The entire crowd drew a collective breath: “Aaaahhhhhhhh…!” Jackson looked up in surprise.
Vicki said, in a voice completely different from any he’d heard from her, “You have one!”
“A Change syringe? Of course—” Then it hit him. “You don’t. Outside the enclaves.”
“Our birth rate is higher than yours,” she said wryly. “And our supply less. When the syringes just stopped appearing a few years ago, you donkeys scavenged and stockpiled them all.”
“So your children—”
“Get sick. Some, anyway. Could die. Don’t you know armed battles are being fought over the remaining syringes?”
He did, of course. But watching it on the newsgrids was different from seeing this crowd eye the syringe hungrily, from feeling their tension, smelling their desperate avidity. He said quickly, “How many unChanged children are in your… your tribe?”
“None yet. But we only had one syringe left, for Lizzie. Next pregnancy… How many syringes have you got, Jackson?”
“Three more…” He almost added with me, saw his mistake in time. “You can have them.”
He injected the baby, who predictably started yelling. Somewhere outside the cubicle, a man’s voice said harshly, “Donkey cops here, them!”
Vicki smiled at him. The smile surprised him: frank, weary, and yet somehow comradely, as if his delivering Lizzie’s baby and handing over the other syringes had changed things between Jackson and the Liver tribe. It took him a minute to realize the smile was a put-on. But she said softly, “You going to let that bitch arrest your patient, Jackson?”
Lizzie lay laughing maniacally over her baby—either the neuropharm company had put too much pleasure stimulant in the patch or Lizzie was especially maternal. The baby wailed loudly. People called and argued in the tiny space, some congratulating Lizzie, some threatening the cops (absurd—they’d be armed and shielded like fortresses), some demanding to know why there weren’t new Y-cones. The smell of packed-in humanity was overwhelming. Jackson looked at Vicki’s smile. He thought of Cazie’s anger, her mockery of him.
Vicki said, under cover of the din, “You told Cazie that you vote two thirds of TenTech stock—yours and your sister’s. You could drop the charges.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
She merely waved her hand to indicate all of it: the baby, the cold room, the ragged Livers, the arguing, the cops he knew must be standing beyond the wall of people who were biologically impervious to disease and hunger but not to cold or violence or other people’s greed. Suddenly he thought of Ellie Lester. Who thought that natives, second-class subjects, slaves—Livers—were ever so witty. Who thought that powerlessness was funny. Unlike Cazie, who merely thought it was boring.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll drop the charges.”
“Yes,” Vicki echoed, and stopped smiling, her eyes narrowing as she regarded him closely, as if wondering what use it might be possible to make of him next.
Four
Today, Theresa thought. Today’s the day.
Lying in bed in the early morning, she felt the familiar dark cloud descend over her mind. Heavy, queasy, hopeless. “The black dog that doesn’t let go,” somebody from old times had called it. “The dark woods than which death is scarcely more bitter.” That was “Dante”—she remembered that name. “The gnawing beast in the brain.” She didn’t remember that one. Thomas, her personal system, had found the quotes for her in some deebee, and now Theresa couldn’t forget them. Dogs, beasts, woods, clouds—she had lived with the darkness for so long she no longer needed names for it, yet she had them. Like the fear itself.
But today the queasy fear wouldn’t stop her. She wouldn’t let it stop her. Today was the day.
“Take a neuropharm,” Jackson always urged her. “I can prescribe… Tessie, it’s an imbalance in brain chemistry. No different from diabetes or anemia. You right the chemistry. You fix it.” And Theresa could never find the words to make him understand.
Because words weren’t important. Action was. She had come to see that only recently. When she had realized it, a deep shame had swept over her. How could she have been so self-indulgent, so pampering of her own weak soul? It had been over a year since she’d even left the apartment… and she’d never left Manhattan East Enclave. Never, her whole life. No wonder she was what Jackson called “clinically depressed.”
Today.
Jackson had gone with Cazie, very early, to check on a factory someplace. Theresa had heard him leave. She was uneasy whenever he left the apartment, but she tried very hard not to let him see that. It wouldn’t be fair. Jackson already stayed home too much for her sake. Hovered over her, worried about her. I can prescribe… He worried about her, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t see what he called a “brain-chemistry imbalance” really was. Only Theresa knew what it really was.
It was a gift. Her soul’s way of telling her that she had better change her ways and pay attention to what really mattered.
Theresa swung her feet over the side of the bed and waited for the daily anxiety to subside. If she let herself, she could stay in bed all day. It was so safe there. Instead, she walked into the sonar shower, took a thirty-second wash, and walked out again. In the bedroom she caught sight of herself naked in the long mirror on the west wall, and stopped.
She didn’t even look like everybody else. Her body was beautiful, she supposed—everybody was beautiful. But she somehow looked… not there. Pale hair and eyes, pale small face, pale skin—what had her parents been thinking of? A fairy. A ghost. An insubstantial holo, fuzzy at the edges. No wonder she didn’t belong anywhere, didn’t know even a single person who could understand her struggle for what it really was. Not even Jackson, loving brother though he was.
Even Jackson thought that Theresa had been born wrong. That she’d been damaged somehow during her in vitro genemod. Even Jackson couldn’t see the nature of the gift that Theresa had been handed. Because it was a gift, no matter what anyone said. Pain always was.
Pain meant that you had to change something, had to learn to think differently about the world. Seeds, Theresa imagined, felt tremendous pain when they burst their husks in the cold dark earth and began to push blindly toward a light they had never seen. Pain was what made you grow. No one seemed to understand that. Everyone she knew, as soon as they were in pain, did everything they could to make it go away. Medicine. Recreational drugs. Sex. Frantic parties. Which were all, when you got right down to it, the same thing. Distractions from pain. How come nobody else in this century thought like that? Only her.
“Each environment,” Jackson had said once, in the slow, careful way he always talked to her, “rewards different personality profiles. Ours rewards vivaciousness, aggressiveness coupled with the appearance of not caring, a certain careless cruelty… you’re not like that, Tess. You’re a different kind of person. Not a worse kind, just different. It’s all right to be different.”
Yes, it was. But only because she’d come to believe that her differentness had a point. The black cloud in her brain, the fear of everything new, the attacks of anxiety so strong that she sometimes couldn’t breathe—their point was to make Theresa break her lazy husk and push blindly toward the light. She believed that. Even though she’d never seen it and didn’t know quite what she was pushing toward. Even though sometimes she despaired that the light was even there But that was part of the gift, too. It made her question everything that happened around her, in case she missed a vital clue to what she was supposed to do next.