by Nancy Kress
“Okay, then, get a newsgrid channel.”
Vicki did. Channel 14 was covering the story. Jackson gazed at a robocam shot of the tribe’s familiar feeding ground, now empty. Everyone must have gone inside to vote.
A voice intoned, “Here on special election day in Willoughby County, Pennsylvania, citizens are voting for district supervisor in an unusual election. One of the three candidates is unused to public office—and perhaps unfitted for it as well. This is the election that has sparked a national debate on the question of who is best suited to serve the public, how voters are registered, and what safeguards the politically innocent have a right to expect against the politically opportunistic. For the first time, our camera is being allowed to hover at the open door of this…‘community’…to watch its members line up to vote.”
The robocam zoomed toward the building door and adjusted for the dim light within. A wide-angle lens showed the tribe’s terminal at one end of the large communal space, on a table covered with a red, white, and blue cloth. At the other end, the tribe lined up to move forward, one at a time, and vote. A hundred sixty-two Livers shuffled forward, carrying babies, holding hands.
“There’s Mama with Dirk!” Lizzie squealed. “And Billy. And Sharon with Callie. Shockey must have already voted, he wanted to go first.” A moment passed. “Why do they all look like that?”
Jackson leaned closer to the screen.
Lizzie said, “Why do they look so…weird?”
The robocam shifted to zoom. Sharon Nugent, Franklin Caterino, Norma Kroll, Scott Morrison—face after face looked strained, unsure. Brows furrowed, eyes dropped, breathing grew rapid as people glanced toward the camera. Sharon huddled closer to her elderly mother, and then Sam Webster moved closer to both.
“What’s going on!” Lizzie cried. “Where’s Shockey?”
The camera found him crouched in an old lawn chair in a dim corner. Shockey’s hands clasped tightly on his lap. When he raised his eyes to the voters, his face clenched. Jackson could swear Shockey trembled.
Someone swung shut the building door from inside.
“In violation of their pre-election agreement, the Livers have just excluded our camera,” the newscaster said with strong displeasure. “We switch you now to another tribal polling site in the county…No, this building appears to be shuttered as well.”
Vicki said, “Turn it off. Switch to the running totals.”
It was 9:17. Jackson found the graphic on the governmental channel, a silent unadorned chart:
POPULAR VOTE
WILLOUGHBY COUNTY DISTRICT SUPERVISOR—
SPECIAL ELECTION
SUSANNAH WELLS LIVINGSTON: 3
DONALD THOMAS SERRANO: 192
SHOCKEY TOOR: 2
As they watched, two more votes registered for Donald Thomas Serrano.
“It’s cheating, them!” Vicki cried. “We saw people vote for Shockey!”
“We saw people vote,” Vicki said. “We can’t really see for whom.”
“It has to be cheating!”
Jackson thought rapidly. The results made no sense. But Vicki was probably right that the system wasn’t cheating; no one would dare. A system rigged against a Liver candidate today could be rigged against a donkey candidate next time. And the newsgrids would hire top datadippers to find the tinkering. No. Something else was happening.
What? Why?
“Fly home,” Lizzie said. “Oh, go quick!”
Jackson exchanged looks with Vicki, lifted the car, and flew back. During the short ride they watched Donald Thomas Serrano capture virtually every vote. Everybody voted early, like dutiful citizens. Jackson landed the car beside the reporters’ vehicles; no one paid any attention until Lizzie emerged. She ignored all questions and comments, running toward the front door. Jackson and Vicki trailed behind, stony.
The door was locked.
Lizzie spoke the overrides and flung herself inside.
“Lizzie!” Annie said. “Why you running, you? What happened?” Annie clutched Dirk, who began to wail.
“What happened?” Lizzie cried. “Shockey’s losing! Nobody’s voting for him.”
Annie took a step backward and dropped her eyes. Annie…who always met insubordination with frowns and commands. She shifted Dirk upright to her shoulder. The baby saw his mother and Vicki and quieted, until he glimpsed Jackson. Immediately he began to cry again, burying his head in Annie’s shoulder.
Vicki said evenly, “Annie, did you vote?”
Annie shrank back and mumbled, “Yes.”
“Did you vote for Shockey?”
Mutely, in distress, Annie shook her head no.
Lizzie cried, “Why not?” while Dirk continued to wail every time he raised his head from his grandmother’s shoulder and caught a fresh glimpse of Jackson.
Annie tightened her grip on the baby. “I didn’t…Shockey ain’t, him…I’m sorry, honey, but it’s just too…we’re better off, us, with somebody who knows, them, what they’re doing.”
Jackson stood very still. Annie’s manner reminded him of something, something he was too confused to get into focus. In a minute he would remember. Across the vast communal area, now empty of voters, Billy Washington emerged from his and Annie’s cubicle. The stately old man took a few hesitant steps, stopped, looked at Annie, took a few steps more, and dropped his eyes. Jackson saw his hand tremble, saw him force himself to move forward.
Theresa. They were all—Billy, Annie, even Dirk—acting like Theresa.
Even Shockey. Today crouching in his lawn chair, nervous and afraid; yesterday full of swaggering innocent corruption, fucking the slumming donkey girl in the woods…
The donkey girl sniffing at her inhaler.
“Get out,” he said rapidly to Vicki and Lizzie. “Now. Get out of the building right away. Vicki, take Annie.”
She looked startled but didn’t protest: it must be his tone. Vickie grabbed Annie by the arm and hauled her toward the door. “No, no,” Annie said. “No, please. I don’t want to go out there, please…”
“Come on,” Jackson said, grabbing Annie’s other arm and hauling her along.
Lizzie said, “What? What is it?” but she followed.
Outside Dirk looked over Annie’s shoulder at the outdoors and screamed louder. Lizzie snatched him. Jackson hustled them all, Annie coatless, through the rain toward his car. Robocams descended and reporters in their vehicles, watching the election results, looked up. Jackson shoved Annie into the car and lifted it.
“Okay,” Vicki said. “What was it?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Jackson said. “A neuropharm, I think. Gaseous. Only…” Only Annie’s Cell Cleaner should now be working overtime, clearing her body of foreign molecules as soon as she was no longer breathing them in. Instead Annie continued to shrink and tremble, and Dirk to scream and cling to his mother. And if the neuropharm was in the building, he and Vicki and Lizzie would have breathed it. But Lizzie looked furious, Vicki alert, and Jackson himself didn’t feel trembly or anxious. So if not in the building…
He landed the car and twisted to look at the rear seat. “Annie, did you have breakfast in the feeding ground?”
Annie shook her head and folded her hands together tightly. Her eyes darted from side to side, and her chest rose and fell rapidly.
“Did Billy breakfast in the feeding ground?”
“He…he went there, him, to bring in some fresh soil for us…privacy…”
“But you never went in the feeding ground this morning?”
Annie drew a deep breath. “I…later. When no reporters there, and everybody else gone inside, them…the sun came out a bit and…Dirk needs sun, him. We just sat there, us, with our clothes on…we didn’t…” She trailed off and looked out the window, her pretty plump face terrified. “Please, Doctor, take…take me home…”
Like Theresa. Jackson said, “Breathe steadily, Annie. Here, put on this patch.”
“No, I…what is it?” Annie shook her head.
Jackson said, “Vicki, put the patch on her.”
He watched closely. Annie—Annie!—didn’t struggle.
She cringed against the car window, and put up one hand in a feeble, warding-off gesture that Vicki, wide-eyed, ignored. Vicki slapped the patch on Annie’s neck. Annie whimpered.
After a few minutes, she sat up a little straighter, but her hands remained clasped tightly together, her body tense. “Now can we go home? What’s going on here, Doctor? Please…take us home!”
Jackson closed his eyes. The patch was one he carried for Theresa, who would never use it. It triggered the release of biogenic amines that prompted the body to create ten different neurotransmitters. Those neurotransmitters calmed anxieties about, and lowered inhibitions to, stimuli perceived as threatening. The patch was moderating Annie’s symptoms a little—but it was not eradicating them.
He said, “Vicki, put a patch on Dirk. No, wait—don’t.” Dirk’s blood and brain should by now be clear of anything he’d breathed in at the camp, but he nonetheless continued to act like a severely inhibited baby in the throes of full-blown stranger anxiety. And Dirk was not usually shy. Why wasn’t the neuropharm wearing off?
Vicki said, “It was in the feeding ground, wasn’t it? Lizzie, did you go in there this morning?”
Lizzie demanded, “What’re you talking about, you? Did somebody do something to Dirk?”
Vicki said, “I didn’t feed at the other tribe, either. Too excited. Why isn’t the Cell Cleaner undoing the effects on Dirk?”
“I don’t know,” Jackson said, at the same moment that Lizzie cried, “What effects? What happened to my baby?” and Annie reached across the seat to tap Jackson’s shoulder and say tremulously, “If anybody hurt this child, them…”
Vicki ignored them all and flicked on the terminal.
POPULAR VOTE
WILLOUGHBY COUNTY DISTRICT SUPERVISOR—
SPECIAL ELECTION
SUSANNAH WELLS LIVINGSTON: 104
DONALD THOMAS SERRANO: 1,681
SHOCKEY TOOR: 32
“Donald Serrano,” Vicki said. “He found a way to win the election, without anybody thinking that it was anything but the material bribes they’ve been spreading around.”
“No,” Jackson answered. “We don’t know how to do this.”
“Do what?” Lizzie cried.
He raised his voice to answer over Annie’s fear, Lizzie’s alarm, Dirk’s fussing. “How to create neuropharms that aren’t cleared immediately by the Cell Cleaner. The medical journals, my med-school friends who went into research…everybody’s looking for that. A patentable hallucinogen or synthetic endorphin or other pleasure drug that doesn’t have to be inhaled every few minutes…For God’s sake, get out of the car, Vicki. I can’t hear myself think.”
Jackson and Vicki climbed out. Jackson locked the doors against Annie’s fearful questions, Lizzie’s attempts to follow. He stood in the drizzle, water trickling down the back of his neck, and tried to organize his thoughts. “Nobody in the medical establishment is anywhere near that kind of breakthrough. And if they were, it wouldn’t be used on a penny-ante election like this. It would be worth billions.”
“Then who?” Vicki said. “Miranda Sharifi?”
“But why? Why would the Supers do it?”
“I don’t know.”
The car shuddered. Jackson looked down at Lizzie pounding angrily at the inside of the rain-streaked windows. Looked at an Annie only slightly restored to tolerance for new situations, and then only for as long as the neuropharm in the patch lasted. Looked at the baby acting like a small Theresa, with Theresa’s timidity and pervasive fear of anything new, anything risky, any departure from what she’d always done.
Such as electing a Liver to political office.
Vicki demanded. “Who, Jackson? Who’s capable of doing this, at multiple sites? And how?”
“I don’t know,” Jackson said. But it had to be Miranda, nobody else had such advanced neurobiology…but it couldn’t be Miranda. She didn’t make people less capable!
Did she?
It had to Miranda. It couldn’t be Miranda.
A whole population of Theresas.
“I don’t…know.”
Twelve
Lizzie clutched Dirk close, and tried to pretend it was for the baby’s sake. She had never seen anything like this. Dr. Aranow had taken them into Manhattan East Enclave, just flown through the Y-shield like it didn’t exist and landed on the roof of his apartment block. Only it wasn’t an apartment block that Lizzie, growing up in the Liver town of East Oleanta and on the road ever since, would have recognized. She didn’t recognize the roof as a roof. It was beautiful. Bright green genemod grass, beds of delicate flowers, benches and strange statues and stranger ’bots she itched to take apart. But she wouldn’t take them apart. She wouldn’t even touch them. She wasn’t smart enough. She was just a dumb Liver who had fucked up: lost the election and failed her tribe and somehow brought harm she didn’t understand to her baby.
“This way,” Dr. Aranow said, leading them across the roof that wasn’t. The air was warm and cloudless.
“‘Oh what is so rare as a day in June,’” Vicki said, which didn’t make sense because this was April. Vicki wasn’t smiling, but she didn’t look as confused as Lizzie felt. Well, of course, Vicki had once lived this way. How could she have left it to come live in East Oleanta? Lizzie felt obscurely ashamed; she never imagined Vicki had left this. Lizzie remembered the times she’s lectured Vicki about the world, and the memory made Lizzie writhe. She didn’t know enough to lecture donkeys. She didn’t know anything at all.
And yesterday, she’d known everything. Just yesterday.
Dr. Aranow had taken Annie back to the camp. Now he led Lizzie, Dirk, and Vicki into an elevator which said. “Hello, Dr. Aranow.”
“Hello. My apartment, please. Is my sister home?”
“Yes,” the elevator said. “Ms. Aranow is home.” It stopped, and the door opened directly into the most wonderful room Lizzie had ever seen. Long and narrow, with smooth white walls, floors of shining silver-gray stone dotted with carpets, a perfect little table with roses on it—only they weren’t exactly roses, they had odd silver-gray leaves and a bewitching smell—and a painting lit by an unseen source. Lizzie didn’t know what to make of the painting. Two naked women feeding on the grass, and two men dressed in stiff old-fashioned nonconsumable clothes. The men must not be hungry.
“The original Manet, of course,” Vicki said, but Dr. Aranow didn’t answer. He strode ahead, and when they followed, Lizzie realized that the wonderful white room with the roses had been only a hallway.
Inside the apartment was another hallway, and then a real room. It stopped her cold. A Y-shield made up one wall, looking down on a green, green park. The other walls shimmered with subtly shifting grays and whites—programmed screens, they had to be. Was the park a program, too? The chairs were white and soft, the tables all polished, there were strange plants inside the tables…and a girl, sitting on a hard wooden chair and eating food by mouth from some kind of ’bot with a flat top like another shining table.
“Theresa,” Dr. Aranow said, and even in Lizzie’s chagrined absorption in her surroundings—she knew nothing, nothing at all!—Lizzie could hear the careful gentleness in his voice. “Theresa, don’t be alarmed, I’ve just brought some people here for a business meeting.”
The girl shrank back in her chair. No older than Lizzie herself, she looked frightened and uneasy…about Lizzie and Vicki? That didn’t make sense. The girl had a cloud of silvery-blond hair and was very skinny, dressed in a strange loose flowered dress that Lizzie would have sworn looked consumable. How could that be? The dress had no holes.
“This is Vicki Turner,” Dr. Aranow said, “and Lizzie Francy, and Lizzie’s son Dirk. This is my sister, Theresa Aranow.”
Theresa didn’t answer. Lizzie thought she trembled and breathed faster. This was a donkey, and yet unlike Vicki, unlike the reporters, un
like the donkey girls who had liked fucking Shockey when he was a candidate, Theresa looked…looked…
Theresa looked like Shockey and Annie and Billy looked now.
A glance passed between Vicki and Dr. Aranow, something Lizzie couldn’t interpret, and Vicki said softly, “Ms. Aranow, would you like to see the baby?”
Theresa’s weird fear seemed to fade a little. “Oh, a baby…yes…please…”
Dr. Aranow took Dirk from Lizzie—fortunately, he was asleep now—and laid him in Theresa’s arms. Theresa looked at him with total delight, and then, to Lizzie’s amazement, started to cry. No sobbing, just pale lightless tears rolling down her pale cheeks.
“Could I…Jackson, could…I hold him while you have your meeting?”
“Of course,” Vicki said, and Lizzie felt a minute of resentment. Dirk was her baby, this girl, this donkey Theresa who lived surrounded by everything and now wanted Lizzie’s baby, too—Theresa hadn’t even asked Lizzie if she could hold Dirk. And from her looks, Theresa was a weakling. She wouldn’t last three minutes using her wits to keep a whole tribe supplied with datadipped goods.
“We’ll be right there in the dining room, Theresa,” Jackson said, and took both Vicki’s and Lizzie’s arms.
The dining room wasn’t a feeding ground, but a table with twelve tall chairs, motionless serving ’bots, and still more huge, strange-looking plants that must be genemod. One wall cascaded with water—not programming, real water. The polished table was bare. Lizzie’s stomach suddenly growled.
She said, and it came out angry for some reason, “Don’t you even have a feeding ground?”
“Yes,” Dr. Aranow said distractedly, “but we’d better…are you hungry? Jones, breakfast for three, please. Whatever Theresa was having.”
“Certainly, Dr. Aranow,” the room said.
“Caroline, on, please.”
Lizzie didn’t see any terminal, but a different voice said, “Yes, Dr. Aranow.”
Vicki said, “You have a Caroline VIII personal system. I’m impressed.”
“Caroline, call Thurmond Rogers at Kelvin-Castner. Tell him it’s a priority call.”
