They don’t understand. None of them. Livers are still Livers, despite the staggering everything that’s happened, and there’s a limit to what you can expect.

I walked toward West Virginia wearing my new legal name and my rapidly decaying dress, full of health and doom. Where was Heuvos Verdes in all this? Miranda Sharifi had been tried under the most spectacular security known to man, and the press from thirty-four countries had waited breathlessly for the Lance-lotian high-tech rescue, the snatching from the legal fire, that had never materialized. Miranda herself had said not one word throughout the trial. Not one, not even on the stand, under oath. She had, of course, been found in contempt, and the crowds of Livers outside — syringed, all — had raised enough un-Liver-like howls to compensate for the silence of ten sacrificial lambs. But not for Huevos Verdes’s silence. No rescue. No defense, to speak of. Nada, unless you count syringes raining from the sky, pushing up from the earth, appearing like alchemy out of the very stones and fields and pavements of the country the Supers were utterly, silently, invisibly transforming.

Drew Arlen had testified. He’d described the illegal Huevos Verdes genemod experiments in East Oleanta, in Colorado, in Florida. The last two labs were apparently only backup locations to East Oleanta and Huevos Verdes, but Jesus Christ, there were only twenty-seven Supers. How in hell had they staffed four locations?

They weren’t like us.

That became clearer and clearer, as the trial progressed. It became clear, too, that Arlen was like us: stumbling around in the same swamp of good intentions, moral uncertainties, limited understanding, personal passions, and government restrictions about what he could or could not say on the stand.

“That information is classified,” became his monotonous response to Miranda Sharifi’s defense attorney, who was surely the most frustrated man on the planet. Arlen sat in his powerchair, his aging Liver face expressionless. “Where were you, Mr. Arlen, between August 28 and November 3?”

“That information is classified.”

“With whom did you discuss the alleged activities of Ms. Sharifi in Upstate New York?”

“That information is classified.”

“Please describe the events that led to your decision to notify the GSEA about Huevos Verdes.”

“That information is classified.”

Just like wartime.

But not my war. I had been declared a noncombatant, removed lock and stock and retina print from any but the most public databases, in perpetuity. Three times over the last year I had been picked up, transported to Albany, and knocked out, while bio-monitors gave up their secrets to scientists who, most probably, had by now syringed themselves with the same thing. The results of the biomonitoring were not shared with me. I was a government outcast.

So why did I even care that the United States, qua United States, was on the verge of nonexistence, the first nationalistic snuff job brought about by making government itself obsolete? Why should / care?

I don’t know. But I did. Call me a fool. Call me a romantic. Call me stubborn. Call me a deliberate, self-created anachronism.

Call me a patriot.

“Billy,” I said as we trudged along the endless gravrail track in the high rolling hills of Pennsylvania, “are you still an American?”

He gave me a Billy-look, which is to say intelligent without the remotest glimmer of vocabular understanding. “Me? Yes.”

“Will you be an American if you are killed by some fanatic last-ditch legalistic donkey defense at Oak Mountain?”

He took a minute to sort this out. “Yes.”

“Will you still be an American if you’re killed by some attack by a purist Liver-government underground that thinks you’ve sold out to the genetic enemy?”

“I ain’t going, me, to be killed by no other Livers.”

“But if you were, would you die an American?” He was losing patience. His old eyes with the young energy roamed over our fellow walkers, looking for Annie. “Yes.”

“Would you still be an American if there is no America, no central government left and nobody to administer it if there were, the Constitution forgotten, the donkeys wiped out by some fanatic revolutionary underground, and Miranda Sharifi rotting in a prison run exclusively by ’bots?”

“Vicki, you think too much, you,” Billy said. He turned his concern on me, that agape concern off which I’d been living, out of caste, for so long. It didn’t help. “Think about whether we’re going to stay alive, us — that makes sense. But you can’t take on the whole damn country, you.”

“The human mind, Charles Lamb once remarked, can fall in love with anything. Call me a patriot, Billy. Don’t you still believe in patriotism, Billy?”

“Besides, I once saw a genemod dog fall to its death off a balcony.” But Billy suddenly spotted Annie. He smiled at me and moved off to walk by his beloved, whose dress, despite her best efforts, was being consumed by her big-breasted body. She looked like a pastoral goddess, utterly unaware that the industrial revolution has begun and the looms are clacking like gunfire.

We reached Oak Mountain July 14, which only I found funny, or even notable. There were already ten thousand people there, by generous estimate. They ringed the flat land around the prison and spread up the sides of the surrounding mountains. Brush had been cleared for feeding for miles around, although the trees remained for shade. No one was on solid food; there was little shit. Tents in the wild colors of Before jacks dotted the grounds: turquoise, marigold, crimson, kelly green. At night, there were the usual campfires or Y-energy cones.

World War I lost more soldiers to disease, the result of being messed together in unsanitary conditions, than to guns. At the siege of Dunmar, they had eaten the rats, and then each other. During the Brazilian Action, the damage to the rain forest was greater than the damage to the combatants as high tech destroyed everything it touched. Never again, none of it.

Did history still apply? Human history?

Billy was right. I thought too much. Concentrate on staying alive.

“Put more dirt on your face,” Lizzie said, peering at me critically. This seemed superfluous; everyone was constantly covered in dirt, which had become acceptable. Dirt was clean. Dirt was mother’s milk. I suspected that Miranda and Company had altered our olfactory sense with her magic brew. People did not seem to smell bad to each other.

“Put more leaves in your hair,” Lizzie said, tipping her head critically to study me. Her pretty face was creased with worry. “There are some weird people here, Vicki. They don’t understand that donkeys can be human, too.”

Can be. On sufferance. If we join the Livers and give up the institutions by which we controlled the world.

Lizzie’s lip quivered. “If anything happened to you…”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I said, not believing it for half a minute. Too much already had. But I hugged her, this daughter slipping rapidly away from both Annie and me, who nonetheless fought over her just as if she weren’t already a different species. Lizzie was almost completely naked now, her “dress” reduced to a few courtesy rags. Unself-consciously naked. There were thirteen-year-olds in this camp who were just as unselfconsciously pregnant. No problem. Their bodies would take care of it. They anticipated no danger in childbirth, had no fears about supporting a baby, counted on plenty of people around all the time to help care for these casual offspring. It was no big deal. The pregnant children were serene.

“Just be careful,” Lizzie said.