Nonetheless, I left the courtroom profoundly depressed. And immediately learned that my ignorance about cellular biology was not my only, or worst, ignorance. I’d thought I was a cynic. But cynicism is like money: somebody else always has more of it than you do.

I sat on the steps of the Science Court, my back to a Doric column the thickness of a small redwood. A light wind blew. Two men paused in the shelter of the column to light sunshine pipes; I’d noticed that Easterners like it smoked. In California, we preferred to drink it. The men were genemod handsome, dressed in the severe sleeveless black suits fashionable on the Hill. Both ignored me. Livers noticed instantly that I wasn’t one of them, but donkeys seldom looked past the jacks and soda-can jewelry. Sufficient grounds for dismissal.

“So how long do you think?” one man said.

“Three months to market, maybe. My guess is either Germany or Brazil.”

“What if Huevos Verdes doesn’t do it?”

“John, why wouldn’t they? There’s a fortune to be made, and that Sharifi woman is no fool. I’m going to be watching the investment trends very carefully.”

“You know, I don’t even really care about the investment factor?” John’s voice was wistful. “I just want it for Jana and me and the girls. Jana’s had these growths on and off for years… what we’ve got now only restrains them so far.”

The other man put a hand on John’s arm. “Watch Brazil. That’s my best guess. It’ll be quick, quicker than if we’d licensed it here. And without all the complications of every blighted Liver town clamoring for it for their medunit, at some undoable cost.”

Pipes lighted, they left.

I sat there, marveling at my own stupidity. Of course. Turn down the Cell Cleaner for American development, make huge political capital from your “protection” of Livers, save a staggering amount of credits from not offering it to your political constituency, and then buy the medical breakthrough for yourself and your loved ones overseas. Of course.

The people must control science and technology.

Maybe Dr. Lee Chang was right. Maybe the Cell Cleaner would run amok and kill them all. All but the Livers. Who would then rise up to establish a just and humane state.

Yes. Right. Desdemona’s mommy and the other Livers I’d seen on the train controlling biotech that could eventually alter the human race into something else. The blind splicing genes, blindly. Right.

Inertia, first cousin to depression, seized me. I sat there, getting colder, until the sky darkened and my ass hurt from the hard marble. The portico was long since deserted. Slowly, stiffly, I got my body to its feet — and had my first piece of luck in weeks.

Miranda Sharifi walked down the wide steps, keeping to the shadows. The face wasn’t hers, and the brown jacks weren’t hers, and I had seen her and Leisha Camden climb into an aircar, which took off two hours ago, pursued by half of Washington. This Liver had pale skin and a large nose and short dirty-blonde hair. So why was I so sure this was Miranda? The big head, and the tip of red ribbon that I, zoom-lensed, saw peeking from her back hip pocket. Or maybe it was just that I needed it to be her, and the “Miranda” who took off with Leisha Camden to be a decoy.

I groped in my pocket for the mid-range infrared sensor Colin Kowalski had given me and surreptitiously aimed it at her. It went off the scale. Miranda or no, this person had the revved metabolism of a SuperSleepless. And no GSEA agents in sight.

Not, of course, that I would see them.

But I refused to give in to negativity. Miranda was mine. I followed her to the gravrail station, pleased at how easily all my old training returned. We boarded a local train traveling north. We settled into a crowded, malodorous car with so many children it seemed the Livers must be breeding right there on the uncleaned floor.

We stopped every twenty minutes or so at some benighted Liver town. I didn’t dare sleep; Miranda might get off someplace without me. What if the trip lasted days? By morning I had trained myself to nap between stops, my unconscious set like an edgy guard dog to nip me awake each time the train slowed and lurched. This produced very strange dreams. Once it was David I was following; he kept shedding his clothes as he danced away from me, an unreachable succubus. Once I dreamed I’d lost Miranda and the Science Court had me on trial for uselessness against the state. The worst was the dream in which I was injected with the Cell Cleaner and realized it was in fact chemically identical with the industrial-strength cleaner used by the household ’bot in my San Francisco enclave, and every cell in my body was painfully dissolving in bleach and ammonia. I woke gasping for air, my face distorted in the black glass of the window.

After that I stayed awake. I watched Miranda Sharifi as the grav train, miraculously not malfunctioning, slid through the mountains of Pennsylvania and into New York State.

Seven

There was a latticework in my head. I couldn’t make it go away. Its shape floated there all the time now, looking a little like the lattices that roses grow on. It was the dark purple color that objects take on in late twilight when it’s hard to see what color anything really is. Miri once told me that nothing “really” is any color — it was all a matter of “circumstantial reflected wave-lengths.” I didn’t understand what she meant. To me, colors are too important to be circumstantial.

The lattice bent around and met itself to form a circle. I couldn’t see what was inside the circle, even though the lattice had diamond-shaped holes. Whatever was inside remained completely hidden.

I didn’t know what this graphic was. It suggested nothing to me. I couldn’t will it to suggest anything, or to change form, or to go away. This hadn’t ever happened to me before. I was the Lucid Dreamer. The shapes that came from my deep unconscious were always meaningful, always universal, always malleable. I shaped them. I brought them outward, to the conscious world. They didn’t shape me. I was the Lucid Dreamer.

I watched Miri’s final day in Science Court on hologrid in a hotel room in Seattle, where I was scheduled to give the revised “The Warrior” concert tomorrow afternoon. The robocams zoomed in close on Leisha and Sara as they climbed into their aircar on the Forum roof. Sara looked exactly like Miri. The holomask over her face, the wig, the red ribbon. She even walked like Miri. Leisha’s eyes had the pinched look that meant she was furious. Had she already discovered the switch? Or maybe that would come in the car. Leisha wouldn’t take it well. Nothing frustrated her more than being lied to, maybe because she was so truthful herself. I was glad I wasn’t there.

Spiky red shapes, taut with anxiety, sped around the purple latticework that never went away.

Sara/Miri closed the car door. The windows, of course, were opaqued. I turned off the newsgrid. It might be months before I saw Miri again. She could slip in and out of East Oleanta — she had, in fact, come to Washington from there — but Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer in his state-of-the-art powerchair, followed everywhere by the GSEA, could not. And even if I went to Huevos Verdes, Nikos Demetrios or Toshio Ohmura or Terry Mwakambe might decide a shielded link with East Oleanta was too great a risk for just personal communication. I might not even talk with Miri for months.

The spiky red shapes eased a little.

I poured myself another scotch. That slowed down the anxiety-shapes sometimes. But I tried to be careful with the stuff. I did try. I could remember my old man, in the stinking Delta town where I grew up:

Don’t you lip me, boy! You ain’t nothing, you, but a shit-bottomed baby!