Clair had already asked Arcady where they were going, and this time he had answered simply, The Farmhouse. She took the hint, although she was both curious and skeptical. A farm, honestly? As the orchard passed by, row after row of branching trees, apparently stretching for miles, she wondered how there could be nearly enough Abstainers in the world to eat so many apples. Then she did the math and realized that if one percent of people were Abstainers, even one tenth of one percent, that still left a huge potential market—but how would the apples get to them without d-mat? There were no trucks anymore, no planes for airfreight. The fruit would rot on the ground.
Every minute or so, Clair checked for the Air and for Q. Still nothing. She bit her lip, trying to protect Jesse from each bump and shudder of the vehicle beneath them. As far as she knew, they were the only survivors of the crash. She didn’t want to think about what it would mean if he died and left her alone. All she knew about farmers was from old movies, and although Arcady and his friends might not look like inbred cannibals, she could imagine any number of terrible fates awaiting a girl on her own in the middle of nowhere.
Her face was crusted with blood, and her nose hurt. It didn’t feel broken, which was a small comfort among a cavalcade of miseries.
They crested a low hill and drove down into a depression that didn’t really constitute a valley. Lights at the bottom of the depression issued from a close cluster of buildings. Clair could make out very few details in the thickening gloom. Sheds of some kind, containing angular agricultural machinery. The Farmhouse, she presumed.
They passed fences and through open gates. The four-wheeler bounced lightly over a packed-earth courtyard and came to a halt in front of a long, gabled building. One wall was entirely windows. She could see people moving within. Strong, stern men with beards and work clothes. Hardly any women. No one she recognized.
Farmers issued from a wide double door and converged on the flatbed. They took Jesse from her and carried him carefully inside. Clair followed closely, blinking in the light. Arcady’s hand was tight on her upper arm, guiding her and keeping her close through a central hall with trestle tables below and naked wooden beams above. Voices came at her from everywhere. Her blocked nostrils twitched—was that a wood fire she smelled?
Somehow she was separated from Jesse. Before she could protest, Arcady ushered her into an office. There was a desk and two chairs and a series of cabinets that might have held actual paper files.
“Take a seat, Clair.”
“How do you know my name?” She stayed standing.
“You were in the video with Dylan Linwood,” he said. “I didn’t think it was real until you practically landed on our heads. We heard reports via shortwave radio of an airship damaged in a power-beam accident. That said two things to us: one, WHOLE was involved, because no one else flies airships so far from the coast; and two, because WHOLE was involved, it was unlikely to be an accident. We immediately mobilized to search for survivors.”
Arcady showed her a map. The Farm stretched across a significant chunk of North Dakota, from the Little Missouri grasslands to the east almost as far as Fargo to the west, north halfway to the Canadian border. Clair’s portion of the airship had come down on the southern edge of the farm, near a ghost town called New Salem. The crew compartment had disintegrated into several pieces, with her larger chunk getting snagged while the rest tumbled on much farther. Farmers were still calling in with news of wreckage raining over the plains. Arcady couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her anything about other survivors.
“Where’s Jesse?” she said, fighting a resurgence of the same panic that had threatened her earlier. “What are you doing to him?”
“He’s being looked after,” Arcady said. “Don’t worry. We have competent medical staff here.”
Clair tugged at a hangnail with her teeth, pulled a face at the taste of dried blood on her tongue. Was competent good enough? Jesse had become much more to her than a guide to his world of misfits and outsiders. He was the only one who agreed with her about how to deal with Improvement and the dupes, and he had saved her on the Skylifter just as much Q had.
She didn’t want any more friends to die that week. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it was beginning to look somewhat more than careless.
“You said I could trust you,” Clair said.
“You can.”
“So why am I in here? Why can’t I be with him?”
Arcady ran his fingers through his beard. “We live quietly. We don’t like attention or surprises.”
“Are you part of WHOLE too? Is what why I can’t access the Air?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“What else am I supposed to do?”
He smiled, which unexpectedly transformed him.
“Come on.” He stood and held out both hands to her. “You need a shower.”
“I want to wait for Jesse.”
“You could be waiting all night,” he said, “and you don’t want to smell like this when he wakes up.”
She sniffed warily at one armpit. Her nose was still mostly blocked, so she couldn’t tell.
“Is it bad?”
“It’s worse,” he said. “Much, much worse.”
The showers were communal, but the water was warm and plentiful, and there was soap, which was enough for Clair to overcome her reluctance. She took a corner stall and scrubbed two days’ worth of accumulated blood and grime from her skin and hair. She lathered and rinsed three times, and then stood under the water for a full minute, savoring the sensation of clean.
The shower was on a generous but definitive timer, otherwise she might have stayed there all night. When it shut off, she reached for two towels, drying her skin first and then her hair as best she could. It would spring up into an Afro now, no matter what she did. The clothes Q had sent her in Manteca lay in a muddy puddle. No way was she putting them on again.
She stepped out of the shower stall wrapped in a thick towel. The steam had cleared her nose. She could smell nothing now but soap.
“Here,” said Arcady, handing her a stack of neatly folded garments. “I think I got your size right.”
Among the clothes were overalls, utilitarian and tough-looking. Fit for a farm.
“These have been fabbed,” she said, caught off guard by something that had once seemed completely normal in such an alien place.
“How can you tell?”
“They smell . . . you know, fresh.”
“This surprises me. I thought you were one of Turner’s crew.”
“We’re temporary allies, that’s all.”
Arcady nodded. “Well, don’t tell the others about the clothes when they get here. They wouldn’t approve.”
“But you trust them, and you say they trust you. How can that work?”
“We’ve been ‘temporary allies’ with Turner Goldsmith for twenty years. We don’t have a problem with d-mat per se, just the way it’s regulated. The Farmhouse has its own closed networks and makes its own patterns. Nothing weird or anything. Just . . . amplifying our produce a little.”
“You grow stuff naturally and then fab it? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does for some things. Think about it. If everything’s fabbed and nothing’s really grown anymore, there goes mutation. Life gets boring—it’s all about produce. Here, we actively breed for mutation, for novelty. We like randomness, and we like what it brings.”
Clair still didn’t understand.
“You’re not getting dressed,” he said.
She didn’t want to drop the towels while someone was watching her. She felt vulnerable enough already.
“Why don’t you go on ahead of me? I’ll catch up.”
“Can’t do that, I’m afraid. No wandering around the Farmhouse on your own just yet.”
She stared at him. “You’re guarding me?”
“Let’s just say I don’t want you to see anything you shouldn’t.”
Then it occurred to her. There was one
class of organic compounds that could be grown but couldn’t legally be transported through d-mat.
The farmers were making drugs—new drugs that no one had ever heard of before, like the one Libby had taken to deal with her Improvement headache. That was why Arcady didn’t want people dropping in on them unexpectedly and why the Air was comprehensively blocked.
“Those apples I saw are for more than just eating, aren’t they? They’re for getting high.”
Arcady winked and turned his broad back on her.
Clair dressed in the uniform of a farmer, deciding as she did so that she could trust the farmers no more or less than Turner did. Terrorists and drug runners. Honor among illegals. But at least their defenses were good—too good even for Q, it seemed. Like everything in recent days, she had to accept the good along with the bad.
She figured she could live with that just as long as the bad wasn’t too bad.
[51]
* * *
THE HALL WAS full of people when she returned and even noisier than before. Turner was there too, and Gemma and Ray. No others.
“Is that all?” Clair remembered the people she had addressed on the Skylifter. It was horrible to think they were now all gone.
Arcady handed her a pewter mug filled to the brim with a foaming golden liquid.
“Devil’s Lake is the finest cider we’ve ever made,” he said, raising the mug he held in his other hand. “Here’s to fallen friends.”
Clair felt as though she’d slipped into in a depressing dream about agricultural Vikings, but she clinked mugs with him and took a sip of the cider. It was sweet and warming, like a memory of fireworks. She took a larger gulp and closed her eyes.
To Dancer, Cashile, and Theo, she thought. To Zep, and to all the others who died because of the dupes. Hell, even to Dylan Linwood.
“To life,” Arcady added, “and the hard business of living it.”
She opened her eyes, nodded hopelessly . . . and there was Jesse, approaching from the fringes of the crowd, looking disoriented by the noise and the people but otherwise uninjured. The relief she felt was almost as potent as the cider.
He hugged her with shining eyes, and she hugged him back. Even through the grime and blood came a smell that she recognized, musky and natural and all him. She didn’t know when his scent had become so familiar to her, but she was glad to have it in her nostrils again.
“Hey,” he said into the top of her head. “It’s good to see you too.”
“I was worried,” she admitted. “Are you all right?”
“I banged my head when we came down. Luckily, I’ve got a thick skull. You?”
“Hungry,” she said, painfully aware of the fact now that she knew he was okay. “Go take a shower, then try some of the local cider. It’s to die for.”
He grinned and hurried off with his farmer guide. Clair watched him go, more glad to see him than she could say—and Turner and Ray and Gemma, too, even if they were terrorists and outlaws.
“Are you two . . . ?” Arcady was watching her over the lip of his mug.
“What? Hardly,” she said, remembering Jesse telling the dupe that she would never be his girlfriend.
“Good. Lots of nice farm lads here. And farm girls.”
He winked, and she felt herself blush right up into the roots of her curly hair.
Dinner consisted of something that looked like a big sheep roasted on a spit. The members of WHOLE stuck to baked vegetables, cheese, and salad. Clair did the same, wary of meat that had been recently alive, not fabbed like food was in the normal world.
The cider served with the meal was smokier than the first brew, with a different name: Sweet Briar Lake. Arcady told her that it was made from pears rather than apples. Someone played an old upright piano, and Arcady sang “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” at the top of his lungs:
There’s a tear in your eye and I’m wondering why
For it never should be there at all.
Clair was reminded of Q’s misquotes of old poems and the conversation they had had in the Skylifter before the meeting with Turner. Clair had barely thought of it since, caught up in events as she had been. But she hadn’t forgotten it.
If I am one of the Improved, why don’t I have a body?
On a drug farm in the middle of nowhere, fuzzy-headed from exhaustion and homemade cider, what had seemed mad hours ago began to make a kind of sense.
Jesse joined her, looking fresh and clean in his own set of sturdy overalls, still wearing his old burned orange T-shirt underneath. Gemma was standing to one side, looking cynical and wary, drinking water, not cider. Her bandage had been changed and the burns to her skin thoroughly salved. She had lost her painkiller patch. Clair waved for her to come over and join them. It was time for more of the answers Clair had hoped to get in the Skylifter.
“What’s the relationship between Improvement and the dupes?” Clair asked.
“The latter protect the former,” said Gemma. “You know how it works. Do anything to suggest Improvement is anything other than a harmless meme, and they’ll come after you.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, duping takes someone out of their body and puts someone else in. You can’t do that without altering the brain, which is exactly what we’ve seen in autopsies of people who have used Improvement. Remember those dead girls?”
“Brain damage,” said Clair. “Are you saying the damage wasn’t random?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Improvement does the same thing as duping . . . only differently. Dupes rarely last longer than a day or two, for instance, while Improvement takes a week. We think that neither duping nor Improvement is permanent, but maybe that’s because we only see the times when it goes wrong. I told you earlier that not everyone who uses Improvement is affected, and that’s true. What if there are people out there right now who are in fact different on the inside, successfully transformed, but we wouldn’t know unless they said so? And why would they?”
They were coming back around to Turner’s paranoid conspiracy theory, in which world leaders were puppets controlled by VIA dupes. Clair cut Gemma off before she could get there.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this back at Escalon?”
“You wouldn’t have believed me.”
That was true enough. Clair still didn’t entirely believe it now.
“So Libby’s not herself anymore? That’s what you think?”
“It’s not like duping; it doesn’t happen right away. But she’s got the symptoms, which means the process is under way. If she’s not already someone else by now, she will be soon.”
“Who? Is it the same person every time?”
“I don’t know. My son never told me his name.”
Clair stared at her for a long moment, reminded of Gemma’s past. Sam, she’d called him, the child she’d lost to Improvement. The note Clair had found had been written three years ago.
“Was that why you joined WHOLE?” Jesse asked. “I remember seeing you at meetings, but you never said what happened.”
“Yes.” Gemma didn’t flinch from the question. “I had Abstainer friends. Your father was one of them. Like a lot of people, I didn’t want to think about what goes on inside the booths until something went wrong. What happened to Sam confirmed a lot of things for me. WHOLE is my family now.”
“Did your son . . . ,” Clair started to say, then caught herself. “Did the person inside Sam . . . tell you anything at all?”
“Nothing useful. Do you want to know how he killed himself?”
Clair shook her head. She didn’t need to think of Libby suffering the same fate any more than she already was.
“Good,” Gemma said. “All you need to know is that dupes and Improvement are connected. And without d-mat, neither would happen.”
“But if we bring down d-mat, I’ll never get Libby back.”
“Do you really think it’s possible to save her?” asked Jesse.
“That’s the thing I thi
nk I’ve worked out. Listen.” Clair leaned over the table, closer to both of them. “There are rules to how d-mat operates. There can’t be two of a particular person at one time, for instance. Things have to even out. So what happens to minds that are pushed out by the dupes? Where do they go?”
“They’re erased,” Gemma said.
Clair shook her head. “No. Data can neither be created nor destroyed, Q says. If you can’t erase the data, that means those minds are still out there somewhere—and so’s Libby. Her original pattern contains everything she was, right down to the atom. Everything she is. All we have to do is find it, and we can put her back the way she was before the brain damage. Before Improvement.”
Gemma was listening, but she was looking deeply skeptical at the same time, and Clair realized that she was talking to the wrong person. To Gemma, minds and bodies were much more than just data, even though people had been zipping around the world for two generations without any apparent loss of soul.
Fortunately, Jesse looked interested, and Arcady was listening too.
“Our private net does everything two, three times over,” he put in. “It’s the only way to weed out errors. Our safety net is basically a big memory dump. We zap something and we keep its data in limbo until we’re absolutely certain it’s come out the other side okay. We call this limbo the hangover. Obviously, our net is different from the one VIA monitors, but I’m betting that part of it works the same.”
Clair was nodding. “Yes! The hangover. That has to be where she is. Not deleted, because important stuff like this can’t be destroyed. Saved. Brilliant!”
She clinked glasses with Jesse and considered the ramifications of this new understanding.
“That means we need VIA more than ever,” she said. “They’ll naturally have access to their own data. They’ll be able to pull out what’s in their hangover and put Libby back the way she ought to be.”
“How long since she used Improvement?” Gemma asked.
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