But the worst was Dirk.
“Look, Dirk, a chipmunk!”
That afternoon she’d carried him a little way into the raw spring woods, dressed in his warm winter jacks, his fringe of dark bangs falling across his forehead under the bright red hood. The whole tiny walk, Dirk buried his head in Lizzie’s shoulder and refused to look up. Gently she forced him to raise his eyes.
“Look at the chipmunk! Scamper scamper!”
The small creature stopped twenty feet away, looked at them inquisitively, and sat on its hind legs, fluffy tail curled upward behind it. It lifted a nut and began to nibble, its head bobbing comically over its small upraised paws. Dirk looked and began to scream in terror.
“Stop it! Stop it, damn it!” Lizzie screamed in turn, and was immediately appalled and frightened. What was she doing? Dirk couldn’t help it! She cradled him tight and ran back to the building. Annie looked up from her wall hanging.
“Lizzie! Where’d you take that child, him?”
“For a fucking walk!” She was angry all over again, now that Dirk, in his familiar surroundings, stopped crying. On the floor he saw the blocks Billy had made for him, the blocks he always played with at this time of the afternoon, and kicked for Lizzie to put him down.
Annie said, “You watch your language, you. Here, come to Grandma, Dirk, this is our block time, isn’t it? Come to Grandma.”
The baby stopped crying. Happily he began to pile blocks on top of each other. Annie smiled at him from her chair.
Despair took Lizzie.
“Where are you going now, child?” Annie said. “Sit down, you, and talk with me.”
“I’m going back outside.”
Alarm filled Annie’s dark eyes. “No, stay here, you. Lizzie, sit here with Dirk and me…”
Lizzie bolted out the door.
The sun had come out from behind gray clouds. She began walking aimlessly, anywhere to get away from the placid, safe routine behind her. Which would go on day after day after day, until everybody died.
Striding the path up the mountain, she kicked at twigs fallen in the winter winds. Would the path just become more and more unused, if it wasn’t part of anyone’s routine to walk on it? Would the neuropharm spread? Maybe she, Lizzie, would get infected if it came back a second time. And she wouldn’t even mind, that was the worst of it. She’d be like Annie, grateful for safety and peace.
Lizzie stopped and punched a birch sapling. No. She was eighteen years old, and she couldn’t just give up. She never had, not in her whole life. There had to be something she could do about this. There had to be.
But what?
She couldn’t look for some antidote to the neuropharm; Jackson and Vicki and Thurmond Rogers were already doing that. She couldn’t start another election; the way everybody was now, there was even less chance than before that she could get people to vote a Liver into power. This had all worked out pretty well for the donkey candidate!
Was that why it had happened? Had Donald Thomas Serrano arranged for the safety-first neuropharm so that a donkey would win the election? But Jackson had said this was a completely new kind of neuropharm, one that the Cell Cleaner didn’t eliminate because it must get the body to permanently change the proteins the body itself made. No one would waste a new neuropharm like that on a dinky election for Willoughby County district supervisor.
Unless they were just testing it? Unless who was just testing it?
This was getting her nowhere! She was just too stupid to figure anything out. Who did she think she was, Miranda Sharifi?
She was Lizzie Francy, that’s who. The best datadipper in the country. Maybe in the whole goddamn world!
All right, she jeered at herself, if she was such a hotshot dipper, why wasn’t she dipping? Why was she standing here in the April woods punching baby trees when she should be doing the one goddamn thing she knew how to do? She should, first, protect herself against getting the neuropharm, by finding a place to live apart from the tribe. There were all kinds of abandoned cabins up here in the mountains. Other tribes wouldn’t be back from the south until the weather warmed up in a few months. She would be safe enough. She could take a spare Y-cone and her terminal, and spend eighteen hours a day searching the Net for answers.
Without Dirk?
Lizzie’s stride faltered. She couldn’t take him. If she did, he’d spend his whole time wailing in fear of the new surroundings. And she’d spend her whole time caring for him. Nobody had told her, when she’d so blithely gotten pregnant, how much sheer time a baby took. Especially one that was crawling and putting everything in his mouth. She couldn’t take Dirk. She’d have to leave him with Annie and the tribe, where he belonged until she could somehow find out what she needed to do to help cure him.
And she would find out. Because she was Lizzie Francy. They—whoever they were!—were not going to defeat her!
At a headlong run Lizzie started back to the camp.
She found a foamcast cabin about two miles from the camp. It looked like it had once belonged to a family of Livers, the kind of stubborn people who before the Change Wars had lived alone on the side of a mountain rather than in a government-supported town. When they’d left, they’d taken or burned for heat everything in the cabin. There was no furniture, no plumbing. Lizzie didn’t need them. The door still closed snugly and the plastic windows were intact. There was a stream in the woods.
She cleared out the wildlife living in corners: a raccoon, a snake, newly hatching spiders. She moved in a Y-cone, her bedding, and a plastic water jug. Then she sat cross-legged on her bedding, back against the plain foamcast wall, and talked to her terminal.
She started, because she had to start somewhere, with Donald Serrano. The new Willoughby County district supervisor was running his office the same way as had the dead Harold Winthrop Wayland. Nothing in Lizzie’s careful tracings of Serrano’s financial holdings or personal records led, even indirectly, to a drug company. If that link existed, Serrano had hidden it better than Lizzie could dip. She didn’t think the link existed.
Next she tried the major biotech companies. This was much trickier. She didn’t want any dipping traced back to her. It took weeks of slow, painstaking work to break all the security codes and get into the deebees. She used phantom searchers, which she constructed in other people’s systems chosen at random. The searchers in turn constructed elaborate programs of clones, worms, encryptions, and blind alleys. Lizzie secreted the files thus pirated in yet other randomly chosen systems, and accessed them only through phantoms. She was very, very careful.
But once she had the information, another problem arose: she didn’t have the scientific background to know what she was looking at. It did help that she knew what she was looking for: any line of development for neuropharms that changed the brain’s permanent reactions in the direction of greater fear. A few companies were working on long-lasting pleasure drugs that could evade the Cell Cleaner; nobody, as far as Lizzie could tell, was succeeding.
She paid special attention to Kelvin-Castner. Their data banks were full of esoteric reports on what was being done with Dirk’s and Shockey’s tissue samples. Every day, it seemed, more researchers joined the team. More equipment paid for, more interim reports filed, more lab notes she couldn’t read. The doctors were doing something at Kelvin-Castner, something big and growing bigger exponentially. TenTech was funding some of it. But whether it was just more pleasure-drug research or whether K-C was trying to find a counteragent to the fear neuropharm, Lizzie simply couldn’t tell. She didn’t have the science.