The progress reports from Kelvin-Castner, Thurmond Rogers told him daily, didn’t seem to progress. The computer models weren’t panning out. The algorithms didn’t, upon investigation, apply. There were possibilities only, tentative hypotheses later disproved, unsatisfactory animal-testing results. They needed a breakthrough, Thurmond Rogers explained in messages that Jackson watched only until he had their gist. The breakthrough would come, Rogers said. It hadn’t yet, however. “After all, we’re not Miranda Sharifi and Jonathan Markowitz,” Rogers added testily.
“Patient’s progress within normal limits,” the nursing ’bot said.
“Sleep. Your sanity is consumable, you know,” Vicki said.
“Possibly a decapeptide, triggering cell response in—”
“De… ded… mmmm…”
“How is she, Jack? How are you? Answer me, damn it—”
After a month, Theresa still had radiation bums on her face and body. Her muscles had atrophied. Her sores stopped oozing. Jackson wanted her to eat, even though she wouldn’t have any real appetite for weeks yet. To eat, she had to come off sedation.
He and Vicki propped Theresa up against her pillows. Beside the bed, Vicki placed a huge bouquet of genemod flowers, pink and yellow and a deep subtle orange. Then she discreetly left the room. The nursing ’bot prepared a liquid protein, with a straw, that smelled of raspberries. Theresa had always liked raspberries.
“Jack… son.”
“Don’t try to talk, Tessie, if it hurts. You’ve been sick, but you’re going to be fine. I’m right here.”
She stared at him fuzzily. Her head was completely hairless, scabbed, burned. But slowly her pale blue eyes cleared.
“M-M-Mir…”
“I said don’t talk, honey.”
“M-Mir…”
He gave in. “Let me help. ‘Miranda Sharifi.’ You went out to La Solana to research your book about Leisha Camden, right? To talk to Miranda’s father, because he once knew Leisha?”
Theresa hesitated. The hairless pathetic head nodded slightly. She winced as the back of her skull scraped the soft pillow.
“De… ed.”
“Richard Sharifi is dead. Somebody bombed La Solana, and he was vaporized.” Jackson saw the question in her eyes. “No, the government doesn’t know who set off the bomb. It was apparently a drone ground-launched from the New Mexico mountains. No group has claimed credit, nobody’s been arrested, and if the FBI has leads, they aren’t making them public. And Selene Base hasn’t retaliated, or even made any public comment.”
“Not… at… Selene.”
“What’s not at Selene? Tess, honey, don’t try to talk anymore, I can see how it’s hurting you. All this can wait until you—”
“De-ed. Miranda.”
Jackson gently held Theresa’s hand. “Miranda Sharifi is dead? You can’t know that, honey.”
“Talked… to her. Me. Saw… her.”
“You saw Miranda Sharifi?” He glanced at the monitor. Theresa’s temperature, skin conductance, and brain scan were normal; she wasn’t hallucinating. “Honey, you couldn’t have. Miranda’s at Selene. On the moon.”
“No!”
“She’s not? She was at La Solana? Tess—how could that be?”
Theresa glared at him, watery blue eyes in a hideously deformed head. Then tears started to fall. Jackson saw her wince where their salt touched her skin. “Dead! Dead!”
“Tess, oh, don’t—”
“If she says she saw Miranda and Miranda’s dead, then it’s probably true,” Vicki’s voice said behind him. “She knows what she saw. And it’s the only motive that makes sense for bombing La Solana without taking credit or making demands.”
Theresa looked past Jackson, at Vicki standing in the doorway. Theresa nodded, a tremendous effort. Then her eyes closed and she was asleep.
Jackson whirled on Vicki. “Do you know what you’re saying?”
“Better than you do, probably.” Vicki’s face contorted and she left the room.
Jackson didn’t follow her. He gazed down at Theresa, who lay propped up, her poor mouth fallen open. Gently Jackson settled her flat on the bed.
He walked the length of the apartment, through the Y-shield onto the terrace. It was apparently dusk; Jackson had lost track of the hours, the days. The trees and flowerbeds in the park below bloomed in full-summer genemod glory. He thought it must be sometime in May.
Theresa said that Miranda Sharifi was dead.
And the rest of the SuperSleepless, too? Maybe. They had usually stayed together, in a pack of their own kind. Maybe because that was the only way they could find anyone who understood them. Or maybe just for simple protection. They stayed together, and hid, and then used all their technology to make the world think they were hiding someplace else, as yet another added protection.
And if Theresa was right, none of it had helped. The haters had gotten them anyway.
The treetops below danced in a sudden breeze. Standing at the very edge of the terrace, Jackson could hear the leaves rustle, smell their cool moisture. In the southeast, just below the moon, a bright planet shone steadily. Probably Jupiter. Or a holo of Jupiter, voted in by the enclave weather committee. Let’s add a planet to the dome programming this month. The children can learn to use the sky-tracking software.
Jackson saw again the printouts of unChanged Liver children on Theresa’s study wall. Dying in bloat and putrefaction from lack of the sanitation nobody needed to practice anymore, or lack of Change syringes, or lack of medical attention.
And now there never would be any more Change syringes. People and groups and governments could send endless messages or even expeditions to Selene, and it wouldn’t matter. Unless the Supers had left a huge cache of syringes somewhere for posthumous discovery, there would be no more Changing for this next generation. Or the next. Or the next. Not even for donkey children with sky-scanning software. The biochemistry/nanotech was too far beyond normal humanity, even genemod humanity. You couldn’t get to the industrial revolution when you’d only just invented the wheel.
Jackson put both hands on the terrace railing and leaned over. From the street four stories below came the soft sound of a woman’s laughter, followed by a man’s, smooth and tenor. Jackson couldn’t glimpse either of them. The air smelled of mint and mown grass and roses.
Eden, Theresa had once said of Central Park, during her religious phase. She’d been twelve, and had wanted to become a nun.
Eden. For how long?
There were probably syringes hoarded, family by family, throughout the enclaves—one or two here, more there. Newborns would be injected, secretly, before outsiders knew the syringes existed and could steal them. When the hoarded syringes were all gone, the birth rate would drop even further than it had, as parents secure in the Change contemplated the disease and food needs of unChanged infants. Finally, people would have babies anyway, because people always did. Then medicine would revive from a coma feverish with research on pleasure drugs, and donkeys would get along about as well as they always had, behind their Y-shields, which would expand every year as the need grew to put more land under agriculture, under dairy farms, under soysynth factories, under tougher security shields. But the enclaves would adapt. They had all the technology to do so. No expulsion from Eden here.
And the Livers? No need to ask what would happen there. It was already happening. Famine, death, disease, war. And, eventually, they would relearn subsistence-survival skills. Or, if the neuropharm inhibiting tolerance for novelty continued to spread, they wouldn’t learn. They’d just cling to old routines designed for Changed bodies that the new generation didn’t have. And the donkeys, embittered by the Change Wars and all too aware that Livers had already been economically unnecessary for at least three generations, would do nothing.