“Maybe the biosensors are malfunctioning. Another failure like duragem.”
“Maybe,” Cazie said. “But I checked around. Nobody else is having sensor failure. Just us. So I think we better go have a look. Okay, Jackson? Tomorrow morning?”
“I’m busy.”
“Doing what? You’re not busy—that’s the trouble, none of us are busy enough. Here’s something to do, something that impacts our finances, something with actual substance. Come with me.”
She smiled at him, full voltage, her long golden eyes full of the sly pleading missing from her brash words. Jackson knew that later, when he lay in bed going over and over this conversation, he wouldn’t be able to re-create the compelling quality of her. Of her eyes, her body language, her tone. He would remember only the words themselves, without grace or subtlety, and so would curse himself for saying yes.
Cazie laughed. “Nine o’clock, then. I’ll drive. Meanwhile, I’m starving. Oh, Tessie, here you are. What a pretty little genemod bird. Can you talk, cage bird? Can you say ‘social dissolution’?”
Theresa held up the Y-energy cage and said, “He only sings.”
“Like most of us,” Cazie said. “Desperate discordant tunes. Jackson, I am hungry. And not for mouth food, either, tonight. I think we should keep Tessie company while she eats, and then you should invite me to dinner in your so-tasteful feeding ground.”
“I’m going out,” Jackson said quickly. Theresa looked at him in quick surprise, as quickly veiled. He never knew how much she knew, or guessed, about his feelings for Cazie. Theresa was so sensitive to distress; she must intuit that it would be impossible for Jackson to go calmly with Cazie to the dining room, take off most of his clothes, and lie on the nutrient-enriched soil while his Changed body absorbed everything it needed, in perfect proportions, through his feeding tubules. Jackson couldn’t do it. Although the lure was powerful. To lie there under the warm lights, their changing wavelengths carefully selected for a relaxing effect on the mind, to breathe the perfumed air, to turn on one elbow to talk casually to Cazie, to watch Cazie feed, lying on her stomach, her small firm breasts bared to the earth…
Impossible.
He waited until his erection had subsided before he stood and stretched with elaborate nonchalance. “Well, people are waiting on me. Good night, Cazie. Theresa, I won’t be late.”
“Be careful, Jackson,” Theresa said, as she always did, as if there could be any danger inside the Manhattan East Enclave, protected by a Y-shield from even unwanted weather. Theresa had not left the apartment in over a year.
“Yes, be careful, Jack,” Cazie mocked tenderly, and his heart caught when it seemed he heard regret mixed with the tenderness. But when he turned back, she was fussing again over Theresa’s bird, and didn’t even look at him.
There was tomorrow.
Damn tomorrow. It was a business trip, to find out what was going wrong at the Willoughby plant. He owned the damn company—or at least a third of it—he should check the factories’ printouts more, give orders to the AI running it, link with the TenTech chief engineer, check up on problems. He should be more responsible about his and Theresa’s money. He should…
He should do a lot of things.
He walked out into the cold November night, which under the dome felt like a warm September night, and tried to think up someplace he might actually want to go to dinner besides home.
Two
Lizzie Francy halted on the rough grass of the dark Pennsylvania field and put a warning hand on Vicki Turner’s arm. A cold wind blew. A hundred feet ahead the TenTech Y-energy cone factory loomed in the moonlight, a windowless foamcast rectangle, blank and featureless as a prison.
“No farther,” Lizzie said. “The security shield starts four feet ahead. See the change in the grass?”
“Of course not, I can’t see anything,” Vicki said. “How can you?”
“I was here in daytime,” Lizzie said. “We have to move, a little left… I left a marker. You’re shivering, Vicki—you cold?”
“I’m freezing. We’re all freezing. That’s the point of this whole illegal nocturnal burglary, isn’t it? God, I must be crazy to do this… How far left?”
“Right here. Don’t go any closer, the infrared detectors will pick us up.”
“Not me, I’m too cold. I’d register as rock. No, I don’t want your cape, you need it.”
“I’m not cold,” Lizzie said. She opened a gunny sack and started pulling out equipment.
“That’s your hormones surging. Pregnancy’s little Y-energy cones. All right, I’ll take the cape… How come your skin doesn’t eat clothes as fast as mine? Or does it just seem that way… Lizzie, baby, don’t get too excited. This isn’t going to work. Nobody, no matter how good a datadipper, can break into a Y-energy factory.”
“I can,” Lizzie said.
She grinned at Vicki. Vicki didn’t know. Vicki was smart, was educated, was a donkey, those people who used to run the world. Vicki had given Lizzie her first terminal, and taught her to use it. Lizzie owed Vicki everything. But Vicki didn’t know. Vicki was old, maybe even forty, and she’d grown up before the Change, when everything was different. Lizzie had spent the last five years on datanets, and she knew how good she was. There wasn’t anything she couldn’t dip (except of course Sanctuary, which didn’t count). It was Lizzie’s world now, and she could do anything. She was seventeen.
The two women unwrapped Lizzie’s equipment from more rough-woven sacking. Crystal library, system terminal, laser transmitter, full-body holosuits. Some of the equipment was jerry-fitted, some was stolen, all was old. Lizzie, her enormous belly pushing out the woven tunic already eaten into holes, worked at fitting the equipment together and aiming it at the building. Vicki, wrapped in Lizzie’s cape, suddenly chuckled. “I met Jackson Aranow once.”
“Who’s Jackson Aranow?”
“The owner of this factory we’re about to rob. Or at least his family is. Know your unwitting and unwilling patrons, I say. The Aranows are old-line conservative, stuffy, boring. And rich as Sanctuary.”
Lizzie looked up from the decryptions on her screen. “Really?”
“No, of course not really. God, don’t be so literal. Nobody’s as rich as Sanctuary.”
“Okay, we’re ready,” Lizzie said. She grinned, a flash of white teeth in the gloom. “You got your sack? Now remember, the shield will only be down for ten seconds before the system resets. You armed?”
“If you call this ‘armed,’ ” Vicki said, hefting the metal pipe she carried in her right hand. “Did you have to make it so heavy? If I’m going to die, I want to die light.”
“You’re not going to die. And you’re all but naked, isn’t that light enough?” Lizzie laughed, a low reckless giggle, and her fingers flew over her equipment. “Okay—now!”
A laser beam pierced the darkness, straight and hard-looking as a diamond-filament rod. It shot through the invisible energy shield to an exact, virtually indistinguishable site high on the building. A second beam followed. Multiple data addresses, their bioelectric molecules excited by the first laser array, absorbed additional energy from the second in a different region of the spectrum. The absorbed energy initiated a branching reaction, a sequential one-photon architecture—a set of wavelength keys fitted across the darkness into a self-repairing chromophore lock originally built of bacterial protein. The night filled with invisible information, some of it sent to other reception sites, farther relays, terminals in other states. There was nothing Lizzie could do about that; security systems, by their nature, alerted other systems. But the air shimmered briefly, and the Y-energy security shield dissolved.