“I. Said. Give. Me. That. Now.”
“No,” Jackson said, smiling. Damn, he didn’t know the codes or he would turn it off himself. Well, he could figure it out. Or—strange thought—ask Lizzie. Cazie stood still, not struggling in his grip, her golden skin flushed with anger, the green-flecked eyes burning.
He had never felt such power over her.
Cazie bent her head toward his left hand, which was still clenched on her upper arm. Pain tore through him, surprising him into opening his fingers. Blood poured over them. She had bitten him. Below him, the girl on the floor said something.
“That’s your trouble, Jackson,” Cazie said. “You’re never prepared for the counterattack.”
Two long slashes slanted across the back of his hand. Clean slashes, not tooth-jagged, and deep. Cazie had retractable blades implanted between her teeth.
Venous blood pooled dark red on the floor beside Lizzie, who again said something. Jackson couldn’t take it in. Was he going into shock? No, no light-headedness or nausea, and the wound wasn’t serious. Cazie must be able to control the retraction of her blades. His shock was all emotional; no one was behaving consistently.
Including the girl on the floor. She looked up at him—dopey-eyed, in a smiling haze of neuropharms—from a sudden pool of water between her legs, and chuckled. “The baby’s coming.”
“Oh, Christ,” Cazie said. “All right, you fly the girl back to her ‘tribe,’ and I’ll stay here with Ms. Champion-of-the-Downtrodden until the cops arrive. There must be somebody in the Liver camp who can do whatever it is they do for childbirth.”
“That someone is me,” Vicki said, kneeling beside Lizzie, holding both her hands. Something in her tone moved Jackson. Or maybe he was moved by nothing more than his need to oppose Cazie on medical grounds, his only sure landscape.
“Ms. Turner’s right, Cazie. She needs to stay with the girl.”
“Charming maternal solicitude,” Cazie said. “So what do you want me to do, Jackson, arrest them both?”
“Neither. Not until this is over.”
“And you’re just going to deliver a baby here on the factory floor.”
“Of course not. She’s not going to deliver for hours yet.” Jackson’s hands probed gently. And found that the baby was a breech.
The Change, he reflected grimly, had not reversed certain key aspects of human evolution. The birth canal was still considerably narrower than an infant head, and the cervix still not designed for anything but headfirst delivery. And Lizzie, prima gravida, was only eight months along.
Still, it could have been worse. Jackson’s fetal dermalyzer showed a frank breech presentation—buttocks first, hips flexed, knees extended, feet up near the shoulders—rather than the more dangerous footling or complete breech. The head was flexed forward, ballottable in the fundal region. The fetus, a boy, weighed a viable 2800 grams, heart rate a steady 160, growth normal. The cord wasn’t prolapsed, and the placenta wasn’t previa; it would decently follow the birth, which, Jackson estimated, was still a few hours off. Although she was already five centimeters dilated. Halfway.
It could have been much worse.
“Lizzie,” Jackson said, “I’m going to lift you. We’re going to take you somewhere more comfortable.”
“Which is where?” Cazie said. “You’re not taking her—them—to the enclave!”
Lizzie said, without urgency, “I want to go home.” She didn’t look like a mother-to-be; she looked like a smiling, slumberous child. Jackson sighed.
“All right. We’ll take you home. But, Lizzie, listen to me, I’m going to stay there with you. The baby is upside down—do you understand? I’m going to stay with you so I can rotate him at the proper times.”
The girl looked up at him. In her drugged black eyes, Jackson was startled to see a flash of coherent relief. He had expected her to protest, however languorously, against having a donkey doctor attend her. Hadn’t she grown up with mechanical medunits, when politicians still supplied those? But maybe Lizzie was different from most Livers, because of this Vicki Turner. Or maybe Jackson didn’t know as much about Livers as he thought.
Cazie said, “You’re just going to walk into a Liver camp with nothing but a pistol? Accompanying a criminal that I’m damn well going to have arrested?”
Jackson stood, lifting Lizzie in his arms. She could walk, but pulling her upright would hasten delivery. He didn’t want to deliver a breech, even a frank breech, in an aircar. He faced Cazie. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. And you can come with me or not. Just as you choose.”
Cazie hesitated. In that moment of her hesitation, Jackson felt a surge of hope. Was that actually respect in her eyes? For him? Whatever it was, it vanished.
“It’s a two-person car, Jack.”
He’d forgotten that. “All right… I’ll take them both to their camp—three can squeeze into my car. You stay here and call for another car.”
“I’ll call for the cops, is what I’ll do.”
“Fine. Call for the cops. They can come to the camp, too. We’ll have a party.”
He carried Lizzie across the factory, now frozen except for the forklift Lizzie had reprogrammed, which went on lifting nothing. Had it resumed work because Lizzie had made an error? Maybe she wasn’t as good a dipper as Vicki claimed. Or maybe Cazie’s signal from the aircar had set up some kind of interference or override. Jackson didn’t know enough about industrial systems to guess. Behind him he heard Cazie on her comlink. “Police emergency, code 655, damn it, Robert, answer me…”
Vicki sat on the passenger seat cradling Lizzie on her lap. Two half-naked women in tattered clothes, wet from Lizzie’s burst water, hair matted, smelling of blood and sweat and dirt and amniotic fluid. It was close in the car.
Vicki had a mocking tendency to catch his thoughts. As the aircar lifted she said, “And when was the last time you played doctor to Livers, Doctor?”
He didn’t answer. The car flew through the passage he opened in the security shield. Lizzie said dreamily, “Another one’s coming. It’s so weird, I feel it but I don’t…”
Jackson looked at the aircar console. The interval between contractions had shortened: ten minutes. That fast. He speeded up. “Fly west,” Vicki said. “Follow that river…”
The “camp” turned out to be an abandoned soy-processing factory. Only Livers had ever eaten soy; now no one did, and all the soy franchises had gone bankrupt. The building was windowed gray foamcast, decayed and badly patched. All around stretched fields returning to weeds, bushes, saplings of maple and sycamore. Their scrawny branches were bare. Jackson had forgotten how ugly ungenemod nature was in November, especially in these high hills, or low mountains, or whatever they were.
He set the aircar down in front of the building’s main door, which had fallen—or been torn—off its hinges, and then clumsily wired back on. Inside, Jackson knew, the machinery would have long since been removed for retooling. Or looted during the Change Wars. Or vandalized. Nothing was less necessary now than large-scale agriculture.
The moment the aircar landed, they were surrounded. The horde—it seemed like a horde, even though Jackson counted only eleven people—shoved their faces against the windows, grimacing. Dressed in warmer clothes than Vicki and Lizzie, they nonetheless looked primitive: old synthetic jacks in garish colors over or under woven tunics; ungenemod faces with a weak chin or low beetling brow or too broad forehead or small squinty eyes. An older man was actually missing a front tooth. And this was post-Change. What had these people looked like before the Cell Cleaner?