After they brought Billy back to Annie Francy’s, his poor heart laboring like an antique factory and his hands shaking so much he couldn’t even turn off the personal shield, I realized what an ass I’d been not to call the GSEA earlier.

But it wasn’t Billy who made me realize this. It was — again, always — Lizzie.

I knew that Billy wasn’t badly hurt, and I suppose I should have been more concerned about the other Livers, especially the three dead. But the fact was, I wasn’t. I had changed my mind about Livers since I came to East Oleanta, and Jack Sawicki in particular seemed a good man, but there it was. I just didn’t really care that Liver stomps had turned on other Liver non-stomps and destroyed them. We donkeys had never expected anything else. The Livers were always a potentially dangerous force, kept at bay only by sufficient bread and circuses, and now the bread was running short and the big tops folded. Bastille time.

But I cared — against all odds — about Lizzie. Who was going hungry. If I called the GSEA, they would come storming in and East Oleanta would no longer be the Forgotten Country. With them would come food, medicine, transport, all the things Livers had come to expect from the labor of others. Which meant Lizzie and Annie would get fed.

On the other hand, Congresswoman Janet Carol Land might resume her planeloads of food any minute. Or the gravrail might be fixed again. That had happened many times already. And if it did, I would lose my chance to cover myself with glory by handing over Miranda Sharifi, lock, stock and illegal organic nanotech, to the GSEA. Also, the moment I called the GSEA, Eden might very well pick up my signal, in which case Ms. Sharifi might have been moved out before the GSEA even got here.

While I wrestled with this three-horned dilemma of altruism, vanity, and practicality, Lizzie blew the whole argument to terrifying smithereens.

“Vicki, look at this.”

“What is it?”

“Just look.”

We sat on the plastisynth sofa in Annie’s apartment. In the bedroom Annie moved around, tending Billy. The medunit had treated his cuts, bruises, and heart rate, and he should probably have been sleeping, which he probably couldn’t do with Annie fussing around him. I doubt he minded. The bedroom door was closed. Lizzie held her terminal, frowning at the screen. Billy’s pathetic squashed sandwiches had temporarily returned the color to her thin cheeks. On the screen was a multicolor holo.

“Very pretty. What is it?”

“A Lederer probability pattern.”

Well, of course it was. It’s been a while since my school days. To save face, I said authoritatively, “Some variable has a seventy-eight percent chance of significantly preceding some other variable in chronological time.”

“Yes,” Lizzie said, almost inaudibly.

“So what are the variables?”

Instead of answering, Lizzie said, “You remember that apple peeler ’bot I used to play with, when I was a kid?”

Two months ago. But compared to the intellectual leaps she’d made since, last summer probably did feel like lost childhood to her.

“I remember,” I said, careful not to smile.

“It first broke in June. I remember because the apples then were Kia Beauties.”

Genemod apples ripened on a staggered schedule, to create seasonal variety. “So?” I said.

“And the gravrail broke down before that. In April, I think. And a couple of toilets before that.”

I didn’t get it. “And so … ?”

Lizzie wrinkled her small face. “But the first things to break down in East Oleanta were way back over a year ago. In the spring of 2113.”

And I got it. My throat went dry. “In spring, 2113? Lots of things breaking, Lizzie, or just a few? Such as might happen from normal wear combined with reduced maintenance?”

“Lots of things. Too many things.”

“Lizzie,” I said slowly, “are those two variables in your Lederer pattern the East Oleanta breakdowns, as you personally remember them, and the newsgrid mentions from the crystal library of any similar breakdown patterns elsewhere?”

“Yes. They are, them. I wanted, me…” She broke off, aware of how her language had reverted. She went on staring at the screen. She knew what she was looking at. “It started here, Vicki, didn’t it? That duragem dissembler got released here first. Because it got made at Eden. We were a test place. And that means that whoever runs Eden…” Again she trailed off.

Huevos Verdes ran Eden. Miranda Sharifi ran Eden. And so my decision was made for me, as simply as that. The duragem dissembler could not be part of any save-Diana-through-a-personal-success-^w^//3/ strategy. It was too concretely, urgently, majorly malevolent. I had no right to sit around playing semi-amateur agent when I suspected that somewhere in these very same mountains that were torturing us with winter was a Huevos Verdes franchise, dispensing molecular destruction. Every decent feeling required that I tell my disdainful bosses, despite their disdain, what I knew.

Everybody has her own definition of decency.

“Vicki,” Lizzie whispered, “what are we going to do, us?”

“We’re going to give up,” I said.

I made the call from a secluded place down by the river, away from Annie’s suspicious eyes. I had forbidden Lizzie to follow me, but of course she did anyway. The air was cold but the sun shone. I wriggled my butt into a depression in the snow on the riverbank and cut the transmitter from my leg.

It was an implant, of course: that was the only way to be positive it couldn’t be stolen from me, except by people who knew what they were doing. After the GSEA had it installed, I’d gone to some people I knew and had detached and taken out the automatic homing-signal part of it, which of course was there. You needed professionals for that. You didn’t need professionals to remove the transmitter itself for use. That could be done with a little knowledge, a local anesthetic, and a keen-edged knife, and in a pinch you could do without either the anesthetic or the keen edge.

I didn’t have to. I slid the implant from under the skin of my thigh, sealed the small incision, and wiped the blood off the transmitter wrapping. I unsealed it. Lizzie’s black eyes were enormous in her thin face.

I said, “I told you not to come. Are you going to faint now?”

“Blood don’t make me faint!”

“Good.” The transmitter was a flat black wafer on my palm. Lizzie regarded it with interest.

“That uses Malkovitch wave transformers, doesn’t it?” And then, in a different voice, “You’re going to call the government to come help us.”

“Yes.”

“You could have called before. Any time.”

“Yes.”

The black eyes stayed steady. “Then why didn’t you?”

“The situation wasn’t desperate enough.”

Lizzie considered this. But she was a child, still, under the frightening intelligence and the borrowed language and the pseudo-technical sophistication I had taught her. And she had been through a terrifying two weeks. Abruptly she pounded on my knees, soft ineffectual blows from cold mittened hands. “You could of got us help before! And Billy wouldn’t of got hurt and Mr. Sawicki wouldn’t of died and I wouldn’t of had to be so very very very hungry! You could of! You could of!”

I activated the transmitter by touch code and said clearly, “Special Agent Diana Covington, 6084 slash A, to Colin Kowalski, 83 slash H. Emergency One priority: sixteen forty-two. Repeat, sixteen forty-two. Send large task force.”

“I’m so hungry,” Lizzie sobbed against my knees.

I put the transmitter in my pocket and pulled her onto my lap. She buried her head in my neck; her nose felt cold. I looked at the river choked with ice, at the blood from the wrapper on the dirty snow, at the uncharacteristically blue sky. It would take the GSEA maybe a few hours to arrive from New York. But the SuperSleepless, at their hidden Eden, were already here. And of course there was no way they would not have picked up my message. They picked up everything. Or so I had been told.