At the end, almost an hour later, I raised my hands. I felt the usual outpouring of holy affection for all of them. “Like a pope or a lama?” Miri had asked, but it wasn’t like that. “Like a brother,” I’d answered, and watched her dark eyes deepen with pain. Her own brother had been killed on Sanctuary. I’d known my answer would hurt her. That was a kind of power, too, and now I felt ashamed of it.
But it was also the turth. In a moment, when the concert ended, these Livers would go back to being the same whining, complaining, ineffectual, ignorant people they’d been before. But for this instant before the concert ended, I did feel a brotherhood that had nothing to do with likeness.
And they wouldn’t go completely back to what they had been. Not completely. Huevos Verdes’s computer programs had verified that.
“…back to his kingdom.”
The music ended. The shapes stopped. The lights came up. Slowly the faces around me dissolved into themselves, first blinking wide-eyed, then laughing and crying and hugging. The applause started.
I looked for the man with the voice magnifier. He wasn’t standing in his same place in the crowd. But I didn’t have to wait long to find him.
“Let’s go, us, to that gravtrain crash — it’s only a half-mile away. There’s still folks hurt there, them, more than there are med-units — I saw, me! And not enough blankets! We can help, us, to bring the injured here… Us!” Us. Us. Us.
There was confusion in the crowd. But a surprising number of Livers followed the new leader, burning to do something. To be heroes, which is the true hidden driver of the human mind. Some people started organizing a hospital corner. Others left, but from behind the now-opaqued shield that let me watch them without being seen, I observed even the departing Livers donating spare jackets and shirts and blankets for the aid of the wounded. Congresswoman Sallie Edith Gardiner bustled over the catwalk toward me.
“Well, Mr. Arlen, that was just marvelous—” Mahvelous.
“You didn’t watch it.”
She wasn’t listening. She stared at the activity in the King-Dome. “What’s all this now?”
I said, “They’re getting ready to help the survivors of the gravrail crash.”
“Them? Help how?”
I didn’t answer. All of a sudden I was very tired. I’d had only a few hours’ sleep, and I’d spent the previous night viewing man-made horrors.
Like this woman.
“Well, they can all just stop this nonsense right now!” Raht now.
She bustled away. I watched a little longer, then went to find my driver — who had, of course, vowed to never drive an aircar again. But that was before the gravrail crash showed that nothing else was any better. Still, I’d find some way back to Seattle. And to the airport. And to Huevos Verdes. And from there to East Oleanta. There were things I had to ask Miranda, critical things, things I should have asked a long time ago. And I was going to say them. I, Drew Arlen. Who had been the Lucid Dreamer long before I met Miranda Sharifi.
Eight
The floor of the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel was covered in leaves. It was late August — no leaves falling yet, them. That meant these leaves were left over from last year, blowing into the hotel last October and November and lying around ever since, without no ’bot to clean them out. I hadn’t been nowhere near the hotel, me, all those months. But I was now.
The funny thing was that for a few days I didn’t even notice the leaves, me. I didn’t notice nothing. My head was a fog, it, and I stumbled toward the hotel HT on its red counter and didn’t see nothing else. Lizzie was too sick.
The HT turned on when I come near, like it’d been doing for the past four days. “May I help you?”
I put both hands, me, on the counter. Like that would help. “I need the medunit, me. An emergency.”
“I’m sorry, sir, the County Legislator Thomas Scott Drinkwater Medical Unit is temporarily out of service. Albany has been notified, and a technician will shortly—”
“I don’t want Albany, me! I want a medunit! My little girl’s sick bad!”
“I’m sorry, sir, the County Legislator Thomas Scott Drinkwater Medical Unit is temporarily out of service. Albany has been—”
“Then get me another medunit, you! It’s an emergency! Lizzie’s coughing her guts up, her!”
“I’m sorry, sir, there’s no medunit immediately available, due to the temporary inoperability of the Senator Walker Vance Morehouse Magnetic Railway. As soon as the railway is repaired, another medical unit can be rushed in from—”
“The gravrail ain’t inaccessible, it’s busted!” I screamed at the HT. I would of busted it with my bare hands if it’d helped. “Let me talk to a human being!”
“I’m sorry, your elected officials are temporarily unavailable. If you wish to leave a message, please specify whether it’s intended for United States Senator Mard Todd Ingalls, United States Senator Walker Vance—”
“Off! Turn the hell off!”
Lizzie’d been sick, her, for three days. The gravrail had been down for five. The medunit had been out for who knows how long — nobody’d got sick, them, since Doug Kane’s heart attack. The politicians had been assholes as long as anybody could remember.
Lizzie was sick bad. Oh sweet Jesus Lizzie was sick bad.
I squeezed my eyes shut, me, and my head swung down, and when I opened my eyes what did I see? Leaves, that no cleaning ’bot had swept out in nearly a year, and that nobody else didn’t bother with neither. Dead leaves, brittle as my old bones.
“There’s a HT with override at the cafe,” a voice said. “The mayor can contact your county legislator directly.”
“You think, you, I ain’t tried that? Do I look that stupid?” I was relieved, me, to yell at somebody, I didn’t care who. Then I saw it was the donkey girl dressed like a Liver, the one who got off the train a week ago. She was the only person, her, staying in the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel. Since the gravrail breakdowns got worse, there ain’t much traveling. Nobody knew why this donkey was in East Oleanta, and nobody knew why she dressed like a Liver. Some people didn’t like it, them.
I didn’t have no time to talk to a crazy donkey. Lizzie was sick bad. I shuffled back through the leaves to the door, only where was I supposed to go, me? Without no medunit. . .
“Wait,” the donkey said. “I heard you, me. You said—”
“Don’t try to talk like no Liver when you ain’t one! You hear me, you!” I don’t know where I got the anger to yell at her like that. Yes, I do. Lizzie was sick bad, and the donkey was just there, her.
“You’re quite right. No point in unnecessary subterfuge, is there? My name is Victoria Turner.”
I didn’t care, me, what her name was, although I remembered her telling somebody else it was Dark Jones. I’d left Lizzie gasping and clawing for breath, her little face hot as a bonfire. I broke into a run, me. The leaves under my boots whispered like ghosts.
“Maybe I can help,” the donkey said.
“Go to hell!” I said, but then I stopped, me, and looked at her. She was a donkey, after all. She must be here, her, for something, just like that other girl in the woods last summer, the one that saved Doug Kane’s life, must of been there for something. I couldn’t guess for what, but I wasn’t no donkey. Still, sometimes donkeys could do things, them, that you didn’t expect.
The girl stood. Her yellow jacks had a tear in them, like everybody’s since the warehouse just stopped opening up for distrib, but they was clean. Jacks don’t get dirty or creased — dirt don’t stick to them somehow, or it washes off easy. But the girl wasn’t really no girl, her. When I looked closer I saw she was a woman, maybe as old as Annie. It was the genemod violet eyes and that body that made me think, me, that she was a girl.