“Aren’t you afraid your troops will get restless, doing nothing like this? What did General Marion do with his men between battles?” I put down my spoon; I hated him too much to even pretend to eat in his presence. God, I wanted a drink.
He seemed surprised. “Why, Mr. Arlen, sir, they don’t ordinarily do nothin’. This here’s Sunday, the Sabbath. Come tomorrow, we go back to regular drill. General Marion knew the value of a day for rest and recuperation of the human spirit.”
He looked around with satisfaction at the desultory gambling, scooter watching, slumped figures probably on sunshine. Only three faces in the whole damn room showed any real animation.
Joncey and Abigail, smiling at each other, Abby still sewing on billowing patterned lace. And Peg.
“Eat your stew, son,” Hubbley said kindly. “Y’all will need food to keep your strength up.”
I left my spoon where it lay. “No,” I said. “I won’t.” Of course he didn’t understand that. But Peg, with animal alertness, caught something in my tone. She looked at me hard, before she went back to watching Jimmy Hubbley, her sullen face transformed by awe and respect and the hopeless, longing love of an ordinary person for one clearly as far above her as a god.
III
OCTOBER 2114
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Ten
The most remarkable thing about being in an off-line dump like East Oleanta was my realization that the GSEA didn’t know where Miranda Sharifi was. They were a sophisticated and determined agency, but apparently they didn’t know where I was either. I wasn’t using any of the identities that Colin Kowalski had issued me, and I had changed personae three times on the way to East Oleanta. “Victoria Turner” had credentials with the IRS, the state of Texas, the bank where her family trust was stashed, educational software franchises, the National Health Care Institute, grocery stores… My larcenous friend was good at what he did. Good enough to convince Huevos Verdes… who knew? But I felt confident the GSEA didn’t.
The second most remarkable thing was that I didn’t call up the GSEA and tell them where I was and what I suspected. I put this down to hubris. I wanted to be able to say, “Here is Miranda Sharifi, lattitude 43°45'l6'' longitude 74°50'86'', it’s an illegal genemod lab, go get her, boys,” instead of saying, “Well, I think she’s here someplace nearby, possibly, although I have no proof.” If I were a regular agent, my silence would have been intolerable. But I wasn’t a regular agent. I wasn’t a regular anything. And I wanted, once in my ineffectual life, to succeed at something by myself. I wanted that very badly.
Of course, like the GSEA, I didn’t exactly know where Miranda was, either, although I suspected she was underground somewhere in the wooded Adirondack Mountains near East Oleanta. But I didn’t have the faintest idea how to actually find her.
Until Lizzie Francy.
I went back to see Lizzie Francy the same evening I first told her about simple computer operations, the day after I’d put a medpatch on her. I’d seen how Billy Washington changed color when I’d asked about Eden. That old man was the worst liar I’d ever seen. He knew something about Eden; he was hopelessly in love with the much tougher and more conventional Annie; Lizzie could do anything with him she chose. Poor Billy.
Lizzie still sat on the spectacularly ugly plastisynth sofa, dressed in a pink nightshirt, her hair in sixteen braids tied with pink ribbon. Electronic parts lay scattered over her blanket. I viewed her around Billy, who opened the door but didn’t want to let me in.
“Lizzie’s asleep, her.”
“No, she isn’t, Billy. She’s right there.”
“Vicki!” Lizzie cried in her little-girl voice, and something unexpected turned over in my chest. “You’re here!”
“She’s sick, her, too sick for no company.”
“I’m fine, me,” Lizzie said. “Let Vicki in, Billy. Pleeeaasse?”
He did, unhappily. Annie wasn’t around. I said, “What have you got there, Lizzie?”
“The apple peeler ’bot from the cafe kitchen,” she said promptly, and without guilt. Billy winced. “It broke and I took it apart, me, to see if I can fix it.”
“And can you?”
“No. Can you?” She looked at me with hungry brown eyes. Billy left the apartment.
“Probably not,” I said. I’m not a ’bot tech. But let me see.”
“I’ll show you, me.”
She did. She put together the pieces of the peeler ’bot, which had a simple standard Kellor chip powered by Y-energy. I went to school with Alison Kellor, who always professed a world-weary disdain for the electronic empire she would inherit. Lizzie assembled the ’bot in about two minutes and showed me how it wouldn’t work despite an active chip. “See this little teeny bit here, Vicki? Where the peeler arm fits onto the ’bot? It’s sort of melted, it.”
I said, “What do you think did that?”
The big brown eyes looked at me. “I don’t know, me.”
“I do.” The destroyed joint was duragem. Had been duragem, until attacked by the renegade replicating dissembler.
“What melted it, Vicki?”
I turned the ’bot over in my hands, looking for other duragem joints. They were there, between the less durable but cheaper nonmoving plastics. The others weren’t “sort of melted, them.” But neither were a few of the duragem parts.
“What melted it, Vicki? Vicki?” I felt a hand on my arm.
Why hadn’t the other duragem joints been attacked? Because the dissembler was clocked. It had self-destructed after a certain time, and had also stopped replicating after making a certain number of copies of itself. Much — maybe even most — nanotech had this safety feature.
Lizzie shook my arm. “What melted it, Vicki? What?”
“A tiny little machine. Too small to see.”
“The duragem dissembler? The one I saw, me, on the newsgrid?”
Then I did look up. “You watch the donkey newsgrids?”
She gave me a long, serious look. I could see this was an important decision for her: to trust me or not. Finally she said, as if it were an answer, “I’m almost twelve, me. My mama, she still thinks I’m six.”
“Ah,” I said. “So how does a twelve-year-old see donkey news-grids? They’re never on at the cafe.”
“Nothing’s on in the middle of the night. Some nights. I go there, me, and watch.”
“You sneak out?”
She nodded solemnly, sure that this admission would bring down the world. She was right. I had never imagined a Liver kid with that much ambition or curiosity or intelligence or guts. Lizzie Francy was not supposed to exist. She was as much a wild card as the duragem dissembler, and as unwelcome. To both Livers and donkeys.
And then I saw a way to use her difference.
“Lizzie, how’d you like to make a bargain with me?”
She looked wary.
“If you tell me what I want to know, I’ll help you learn as much as I can about how machines work.”
Lizzie’s face changed. She leapt on my words like the promising little piranha she was.
“You promised, you. Vicki, I heard you, me, and that was a promise. You say you’ll help me find out everything about how machines work!”
“I said, ‘as much as I can.’ Not everything.”
“But you promised, you.”