is done. Y’all are dismissed. And Mr. Aden, sir, I think Peg better take y’all to your room. Y’all look a little peaked. If it ain’t too great an impertinence in me to tell you so.”

It went on like that for weeks.

Physical training, holos about the state of society (where were they made?), political drill. It was the worst of being in school, all over again. I kept finding small lace oblongs from Abigail’s wedding gown, and Peg never pushed my chair anywhere in spitting distance of a terminal.

There were no more executions.

I badly wanted a drink. Hubbley said no. He allowed sunshine, because it didn’t dull reaction time. I wanted a drink, because it dulled reaction time.

Hubbley had allowed me a handheld dumb terminal, the kind kids use for schoolwork, and a standard encyclopedia library. I said to him once, because I couldn’t bite back the words, “Francis Marion discouraged the killing of prisoners. He even spirited a Tory, Jeff Butler, out of his own camp when it looked like Marion’s men might butcher him.”

Hubbley laughed with delight and rubbed the lump on his neck. “Damn, you been studyin’, son, hail if you haven’t! I’m damn proud of you!”

My teeth hurt from clenching them. “Hubbley—”

“But it don’t make no never mind, Mr. Arlen, sir. No, it really don’t. General Marion showed compassion to Tories because they were his own kind, his neighbors, living off the land same as he did. He didn’t show that same compassion to British soldiers, now, did he? Donkeys ain’t our kind. They ain’t our neighbors in their snooty enclaves. And they sure don’t live like we do, deprived of education and personal property and real power. No, donkeys are the British, Mr. Arlen. Not Jeff Butler — but Captain James Lewis of His Majesty’s Forces, who was killed by a fourteen-year-old patriot named Gwynn. That’s natural law, son. Protect your own.”

“Marion didn’t—”

“You say ‘General Marion,’ you!” Peg yelled. She glanced at Hubbley, like a dog hoping for a pat on the head. Hubbley smiled, showing his broken teeth.

These were the people who had loosened the duragem dissembler on the country, wrecking civilization. These.

And it was wrecked. The HT in commons received donkey newsgrids. There was scarcely agravrail running a steady schedule, especially outside the cities. Most technicians had been diverted to major population areas, where the votes were. And the danger of rioting. Security had been tripled at most enclaves. Few planes flew, which meant the country was being run mostly by teleconferencing, at a distance. Medunits malfunctioned regularly. They didn’t dispense wrong diagnoses; they just stopped diagnosing.

A viral plague was spreading in southern California. Nobody knew if it was a natural mutation, or bioengineered.

A Liver messiah in East Texas had proclaimed this the Time of the End. He was quoting Revelations on the four horsemen, with a twist: The horseman of war must be loosed by the Livers. Now. When the state security squad tried to arrest him, he and his followers blew away thirty-three people with illegal Mexican weapons. The governor, said the newsgrid with concern, was virtually certain to fail reelection.

In Kansas, a soysynth factory owned by the D’Angelo franchise was ripped apart by hoarders, who carried off the treated and untreated soy. They also wrecked three million dollars of robotic machinery.

The lieutenant-governor of South Dakota was somehow knifed to death in his sleep, within a protected enclave.

Livers in San Diego broke into the world-famous zoo there, killed a lion and two elehippos, and ate them, following a report that animals could not get the new plague.

The northeast had been hit by early winter. Small towns were isolated without gravrails, starving without food. People starved. Small towns like East Oleanta.

Where was Miranda? And what was she waiting for? Unless something had gone wrong in the last steps of the project. Unless the GSEA had discovered Eden, traced it back from the carefully disseminated rumors in the little isolated Liver towns.

Unless there was even more that she, and Huevos Verdes, hadn’t told me.

For the first time, I wondered if she wasn’t coming for me at all.

“The greatness of the Constitution is in its Will to the common people,” Jimmy Hubbley said, his pale eyes bright.

“The greatness of the Constitution is in its checks and balances,” Leisha had always said. Leisha. Who. Was. Dead.

The dark lattice in my mind was furled tight as an umbrella, impenetrable, a thin sharp line that cut me inside.

Where were the checks and balances on Huevos Verdes?

“Take me around the compound again,” I said to Peg.

She was slumped in a chair in commons, watching a scooter race someplace in California. A part of California without plague. “I don’t want, me, to take you again. You seen everything you’re gonna see.”

“Fine. I’ll go alone.” I wheeled the chair away from her. I didn’t dare exercise my upper body, not even after she’d locked me in at night. I couldn’t see the surveillance monitors but I knew they had to be there. I settled for furtively hoisting myself a few inches above the arms of my chair several times a day, lifting my useless legs, careful to choose different locations each day.

“Wait, you.” Peg sighed and heaved herself up. Roughly she shoved the chair forward.

A white corridor with the featureless doors locked.

Another white corridor with the featureless doors locked.

And another white corridor with the featureless doors locked.

The landing stage, guarded by Campbell, who was asleep but not very. Another white corridor with…

A piece of Abby’s wedding dress lay snagged on a rough spot in the wall.

“Damn!” Peg said, with more energy than I’d ever heard her say anything. “That bitch can’t keep nothing tidy, her! This stupid stuffs everywhere!” She snatched it up savagely and tore the small oblong into even smaller pieces. Her face was a mottled, angry red. There were tears in her eyes.

Why was there a rough place on a nanosmooth wall to snag a piece of dropped lace?

“Stupid bitch!” Peg said. Her voice caught.

“Why, Peg,” I said. “You’re jealous.”

“You shut up, you!”

Through the zoom portion of my corneas, the rough place on the wall had an added-on look. Not a mistake in the nanopro-gramming, but a bump built later, with another clocked nanoas-sembler, manually. Why?

To snag an oblong of lace?

Every oblong was different. The lace had been programmed that way. To make a unique pattern on an old-fashioned wedding gown.

To make a code.

Peg had recovered herself. Blank-faced once more, but with red eyes, she shoved the torn bit of lace in the pocket of her hideously unbecoming turquoise jacks. Her mouth twitched in pain. No sympathetic shapes slid through my mind. Peg didn’t know what pain was. Peg hadn’t seen Leisha die, mud caked on her thin yellow shirt, two small red dots on her forehead.

“Let’s go, you,” she said impatiently, as if I were the one who’d delayed her.

A code. The bits of lace were a code, in a place where every word, every action, every chance encounter was monitored. And everyone was encouraged to be “tidy” and pick up litter, because Brigadier General Francis Marion had been the tidiest son-of-a-bitch to ever attack the British army.

How many people were involved? Abigail and Joncey, most certainly. Who did they have with them against Hubbley? Did they have anyone on the outside?

I saw again the gray canister. PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY. CLASSIFIED. DANGER.

“See,” Peg snarled when we got back to commons, “you seen everything, you! Now can we stay put?”

“I get bored staying put,” I said. “Let’s do it again.” And I wheeled away my primitive chair, hearing her curse behind me.

Three days later, three days of ceaseless wheeling, the door to Jimmy Hubbley’s private quarters opened and he and Abigail came out. When Abigail saw Peg, she lowered her eyes, smiled, and pretended to finish zipping the pants to her jacks.

Peg was behind me, where I couldn’t see her face, but I could see her hands, large and rough on the handles of my chair. In the stiffening of her hands — controlled, habitual — I saw that she already knew about Abigail and Hubbley. Of course. Everyone would know; you couldn’t hide it in a place like this. Joncey must accept it. Maybe it advanced his and Abby’s plans for the counterrevolution. Maybe he thought Hubbley was just spreading his genes in the allowable natural way to strengthen the human genome. Maybe Hubbley even thought he was spreading Francis Marion’s, to every pretty soldier with a duty to Will and Idea.

“Evenin’, Peg,” Hubbley said. She choked out some reply. Abigail smiled demurely. She made a shape in my mind: flowers with tiny, deadly teeth in their sunny yellow centers.

“Evenin’, Major Hubbley,” Peg choked out. I didn’t even know he’d been promoted.

But now I had him.

At dinner the commons was full. Abigail sat with her friends, laughing, sewing on her white lace wedding dress. Her face was flushed and giddy. Above, in the world I now knew only from the HT, it turned November. Sixty-seven days underground, and Miranda had not come.

Joncey stood with a group watching a pair of gamblers play Devil. The twelve-sided dice, made of some shiny metal, flashed as they were thrown overhead. Everyone shrieked and laughed. Peg sat slumped, blank-faced, in her chair, her rough hands slack on her knees. I’d asked her for paper and pen, which made her first suspicious and then disgusted.

“What for? You got your library terminal, you.”

“I want to write something.”

“You can speak, you, to the terminal anything you want saved.”

“I want to write it. On paper.”

Her suspicion deepened. “You can write?”

“Yes.”

“I thought Major Hubbley said, him, that you wasn’t no donkey, you.”

“I’ve been to donkey schools. I can write. Can’t you read?”

“Course I can read, me!”

She probably could, at least a little. Liver children usually learned to read basic words, if not to write them. You needed to read names on packages at the warehouse, on street signs, on scooter bet sheets. I hoped to hell she could read.

An unseen monitor watched me, of course. I bent over the paper Peg brought me, coarse pale sheets probably meant to wrap something in. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d written anything. I was never very good at it. The pen felt heavy in my hand.

Drew, bold it like this.

What for, Leisha? / can speak, me, to the terminal anything I want it to know.

What if someday there aren’t any terminals?

In your nose hairs! There will always be terminals, them!

Slowly I printed A HISTERY OF THE SECUND AMERICAN REVALUTION.

Three hours later, after much crumpling up and tearing of paper and fidgeting in my chair, I had three crossed-out pages. They described James Francis Marion Hubbley’s philosophy, activities, and goals. Hubbley himself strode across the room, looming over me. I wondered what had taken him so long.

“Now, Mr. Arlen, sir, I’m glad as Sundays that y’all are interested enough in our revolution to write it down. But naturally I want to check what y’all are sayin,’ for accuracy. Y’all can understand that, son.”

“Does that mean y’all think anybody’s going to actually see it?” I said, handing over the papers. But baiting him had no effect. His face, always bony, looked gaunt and drawn. The skin around the eyes bunched in thick ridges. He hardly glanced at my “histery.”

“Hail, that’s fine, son. Only y’all need more on Colonel Marion. Inspiration is the heart of action, we always say down here.”

“I haven’t ever heard any of you say that.”

“Ummm,” he said, not really listening. He gazed distractedly around the room. Abigail was still laughing brilliantly with her friends, sewing on her everlasting wedding gown; she’d been at it for three solid hours. She was now around seven months pregnant, and the white lace cascaded over the bulge of her belly. Joncey had disappeared. So had Campbell and the doctor. Peg, awake beside me, gazed at Hubbley as if at the sun. Something was happening, something I didn’t understand.

The shapes in my mind were tight and hard, as closed as the dusky lattice. I was running out of time.

Bracing my hands on the arms of the wheelchair, I lifted my torso inches off the seat. Then I shifted my weight to the left hand, until the chair — not anywhere as stable as a powerchair — toppled. I fell on top of Peg, who instantly had her hands around my throat, squeezing. I fought with myself not to respond. Every fiber in my arms screamed to slug her, but I kept myself still, eyes wide, choking to death. The room wavered, dimmed. It was eternity before Jimmy Hubbley pulled her off me.

“There now, Peg, let go, the man ain’t nghtin’, he just fell. . . Peg! Let go!”

She did, instantly. Air rushed back into my lungs, burning and painful as acid. I gasped and wheezed.

Hubbley stood restraining Peg, although she topped him by ten inches and was undoubtedly stronger than he. He kept one arm around her waist. With the other he hauled my chair upside down. Spectators had gathered.

“C’mon, y’all, this ain’t nothin’. Mr. Aden’s chair tipped — see how this metal thing is bent underneath here? Calm down, Peg. Shoot, he ain’t even armed. You hurt, Mr. Arlen, sir?”

“N-n-no.”

“Wail, these things happen. Starrett, lift Mr. Arlen into this here chair. Where’s Bobby? There you are. Bobby, this is your department, straighten out this metal so his wheelchair don’t tip again on him. That’s downright dangerous. Now, y’all, it’s gettin’ close to lights out, so just move on to your quarters.”

I was lifted into a commons chair. Bobby took a power brace from his pocket and straightened the metal strut on the underside of the chair in fifteen seconds. Lacking a power brace, it had taken me half an hour and every ounce of strength I possessed to bend it that afternoon.

Hubbley took his arm away from Peg, who shivered. He left the room. I picked up my “histery” and let Peg wheel me to bed and lock me in. She was rough, upset at herself for overreacting, wondering if anyone else had seen how desperately she had protected Jimmy Hubbley. She really didn’t know that everyone else saw, and mocked, her hopeless passion. Poor Peg. Stupid Peg. I was counting on her stupidity.

In my room I humped up the blanket on the pallet, trying to make it look as if I were underneath. This wasn’t easy; the blanket was thin. I left the wheelchair conspicuously empty, to my right, visible as soon as the door was partially open. I positioned myself behind the door, propped against the wall, my useless legs tucked under me.

How long would it take Peg to undress? Did she go through her pockets? Of course she did. She was a professional. But a stupid professional. And sick with passion.

Stupid and sick enough? If not, I was as dead as Leisha.

I was sitting in almost the same position Leisha had when she died. But Leisha had never known what hit her. I would know. The shapes in my mind were taut and swift, silver sharks circling the closed green lattice.

The note in Peg’s pocket was written with the same pencil as my histery — it might have been the only pencil in the entire bunker — but not on thick pale wrapping paper. It was written on a piece of lace from Abigail’s wedding gown, an oblong discarded oh-so-carelessly along a corridor, an oblong with fewer lacy perforations than normal and so room to scrawl, in a hand as different from my histery as I could make it. Of course, a handwriting expert would know the writing was the same person’s. But Peg was not a handwriting expert. Peg could barely read. Peg was stupid. Peg was sick with passion, and jealousy, and protectiveness for her crazy leader.

The note said: She is traitor. Plan with me. Arlens room safest. I had written it amidst all the crumpling and tearing and fidgeting of my histery, and it had not been hard to slip it into Peg’s pocket. Not for someone who had once picked the pocket of the governor of New Mexico, Leisha’s guest, because the governor was an important donkey and I was a sullen crippled teenager who had just been kicked out of the third school Leisha’s donkey money had tried to keep me in.

Leisha…

The silver sharks moved faster through my mind. Could Peg puzzle out the word “traitor”? Maybe I should have stayed with words of one syllable. Maybe she was more professional than lovesick, or less stupid than jealous. Maybe—

The lock glowed. The door opened. The second she was inside I slammed her in the face with the wheelchair, swinging it upward with every bit of strength in my augmented arm muscles. She fell back against the door, closing it. She was only stunned a moment, but I only needed a moment. I swung the chair again, this time aiming the arm rest, which I had bent out at an angle, directly into her stomach. If she had been a man I could have gone for her balls. Patiently I’d removed the padding on the armrest and worked the metal back and forth, sweat streaming down my face, until it broke off jagged, and then I replaced the armrest. This had taken days, finding the odd moments when I could plausibly bend over the armrest to hide my work from both the monitors and Peg. It took only seconds for the sharp jagged metal to pierce Peg’s abdomen and impale her.

She screamed, clutched the metal, and fell to her knees, stopped by the bulk of the chair. But she was strong; in a moment she had the jagged armrest out of her flesh. Blood streamed from her belly over the twisted metal of the chair, but not as much as I’d hoped. She turned toward me, and I knew that in all my concerts, all my work with subconscious shapes in the mind, I’d never created anything as savage as Peg’s face looked that moment.

But she was on her knees now, on my level. She was strong, and trained, and bigger than I was, but I was augmented, as her philosophy — Hubbley’s philosophy — could never let her be. And I was trained, too. We grappled, and I got both my hands around her neck and squeezed the fingers Leisha had paid to have strengthened. In case I would ever, in my bodily weakness, need them.

Peg struck at me viciously. Pain exploded in my head, a hot geyser, spraying the dark lattice. I hung on. Pain drowned us both, drowned everything.

For the third time, the purple lattice disappeared. Then so did everything else.

Slowly, slowly, I became aware that objects in the room had shapes of their own, shapes outside my head. They were solid, and sharp-edged, and real. My body had shapes: legs crumpled under me, my head lying on top of the metal wheelchair, my balls screaming with hurt. My hands had shape. They clenched, locked into shape, around Peg’s neck. Her face was purple, the tongue poking out swollen between her lips. She was dead.

It hurt to unclench my hands.

I looked at her. I had never killed anybody before. I looked at every inch of her. The note scrawled on lace was locked in her rigid fingers.

As quickly as I could I righted the wheelchair, stuck the padding back on the jagged armrest, and hauled my hurting body into it. Peg had a gun in her jacks; I took that. I didn’t know how sophisticated the room’s surveillance program was. Peg was presumably allowed to enter at will. Could the surveillance program interpret what it recorded, making judgment calls about sounding an alarm? Or did someone have to be actively watching? Was someone actively watching?

Francis Marion, Hubbley had told me, was meticulous about pickets and sentries.

I opened the door and wheeled myself into the corridor. The wheels left a thin line of blood on the perfect nanobuilt floor. There was nothing I could do about it.

I had watched, through all the wheeled trips around the bunker, who went in and out of which doors. I had listened, trying to figure out who were the most trusted lieutenants, who seemed smart enough for computer work. I had guessed which doors might have terminals behind them.

Nobody had come for me. It had been five minutes since I left my room. Eight. Ten. No alarms had sounded. Something was wrong.

I came to a door I hoped held a terminal; it was of course locked. I spoke the override tricks Jonathan and Miranda had taught me, the tricks I didn’t understand, and the lock glowed. I opened the door.

It was a storage room, full of more small metal canisters, stacked to the ceiling. None of the canisters were labeled. There were no terminals.

Footsteps ran down the hall. Quickly I closed the door from the inside. The footsteps ceased; the room was sound shielded. I opened the door again a few inches. Now people were shouting farther down the corridor.

“Goddamn it, where is he, him? Goddamn it to hell!” Campbell, whom I had never heard even speak. They were looking for me. But the surveillance program should show clearly where I was…

Another voice, a woman’s, low and deadly, said, “Try Abby’s room.”

“Abby! Fuck, she’s in on it! Her and Joncey! They already got the terminal room—”

The voices disappeared. I closed the door. The shapes in my mind suddenly ballooned, crowding out thought. I pushed them down. This was it, then. It had started. They weren’t looking for me, they were looking for Hubbley. The revolution against the revolution had started.

I sat thinking as fast as I could. Leisha. If Leisha were here—

Leisha was no plotter. No killer. She’d believed in trusting the eventual outcome of any clash between good and evil, in trusting the basic similarities among human beings, in trusting their ability to compromise and live together. Humans might need checks and balances, but they didn’t need imposed force, nor defensive isolation, nor crushing retribution. Leisha, unlike Miranda, believed in the rule of law. That’s why she was dead.

I opened the door the rest of the way and wheeled my chair, bent as it was, into the corridor. The padding fell off the armrest. I blocked the corridor, gun drawn, and waited for someone to round the corner. Eventually someone did. It was Joncey. I shot him in the groin.

He screamed and fell against the wall. There was a lot more blood than there had been with Peg. I raced my chair up to him and pulled him across my lap, holding his wrists with one of my augmented hands and the gun with the other. Another man rounded the corner, Abigail waddling after him. Abigail made a moaning sound, more like wind than people.

“Oohhhhhhhh…”

“Don’t come close or I’ll kill him. He’ll live, Abby, with medical attention, if I let him have it soon. But if you don’t do what I ask, I’ll kill him. Even if you draw a gun and shoot me, I’ll kill him first.”

The other man said, “Shoot the crippled bastard, you!”

“No,” Abby said. She’d regained control of herself immediately; her eyes darted like trapped rabbits, but she was in control. She was a better natural leader than most, maybe better than Hubbley. But I held Joncey in my arms, and she wasn’t leader enough for that sacrifice.

“What do you want, Alien?” She licked her lips, watching the blood pour out of Joncey’s groin. He’d fainted, and I shifted him to free my other hand.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you? The ones of you left alive. Did you kill Hubbley?”

She nodded. Her eyes never moved from Joncey. He was still on my lap. The almost forgotten shapes of childhood prayer whipped through my mind: Please don’t let him die yet. I saw the same shapes in Abigail’s eyes.

“Leave me here,” I said. “Just that. Here, and alive. Somebody will come eventually.”

“He’ll call, him, for help,” the other man said.

“Shut up,” Abby said. “You know nobody can’t use them terminals but Hubbley and Carlos and O’Dealian, and they’re all dead, them.”

“But, Abby—”

“Shut up, you!” She was thinking hard. I couldn’t feel Joncey’s heart.

A woman raced into the corridor. “Abby, what’s the matter, you? The submarine’s off the coast—” She stopped dead.

The submarine. All of a sudden I saw how the underground revolution had evaded the GSEA for so long. A sub meant military help. There were agencies inside the government involved, or at least people within agencies. PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT. CLASSIFIED. DANGER.

For a long moment I thought I was dead.

“All right!” Abby said. “Give him to me and lock yourself in that there storage room, you!”

“Don’t come close,” I said. I backed into the room with the canisters, still carrying Joncey. At the last minute I dumped him onto the floor and slammed the door. It could be locked from the inside, but I had no doubt she could override it. I held onto the urgency in the second woman’s voice, the panic: Abby, the submarine’s off the coast! Let the sub be ready to go. Let Abby want Joncey alive, safely tucked inside a medunit, more than she wanted me dead. Let the canisters all around me not contain deadly viruses, and let them not be able to be released by remote…

I sat, heart pounding. The shapes in my mind were red and black and spiky, painful as cactuses.

Nothing happened.

Minutes dragged by.

Finally a small section of the wall beside me brightened. It was a holoscreen, and I hadn’t even realized it. A dumb terminal. Abby’s face filled it. It was smeared with blood, twisted with hate.

“Listen, Arlen, you. You’re going to die there, underground. I done sealed it off. And the terminals are frozen, them, all of them. In another hour the life support will cut out automatically. I could kill you now, me, but I want you to think about it first. . . You hear me? You’re dead, you — dead dead DEAD.” With each word her voice rose, until it was a shriek. She whipped her head from side to side, her hair seething and foaming, caked with blood. I knew Joncey was dead.

Someone pulled her away from the screen, and it went blank.

I edged open the door of the storage room. My wheelchair was so bent I could hardly wheel it along the corridors. My vision kept fading in and out, until I wasn’t sure what shapes were in front of me and what were in my head, except for the dark lattice. That was in my head. It stirred, and for the first time began to open, and every inch of its opening pushed against my mind like pain.

I found Jimmy Hubbley. They had killed him clean, as near as I could tell. A bullet through the head. Francis Marion, I remembered, had died quietly in bed, of an infection.

Campbell must have fought. His huge body blocked a corridor, bloody and torn, as if by repeated blows. He lay sprawled across the captured doctor. The doctor’s face looked both terrified and indignant; this was not supposed to be his war. His blood slid down the nanosmooth walls, which had been designed to shed stains.

Two bodies lay on the terminal room floor, when I had finally opened enough doors to find it. A woman named Junie, and a man I’d never heard called anything but “Alligator.” They, too, had died clean, of bullets through the forehead. Abigail’s bid for power hadn’t been sadistic. She just wanted to control things. To be in charge. To know what was best for 175 million Americans, give or take a few million donkeys.

I sat in front of the main terminal and said, “Terminal on.” It answered, “YES, SIR!”

Francis Marion had believed in military discipline.

It took me fifteen minutes to try everything Jonathan Mar-kowitz had taught me. I spoke each step, or coded it in manually, not understanding what any of them meant. Even if Jonathan had explained, I wouldn’t have understood. And he had not explained. The shapes in my mind darted quickly, palpitating, sharp as talons.

“READY FOR OUTSIDE TRANSMISSION, SIR!”

I didn’t move.

If Abigail had been telling the truth, I had thirty-seven minutes of life support left in the underground bunker.

Huevos Verdes, off the Mexican coast, could be here in fifteen. But would they be? Miranda had not come for me before now.

“SIR? READY FOR OUTSIDE TRANSMISSION, SIR!”

The dark lattice in my mind was, finally, opening.

It started to unfurl like an umbrella, or a rosebud. They have rosebuds now, genemod, that will unfurl completely in five minutes, with the right stimuli, for use in various ceremonies. They’re pretty to watch. The opaque diamond-shaped panes on the lattice lightened and widened, both at the same time. The lattice itself expanded, larger and larger, until it had opened completely.

Inside was a ten-year-old boy, dirty and confident, his eyes bright.

I hadn’t seen him, me, in decades. Not his sureness about what he wanted, his straight-line going after it. That boy had been his own man. He made his own decisions, undaunted by what the rest of the world said he should do. I hadn’t seen him since the day he arrived at Leisha Camden’s compound in New Mexico, and met his first Sleepless, and gave his mind to their superior ones. Not since I’d become the Lucid Dreamer. Not since I’d met Miranda.

And here he was again, that solitary grinning boy, released from the stone lattice that had encased him. A bright glowing shape in my mind.

“SIR? DO YOU WISH TO CANCEL TRANSMISSION, SIR?” There were thirty-one minutes left.

“No,” I said, and spoke the emergency override code, the one I’d been urged to memorize carefully and not forget, as Drew Arlen common Liver might easily forget, in case of emergency. She herself answered. “Drew? Where are you?” I gave her the exact longitude and lattitude, obtained from the terminal, and told her how to get the rescue force through the mucky pool. My voice was completely steady. “It’s an illegal un-derground lab. Part of the revolution that already released the duragem dissemblers. But you know all about that, don’t you?” Her eyes didn’t nicker. “Yes. I’m sorry we couldn’t tell you.”

“I understand.” And I did. I hadn’t understood before, but I did now. Since Jimmy Hubbley. Since Abigail. Since Jontcey. I said, “There’s a lot I have to tell you”

She said, “We’ll be there in twenty minutes. There are people already close by … just wait twenty minutes, Drew.”

I nodded, watching her face on the screen. She didn’t smile at me; this was too important. I liked that. The shapes in my mind left no room for smiles. The crying boy, the people — all the people in the world — inside the dark lattice. Inside my mind, inside my unwilling responsibility.

“Just twenty minutes,” Carmela Clemente-Rice said in her warm voice. “Meanwhile, tell us how the—” and then the screen went dead as Huevos Verdes picked up the signal, overrode it, and cut off my communication with the GSEA.

Fourteen

The morning the President declared martial law, him, was the same morning I found the dead genemod rabbit by the river. It was a week after we walked to Coganville and the government people came, them, to East Oleanta to blow up Eden. Only when Annie finally let me out of bed, I listened hard, me, to what everybody in the cafe said about the place that got blown up. Some people even hiked out, them, to look at it. And soon as they described it, I knew, me, that the government didn’t blow up the place my big-headed girl went underground. Not my Eden.

And I was the only person in the world, me, that knew that.

Still, I wanted, me, to go see for myself. I had to go.

“Where you going, Billy?” Annie said, breathing hard. She’d just lugged in a bucket of river water for washing. The government techs fixed everything, them, but two days later stuff started to break again. That’s when a lot of people left East Oleanta on the gravrail, before it could break. The women’s bath wasn’t working. Lizzie was right behind Annie, her, lugging another bucket. It broke my heart, nearly, with my own uselessness. The medunit said, it, that I wasn’t supposed to lift nothing.

“Down to the cafe,” I lied.

Annie pressed her lips together. “You don’t want, you, to go down to the cafe again. Where you really going, Billy? I don’t want you, me, taking no more walks in them woods. It’s too dangerous. You might fall again.”

“I’m going to the cafe,” I said, and that was two lies.

“Billy,” Annie said, and I knew from her bottom lip that she was going to say it again, “We could leave, us. Now. Before more duragem gets eat away on that train.”

“I ain’t leaving East Oleanta, me,” I said. It scared me to tell her no. Each time it scared me, each and every single time. What if Annie left anyway, her, without me? My life would end. What if Annie took Lizzie and just left?

But I had to stay, me. I had to. I was the only person who knew, me, that the government didn’t blow up Eden. Dr. Turner was the one that called the government to come to East Oleanta. Lizzie told me, her. Annie didn’t know. I had to stay and make sure Dr. Turner didn’t find that Eden still existed and call the government to come back and finish the job. I didn’t know, me, how I could stop Dr. Turner unless I killed her, and I didn’t think I could do that. Maybe I could. But I couldn’t go off, neither, and leave the dark-haired big-headed girl who’d deliberately let me know where Eden was in case I ever really needed it again. I owed that girl, me.

Only it wasn’t only that.

So I said to Annie, “Get off my back, woman. I’m going, me, down to the cafe, and I’m going alone!”

Then I held my breath, me, the sick fear churning inside me.

But Annie only sighed, her, and took off her parka and picked up a washrag. That was the wonderful thing about Annie. She knew there was things a person was just going to do, them, and she didn’t waste her breath arguing about it, unless of course the person was Lizzie. Actually, the next person I expected trouble from, me, was Lizzie. But Lizzie sat on the sofa with her library terminal, doing her everlasting studying, her, and glancing up at the door for Dr. Turner, ready to ask the doctor questions nineteen to the dozen.

That was another reason for taking my walk now. Dr. Turner wasn’t around, her. For a change.

I zipped my parka, me, and picked up the walking stick Lizzie brought me. It’s a good stick. I’d use it even if it wasn’t, because Lizzie brought it to me, but it is good. The right height and thickness. Lizzie’s got an eye, her. When she takes it off her library terminal and Dr. Turner.

Annie said, more gentle, “You be careful, Billy Washington. We don’t want, us, anything to happen to you,” just like she knew I wasn’t going to the cafe after all, just like we didn’t have no bitter fights over leaving East Oleanta. And she put her arms around me. For a minute I held Annie Francy, me, against my chest, her head resting just under my chin, and closed my eyes.

“You,” I said, which was stupid enough, but then it was all right because Annie smiled. I could feel her smiling, her, against my neck. So I said it again. “You.”

“You yourself,” she said, pulling away. Her chocolate brown eyes had a tender look, them. I walked out that door like I was walking on sky. And I didn’t feel too weak, me, neither. My legs worked better than I expected. I got all the way, me, down to the river without my heart racing. Only my mind, it.

Why wouldn’t I leave East Oleanta? Annie really wanted, her, to go someplace better for Lizzie. She was only staying for me.

And why was I staying, me? Because a big-headed Sleepless girl, who was probably Miranda Sharifi herself, might need me. Me, Billy Washington, who couldn’t even help carry water or trap rabbits or move Y-energy heat cones to places where they was needed. It was funny when you thought about it. Miranda Sharifi, from Huevos Verdes and Eden, needing Billy Washington.

Only it wasn’t funny.

I poked the end of my stick, me, in the soft mud and leaned on it to ease my old fool’s body down the riverbank. I was kidding myself. The truth was, it was me that needed Eden. In my head anyway. And I didn’t really know why.

I picked my way, me, over the rocks along the river. We’d got a thaw the last few days, and the river mud was thick as soup dotted with patches of snow. The sun was shining, it, and the water ran high, green and cold, rushing along like agravrail. I saw something dark, me, lying in some snow, and I stumped along for a closer look.

It was a rabbit. With long, clawed paws. It laid on its side, him, on the white snow, its guts torn out. Fox prints dotted the mud, them. The rabbit was reddish brown.

Somebody climbed down the bank behind me. I poked my stick, me, into the rabbit and turned it over. The rabbit was brown.

“Ugh,” Dr. Turner said. “What killed it?”

“Fox.”

“Well, why are you looking so funereal about it? Surely this must happen all the time out here in God’s country. Were you thinking we could eat it?”

“No. Not this rabbit, him.”

“Well, if you can get your mind off the local wildlife, I have news. The President’s declared martial law.”

She sounded upset, her. I didn’t say nothing.

“Congress has backed him up. Good old Article 1 Section 8. That big fuck-up on Wall Street yesterday, and enough state budgets have run out of money so they can’t afford to pay jurors, which means that even where there aren’t food riots the judiciary has stopped functioning in just enough states for ol’ Commander-in-Chief Bonny Profile to declare civil authority inadequate to — you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, do you, Billy? Do you know what martial law is?”

“No, Dr. Turner.”

“The President has put the army in control. To keep peace where there’s rioting. No matter what they have to do to keep it.”

“Yes, Dr. Turner.”

She looked at me, her, sideways. I ain’t never been any good, me, at hiding things. “What is it, Billy? What’s wrong with that rabbit?”

I said, slower than I meant, “It’s brown.”

“So? We’ve seen lots of brown rabbits. Lizzie told me she even had a brown rabbit for a pet, last summer.”

“It ain’t summer.”

She went on, her, looking at me, and I saw she really didn’t understand. Sometimes donkeys don’t know the most simple things.

“This here rabbit’s a snowshoe rabbit. It should of changed its coat, him, by now. Reddish brown in the summer, white in the winter, and here it is the start of November. It should have changed, him.”

“Always, Billy?”

“Always.”

“Genemod.” Dr. Turner kneeled in the snow, her, and studied the rabbit hard. There wasn’t nothing to see, except that reddish brown coat. Almost the same color as the little hairs escaping from her hat onto the back of her neck where she kneeled down, her, in front of me. I could of killed her right then, me, bashed her neck with my stick, if I was the killing kind. And if I’d of thought, me, that it would of done anybody any good.

“Billy — are you. positive the coat shouldn’t still be brown?”

I didn’t even answer, me.

She sat back on her feet, thinking hard. Then she looked up at me, her, with the damnedest look I ever saw on anybody’s face. I didn’t have no idea, me, what it meant, except it reminded me of Jack Sawicki when he played chess. When he was alive, him, to play chess. People used to snicker, them, at Jack for liking chess. It wasn’t no game for a Liver.

Then Dr. Turner smiled, her. She said, “ ‘Oh, my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!’ ” which didn’t even make no sense. “Billy, you have to take me to Eden.”

I leaned on my stick. The end of it was mucky from poking at the rabbit. “There ain’t no Eden, Dr. Turner. The government blew it up, them.”

“ ‘There is no rabbit,’ ” she said, smiling, her, in that same voice that didn’t make no sense. “Down the rabbit hole, Billy. Off with their heads. You and I both know they didn’t blow it up. They missed.”

I looked, me, again at the dead rabbit. The fox had done a job on it. “What makes you say, you, that they missed?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they did miss, and that there are things I need to know. And I’ve decided that the only way left to discover them is to go to Eden and ask. Nicely direct, don’t you think? Will you take me there?”

I picked, me, a place in the river, and stared at it. Then I stared at it some more. I wasn’t going, me, to get into no argument with no donkey. There ain’t never any way to win those arguments. But I wasn’t going to take her to Eden, neither. She had called the government once, her, to blow up Eden, and she could do it again. She wasn’t going to learn nothing from me.

After a few minutes Dr. Turner stood up, her, wiping mud off the knees of her jacks. Her voice was serious again. “All right, Billy. Not yet. But you will, I know, when something happens. And something will. The SuperSleepless aren’t releasing genemod rabbits that everyone can see are genemod rabbits for no reason at all. This is a message. Pretty soon the meaning will come clear, and then we’ll discuss this again.”

“Ain’t nothing to discuss,” I said, me, and I meant it. Not with her. No matter how many genemod rabbits turned up.

The sun was lower now, it, and the air was getting cold. And my walk was pretty much ruined anyway. I climbed the riverbank, me, taking my time. Dr. Turner knew better than to try and help me.

Lizzie was dancing around the apartment, clean from a bath, waving her study terminal. “Godel’s proof!” she sang, her, like it was a song. “Godel’s proof, Billy!”

She was as bad as Dr. Turner with her looking glasses and rabbit holes. Still, I was glad to see Lizzie so happy.

“Look, Vicki, look what happens if you take this formula and just kind of sneak up on these numbers…”

“Let me get my coat off, Mr. Godel,” Dr. Turner said, which didn’t make no more sense than her talk at the river. But she was smiling, her, at Lizzie.

Lizzie couldn’t hardly stay still, her. Whatever she had on that library terminal must of been pretty exciting. She grabbed my stick, her, and started dancing around with it like it was a partner. Then she stuck it under her and rode it like a hobbyhorse. Then she raised it up over her head like a flag. I knew from all this, me, that Annie wasn’t home.

“All right, let’s see Godel’s proof,” Dr. Turner said. “Did you access Sven Bjorklind’s variations?”

“Course I did, me,” Lizzie said, with scorn. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was like a light, her. A sun. My Lizzie.

By the next morning she was so sick she couldn’t move.

It didn’t look like no sickness I ever saw, certainly not like the fever she’d had last August. Lizzie was shitting bad, her, with blood in it. Annie kept emptying the bucket and cleaning her up, but the apartment still smelled awful. And Lizzie couldn’t move her legs or head without it hurting her. Annie and me were up with her, us, all night. By dawn she wasn’t even crying no more, just laying there, her eyes open but not seeing nothing. I was scared, me. She just laid there.

I said to Annie, “I’m going, me, to get Dr. Turner. She’s down at the cafe, her, watching the news about martial—”

“I know, me, where she is!” Annie snapped, because she was so worried, her, about Lizzie, and so exhausted. “She’s been there all night, ain’t she? But Lizzie don’t need no donkey doctor, her. This time our medunit’s working.”

I didn’t say, me, that donkeys invented the medunit. I was too scared myself. Lizzie groaned and shit in the bed.

“You go ahead, you, and wake up Paulie. I’ll bring her as soon as she’s cleaned up.”

Paulie Cenverno’s been mayor, him, since Jack Sawicki was killed. Paulie keeps the code to the clinic. I grabbed my stick, me, and set off as fast as I could go to Paulie’s apartment building.

Outside was cold and gray but sweet-smelling, which somehow made me feel even scareder for Lizzie. Halfway down the street I met Dr. Turner. She looked, her, so tired and upset that her genemod face was almost plain.

“Billy? What is it?” She grabbed my arm hard, her. “Your face… Lizzie? Is it Lizzie?”

“She’s sick really bad, her. It got worse so fast. . . she’s going to die!” It just came out. I thought I’d faint, me. Lizzie. . .

“Get Paulie to unlock the clinic. I’ll help Annie.” She was gone, her, running like I could of, once.

Paulie got up right away, him. By the time we got to the clinic Annie and Dr. Turner were there. Dr. Turner carried Lizzie. Lizzie was crying, her. Her poor legs dangled like broke branches.

It felt like hot coals burned in my stomach, I was so scared. No normal kid sickness should get that bad that fast.

The clinic ain’t nothing but a locked foamcast shed, no windows, big enough to hold the medunit and four or five other people who might be standing around. Paulie said, “Put her there, her… right there…” Paulie didn’t really know nothing, him. He was as scared as we were.

Dr. Turner laid Lizzie on the medunit couch, strapped her down, and slid the couch inside the unit. We could see Lizzie, us, through the plasticlear windows. The needles came out and went into Lizzie, but she didn’t cry out, her. It was like she didn’t feel nothing that was happening.

A few minutes went by. Lizzie didn’t move, her. She looked almost asleep. Maybe the medunit gave her something, it, to sleep. Finally the medunit said, “This unit is inadequate to make a diagnosis. Viral configuration is not on file. Administering wide-spectrum anti-virals and secondary antibiotics…” There was more. Nobody never listens to a medunit, them. You just let it fix you.

But Dr. Turner jumped like she was shot. She shoved Paulie aside, her, and talked at the medunit.

“Additional information! What class is the viral configuration?”

“You have exceeded this unit’s capabilities. This unit responds only manually to specific medical requests.”

“Cheap politicians.” Dr. Turner spoke again, her, to the medunit and a panel opened on the side, where I never noticed no panel. Inside was a screen and keyboard. Dr. Turner typed hard, her. She studied the screen.

“What is it?” Annie said. “What’s Lizzie got, her?” Annie’s voice was tiny and thin. It didn’t sound nothing like Annie.

This time Dr. Turner didn’t have the chess-playing look. This time she looked, her, like my stomach felt. The bones in her cheeks stood out like somebody drew them on her skin.

“Billy… did Lizzie touch the end of your walking stick? The end you poked the brown rabbit with?”

I saw Lizzie, me, dancing around the apartment with my stick, riding it, waving it by one end, singing about them Godel’s proofs. Something inside my belly dropped, it, and I thought I was going to throw up.

“Yes. She was playing, her…”

Dr. Turner slumped, her, against the wall. Her voice was thick. “Not Eden. Eden didn’t engineer that rabbit. The other ones did, the illegal lab that released the dissembler … oh my sweet Jesus in hell. . .”

“Don’t blaspheme, you,” Annie said, her, but there wasn’t no fire in it. Her eyes were big as Lizzie’s. Lizzie, who I saw was going to die.

Paulie said, “Eden? What about Eden, it?” His face looked tight and small.

Dr. Turner looked at me, her. Her eyes, all genemod violet and as unnatural as a brown snowshoe rabbit in a hard November, didn’t see me. I could tell, me. She saw something else, her, and her words didn’t make no sense. “A pink poodle. A pink poodle with four ears and hyperlarge eyes…”

“What?” Paulie Cenverno said, bewildered. “What about a poodle?”

“A pink poodle. Sentient. Disposable.”

“Easy there, easy,” I said, because she was out of her head, maybe, and I just realized, me, that I was going to need her. Need her sensible. To carry Lizzie. No, Annie could do it. But Annie wasn’t in no shape to carry Lizzie. Paulie, then. But Paulie was already backing out of the clinic, him. There was something strange going on here, and he didn’t like it, and when Paulie don’t like something, him, he gets away from it. He ain’t no Mayor Jack Sawicki.

Besides, I couldn’t think, me, of no way to keep Dr. Turner from following us, short of killing her, and I didn’t have no way to do that. Even if I could of made myself do it. And if Dr. Turner was carrying Lizzie, then Dr. Turner couldn’t fire no gun, her, when the door to Eden opened.

Dr. Turner’s eyes cleared. She saw me again, her. And she nodded.

I looked again through the medunit window. Lizzie was getting some kind of medicine patch, her, even though the unit said it wasn’t the right medicine. Probably the best it could do, it. It was only a fancy ’bot.

The big-headed girl who had saved Doug Kane’s life and killed the rabid raccoon wasn’t no ’bot.

I was going to do what I swore, me, I’d never do. I was going to take Dr. Turner with me to Eden.

The sun was just coming up when we left town. I walked first, me, leaning on a different stick that Dr. Turner tore off a maple tree. She carried Lizzie, her, wrapped in blankets. Lizzie was still asleep from whatever the medunit gave her. Her skin looked like wax. Annie came last, her, stumbling through the woods, where Annie didn’t never go. I think she was crying, her. I couldn’t look, because it might be that hopeless kind of crying women do at the very end, and I couldn’t of stood it. It wasn’t the very end yet. We were going, us, to Eden.

The sky turned all the colors of a pine-knot fire.

I tried to lead them, me, where the snow wasn’t too deep. A few times I guessed wrong and fell into a hollow packed with snow, sinking up to my knees. But it was okay because only me fell. I stayed enough ahead, me, for that. Still, each time I fell, me, I could feel my heart go a little faster, and my bones ache a little more.

The thaw we’d been having, it helped. A lot of snow had melted, especially in the sunny places. Without that thaw I don’t know, me, if we could of made it through the mountains.

Lizzie moaned, her, but she didn’t wake up.

“Just a … minute, Billy,” Dr. Turner said, after about an hour. She stopped in a sunny patch, her, and sank to her knees, Lizzie laid across her lap. I was surprised, me, that she’d kept going that long — Lizzie ain’t as light as she was even a year ago. Dr. Turner must be stronger than she looked, her. Genemod.

“We don’t have any extra minutes, us!” Annie cried, but Dr. Turner didn’t pay her no attention, not even to scowl at her. Maybe Dr. Turner was just too tired, her, to scowl. She’d been up all night, watching the newsgrids about the President’s martial law. But I think she knew, her, how scared to death Annie was.

“How… much farther?”

“Another hour,” I said, even though it was more. We weren’t making good time, us. “Can you make it?”

“Of. . . course.” Dr. Turner stood up, her, struggling with Lizzie, who hung like a sack. For just a minute I thought, me, that I saw Annie put her hand on Dr. Turner’s arm, real gentle. But maybe Annie was just steadying herself.

The woods never seemed so big to me.

After a while the ache just started to live in my bones, like some little animal. It chewed away, it, at my legs and knees and the shoulder of the arm holding my stick. And then it started to chew away near my heart.

I couldn’t stop, me. Lizzie was dying.

Now we climbed higher, us, up the wooded side of the mountain. The brush and trees got thicker, them. There wasn’t no sunny patches. I wasn’t taking them, me, the way Doug Kane and I had gone last fall — too much snow. This way was harder, and longer, but we’d get there.

It took us nearly until noon. Dr. Turner made us stop and eat from the food Annie carried. It tasted like mud. Dr. Turner watched, her, to make sure I ate all my share. Lizzie couldn’t take nothing, her. She still didn’t move, not even her eyes. But she was still breathing. I melted a little clean snow, me, with Dr. Turner’s Y-energy lamp and poured it over Lizzie’s lips. They were blue.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven, give us this day our daily bread…” Dr. Turner stared at Annie in disbelief. I thought she was going to say something sharp about who gave Livers their daily bread, like I’d heard others donkeys say. Donkeys ain’t religious, them. But she didn’t.

“How much farther, Billy?”

“Soon now.”

“You’ve been saying ‘soon now’ for two hours!”

“Soon. Now.”

We started off again, us.

When we headed back down the trail to the little creek, I thought, me, for a panicky minute that I was in the wrong place. It didn’t look the same. The trail was a slick of mud, it, and the creek ran fast but was clogged with ice chunks and fallen branches, which made it wider than I remembered. We slipped and slided, us, down the steep trail. Dr. Turner held Lizzie over her shoulder with one hand, the other clutching tree after tree to keep from falling. We waded careful, us, across the creek. There was a flat, mostly clear ledge of ground, with just one birch, and one oak with last year’s leaves rattling in the wind. They were my landmarks, them. We were there, and there wasn’t nothing there.

Nothing to see. Nothing different. Creek, mud, rock shelf, the side of the mountain. Nothing.

“Billy?” Annie said, so soft I hardly heard her, me. “Billy?”

“What do we do now?” Dr. Turner said. She sank to the ground, her, trailing Lizzie in the mud, too tired to even notice.

I looked around. Creek, mud, rock shelf, the side of the mountain. Nothing.

Why would the SuperSleepless let in two muddy Livers, a turncoat donkey, and a dying child? Why should they, them?

That was the minute I knew, me, what Annie meant when she talked about Hell.

“Billy?”

I sank down on a rock, me. My legs wouldn’t hold me up no more. The door had been right here. Creek, mud, rock shelf, the side of the mountain. Nothing.

Dr. Turner shoved Lizzie onto her mother. Then she jumped up, her, and started screaming like some crazy thing, like somebody wild person who ain’t just carried a heavy child for hours and hours through the snow.

“Miranda Sharifi! Do you hear me? There’s a dying child here, a victim of an illegal genemod virus transmittable by wildlife! Some illegal lab engineered it, some demented bastards who can wipe out entire communities in days, and probably want to! Do you hear me? It’s genemod, and it’s lethal! You people are responsible for this, you’re supposed to be the big experts on genemod tailoring, not us! You’re responsible, you Sleepless bastards, whether you made it or not, because you’re the only ones who can cure it! You’re the big brains we all kowtow to, you’re the ones we’re supposed to look up to — Miranda Sharifi! We need that Cell Cleaner that was trampled on in Washington! We need it now! You baited us with that, you bitch — you damn well owe it to us!”

I couldn’t believe it, me. She sounded like Celie Kane screaming about donkeys. I whispered, “You can’t boss around a SuperSleepless, you!”

She didn’t pay me no attention, her. I might of not even been there. “Miranda Sharifi! Do you hear me, you bitch? In the name of a common humanity… what the hell am I doing?”

She stood looking dazed, her, like she wasn’t never going to move again. Then Dr. Turner started to cry.

Dr. Turner. Started to cry.

I didn’t know, me, what to do. It’s one thing when Annie cries, Annie’s a normal woman. But a donkey crying, sobbing and carrying on like she was the bottom of the apple bin, her, instead of the top … I didn’t know what to do. And even I had known, I couldn’t do it. The aching animal was gnawing, it, at my chest too bad, and not even for Lizzie could I of got my body up off the ground.

“Please…” Dr. Turner whispered.

And the door in the mountain opened. No, it didn’t open, it — that’s not how it works. There was a kind of hard shimmer, some kind of shield, and then the earth sort of vanished, mud and dead oak leaves and moss-covered rocks and everything, and there was a solid plasticlear square at our feet, only it wasn’t really plasticlear, about three feet by three feet. And then that vanished and there was stairs.

Dr. Turner went down first, her, and reached up for Lizzie. Annie handed her down. Then Annie eased herself down the stairs. I went last, me, because even though my chest hurt so bad my eyesight squiggled, I wanted to see what happened after we were all under the square. It might be the last thing I ever saw, me, and I wanted to see it.

What happened was the shimmer came again, it, and the plasticlear-that-wasn’t-plasticlear came back over my head. I reached up, me, and touched it. It was hard as diamonds. It tingled. On the other side dirt and rocks started to grow — they grew — and the dirt wasn’t loose but hard-packed, joined to all the other dirt. I could see, me, that in a few minutes there wouldn’t be no signs anything had happened, except maybe our footprints in the mud. But I wouldn’t bet, me, on any footprints being left.

We stood, us, in a small room, all white and bright, with nothing in it. The walls were perfect — not a nick or a scratch or nothing. I never seen such walls, me. We stood there a long time, it seemed, though it probably wasn’t. I wrapped my arms across my chest, me, to keep the pain from gnawing straight through. Dr. Turner turned to me and her face changed. “Why, Billy…” And then a door opened where there hadn’t been no door, and she stood there, my big-headed dark-haired girl from the woods, not smiling, and I had just enough time, me, to see her before the animal in my chest reared back and sank its teeth into my heart and everything disappeared.

Fifteen

I had completely lost my composure, my rationality, and my common sense, and then the door to Eden opened. This bothered me. I stood there with a dying child and an old man whom I had — against all odds — come to love, at the threshold of the technological sanctum my entire government had been seeking for God knows how long, facing the single most powerful woman in the entire world — and I was bothered that it was my irrational class-based screaming that had caused the gates of Eden to swing wide. Only it wasn’t that, of course. I knew it wasn’t that. I wasn’t quite that many standard deviations along the irrationality curve. But the feeling persisted, because nothing was normal and when nothing’s normal, nothing seems any more abnormal than anything else. The measuring scales break down. Miranda Sharifi did that to things.

Up close, she looked even plainer than she had in Washington. Big, slightly misshapen head, wild clouds of black hair, body too short and too heavy to be a donkey yet clearly not a Liver. She wore white pants and shirt, generic looking but not jacks, and her face was pale. The only spot of color was a red ribbon in her hair. I remembered what I’d thought on the steps of Science Court — that she was too old for hair ribbons — and I felt obscurely ashamed. It was difficult to keep my mind on serious subjects. We had too many of them. Or maybe it was just the nature of my mind.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I stood staring at the red hair ribbon.

She was everything I was not.

Annie fell to her knees. The hem of her muddy parka pooled ungracefully on the shining floor and her eyes turned upwards as if to an angel. Maybe that’s what she thought Miranda was.

“Ma’am, you have to help us, you. My Lizzie’s dying, her, with some disease, Billy says she’s dying, Dr. Turner says it ain’t natural, this disease, it’s genemod, it… and Billy, he’s been so good to us, him, and he ain’t hardly even got nothing out of it — but Lizzie, my little girl—” She started to cry.

At the words “Dr. Turner,” Miranda’s eyes moved to me for a moment, then back to Annie. It was like having a laser sweep over you. I felt she suddenly knew everything there was to know about me: my aliases, my supposedly secret and pathetically marginal GSEA affiliation, the entire history of my residences, pseudo-jobs, pseudo-loves. I felt naked, clear to the cellular level. I told myself to stop it immediately. She wasn’t a psychic; she was a human being, a woman with awesome technology behind her and a super-heightened brain and thoughts I would never have and would not understand if they were explained to me…

This was how Livers felt about donkeys like me.

Annie said, through her tears and still kneeling, “Please.” Just that word. In that place, it had a surprising dignity.

A door appeared in the wall behind Miranda, a door that a moment before had not existed even in outline, and a man stuck his head through. “Miri, they’re on the way—”

“You go, Jon,” she said. They were the first words she’d spoken. Jon had the same misshapen head as Miranda but handsome features, a bizarre and dissettling combination, like a manticore with the face of a domestic collie. His mouth tightened.

“Miri, you can’t—”

“That’s already settled!” she snapped, and for the first time I saw she was under tremendous tension. But then she turned to him and uttered a few words I didn’t catch, so rapidly did she speak. Despite her speed, the words had the curious feel of being separate, each a discreet communication rather than part of a grammatical flow … I was only guessing. Miranda wore a single ring, a slim gold band set with rubies, on the ring finger of her left hand.

Jon withdrew, and the “door” disappeared. There was no sign it had ever existed.

Miranda put her hand on Annie’s shoulder. The hand trembled.

“Don’t cry. I can help them both, I think. Certainly your daughter.” But it was Billy she knelt next to first. She held a small box to his heart and studied its miniature screen; she put the box against his neck and studied the screen again; she fastened a medicine patch on his neck. Watching, I was obscurely reassured. This was known. She was treating Billy for his heart attack, if that was what it was.

He started to breathe more easily, and moaned. Miranda turned to Lizzie. From her pocket she drew a long, thin black syringe, opaque. Very little medication is given by sy-ringe rather than patch. Something turned over in my chest.

I said, “She’s already had wide-spectrum antibiotic and antiviral from a K-model medunit. The unit said this was an unknown virus, outside the cofiguration of any known tailored microorganism, you’d have to build it fresh if you can—”

I was babbling. Miranda didn’t look up. “This is the Cell Cleaner, Dr. Turner. But I think you already guessed that.” There was something deliberate about her speech, as if the words were chosen carefully, and yet she felt they were completely inadequate to whatever she wanted to say. I hadn’t noticed that in Washington, where her speeches to the Science Court must have all been carefully prepared in advance. The slowness was in marked contrast to the way she’d spoken to “Jon.”

Annie watched the needle disappear into Lizzie’s neck. Annie was completely still, kneeling on the hem of her muddy parka, smearing dead leaves across the featureless white floor.

The moment was surreal. Miranda hadn’t even hesitated. I choked out, “Aren’t you even going to explain it to them give them a choice…”

Miranda didn’t answer. Instead she pulled a second syringe from her pocket and injected Billy.

I thought crazily of all the fatty deposits in the arteries of his heart, all the lethal viral copies that can lie in wait for years in lymph nodes until the body weakens, all the toxic mismultipli-cations of normal DNA over the sixty-eight years of Billy’s bone and flesh and blood … I couldn’t speak.

Miranda pulled out a third syringe and turned to Annie, who put out a warding-off hand. “No, ma’am, please, I ain’t sick—”

“You will be,” Miranda said, “without this. Soon.” She waited.

Annie bowed her head. It looked to me like prayer, which suddenly enraged me for no reason I could understand. Miranda injected Annie.

Then she turned to me.

“How toxic is the mutated vir—”

“Fatal. Within twenty-four hours. And easily transmitted. You will become infected.”

“How do you know? Did your people engineer and release the virus? Did you?”

“No,” she said, as calmly as if I’d asked her if it was raining. But a pulse beat in her throat, and she was taut as harpstrings, and as ready to vibrate at a touch. I just didn’t know whose. I stared at the syringe in her hand: long, thin, black, the fluid hidden inside. What color was it? That fluid had already gone into Lizzie, into Billy, into Annie.

I whispered, before I knew I was going to, “But I’m a donkey—”

Miranda said, “I have already been injected myself. Months ago. This is not an untested procedure.”

She had missed completely what I had meant. It lay outside her range of vision. Apparently, then, some things did. I said, “You’re so—” without knowing how I was going to finish the sentence.

“We don’t have much time. Lower your head, please, Dr. Turner.”

I blurted out — this is to my everlasting shame, it was so inane, and at such a moment — “I’m not really a licensed doctor!”

For the first time, she smiled. “Neither am I, Diana.”

“Why don’t we have much time? What’s going to happen? I’m not sick yet, you’re going to alter my entire biochemistry, let me at least think a moment—”

A screen suddenly appeared on the wall. Even though this — unlike the door — was certainly a normal technology, I nonetheless jumped as if an angel had appeared with flaming sword. But the angel was in front of me, staring at the screen as if in pain, and the sword trembled in her hand, and I was going to die not because I’d eaten of this particular genetically-engineered apple, but because I didn’t.

She didn’t give me a choice. The screen showed a plane landing where no plane should have been able to land, a folded thing setting straight down like a rotorless coptor but far more precisely than any coptor, on the same small flat patch of ground between stream and mountain where I had screamed for Eden to open. The same naked birch tree, shivering white. The same tattered oak. I raised my head to stare at the four men climbing out of the unfolded cylinder of the government plane, and Miranda pushed the syringe into my neck. With her other hand on my shoulder, she held me still while the fluid drained.

She was very strong.

Somehow, that one fact cleared my head, which just shows how crazed was the whole situation. I said, almost as if we were coconspirators, “They can’t get in, can they? They couldn’t even find it before, they blew up the wrong installation. They must have followed us here, Billy and Annie and Lizzie and me — oh, I’m sorry, Miranda—”

She wasn’t listening. To my complete shock — it was the weirdest thing that had happened yet, because after all, I’d known about the Cell Cleaner, I’d seen her explain it in Washington — to my utter shock, tears glittered in her eyes. She circled the fingers of her right hand around her left. Covering the ring.

A fifth man was helped out of the plane, and into a powerchair someone else swiftly unfolded. I saw with yet another shock that it was Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer.

He put his hand on the birch tree. I didn’t know — and never found out — if it was to steady himself, or if it was part of the entry procedure, an activator or a skin-recognition system or just a failsafe of some unimaginable kind. Then he spoke a series of words, very clear, in that famous voice. The door above our heads opened.

Miranda made no effort to stop him, if she could have. Of course she could have. There must have been shields, counter-shields, something. They were SuperSleepless.

The four GSEA agents came down the stairs as if this were a root cellar in Kansas. They had drawn their guns, which filled me with sudden contempt. Drew Arlen stayed outside.

“Miranda Sharifi, you are under arrest for violations of the Genetic Standards Act, Sections 12 through 34, which state—”

She completely ignored them. She pushed past the four men as if they weren’t there, a sudden fire glowing around her that had to be some sort of electrified personal shield. One of the agents reached for her, cried out, and cradled his burned hand, his face distorted by pain. The agent blocking the steps hesitated. I saw him think for half a second about firing, and then change his mind. I could almost see the report later: “Civilians were present, making it inadvisable to—” Or maybe they realized that whoever officially killed Miranda Sharifi was dead himself careerwise, forever, a scapegoat. The agent moved off the steps.

Miranda ascended them slowly, heavily, the tears sparkling in her dark eyes. Three of the agents followed. After a stunned moment I bolted after them.

Drew Arlen sat in the cold November woods in a powerchair. Miranda faced him. A slight wind shook the oak tree, and the dead leaves rattled. A few fell.

“Why, Drew?”

“Miri — you don’t have the right to choose for 175 million people. Not in a democracy. Not without any checks and balances. Leisha said—”

“Kenzo Yagai did. He chose. He created cheap energy, and changed the world for the better.”

“You could have stopped the duragem dissembler. And didn’t. People died, Miranda!”

“Not as many as if we had stopped it. Not in the long run.”

“That wasn’t your reason! You just wanted control of the situation! You Supers, who don’t ever have to die!”

There was a noise behind me. I didn’t turn around. What I was looking at was more important than any noise. The questions Drew and Miranda hurled at each other were the same public question I had struggled with ever since I’d seen the Cell Cleaner in Washington: Who should control radical technology? Only they were making of it a private weapon, as lovers can make private weapons of anything. Who should control technology…

And — make no mistake — technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.

The GSEA had hoped to keep radical tech from falling into the wrong hands. But Huevos Verdes was the right hands: the hands that used nanotech to strengthen human beings, not destroy them. That was what the GSEA could not admit. It wasn’t their place to judge, they claimed; they only carried out the law. Maybe they were right.

But somebody, somewhere, sometime, had to judge, or we’d end up with pure Darwinian jungle, red in byte and assembler.

Huevos Verdes had judged. And I, by not summoning the GSEA a second time, along with them. And there was no clear way to know whether either of us was right.

All this I realized, with that peculiar clarity that comes in bodily crisis, as I watched Drew Arlen and Miranda Sharifi tear each other apart in the cold woods.

He said, “You don’t have the right to carry out this project. You never did. No more than Jimmy Hubbley—”

She said, “It was supposed to be ‘we,’ not ‘you.’ You were part of this.”

“Not any more.”

“Because you fell into the hands of some scientific crazies. God, Drew, to equate Jimmy Hubbley with us—”

“So you did know about him. And left me there all these months.”

“No! We knew about the counterrevolution, but not specifically where you were—”

“I don’t believe you. You could have found me. You Supers can do anything, can’t you?”

“You think I’m lying to you—”

“Yes,” Drew said. “I think you’re lying.”

“But I’m not. Drew—” It was a cry of pure anguish. I couldn’t look at her face.

“You could have stopped the duragem dissembler, too, couldn’t you? You knew it came from the underground. But you let it encourage social breakdown because that prepared the way better for the project. For your plans. Isn’t that true, Miranda?”

“Yes. We could have stopped the dissembler.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“We were afraid—” She stopped.

“Afraid of what? That I’d tell Leisha? The newsgrids? The GSEA?”

She said, more quietly, “Which is just what you did. The first chance you got. We did look for you, Drew, but we’re not omnipotent. There was no way of knowing which bunker, where… And meanwhile you did exactly what Jon and Nick and Christy said you would — betray the project to the GSEA.”

“Because I started to think for myself. Again. Finally. And that’s not what Supers want, is it? You want to think for all of us, and us to obey you, without question. Because you always know best, don’t you? God, Miranda, aren’t you ever wrong?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was wrong about you.”

“That won’t be a problem for you any longer.”

She cried, “You said you loved me!”

“Not any more.”

They went on looking at each other. Drew’s face I couldn’t read. Miranda’s had turned stony, her tears gone. Her eyes were lasers.

She said, “I loved you. And you couldn’t stand being inferior. That’s what your betrayal to the GSEA is really about. Jon was right. You can’t ever really understand. Anything.”

Drew didn’t answer. The wind picked up, smelling of cold water. More leaves blew off the oak. The birch tree shuddered. There was more noise behind me. I didn’t turn around.

A GSEA agent said, “I arrest you, Miranda Sharifi, for violations of the—”

She cried out, just as if the agent hadn’t spoken, “I can’t help it that I know more and think better than you, Drew! I can’t help what I am!”

He said, his voice unsteady but angry, the way men are when they know they look weak, “Who should control the technology—”

“Shit!” someone called. I turned. Billy sat dazed on the ground, holding his chest. The noise had been him and Annie, pulling the unconscious Lizzie up from the underground bunker, which they didn’t understand and must have feared. Or maybe Annie had pulled Lizzie up the steps, and the agent with the burned hand had helped Billy. The agent stood there beside the old man, looking dazed. But there was nothing dazed about Billy. He sat in the frozen mud, an old man with a body about to be the most biologically efficient machine on the planet, and I saw that he, too, knew what he was looking at. Billy Washington, the Liver. His wrinkled old-man’s gaze moved from Drew to Miranda — the latter, I saw, with adoration — then back to Drew again, then to Miranda. “Shit,” he said again, and there were layers and layers in his tone, unsortable.

“You’re fighting, you, about who should control this technology — but don’t you see, it don’t matter who should control it, them? It only matters who can?” And he put his gnarled, grateful, hand on the crumpled sleeping form of Lizzie, lying in the mud, her small face peaceful and cool and damp as her lethal fever broke.

Sixteen

There was nothing to confiscate for evidence. More planes came, and Drew used the codes that made the door appear in the far wall of the bunker. I contrived to be present for this. Security was chaotic, except for Miranda Sharifi, electro-cuffed to the birch tree, whom agents watched as if they expected an anti-grav heavenly ascension, tree and all. Maybe they did. But Miranda allowed herself to be captured. And everybody understood that’s what happened: she allowed it.

But nobody, including me, understood why.

Behind the bunker door lay nothing. Even the sterile, fortifying walls that had probably been there were self-consuming by the same nanotechnology that had built them. There were only a series of earth-packed tunnels and caves extending back into the mountain, dangerous to explore without proper equipment because the dirt walls crumbled and threatened to cave in. It was impossible to tell how extensive the caves/tunnels were. It was impossible to tell what had been nano-destroyed in them, or removed from them before their collapse. Miri, they’re on the way — Miri, you can’t—

I looked for the slim black syringes that had injected the four of us, but all I saw was smudges of melted black, like metallic candle wax, on the floor at the bottom of the steps where Lizzie and Billy had lain.

There was more. And it happened, incredibly, almost as an afterthought.

But first one of the agents arrested me. “Diana Arlene Cov-ington, you are under arrest for violations of the United States Code, Title 18, Sections 1510, 2381, and 2383.”

Obstruction of criminal investigations. Assisting rebellion or insurrection. Treason. I was, after all, supposed to be a GSEA agent.

Miranda watched me intently from her birch tree. Too intently. Drew had gone into the plane. We awaited a second plane, either for more space or more security. With a sudden feint that surprised the agent, I ducked around him and sprinted toward Miranda.

“Hey!”

She had time to say to me only, “More in the syringe—” before the outraged agent had me again and dragged me grimly into the plane. His grip bruised my arms.

I barely noticed. More in the syringe—

The whole extent of the project, she had said to Drew Arlen.

So not just the Cell Cleaner, which was staggering enough. Not just that. Something else.

Some other biological technology: radical, unexpected. Unimaginable.

Something more.

Huevos Verdes had not needed to set up this elaborate underground lab to perfect or test the Cell Cleaner. They had already done that, openly, before the Science Court hearing last fall.

Huevos Verdes had expected to lose their case in front of the Science Court. That had been clear at the time, to nearly everybody. What had not been clear was why they were presenting the case at all, given the foregone conclusion. It was because Miranda wanted the moral reassurance that all legitimate paths for this larger project were closed, before she completed her stroll down illegitimate paths at East Oleanta.

How much did the agent know? The GSEA top brass, of course, would know everything. Arlen would have told them.

This intellectual speculation lasted only a moment. It was replaced almost instantly with a freezing fear, the kind that doesn’t melt your bones but stiffens them, so it seems you won’t ever move, or breathe, again.

Whatever bioengineering project Huevos Verdes had been built for, the charade of the Science Court had been staged for, Drew Arlen had performed concerts for, the duragem dissembler had not been stopped for — whatever bioengineering project had occupied all of the SuperSleepless’s unfathomable energies — whatever that bioengineering project was, I had been injected with it. It was in my body. In me. Becoming me.

You don’t have the right to choose for 175 million people. Not in a democracy. Not without any checks and balances—

Kenzo Yagai did.

I swayed against the metal bulkhead, then caught myself. My fingers were faintly blue with cold. The nail on the middle finger had broken. The flesh was smooth except for one tiny cut on the index finger. Mud, now dried, made a long arc from wrist to nails. My hand. Alien.

I said aloud to Miranda, “What was it?”

In my mind she turned her misshapen head to look at me. Tears, which still didn’t fall, brightened her eyes. She said, “Only for your good.”

“By whose definition!”

Her expression didn’t change. “Mine.”

I went on staring at her. Then she dissolved, because of course she was an illusion, born of shock. She wasn’t really inside my head. She couldn’t ever be inside my head. It was way too small.

The plane lifted, and I was transported to Albany to be arraigned in a court of law.

Billy, Annie, Lizzie, and I were taken to the Jonas Salk United States Research Hospital in Albany, a heavily shielded edifice conspicuous for security ’bots. I was led down a different corridor. I craned my neck to keep Lizzie’s gurney in sight as long as I could.

In a windowless room Colin Kowalski waited for me, with a man I recognized instantly. Kenneth Emile Koehler, director, Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency. Colin said nothing. I saw that he never would; he was too outranked, included only because he had had the bad judgment to hire me, the wildcat agent who could have led the GSEA to Miranda Sharifi before Drew Aden did, and hence just as much an official quisling. But, of course, for the other side. Colin was in disgrace. Aden was probably a hero who had belatedly but righteously seen the light. I was under arrest for treason. One loser, one winner, one who doesn’t know how to play the game.

“All right, Diana,” Kenneth Emile Koehler said: a bad beginning. I’d been reduced to a first name. Like a ’bot. “Tell us what happened.”

“Everything?”

“From the beginning.”

The recorders were on. Drew Arlen had undoubtedly spilled his brain cells already. And I myself could think of no reason not to tell the truth: Something bioengineered had been injected into my veins. More in the syringe—

But I didn’t want to start there. I felt instead an overwhelming desire to begin at the beginning, with Stephanie Brunell and her illegal genemod pink poodle hurtling itself over my terrace railing. I needed to tell it all, every last action and decision and intellectual argument that had brought me from disgust at illegal bioengi-neering to championing it. I wanted to explain clearly to myself as well as to these men exactly what I had done, and why, and what it meant, because that was the only way I would fully understand it myself.

That was the moment I realized the GSEA had already gotten a truth drug into me. Which was, of course, a completely illegal violation of the Fifth Amendment, a fact too insignificant to even comment on. I didn’t comment on it. Instead I gazed at Koehler and Kowalski and the others who had suddenly appeared and then, wrapped in the glow of absolute truth and in the tender and selfless desire to share it, I talked on and on and on.

Seventeen

There were human guards, robot guards, guard shields. But it was the human guards I noticed. Techs, mostly, although at least one was donkey. I noticed them because there were so many. Miranda had more human guards than the entire population of Huevos Verdes, even including the Sleepless hangers-on like Kevin Baker’s grandchildren. She awaited her trial in a different prison from her grandmother, whose treason conviction was ancient history now. Jennifer probably had fewer guards.

“Put your eye directly up to the ’scope, sir,” one of them said. He wore the drab blue prison uniform, cut like jacks but not jacks. I let my retina be scanned. Huevos Verdes had passed this level of identification ten years ago.

“You, too, ma’am.”

Carmela Clemente-Rice stepped closer to the scope. When she stepped back, I felt her hand on my shoulder, cool and reassuring. I felt her in my mind as a series of perfectly balanced interlocking ovals.

I felt the prison as hot blue confusion. Mine.

“This way, please. Watch the steps, sir.”

They evidently didn’t see too many powerchairs here. Inanely, I wondered why. My chair skimmed down the steps.

The warden’s office showed no signs of security or surveillance, which meant there was plenty of both. It was a large room, furnished in the currently popular donkey style, simple straight-lined tables of teak or rosewood combined with some fancy antique chairs with cloth seats and carved arms. I didn’t know what period they were from.

Miranda would have known.

The warden didn’t rise as Carmela and I were shown in. He was donkey to his blond hair roots. Tall, blue-eyed, heavily muscled, a genemod re-creation of a Viking chief by parents with more money than imagination. He spoke directly to Carmela, ignoring me.

“I’m afraid, Dr. Clemente-Rice, that you are unable to see the prisoner after all.”

Carmela’s voice remained serene, with steel. “You’re mistaken, Mr. Castner. Mr. Arlen and I have clearance from the Attorney General herself to see Ms. Sharifi. You’ve received both terminal and hard copy notification. And I have copies of the paperwork with me.”

“I already received this notification from Justice, doctor.”

Carmela’s expression didn’t change. She waited. The warden leaned back in his antique chair, hands laced behind his head, eyes hostile and amused. He waited, too.

Carmela was better at it.

Finally he repeated, “Neither of you can see the prisoner, despite what Justice says.”

Carmela said nothing.

Slowly his amused look vanished. She wasn’t going to either ask or beg. “You can’t see the prisoner because the prisoner doesn’t choose to see you.”

I blurted, despite myself, “At all?”

“At all, Mr. Arlen. She refuses to see either of you.” He leaned back in his chair even farther, unlacing his hands, his blue eyes small in his handsome face.

Maybe I should have expected it. I had not. I laid my hands, palms flat, on his desk.

“Tell her … tell her just that I … tell her…”

“Drew,” Carmela said softly.

I pulled myself together. I hated that the smirking bastard had seen me stammer. Supercilious donkey prick … In that moment I hated him as much as I had hated Jimmy Hubbley, as much as I had hated Peg, that poor ignorant hopeless slob pathetically trying to measure up to Jimmy Hubbley… / can’t help it that I know more and think better than you do, Drew! I can’t help what I am!

I turned the powerchair abruptly and moved toward the door.

After a moment I felt Carmela follow me. Warden Castner’s voice stopped us both.

“Ms. Sharifi did leave a package for you, Mr. Arlen.”

A package. A letter. A chance to write back, to explain to her what I’d done and why I’d done it.

I didn’t want to open the package in front of Castner. But I might need to make arrangements to answer her letter, now, here, and the letter might have some clue to that… It had taken Carmela three weeks to get us this far. A direct favor from the Attorney General. Besides, Castner had undoubtedly already read whatever Miranda had to say. Hell, entire computer-expert security teams had undoubtedly analyzed her words for code, for hidden nanotech, for symbolic meaning. I turned my back to Castner and ripped open the slightly padded envelope.

What if she’d written words too hard for me to read—

But there were no words. Only the ring I’d given her twelve years ago, a slim gold band set with rubies. I stared at it until the ring blurred and only its image filled my empty mind.

“Is there an answer?” Castner said, his voice smooth. He’d scented blood.

“No,” I said. “No answer.” I went on looking at the ring.

You said you loved me!

Not any more.

Carmela had her back to me, giving me the illusion of privacy. Castner stared, smiling faintly.

I put the ring in my pocket. We left the federal prison. Now there were no shapes in my mind, nothing. The dark lattice, that had dissolved in Jimmy Hubbley’s underground bunker to show me my own hemmed-in isolation, had never reappeared. I was no longer sealed in by Huevos Verdes. But Miranda was gone. Leisha was gone. Carmela was there, but I didn’t feel her in my mind, didn’t even really see her.

I was alone.

We went back through the security system and out of the prison, into the cold bright Washington sunlight.

Eighteen

I blinked and shut my eyes against the glare of a wall that seemed excessively white. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was, or who I was. This information returned. I sat up, too quickly. Blood rushed from my head and the room swirled.

“Are you all right?”

A pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman, with a thick body and deep lines from nose to mouth. Minimally genemod, if at all, but not a Liver. She wore a security uniform. She was armed.

I said, “What day is it?”

“December tenth. You’ve been here thirty-four days.” She spoke to the wall. “Dr. Hewitt, Ms. Covington is back.”

Back. Where had I been? Never mind, I knew. I sat on a white hospital bed in a white hospital room thick with medical and surveillance equipment. Under the disposable white gown my arms and legs and abdomen were covered with small clear globs of blood-clotter. Somebody had been taking many many samples.

“Lizzie? Billy? The Livers who came in with me, there were three of them…”

“Dr. Hewitt will be here in a minute.”

“Lizzie, the little girl, was sick, is she—”

“Dr. Hewitt will be here in a minute.”

He was, with Kenneth Emile Koehler. Immediately my head cleared.

“All right, Dr. Hewitt. What did Huevos Verdes do to me?”

My directness seemed expected. Why not? We’d spent thirty-four days in intimate communion, none of which I could remember. He said, “They injected you with several different kinds of nanotechnology. Some are built from bioengineered organisms, primarily viruses. Some apparently are completely machines, created one atom at a time, that have lodged in your cells. Most seem self-replicating. Some, we guess, are clocked for replication. We have everything under study, trying to determine the exact nature of—”

“What do the machines do? What’s been changed in my body?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“You don’t know?” I heard my own shrillness. I didn’t care.

“Not completely.”

“Lizzie Francy? Billy Washington? Lizzie was sick—”

“A part of the injection you received is the Cell Cleaner mechanism, as you already know. But the rest…” A strange look passed over Hewitt’s face, resentful and yearning. I didn’t want to pursue this look. I was in a sudden frenzy, the kind that makes you think you can’t live through the next five minutes without hearing information that you know you will reject in the five minutes after that.

“Doctor — what do you think this fucking injection will do?”

His face closed. “We don’t know.”

“But you must know something—”

A ’bot rolled through the door. It was table-shaped, with an unnecessary grille suggesting a smiling face. On its surface was a covered tray. “Lunch for Room 612,” the ’bot said pleasantly. I smelled chicken, rice — the real thing, not soysynth, foods I hadn’t tasted for months. Suddenly I was ravenous.

Everybody watched me eat. They watched with peculiar intensity. I didn’t care. Chicken juices trickled down my chin; rice grains fell from my lips. My teeth tingled with the thick sweetness of ripping meat. Fresh sweet peas, spiced applesauce. I was greedy for food, consumed by what I was consuming. No amount could be enough.

When I had finished, I lay back on the pillows, curiously exhausted. Hewitt and Koehler wore identical expressions, and I couldn’t read either of them. There was a long, pregnant silence — pointlessly so, it seemed to me.

I said, “So now what? When am I going to be arraigned?”

“Not necessary,” Koehler said. His face was still inscrutable. “You’re free to leave.”

My sudden exhaustion just as suddenly departed. This was not how the system worked.

“I’m under arrest for obstructing justice, conspiring to overthrow—”

“Charges have been dropped.” Hewitt this time. It was as if they’d switched roles. Or as if roles no longer mattered. I lay there, thinking about this.

I said slowly, “Let me have a newsholo.”

Koehler repeated Hewitt’s line, tonelessly, “You’re free to go.”

I swung my feet over the sides of the bed. The hospital gown tented shapelessly around me. In big moments, small things matter: the world’s way of keeping us petty. I demanded, “Where are my clothes?” Just as if I wanted the muddy cheap jacks and parka I’d worn to the hospital.

There would be body monitors, of course. Subepidermal homers, radioactive blood markers, who knew what else. I’d never find them.

A ’bot brought me my clothes. I put them on, not caring that the men watched. The usual rules did not apply.

“Lizzie? Billy?”

“They left two days ago. The child is recovered.”

“Where did they go?”

Koehler said, “We do not have that information.” He was lying. His information was closed to me. I was off the government net.

I walked out of the room, expecting to be stopped in the corridor, at the elevator, in the lobby. I walked out the front door. There was absolutely nobody around: nobody crossing from the parking lot, nobody hurrying in to visit a brother or wife or business partner. A ’bot groomed the spring grass, which to my East Oleanta eyes looked aggressively genemod green. The air was soft and warm. Spring sunlight slanted over it, making long late-afternoon shadows. A cherry tree bloomed with fragrant pink flowers. My parka was far too heavy; I took it off and dropped it on the sidewalk.

I walked the length of the building, wondering what I was going to do next. I was genuinely curious, in a detached way that should have alerted me to how quietly and numbly crazed I actually was. Reality could only interest me, not surprise me. Even the interest was precarious. The next step would have been catatonia.

I reached the corner of the building and turned it. A shuttle bus sat there, compact, green as the engineered grass. The door was open. I climbed in.

The bus said, “Credit, please.”

My hands fumbled in the pocket of my jacks. There was a credit chip there: not a Liver meal chip, but donkey credit. I pushed it into the slot. The shuttle said, “Thank you.”

“What name is on that chip?”

“You have exceeded this unit’s language capacity. Destination, please? Civic Plaza, Hotel Scheherazade, loto Hotel, Central Gravrail Station, or Excelsior Square?”

“Central Gravrail Station.”

The shuttle doors closed.

There were people in the station, Livers dressed in bright jacks and a few government donkeys; this was Albany, the state capital. Everybody seemed in a hurry. I walked into the Governor John Thomas Lividini Central Gravrail Cafe. Three men huddled at a corner table, talking intently. The foodbelt had stopped. The holo-grid showed a scooter race, and none of the men looked up when I changed it to a donkey news channel.

“—continues to spread in the midwestern and southern states. Because the engineered virus can be carried by so many different species of animals and birds, the Centers for Disease Control recommend avoidance of all contact with wildlife. Since the plague is also highly contagious among humans—”

I switched channels.

“—strict embargo on all physical trade, travelers, mail, or other entrance of any object whatsoever into France from North America. As with other nations, French fear of contamination has led to an hysteria that—”

I switched channels.

“—apparently ended. Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have issued a statement that the duragem dissembler’s clocked nanomachanisms have not run their programmed course, but rather have failed over time because of faulty understanding of the complex scope of their construction. Department of Engineering Chairman Myron Aaron White spoke with us at his office in the—”

I switched channels.

“—chronic food shortages. The situation, however, is expected to ease now that the so-called duragem dissembler crisis has slowed, apparently due to—”

I watched for an hour. Famine was easing; famine was increasing. The engineered plague was spreading; the engineered plague had been checked. The rest of the world had been infected by American goods and travelers; the rest of the world showed only minor signs of either duragem contamination or the “wildlife plague.” There was less breakdown from the duragem dissemblers; there was more breakdown in some areas, but scientists were close to a solution to the problem, which was actually difficult to understand because of the advanced nature of the science, for which experts were on the verge of a major breakthrough. Albany was Albany.

But not once was an underground organization of nanotech saboteurs mentioned. Not once was the overground organization of Huevos Verdes mentioned. The SuperSleepless might not have existed. Nor Miranda Sharifi.

I walked over to the table of men in the corner. They looked up, not smiling. I wore purple jacks and genemod eyes. I didn’t even feel to see if there was a personal shield on my belt. There would be. Koehler wanted me alive; I was an expensive walking laboratory.

“You men know, you, where I can get to Eden?”

Two faces remained hostile. On the third, the youngest, the eyes nickered and the mouth softened at the corners. I spoke to him.

“I’m sick, me. I think I got it.”

“Harry — she’s genemod, her,” the oldest man said. Nothing in his voice showed fear of infection.

“She’s sick,” Harry said. His voice was older than his face.

“You don’t know who—”

“You go to the sunshine machine by track twelve, you. A woman’s there with a necklace pounded like stars. She’ll take you to the Eden, her.”

“The” Eden. One of many. Prepared for in advance by Huevos Verdes: technology, distribution, information dissemination, all of it. And the Liver security, if you could call it that, consisted only of Harry’s companions’ mild discouragement, which meant the government wasn’t interfering. I felt dizzy.

On the long walk to track 12,1 saw only fourteen people. Two of them were donkey techs. I saw no trains leave the station. A cleaning ’bot sat immobile where it had broken down, but there were no soda cans, half-eaten sandwiches, genemod apple cores, soysynth candy wrappers on the ground. Without them, the station looked donkey, not Liver.

A middle-aged woman sat patiently on the ground by the sunshine machine. She wore blue jacks and a soda-can necklace, each soft metal lid bent and pounded into a crude star. I planted myself in front of her. “I’m sick.”

She inspected me carefully. “No, you’re not.”

“I want to go to Eden.”

“Tell Police Chief Randall if he wants, him, to shut us down, to just do it. He don’t need no donkeys pretending to be sick, them, when you ain’t.” The woman said this mildly, without rancor.

“Down the rabbit hole,” I said. “ ‘Eat Me,’ ‘Drink Me.’ ” To which she naturally did not respond at all.

I walked to a gravrail monitor and asked it for information about train departures. It was broken. I tried another. On the fourth try, a working monitor answered me.

Track 25 was in another section of the station. There was more activity here, although not more garbage on the ground. Three techs worked on a small train. I sat cross-legged on the ground, not speaking to them, until they’d finished. They repaired only this one train, then left, looking tired. Colin Kowalski and Kenneth Koehler had known where I would go.

I was the only passenger. The train was direct. It was just barely the beginning of sunset when I stepped off onto the deserted main street of East Oleanta.

Annie’s apartment on Jay Street was empty, the door ajar. Nothing had been taken. Not the ugly garish wall hanging, not the water buckets, not the plasticloth throw pillows, not Lizzie’s discarded doll. I went in and lay down on Lizzie’s bed. After a while I walked to the Cafe.

Nobody was there, either. The foodbelt was stopped and empty, the holoterminal off. The Cafe hadn’t been trashed. It had just been evacuated, like the rest of the town. The government wanted everything extraneous cleared out for a while, which did not include me. I was not extraneous. From their point of view, I was one of the five most important people in the world: four walking biological laboratories and their captured mad scientist. I had the run of the laboratory, and so probably did three of the others. I only had to wait for them to arrive.

Before the light failed, I.walked through the snow to the flat, stony riverbank where Billy had poked at the brown snowshoe rabbit with the stick Lizzie had given him. The rabbit was gone. I sat for a long time on the embankment, watching the cold water, until the sun set and the rock chilled my butt.

I spent the night in Annie’s apartment, on the sofa. The heat unit still worked. Although I woke often during the night, it was only for brief periods. It wasn’t true insomnia. Each time, I listened carefully in the darkness. There was nothing to hear.

Once, from some half-conscious impulse, I fingered my ears. The holes for my earrings had closed. I ran a finger over my thigh, searching for the scar from a childhood accident. The scar was gone.

I spent the next morning watching the holoterminal. Bannock Falls, Ohio, had been wiped out by plague in twenty-four hours. Camera ’bots showed bodies dead where they’d fallen outside the Senator Ellen Piercy Devan Cafe, sprawled across each other in heavy winter jacks like fourteenth-century victims of bubonic plague.

Jupiter, Texas, had rioted, blowing up their town with nanotech explosives that Livers should not, could not, have obtained. The townspeople promised to move on Austin if 450,000 cubits of food, apparently a biblical measure, was not delivered within twenty-four hours.

The donkey enclave of Chevy Chase, Maryland, had imposed quarantine on itself: nobody in, nobody out.

Most of Europe, South America, and Asia had imposed embargoes on anything coming from North America, violations punishable by death. Half the countries claimed the embargoes were working and their borders were clean; the other half claimed legal vengeance for their failing infrastructures and dying people. Much of Africa made both claims at once.

Washington, D.C., outside of the Federal Protected Enclave, was in flames. It was hard to know how much government remained to answer claims of legal vengeance.

Timonsville, Pennsylvania, had disappeared. The entire town of twenty-three hundred people had just packed up and dispersed. That was the closest any newsgrid came to hinting at vast changes in where people went, or why, or what microorganisms they carried with them in their diaspora.

Nobody mentioned East Oleanta at all.

In the afternoon it started to snow, even though the temperature was just barely above freezing. I’d thought about hiking into the mountains, looking for the place Billy had led us to over a month ago, but the weather made that impossible.

All night I lay awake, listening to the silence.

In the morning I took a shower at the Salvatore John DeSanto Public Baths, which were mysteriously working again. Then I returned to the cafe. East Oleanta was still deserted. I sat on the edge of a chair, like an attentive donkey schoolgirl, and watched the HT as my country disintegrated into famine, pestilence, death, and war, and the rest of the world mobilized its most advanced technology to seal us within our own borders. If there was other news, the newsgrids weren’t reporting it. By 11:00 A.M. only three channels still transmitted.

At noon I felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to sit by the river. This urge struck me with the force of a religious revelation. It was not arguable. I must go sit by the river.

Once there, I took off my clothes, an act as uncharacteristic and as unstoppable as public diarrhea. It was forty degrees and sunny, but I had the feeling it wouldn’t have mattered if it were below zero. I had to take off my clothes. I did, and stretched full length on an expanse of exposed mud.

I lay on my back in the sun-softened mud, shivering violently, for maybe six or seven minutes. Stones poked into my shoulder blades, the backs of my thighs, the small of my back. The river mud smelled pungent. I was cold. I have never been so uncomfortable in my life. I lay there, one arm flung over my face to shield my eyes from the bright noon sun, unwilling to move. Unable to move. And then it was over, and, still shivering, I sat up and dressed again.

It was over.

Eat me, said the vials Alice found at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Drink me.

It had been two full days since I’d devoured the chicken and rice and genuine new peas in the Albany government hospital. I hadn’t felt hungry: shock, anxiety, depression. All those can arrest appetite. But the body needs fuel. Even when hunger is absent, glucose levels fall. There are hidden storages of starch in the liver and muscles, but eventually these get used up. The blood needs new sources of glucose to send to the body.

Glucose is nothing but atoms. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. Arranged one way in food. Arranged another way in mud and water and air. Just as energy exists in one form in chemical bonds, and another in sunlight.

Y-energy rearranged the forms of energy so there would always be a readily available, cheap supply.

Nanotechnology rearranged atoms, which could be found everywhere and anywhere.

Under my clothes, I could feel the mud still caking the backs of my thighs. I tried to remember what those openings were called through which plants took in air, those minute orifices in the epidermis of leaves and stems. The word wouldn’t come. My mind was watery.

My body had fed.

I walked carefully, setting my foot down cautiously on each step, transferring my weight slowly from one foot to the other. My arms hovered protectively six inches from my side, to catch myself if I fell. I held my head stiffly. I made very slow progress up the embankment, and it felt excruciating. It seemed to me I had no choice. I moved as if I were something rare and fragile that I myself were carrying, as if I shouldn’t jar myself. Nothing must happen to my body. I was the answer to the starving world. No. Huevos Verdes was the answer.

Once that thought came, I could walk normally. I scrambled up the hill to town. I was not the only one. By now there were hundreds, thousands of us. Eden existed in a gravrail station in Albany, beside the sunshine machine. The entire town of Ti-monsville, Pennsylvania, had disappeared. Miranda Sharifi had gone public with the Cell Cleaner, the most comprehensible part of her project, over three months ago. And in the last month Huevos Verdes could have stockpiled oceans of serum in forests of slim black syringes. That’s what they were doing all over the country, in all those places the plague was not killing people. I was not the only one. I had only been the first. Except for the Sleepless themselves.

My body felt good, which is to say it felt like nothing at all. It disappeared from my consciousness, as healthy and fed bodies do. It was just there, ready to climb or run or work or make love, without depending on the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe. Without depending on CanCo Franchise agrobots_% on political food distribution systems, on the FDA, on controlling the means of production, on harvesters and combines and the banks you owed them to, on forty acres and a mule, on the threshing floor, on the serfs in the field, on the rains coming this year and the locusts staying away, on Demeter and Indra and the Aztec corn gods. Seven thousand years of civilization built on the need to feed the people.

More in the syringe.

I could still eat normally — I had eaten chicken and rice and peas in the Albany hospital. But I didn’t have to. From now on, my body could “eat” mud.

I thought wildly of all the food I had consumed in my one single life. Beef Wellington, the pastry flaky around succulent medium-rare roast. Macaroons chewy with fresh-grated coconut. Potatoes Anna, crisp and crunchy. Bittersweet Swiss chocolate. Cassoulet. Alaskan crab as they did it at Fruits de la Mer in Seattle. Deep-dish apple pie…

My mouth watered. And then it stopped. A programmed biological counterresponse? I would probably never know.

Biscuits dripping with butter. But I could still have them. Lamb Gaston. Fresh arugula. // they were available. Strawberries in cream. But would anybody grow or raise the ingredients without a captive market?

A sudden wave of dizziness overtook me. I must have been in shock, or some kind of quiet hysteria. It was lightheadedness at the sheer size of the thing, the audacity. Miranda Sharifi and her twenty-six inhuman Supergeniuses, thinking in ways fundamentally different from ours, aided by technology they themselves built so that each step ahead opened six more pathways, and twenty-seven Superminds added to those branching possibilities… Miranda Sharifi and Jonathan Markowitz and Terry Mwak-ambe and the others whose names I didn’t remember from old newsgrids, whom I would never meet, who were not like us and never had been, and yet who had seen what would happen to a society they didn’t belong to and had planned a countermeasure. Planned, probably, for years, and carried out the unimaginably complex plans that would change everything for everybody—

And I had once thought that donkeys were perpetually dissatisfied and never found anything to be enough.

“How could she?” I said aloud, to nobody.

Dazed, I wandered past the station. A train pulled in and Annie and Billy and Lizzie stepped off the otherwise empty gravrail, carrying bundles. Lizzie saw me, shrieked, and ran toward me. I stood watching them, feeling lighter and lighter in the head, my cranium swelling like a balloon. Lizzie hurtled herself into my arms. She was taller, stronger, filled out, all in just a month. Billy’s face broke into a huge grin. He loped toward me like a man half his age, Annie trailing.

“Billy,” I said. “Billy—”

He went on grinning.

“We’re home now, us,” Billy said. “We’re all home.”

Annie sniffed. Lizzie squeezed me tight enough to crush ribs. Under my jacks I felt mud flake off the skin of my thighs.

“Hurry,” Annie said. “I want to get to the cafe, me, before the broadcast.”

“What broadcast?” I said.

All three of them looked at me, shocked. Lizzie said, “The broadcast, Vicki. From Huevos Verdes. The one all the Liver channels been talking about, them, for days. Everybody’s going to watch it!”

“I’ve been watching only donkey channels.” But if it were coming from Huevos Verdes, they could use all channels at once, Liver and donkey. They’d done it once before, thirteen years ago.

“But, Vicki, it’s the Huevos Verdes broadcast” Lizzie repeated.

“I didn’t know,” I said, lamely.

“Donkeys,” Annie said. “They never know nothing, them.”

Nineteen

This is Miranda Serena Sharifi, speaking to you on an unedited holo recorded six weeks ago. You will want to know what has been done to you.

I am going to explain, as simply as I can. If the explanation is not simple enough, please be patient. This broadcast will play over and over again for weeks, on Channel 35. Perhaps parts of it will become clearer as you hear it more than once. Or perhaps as more technically trained people — donkeys — use the syringes we are making available everywhere, some donkeys will explain to you in easier words. Meanwhile, these are the simplest words I can find for these concepts without losing scientific accuracy.

Your body is made of cells. A cell, any cell, is basically a complex of systems for transforming energy. So is an organism, including a human being.

Humans get their basic energy from plant food, either directly or indirectly, through a process called oxidative phosphorylation. Your bodies break down the bonds of carbon-containing molecules, and a significant portion of the food’s potential energy is repackaged into the phosphate bonds of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). When human cells need energy, they get it from ATP.

Plants get their basic energy from sunlight. They use water from the soil and carbon dioxide from the air to form glucose. Glucose can then be repackaged as ATP. Most plants use chlorophyll to carry on this photophosphorylation.

Some bacteria, the halobacteria, can carry on both oxidative phosphorylation and photophosphorylation. They can both ingest nutrients and, under the right conditions, create ATP through a photosynthetic mechanism. In other words, they can get basic energy from either food or sunlight.

The halobacteria don’t use chlorophyll to do this. Instead, they use retinal, the same pigment that responds to light in the human eye. The retinal exists in conjunction with protein molecules in a complex called bacteriorhodopsin.

Your bodies have been modified to include a radically genetically engineered from of bacteriorhodopsin.

It exists under clear membranes which now exist at the ends of tiny tubules projecting between the dead skin cells of your outer epidermis. The modified bacteriorhodopsin is far more efficient, orders of magnitude more efficient, at capturing photons than are any thylakoids found in nature.

Additional tubules, with active transport capacity, also end in a permeable membrane at the surface of your skin. These can selectively absorb molecules of carbon, plus additional necessary elements, directly from the soil or other organic material. The absorbed molecules are acted upon by genemod enzymes, working in conjunction with your human thylakoids, and with nanoma-chinery replicating in your cells.

This is not as foreign to you as it may sound. The human embryo, when only a few cells old, develops an outer layer of cells called the trophoblast. The trophoblast possesses the unusual property of being able to digest or liquefy the tissues it comes in contact with. This is how the embryo implants itself in the uterus wall. Your reengineered skin can now liquefy and absorb other kinds of matter.

You have also been injected with genetically engineered nitrogen-fixing microorganisms.

Human tissue consists 96.6 percent of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The nanomachinery now in your cells has been programmed to arrange these plus other less concentrated elements into whatever molecules are needed. These processes are all powered by sunlight, used far more efficiently than in nature. The energy from sunlight is stored as ATP to be used when there is no sunlight. Less than thirty minutes’ naked exposure per twenty-four-hour period is sufficient. A surplus can, as with food, be stored as glycogen or fat.

The Cell Cleaner will destroy any cancerous cells engendered as a result of ultraviolet exposure. It will also, of course, destroy any toxic molecules absorbed from the soil, by rearranging their atoms into nontoxic forms.

Nanomachinery will keep your gastrointestinal system capable of operation, even when it is unused for long periods of time. Genemod enzymes are designed to eliminate, through allosteric interactions, any subjective feelings of hunger.

When food is available, you can eat, and store energy from oxidative phosphorylation. When food is not available, you can lie on the soil, in the sunlight, and store energy through photo-phosphorylation.

Now you understand.

You are now autotrophic.

You are now free.