“Yes, thanks,” Jackson said. Beside him, Vicki went still. Jackson took her hand. “Something for my… friend, too. Although she’ll wait in the suite.”
“Of course,” Rogers said. He looked much happier. He had Vicki figured out. Jackson could almost hear Rogers’s thoughts: Not my taste but actually rather pretty underneath and Jackson always did like acerbic women he married Cazie Sanders didn’t he—Vicki mercifully said nothing until the hostess holo had shown them to a discreet conference room with a discreet bedroom and bath beyond a discreet door.
“Not in the bioshielded part of the building that Rogers was in,” she commented, randomly opening closets. Inside hung both business clothes and bathrobes. “What do you want to bet Rogers only attends the meeting in holo?”
“Could be,”
“Although this is a nice enough suite at that.” She pressed against Jackson and breathed directly into his ear, so low that no listening device could have caught it. “What are you going to do?”
It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see the monitors; they were there, He put his arms around her and whispered back, “Let Cazie commit investment funds.”
“Why?”
“Only way to find out what they do.”
She nodded against his shoulder. It was disturbing holding her in his arms. She didn’t feel like Cazie. She was taller, less rounded. Her skin felt cooler. She smelled different. Jackson had an erection.
He released Vicki and turned away, pretending to be busy examining clothing in a closet. When he turned back, he expected to see her smiling sardonically, poised to make some cutting comment. But she wasn’t. She stood quietly, somehow forlornly, in the middle of the room, and her face had softened into an expression that on anyone else he would have called wistful.
“Vicki…?”
“Yes, Jackson?” She raised her eyes to his and he saw with a shock that they were wide with naked need.
“Vicki…!…”
His mobile spoke. “Moonquake from Theresa Aranow. Repeat, moonquake from Theresa Aranow.”
“Moonquake” was the family code, left over from childhood, for a high-emergency call. Theresa had never used it before. Jackson opened the mobile. Her image was there, in some kind of small open cabin… it looked like a plane. But that was impossible. Theresa couldn’t ride a plane.
“J-Jackson!” she gasped. “They’re dead!”
“Who? Who’s dead, Theresa?”
“Everyone in La Solana! Richard Sharifi!” Suddenly Theresa pulled herself together. “Richard Sharifi. He was in the compound, or at least his recorded image was still there… La Solana—”
Behind him, Vicki snapped, “Terminal on! Newsgrid! Channel 35!” A wall screen brightened.
“—nuclear detonation at La Solana, the heavily shielded New Mexico compound that is home to Miranda Sharifi’s father. Richard Keller Sharifi. No group has claimed credit for the bomb, which of course violates national and international nuclear bans. The White House has issued a statement of outrage, followed by the Pentagon’s immediate dispatching of defense ’bots programmed for minute analysis of the radioactive rubble for any clue as to the bomb’s composition, origin, or means of delivery. The energy shield around La Solana was developed by—”
Theresa said, “I’m flying home, Jackson.”
“Tess, hold on, you sound funny, you don’t sound like yourself—”
“I’m not,” Theresa said. Her eyes opened very wide and for a moment she smiled. It was the most unsettling thing Jackson had seen in an unsettling day.
Theresa added, in a voice not at all her own, “The pilot says we took two hundred forty rads,” and then the screen blanked.
“Jesus Christ,” Vicki said softly. “Will she… is that enough to kill her?”
“Probably not, but she’s going to be very sick. I’ve got to go.”
“What about Cazie?”
“To hell with her,” Jackson said, and saw Vicki smile, and knew—just as Vicki did—that he didn’t mean it. Not yet. But maybe someday he would. And meanwhile, Cazie couldn’t actually commit major investment capital without his consent or Theresa’s. Which was, at least, better than nothing.
Although nothing like enough.
Sixteen
When Lizzie awoke, Vicki was still gone.
It was easy to know who was in camp and who wasn’t. Everyone gathered at the same time for breakfast under the feeding tarp, and everybody lay or sat in the same place. Some people—Norma Kroll. Grandma Seifert, Sam Webster—even lay in the same position. Day after day. The tribe talked softly as they fed, and then they left the feeding ground in the same order, and set about the same tasks. Bringing fresh soil, with unused nutrients in it. Cleaning out the building. Tending the children, who played the same games with the same toys in the same places. Making things of wood or cloth, or getting the wood or cloth in the forest or from the weaving ’bot. Day after day.
Lunch at the same time, in the same places.
Naps for the children, crafts or holo-watching or water-fetching or cards or exercise. Dinner, in the same places under the tarp. The same stories at night, when the unseasonably cold April kept everyone inside. Would they still stay inside in June, in August, just because it had been the routine in April?
“I can’t stand it,” Lizzie had said to her mother. Annie replied, “You always was too impatient, you. Enjoy this time, Lizzie. It’s safe and peaceful. Don’t you want peace, you, for your baby?”
“Not like this!” Lizzie shouted, but Annie just shook her head and went back to the wall hanging she was making of woven cloth, pebbles, and dried flowers. When it was done, Lizzie thought in despair, she’d make another one. At ten o’clock she and Billy would go to bed, because ten o’clock was their bed time. They probably made love the same nights each week. Certainly Shockey and Sharon, in the cubicle next to Lizzie’s, did. Tuesday and Saturday nights, Sunday afternoon.
At least when Vicki had been in camp, there’d been someone else to talk to. Vicki was tense, agitated, frustrated, unpredictable. Vicki was real. She paced through the wood paths, mud clinging to her boots, talking out her fear and her hope. Sometimes it seemed to Lizzie that Vicki couldn’t tell one from the other.
“We have to wait on Jackson,” Vicki had said, smacking one fist into her opposite palm. “Much as I hate doing it, he and his spectacularly obnoxious researcher friend, Thurmond Rogers, are the only way we’re going to get to the medical roots of this, Lizzie. It’s a medical problem, and it can be fought best with a medical model. Somehow the brain chemistry’s been shifted, and we—”
“Wait,” Lizzie said. “Wait.”
Vicki looked at her.
“It’s not just a medical problem, it.” She heard her own shift into Liver language and hated it. Wouldn’t she ever learn? “It’s political, too. Somebody’s doing this, them! It just didn’t happen all by itself!”
“Yes, of course, you’re right. But we can’t deal directly with the cause—we tried that with the election, remember? The best we can hope for is to manipulate the results. Come on, Jackson… call!”
And apparently Jackson eventually had, because now Vicki was gone. To Jackson’s wonderful house in Manhattan East? To Kelvin-Castner in Boston? Lizzie didn’t know.