Lizzie whispered, “Thirty-eight point seven percent.”
Better than a one in three odds. So now, Jackson thought, they knew. The inhibition infection might end up passed from person to person, through blood. Saliva. Semen. Urine? Maybe. Probably. A thirty-nine percent chance. To get that high a possibility, the lab samples must be mutating like crazy.
Vicki said to Lizzie, “You were afraid you might get infected yourself, out there. Then you’d never be able to help Dirk. So you came into the bioshielded area with us.”
Jackson said, “Even if the mutation has already happened—which isn’t likely—she wouldn’t have contracted it if she’d just stayed away from people. She’d have needed to come in direct contact with blood or have sex or—Lizzie, what is it?”
Lizzie whispered, “Or touch eyeballs?”
“Eyeballs?”
“Dead ones, I mean, me. Oh, Dr. Aranow, I done touched… oh, God, what if I got it? Dirk! Dirk! Is there a test, what if I got it, me, what if I got it!”
The girl was hysterical. Jackson remembered that Lizzie was eighteen years old, and had just come through horrors Jackson couldn’t imagine. Lizzie sobbed, and when Vicki led her down the hall and a door somewhere closed behind them, Jackson was glad for the sudden silence.
It seemed a long time before Vicki returned, although it probably wasn’t. Her genemod violet eyes looked tired. It must be some god-awful early hour of the morning.
“Lizzie’s asleep.”
“Good,” Jackson said.
Vicki stood three feet from him, not trying to touch. “So what happens now?”
“Kelvin-Castner scraps the fake data tree and does the research for real.” Jackson looked at the silent screen. “You hear that, you bastards? Now you have a motive. It’s not just Livers who inhale some weird compound. They’ve got it at Brookhaven, don’t they? Shielded enclaves can get the infection. You can get it. Better find a reverser.”
He waited, half expecting to see Thurmond Rogers or Alex Castner or even Cazie. The screen stayed blank.
Vicki said, “So now we’re all on the same side, looking out for the same interests. How cozy.”
“Right,” Jackson said bitterly.
“Except,” Vicki continued, “you and I and Theresa know something the rest of the world doesn’t. Miranda Sharifi and the Sleepless can’t get us out of this one. This time, no miraculous syringes from Sanctuary or Eden or Selene. The Supers are all dead.”
Jackson stared at her.
“No, we shouldn’t keep it secret, Jackson. We need to tell K-C. We need to call the newsgrids and the government and all the people counting desperately on Miranda Sharifi to rescue us one more time. Because K-C isn’t going to get any help from the sky. And the government has to break into Selene to verify missing persons. And people might as well stop beaming messages to Miranda, because there won’t be any dea ex machina this time. The machina broke down, and the dea is dead. Jackson… please hold me. I don’t care who’s watching.”
He did. And although Vicki felt warm in his arms, it didn’t really help. Not really.
“Jack,” Cazie said from the terminal screen, her face grim, “tell me what you think you know about Miranda Sharifi and Selene.”
He went over it for Cazie, in the middle of the night. He went over it for Alex Castner, also in the middle of the night. He went over it for the FBI and the CIA late the next morning—late because, it turned out, Kelvin-Castner did not call the feds until K-C had had a board meeting. Jackson was grateful for the prolonged sleep. For the FBI and CIA, he had to go over it a lot.
After that, he tried to push the investigation out of his mind. He spent his days with the data Kelvin-Castner now freely gave him. No reason not to. As Vicki had said, now they were all on the same side.
The twenty-first day of his quarantine, the last day, and he had worked his way through all the data K-C had. He didn’t go into the labs themselves; he was not a trained researcher. He confined himself to the medical models, which were inconclusive. Maybe a reverser to the neuropharm could be found. But they didn’t yet know where, or how.
Or when.
The cold black anger stayed with him. The anger wasn’t because devising a cure was hopeless. It wasn’t hopeless. Nor was the anger because someone had created this dangerous and cruel neuropharm, unknown in nature. For four thousand years men had created poisons unknown in nature to incapacitate each other. Nor was the anger because Kelvin-Castner had put its own profits ahead of public good, until the public good suddenly became identical with its own good. That was how corporations worked.
On the twenty-first day, as Jackson was leaving K-C for a brief trip to see Theresa, Thurmond Rogers stopped him just short of the security lock into the bio-unshielded part of the building. Thurmond Rogers in person, not holo or comlink. “Jackson.”
“I don’t think we have anything to say to each other, Rogers. Or are you a messenger boy for Cazie?”
“No,” Rogers said, and at his tone Jackson looked closer. Rogers’s skin, genemod for a light tan meant to contrast with the golden curls, looked blotched and pasty. The pupils of his turquoise eyes were dilated, even in the simulated sunlight of the corridor.
“What is it?” Jackson said, but he already knew.
“It’s gone to direct transmission.”
“Where?”
“The Chicago North Shore Enclave.”
Not even among the Livers. Someone had gone outside North Shore—or someone else had come in—and contracted the neuropharm from blood, semen, urine, saliva, breast milk. It was in non-inhalant form.
He said crisply to Rogers, “Behavior of the victim?”
“Same severe inhibition. Panic anxiety at new actions.”
“Medical models?”
“All match known effects. Cerebrospinal fluid, brain scans, heart rate, amygdalae activity, blood hormone levels—”
“All right,” Jackson said, meaninglessly, since it was not all right. But all at once he knew why he was so angry.
“It’s the same thing, over and over,” Jackson said to Vicki. They sat side by side in his aircar, lifting off from Boston. This month the Public Gardens below them bloomed yellow: daffodils and jonquils and roses and pansies in artful genemod confusion. The dome of the State House gleamed gold in the late afternoon sun, and beyond the dome the ocean brooded gray-green. After a month in front of terminals, Jackson’s fingers felt awkward on the car console. He set it for automatic and flexed his shoulders against the back of the seat. He was very tired.
Vicki said, “What’s the same thing over and over?”
“People. They just go on doing the same thing over and over, even if it doesn’t work.”
“What specific people are we talking about here?” Vicki laid her hand on Jackson’s thigh. He covered with his own, and immediately thought, Where are the monitors? Twenty-one days of holding back, self-conscious about being observed… Only there were no monitors in his aircar. Or were there? The car had been sitting for three weeks under the Kelvin-Castner dome. Of course there were monitors. And anyway, he was too tired for sex.
“All people,” he said. “Everyone. We just go on doing whatever we’ve always done, even if it doesn’t work. Jennifer Sharifi just went on trying to control everything that might threaten Sanctuary. Miranda Sharifi just went on relying on better technology to lift up us poor benighted beggars who have to sleep. Kelvin-Castner just goes on following profits, no matter where they lead. Lizzie goes on datadipping whatever system’s in front of her. Cazie—” He stopped.