I felt light, me, filled with light, like I might float off the floor. She wasn’t going to send me away. I could stay, me, with her and Lizzie. Just like we were before.
“Sure, Annie. I understand, me. We won’t never talk about it again.”
She let out a long sigh, her, like she’d been holding it in since last night. Maybe she was. “Thank you, Billy. You’re a good friend, you.”
We went back out to Lizzie, who was listening hard to Dr. Turner talk donkey talk. Here was more trouble.
“. . . isn’t like that, Lizzie. The basic principle of the computer is binary, which just means ‘two.’ Tiny switches, too small to see, with two positions: on and off. They make a code.”
“Like base two in math,” Lizzie said eagerly, but underneath her eagerness she was tired so deep, her, she could hardly keep her eyes open.
Annie said sharply, “She has to sleep now, her. Is the examination done, Doctor?”
“Yes,” Dr. Turner said, standing up. She looked bewildered, her; I didn’t see no reason why. “But I’ll come back this afternoon.”
“Medunit don’t see people twice a day,” Annie said.
“No,” Dr. Turner said, still looking bewildered. She stared at Lizzie, who was already asleep, her. “That’s a remarkable child.”
“Bye, doctor,” Annie said.
Dr. Turner ignored her. She stood quiet, her, but tensed up inside, like she was making some kind of important decision. “Billy — listen to what I’m going to tell you. Stockpile whatever you can from the food line here in this apartment. And if the warehouse reopens, stockpile blankets and jacks and — oh — toilet paper and soap and whatever else occurs to you. And buckets for water — lots of buckets. Do it.” She said it like nobody else but her could of thought of all that. Like / couldn’t of thought of it.
Annie said, “Folks start stockpiling, them, there ain’t going to be enough for everybody else.”
Dr. Turner stared at Annie bleakly. “I know, Annie.”
“Ain’t right.”
The doctor said softly, “A lot of things ain’t right.”
“So you telling us, you, to make it more not right?”
Dr. Turner didn’t answer. I had the weird feeling, me, that she didn’t have an answer. A donkey without an answer.
With a last look at Lizzie, Dr. Turner left. Annie said, “I don’t want her around here no more! She can just leave Lizzie alone!”
I could of told Annie, me, that wasn’t going to happen. Not from the look in Lizzie’s tired, sick eyes when the donkey doctor was telling her about that computer code. This was what Lizzie’d been looking for, her, all her life. Looking in the school software that Dr. Turner talked down, and in the East Oleanta library when we still had one, and in taking apart the apple peeler ’bot in the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe kitchen. This. Somebody who could tell her, them, what that smart little throwback mind wanted to know. And Annie wasn’t going to be able to stop it. Annie didn’t know that, her, but I did. Lizzie was already nearly twelve years old, her, and ain’t nobody been able to really stop her from anything since she was eight.
But I didn’t say nothing, me, to Annie. Not then. Annie watched Lizzie sleep with her whole heart in her eyes, and I couldn’t say nothing, because I was too busy, me, watching them both.
That afternoon, though, I did hunt up Jack Sawicki, me, and ask him for a terminal password. He gave it to me, him, without asking too many questions. We go back a long way, Jack and me, and besides he had his hands full. A technician actually arrived, her, from Albany to fix the medunit. And there was supposed to be a big all-lodge dance that night in the cafe. Three lodges combined, them, to give the party. There was a dance jam, and betting games, and some kind of bare-breasted beauty contest, and most of the young people in town were going, which meant testing all the security ’bots. Especially since the gravrail was running again, it, and word of the dance might of traveled to other towns. Jack didn’t even ask, him, why I wanted the password.
I walked, me, to the hotel. Dr. Turner wasn’t around. It had turned cool for August; maybe she went for another walk in the woods, looking for Eden. She wasn’t going to find it. I had looked, me, and there wasn’t nothing nowhere near where Doug Kane had keeled over beside that rabid raccoon. No place that big-headed girl could of come from.
I said to the hotel HT, “Newsgrid mode. Password Thomas Alva Edison.” Jack don’t want the whole town knowing the hotel HT can go newsgrid; you’d have every Tom, Dick, and Harry in here, them, who want to watch a different channel than the HT at the cafe or the lodge houses.
“Newsgrid mode,” the HT said cheerfully. It’s always cheerful, it. “What channel, please?”
“Some donkey channel.”
“What channel, please?”
I tried different numbers, me, until I found a donkey newsgrid. Then I sat and watched, me, for an hour, trying to remember the words Dr. Turner explained. Molecular bonds. Dissemblers. Alloy. Duragem. Only the newsgrid didn’t use those words, it, except for “duragem.” Instead it used words like “proposed epicenter” and “replication rate equations” and “Stoddard equations for field failure curves” and “manual replacement efforts falling behind incident rate.” I watched anyway, me. After an hour I got up and said, “Information mode.”
I went home, me, and got Lizzie’s and Annie’s meal chips. When nobody in the cafe was near the foodbelt, I took everything the chips would give me and put it all in a clean covered bucket and carried it home. Lizzie was still asleep, her, holding her doll. I went to the warehouse, which was opened again after a new shipment came on the gravrail, and got two more buckets, three blankets, and three sets of jacks on all our chips. Plus a new door lock, flowerpots, and a suitcase. The tech there looked at me funny, him, but didn’t say nothing. I filled all the buckets with clean water, one at a time, and lugged them, me up the stairs to Annie’s apartment. At the end my back ached and I was panting like the old fool I was.
But I didn’t stop, me. I rested for ten minutes and then borrowed Annie’s broom. I took it down to the hotel. People were carrying plasticloth banners into the cafe to decorate for the dance. They laughed and joked, them; a young girl flashed her breasts. Getting ready for tonight’s contest. A few strangers checked themselves into the hotel on their New York State chips. They chattered on about the dance. Dr. Turner was still gone, her.
I took Annie’s broom, me, and swept all the dead leaves out of the hotel lobby, all the leaves left by the broken cleaning ’bot that wasn’t never going to get fixed now because it wasn’t all that important compared to other breakdowns, all the leaves that had died, them, since last year, before all the breakdowns started and the rabid coons first come to East Oleanta.
Nine
When I left Seattle for Huevos Verdes, it was on a plane from Kevin Baker’s corporate fleet. Kevin’s reasons for not following the rest of the Sleepless to Sanctuary, unlike Leisha’s, were not idealistic. He was Sanctuary’s financial liaison with the rest of the planet. I figured that a Sleepless plane was the least likely in the world to crash from duragem dissembler damage. The plane would have been checked and rechecked compulsively; the Sleepless do safety very well. “Because we’ve had so little of it,” Kevin said somberly when I phoned him and begged the use of plane and pilot. I was not interested at that moment in the social problems of the Sleepless. Kevin had never liked me, and I’d never asked him for any favors before. But I did now. I was going to force a showdown at Huevos Verdes, learn some important answers. Maybe Kevin knew that. You never know how much they know.