Theresa looked longingly at the brown box. But most patches, Jackson said, were prepared for Changed bodies. He’d warned her not to use anything not adjusted for her unChanged chemistry.
“No, thank you. Just… just a blanket.” She was shivering, even though the plane was heated.
Somewhere over hills still topped with snow, Theresa fell asleep naturally. She woke when the pilot said, “Ms. Aranow, this is Taos. Do you want to set down here or at some private airfield?”
“Do you know where the airfield is for… for La Solana? Where Leisha Camden once lived?”
Pilot Olivetti turned in her seat and stared at Theresa. “Of course. There used to be crowds of reporters and tourists going there all the time. And lately, people wanting to talk to Richard Sharifi about sending messages to his daughter. But it won’t do you any good to go there—Richard Sharifi never comes out. The most you’ll get is the standard recorded message.”
Theresa closed her eyes. What had she been thinking? Of course she wasn’t the first one to try to contact Miranda through La Solana. Probably everybody in the world had already tried—politicians and important people like that. And if Richard Sharifi didn’t see them, there was no reason he would see Theresa Aranow. She was a fool.
What would Cazie do?
“We’re here now,” she said to the pilot. “Go to La Solana.”
Pilot Olivetti shrugged and spoke to the plane.
Theresa saw the compound long before they reached it. A pale blue semi-ovoid on the desert floor, it shone as featureless and perfect as a robin’s egg. Terry Mwakambe, Miranda Sharifi’s most gifted practical physicist, had designed the shield for Leisha. There was nothing like it anywhere on Earth, except around the deserted island of Huevos Verdes, where Miranda and her people had created the Change syringes.
The shield wasn’t Y-energy, but something else—Theresa didn’t know what. It extended under the ground as well as through the air. Nothing with any DNA content not stored in the security banks got through the blue dome: not birds or worms or microbes. Nor did anything unaccompanied by DNA that was stored in the data banks: not ’bots or missiles or rocks. The shield also kept out all but a narrow range of radiation. And nothing that wasn’t nuclear could destroy the shield itself.
Theresa walked from the plane to the half-buried robin’s egg. Desert sun hit her uncovered head. A small wind stirred the incredible pile of rubble heaped against the shining blue. Stacks of holo cartridges. A child’s doll. A tattered American flag. Plastic flowers, bloody handkerchiefs, the bleached skull of some animal, wrecking tools, each bent and twisted. And a sealed, tiny coffin. Theresa’s gorge rose. Was it just symbolic, or did the coffin hold somebody’s unChanged baby, dead of a disease that could have been cured by more Change syringes?
A section of blue wall shimmered into a huge screen, ten feet square. It held the image of a man who appeared to be in his forties, although Theresa knew he was actually seventy-seven. The dark eyes above the heavy black beard looked weary.
“This is Richard Sharifi, Miranda Sharifi’s father. There is no admittance to La Solana under any circumstances. If you wish to speak a message for Miranda Sharifi, tell the recorder when you want it to start. All messages for Miranda will be beamed to Selene daily. No physical object you leave outside these walls will ever be retrieved or examined. Thank you.” The image disappeared.
That was it. Theresa clasped her hands in front of her. “Recorder start.”
“Recorder on.”
“My name is Theresa Aranow. You don’t know me. I’m… I’m not anybody. But there are babies dying from not being Changed—”
She stopped. Richard and Miranda Sharifi already knew that. What could she say that might interest them, convince them… of what? That people needed help? Who was she to think she could help anyone? Some days she could barely get out of bed in the morning.
But not this day. She tried again.
“I’m not anybody. I’m not even Changed. I wanted… I needed to keep what I am because I’m not normal for a donkey, and if I lose that then I lose Theresa. I lose… the way I’m supposed to be, to find what… I’m looking for.”
Something was happening inside her. The rush of competence she’d felt when she was being Cazie returned, only not because she was being someone else. Because she was being the most real, bedrock Theresa. The words rushed out the same way they had when she’d talked to Sister Anne at the convent for the Sisters of Merciful Heaven.
“I could be Changed, and maybe it wouldn’t matter. I’m expensive like I am, I know. I have to eat real food. I have to have a house kept free of germs. I have to have clean water. All those things cost money, and if I didn’t have so much money, and if my brother wasn’t a doctor, then it would be wrong for me not to be Changed because I would be such a burden on everybody else. But I do have money, and I do have Jackson, and so it would be wrong for me to arrange things so I don’t hurt. I have to hurt. Everybody needs to hurt in some way, or they get… sloppy. No, that’s not the word. Miranda—”
She was talking directly to Miranda, who wasn’t even on Earth, but that didn’t matter. Theresa rushed on.
“Miranda, I don’t know the word for how people get when they can’t feel hurt and alone. But something happens to them. When they take those kinds of neuropharms all the time they get so they can’t feel themselves, and then pretty soon they can’t feel other people either. They get like Cazie’s friends, and maybe even Cazie herself… I don’t know. Cazie is good underneath. But she did so many inhalers to cover up her hurt that pretty soon she couldn’t see Jackson’s hurt, and then pretty soon after that she couldn’t see Jackson at all. He’s just another piece of furniture in her life, or another ’bot.
“People have to hurt. They have to let themselves feel the hurt. They have to make themselves stand it, and not take it away with EndorKiss or neuropharms or sex or making money… it’s the only way we know we should do something different. That we should keep on looking harder, inside us and also inside everybody else… You can’t just go around the pain, you have to go through it to get to the place on the other side where your soul is… oh, I don’t know! I’m not smart enough to know! Something went wrong in my embryonic genemod, I’m not smart like Jackson or Cazie… but I do know that you have to give us more Change syringes, so babies can live long enough to even feel their own hurt and start to learn from it. Maybe you shouldn’t have given us the Change syringes at all. But you did, and now the Livers can’t survive without them because we donkeys just dumped them all, and we control the resources. So you have to give us more Change syringes so those children even live long enough to look for what matters.
“But there’s something else wrong, too. There’s a camp in New York—the state, not the city—that has a new kind of Change syringe. Red ones. And it’s doing something to those Livers. They’re bonding by pheromones or something in threes, so that if they go far from each other, they die. Really die. And the syringes came with a holo cartridge that has you in it, explaining the syringes are another gift from Miranda Sharifi. The Livers believe that. Only it’s wrong. The holo is a fake, and the new syringes just make it even harder for people to feel their own individual hurt and see each other. The triads are all blurred together in a blob, they’re not real people anymore, they have the comfort of never feeling alone but unless they can feel alone how can they ever feel their own hurt and then start to go through it to—”