Lizzie scowled over the sleeping baby. “And you think we’ll fall for that? Be bought like that?”
Jackson said quietly, “You were bought like that for nearly a hundred years.”
“But no more! We’re different now, us! Since the Change! We don’t need you no more!”
“Which is why we want you to give us a ride now,” Vicki said. “Earn your keep. Jackson. Lizzie, Shockey, get in the car.”
They did. Vicki gave him directions, and the four flew in silence for several minutes over rough country littered with the debris of winter. Wind-fallen branches, withered scrub, soggy dead leaves, dells of deep snow. Finally Jackson said, “Do you want me to land right by their… camp? Or shouldn’t they see a donkey associated with this Liver enterprise?”
“No,” Lizzie said, surprising him. “You come, too. These particular people, they should see you.”
The tribe, like so many, had passed the winter in an abandoned food-processing plant. Jackson guessed this one had once processed apples from the gone-wild orchards covering the low hills. No one came out to meet them. Lizzie, carrying the still sleeping Dirk, led the way around to the back of the building, where, under the usual plastic-tent feeding ground, lunch was in progress.
Sixty or seventy Livers lay or sat naked on the churned-up ground, soaking in both nutrients and sun. For a second Jackson flashed on Terry Amory’s party that Cazie had taken him to. But there was no danger of confusing the two. These Livers were—well, Jackson hated to admit it because it echoed the worst kind of dehumanizing bigotry—the Ellie Lester kind. But it was the truth. The Livers were repulsive.
Hairy backs, sagging breasts, flabby bellies and thighs, graceless proportions, faces with features too squished together or too spread apart or not well matched to each other. It didn’t even matter that everyone’s Cell Cleaner skin was smooth and healthy and blemish-free. Since his internship had ended, Jackson had seen mostly perfect genemod bodies. Now he remembered how purely ugly most of humanity was in comparison.
Vicki murmured by his ear, “Kind of a shock, isn’t it? Even for a physician. Welcome to homo sapiens. ‘The aristocrat among the animals,’ as Heinrich Heine remarked.”
Lizzie said, without preamble, “We’re back, us, to talk to you some more about this here election. Janet, Arly, Bill, Farla—you listen, you.”
“Do we got any choice, us?” said a flabby, grinning, naked middle-aged woman with buttocks like deflated balloons. “Lizzie, you hand me that there sweet baby.”
Lizzie handed over Dirk and stripped off her clothes. Shockey and Vicki, with complete unself-consciousness, followed. Vicki grinned at Jackson. “When in Rome…”
He wasn’t going to let her—let any of them—intimidate him. He stripped off his jacket and shirt.
“Oooooh, nice,” the middle-aged woman said, and laughed at Jackson’s discomfiture. “But, Lizzie, tell us, you, why you brought this pair of donkeys, them, along with your so-called candidate.”
“Ain’t nothing so-called about me, Farla,” Shockey said good-naturedly. “I’m the next Willoughby County district supervisor, me.”
Farla grinned. “Sure you are.”
Jackson was having trouble. He stood slowly unfastening his pants… as slowly as he could. Livers were used to communal feeding nudity. So were donkeys—but ground feeding, done in softly lit and perfumed private feeding rooms, was very often sexual. Here, young men like Shockey were relaxed naked. Comfortable. Flaccid. Jackson, for no good reason he could discover, had an erection.
“Go on, Jackson,” Vicki said softly. “Unveil the genemod family lavaliere.”
He turned to her angrily—why did she always try to make things worse?—and immediately things were worse. Her naked body was dizzyingly beautiful. Smaller breasts than Cazie’s but higher, narrower waist, slim hips, and long legs… Her pubic hair was reddish-blonde, a pretty light fuzz, a veil over…
“Oh, my,” Vicki said. “Your family got their money’s worth.” And then, a moment later in a different voice, “Come on, Jack. Laugh. It’s funny, don’t you even see that?”
He laughed hollowly, trying to exaggerate the hollowness, trying for irony. He knew he failed.
Lizzie was giving her pitch. “If you all register, you, between 11:15 and 11:50 tonight, like we told you, then no other donkeys can register themselves for the election. We got enough Livers to win. If we win, us, we can get the tax pool money and stock the warehouse at the county seat with whatever we need. You going to tell me, you, there ain’t stuff you need?”
“Course there is,” said a small, scowling, elderly man. “And hell. I’d vote for you, Shockey. You been a mayor, you. ’Sides, I can remember when not all candidates was donkeys, them, long before you kids was even born. But what I want to know, me, is what price the donkeys going to make us pay for electing one of our own.”
Shockey said. “Ain’t going to be no price.”
“Ah, son, there’s always a price. They always make a price, them.”
Shockey bristled. “Like what, Max? What could the donkeys do to us, them?”
“What couldn’t they do, them? They got weapons, police, they can change the goddamn climate, I hear, me—at least a little ways. We’re better off, us, the way we are. We got everything we really need, and we don’t attract no attention.”
“But that way things will never change, them!” Lizzie cried. “We’ll never get anyplace!”
The old man said, “Just as well. You keep your eyes on the sky, you, you’re bound to stumble over the rocks.”
“But—”
“But they got donkeys with them,” another man said suddenly. “They ain’t just Livers, them, stumbling along with the rest of us.”
Lizzie said, “Vicki and Dr. Aranow aren’t—” but Vicki interrupted her. Vicki looked right at the man.
“That’s right. They have donkeys with them. I’m Victoria Turner, formerly with the GSEA. And this is Dr. Jackson Aranow, a physician, and owner of TenTech, a major corporation. Lizzie’s not fighting alone. Any paybacks the donkeys try for beating them in the election, Dr. Aranow and I have the resources to counter.”
Jackson stared. The man said bluntly, “Why? Why you on Lizzie’s side, you?”
“My side,” Shockey said, scowling.
“Because,” Vicki said, “I believe in this country.” She reached over to the pile of Shockey’s discarded clothing and tore the red-white-and-blue rosette off the jacket shoulder. She held it out to the man: with overt sincerity, with cynical irony, with what Jackson finally perceived to be a protective camouflage over genuine belief. But Vicki didn’t believe this election could really succeed—she’d said as much. She must believe in some deeper political commitment, of which this was only a first necessary defeat.
The man snorted. But he took the rosette. The older man, Max, grinned. Farla said abruptly, “All right, Shockey, tell us, you, what you gonna do if we elect you.”
Someone in the crowd giggled. “Yeah, Shockey. Make a campaign speech, you.”
“Well, I will, me! Now you Livers listen, you! Everybody!”
“ ‘Let arms yield to the toga,’ ” Vicki murmured. “Jackson, get comfortable. The people speak.”
It was dark before they left Farla’s tribe. The debate went on all afternoon and early evening, as much, Jackson suspected, out of relish for the fighting as desire for information. People shouted and insulted and threatened and blustered. They moved indoors after feeding, to the dark, warm den of battered chairs, sleeping cubicles created by makeshift partitions, craft projects and skinned rabbits, and an expensive terminal with a label from one of TenTech’s subsidiaries. Stolen? Vicki grinned at him. Y-cones kept the huge depressing place warm—were the cones some of the ones he’d sent Lizzie’s tribe from TenTech? Maybe Shockey, too, understood the value of voter bribery.