His furrowed face turned stubborn. “Only if I have to, me. Better I bring food and stuff out.”
“At least make her hide that terminal and crystal library I gave her.”
He nodded and stood. His knees weren’t trembling anymore. He picked up his baseball bat and I hugged him, a long hard hug that surprised him so much he actually staggered. Or maybe I pushed him slightly.
“Thank you, Billy.”
“You’re welcome, Doctor Turner.”
He gave me the code to the servoentrance door, then crawled cautiously out. I made a blanket nest on the floor and sat in it. From my jacks I pulled out the handheld monitor. The homer I’d fastened firmly inside his deepest pocket when he staggered off balance showed Billy walking back to Annie’s. He wouldn’t go anywhere else today, maybe for several days. When he did, I wanted to know about it.
Rex, who came before Paul and after Eugene, once told me something interesting about organizations. There are essentially only two types in the entire world, Rex had said. When people in the first type of organization either don’t follow the organization’s rules or otherwise become too great a pain in the ass, they can be kicked out. After that they cease to be part of the organization. These organizations include sports teams, corporations, private schools, country clubs, religions, cooperative enclaves, marriages, and the Stock Exchange.
But when people in the second type of organization don’t follow the rules, they can’t be kicked out because there isn’t any place to send them. No matter how useless or aggravating or dangerous are the unwanted members, the organization is stuck with them. These organizations include maximum-security prisons, families with impossible nine-year-olds, nursing homes for the terminally ill, and countries.
Had I just seen my country kick out an unwanted and aggravating town of voters who had been following the rules?
Most donkeys were not cruel. But desperate people — and most especially desperate politicians — had been known to act in ways they might not usually act.
I settled my back against the wall and watched the automated kitchen turn soysynth into chocolate chip cookies.
Eleven
The day after East Oleanta wrecked the warehouse, them, food started coming in by air. Like I told Dr. Turner, it wasn’t all of us in East Oleanta. Only some stomps, plus the people like Celie Kane who was always angry anyway, plus a few good people who just couldn’t take it no more, them, and went temporary crazy. They all calmed down when the plane started coming every day, without no warehouse goods but with plenty of food. The tech who ran the delivery ’bots smiled wide, her, and said, “Compliments of Congresswoman Janet Carol Land.” But she had three security ’bots with her, and a bluish shimmer that Dr. Turner said was a military-strength personal shield.
Dr. Turner moved, her, out of the space behind the kitchen just an hour before the delivery ’bots started marching in. She just barely didn’t get caught, her. “All of Rome meets in the Forum,” she said, which didn’t make no sense. She moved back to the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel.
Then the women’s shower in the baths broke. A security ’bot broke. The streetlights broke, or something that controlled the streetlights. We got a cold stretch of Arctic air, and the snow wouldn’t stop, it.
“Damn snow,” Jack Sawicki grumbled every time I saw him. The same words, them, every time, like the snow was the problem. Jack had lost weight. I think he didn’t like being mayor no more.
“It’s the donkeys doing it to us,” Celie Kane shrilled. “They’re using the fucking weather, them, to kill us all!”
“Now, Celie,” her father said, reasonable, “can’t nobody control the weather.”
“How do you know what they can do, them? You’re just a dumb old man!” And Doug Kane went back to eating his soup, staring at the holoterminal show of a Lucid Dreamer concert.
At home, Lizzie said to me, “You know, Billy, Mr. Kane is right. Nobody can control the weather. It’s a chaotic system.”
I didn’t know what that meant. Lizzie said a lot of things I didn’t know, me, since she’d been doing software every day with Dr. Turner. She could even talk like a donkey now. But not around her mother. Lizzie was too smart, her, for that. I heard her say to Annie, “Nobody can’t control the weather, them.” And Annie, counting sticky buns and soyburgers rotting in a corner of the apartment, nodded without listening and said, “Bed time. Lizzie.”
“But I’m in the middle of—”
“Bed time”
In the middle of the night somebody pounded on the apartment door.
“B-B-Billy! Annie! L-L-Let me in!”
I sat up on the sofa where I slept, me. For a minute I thought I was dreaming. The room was dark as death.
“L-Let m-m-me in!”
Dr. Turner. I stumbled, me, off the sofa. The bedroom door opened and Annie came out in her white nightdress, Lizzie stuck behind her like a tail wind.
“Don’t you open that door, Billy Washington,” Annie said. “Don’t you open it, you!”
“It’s Dr. Turner,” I said. I couldn’t stand up straight, me, so fuddled with dreaming. I staggered and grabbed the corner of the sofa. “She don’t mean no harm, her.”
“Nobody comes in here! We won’t understand none of it, us!”
Then I saw she was fuddled with dreaming, too. I opened the door.
Dr. Turner stumbled in, her, carrying a suitcase but wearing a nightdress, covered with snow. Her beautiful donkey face was white and her teeth chattered. “L-L-Lock the d-door!”
Annie demanded, “You got people hunting you, them?”
“No. N-N-No… j-just let me g-g-get warm…”
It hit me then. From the hotel to our apartment wasn’t all that far, even if it was freezing out. Dr. Turner shouldn’t be that cold, her. I grabbed her shoulders. “What happened at the hotel, doctor?”
“H-H-Heating unit qu-quit.”
“Heating unit can’t quit, it,” I said. I sounded like Doug Kane trying to talk to Celie. “It’s Y-energy.”
“N-N-Not the circulating equipment. It m-m-must have dura-gem p-parts.” She stood by our unit, rubbing her hands together, her face still the same white-gray as all the snow piled in the streets.
Lizzie said suddenly, “I hear screaming!”
“Th-they’re b-burning the hotel.”
“Burning it?” Annie said. “Foamcast don’t burn!”
Dr. Turner smiled, her, one of those twisted donkey smiles that said Livers just now caught on to what donkeys already knew. “They’re trying anyway. I told them it won’t eradicate the duragem dissembler, and somebody will likely get hurt.”
“You told ’em,” Annie said, one hand on her wide hip. “And then you come here, you, with a mob following you—”
“No one’s following me. They’re far too busy trying to contravene the laws of physics. And Annie, I’m freezing. Where else would I go? The tech reprogrammed the entrance codes for the kitchen, and anyway it’s still full of delivery ’bots whenever that unpredictable plane comes.”
Annie looked at her, and she looked at Annie, and I could see, me, that there was something wrong with Dr. Turner’s speech. It wasn’t no plea for help, even if the words said that. And it wasn’t trying to sound reasonable, either. Dr. Turner really was asking Where else would I go? Can you tell me some other place I ain’t mentioned? Only it wasn’t Annie she was asking, her. It was me.
And I wasn’t about to tell her, me, that finally I knew. After all my looking, I knew where Eden was.
“You can stay here with us,” Lizzie said, and her big brown eyes looked at her mother. I felt my back muscles knot, them. This was it, the big Armaggedon between Annie and Dr. Turner. Only it wasn’t. Not yet. Maybe because Annie was afraid, her, of whose side Lizzie would take.