I stood under a pine whose branches started ten feet up the trunk, pondering my choices. From behind me Billy said quietly, “You ain’t gotten any better, you, in the woods. Not since your first time.”
I turned. “How did you do that?”
“Don’t matter how / did it, me. The question is what you think you’re doing here.”
“Following you. Again.”
“Why?”
He had never asked before. The other times I’d followed him, he’d refused to talk to me at all. He looked unusually impressive, standing there in the bleak landscape with his wrinkled face stern and judgmentaclass="underline" a Liver Moses. I said, “Billy, where is Eden?”
“That what you after, you? I don’t know where it is, me, and if I did I wouldn’t take you there.”
This was promising; when someone has reasons not to do something, he has at least conceived that it’s possible to do it. From possibility to agreement isn’t nearly as large a leap as from denial to possibility. “Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why wouldn’t you take me to Eden if you knew where it was?”
“Because it ain’t no donkey place, it.”
“Is it a Liver place?”
But he seemed to realize he’d said too much. Deliberately he put down his sack, brushed the snow off a fallen tree, and sat down with the air of a man who wasn’t going to move until I left. I would have to prod him by offering more.
“It’s not a Liver place, either, is it, Billy? It’s a Sleepless place. You’ve seen a SuperSleepless from Huevos Verdes, or more than one, in these woods. They have larger heads than normal, and they talk like they’re slowing down their speech, because they are. They think so much faster and more complexly than we do — you or me — that it’s an effort for them to choose a few simple-enough words for us to understand. You saw one, didn’t you, Billy? A man or a woman?”
He stared at me, a wrinkled somber face against the gray and white woods.
“When was this, Billy? In the summer? Or longer ago than that?”
He said, with transparent effort and equally transparent mendacity, “I never saw nobody, me.”
I walked toward him and put my hand firmly on his shoulder. “Yes, you did, you. When was it?”
He stared at the snowy ground, angry but unwilling, or unable, to show it.
“Okay, Billy,” I sighed. “If you won’t tell me, you won’t. And you’re right — I can’t follow you unseen through the woods because I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m already cold.”
Still he said nothing. I trudged back to town. Lizzie’s computer and crystal library wasn’t all that Dark Jones had bought in New York. The homing device I’d stuck on the back of his plastisynth jacket, behind the shoulder and below the neck where he wouldn’t see it until he removed the jacket, registered as a motionless dot on my handheld monitor. It stayed a motionless dot for over an hour. Wasn’t he cold?
Russell, who came before David and after Anthony, had a theory about body temperature. He said that we donkeys, who are used to having instant adjustments in anything that happens to distress us, have lost the ability to ignore slight fluctuations in body temperatures. Constant environmental pampering had softened us. Russell saw this as a positive, because it made very easy identification of the successful and the genetically highly tuned (who naturally were one and the same). Watch a person pull on a sweater for a one-degree temperature drop and you know you’re looking at a superior person. I lacked the strength of will to avoid responding to this. Sort of a Princess and the Centigrade Pea, I said, but whimsey was wasted on Russell. We parted shortly afterwards when I accused him of inventing even more artificial social gradations than the ridiculous number that already existed, and he accused me of being jealous of his superior genemod left-brain logic. The last I heard, he was running for congressional representative from San Diego, which has possibly the most monotonous climate in the country.
Maybe Billy Washington made a fire; the monitor wouldn’t show that. After an hour, as I sat in warmth in my East Oleanta hotel room, the Billy-dot moved. He walked several more miles over the course of the day, in easy stages, in various directions.
A man looking for something. At no point did the dot disappear, which would have meant he’d disappeared behind a Y-energy security shield. The same thing happened for three more days and nights. Then he came home.
Incredibly, he didn’t confront me about the homer. Either he never found it, even after he took his jacket off (hard to believe), or he did but had no idea what it was and decided not to wonder. Or — and this only occurred to me later — he saw it but thought someone else had put it there, maybe while he was sleeping, and wanted it left alone. Someone out in the woods. Someone he wanted to please.
Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. What did I know about how a Liver thought? What, in fact, did I know about how anybody thought? Would somebody who had the ability to discern that knowledge on short acquaintance have actually spent eighteen months with Russell?
Two days after Billy’s return from the woods, Annie said, “The gravrail’s broke again, it.” She didn’t say it to me. I sat in her apartment, visiting Lizzie, but Annie had yet to acknowledge directly that I was there. She didn’t look at my face, she didn’t speak to me, she maneuvered her considerable bulk around the space I occupied as if it were an inexplicable and inconvenient black hole. Probably Billy had let me in only because I’d brought a double armful of food and warehouse goods, obtained on “Victoria Turner’s” chip, to contribute to the growing stockpiles along the walls. The place smelled vaguely like a landfill where the waste-eating microorganisms had fallen behind.
“Where’s it at?” Billy said. He meant the actual train, sitting somewhere along its magnetic track.
“Right here,” Annie said. “About a quarter mile outside town, that’s what Celie Kane said, her. Some of them are mad enough to burn it.”
Lizzie looked up with interest from the handheld terminal with her precious crystal library. I hadn’t witnessed Annie’s reaction to my gift, but Lizzie had told me about it. The only reason Lizzie still owned the thing was that she’d threatened to run away on a gravrail otherwise. She was twelve, she’d told her mother — a lot of kids left home at twelve. I suppose Liver kids did, coming and going with their portable meal chips. That was when Annie had stopped speaking to me.
Lizzie said, “Can trains burn, them?”
“No,” Billy said shortly. “And it’s against the law to do hurt to them anyway.”
Lizzie digested this. “But if nobody can’t come, them, from Albany on the train to punish people who break the law—”
“They can come, them, on a plane, can’t they?” Annie snapped. “Don’t you be thinking about breaking no laws, young lady!”
“I ain’t thinking about it, me. Celie Kane is,” Lizzie said reasonably. “Besides, ain’t nobody going to come, them, to East Oleanta on a plane anymore from Albany. All those donkeys got bigger problems than us, them.”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” I said, but naturally no one answered.
Outside, in the hall, someone shouted. Feet ran past our door, came back, pounded once. Billy and Annie looked at each other. Then Billy opened the door a crack and stuck his head out. “What’s wrong?”
“The warehouse ain’t opened again, it! Second week in a row! We’re going smash that fucking building — I need another blanket and some boots, me!”
“Oh,” Billy said, and shut the door.