She hadn’t told Jackson that part. He already worried too much about her, and he wouldn’t understand anyway. That was actually funny—Jackson was the smart one, Theresa the one whose IQ modification hadn’t quite worked. Certainly she’d never been very good at school software. But Jackson wouldn’t understand that although he had been right about different personalities being rewarded in different cultures, he hadn’t taken the idea far enough.
Theresa had. She’d spent thousands of hours at her terminal, slowly and laboriously sending Thomas to search through the history deebees. And she’d found the place that would have rewarded who she was: the Age of Faith.
She should have been born Catholic. In the late Middle Ages, when men and women had been honored for devoting their lives to the uses of pain in the service of spiritual growth. She would have belonged. To enter an abbey, to have a reason for a cloistered life, joined with others in constant prayer… But she had been born into an age when no one she knew even believed in God. Including her.
Tears filled Theresa’s eyes. She dashed them away impatiently and moved away from the sight of her naked body in the mirror. It was stupid to cry. She had been born now, not then, and that must be part of the gift, too. She was meant to find another way, a different push toward the light she so often despaired of finding. And after months—years—of meditation and false starts, she had come to see what that way was.
She must go out.
Out of the apartment, out of the enclave. Jackson usually urged her not to watch the newsgrids because they made her feel so much worse, and until a few months ago Theresa had been glad to do what Jackson wanted. But lately she had watched holovid whenever Jackson wasn’t home, and although most of the news had of course been about donkeys, there had been glimpses of Livers, too. Between the stock market reports and enclave politics and even an occasional national report from Washington, which nobody seemed to think anymore was anywhere near as important as internal enclave affairs. Just glimpses of Livers, and those Livers were suffering. Not from hunger—not that, ever again. But from lack of things like energy cones and decent clothing and replacement parts for terminals. While people like Theresa and Jackson and Cazie and those loathsome friends Cazie had brought by last night had more things than they knew what to do with. That’s when shame had burned her.
And then Theresa had seen something on the holovid that made her know she was meant to go outside. There were Livers actually frying to organize into spiritual groups! And the news channel had shown where one of those groups was wintering. The holovid had been sneering, of course… but it had given district coordinates.
She dressed in one of her long, loose, flowered dresses. Theresa designed them herself, sending sketches and her measurements to a tailoring franchise that would still work in cotton. She found a warm coat—they didn’t have weather voting, outside—and an old pair of boots. But then she hesitated.
What should she take to give them? Energy cones, yes—she’d already ordered a dozen on the TenTech account, and the mail ’bot had delivered them last week. Theresa hadn’t understood the account very well. Usually Jackson took care of these things. She had used a “proprietary password” he’d once given her, but it must have been the wrong word because the system thought she’d wanted access to factory records. She’d mucked around in them awhile before realizing her mistake; she only hoped she hadn’t caused malfunctions in any system anyplace. After she’d found the household accounts, though, she’d been able to figure out how to order what she wanted. It gave her an odd sense of power, which she immediately distrusted. “Pride goeth before a fall.” Her mother used to say that.
Clothing. She should bring decent clothing. On the holovid the Livers wore these awful homespun things, or else jacks in truly terrible colors… but all her clothing was cotton or silk. That wouldn’t do. The Livers were all Changed, of course. They needed nonconsumables.
She went into Jackson’s room and looted his wardrobe. Shirts, pants, tunics, coats, farrells, shoes. He could always order more. And next trip she’d bring some nonconsumable women’s clothes.
What else? Oh! Money, of course. But how did that work, for Livers? They didn’t use money, or at least they hadn’t, before the Change. They’d all had meal chips and ID cards and the politicians had given them everything free in exchange for votes. Nobody voted anymore, except for enclave elections. Well, of course not… that’s why the Livers were in this position! They didn’t have any money to buy the things they needed. So most of them just went south, where they didn’t need heat or clothes, and fed out in the open, and got into stupid wars, and forgot civilization entirely. But not all of them. The ones Theresa was going to visit could surely use money. But how do you sign over credit to people who don’t have accounts?
She’d bring a handheld terminal. A mobile. Maybe they had some sort of group account for the organization, or something. Or maybe she could figure out how to set up one in their name, but with access to some of her money. That shouldn’t be too hard. People must set up accounts on the Net all the time. She could leave them the mobile.
She could do this. She really could. For the first time in her life, after so many false starts, she—Theresa Katherine Aranow—could actually be useful to something larger than herself.
The black cloud in her head didn’t lift. But it lightened a little, and Theresa smiled.
On her way out, she passed her main terminal. It was on, holding a screen of her book about one of the first Sleepless, Leisha Camden. Another false start. Theresa knew she wasn’t much of a writer; the book wasn’t very good. But she had wanted to write about Leisha, that outsider from her own people who’d fought so hard to keep Sleepless and donkeys from splintering into two armed camps. Leisha had tried to keep the Sleepless from withdrawing into armed retreat in Sanctuary. She’d tried to keep Sleepers from boycotting all corporations invested in by Sleepless. She’d tried to keep Miranda Sharifi from the same kind of isolation that had driven Miranda’s grandmother to treason.
Leisha had failed, at all of it. And then the Sleepless had engineered the SuperSleepless and everything got even worse. But Leisha had at least tried. What had driven Leisha, Theresa wondered, before she’d been murdered by outlaw Livers in a desolate Georgia swamp? Something must have driven Leisha. Some light she could see more clearly than Theresa had been able to do.
At the elevator to the roof, her arms filled with a load of Jackson’s expensive and perfectly tailored clothes, Theresa hesitated. It was so hard to go outside. So many new things… what if she had an attack? Maybe if she first watched a Drew Arlen concert, the one about taking risks…
Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer. There had been a period, several months long, during which Theresa had watched an Arlen concert two or three times each day. She’d let Arlen hypnotize her, with his subliminals and programmed graphic shapes that seized the unconscious mind, into a different kind of dreaming. Deep, personal, massaged into shape by Drew’s art of mass hypnosis and universal symbols to which he seemed to have easy access. The dream became whatever the listener wanted it to be, needed it to be, and the dreamer awoke cleansed and stronger. Like any other temporary drug.
No. Not today. She was not going to watch a Drew Arlen concert today, not use it like just another neuropharm. She could do this alone. She could. Today was the day.