Every day she trudged down the mountain to see Dirk for a few minutes. There was never any message for her from Dr. Aranow on the camp terminal, telling her what was going on.
Why should he tell her? She was nobody.
She turned next to dipping other Liver camps. This was both easier and harder. The temporary camps, always moving, usually had one or two young people who could exploit a terminal. Some dipped extensively and deeply; some merely scanned other camps’ postings. There were few patterns to look for. On the other hand, almost no Liver users knew how to cover their electronic tracks. The data was disorganized, massive, and ragged, but it wasn’t encrypted.
She wrote programs to access and analyze dozens of different kinds of data, looking for… what? How could you use the Net to notice fear of new things? If people were afraid of new areas, they simply didn’t access them. How did you find an absence of subsets of people, across a whole continent?
Slowly, her probability programs began yielding patterns.
A Liver camp in someplace called Judith Falls, Iowa, dipped the accounts of nearby donkey warehouses at exactly the same time every day, for exactly the same duration. The repetitious pattern had not existed before April.
A tribe roaming across Texas sent greetings to exactly the same list of distant relatives in exactly the same order, with essentially the same wording, on the same days every week. Starting April 3.
A town, apparently pre-Change Wars and still occupied by the same people in northern Oregon, datadipped only on Thursday afternoons. Each Thursday, some dipper—whose technique wasn’t bad, Lizzie noted approvingly—broke into the same nearby biotech data banks. As near as Lizzie could follow the dipper’s tracks, he or she was checking various inventories for Change syringes. There never were any.
Sitting cross-legged on her pallet, Lizzie pulled at her hair. The cabin door stood wide open; spring had given way to an early, abrupt summer, even though it was only May. The scent of wild mint blew in on a warm breeze. Birds, nesting, sang in the leafing trees. Lizzie ignored it all.
Suppose that these Liver camps had been infected with the neuropharm, just like Lizzie’s camp. Suppose that was why they showed repeated actions—safe, routine actions. Suppose further that they were test sites, too. What good did knowing this do her? Lizzie couldn’t travel to Iowa or Texas or Oregon to investigate these camps. And even if she could—so what? She might find that other Livers were lab rats, too. Like her Dirk. But knowing that wouldn’t help change anything.
Her neck and back ached from sitting so long, and her left foot was asleep.
She had to figure out something else to try. All right, forget the Livers who’d been infected and the drug companies that might have made the drug. Who else? Who wanted everything to stay exactly the same? Donkey politicians, yes. Shockey’s non-election had proved that. But how to find out which politicians could create such a political weapon? No monitor and flagging programs, no Leland-Warner decision algorithms, and no probability equations had yielded anything significant. So now what?
Follow the money. Something Vicki always said. But she’d tried to do that, through the drug-company investments, and gotten nowhere. Or nowhere she could understand. So now what?
Don’t start with the end product, the neuropharm, and follow it to the money. Start with the money, and follow it to the neuropharm.
But that was impossible. Lizzie could dip the records of the world’s major banks—or most of them, anyway—but she often couldn’t follow the transactions she uncovered. She lacked the financial sophistication. And not once had she been able to change anything in any bank records. Well, she didn’t need to do that now. The problem was something else: the sheer volume of daily transfers of money around the Earth, Moon, Mars, and orbital accounts. How was she supposed to tell which ones had anything to do with a secret neuropharm developed who-knew-where by who-knew-who? It was impossible.
She couldn’t follow the drug development. She couldn’t follow the money. All right, then—try again. If those camps in Iowa and Texas and Oregon were test sites for the neuropharm, the people who tested would want to know the results. They’d be observing, probably by robocam. Maybe by high-zoom, low-orbit satellite.
Which meant they would also be observing her tribe.
A shiver ran over Lizzie. Were stealth probes, disguised by Y-shields, observing her “hiding place” in the mountain cabin? Did they watch her go back and forth to see Dirk every day? Was someone amused at the idea that Lizzie thought she could escape infection that easily, if they decided they wanted her infected? Worse—was someone, despite all her care, following her electronic footsteps as she datadipped day and night?
She got up, stamped her sleeping foot, and went to the door of the cabin. She looked, stupidly, up at the bright blue sky. Of course there was nothing to see. The fresh scent of mint made her remember that she hadn’t bathed of washed her hair in days. She smelled like something hit by a maglev train.
She went back inside and sat on her dirty pallet, staring at her terminal.
It didn’t have radar capability, especially not if the probes were actually in orbit, and actually stealth. Visual monitoring was beyond her. But she could detect a ground-source data stream within a mile or so radius. If there were implanted transmitters of any kind monitoring the camp, she could find them if she just moved her terminal to various points around the woods. Unless, of course, the theoretical hidden probes found her first and stopped sending.
On the third night, she found it. A steady data stream, heavily encrypted, from a source in a thick pine tree forty yards away from the tribe building. It had a clear scan of the feeding ground. Lizzie wasn’t sure what the data were; she couldn’t dip the stream. That itself was scary.
But even if she couldn’t break the coding—and she tried!—she could at least determine where the data stream went. It beamed itself upward, undoubtedly to a relay satellite in orbit. From there, its destination was theoretically so scrambled it was unknowable. But not to Lizzie. Relay data were old news to her.
She worked at the problem an entire morning, while warm rain pattered on the roof and her heart ached to hold Dirk. Eventually, as she knew she would, she dipped the transmission data.
She gasped and glanced wildly around, although of course there was nobody to see. Then, heart pounding as badly as Dirk’s whenever she took him away from his blocks, she shut down her entire system. She even closed and locked the Jansen-Sagura terminal. Sitting cross-legged, staring at nothing at all, she tried to think about implications, and meanings, and safeguards. And couldn’t.
The observations about her tribe were indeed being transmitted to orbit. To Sanctuary.
“I have to find Dr. Aranow,” Lizzie said to Billy Washington, because she had to tell somebody. She’d found Billy where he always was in the early afternoon, fishing in the creek.
“No, you best stay here, you,” Billy said, but more mildly than Annie would have. Individual biochemical differences, Dr. Aranow had said. People reacted differently, sometimes very differently, to any drug.
“I can’t stay here, Billy. I have to find Dr. Aranow and Vicki.”
“Speak up, you. I can’t hardly hear you.”
“No, I’m not going to speak louder, Billy.” The monitor was a quarter mile away, but Lizzie wasn’t taking chances. “How can I get to Manhattan East Enclave?”
“Manhattan? You can’t, you. You know that.”
“I don’t believe that. You know a lot more than you let on, Billy. You talked to strangers all the time, before we settled here for the winter.” She saw the alarm flickering in his eyes at the mention of strangers. “The gravrail doesn’t run, it, I checked, but there must be some way!”