Theresa’s weakened legs gave way. Her crutches clattered to the floor, and she with them. Later—how much?—she felt herself half dragged, half carried, outside. Dumped into a go-’bot. Held firmly around the shoulders.
“Come on, girl, it’s all right. Come on, girl,” Lizzie was saying, over and over. “Don’t be like this, you. You can’t be like this, I need you!”
I need you. It got through to her. I need you. Like people needed Cazie, like people needed Jackson… but not Theresa. People never needed Theresa because she was always the one doing the needing.
Not this time.
She concentrated on once more being Cazie. Her breathing slowed, the streets came back into focus, her fingers unclutched Lizzie. The click went on in her brain.
Lizzie was staring at her. “How did you do that?”
“I can’t… explain.”
“Well, don’t then, you. We have more important things. Where can you make this thing go so we can talk?”
“Home!”
“No. Probably monitored. What’s all that woods?”
“Central Park. But we can’t—”
“’Bot,” Lizzie said, “go into Central Park and stop someplace private. With a lot of trees, and no people within a hundred yards.”
The go-’bot whizzed through the streets of the enclave, entered the park, and stopped under a huge maple near the East Green. With one hand Lizzie dragged Theresa away from the go-’bot. With the other she carried a purple backpack, which she opened on the grass to pull out a terminal. The go-’bot whizzed off.
“I wanted it to wait!” Lizzie said. “Oh, never mind, we’ll call another one. I have to find Dr. Aranow right away, I’ll have to take the risk of a call—”
“Jackson’s at Kelvin-Castner,” Theresa said. She wrapped her arms around herself; her wasted body felt cold and exhausted. “But you can’t reach him. Cazie’s intercepting his calls, even emergency ones. She didn’t want me to know, but… but Sanctuary was bombed and destroyed.”
Lizzie didn’t answer. She didn’t look surprised. But then she said slowly, “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Theresa felt the tears start again. “I saw… the newsgrids.”
“Who did it?”
Theresa could only shake her head.
Lizzie demanded, “Why are you crying? There were only Sleepless on Sanctuary, right?”
“Leisha… Miranda…”
“Miranda Sharifi’s on the moon. At Selene. And who’s Leisha? Never mind, let me think, you.”
Lizzie sat over her unactivated terminal, silent. Theresa fought for control of herself. She was Cazie… she was Cazie… no, she wasn’t. She was Theresa Aranow, sick and weak and exposed in Central Park, and she wanted passionately to go home and go to sleep.
Lizzie said slowly, “Sanctuary made the fear neuropharm that infected my baby. And my mother, and Billy, and… all of them. At least, I think it was Sanctuary. They were monitoring my tribe afterward, with heavily encrypted and shielded data streams, and I don’t know how they’d even know we were infected if they hadn’t done it. Only… only if they’re all dead, all the Sleepless… God, Theresa, don’t cave in now, you!”
“I want… to go home.”
“No, we can’t. I have to find Dr. Aranow. If we can’t call him, we’ll have to go there, us… Look, I’ll call a go-’bot on my terminal. Just hang on.”
Theresa didn’t. But she didn’t panic, either; she was too exhausted, clear down to her weakened bones. She tried to tell Lizzie that a go-’bot wouldn’t take them to Kelvin-Castner in Boston because the go-’bots couldn’t leave the enclave, but she was too exhausted to form the words. The last thing she remembered was falling asleep on the grass in Central Park, genemod and fragrant, while she wept wearily for the Sleepless, who were all gone and would never come again.
Twenty-two
Jackson sat in the atrium of Kelvin-Castner on a white marble bench, surrounded by white marble columns, a decorative pool filled with milky white water, and his lawyer. The surface of the white water was occasionally broken by darting silver fish, genemod and shining. The white columns were subtly laced with silver threads. The last time Jackson had sat here, the lobby had been all paisley double helixes. Somebody had reprogrammed.
Jackson’s lawyer, in severe black business coat buttoned to his chin, was costing TenTech triple legal fees for “immediate, exclusive, and overriding service.” Jackson had summoned him from Manhattan’s best law firm an hour before, causing several other cases to be postponed. For this situation, Jackson didn’t want a TenTech lawyer. Who might have slept with Cazie.
“They can’t keep us waiting out here indefinitely, can they?” he demanded.
“No,” said Evan Matthew Winterton, of Cisneros, Linville, Winterton and Adkins. He was genemod for a certain kind of eighteenth-century handsomeness: long bony aristocratic face, sharp deepset eyes, delicate long fingers with tensile strength. Winterton flicked through a handheld terminal in write mode. “Contractually, you have guaranteed physical access to the premises as well as the data. Not, however, to the person of Alex Castner. He doesn’t have to see you.”
“But Thurmond Rogers does.”
“Yes. Although the wording here in section five paragraph four is ambiguous on a few points… Why didn’t you come to me in the first place, to have this drawn up?”
“I didn’t know I’d need you. Or anyone like you. I trusted Kelvin-Castner to do what they said they’d do.”
The lawyer just looked at him.
“All right, I was a fool,” Jackson said, and hoped the building was recording. Let Cazie and Rogers know that he knew it. “I won’t be a fool again. Which is why I’ve hired a systems expert on the same basis as you.”
“You can have a systems expert,” Winterton said, with the patience of someone who’s already said it several times. “A systems expert to write flagging, data-organization, and data-summary algorithms. What you can’t have is a systems expert to dip private corporate records, unless you have sufficient evidence for a court order that Kelvin-Castner is in violation of contract. I’ve already explained, Jackson, that you don’t have such evidence.”
No. All he had was the look in Cazie’s eyes, to which years of watching had attuned him as sensitively as a brain scan. Not the sort of thing that led to a court order. It led only to truth.
“However,” Winterton continued, in his pedantic style that Jackson suspected covered the instincts of a killer shark, “if your professional examination of the data offered, plus that of the systems expert, shows sufficient cause to suspect that Kelvin-Castner is not complying with contractual promises of disclosure, then a subpoena duces tecum is certainly possible.”
So Winterton, too, expected the building to be recording. He was warning Castner.
The wall brightened and a holo of Thurmond Rogers appeared, smiling warmly. “Jackson! I’m so glad you finally dropped by to see our progress personally!”
“No, I don’t think you will be,” Jackson said. “This is my lawyer, Evan Winterton. A systems expert is en route from New York, along with two medical consultants. We’re going to be going very carefully over your data, Thurmond, to be sure you’re in contractual compliance.”
Rogers’s smile didn’t waver. “Certainly. Jackson. Standard procedure when there’s this much at stake, isn’t it? You’re more than welcome.”
“Then let us in.”
“Now, Jackson, this is a level-four biohazard facility. The air is sealed, you know that, and we have U.S. Installation A decontamination procedures. No researcher has left the building since the start of the project. Once in, you’re in. But Alex Castner has authorized complete terminal facilities for you in the unsealed portion of Kelvin-Castner. The rooms are quite comfortable. So if you’ll just follow my holo—”