“What new syringes?” Richard Sharifi said.
Theresa blinked. The image on the shimmering blue wall was real-time. Richard Sharifi’s sad dark eyes stared at her steadily, waiting for an answer.
“The… the new syringes somebody left at the… the camp in the mountains in New York, at… at…” She couldn’t remember the coordinates. “Red syringes, and there was a holo of Miranda that wasn’t really Miranda…”
Richard Sharifi turned his head. He frowned and said, “No—” His huge image abruptly shrank, until Theresa was looking at a screen no more than three inches square. On it Richard Sharifi was replaced by a plain woman with wild dark hair held by a red ribbon.
“Theresa. This is Miranda Sharifi.”
Theresa gasped, “Are you… are you sending from Selene?”
“Please tell me everything you can about this new syringe and holo cartridge left with the Liver tribe. Start at the beginning, go slow, and don’t leave anything out. It’s very important.”
A second three-inch-square image appeared—Richard Sharifi again, scowling fiercely. He said, “You should know that we have scanned you, your plane, and the area for any recording equipment. Your pilot is not observing you, and even if she were, this screen at that distance is too small for even the most powerful Sleeper zoom lenses to see. If you state to anyone that this conversation ever occurred, your chances of being believed are very low. Your medical records indicate—”
“Unnecessary, Daddy,” Miranda said, and now she was scowling, too. The tiny image of Richard Sharifi disappeared.
Theresa blurted, “You’re not at Selene at all, are you? You’re here…”
“Tell me everything about the new syringes, Theresa. Starting with how you happened to be in a Liver camp. No, don’t panic—I can’t send help out to you. Breathe deeply, look at this screen, Theresa, look at it—”
She did, gasping for air, through waves of panicky blackness. Around Miranda shimmered subtle shapes and colors, what were they, she felt a little calmer… Subliminals. Theresa breathed.
“Those… those are like a Drew Arlen concert!”
An expression of pain, complicated and deep, passed over Miranda’s face. “Tell me about the new syringes.”
Theresa did, growing calmer as she talked. Miranda listened without ever blinking her dark eyes. Dark like her father’s, too dark to be Cazie’s… But Theresa wasn’t pretending to be Cazie. She wasn’t even pretending to be Leisha Camden. She was Theresa Aranow.
“Miranda… turn off the subliminals. Please. I can… can do this. I think.”
For the first, and last, time, Theresa saw Miranda Sharifi smile.
When she was done talking, Theresa said, “But if you didn’t make the new syringes, who did? Jackson said we donkeys don’t have any biotech like that, that sophisticated—”
“Here’s what I want you to do, Theresa. Listen carefully, I want you to go home, and tell nobody about your visit here, or the new syringes. Not even Jackson. Also—this is very important—don’t speak anything about this into any terminal. Not even if you think it’s completely freestanding.”
Theresa put out her hand, but stopped short of the tiny image on the blue wall. Her fingers hung suspended. Hot wind stirred the rubble of weathered offerings at her feet.
“Miranda—why did you stop the Change syringes?”
“We made a mistake. We didn’t intend—our goal was to make the Livers free of donkey domination. Autotropic. We didn’t know they… you… would so quickly regress to infantile dependence. And now none of us know what the next step should be, because we can’t find the equations to predict outcomes with any degree of accuracy. We’re all here trying so hard…” The holo image shuddered. Miranda raised her hands, let them fall helplessly. “An enormous mistake. When I see the newsgrids of babies dying, of unChanged children suffering, when those pleas are rebeamed from Selene… We thought we could control it all for you! Like your ‘gods.’ We thought… we forgot…”
Theresa finished the sentence. “You forgot to look hard enough inside yourselves.”
“Yes,” Miranda whispered. “We did. And we caused chaos.”
“But you only meant to—”
“And now we’re trying desperately to find a way out of that chaos, a scientific solution you can synthesize yourselves, without us, the right substance… a solution you can control, and won’t pervert. But, Theresa, we don’t think like you, or react like you, or feel like you.”
It was a plea. Theresa saw that Miranda—Miranda Sharifi!—hurt with a depth of pain Theresa could only imagine. She caught her breath. The two women stared at each other, and something passed between them that, it seemed to Theresa, she had never shared with anyone else in her life, not even Jackson.
She said softly, “Yes, you do. You feel exactly like me.”
Miranda didn’t smile. “Perhaps. Go now, Theresa. We’ll take care of the new syringes that destroy even more freedom than we already destroyed.”
The blue shimmering wall went blank.
Dazed, Theresa returned to the plane. The pilot waited, watching a newsgrid. She blanked the screen as Theresa climbed in. La Solana was already out of sight when Theresa finally spoke.
“Do you know how long it takes for a message to get to the moon and back? By the fastest way?”
The pilot glanced at her quizzically. “You mean, if you decided to transmit to Luna City and they answered immediately?”
“Yes. Isn’t there a… a lag when people are speaking to each other? Of a few seconds, at least?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” Of course, that was human technology. Jackson said the Supers had all sorts of technology that humans didn’t. We don’t think like you, or react like you…
“Oh, my God!” Pilot Olivetti said.
“What? What is it?”
The plane suddenly leaped forward with an acceleration that crushed Theresa against the back of her seat. Then the sky filled with blinding light. The pilot cried out.
The light faded; moments later the plane shuddered as if it would come apart. Roaring assaulted Theresa’s ears. The plane righted, and flew on.
The brilliant light was behind her. But the sun was ahead, to the southeast… how could that bright a light be where the sun wasn’t? Theresa turned to look out the rear window, and saw the top of the mushroom cloud rising above the horizon.
“We took two hundred forty rads,” Pilot Olivetti gasped, looking at her screens. “Ms. Aranow… prepare to be very sick.”
“But… but what happened?”
“Someone took out La Solana. With a nuclear weapon. Minutes earlier, and we would be dead.”
“But… why?”
“How should I know? But God, if Selene retaliates…” She turned on the newsgrid.
Theresa put her head in her hands. Selene couldn’t retaliate. Nobody was at Selene. Miranda Sharifi and all her SuperSleepless had been in La Solana—we’re all here trying so hard to find a solution—and now they were all dead. They would never give more Change syringes to save dying children, or find a solution to humans’ being so dependent on the syringes, or stop whoever was making Jomp and the other triads even more dependent and afraid. Somebody had bombed La Solana to kill Richard Sharifi, or to destroy Miranda’s old home, or to attract attention to some cause of their own. The SuperSleepless were all dead.
And Theresa was the only person on Earth who knew it.
Interlude
TRANSMISSION DATE: April 4, 2121
TO: Selene Base, Moon
VIA: Lubbock Enclave Ground Station, Satellite S-65 (Israel)