But sometime near dawn, five or six in the morning, I woke abruptly from a blotchy sleep. Billy’s voice filled my mind: and now it’s gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I ain’t never going to go down that mountain trail, me, and splash across that creek, me, and see that door in the hill open and go inside with her…

I crept out of my room in the hastily repaired hotel. A new terminal sat on the counter, but that was far too risky. I went down to the cafe. People were there, queuing at the foodbelt, a donkey newsgrid playing animatedly on the holoterminal. Liver channels almost never ran news. If East Oleanta wanted to see itself on a grid, it would have to be a donkey grid.

I crouched in a corner, unobtrusively, and watched. Eventually the explosion came on, the sensational tracking of the duragem dissembler source that had so plagued the country, close-ups of Charlotte Prescott and of Kenneth Emile Koehler, GSEA director, in Washington. Then the explosion again. I wanted to freeze-frame the HT, but didn’t dare. Instead, I listened carefully.

A gravrail left at 7 A.M. By eight I was in Albany. There was a public library terminal at the station, for the use of Livers who were fuzzy about their destinations and wanted to look up such vital information about them as the average mean rainfall, location of public scooter tracks, or longitude and lattitude. A sign said THE ANNA NAOMI COLDWELL PUBLIC LIBRARY. Cobwebs draped the sign. Few Livers were fuzzy about their destinations, or at least about what they wanted to know about them.

I slipped in one of the credit chips the GSEA didn’t know I had. Maybe didn’t know. The terminal said, “Working. What town, city, county, or state are you interested in?”

“Collins County, New York.” My voice was slightly unsteady.

“Go ahead with your request, please.”

“Display a map of the whole county, with natural features and political units.”

When the map appeared, I asked to have sections of it enlarged, then enlarged again. The hypertext gave it to me. The map displayed lattitude and longitude.

The explosion destroying the illegal lab had not been at the base of a hill, nor anywhere near a creek.

. . . and now it’s gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I ain’t never going to go down that mountain trail, me, and splash across that creek, me, and see that door in the hill open, and go inside with her…

I believed that the GSEA had destroyed an illegal genemod lab. I believed that it was the lab that had released the duragem dissemblers. But whatever, and whosever, that lab was, it wasn’t Billy Washington’s Eden. Not the Eden at the base of a mountain and beside a creek, the Eden that had permitted Billy to see its door opening, the Eden of the big-headed savior of old men who collapse in the woods. That Eden was still there.

Which meant that whoever had released the duragem dissembler, it hadn’t been Huevos Verdes.

So who had? And was Huevos Verdes with them or against them?

On the one hand, the duragem destruction had started in East Oleanta, right around the corner from Eden. Coincidence? I doubted it. And yet Miranda Sharifi had done nothing to stop the dissembler release.

On the other hand, if the Supers were interested in destruction, why had one of them allowed Billy Washington to see the entrance to their Adirondack outpost, and to walk away with that knowledge? Why hadn’t they killed him? And why had Miranda Sharifi tried to gain legal clearance for the Cell Cleaner, a clear boon to us ordinary mortals? The Sleepless already had that biological protection, and they sure the hell didn’t need the money.

And what about the fact — Billy was right about this — that if some illegal lab did come up with something even worse than a duragem dissembler — a retrovirus that made us all zombies, say — only Huevos Verdes had the brainpower to design a counter-microorganism fast enough to prevent a whole country of ambulatory idiots.

But would they?

Was Huevos Verdes my country’s enemy, or its covert friend?

These weren’t the sort of questions a field agent was supposed to ask. A field agent was supposed to do what she was told and report any significant new developments up the chain of command. A field agent in my position should immediately call the GSEA. Again.

But if I did that, the questions would never get answered. Because Colin Kowalski already thought he knew the answer: Bomb anything too unfamiliar.

I must have stood, motionless, for fifteen minutes in front of the Anna Naomi Coldwell Public Library. Livers rushed by, hurrying to make their trains. A cleaning ’bot ambled along, scrubbing the floor. A sunshine dealer glanced at me, then away. A tech, genemod handsome, spoke into his terminal as he strode the platform.

I have never felt so alone.

I got back on the gravrail and returned to East Oleanta.

IV

OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2114

Thirteen

I was underground with the Francis Marion Freedom Outpost for two months, throughout September and October. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to hide for days, weeks, months, from the GSEA. The Outpost was a bunch of nuts; what possible chance could they have of evading the government after killing three GSEA agents, murdering Leisha Camden, and blow-ing up an agency rescue plane? None. Nada. It wasn’t possible. That’s what I would have believed.

Nor did I believe it was possible to hide from Huevos Verdes. Daily, hourly, I expected them to come for me.

The shapes in my head were thin and fragile, like nervous membranes. Vulnerable. Uncertain. These shapes swam around the immobile green lattice like spooked fish. Sometimes they had faces, or the sketches effaces, on the uncertain shapes. Sometimes the faces were mine.

At 5:00 A.M. of my second day underground an alarm had sounded. My heart had leapt: their defenses were breached. But it was reveille.

Peg slouched in, sullen. She wheeled me to a common bath, dumped me in, pulled me out. I didn’t reveal that I could easily have done this for myself. She wheeled me to commons, jammed with people hastily eating, so many people that some gulped their food standing up. Then she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and thrust it at me angrily.

“Here. Yours.”

It was a printout of a schedule, headed ARLEN, DREW, TEMPORARY ASSIGNMENT COMPANY 5. “I’m assigned to Company 5. Is that your group, Peg?”

She snorted in derision and wheeled me around so hard I nearly tumbled out of the chair.

Company 5 assembled in a huge barren underground room: a parade ground. I didn’t see Joncey, Abigail, or anyone else I recognized. For two hours twenty people did calisthenics. I did intentionally feeble imitations in my chair. Peg grunted and sweated.

Next came two hours of holo instruction on weapons — pro-pellant, laser, biological, grav — I was amazed Hubbley let me see this, and then I wasn’t. He didn’t expect me to ever have the chance to tell anyone.

As the holo explained weapon charging, care, and use, the twenty members of Company 5 practiced with the real thing. I was ten feet away from wresting a gun from Peg and shooting her dead. She didn’t seem bothered by this, although I saw a few others glance at me, hard-eyed. Probably Peg didn’t object because these were Hubbley’s orders. Perhaps this was the way that Francis Marion had converted his prisoners of war.

Lunch, then more physical training, then a holo on living off the land. Incredibly, it came from the Government Document Office. I fell asleep.