“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.