“Yes, yes, I promised. But in return you have to answer all the questions I have.”
She considered this, her head cocked to one side, the sixteen pink-tied braids all sticking out in different directions. She didn’t see any major trap. “All right.”
“Lizzie, have you ever heard of Eden?”
“In the Bible?”
“No. Here, near East Oleanta.”
Despite our agreement, she hesitated. I said, “You promised, too.”
“I heard, me, Billy and Mama talking about it. Mama said Eden don’t never exist except in the Bible. Billy, he said he wasn’t so sure, him. He said maybe it was a place in the mountains or the woods that donkeys don’t know about, and Livers might work there, them. They thought I was asleep.”
A place donkeys don’t know about. Meaning, to East Oleanta, government donkeys, practically the only kind a town like this ever saw.
“Does Billy ever go off alone into the woods? Without your mama?”
“Oh, yeah, he likes it, him. Mama wouldn’t never go off in the woods. She’s too fat.” Lizzie said this matter-of-factly; for some reason I thought suddenly of Desdemona, seizing my soda-can bracelet without guilt or evasion.
“How often does he go? How long does he stay?”
“Every couple of months, him. For five or six days. Only now he’s getting too old, him, Mama says.”
“Does that mean he won’t go any more?”
“No, he’s going next week, him. He told her he got to, unless something important breaks down and he’s afraid, him, to leave us alone. But we got the food.” She pointed to the pathetic piles of tasteless synthetic food rotting in buckets in the corners.
“When next week?”
“Tuesday.”
Lizzie knew everything. But more to the point — what did Billy know? Did he know where Miranda Sharifi was?
“What time does Billy leave when he goes to the woods?”
“Real early in the morning. Vicki, how are you going to teach me, you, everything about machines? When do we start, us?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Today.”
“You’re still recovering. You had pneumonia, you know. Do you know what that is?”
She shook her head. The silly pink ribbons bobbed. If this were my kid, I’d tie up her braids with microfilaments.
If this were my kid? Jesus.
“Pneumonia is a disease caused by bacteria, which is itself a tiny little living machine, which got destroyed in your body by another tiny living machine engineered to do that. And that’s where we’ll start tomorrow. If you have the right codes there are programs you can access on the hotel terminal, where people hardly ever go…” For the first time it occurred to me that Annie would object vigorously to this tutorial program. I might be educating Lizzie in the middle of the night.
“What codes?” Her eyes were bright and sharp as carbon-rod needles.
“I’ll show you tomorrow.”
“I already reprogrammed, me, the servoentrance door at the cafe to let me and Mama in. I can understand about the hotel terminal. Just say, you, a little bit how…”
“Good-bye, Lizzie.”
“Just say how—”
“Good-bye.”
As I closed the door, she was once more taking apart the peeler ’bot.
In the next six weeks, Lizzie spent all her free time at the hotel terminal, accessing education software in the vast donkey public library system. She appeared at the hotel at odd times, in the early morning with her hair wet from the baths, or at twilight, times I suspected Annie thought she was playing with her friends Carlena and Susie, a pair of dumb chirps. Lizzie disappeared just as abruptly, an outlaw running from the scene of the scholastic crime to report for dinner or for church. I don’t know if she accessed in the middle of the night or not; I was, sensibly, asleep. She learned at a frightening rate, once she had something substantial to learn. I didn’t control what she accessed, and I only commented when she had questions. After the first day she zeroed in on computer systems, both theory and applications.
Within a week she showed me how she’d reprogrammed a still-functional cleaning ’bot to dance, by combining, speeding up, and sequencing its normal movements. The thing jigged around my dismal hotel room as if it had a metallic seizure. Lizzie laughed so hard she fell off the bed and lay helplessly shrieking on the floor, her arms wrapped around her negligible middle, and again that unwelcome something turned over, blood warm, in my chest.
Within a month she had worked through the first two years of the American Education Association-accredited secondary school software for computer science.
After six weeks she showed me, gleefully, how she’d broken in to the Haller Corporation data banks. I peered over her shoulder, wondering if the Haller security software would trace the intrusion to East Oleanta, where there should not have existed anyone capable of data bank intrusion. Did the GSEA monitor corporate break-ins?
I was being paranoid. There must be a quarter million teenage net busters snooping around in corporate data banks just to count technological coup.
But those kids were donkeys.
“Lizzie,” I said, “no more net busting. I’m sorry, honey, but it’s dangerous.”
She pressed her lips together, a suspicious little Annie. “Dangerous how?”
“They could trace you, come here, and arrest you. And send you to jail.”
Her black eyes widened. She had some respect for authority, or at least for power. A cowardly little Annie.
“Promise,” I said, relentless.
“I promise, me!”
“And I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow I’ll go to Albany on the gravrail” — it was working again, briefly — “and buy you a handheld computer and crystal library. It has far more on it than you can access here. You won’t believe what you’ll learn to do.” And a free-held unit couldn’t be traced. I could use the “Dark Jones” account, which the high cost of a crystal library and compatible unit would just about empty. Maybe I’d better go farther than Albany to buy it. Maybe New York.
Lizzie stared at me, for once speechless. Her pink mouth made a little “O.” Then she was hugging me, smelling of warehouse distrib soap, her voice muffled against my neck.
“Vicki… a crystal library… oh, Vicki. . .”
For you. I didn’t say more. I couldn’t.
Anthony, who came before Russell and after Paul, once told me that there was no such thing as a maternal instinct, nor a paternal one either. It was all intellectual propaganda designed to urge humans toward a responsibility they didn’t really want, but couldn’t admit not wanting. It was a PR tour de force without genuine biological force.
I used to love some very stupid men.
Three days after I brought Lizzie her crystal library, I was up by 4:00 A.M., ready to follow Billy yet again into the deep woods.
This was my third trip in six weeks. Lizzie kept me informed, per our bargain, of Billy’s plans. She told me he used to go every few months, but now he went far more often. Maybe he had even made a few short trips Lizzie and I missed. Something was stepping up his scouting schedule, and I hoped it would lead me to “Eden,” careful hints about which were increasing on the local Liver channels. Broadcast from where? By whom? I’d bet anything they weren’t part of the regularly organized broadcasting from Albany.
This morning it was snowing in a desultory, nonserious way, even though it was only mid-October. In San Francisco, I hadn’t paid much attention to the “coming mini-ice age” stuff. In the Adirondacks, however, there wasn’t much choice. Everyone went around bundled in winter jacks, which were surprisingly warm, although no more tastefully dyed than summer jacks. Marigold, crimson, electric blue, poison green. And for the conservative, a dun the color of cow piles.
Which was what Billy wore when he emerged from his apartment building at 4:45 A.M. He carried a plasticloth sack. It was still dark out. He walked toward the river, which flowed by the edge of the village, only five or six blocks from what passed as downtown. I followed him unseen while there were buildings for cover. When there weren’t, I let him get out of sight and then followed his footprints in the light snow. After a mile the footsteps stopped.