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.