“Billy,” I said carefully, “who else knows you have food and warehouse goods hoarded here?”
“Nobody but us four,” he said, not meeting my eyes. He was ashamed.
“Don’t tell anyone. No matter how much they say they need this stuff.”
Billy looked helplessly at Annie. I knew he was on my side. East Oleanta, I had discovered, had a healthy barter economy existing side-by-side with the official donkey one. Skinned rabbits, good roasted over an open fire, were traded for spectacularly hideous handmade wall hangings or embroidered jacks. Nuts for toys, sunshine for food. Services, everything from babysitting to sex, for music decks or homemade wooden furniture from trees in the forest. I could see Billy trading some of our stockpiled stuff, but not risking it all by4etting anyone know we had it. Not when there was a chance Lizzie might need it.
Annie was another story. She would die for Lizzie, but she had in her the sharing and fairness and unthinking conformity that create a sense of community.
I stretched. “I think I’ll go witness the liberation of the District Supervisor Aaron Simon Samuelson Goods Distribution Center.”
Annie gave a sour look without actually looking at me. Billy, who knew that I was equipped with both a personal shield and stun weaponry, nonetheless said unhappily, “Be careful.” Lizzie jumped up. “I’m going too, me!”
“You shut up, child! You ain’t going no place, you, that dangerous!” Annie, of course. The broken gravrail temporarily invalidated Lizzie’s leverage: her threat to leave.
Lizzie pressed her lips together so tightly they all but disappeared. I had never seen her do that before. She was still Annie’s child. “I am too going, me.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll tell you what happens.” Lizzie subsided, grumbling.
Annie was not grateful.
A small crowd, twenty or so, battered on the foamcast door of the warehouse, using a sofa as battering ram. I knew this was hopeless; if the Bastille had been made of foamcast, Marie Antoinette would have gone on needing wigs. I lounged across the street, leaning against a turquoise apartment building, and watched.
The door gave way.
Twenty people gave a collective shout and rushed inside. Then twenty people gave another shout, this one furious. I examined the door hinges. They had been duragem, taken apart atom by atom by dissemblers.
“There’s nothing in here!”
“They cheated us, them!”
“Fucking bastards—”
I peered inside. The first small room held a counter and terminal. A second door led to the depository, which was lined with empty shelves, empty bins, empty overhead hooks where jacks and vases and music chips and chairs and cleaning ’bots and hand tools should go. I felt a chill prickle over me from neck to groin, an actual frisson complexly made of fear and fascination. It was true then. The economy, the political structure, the duragem crisis, were acutally this bad. For the first time in over a hundred years, since Kenzo Yagai invented cheap energy and remade the world, there really was not enough to go around. The politicians were conserving production for the cities, where larger numbers of voters resided, and writing off less populous or less easily reached areas with fewer votes. East Oleanta had been written off.
No one was going to come to fix the gravrail.
The crowd howled and cursed: “Fucking donkeys! Fuck them all, us!” I heard the sound of shelves ripping from the walls; maybe they’d had duragem bolts.
I walked rapidly but calmly back outside. Twenty people is enough to be a mob. A stun gun only fires in one direction at a time, and a personal shield, although unbreachable, does not prevent its wearer from being held in one place without food or water.
The hotel or Annie’s? Whichever I chose, I might be there semipermanently.
The hotel had a networked terminal I could use to call for help, if I chose my moment well. Annie’s apartment was on the edge of town, which suddenly seemed safer than dead center. It also had food, doors whose hinges were not duragem, and an owner already hostile to me. And Lizzie.
I walked quickly to Annie’s.
Halfway there, Billy rounded the corner of a building, carrying a baseball bat. “Quick, doctor! Come this way, you!”
I stopped cold. All my fear, which had been a kind of heightened excitement, vanished. “You came to protect me?”
“This way!” He was breathing hard, and his old legs trembled. I put a hand on his elbow to steady him.
“Billy… lean against this wall. You came to protect me?”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me down an alley, the same one the stomps used for creative loitering when the weather had been warm. I heard it, then — the shouts from the opposite end of the street from the warehouse. More angry people, screaming about donkey politicians.
Billy led me through the alley, behind a few buildings, on our hands and knees through what seemed to be a mini-junkyard of scrapped scooters, chunks of plastisynth, mattresses, and other large unlovely discards. At the back of the cafe he did something to the servoentrance used by delivery ’bots; it opened. We crawled into the automated kitchen, which was busily preparing soysynth to look like everything else.
“How—”
“Lizzie,” he gasped, “before she even… learned nothing… from you,” and even through his incipient heart attack I heard his pride. He slid down the wall and concentrated on breathing more slowly. His hectic color subsided.
I looked around. In one corner was a second, smaller stockpile of food, blankets, and necessities. My eyes prickled.
“Billy…”
He was still catching his breath. “Don’t nobody know… about this, so they won’t think, them … to look for you here.”
Whereas they might have in Annie’s apartment. People had seen me with Lizzie. He wasn’t protecting me; he was protecting Lizzie from being associated with me.
I said, “Will the whole town go Bastille now?”
“Huh?”
I said, “Will the whole town riot and smash things and look for somebody to blame and hurt?”
He seemed astounded by the idea. “Everybody? No, of course not, them. What you hear now is just the hotheads that don’t never know, them, how to act when something’s different. They’ll calm down, them. And the good people like Jack Sawicki, he’ll get them organized to seeing about getting useful things done.”
“Like what?”
“Oh,” he waved a hand vaguely. His breathing was almost normal again. “Putting by blankets for anybody who really needs one. Sharing stuff that ain’t going to be coming in. We had a shipment of soysynth, us, just last week — the kitchen won’t run out for a while, though there won’t be no extras. Jack will make sure, him, that people know that.”
Unless the kitchen broke, of course. Neither of us said it.
I said quietly, “Billy, will they look for me at Annie’s?”
He looked at the opposite wall. “Might.”
“They’ll see the stockpiled stuff.”
“Most of it’s here. What you saw is mostly empty buckets, them. Annie, she’s putting them in the recycler now.”
I digested this. “You didn’t trust me to know about this place. You were hoping I’d leave before I had to know.”
He went on staring at the wall. Conveyer belts carried bowls of soysynth “soup” toward the flash heater. I looked again at the stockpile; it was smaller than I’d thought at first. And if the kitchen did break, then of course it would be only a matter of time before the homegrown mob remembered the untreated soysynth that must be behind their foodbelt somewhere. Billy must have other piles. In the woods? Maybe.
“Will anybody bother you or Annie or Lizzie because I used to be with you, even if I’m not now?”
He shook his head. “Folks ain’t like that.”
I doubted this. “Wouldn’t it be better to bring Lizzie here?”