“—goes on performing for whatever audience feeds her hunger for applause,” Vicki said, more tartly. “And what about you? What do you go on doing, Jackson?”
He was silent.
“Didn’t think of applying your own theory to yourself? Well, then, I will. Jackson goes on assuming that the medical model can explain everything about people. Profile the biochemistry and you understand the person.”
He glanced sideways at Vicki. Her eyes were closed; Jackson was suddenly sorry not to see their pure violet. She had removed her warm fingers from his. He said, “You sound like Theresa.”
“Theresa,” Vicki said, not opening her eyes, “is learning to do something different. Very different.”
“It’s still just a biofeedback control of the brain chemistry that—”
“You’re a fool, Jackson,” Vicki said. “I don’t know how I can be so much in love with a man who’s such a fool. Watch Theresa when she learns that the inhibition neuropharm is transmissible. Just watch her. And meanwhile—car; land there, in that soonest clearing at two o’clock.”
The flowers in the clearing weren’t genemod. The grass was rough, smelling of wild mint. The air was a little too cold, at least for naked bodies. But Jackson discovered that he wasn’t nearly as tired as he thought.
Afterward, Vicki clung to him, her long body imprinted with marks from grass and weeds, smelling of crushed mint. He stroked her goose-pimpled skin. Against his shoulder, he felt her lips curve into a smile.
“Solely biochemistry, Jackson?”
He laughed, feeling too good for annoyance. “You never give up, do you?”
“I wouldn’t appeal to you if I did. Solely biochemistry?”
He wrapped his arms around her. They had to return to the aircar; this scraggly field was hard ground. Also exposed. Also blanketed with biting insects. In addition, he had to see Theresa, get back to Kelvin-Castner, launch the legal fight to get K-C to share data with the CDC now that the neuropharm had moved from random terrorism to public health crisis…
Vicki’s voice held sudden uncertainty, that unexpected quality that emerged in her at unexpected times. “Jackson? Biochemistry?”
He held her tighter. “Not biochemistry. Love.”
And that both was, and was not, the truth. Like everything else.
Epilogue
November 2128
All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious.
Jackson waited beside the ugly bulk of a destroyed building, his equipment well back in the shadows. The usual procedure. The building had been foamcast, which meant it couldn’t bum, but everything else had been done to it. Smashing, ramming, looting, maybe even shelling. Old destruction, starting to be covered by the mutated form of kudzu covering the rest of St. Louis, possibly the ugliest place Jackson had ever been.
In the last seven years, he’d been a lot of ugly places.
Theresa and Dirk had finished their readying and started their walk forward. Dirk, eight years old and new to readying, clung tightly to his mother’s hand. Lizzie, of course, had not needed to ready; she’d never contracted the inhibition virus. But she was guiding Dirk, who over the past year had made tremendous progress in sustaining another persona—he called his “Treeboy.” Dirk had learned readying with the adaptability of the young, apparently still present under the panicky inhibition artificially hardwired into his amygdalae. “Treeboy,” created by imagination but neurochemically real, was braver and freer than Dirk was. Jackson had the brain scans to prove it.
Theresa led the way. Theresa, dressed in the most ragged of all three of their pathetic rags. Theresa, whose fair hair, grown out from baldness, was the most matted of the three. Theresa, with the emptiest hands, for whom this was harder than for anyone else.
Theresa, who was finally happy.
The three beggars approached the semi-whole building where the infected tribe camped. All the Livers, of course, had fled inside. Theresa, Lizzie, and Dirk squatted in front of the closed door and began to beg.
“Warm clothing, please. Oh, please give us some warm clothing if you can spare it, the nights are so cold…”
They would stay there, Jackson knew, for days, if days were necessary. This time, he didn’t think they would be. The beggars had a child with them. All the inhibited, in and out of the enclaves, were more likely to open to women and children. The Order of the Spiritual Brain—Jackson hated the name, but it had been Theresa’s choice—had three thousand members across the country, not counting affiliated doctors and corporate sponsors, but only twenty-eight percent were male. Still, the number was growing. The Order was growing.
Almost as fast as the inhibition was spreading.
Still, the major pharmaceutical companies—Kelvin-Castner, Lilly, Genentech Neuropharm, Silverstone Martin—were close to a reverser. They might have been closer still if the inhibition plague had been easier to transmit. But the human race had been lucky. If one person in a camp or enclave got it, usually everyone did, due to the poor sanitation and feeding habits of the Changed. But transmission between camps and enclaves was slow, because once infected, the inhibited neither became nor received visitors.
Theresa was changing that.
“Please, just a warm coat…” little Dirk begged.
Sometimes the camp would just open the door and throw out whatever was being begged: clothing, a jug of water, a spare Y-cone for warmth. The beggars didn’t go away. The one thing about religious orders, Jackson thought, awaiting his part in the shadows, was that they were persistent. Nuts, maybe, but persistent.
And, sometimes, effective.
The door of the Liver building opened a crack. A man squeezed through, followed by a child. Jackson switched his eyes to zoom augments. The child wasn’t Changed. Jackson studied the bare, inflamed patches on the side of her scalp: rounded lesions, crusty in the middle and scaly at the edges. Most likely ringworm. But otherwise the little girl looked healthy, if inhibited. Although not as inhibited as some others. The renegade neuropharm, like every other drug, affected different people differently. There were even a few cases of natural immunity, studied eagerly by the pharmaceuticals and the CDC.
The little girl ducked behind the man’s legs, but peeped out between them at Dirk.
Treeboy smiled.
Maybe Jackson wouldn’t have to wait too long to do his part, after all.
The equipment stood ready, loaded onto a floater. Medicines, nursing ’bot. And, most important, holo cartridges to play on the camp’s very own terminal, a terminal they were used to, that was a part of the usual routine. Theresa would start them with the holos on medical care for the unChanged children. Even the most inhibited would try something new when their children’s lives were at stake. The more unChanged children were born, the more desperate the inhibited came—and that need was the key to getting into their lives.
Once in, Theresa would gradually introduce the holos on readiness. She, herself constantly afraid, would teach them to overcome fear by imagining a different self. Then, later, they would learn the biofeedback techniques that could make that different self neurochemically real. Temporary—but real. And ready when you needed it.
Or until somebody found a medical solution to the same problem.
A medical solution would of course be simpler, easier, faster. Just take a neuropharm. With the right neuropharm, you could become less fearful, more fearful, more lusty, more hopeful, less angry, more lethargic… anything. But Theresa and her disciples weren’t using neuropharms. So the question wasn’t, as Jackson had always assumed, how neurochemically driven were humans? The question was, why were they ever driven by anything but neurochemicals? Why—and how—could men and women choose against their own fear, lust, hope, anger, inertia? Because clearly they could choose that. Theresa was doing so, right in front of his eyes. So not—isn’t man just a bunch of chemicals? Rather—how could man ever be anything else?