“Maybe,” Dr. Turner said. Her voice had changed, her, and she looked at Lizzie real hard. “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Better.” But I could see Lizzie was tiring, her.
I said, “You eat, and then lie down again. You been very sick, you. If that medicine—” The door opened behind me and Annie came in.
I couldn’t see her, me, but I could fed her. She was warm and soft and big in my arms. Only that wasn’t ever going to happen again. Dr. Turner was watching, her, with that sharp donkey stare. I fixed my face and turned around. “Morning, Annie. Let me help you with them buckets.”
Annie looked at me, and then at Lizzie, and then at Dr. Turner. I could see she didn’t know, her, who to get stiff with first. She chose Lizzie. “You eat that food and lie down, Lizzie. You been sick.
“I’m better now,” Lizzie said, sulky.
“She’s better now, her,” Annie said to Dr. Turner. “You can leave.” It wasn’t like Annie to be so rude, her. She was the one believed even donkeys have their place.
“Not just yet,” Dr. Turner said. “I’m going to talk to Lizzie first.”
“This is my home!” Annie said, between pressed-together lips.
I wanted to say to Dr. Turner, She ain’t mad at you, her, she’s confused at me, but there ain’t no way to say that to a donkey doctor dressed in torn yellow jacks standing in a living room that ain’t even yours and that you’re afraid you’re about to get tossed out of yourself for loving in the wrong way. No way to say that.
Lizzie said, “Please let Vicki stay, Mama. Please. I feel better, me, when she’s here.”
Annie set down the two buckets of water she carried. She looked ready to explode, her. But then Dr. Turner said, “I do need to examine her, Annie. To make sure the medication is the right one. You know that if the medunit were working it would check her every day and sometimes change the dosage. A live doctor isn’t any different.”
Annie looked ready to cry. But all she said was, “She got to get washed first, her. Billy, bring this water into Lizzie’s bedroom.”
Annie dragged up Lizzie and half carried her to the bedroom, ignoring Lizzie’s squawk: “I can walk, me!” I followed with the water, set it down, and came back out. Dr. Turner had picked up Lizzie’s doll. It was plastisynth, from the warehouse, with black curls and green eyes and a genemod face, but Annie had sewn it jacks from a pair she ripped up, and Lizzie had made it soda-can jewelry.
“Annie doesn’t want me here.”
“Well,” I said, “we don’t get many donkeys, us.”
“No, I imagine not.”
We stood in silence. I didn’t have nothing to say to her, or her to me. Except one thing. “Dr. Turner—”
“Call me Vicki.”
I knew, me, that I wasn’t going to do that. “What you watched, you, on that donkey channel, the stuff you said wasn’t more of the same old government shit — what was it? What’s happening?”
She looked up from the doll, then, more sharp than before. “What do you think it meant?”
“I don’t know, me. I don’t know those words. It sounded like just more worry over the economy, more excuses why the government can’t get things working right, them.”
“This time it’s not an excuse. Maybe. Do you know what a dissembler is?”
“No.”
“A molecule?”
“No.”
“An atom?”
“No.”
Dr. Turner shook Lizzie’s doll. “This is made of atoms. Everything is made of atoms. They’re very tiny pieces of matter. Atoms clump together into molecules like… like snow sticking together into a snowball. Only there’s all kinds of atoms, and they stick together in different ways, so you get different kinds of matter. Wood or skin or plastic.”
She looked at me hard, her, trying to see if I understood. I nodded.
“What holds molecules together are molecular bonds. Sort of a … an electrical glue. Well, dissemblers take those bonds apart. Different kinds of dissemblers take different kinds of molecular bonds apart. Enzymes in your stomach, for instance, break the bonds on food so you can digest it.”
I heard Lizzie laugh, her, behind the bedroom door. It was a tired kind of laugh, and the worry about her started up in my gut again. And in another few minutes Annie would come out. I didn’t know, me, what to say to Annie. But I knew what Dr. Turner was saying was important — I could see it on her donkey face — and I tried, me, to listen. To understand.
“We can make dissemblers, and have for years. We use them for all kinds of things: disposing of toxic waste, recycling, cleaning. The dissemblers we make are pretty simple, and each one can only break one kind of bond. They’re made out of viruses, mostly — that means they’re genemod.”
“Could a … dissembler break bonds, it, that cause rabies?”
“Rabies? No, that’s a complex organic condition that — why do you ask, Billy?” Her look was sharp again.
“No reason.”
“No reason?”
“No.” I stared her down, me.
“Anyway,” she said, “the making of dissemblers is very carefully controlled by the GSEA. The Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency. Naturally they have to control anything that can go around dissembling things. But the GSEA is constantly ferreting out and busting illegal genemod operations, run outside the law for profit or even pure research, creating things without proper controls. Including dissemblers. A lot of them are self-replicating, that means they can reproduce themselves like small animals—”
“Animals? Sex?” I could feel, me, the surprise on my face.
She smiled. “No. Like… algae on a pond. But GSEA-approved dissemblers have built-in clocking mechanisms for control. After a certain number of replications, they stop reproducing. Illegal ones sometimes don’t. Now there are rumors — still just rumors — that an ilegal replicator without a clocking mechanism is loose. It attacks the molecular bonds of an alloy called duragem that’s used in many machines. Many machines. It—”
I suddenly saw. “It’s causing all these breakdowns, it. The gravrail and the foodbelt and the warden ’bot and the medunit. My God, some crazy donkey germ is breaking everything!”
“Not exactly. Nobody knows yet. But maybe.”
“You people are doing it to us again!”
She stared at me, her. I said, “You take everything, you, away from us and call it aristo Living, and then you wreck the what’s left!”
“Not me,” she said, hard. “Not the government. The government is what kept all of you alive after you became utterly unnecessary to the economy. Rather than just eliminate seventy percent of the population the way they did in Kenya and Chile. Donkey genemod science could do that, too. But we didn’t.”
The bedroom door opened and Lizzie came out, cleaned up, leaning on Annie. Lizzie laid on the couch and said, “Tell me something, Vicki.”
“Tell you what?” Dr. Turner said. She was still mad, her.
“Anything. Anything I don’t know, me. Anything new.”
Dr. Turner’s expression changed again. For a second she almost looked afraid, her. Annie said, “Can I see you a minute, Billy?”
This was it, then. Annie was ready, her, to send me away. I followed her into Lizzie’s bedroom. She shut the door.
“Billy, what we did, us, last night…” She didn’t look at me. I couldn’t help her, me, even if I’d of wanted to. My throat was too closed up. And I didn’t want to.
“Billy, I’m sorry. I behaved, me, like a fool. It just been too long. I didn’t mean to make you … I can’t. . . Can we just go back, us, to the way we was before? Friends? Partners, sort of, but not. . .” She raised her beautiful chocolate eyes to me.