“Oh, God, Jack, you’ll never change, will you? You just gaze at your tiny specialty, the sacred medical model, and never even glance at the larger picture. Look up—literally! The Livers don’t exist all by themselves, some little helpless endangered lizards alone on a barren desert! They have Miranda Sharifi as guardian angel. With a whole host of SuperSleepless seraphs and cherubs. Miranda will fly out of Selene when she’s goddamn good and ready, burn a few bushes and hand down a counteragent, and that’ll be that. K-C doesn’t have to do anything for Livers. And there’s no reason why we should.”
“Well, there’s the little fact that you promised me.”
Cazie looked at him. God, she was beautiful. The most desirable woman he’d ever known. Beautiful, smart, tender when she felt like it. His wife—once, anyway—with everything Jackson had once thought that word meant. Something under his ribs twisted sharply. It physically hurt to know that he’d never hold her in his arms again.
“Jack—”
“Tell Thurmond Rogers, my old university pal, that I’m moving into Kelvin-Castner. Immediately. With a datadipper and a lawyer. I’m going over every report personally, visiting every lab in the biohazard complex, fucking haunting him with consultant experts. And if—”
“You can’t bring outsiders into K-C! Nondisclosure—”
“—if I don’t find substantial, scientifically valid progress, daily, toward a counteragent to the inhibition neuropharm. I’m tying up K-C in contract-violation lawsuits that will prevent old Alex from getting a patent until the millennium. Even if I bankrupt TenTech in the process.”
Cazie stared at him. It seemed to Jackson that suddenly she stood behind a Y-shield, invisible but unbreakable. His shield, or hers? Bleakly, he realized that it no longer mattered which.
She had always been quick. She said softly, “You’re through with me this time, aren’t you, Jack? For good.”
“Tell Rogers what I said.”
“Something’s changed in you. You really would sacrifice TenTech for this quixotic gesture. Why?”
“Because you’re incapable of seeing that it’s not a gesture.”
She said, not moving, “I never pretended to be anything besides what I am, Jack.”
He said painfully, “No. You never did.”
Suddenly Cazie threw back her head and laughed, a high full laugh with no hint of hysteria. Jackson felt something then, a quick flash of old fear—I can’t let her go—and felt just as clearly the moment it died, leaving him empty.
She said lightly, “I’m going to visit Theresa now.”
He stood there after she left, waiting. Now Vicki would come in, with some sardonic, provocative remark. That was how it went: he quarreled with Cazie, Vicki listened at doors, then she came in and poked the wound. That was how it went.
But this wasn’t just another routine quarrel with Cazie. And in a few minutes Vicki did come in, but not to poke. She was pulling a sweater over her head, her hair made wild by her roughness, her eyes not focused on him at all.
“I’m taking your car, Jack. Lizzie’s gone.”
“Lizzie? Gone where?”
“Annie doesn’t know. But Lizzie left the camp a week ago and hasn’t called since. Two strangers, genemod, came looking for Lizzie right after she’d gone. Annie was terrified of them, of course.”
“A week—listen, Vicki, I can’t go with you, I have to go to Kelvin-Castner—”
That distracted her for just a moment; the cold determination on her face lifted and her eyes gleamed. For just a moment.
Jackson finished, “—but I can let you have a gun. A Larsen-Colt laser that—”
“You don’t have any weapons comparable to what I can get,” Vicki said with the same efficient coldness, and left Jackson staring after her as she left the study cluttered with printouts he hadn’t yet read.
Interlude
TRANSMISSION DATE: May 13, 2121
TO: Selene Bose, Moon
VIA: Dallas Enclave Ground Station, GEO Satellite C-1867 (U.S.), Satellite E-643 (Brazil)
MESSAGE TYPE: Encrypted
MESSAGE CLASS: Class C, Private Paid Transmission
ORIGINATING GROUP: Gregory Ross Elmsworth
MESSAGE:
Ms. Sharifi—Undoubtedly you know who I am; I wouldn’t insult your intelligence by suggesting otherwise. The people of the United States chose to reject my bid for the presidency, but that does not mean that I still don’t stand ready to serve this great country of ours any way I can. I therefore am prepared to offer you one billion dollars—a third of my private fortune—in return for a complete scientific explanation of your Change syringes, sufficient for commercial duplication. I will make this information, without charge, freely available to all pharmaceutical companies in the United States. Although your own fortune is of course large, I can’t believe you will be indifferent to my offer.
Addresses and encryptions to reach my lawyers are attached.
Let history fondly recall both of us.
Sincerely,
Gregory Ross Elmsworth
Gregory Ross Elmsworth
Elmsworth Enterprises International, Inc.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received
III
May 2121
It is impossible for such a creature as man to be totally indifferent to the well- or ill-being of his fellow-creatures, and not readily, of himself, to pronounce, where nothing gives him any particular bias, that which promotes their happiness is good, and what tends to their misery is evil.
Nineteen
Lizzie shrank back farther into the shadows of the building. The tribe was just around the corner. No, it wasn’t a “tribe”—a tribe had rules and order and kindness. This was just a… a… she didn’t know what.
The scum of the Earth, them, she heard inside her head, and it was her mother’s voice. Who had Annie been talking about? Nobody like these people—there’d been nobody like this in East Oleanta or Willoughby County. Lizzie couldn’t remember who Annie had called scum. She couldn’t remember anything. She was too scared.
“My turn, me,” a man’s voice said. “Get off her, you!”
“Hold your horses, I’m getting… All yours.”
A third voice laughed. “Didn’t leave much, did you, Ed? Hope Cal don’t like them feisty, him.”
“Fuck, she ain’t even breathing!”
“Sure she is, her. Climb on, Cal.”
“Christ!”
“You go last, you, you take wet decks.”
Lizzie fingered her belt, with its reassuring slight bulge of the personal-shield casing. The shield was on. She could see its faint shimmer around her hands. The men out there couldn’t hurt her, even if they caught her. The most they could do would be knock the shield around awhile, with her in it like sausage in a casing. Lizzie remembered sausage. Annie used to make it. Sausage… what was she doing thinking of sausage? The girl out there was being… and there was nothing Lizzie could do to help her. She couldn’t even help herself by hiding inside this building she cowered behind. The building, like all the others in the abandoned gravrail yard, was Y-shielded. She pressed her own shield tight against the building’s shield.