The boy gasped, “You the doctor? This is my daughter, her. Can you give her a Change syringe? We didn’t have none in my tribe… no place else neither… I heard, me, about this place…”
“No,” Jackson said, “I don’t have any more syringes.” Vicki stared at him, stunned. Clearly she had expected a different answer, not of course knowing that Theresa had cleaned out Jackson’s meager supply.
The boy said, “You don’t have no syringes, you? Really?”
“Really,” Jackson said.
“But ain’t you a doctor… a donkey doctor?”
Jackson didn’t answer. No one else spoke. The silence stretched on, painful. Finally Jackson nodded, miserably, and then shook his head. He couldn’t meet the young father’s eyes.
The boy didn’t argue, or explode, or even start sobbing again. In the slump of his thin shoulders Jackson saw resignation: the boy hadn’t actually expected real help. He’d never had it. He’d come here because he hadn’t known what else to do.
Vicki said tightly, “Will you do what you can, Jackson?”
She had already fetched his bag from its pocket in the tribal junk. Jackson went through futile motions. When he’d finished, the boy said, “Thank you, Doctor,” and Jackson’s humiliation was complete.
“Come with me,” Vicki said, and he followed her, basely glad to go, not caring where. Livers had come in from outside and sat talking animatedly in the communal chairs. Vicki led him around the maze of cubicles, through a curtain stretched between a wall and a long upended table.
“No one will come here, Jackson.”
“Where’s that baby’s mother?”
Vicki shrugged. “You know how it is. They get pregnant so easily, nothing can go wrong in their bodies, everyone raises the kids tribally. Anyone who doesn’t want to be bothered with an infant doesn’t have to be.”
“Then it’s wrong. This new social organization the Change has created—it’s all wrong.”
“I know.”
“You know? I thought you were the biggest advocate of what Miranda Sharifi gave the world!”
“I’m the biggest advocate of adjusting to it. So far, we haven’t done that.”
He hadn’t ever seen her like this: somber, straightforward, unprotected by amused detachment. He didn’t like it. She was unsettling, like this. To escape her eyes, he looked around the cubicle, and realized it must be hers. The cubicle held nothing different from any other tribe member’s: pallet on the floor, scarred bureau cluttered with handmade jewelry, clothes hanging on pegs. Nothing as expensive or incongruous as the Jansen-Sagura terminal and crystal library in Lizzie’s cubicle. Yet the small space looked donkey, not Liver. In the colors, muted and harmonious. In the arrangement of furniture. In the single spray of willow, placed in a black clay bowl with an almost Oriental spareness and grace.
She said, “Did you realize you were crying, holding that baby?”
He hadn’t. He swiped at his wet cheeks, disliking her for having noticed, at the same time that he was grateful for her not exposing his tears to the Livers laughing in the middle of the building.
He said, because he had to say something, “They suffer. Not here, in this tribe, but other places without as many resources they live so—”
“The poor have always lived in a different country from the rich. In every age, and no matter how physically close their houses were.”
“Please don’t lecture me on—”
“Look at this, Jackson.” She opened her top bureau drawer, pulled out a holo recorder, and said to it, “Play recording three.” When she handed it to Jackson, he took it.
The miniature screen replayed a newscast. From a donkey channel, the tone hovered somewhere between bemusement and contempt. The program, no more than two minutes long, interviewed one of a group of doctors in Texas, who had set up a Y-shielded clinic just outside the Austin Enclave to treat unChanged Liver children. “It’s necessary,” said a tired-looking young physician who needed a haircut. “They’re in pain. What Miranda Sharifi is letting happen here is criminal.” The recorder stage went dark.
Vicki snorted. “ ‘What Miranda is letting happen.’ We still don’t take responsibility.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” he snapped. “Sometimes you use ‘we’ for Livers, sometimes for donkeys.”
“So what? Jackson, there are more and more unChanged kids. They need doctors.”
He saw again the weary face of the physician in the holo, the security shield around the clinic, the Livers who had attacked his apartment building while Theresa was there. Despite his fondness for the irrepressible Lizzie, he didn’t want to practice among Livers. It wasn’t what he had trained for.
“Compassion is a lot easier to feel than act on, isn’t it?” Vicki said. “But not nearly as satisfying in the long run. Believe me, I know.”
He said dryly, “I haven’t yet seen you when you thought you didn’t.”
Vicki laughed. “You’re right.” She leaned over and kissed him.
It caught Jackson by surprise. What was she doing? Surely she wasn’t kissing him just because he’d been crying over a Liver kid… was she? She didn’t seem the—but then all thought left him. Her lips were soft, thinner than Cazie’s, her body taller and less rounded. Her mouth clung briefly, pulled away, returned. Jackson pulled her to him and a shock went through his torso, sweeping downward from his mouth through his chest to end with a sharp pleasurable jolt in his penis. He tightened his arms around her.
Vicki pulled away. “Give a clinic some thought,” she said. “Between your other worries, of course. Here she comes.”
Jackson became aware that an alarm was sounding, had been sounding just beyond the edge of his attention. Over it he heard Cazie yelling, “Jackson! I know you’re in here someplace! Jack, damn it, I want to talk to you!”
Vicki smiled. Very deliberately she drew back her curtain and called, “Over here, Cazie. We’re over here.”
Cazie strode through the ridiculous maze of shabby furniture. She took in the scene all at once: Jackson beside Vicki’s bed, Vicki standing with one hand gracefully holding back the curtain, Jackson’s face flustered and Vicki’s sly. Cazie stood very still.
“We’re finished here,” Vicki cooed. “See you later, Jackson.” She winked at him.
He was afraid to meet Cazie’s eyes.
April 1, election day, was wet. When Jackson woke in a stuffy cubicle in the tribe building in Willoughby County, he heard the rain clattering on the roof.
He had not planned to be here. But yesterday he’d hiked into a barrage of robocams and reporters, two of whom had tried to pin him against the building wall to identify him. They’d been close enough to see his genemod eyes. He’d shoved them off and escaped into the building, where Lizzie insisted that if he didn’t want to be recognized, he should stay all night. Vicki was gone to another tribe. Jackson was just as glad.
He lay on the hard pallet of nonconsumable fabric, staring in the dim gloom at two walls made of foamcast, one of what appeared to be discarded sheet metal braced with broken chair rungs, and one of dun homespun curtain. Hanging on the sheet metal was a handworked sampler in lavender yam and crimson: WELCOME STRANGER. From this he deduced that he had been put in the tribe’s guest room.
He stood up, stretched, pulled on his pants, and followed the general morning noise to the center of the cavernous building.
“Morning!” Lizzie sang. Her black eyes sparkled. She wore outdoor clothes and hiking boots. Dirk lay in a turquoise plastic box on the floor, waving his fat fists and trying to capture his bare toes. “Today’s the day!”
“Where’s Shockey?” Jackson asked. He badly wanted a cup of coffee, which he was not going to get.