“I’m sorry,” Lizzie muttered. Was she sorry? She didn’t know. Lately Vicki confused her, and she used to think Vicki was so wonderful… nothing was the same, it.
“Don’t be sorry.” Vicki stood, stretching the kinks out of her legs. “Here’s looking at you, Karl Marx.”
“What?”
“Nothing, dear heart. I’ll see you at dinner, okay?”
“Okay,” Lizzie mumbled. She watched Vicki stroll out of Lizzie’s cubicle and disappear around the battered plastic upended table that formed one of its walls. Vicki didn’t look back, Lizzie hugged Dirk, wishing she hadn’t said that about Vicki knowing everything. Vicki’d been so good to Lizzie when Lizzie was just a kid, her. But… Vicki did act like she knew everything. Every idea that came up, every plan or… Why was Vicki like that? Because she was a donkey?
Lizzie reached upward, trying not to disturb the baby, until her fingers groped at the top of her chest of drawers. She pulled down her terminal. “Library search.”
“Ready,” the system said.
“Three-sentence definitions of two things. First—‘Here’s looking at you.’ Second—‘Carl Marks.’ ”
“ ‘Here’s looking at you,’ was a famous line from a pre-holo entertainment recording titled Casablanca. It was said as a drinking toast by the male lead to the female lead. In the 2090s the phrase enjoyed a renewed vogue as an ironic expression roughly meaning ‘I guess you won that contest.’
“ ‘Karl Marx’ was a political theorist whose writings were used by many twentieth-century revolutionaries as a basis for rebellion. He advocated a socialism that included collective ownership of the means of production. The mechanism he foresaw for achieving this was class warfare.”
“System off,” Lizzie said.
“System off.”
Class warfare. Was that what she, Lizzie, was asking for? Was that what Vicki really felt about Lizzie? And Billy and Annie and… Dirk?
A sour taste filled Lizzie’s mouth. She swallowed, but it didn’t go away. She’d been going to ask Vicki to go with her to explain the plan to Shockey. Maybe now she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d just go alone, if that was the way Vicki felt.
The baby had finished feeding and had fallen asleep again. Lizzie hugged him close and bent over to smell his sweet, clean baby smell. But even then the sour taste in her mouth and nose didn’t go away.
She found Shockey with Sharon and Sharon’s baby, nine-month-old Callie, fishing by the river in the mild weather. Sharon and Shockey wore winter jacks with the coats unbuttoned. Lizzie saw that Sharon’s shirt was unbuttoned as well. So that’s how it was.
Callie sat on the riverbank in a blue plastic clothes basket, turning a grimy plastic duck over and over in her fat little fists. She was a pretty baby, with Sharon’s soft brown hair and big eyes, but when she caught sight of Lizzie, she screwed up her face to cry and looked frantically around for her mother. Annie said babies got this way at Callie’s age. They got shy of strangers and nervous about new things. Callie would outgrow it, Annie said. Well, Lizzie didn’t spend a lot of time with Sharon but she wasn’t exactly a stranger, either; they belonged to the same tribe. She hoped Dirk didn’t go through a stage like this when he was older. She moved out of Callie’s line of sight.
Sharon and Shockey bent over their fishing lines. Sharon giggled and guided Shockey’s hand from his line to her open shirt.
“Hello!” Lizzie said loudly.
“Hey. Liz,” Shockey said, straightening. “If we catch anything, us, want to share a real meal for a change?”
There was nothing wrong with the words. The tribe ate by mouth often: berries or nuts, roasted rabbit, wild apples. Sometimes Lizzie got a longing in her mouth that nothing but the sharp bite of wild onions would satisfy. The Change just meant that nobody had to bother with getting food; not that they couldn’t. There was nothing wrong with Shockey’s offer of fish. It was the way he said it—his eyes bold on Lizzie, his mouth half smiling, half sneering, his hand still on Sharon’s bare breast. Sex bareness was different from eating bareness; it should be private. And Shockey acted like he owned Sharon. Well, he didn’t own Lizzie.
But she made herself smile. “Sure, if you catch anything, you. But that’s not why I’m here. I have an offer, me, to make to you.”
Shockey’s smile widened and his dark eyes blinked slowly. Lizzie said quickly, “Billy told me you used to be mayor of a town someplace.”
Shockey’s smile vanished. “Yeah? So what? Somebody had to be mayor, them.”
“You’re right, you,” Lizzie said. She looked levelly into Shockey’s face. “And somebody still does.”
Sharon said, “We don’t need no mayors, us, anymore.”
“But we need a district supervisor, us. Harold Winthrop Wayland is dead.”
Sharon’s voice scaled upward. “Shockey ain’t no donkey, Lizzie Francy, and don’t you forget it, you!”
“Of course he ain’t,” Lizzie said. “He’s a Liver, him—that’s the whole point.”
“What whole point?” Sharon said, so loudly that Callie, alarmed, looked up from her rubber duck. “Livers don’t work, them, at no jobs like district supervisor!”
“A district supervisor controls the warehouse distrib. Willoughby County ain’t got no supervisor, us, so there ain’t nothing in the warehouse. But if we elect one of our own, then—”
“Then there still ain’t nothing in the warehouse! Dip your brain, you, for a change, instead of donkey nets! Shockey can’t put no goods in no warehouse!”
“Yes, he could,” Lizzie said. She was suddenly tired of talking Liver to this stupid girl. She’d known Sharon all her life, and Sharon had always been stupid. “There’s a tax pool of credit from the state, collected from corporate taxes, that’s divided up between all the counties. A credit base that donkey taxes add to. But if we can get enough Livers registered and get Shockey elected, he can use Willoughby’s share to stock a warehouse for us.”
“But if he—”
“Shut up, Sharon, and let Shockey talk.” Lizzie hoped this would make Shockey mad—the hint that Sharon was controlling him. But Shockey wasn’t mad. His bold eyes, under heavy brows, had a faraway look, and his hand moved from Sharon to stroke his dark beard. Both women stared at him.
Finally he said, “Yeah.”
“ ‘Yeah’?” Sharon shrieked.
“Shut up, Sharon. Yeah, I’ll do it, Liz.” Abruptly he swooped down on the baby and lifted her high above his head. “How about it, Callie—you want, you, to see your big buddy a district supervisor?”
The baby squealed happily. Apparently little Callie didn’t consider Shockey a “stranger.” Sharon sulked. But Lizzie, watching, thought that Shockey wasn’t seeing either of them. His eyes gazed at something else, and he smiled the same half sneer as when he offered Lizzie the fish. What was it Vicki’d said? In her list of kinds of human relationships? A covert struggle for dominance, without much outbreak of actual fighting…
“Liz, you just tell me what to do first. I’m all ready, me, and I’m all yours.”
Eight
When the security alarm sounded, Theresa was sitting in her new study, working at a terminal.
She had made the study from a maid’s room in the middle of the apartment’s upper floor, unused probably since before house ’bots. Theresa had chosen it because it had no window, only a skylight set small and high on the wall and angled into an airshaft, from which she could see nothing but a patch of artificial sky. She’d had the building ’bot clean the room and paint it white, and she had moved in a terminal and an old-fashioned, inflexible chair. The only other thing in the room were the printies.