“It does for some things. Think about it. If everything’s fabbed and nothing’s really grown anymore, there goes mutation. Life gets boring—it’s all about
Clair still didn’t understand.
“You’re not getting dressed,” he said.
She didn’t want to drop the towels while someone was watching her. She felt vulnerable enough already.
“Why don’t you go on ahead of me? I’ll catch up.”
“Can’t do that, I’m afraid. No wandering around the Farmhouse on your own just yet.”
She stared at him. “You’re guarding me?”
“Let’s just say I don’t want you to see anything you shouldn’t.”
Then it occurred to her. There was one class of organic compounds that could be grown but couldn’t legally be transported through d-mat.
The farmers were making drugs—new drugs that no one had ever heard of before, like the one Libby had taken to deal with her Improvement headache. That was why Arcady didn’t want people dropping in on them unexpectedly and why the Air was comprehensively blocked.
“Those apples I saw are for more than just eating, aren’t they? They’re for getting high.”
Arcady winked and turned his broad back on her.
Clair dressed in the uniform of a farmer, deciding as she did so that she could trust the farmers no more or less than Turner did. Terrorists and drug runners. Honor among illegals. But at least their defenses were good— too good even for Q, it seemed. Like everything in recent days, she had to accept the good along with the bad.
She figured she could live with that just as long as the bad wasn’t
51
THE HALL WAS full of people when she returned and even noisier than before. Turner was there too, and Gemma and Ray. No others.
“Is that all?” Clair remembered the people she had addressed on the Skylifter. It was horrible to think they were now all gone.
Arcady handed her a pewter mug filled to the brim with a foaming golden liquid.
“Devil’s Lake is the finest cider we’ve ever made,” he said, raising the mug he held in his other hand. “Here’s to fallen friends.”
Clair felt as though she’d slipped into in a depressing dream about agricultural Vikings, but she clinked mugs with him and took a sip of the cider. It was sweet and warming, like a memory of fireworks. She took a larger gulp and closed her eyes.
“To life,” Arcady added, “and the hard business of living it.”
She opened her eyes, nodded hopelessly . . . and there was Jesse, approaching from the fringes of the crowd, looking disoriented by the noise and the people but otherwise uninjured. The relief she felt was almost as potent as the cider.
He hugged her with shining eyes, and she hugged him back. Even through the grime and blood came a smell that she recognized, musky and natural and all him. She didn’t know when his scent had become so familiar to her, but she was glad to have it in her nostrils again.
“Hey,” he said into the top of her head. “It’s good to see you too.”
“I was worried,” she admitted. “Are you all right?”
“I banged my head when we came down. Luckily, I’ve got a thick skull. You?”
“Hungry,” she said, painfully aware of the fact now that she knew he was okay. “Go take a shower, then try some of the local cider. It’s to die for.”
He grinned and hurried off with his farmer guide. Clair watched him go, more glad to see him than she could say—and Turner and Ray and Gemma, too, even if they were terrorists and outlaws.
“Are you two . . . ?” Arcady was watching her over the lip of his mug.
“What? Hardly,” she said, remembering Jesse telling the dupe that she would never be his girlfriend.
“Good. Lots of nice farm lads here. And farm girls.”
He winked, and she felt herself blush right up into the roots of her curly hair.
Dinner consisted of something that looked like a big sheep roasted on a spit. The members of WHOLE stuck to baked vegetables, cheese, and salad. Clair did the same, wary of meat that had been recently alive, not fabbed like food was in the normal world.
The cider served with the meal was smokier than the first brew, with a different name: Sweet Briar Lake. Arcady told her that it was made from pears rather than apples. Someone played an old upright piano, and Arcady sang “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” at the top of his lungs:
Clair was reminded of Q’s misquotes of old poems and the conversation they had had in the Skylifter before the meeting with Turner. Clair had barely thought of it since, caught up in events as she had been. But she hadn’t forgotten it.
On a drug farm in the middle of nowhere, fuzzy-headed from exhaustion and homemade cider, what had seemed mad hours ago began to make a kind of sense.
Jesse joined her, looking fresh and clean in his own set of sturdy overalls, still wearing his old burned orange T-shirt underneath. Gemma was standing to one side, looking cynical and wary, drinking water, not cider. Her bandage had been changed and the burns to her skin thoroughly salved. She had lost her painkiller patch. Clair waved for her to come over and join them. It was time for more of the answers Clair had hoped to get in the Skylifter.
“What’s the relationship between Improvement and the dupes?” Clair asked.
“The latter protect the former,” said Gemma. “You know how it works. Do anything to suggest Improvement is anything other than a harmless meme, and they’ll come after you.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, duping takes someone out of their body and puts someone else in. You can’t do that without altering the brain, which is exactly what we’ve seen in autopsies of people who have used Improvement. Remember those dead girls?”
“Brain damage,” said Clair. “Are you saying the damage wasn’t random?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Improvement does the same thing as duping . . . only differently. Dupes rarely last longer than a day or two, for instance, while Improvement takes a week. We think that neither duping nor Improvement is permanent, but maybe that’s because we only see the times when it goes wrong. I told you earlier that not everyone who uses Improvement is affected, and that’s true. What if there are people out there right now who are in fact different on the inside, successfully transformed, but we wouldn’t know unless they said so? And why would they?”
They were coming back around to Turner’s paranoid conspiracy theory, in which world leaders were puppets controlled by VIA dupes. Clair cut Gemma off before she could get there.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this back at Escalon?”
“You wouldn’t have believed me.”
That was true enough. Clair still didn’t entirely believe it now.
“So Libby’s not herself anymore? That’s what you think?”
“It’s not like duping; it doesn’t happen right away. But she’s got the symptoms, which means the process is under way. If she’s not already someone else by now, she will be soon.”
