I don’t say this aloud.
Terry Mwakambe jumped down from the windowsill. He hadn’t said a single word the whole time we’d been in the room. His thought strings, Miri said, consisted almost entirely of equations. But now he said, “Lunch?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Lunch! The one tie between Terry Mwakambe and Drew Arlen: food. Surely even Terry and Miri must see the joke, standing here in this room, this building, this project. . . Lunch!
Neither of them laughed. I felt the shape of their bewilderment. It was a rain of tiny, tear-shaped droplets, falling on everything, falling on the apocalypse in my mind, falling on me, light and cold and smothering as snow.
Four
One night in another lifetime Eugene, who came before Rex and after Claude, asked me what the United States reminded me of. That was the sort of question to which Gene was given: inviting metaphorical grandiosity, which in turn invited his scorn. I replied that the United States had always seemed to me like some powerful innocent beast, lushly beautiful, with the cranial capacity of a narrow-headed deer. Look how it stretches its sleek muscles in the sunlight. Look how it bounds high. Look how it runs gracefully straight into the path of the oncoming train. This answer had the virtue of being so inflatedly grandiose that to object to it on those grounds became superfluous. It was beside the point that the answer was also true.
Certainly from my gravrail I could see enough of the lush, mangled carcass. We’d come over the Rockies at quarter speed so the Liver passengers could enjoy the spectacular view. Purple mountain majesties and all that. Nobody else even glanced out the window. I stayed glued to it, savoring all the asinine superiority of genuine awe.
At Garden City, Kansas, I changed to a local, zipping through gorgeous countryside at 250 miles an hour, crawling through crappy little Liver towns at nothing an hour. “Why not justly to Washington?” Colin Kowalski had said, incredulous. “You’re not supposed to be pretending to be a Liver, after all.” I’d told him I wanted to see the Liver towns whose integrity I was defending against potential artificial genetic corruption. He hadn’t liked my answer any better than Gene had.
Well, now I was seeing them. The mangled carcass.
Each town looked the same. Streets fanning out from the grav-rail station. Houses and apartment blocks, some pure foamcast and some foamcast added onto older buildings of brick or even wood. The foamcast colors were garish, pink and marigold and cobalt and a very popular green like lobster guts. Aristocratic Liver leisure did not confer aristocratic taste.
Each town boasted a communal cafe the size of an airplane hangar, a warehouse for goods, various lodge buildings, a public bath, a hotel, sports fields, and a deserted-looking school. Everything was plastered with holosigns: Supervisor S. R. ElectMe Warehouse. Senator Frances Fay FamilyMoney Cafe. And beyond the town, barely visible from the gravrail, the Y-energy plant and shielded robofactories that kept it all going. And, of course, the scooter track, inevitable as death.
Somewhere in Kansas a family climbed onto the train and plunked themselves down on the seats across from me. Daddy, Mommy, three little Livers, two with runny noses, everybody in need of a diet and gym. Rolls of fat bounced under Mommy Liver’s bright yellow jacks. Her glance brushed me, traveled on, reversed like radar.
“Hey,” I said.
She scowled and nudged her mate. He looked at me and didn’t scowl. The cubs gazed silently, the boy — he was about twelve — with a look like his daddy’s.
Colin had warned me against even trying to pass for a Liver; he said there’d be no way I could fool Sleepless. I’d said I didn’t want to fool Sleepless; I only wanted to blend into the local flora. He said I couldn’t. Apparently he was right. Mommy Liver took one look at my genemod-long legs, engineered face, and Anne Boleyn neck that cost my father a little trust fund, and she knew. My poison-green jacks, soda-can jewelry (very popular; you made it yourself), and shit-brown contact lenses made not a bit of difference to her. Daddy Son weren’t so sure, but, then, they didn’t really care. Breast size, not genescan, was on their mind.
“I’m Darla Jones, me,” I said cheerfully. I had a lock-pocket full of various chips under various names, some of which the GSEA had provided, some of which they knew nothing about. It’s a mistake to let the agency provide all of your cover. The time might come when you want cover from them. All of my identities were documented in federal databases, looking as if they had long pasts, thanks to a talented friend the GSEA also knew nothing about. “Going to Washington, me.”
“Arnie Shaw,” the man said eagerly. “The train, it break down yet?”
“Nah,” I said. “Probably will, though, it.”
“What can you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Keeps things interesting.”
“Arnie,” Mommy Liver said sharply, interrupting this mild conversational excursion, “back here, us. There’s more seats.” She gave me a look that would scorch plastisynth.
“Plenty of seats up here, Dee.”
“Arnie!”
“ ‘Bye,” I said. They walked away, the woman muttering under her breath. Bitch. I should let the SuperSleepless turn her descendants into four-armed tailless guard dogs. Or whatever they had in mind. I leaned my head against the back of the seat and closed my eyes. We slowed down for another Liver town.
As soon as we left it, the littlest Shaw was back. A girl of about five, she crept along the aisle like a kitten. She had a pert little face and long dirty brown hair.
“You got a pretty bracelet, you.” She looked longingly at the soda-can atrocity on my wrist, all curling jangles of some lightweight alloy bendable as warm wax. Some besotted voter had sent it and the matching earrings to David when he was running for state senator. He’d kept it as a joke.
I slipped the bracelet off my wrist. “You want it, you?”
“Really?” Her face shone. She snatched the bracelet from my outstretched fingers and scampered back down the aisle, blue shirt-tail flapping. I grinned. Too bad kittens inevitably grow up into cats.
A minute later Mommy Liver loomed. “Keep your bracelet, you. Desdemona, she got her own jewelry!”
Desdemona. Where do they ever hear these names? Shakespeare doesn’t play at scooter tracks.
The woman looked at me from very hard eyes. “Look, you keep, you, to your kind, and we keep to ours. Better that way all around. You understand, you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and popped out my lenses. My eyes are an intense, genemod violet. I gazed at her calmly, hands folded on my lap.
She waddled away, muttering. I caught the words, “These people…”
“If I find I can’t pass for a Liver,” I’d told Colin, “I’ll pass for a semi-crazy donkey trying to pass for a Liver. I wouldn’t be the first donkey to go native. You know, the working-class person pathetically trying to pass for an aristo. Hide in plain sight.”
Colin had shrugged. I’d thought he already regretted recruiting me, but then I realized that he hoped my antics would draw attention away from the real GSEA agents undoubtedly heading for Washington. The Federal Forum for Science and Technology, popularly known as the Science Court, was hearing Market Request no. 1892-A. What made this market request different from numbers 1 through 1891 was that it was being proposed by Huevos Verdes Corporation. For the first time in ten years, the Super-Sleepless were seeking government approval to market a patented genemod invention in the United States. They didn’t have a fish’s chance on the moon, of course, but it was still pretty interesting. Why now? What were they after? And would any of the twenty-seven show up personally at the Science Court hearing?