I said impatiently, “You have to have controls of genetic and nanotech research, Billy. Or any lunatic will go around inventing things like dissemblers.”
“Seems to me some lunatic was,” he said, more tartly than I’d ever heard him. “And look what happened. The real scientists can’t invent no way to stop it, because they ain’t allowed, them, to do no experiments themselves!”
No permitted antidotal research. It wasn’t a new argument. I’d heard it before. Never, however, from such a person, in such a situation. Billy had glimpsed Eden, and he thought the gods there were not only omnipotent but benevolent. Capable of antidotes to the evil they themselves had caused. Maybe I had thought so fleetingly, too, at the patent hearing for Miranda Sharifi’s Cell Cleaner. But SuperSleepless didn’t make mistakes, at least not on this order. If Huevos Verdes had released the duragem dissembler, it must have been deliberate, in order to destroy the culture that hated them. I couldn’t imagine any other reason. And Huevos Verdes had almost succeeded.
“Go to sleep, Billy,” I said, and rose to leave. But the old man was disposed to talk.
“I know, me, they weren’t bad. That girl, the day she saved Doug Kane’s life… and now it’s gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I ain’t never going to go down that mountain trail, me, and splash across that creek, me, and see that door in the hill open and go inside with her…”
He was maundering. Of course: The agents had given him a truth drug. Whatever he had been asked, he’d answered. A talking jag was one of the side effects when those Pharmaceuticals wore off.
“Good-bye, Billy. Annie.” I moved to the door.
Lizzie heard something in my voice. She scuttled over to me, “chicken bone” in her hand, all big eyes and thin hands. But already she looked healthier. Children respond quickly to good food.
“Vicki, we’ll have our lesson in the morning? Vicki?”
I looked at her, and suddenly I had the completely insane sensation that I understood Miranda Sharifi.
There exists a kind of desire I had never experienced, and never expected to experience. I have read about it. I have even seen it, in other people, although not many other people. It is desire so piercing, so pointed, so specific, that there is no stopping it, any more than you could stop a lance hurtled unerringly at your belly. The lance propels your whole body forward, according to the laws of physics. It changes the way your blood flows. You can die from it.
Mothers are said to feel that raw agony of longing to save their infants from deadly harm. I have never been a mother. Lovers are said to feel it for each other. I never loved like that, despite shoddy imitations with Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David. Artists and scientists are said to feel it for their work. This last was true of Miranda Sharifi.
What / had felt about Miranda Sharifi, ever since Washington, had been envy. And I hadn’t even known it.
But not now. Looking at Lizzie, knowing I would leave East Oleanta in the morning, seeing from the corner of my eye the way Annie’s bulk shifted in her chair as she watched us, the lance changed the way my blood flowed and I put both hands convulsively over my belly. “Sure, Lizzie,” I gasped, and Colin Kowalski was in my voice, guileless with donkey superiority, lying like the pigs we are.
But sometime near dawn, five or six in the morning, I woke abruptly from a blotchy sleep. Billy’s voice filled my mind: and now it’s gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I ain’t never going to go down that mountain trail, me, and splash across that creek, me, and see that door in the hill open and go inside with her…
I crept out of my room in the hastily repaired hotel. A new terminal sat on the counter, but that was far too risky. I went down to the cafe. People were there, queuing at the foodbelt, a donkey newsgrid playing animatedly on the holoterminal. Liver channels almost never ran news. If East Oleanta wanted to see itself on a grid, it would have to be a donkey grid.
I crouched in a corner, unobtrusively, and watched. Eventually the explosion came on, the sensational tracking of the duragem dissembler source that had so plagued the country, close-ups of Charlotte Prescott and of Kenneth Emile Koehler, GSEA director, in Washington. Then the explosion again. I wanted to freeze-frame the HT, but didn’t dare. Instead, I listened carefully.
A gravrail left at 7 A.M. By eight I was in Albany. There was a public library terminal at the station, for the use of Livers who were fuzzy about their destinations and wanted to look up such vital information about them as the average mean rainfall, location of public scooter tracks, or longitude and lattitude. A sign said THE ANNA NAOMI COLDWELL PUBLIC LIBRARY. Cobwebs draped the sign. Few Livers were fuzzy about their destinations, or at least about what they wanted to know about them.
I slipped in one of the credit chips the GSEA didn’t know I had. Maybe didn’t know. The terminal said, “Working. What town, city, county, or state are you interested in?”
“Collins County, New York.” My voice was slightly unsteady.
“Go ahead with your request, please.”
“Display a map of the whole county, with natural features and political units.”
When the map appeared, I asked to have sections of it enlarged, then enlarged again. The hypertext gave it to me. The map displayed lattitude and longitude.
The explosion destroying the illegal lab had not been at the base of a hill, nor anywhere near a creek.
. . . and now it’s gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I ain’t never going to go down that mountain trail, me, and splash across that creek, me, and see that door in the hill open, and go inside with her…
I believed that the GSEA had destroyed an illegal genemod lab. I believed that it was the lab that had released the duragem dissemblers. But whatever, and whosever, that lab was, it wasn’t Billy Washington’s Eden. Not the Eden at the base of a mountain and beside a creek, the Eden that had permitted Billy to see its door opening, the Eden of the big-headed savior of old men who collapse in the woods. That Eden was still there.
Which meant that whoever had released the duragem dissembler, it hadn’t been Huevos Verdes.
So who had? And was Huevos Verdes with them or against them?
On the one hand, the duragem destruction had started in East Oleanta, right around the corner from Eden. Coincidence? I doubted it. And yet Miranda Sharifi had done nothing to stop the dissembler release.
On the other hand, if the Supers were interested in destruction, why had one of them allowed Billy Washington to see the entrance to their Adirondack outpost, and to walk away with that knowledge? Why hadn’t they killed him? And why had Miranda Sharifi tried to gain legal clearance for the Cell Cleaner, a clear boon to us ordinary mortals? The Sleepless already had that biological protection, and they sure the hell didn’t need the money.
And what about the fact — Billy was right about this — that if some illegal lab did come up with something even worse than a duragem dissembler — a retrovirus that made us all zombies, say — only Huevos Verdes had the brainpower to design a counter-microorganism fast enough to prevent a whole country of ambulatory idiots.
But would they?
Was Huevos Verdes my country’s enemy, or its covert friend?
These weren’t the sort of questions a field agent was supposed to ask. A field agent was supposed to do what she was told and report any significant new developments up the chain of command. A field agent in my position should immediately call the GSEA. Again.
But if I did that, the questions would never get answered. Because Colin Kowalski already thought he knew the answer: Bomb anything too unfamiliar.
I must have stood, motionless, for fifteen minutes in front of the Anna Naomi Coldwell Public Library. Livers rushed by, hurrying to make their trains. A cleaning ’bot ambled along, scrubbing the floor. A sunshine dealer glanced at me, then away. A tech, genemod handsome, spoke into his terminal as he strode the platform.