by Nancy Kress
The bridge was 2.369 kilometers long.
Darkness set in more quickly than Lizzie had counted on. Darkness was a cover, of course, but she was afraid of crawling across the unlighted bridge. Not of falling off, but of…what? She was just afraid. Of everything.
No, she wasn’t. She was Lizzie Francy, the best datadipper in the country, the only Liver to even try to reclaim political power from the donkeys. She would not be afraid. Only people like her mother were afraid of everything—even before the neuropharm.
Stay home, child, where you belong, you. Annie’s voice again. God, she’d be glad when she was too old to hear her mother’s voice in her head. How old was that? Maybe as much as thirty?
Then she heard something else. People, crossing the bridge from the Manhattan side.
Lizzie crawled forward even faster. Now she could see their light, a bright Y-energy torch, bobbing in the distance. How far? The wind must be blowing toward her; it carried their laughter. Men’s laughter.
It should be here soon, soon, it had been a while since the last one…
She felt it in the darkness, the small dark bump at the edge of the bridge, meant to be used in making repairs. The techs attached their floaters here, then activated the energy shield that temporarily augmented the width of the bridge for easy maneuverability. The shields could hold several tons of equipment, if they had to. They could also bend at any needed angle. Lizzie had read everything about them in the crystal library—which did not include the activation codes. And she hadn’t dared open a satlink to try to dip the information from the gravrail corporation’s deebees.
Now, she didn’t have any choice.
“System on,” she whispered. “Oh, God—system on. Minimal volume.”
“Terminal on,” the computer whispered.
She worked as quickly as she could, muttering feverishly to the terminal, eyeing the torchlight ahead. It seemed to have stopped. Occasional wordless voices blew toward her on the wind. Raised voices—an argument. Good. Let them argue, let them fight, let them all throw each other off the bridge…What if they threw her off the bridge? She didn’t know how to swim.
Stay home, child, where you belong, you.
“Path 74, code J,” Lizzie tried. Come on, come on…It had to be a simple code, maybe even a standard industrial one, easy for all techs on rotating crews to remember. Not too many contingencies or automatic changes; they’d hamper an emergency. It had to be fairly simple, not all that deeply secured…
She had it.
The torch was moving forward again. Lizzie seized her terminal and backpack in her arms. She laid a hand on the dark bump and spoke the code. Soundlessly—thank God it was soundless!—the bridge extended itself over the water, a clear platform of energy disappearing into the darkness.
Lizzie hesitated. It looked so insubstantial. If she crawled out on it and it just let her drop through into the river far below…but that wouldn’t happen. Y-energy wasn’t insubstantial. Y-energy was the surest and most solid thing left from the old days, before the Change Wars, when life had been safe.
The voices crystallized into words. Hurry up…Where’s…can’t never…Janey girl…
They might be all right. They might be just normal people, crossing a bridge. Or they might be like those animals at the tech yard. Lizzie looked again at the almost-invisible shield, closed her eyes, and rolled onto it. She whispered code, and felt the shield curve, move, and swing her under the bridge for inspection and repair.
Cautiously Lizzie opened her eyes. She lay inches under the trestle, the underside of which was pocked with bumps and panels. Probably some of those were terminals. For once, she felt no desire to datadip. She groped with one hand along the edge of the energy shield supporting her, trying to feel the place it met the bridge. As far as she could feel, the whole shield had swung neatly underneath, detectable from the top only if you happened to be looking in the dark for a bridge extension made of energy field.
Above her, people straggled past.
She waited several minutes after the last vibration in the bridge. Then she spoke the code to swing the extension back, followed by the one to close it up.
On the east side of the bridge the gravrail divided. One line ran south, along the western shore of Manhattan, on a narrow strip of land between the river and the dome of Manhattan West Enclave. The other veered north, to skirt the enclave and, eventually, Central Park. That way, Lizzie knew, were the ruins of Livers’ New York. Not too many people lived there now; broken foamcast and fallen stone didn’t provide much to feed on. Those that did remain tended to be dangerous.
She had no choice. This was the way to Dr. Aranow.
Wrapped in her personal shield, Lizzie hid under a thick bush until morning. She felt fairly sure she wouldn’t be seen. But she couldn’t go to sleep for a long time.
In the light, New York was even worse than she’d imagined.
She’d never seen anything like it. Yes, she had—those history holos that Vicki had insisted she study in the educational software, before Lizzie grew old enough to put her foot down and study only the software she wanted. The holos had shown places like this one: burned, fallen piles of rubble with weeds straggling through them. Streets so blocked you couldn’t be sure which direction they’d once run. Scattered twisted metal separated by black glassy areas where some weapon had fused everything into smoothness. Lizzie had always assumed the holos were made-up, like the literature software Vicki had made her watch. Or if not made-up completely, then data-enhanced.
But this broke-down city was real.
She moved cautiously through the ugly ruins, listening. A few times she heard voices. Immediately she hid, shaking, until the men had passed. She didn’t see them, and was just as glad.
People lived in some of the ruined buildings. She saw a woman carrying water from the river, a man braiding rope, a Changed child chasing a ball. And then an unChanged baby, carried by a little girl of about ten.
The Changed girl was dirty, half-naked, hair matted with debris. But her skin shone with health, and she clambered strongly over a pile of rubble, the baby clinging to her chest. He—she?—looked over a year old, the age of Sharon’s baby, Callie. But this child’s legs were shriveled and weak-looking, his belly swollen, his arms like sticks. An open sore on his leg oozed pus. When the little girl set him down, he mewed and held up arms that almost immediately dropped helplessly to his side.
That’s how all babies would look soon, if Miranda Sharifi didn’t make more Change syringes, and if Sanctuary spread the fear neuropharm. Just like that.
The older girl set the child down, and he immediately fell over. His bones had no strength.
Lizzie moved away from the children. It would have been better to wait until they left the area, but she couldn’t stand to wait. Carefully she made her way across Manhattan, keeping direction by the gravrail even when she had to skirt north of it to avoid people. To the south, both ahead and behind her, she could see the towers of Manhattan West and Manhattan East, separated by the broad expanse of the park. The towers shone in the sunlight, and bright splashes of genemod color bloomed on their terraces under the enclave Y-shields. Aircars flew in and out of invisible gates in the invisible dome.
By mid-afternoon, she’d reached the northern ground gate for Manhattan East Enclave.
It was surrounded by a sort of ruined-village-within-the-ruined-city. Of what Lizzie guessed were the original foamcast buildings, half were intact and empty, still surrounded by impenetrable shields. The other half were rubble, burned or bombed or hacked into ragged chunks by sheer brute force. Around and between, people had constructed shacks of board, foamcast debris, sheet plastic, even broken ’bots. Well, tribes everywhere made do with what they found. But these shacks were also broken and ruined—some patched, some not—as if there had been a second Change War here. And a third, and a fourth.
Lizzie saw no people, but she knew they were there. A dead campfire, the ashes still undisturbe
d. A worn path, free of weeds. A bouquet of unwilted wildflowers from some child’s game. And, most puzzling, a framed picture of a man in very old-fashioned clothes, stiff ruffles at neck and wrists, holding some sort of jeweled book. How had that gotten there? She stayed hidden, within sight of the enclave gate, and waited.
Suddenly a chime sounded.
Immediately people rushed out of hiding from behind rubble, out of shacks, even from an underground tunnel. Livers, but not dressed like any Livers that Lizzie had ever seen. They wore donkey clothes: boots, tight little shirts, full trousers, rich coats. But only in bits and pieces—nobody had a complete outfit. The people—women, children, a few men—didn’t look dangerous. They gathered around the enclave gate. The chime sounded again.
If Lizzie wanted to see what was happening, she was going to have to gather with them. Cautiously she edged into the small crowd. They stank. But no one paid her any particular attention. So they weren’t really a tribe, who knew each other and stuck together. They were just a bunch of pathetic people. She jostled to the front of the group.
The enclave dome was opaqued gray for fifteen feet up, clear after that. Probably the residents didn’t want Livers peering in at them, spoiling the view of their pretty gardens. The gate, a black outline on the gray energy field, suddenly disappeared. Everyone rushed inside the enclave.
It couldn’t be this easy!
It wasn’t. Inside was another sealed dome, full of…what? Piles of clothing, boxes of stuff. Lizzie saw a doll with a broken head, some mismatched dishes, a scratched wooden box, some blankets. Then she understood. The donkeys in Manhattan East Enclave were giving away the used things they no longer wanted.
People snatched objects from the piles, the boxes, each other. There was a little pushing and shoving, but no real fighting. Lizzie watched carefully, trying to see everything, both dome structure and discards. Clothing, pictures, toys, bedding, flowerpots, furniture, plastics—nothing electronic or Y-energy, nothing that could become a weapon. In three minutes the dome was picked clean, and all the Livers ran away with their new discards.
Lizzie waited, her heart starting a slow hammering in her chest.
“Please leave the dome now,” a stern ’bot voice said. “Today’s giveaway is over. Please leave the dome now.”
Lizzie stayed where she was, fingering her personal shield.
“Please leave the dome now. Today’s giveaway is over. Please leave the dome now.”
Outside, someone screamed something unintelligible. The Livers froze for a horrified moment, then started running.
“Please leave the dome now. Today’s giveaway is over. Please leave the dome now.” And then, just like that, she was outside. The rear energy wall had unceremoniously pushed her forward, closing itself, so quickly that Lizzie tumbled on her face in the dirt.
The Livers still screamed and ran, disappearing into their dens and holes. Some weren’t quick enough. The band of raiders, mostly men but a few women too, burst on them and started grabbing the donkey discards, knocking people down, shouting and hollering as they stomped with heavy, stolen boots on bodies and faces.
Lizzie rolled back toward the dome that had just ejected her. She understood now why the shacks had been repeatedly destroyed, repeatedly rebuilt. The price for living near the enclave’s used bounty was that others would take it away from you, with varying degrees of viciousness.
She scrambled to her feet and started sidling along the dome. Useless—she was the most visible, best-equipped target in sight. Two men converged on her.
“Backpack! Grab it, Tish!”
It wasn’t two men but a man and a woman, a woman as tall and broad-shouldered as a man. With deep purple eyes under thick, thick lashes. Genemod.
The beautiful donkey eyes leered at Lizzie, grabbed for her, encountered the personal shield. “Fuck! She’s shielded, her!” The voice was pure Liver.
Tish outweighed Lizzie by at least thirty pounds. She knocked Lizzie sideways, and Lizzie felt herself fall against the energy dome and slide down it. She cowered and whimpered, groping inside her boot. Tish dropped to her knees beside her, the purple eyes bright with the joy of torture, and began to shake Lizzie by the neck like a dog with a bone.
“So I can’t get inside there, me…I can still shake you till your neck breaks, it, right inside your safe little shield…”
Lizzie pulled Billy’s rabbit-skinning knife from her boot and shoved it up and under the woman’s breastbone.
She’d sharpened the knife every day, during the long daylight hours of hiding. Even so, she was surprised how hard it was to drive the blade through muscle and flesh. She pushed until the long blade was buried to its handle.
Tish’s beautiful eyes widened. She slumped forward on top of Lizzie, her arms settling around Lizzie like an embrace.
Lizzie shoved her off and looked wildly around. The man who’d told Tish to grab Lizzie’s backpack was across the clearing, fighting with one of the few men left alive near the enclave. Tish’s partner seemed to be winning. And there were other raiders around, in a minute another one would attack…Lizzie had only a few moments.
She didn’t hesitate. If she thought, she’d never be able to do it. But Tish was too heavy for Lizzie to lift, she couldn’t carry that muscular body…but she didn’t need the whole body.
Shaking, Lizzie knelt beside Tish and pulled out the silver teaspoon she’d stolen from Dr. Aranow’s dining room. She’d had some weird idea that once inside Manhattan East, she could show it to the house system, convince “Jones” that she belonged there…not likely. But now she grasped Tish’s right eyelid with her right thumb and index finger, pried the eyelid wide open, and slid the spoon under the eyeball. Gasping, she scooped the eyeball out of its socket. She pulled her knife from Tish’s body; immediately blood spurted over her in jets, running down the outside of the energy shield. Lizzie sliced through the nerves and muscles tethering the eyeball to its empty socket.
She turned, groping for the black outline of the enclave gate. Blood smeared between the outside surfaces of the dome’s Y-shield and hers. Embedded in the gate outline was a standard retina scanner, set to admit any genemod configuration. An emergency measure: a tech could get caught outside, an adventurous adolescent could be stranded. Lizzie knew about it from datadipping.
She pushed Tish’s eyeball against the scanner, and the outer dome gate opened. It closed behind her, just ahead of the raiders screaming for her death.
Lizzie collapsed to the floor and heaved. She couldn’t vomit; she’d had no mouth food in weeks. But there was no time. How long did a dead eyeball stay fresh enough to fool a scanner? Such information wasn’t in the deebees.
Staggering to her feet, she held Tish’s purple genemod eye to the second scanner. The inner gate opened, and Lizzie lurched through.
She was inside Manhattan East.
Specifically, she was inside a warehouse of some kind, with heavy-machinery ’bots standing motionless around the walls. Good. No cop ’bots until she left the building, which would be heavily shielded and locked. That could wait. Lizzie lay on the floor until she could breathe normally.
When she could stand, she turned off her personal shield. Tish’s blood slid off onto the floor. Lizzie turned the shield back on, then realized she was still holding the eyeball. It wasn’t bloody; all the blood had come from withdrawing the knife from Tish’s body.
Tish had never used her genemod eyes to enter the enclave. Why not? She must have known what she was. But when she tried to shake the life out of Lizzie, Lizzie had felt the reason for Tish’s exile. Tish’s hands had circled Lizzie’s neck; Tish’s body had pressed hard against Lizzie’s. And through Tish’s clothing, Lizzie had felt the hard lumps in the wrong places, the misshapen breastbone, the asymmetrical ribs. Tish’s skeleton must have gone wrong in the womb. Naked, she would look grotesque. Lizzie thought of how donkeys insisted on physical perfection, and how long Tish must have dwelled with Livers to have that accent. Vicki
always said that hating yourself was the worst kind of hatred. Lizzie had never understood what Vicki meant.
She shuddered and dropped the purple eyeball. Her gorge rose. But still, she couldn’t leave the thing here, for a maintenance ’bot to find. She forced herself to pick the eyeball back up and put it in her pocket.
Then Lizzie started patiently to dip the inside security locks on the warehouse.
It took her almost half an hour. When she was finished, she stepped out into Manhattan East Enclave. She stood on an immaculate street bordered with genemod flowers, long slinky blue shapes that yearned toward her. Lizzie jumped back, but the flowers were soft, flaccid, harmless. The air smelled of wonderful things: woodsmoke and newly mown grass and spices she couldn’t identify. The towers of Manhattan gleamed in sunset, the programming on their outer walls subtly keyed to the colors in the sky. From somewhere came the low (artificial?) hooting of mourning doves.
People actually lived in this beauty and order. All the time. They really did. Lizzie, terrified and exhausted and enchanted, suddenly felt that she might cry.
There was no time. A cop ’bot zoomed toward her.
Frantically she dug in her pocket for Tish’s eyeball. It had grown softer, slightly squishy. Lizzie’s gorge rose. She held the disgusting thing in front of her right eye, squeezing shut the left, but the ’bot didn’t even try for a retina scan on the decaying purple eye. Somehow, it already knew she didn’t belong in Manhattan East. Lizzie saw the mist squirt into her face, screamed, and slumped backward onto the genemod flowers, which wrapped their soft petals lovingly around her paralyzed limbs.
Twenty