Timonsville, Pennsylvania, had disappeared. The entire town of twenty-three hundred people had just packed up and dispersed. That was the closest any newsgrid came to hinting at vast changes in where people went, or why, or what microorganisms they carried with them in their diaspora.
Nobody mentioned East Oleanta at all.
In the afternoon it started to snow, even though the temperature was just barely above freezing. I’d thought about hiking into the mountains, looking for the place Billy had led us to over a month ago, but the weather made that impossible.
All night I lay awake, listening to the silence.
In the morning I took a shower at the Salvatore John DeSanto Public Baths, which were mysteriously working again. Then I returned to the cafe. East Oleanta was still deserted. I sat on the edge of a chair, like an attentive donkey schoolgirl, and watched the HT as my country disintegrated into famine, pestilence, death, and war, and the rest of the world mobilized its most advanced technology to seal us within our own borders. If there was other news, the newsgrids weren’t reporting it. By 11:00 A.M. only three channels still transmitted.
At noon I felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to sit by the river. This urge struck me with the force of a religious revelation. It was not arguable. I must go sit by the river.
Once there, I took off my clothes, an act as uncharacteristic and as unstoppable as public diarrhea. It was forty degrees and sunny, but I had the feeling it wouldn’t have mattered if it were below zero. I had to take off my clothes. I did, and stretched full length on an expanse of exposed mud.
I lay on my back in the sun-softened mud, shivering violently, for maybe six or seven minutes. Stones poked into my shoulder blades, the backs of my thighs, the small of my back. The river mud smelled pungent. I was cold. I have never been so uncomfortable in my life. I lay there, one arm flung over my face to shield my eyes from the bright noon sun, unwilling to move. Unable to move. And then it was over, and, still shivering, I sat up and dressed again.
It was over.
Eat me, said the vials Alice found at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Drink me.
It had been two full days since I’d devoured the chicken and rice and genuine new peas in the Albany government hospital. I hadn’t felt hungry: shock, anxiety, depression. All those can arrest appetite. But the body needs fuel. Even when hunger is absent, glucose levels fall. There are hidden storages of starch in the liver and muscles, but eventually these get used up. The blood needs new sources of glucose to send to the body.
Glucose is nothing but atoms. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. Arranged one way in food. Arranged another way in mud and water and air. Just as energy exists in one form in chemical bonds, and another in sunlight.
Y-energy rearranged the forms of energy so there would always be a readily available, cheap supply.
Nanotechnology rearranged atoms, which could be found everywhere and anywhere.
Under my clothes, I could feel the mud still caking the backs of my thighs. I tried to remember what those openings were called through which plants took in air, those minute orifices in the epidermis of leaves and stems. The word wouldn’t come. My mind was watery.
My body had fed.
I walked carefully, setting my foot down cautiously on each step, transferring my weight slowly from one foot to the other. My arms hovered protectively six inches from my side, to catch myself if I fell. I held my head stiffly. I made very slow progress up the embankment, and it felt excruciating. It seemed to me I had no choice. I moved as if I were something rare and fragile that I myself were carrying, as if I shouldn’t jar myself. Nothing must happen to my body. I was the answer to the starving world. No. Huevos Verdes was the answer.
Once that thought came, I could walk normally. I scrambled up the hill to town. I was not the only one. By now there were hundreds, thousands of us. Eden existed in a gravrail station in Albany, beside the sunshine machine. The entire town of Ti-monsville, Pennsylvania, had disappeared. Miranda Sharifi had gone public with the Cell Cleaner, the most comprehensible part of her project, over three months ago. And in the last month Huevos Verdes could have stockpiled oceans of serum in forests of slim black syringes. That’s what they were doing all over the country, in all those places the plague was not killing people. I was not the only one. I had only been the first. Except for the Sleepless themselves.
My body felt good, which is to say it felt like nothing at all. It disappeared from my consciousness, as healthy and fed bodies do. It was just there, ready to climb or run or work or make love, without depending on the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe. Without depending on CanCo Franchise agrobots% on political food distribution systems, on the FDA, on controlling the means of production, on harvesters and combines and the banks you owed them to, on forty acres and a mule, on the threshing floor, on the serfs in the field, on the rains coming this year and the locusts staying away, on Demeter and Indra and the Aztec corn gods. Seven thousand years of civilization built on the need to feed the people.
More in the syringe.
I could still eat normally — I had eaten chicken and rice and peas in the Albany hospital. But I didn’t have to. From now on, my body could “eat” mud.
I thought wildly of all the food I had consumed in my one single life. Beef Wellington, the pastry flaky around succulent medium-rare roast. Macaroons chewy with fresh-grated coconut. Potatoes Anna, crisp and crunchy. Bittersweet Swiss chocolate. Cassoulet. Alaskan crab as they did it at Fruits de la Mer in Seattle. Deep-dish apple pie…
My mouth watered. And then it stopped. A programmed biological counterresponse? I would probably never know.
Biscuits dripping with butter. But I could still have them. Lamb Gaston. Fresh arugula. // they were available. Strawberries in cream. But would anybody grow or raise the ingredients without a captive market?
A sudden wave of dizziness overtook me. I must have been in shock, or some kind of quiet hysteria. It was lightheadedness at the sheer size of the thing, the audacity. Miranda Sharifi and her twenty-six inhuman Supergeniuses, thinking in ways fundamentally different from ours, aided by technology they themselves built so that each step ahead opened six more pathways, and twenty-seven Superminds added to those branching possibilities… Miranda Sharifi and Jonathan Markowitz and Terry Mwak-ambe and the others whose names I didn’t remember from old newsgrids, whom I would never meet, who were not like us and never had been, and yet who had seen what would happen to a society they didn’t belong to and had planned a countermeasure. Planned, probably, for years, and carried out the unimaginably complex plans that would change everything for everybody—
And I had once thought that donkeys were perpetually dissatisfied and never found anything to be enough.
“How could she?” I said aloud, to nobody.
Dazed, I wandered past the station. A train pulled in and Annie and Billy and Lizzie stepped off the otherwise empty gravrail, carrying bundles. Lizzie saw me, shrieked, and ran toward me. I stood watching them, feeling lighter and lighter in the head, my cranium swelling like a balloon. Lizzie hurtled herself into my arms. She was taller, stronger, filled out, all in just a month. Billy’s face broke into a huge grin. He loped toward me like a man half his age, Annie trailing.
“Billy,” I said. “Billy—”
He went on grinning.
“We’re home now, us,” Billy said. “We’re all home.”
Annie sniffed. Lizzie squeezed me tight enough to crush ribs. Under my jacks I felt mud flake off the skin of my thighs.