“It’s coming apart, Billy. This time, it really is.”

“What?” I said. I thought, me, she meant her dress. I really did. Old fool.

“The country. The classes, For good this time. The gap between donkeys and Livers was always held together with baling wire and chewing gum, and now the last semblance is going.”

I motioned Annie on, me, with a wave of my hand. She marched off, her, probably to find Lizzie. I sat down on a log and after a minute Vicki sat down too. She can’t help, her, being upset about the country. She’s a donkey. In East Oleanta that don’t matter, everybody left is used to her, but we still get news channels in the cafe. A few, anyway. Donkeys are having a hard time, them. It’s like when Livers found out we don’t need donkeys anymore, we got mad, us, that we’d ever needed them. Only that ain’t all of it. There’s been a lot of killing, and most donkeys are holed up, them, in their city enclaves. Some ain’t come out in damn near half a year.

I looked, me, for something to make Vicki feel better. “There ain’t no police no more. To punish people who break the law, them, by attacking other people. If we got security ’bots back—”

“Oh, Billy, it’s broader than that. There isn’t any law anymore. There’s just the town councils. And where people don’t feel like obeying those, there’s anarchy.”

“I ain’t seen, me, nobody get hurt here.”

“Not in East Oleanta, no. In East Oleanta the Huevos Verdes plan worked. People made the transition to small, local, cooper-ative government. To tell you the truth, I give Jack Sawicki, poor dead bastard, credit for that. He had everybody primed for self-responsibility. And other places have worked just as well. But they’ve killed off donkeys in Albany, they killed off each other in Carter’s Falls, they’ve had a rape fest and general lawless might-makes-right in Binghamton, and in other places they’ve had a witch hunt for “subhuman genemods” worse than any the GSEA ever mounted. And where is the GSEA? Where is the FBI? Where is the Urban Housing Authority and the FCC and the Department of Health? The entire network of government has just vanished, while Washington walls itself off, issuing decrees to which the rest of the country pays not the slightest attention!”

“We don’t need to, us.”

“Precisely. As an entity, the United States no longer exists. It fragmented into classes with no common aims at all. Karl Marx was right.”

“Who?” I didn’t know, me, nobody with that name. “Never mind.”

“Vicki—” I had to hunt, me, for my words. “Can’t you… care less, you? Ain’t this enough? For the first time, we’re free, us. Like Miranda said, her, on her HT broadcast, we’re really free.”

She looked at me. I ain’t never seen, me, before or since, such a bleak look. “Free to do what, Billy?”

“Well. . . live.”

“Look at this.” She held out a piece of metal, her. It was twisted and melted.

“So? Duragem. The dissembler got it. But the dissemblers are clocked out, them. And the kids are figuring out all new ways to build stuff without no metals that—”

“This wasn’t duragem. And it wasn’t attacked by a genemod organism. It was melted by a U-614.”

“What’s that?”

“A weapon. A very devastating, powerful, government weapon. That was only supposed to be released in case of foreign attack. I found this last week near Coganville. It had been used to blast an isolated summer cottage where, I suspect, there’d been some donkeys hiding months ago. Not even the bodies are there now. Not even the building is there.”

I looked at her, me. I didn’t know she’d walked, her, to Coganville last week.

“Don’t you get it, Billy? What Drew Arlen hinted at during Miranda Sharifi’s trial is true. He didn’t say it outright, and I’ll bet that’s because somebody decided it was prejudicial to national security. ‘National security’! For that you need a real nation!”

I still didn’t get it, me. Vicki looked at me, and she put her hand, her, on my arm.

“Billy, somebody’s arming Livers with secret government weapons. Somebody’s engineering civil war. Do you really think all this violence isn’t being deliberately nursed? It’s probably the same bastards who released the duragem dissembler in the first place, still out there, trying to get all the donkeys wiped out. And maybe all the Sleepless, too, that aren’t holed up in Sanctuary. Somebody wants this country to continue coming apart, and they’ve got enough underground government support to do it. Civil war, Billy. This last nine months of bioengineered pastoral idyll is only a hiatus. And we people — struggling to create weaving ’bots and rejoicing in our liberation from all the old biological imperatives — are not going to stand a chance. Not without a strong government participation on our side, and I don’t see that happening.”

“But, Vicki—”

“Oh, why am I talking to you? You don’t understand the first thing I’m talking about!”

She got up, her, and walked away.

She was half right. I didn’t understand, me, all of it, but I understood some. I thought of Annie not wanting, her, to leave East Oleanta, not even to get Miranda Sharifi free. We got it good here, Billy. There ain’t nothing to be afraid of here…

Vicki came back. “I’m sorry, Billy. I shouldn’t take it out on you. It’s just. . .”

“What?” I said, me, as gentle as I could.

“It’s just that I’m afraid. For Lizzie. For all of us.”

“I know.” I did know, me. That much I knew.

“Do you remember what you said, Billy, that day that Miranda injected us with the syringes, and she and Drew Arlen were arguing about who should control technology?”

I don’t remember that day, me, real clear. It was the most important day in my entire life, the day that gave me Annie and Lizzie and my body back, but I don’t remember it real clear. My chest hurt, and Lizzie was sick, and too much was happening. But I remember, me, Drew Aden’s hard face, may he rot in Annie’s hell. He testified against her at her trial, and sent his own woman to jail. And I remember the tears in Miranda’s eyes. Who should control technology…

“You said it only matters who can. Out of the mouths of the untutored, Billy. And you know what? We can’t. Not the syringed Livers or the syringed donkeys in their shielded enclaves. And without some pretty sophisticated technology of our own, any really determined technological attack by the government or by this demented purist underground could wipe us out. And will.”

I didn’t know, me, what to say. Part of me wanted to hole up with Annie and Lizzie — and Vicki, too — forever in East Oleanta. But I couldn’t, me. We had to get Miranda Sharifi free, us. I didn’t know how, me, but we had to. She set us free, her.

“Maybe,” I said, slow, “there ain’t no underground stirring up fighting. Maybe this is just a … a getting-used-to period, and after a while Livers and donkeys will go back, them, to helping each other live.”

Vicki laughed, her. It was an ugly sound. “May God bless the beasts and children,” she said, which didn’t make no sense. We weren’t neither.

“Oh, yes, we are,” Vicki said. “Both.”

The next week we left, us, to walk to Oak Mountain Maximum Security Federal Prison in West Virginia.

We weren’t the only ones, us. It wasn’t the East Oleanta Council’s original idea. They got it, them, off a man walking south in one of the slow steady lines of people moving along the old gravrail tracks. Feeding in the afternoons in pastures and fields. Leaving the grass torn up to lie in the sweet summer mud. Deciding together where the latrines should be. Making chains of daisies to wear around their necks, until the daisies get slowly fed on and disappear, the same as cloth does from the weaving ’bot. Vicki says, her, that eventually we’ll all just go naked all the time. I say, me, not while Annie Francy’s got breath in her beautiful body.