“Then we’ll get the old-fashioned ’bot medunits for the babies,” Lizzie said. Her arms tightened on Dirk. What if he hadn’t been Changed, what if she had to worry all the time about infections and bad water and worms… For the first time, Lizzie glimpsed what motherhood must have been like for her own mother. Why, Annie must have been afraid every single minute that something would happen to Lizzie! How could parents live like that, them? Lizzie shuddered.
Dr. Aranow said, “I don’t think—”
“Yes, you do,” Vicki interrupted, and her voice had changed yet again, to something Lizzie hadn’t heard in a long time. Vicki was talking to the doctor like she used to talk to Lizzie herself when she was a child, small and sick. “In fact, you probably think too much, Jackson. But this time—don’t. Just act. You’ll feel better if you do this one thing for the Livers. Without first worrying it to death. And it will cost you so little.”
“Don’t try to bully me, Ms. Turner.”
“I’m not. I’m only trying to present our case—Lizzie’s case—in all its aspects. You’re an aspect now. You didn’t ask to be, but you are. If you say no, that’s just as much a statement as if you’d said yes. There’s no fence to sit on here. The choices are yours. All I’m trying to do is articulate that.”
Vicki’s eyes locked with Dr. Aranow’s. Lizzie wondered if Vicki was going to bring up Mrs. Aranow, or whatever her name was—the woman that Vicki said was the doctor’s ex-wife. She still owned him, Vicki said. Lizzie didn’t see how that could be—your family owned you, maybe, and your tribe, but not somebody who’d chosen to leave your tribe. Why, that would be like saying that Harvey could influence Lizzie’s decisions just because he was Dirk’s father! The world didn’t work like that. Still, if mentioning Mrs. Aranow would help the doctor choose against the donkeys… but maybe Lizzie better leave this to Vicki. Vicki was the donkey, after all. Although no one in the tribe would dream of holding it against her.
Vicki said, in a different voice, “Don’t you ever wish, Jackson, that the class war had turned out differently? That both sides weren’t paying the price we are?”
To Lizzie, the words made no sense. What price were the donkeys paying? Donkeys were public servants, they did the work of running things so the Livers could enjoy themselves—or, they used to do that. Now they had so much less work to do. Didn’t they like that? How had they paid any sort of price for not supplying warehouses and medunits and food lines and all the other things? It saved them money and work. Vicki wasn’t making sense.
But Dr. Aranow was gazing straight ahead now, through the car window. Lizzie had the feeling he wasn’t seeing the river or the fields or the cold woods. He was seeing some other place, some other people besides her and Vicki. Who?
“All right,” Dr. Aranow said. “On one condition. Not this car. I don’t want it spotted and traced and my system jammed with irate messages from people who used to be my friends. I’ll furnish you with an aircar leased to some nonexistent company in another state.”
“Oh, thank you, Doctor!” Lizzie said. She leaned over and kissed Dr. Aranow on the cheek. Her motion pushed her breast into Dirk’s face, and sleepily he started to suck. When he discovered cloth between his mouth and her nipple, he whimpered and screwed up his face. Lizzie opened her shirt and gave him her breast.
She’d done it. She’d managed to people-dip an aircar.
She said, “And you’ll find out, you, about the other candidates? Please?”
“Why not.” He didn’t sound as happy as Lizzie had hoped.
“Cheer up, Jackson,” Vicki said. “Commitment only hurts while the first rope goes on.”
“You’re quite a pastoral philosopher, aren’t you? Could part of this deal be that you just stop lecturing me?”
“But you like it so much. Look at Cazie.”
“Vicki,” Lizzie said. But then the doctor smiled. It wasn’t a very sweet smile, but it was a smile. He wasn’t mad at Vicki for her nasty comment. Why not? Lizzie would never understand donkeys.
But she didn’t have to. He’d promised to do it. Lizzie had won.
Now all she had to do was convince Billy. But that would be easy—Billy had never denied her anything, not in her whole life.
“No,” Billy said.
“No? No?”
“No, I won’t, me.”
“But… but it’s for Dirk!”
Billy didn’t answer. He and Lizzie sat on a fallen log in the November woods, their coats open to an afternoon that had suddenly turned warm. Billy loved the woods. Before the Change he was the only one in East Oleanta who used to go off into the woods by himself, just to be alone with trees. Now more people did, but Billy was still the only one who’d go in winter for days at a time. Or as many days anyway as Annie’d let him. And just when Annie got to grumbling and complaining about his absence—just at that very minute, it always seemed to Lizzie—Billy would come home again. Walking into camp with the strong walk he had since the Change, not the old-man shuffle from before. There’d be wet leaves stuck to Billy’s jacks, and twigs in his hair, and Annie would squeal when Billy hugged her because he hadn’t shaved in so long. But she’d hug back, hard and tight, before she started scolding and grumbling again.
Lizzie had known that Billy would be in the woods, checking his rabbit traps, and she had followed his tracks in the mud. When Billy wanted to hide, nobody could track him, but his time he hadn’t bothered. Lizzie had left Dirk with Annie. Now she wished she’d brought the baby. Maybe Dirk would have changed Billy’s stubborn old mind.
Billy was too old, him. That was the trouble. Even if the old people were healthy and strong since the Change, they were still old in their brains. They thought old. Lizzie made herself calm down to reason with Billy.
“Why won’t you run for district supervisor, you? Don’t you see that it will help us get all the things we need, us, like more ’bots and medunits for any more babies and better boots? Don’t you see that?”
“I see that, me.”
“Well, then, why don’t you run for election? It will work, Billy!”
“Not if I run, me.”
Lizzie stared at him. The old man broke a branch off a dead maple and poked at the ground with it.
“Lizzie, you see this dirt? It should be frozen, it, by this time in November.”
“What’s that got to do with—”
“Wait. The reason the ground ain’t frozen is ’cause we had us a mostly warm autumn. Nobody could predict that, them. It just happened. But we didn’t know it would happen, so we got all ready, us, for a hard winter. All the blankets and jacks we could scrounge, caulking the tribe house airtight, them cones you and Vicki got us from TenTech.”
Lizzie waited. There was no use rushing Billy, him. He always did what she wanted, but it sometimes took him a long time to get there.
“We prepared, us, for the hardships we could see coming, even if they didn’t come. Anything less is just stupid. Right, dear heart?”
“Right,” Lizzie said. Billy’s stick continued to poke at the ground.
“If you and Vicki do this donkey election, you got to see coming what you can, you, and prepare for it. Donkeys ain’t stupid, and they don’t play as fair as the weather. Where Livers be concerned, us, donkeys are always cold.”
Not Vicki or Dr. Aranow, Lizzie wanted to say, but she didn’t interrupt.
“If I run for district supervisor, me, we’ll lose. Nobody will vote for me, them. Not just no donkeys—no Livers neither, outside our tribe. Just like they wouldn’t vote for you or Annie. We was the first ones who got Changed. Who tracked down Miranda Sharifi in her underground lab and demanded, us, that she help you when you was so sick. Who actually saw Miranda and talked to her.”