She said icily, “We’re going to elect our own candidate, us, to district supervisor. Somebody from the tribe. A Liver.”
There, that was better. Dr. Aranow was looking at her like she’d really surprised him, her. Like she was somebody for even a donkey to notice!
But then his expression changed. He said gently—too gently, “But, Lizzie—even if you brought that off… even if you got a Liver elected to district supervisor… don’t you know that donkeys pay taxes by providing services out of their own money? In exchange for votes? That way they get—used to get—the power to make laws that suit them, and you people got the goods and services to stay alive. But if a Liver was elected—how would he fill a warehouse? You don’t have the money in the first place. You see, my dear—”
“Don’t talk to me like a baby, you son of a bitch!”
Dr. Aranow’s eyes widened. Behind her. Lizzie could hear Vicki shake with badly contained laughter. At that moment she hated them both. But at least she had Dr. Aranow’s attention. In her arms, Dirk stirred and whimpered. Lizzie lowered her voice, and the baby again drifted into sleep.
“I know more, me, than you do about it. Not all the warehouse supplies come from the politicians themselves. There’s a pool of tax money they all pay into, and it gets divided among the counties of Pennsylvania, and you can spend it on what you need. That money—I want it.”
“There, Jackson—not up on our governance procedures, are we,” Vicki murmured. “Medicine is such a demanding mistress.”
“I want those credits,” Lizzie repeated, because Dr. Aranow looked impressed for the first time. Or stunned. Was he stunned? Was it really so hopeless for a Liver to get elected? Again doubt attacked her. Maybe this couldn’t really work… Yes. It could. She would make it work.
Dr. Aranow said, “You? Personally? You want to run for district supervisor?”
“Not me.” Lizzie said. “I’m not old enough. You got to be eighteen.”
Dr. Aranow looked over his shoulder. “Ms. Turner?”
“Oh, certainly,” Vicki said. “A donkey gone native. Nobody in either camp would vote for me. But don’t look so terrified, Jackson… we’re not going to ask you to run.”
“Course not,” Lizzie said. “Billy Washington is going to run. Only he don’t know it yet, him.”
Dr. Aranow said, “Billy Washington? That elderly black man who pulled your mother off me when I was trying to deliver your baby?”
Vicki said, “You have a good memory for names. Almost a politician already.”
“Yes, that’s Billy,” Lizzie said eagerly. “My stepfather, him. He’ll do it, if I ask him. He’d do anything for me and Dirk.”
“The ‘plan for the health of babies,’ ” Dr. Aranow said. His mouth twisted. It wasn’t quite a smile. “I see. Well, your campaign should be quite interesting. What do you plan to do, register all the nomad Liver voters in Willoughby County at least three months before the election, promise them warehouse access if they vote for Mr. Washington, and just overwhelm the divided donkey candidates by sheer numbers?”
“Yes,” Lizzie said eagerly. “I know we can do it!”
“I’m not so sure. Both established political parties will mobilize their own voters, you know.”
“We figured that out. We’ll get all the voters lined up, but none of them will register until 11:30 P.M. on December thirty-first, the last day before the three-month deadline. It’ll be too late for the donkey candidates to get more people registered. They’ll never know what hit them.”
“And do the numbers indicate—”
“There are only four small enclaves in Willoughby County,” Lizzie said. Her confidence returned in a rush; this was data. “And they’re summer enclaves. The total of voters registered here even for internal enclave elections is only four thousand eighty. That’s all. We don’t know how many Livers are in the county right now, but more probably than we guess, in abandoned towns and farms and factories like ours. Staying out the winter. We can get them registered here, or reregistered here.”
“Out of their vast civic pride,” Vicki said. But Lizzie saw that she didn’t smile.
“Well,” he said, “good luck. But one question: How do you know I won’t just go tell everyone I know about this, so that more donkeys register in Willoughby before December thirty-first?”
“You won’t, you,” Lizzie said. The baby stirred in her arms and she shifted his solid little body. “We need you.”
“For what?” He looked nervous, and again Lizzie felt that rush of confidence. She could make a donkey nervous.
“Two things. We need you to find out about these two candidates. Susannah Wells Livingston and Donald Thomas Serrano. How their voters are split up, like.”
“Because,” Vicki said, “if one candidate is going to get one hundred percent of the vote, Lizzie will need to register a lot more people than if she can be confident the vote will be split up like cannibals and missionaries. Or if, say, one of the candidates should happen to be as dead as Harold Wayland.”
Dr. Aranow turned in his seat to face her. “You’re not taking any of this very seriously, are you?”
“On the contrary,” Vicki said, “this is how I sound when I’m serious. When I’m frivolous, I make pontificating speeches of great pretentiousness. Such as this one: There’s a way of looking at history that traces all enormous events back to the nature of key personalities shaped by very limited environments. This theory says that Napoleon, Hitler, Einstein, and Ballieri changed the world so profoundly precisely because of the strictures or hardships of their childhoods.”
“Who’s Napoleon?” Lizzie asked. “Or… what name did you say? Ballieri?”
“You don’t know who Ballieri was?”
“No.”
“Lewis Ballieri? Last century?”
“No! And I don’t care, me!” Why couldn’t Vicki behave like normal people? But if she had… If she had, she’d never have come to live with Livers, and Lizzie wouldn’t ever have gotten… She thrust that line of thought away from her.
Vicki said to Dr. Aranow, “I prove my point.”
Lizzie changed her grip on Dirk and leaned toward the doctor. “There’s a second thing that we need you for, us.”
“What’s that?”
She couldn’t read his expression; his face never seemed to change. She drew in a deep breath. “We need your aircar.”
“My aircar?”
“To borrow. We need to go look for other Livers, us, and we can’t contact them by comlink because the link might be dipped. Our plan has to be secret. So we need to cover the county by air to find everybody’s tribes in all the mountains and valleys, and then visit them. Vicki can drive. She knows how. Please. We just need it, us, for a few weeks. And when Billy is elected, we’re going to use the tax credits to get Change syringes as well as Y-cones. It’s for the babies.”
Dr. Aranow sat silent. Outside the car, the wind picked up, whipping the cold river into small frothy waves. A crow landed on a gray rock, cawing. Finally Dr. Aranow said gently, “Lizzie… You can’t get Change syringes through a warehouse. What few are left are not for sale, at any price. Every donkey organization in the country has been trying to reach Miranda Sharifi at Selene to beg for more… didn’t you know that? Selene never answers. Electing Billy Washington to district supervisor of Willoughby County won’t change that.”