Everybody has her own definition of decency.
“Vicki,” Lizzie whispered, “what are we going to do, us?”
“We’re going to give up,” I said.
I made the call from a secluded place down by the river, away from Annie’s suspicious eyes. I had forbidden Lizzie to follow me, but of course she did anyway. The air was cold but the sun shone. I wriggled my butt into a depression in the snow on the riverbank and cut the transmitter from my leg.
It was an implant, of course: that was the only way to be positive it couldn’t be stolen from me, except by people who knew what they were doing. After the GSEA had it installed, I’d gone to some people I knew and had detached and taken out the automatic homing-signal part of it, which of course was there. You needed professionals for that. You didn’t need professionals to remove the transmitter itself for use. That could be done with a little knowledge, a local anesthetic, and a keen-edged knife, and in a pinch you could do without either the anesthetic or the keen edge.
I didn’t have to. I slid the implant from under the skin of my thigh, sealed the small incision, and wiped the blood off the transmitter wrapping. I unsealed it. Lizzie’s black eyes were enormous in her thin face.
I said, “I told you not to come. Are you going to faint now?”
“Blood don’t make me faint!”
“Good.” The transmitter was a flat black wafer on my palm. Lizzie regarded it with interest.
“That uses Malkovitch wave transformers, doesn’t it?” And then, in a different voice, “You’re going to call the government to come help us.”
“Yes.”
“You could have called before. Any time.”
“Yes.”
The black eyes stayed steady. “Then why didn’t you?”
“The situation wasn’t desperate enough.”
Lizzie considered this. But she was a child, still, under the frightening intelligence and the borrowed language and the pseudo-technical sophistication I had taught her. And she had been through a terrifying two weeks. Abruptly she pounded on my knees, soft ineffectual blows from cold mittened hands. “You could of got us help before! And Billy wouldn’t of got hurt and Mr. Sawicki wouldn’t of died and I wouldn’t of had to be so very very very hungry! You could of! You could of!”
I activated the transmitter by touch code and said clearly, “Special Agent Diana Covington, 6084 slash A, to Colin Kowalski, 83 slash H. Emergency One priority: sixteen forty-two. Repeat, sixteen forty-two. Send large task force.”
“I’m so hungry,” Lizzie sobbed against my knees.
I put the transmitter in my pocket and pulled her onto my lap. She buried her head in my neck; her nose felt cold. I looked at the river choked with ice, at the blood from the wrapper on the dirty snow, at the uncharacteristically blue sky. It would take the GSEA maybe a few hours to arrive from New York. But the SuperSleepless, at their hidden Eden, were already here. And of course there was no way they would not have picked up my message. They picked up everything. Or so I had been told.
I held Lizzie and made pointless maternal noises. Her cold nose dribbled into my neck.
“Lizzie, did I ever tell you about a dog I saw once? A genemod pink dog that should never have existed, poor thing?”
But she only went on sobbing, cold and hungry and betrayed. It was actually just as well. The story about Stephanie Brunell’s dog seemed, at this point, lame even to me, something I had once believed in, probably still did, but could no longer clearly recall.
Like so much else.
The GSEA showed up within the hour, which I have to admit impressed me. First came the planes, then the aircars, and by nightfall, the gravrail was up, roaring into East Oleanta with a complement of thirty calm-eyed agents, some techs, and a lot of food. Government types work best on a full stomach. The techs went around town repairing things. The GSEA commandeered the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe, threw a Y-shield around the half of it farthest from the techs stocking the foodbelt, and ordered everybody else to stay out, which the good citizens were happy to do because food was being dispensed from the ruins of the warehouse. God knows how they were cooking it. Maybe they were eating soysynth raw.
“Ms. Covington? I’m Charlotte Prescott. I’m in temporary command here, until the arrival of Colin Kowalski from the West Coast. Come with me, please.”
She was tall, flame-haired, absolutely beautiful. Expensive genes. She had the accent that goes with the monied Northeast, and eyes like the Petrified Forest. I went with her, but not without a patented little Diana-protest: spirited but essentially ineffectual.
“I don’t want to talk until I’m sure that two people are getting fed. Three actually. An old man and a little girl and the girl’s mother… they might not be able to handle being part of that mob outside…” What was I saying? Annie Francy could handle being part of Custer’s Last Stand, protesting all the while that the Indians weren’t behaving properly.
Charlotte Prescott said, “Lizzie Francy and Billy Washington are being seen to. The guard at the apartment will procure them food.”
And she had only been in East Oleanta ten minutes.
Charlotte Prescott and I sat opposite each other in two plas-tisynth cafe chairs and I told her everything I knew. That I had followed Miranda Sharifi from Washington to East Oleanta, after which she had disappeared. That I’d been searching the woods for her. That some of the locals half believed there was a place in the mountains they called Eden, probably a shielded underground illegal genemod lab, and that I believed that was where Huevos Verdes was releasing the duragem dissembler. That I’d followed various locals into the woods in the hopes of discovering Eden, but had never seen anything, and was now convinced nobody knew where, or if, this mythical place existed.
This last wasn’t strictly true. I still suspected Billy Washington knew something. But I wanted to tell that directly to Colin Ko-walski, whom I halfway trusted, rather than to Charlotte Prescott, whom I trusted not at all. She reminded me of Stephanie Brunell. Billy was an ignorant and exasperating old man, but he was not a pink dog with four ears and overly big eyes, and I was not going to watch him go over any metaphorical terrace railing.
Prescott said, “Why didn’t you report your whereabouts, and Miranda Sharifi’s suspected whereabouts, as soon as you reached East Oleanta? Or even en route?”
“I was fairly sure that the SuperSleepless outpost would be able to monitor any technology I used.”
This was a fair hit; not even the GSEA flattered itself that it could outinvent Supers. Prescott showed no reaction.
“You were in violation of every Agency procedure.”
“I’m not a regular agent. I run wild-card for Colin Kowalski, under informant status. You wouldn’t even know about me now if he hadn’t told you.”
Still no reaction. She had the ability, like some reptiles, to just draw a nicitating membrane between herself and any blowing insinuating sand. I saw this about her: her limitations, her rigidity born of the automatic assumption of superiority. Yet I still couldn’t help feeling unworthy beside her, in a way I hadn’t felt unworthy in months. Me in my rumpled turquoise jacks and untrimmed hair, she looking like something off a holovid ad for the Central Park East Enclave. Even her fingernails were perfect, genemod rose so they never had to be painted.
The questions went on. I was as honest as I could be, except for Billy. It didn’t help my mood, which was middling lousy. I was doing what I should, what I needed to do, what was right and patriotic for my country three cheers and “Hail to the Chief.” No, I don’t mean that cynicism — it was right. So why did I feel so terrible?