Lizzie walked up to Jackson, who was disguised as a Liver. In the last three weeks he’d grown a scraggly beard. He wore baggy blue jacks, a battered hat pulled low over his forehead, and the heaviest boots he’d ever had on in his life. The ground was a sea of mud; it had rained for two days straight, a hard-driving late March rain that threatened to resume. Jackson’s boots were caked with mud. He’d walked with Lizzie over a mountain to this tribe; Livers didn’t use aircars, and he was passing as a Liver. So far, none of the swarming reporters had noticed him. He felt ridiculous.
Lizzie leaned close to him in despair and whispered, “He says Shockey said it was all right for them to accept the scooters!”
“Well, do you think Shockey really said it?” Jackson asked. His own opinion was yes. Shockey hadn’t seemed to grasp Lizzie’s idea that if the Livers were going to vote for their own candidate on April 1, they couldn’t accept material objects or credit accounts from the other two candidates on March 25. “Reparations,” Shockey called them, and where had he even learned the word? “Bribes,” Lizzie said, and she was right.
Lizzie chewed her bottom lip. “Harry Jenner says Shockey told him to accept the gifts, make no real promises, and then just vote for Shockey anyway.”
That was the way donkeys had done it for decades. Jackson said as much to Lizzie.
“But it isn’t right,” she said, and he was suddenly impatient. For her, so invested in this innocent, doomed legal revolution. For himself, standing here in the concealing shade of trees that didn’t offer much shade because it was only March, itching in his nonporous synthetic jacks caked with mountain mud.
“The important thing is,” he said, “will Harry and his tribe actually vote for Shockey after accepting scooters and jazzy clothes and perfumed soaps and diamond necklaces? Or will they vote for the candidate giving them all this loot?”
“Diamond necklaces?” Lizzie said blankly.
“That girl closest to the plastic, the one with the long brown hair, is wearing a diamond necklace. Tiffany, I believe.”
“Oh, my dear Lord.”
Jackson smiled. Lizzie would be upset to know that in moments of stress, even when she didn’t talk Liver, she sounded like her mother, the formidable Annie. Jackson didn’t tell her. In the last three months, hanging around this ridiculous campaign, he’d become fond of Lizzie. She was an odd combination of toughness and vulnerability. Sometimes, she even reminded him of Theresa.
Which was not nearly reason enough to have gotten involved in this quixotic project. So why was he?
“Look, Lizzie, it’s six days until the election. You’ll just have to trust Harry Jenner and all the rest of them that they’ll vote for Shockey despite the… gifts.” Gifts. Bribes. Reparations.
“Do you think they’ll vote for Shockey?” Her black eyes pleaded.
“Actually,” he said slowly, “I do. I think the hatred left over from the Change Wars is stronger than Liver greed.” Or Liver gratitude. Livers were exactly the opportunists that donkeys had made them.
“That’s what Vicki says, too,” Lizzie said.
Jackson didn’t want to discuss Vicki, who’d been left behind to keep order in “campaign headquarters,” and who was so much a part of Shockey’s tribe that she didn’t have to stand here in the mud dressed like something she was not. We don’t need the adverse effect of your known presence, she’d said to Jackson, and you don’t need the adverse effect on your, ah, medical career. Yeah. Right.
“Okay,” Lizzie said. “I won’t tell them to give back the scooters and other things. But I will tell them again how much they need to vote for Shockey!”
“Well, do it now. That reporter is starting to look interested in you again. And in me.”
“See you back at camp.”
“Right,” Jackson said, and tramped off back through the woods.
After a few miles, he was hot enough to open his jacket, and then to remove it. The hat he kept on; reporters with no better story to pursue had used aircars and zoom cams to record this campaign. Which was, depending on the newsgrid channel, an outrage against common sense, a threat to what remained of civil order, an unimportant footnote to political history, or a cosmic joke. Sometimes all at once.
Even to Susannah Wells Livingston and Donald Thomas Serrano. Last week Jackson, a spy in the enemy camp, had attended a fund-raiser for Don Serrano. He’d learned that the donkey candidate wasn’t really worried. “I’ve spread around all kinds of ‘benefits’ to my constituency,” Serrano told him. “Since when can’t you buy a Liver?” Jackson had just nodded. Wasn’t that exactly what he himself had believed, until Lizzie Francy tumbled into his life from eight feet up a factory wall?
The election, however, was not a cosmic joke to Cazie. To avoid her, Jackson had temporarily moved out of his apartment and, under another name, into a hotel in Pittsburgh Enclave. Not a luxury hotel, the place served mostly techs, those marginal donkeys whose parents had been able to afford only limited genemods, usually for appearance. Techs worked for a living but never ran anything. Jackson came and went quietly among them. He talked to Theresa, the only person with his physical address, daily, on what he hoped was a sufficiently shielded link. That Cazie couldn’t find him gave Jackson an odd satisfaction, almost as great as the satisfaction of knowing she was looking.
It took him three hours to hike back to Lizzie’s tribe. The late afternoon sun slanted over the mountaintops, dark green with pine and white with lingering patches of snow. The other “voter checking teams” would be straggling in as well, after arduous trips to check the loyalty of the other voters.
So why was he involved in all this? Because Cazie hated it? Not reason enough, not nearly enough.
Because he was sick of his life, his class, his pointless activities? Not reason enough.
Because babies without Change syringes were dying across the country? This election wouldn’t help those suffering infants. Even if Livers won every goddamn election for the next six years and controlled every political office from President to game warden, ungenemod carpetbaggers in their own appalled capitals, it wouldn’t create more Change syringes. Only Miranda Sharifi and the Supers could do that. And they had not. They didn’t even answer the transmissions to Selene, city of exile under the surface of the moon.
Jackson stopped in the shadow of a huge fragrant pine, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and braced himself for the hallucinogenic-holo reality of “campaign headquarters.”
It started a quarter mile before the camp, with the candidate.
“Who the hell are you?” the girl said. She raised her face from Shockey’s, who chivalrously had chosen to lie underneath, separated from the mud by a blanket of blaring orange. The girl, naked from waist to expensive boots, sat astride him. She didn’t move off when Jackson bumbled over a slight rise between the trees and into their barely hidden dell.
Jackson dropped his eyes—not to avoid looking at her, but vice versa. He’d already seen her. Maybe seventeen, with genemod green eyes and long black hair. A donkey girl, slumming. Jackson was supposed to be a Liver; how would a Liver react? Jackson shuffled his feet, as if embarrassed, and kept his eyes on her boots. They were calf-high, Italian leather undoubtedly nanocoated so her feet wouldn’t consume them, caked with mud. Above them the girl’s perfect thighs prickled with goose bumps. The March air was cool.
She said slyly, “You a reporter?”