The warm wind whispered seductively through the sweet-scented wheat.

I sat on the ground, cross-legged, my back to the energy fence. Around me adults settled into games of cards or dice. Children raced around, screaming. A young couple brushed past me and disappeared into the wheat, sex in their eyes. The older woman sat by herself reading a book, an actual book. I couldn’t imagine where she’d gotten it. And the big-headed Sleepless, if that’s what he/she was, stretched out on the ground, closed his eyes, and pretended to sleep. I grimaced. I’ve never liked self-serving irony. Not in other people.

After two hours, the server ’bots again brought out food and drinks. “Compliments of State Senator Cecilia Elizabeth Dawes.

So nice to have you aboard.” How much soysynth did a Liver gravrail carry? I had no idea.

The sun threw long shadows. I sauntered to the woman reading. “Good book?”

She looked up at me, measuring. If Colin had sent me to the Science Court in Washington, he probably had sent some legitimate agents as well. And if Big Head was a Sleepless, he might have his own personal tail. However, something in the reading woman’s face convinced me it wasn’t her. She wasn’t genemod, but it wasn’t that. You can find donkey families who refuse even permitted genemods, and then go on existing very solidly corporate but on the fringe socially. She wasn’t that, either. She was something else.

“It’s a novel,” the woman said neutrally. “Jane Austen. Are you surprised there are still Livers who can read? Or want to?”

“Yes.” I smiled conspiratorally, but she only gave me a level stare and went back to her book. A renegade donkey didn’t arouse her contempt, or indignation, or fawning. I genuinely didn’t interest her. I felt unwitting respect.

Apparently I didn’t know as much about the variety of Livers as I’d thought.

The sunset ravished me. The sky turned lucid and vulnerable, then streaked with subtle colors. The colors grew aggressive, followed by wan and valedictory pastels. Then it grew cold and dark. An entire love affair, empyrean, in thirty minutes. Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David.

No repair technician appeared. The prairie cooled rapidly; we all climbed back onto the train, which turned on its lights and heat. I wondered what would have happened if those systems — or the server ’bots — had failed as well.

Someone said, not loudly and to no one in particular, “My meal chip, it came late from the capital last quarter.”

Pause. I sat up straighter; this was a new tone. Not complaint. Something else.

“My town got no more jacks. The warehouse donkey says, him, that there’s a national shortage.”

Pause.

“We’re going, us, on this train to get my old mother from Missouri. Heat blower in her building broke and nobody else took her in. She got no heat, her.”

Pause.

Someone said, “Does anybody know, them, how far it is to the next town? Maybe we could walk, us.”

“We ain’t supposed to walk, us! They supposed to fix our fucking train!” Mommy Liver, exploding in rage and saliva.

The quiet tone was over. “That’s right! We’re voters, us!”

“My kids can’t walk to no next town—”

“What are you, a fucking donkey?”

I saw the big-headed man gazing from face to face.

The holo of the tall swarthy engineer appeared suddenly inside the car, standing in the center aisle. “Ladies and Gentlemen, Morrison Gravrail apologizes once more for the delay in service. To make your wait more enjoyable, we are privileged to present a new entertainment production, one not yet released to the holo-grids, compliments of Congressman Wade Keith Finley. Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer, in his brand-new concert ‘The Warrior.’ Please watch from the windows on the left side of the gravrail.”

Livers looked at one another; instantly happy babble replaced rage. Evidently this was something new in breakdown diversions. I calculated the cost of a portable holoprojector capable of holos big enough to be seen from windows the length of a train, plus the cost of an unreleased vid from the country’s hottest Liver entertainer. I compared the total to the cost of a competent repair team. Something was very wrong here. I knew nothing about Hollywood, but an unreleased concert from Drew Arlen must be worth millions. Why was a gravrail carrying it around as emergency diversion to keep the natives from getting too restless?

The big-headed man quietly watched his fellow travelers press their faces to the left windows.

A long rod snaked from the roof of the car behind ours, which sat in the center of the train. The rod rose at an obtuse angle to the ground and extended almost to the wheat field. Light fanned from the end of the rod downward, forming a pyramid. Everyone went “Ooooohhhhh!” Portable projectors never deliver the clarity of a good stationary unit, but I didn’t think this audience would care. The holo of Drew Arlen appeared in the center of the pyramid, and everyone went “Oooooohhhhhh” again.

I slipped out of the train.

In the dark and up close, the holo looked even stranger: a fifteen-foot-high, fuzzy-edged man sitting in a powerchair, backed by miles of unlit prairie. Above, cold stars glittered, immensely high. I unfolded a plasticloth jacket from the pocket of my jacks.

The holo said, “I’m Drew Arlen. The Lucid Dreamer. Let your dreams be true.”

I’d seen Arlen perform live once, in San Francisco, when I’d been slumming with friends. I was the only person in the Congressman Paul Jennings Messura Concert Hall not affected. Natural hypnotic resistance, my doctor said. Your brain just doesn’t possess the necessary fine-tuned biochemistry. Do you dream at night?

I have never been able to recall a single one of my dreams.

The pyramidal light around Arlen changed somehow, flickered oddly. Subliminal patterns. The patterns coalesced slowly into intricate shapes and Arlen’s voice, low and intimate, began a story.

“Once there was a man of great hopes and no power. When he was young, he wanted everything. He wanted strength, him, that would make all other men respect him. He wanted sex, him, that would make his bones melt with satisfaction. He wanted love. He wanted excitement. He wanted, him, for every day to be filled with challenges only he could meet. He wanted—”

Oh, please. Talk about crudely tapping into basic desires. And even some donkeys called this stomp an artist.

The shapes were compelling, though. They slid past Arlen’s powerchair, folding and unfolding, some seemingly clear and some flickering at the very edge of conscious perception. I felt my blood flow more strongly in my veins, that sudden surge of life you sometimes get with spring, or sex, or challenge. I was not immune to subliminals. These must have been wicked.

I peered into the gravrail car. Livers stood motionless with their faces pressed to the glass. Desdemona watched with her mouth open, a small pink pocket. Even Mommy Liver’s face hinted at the young girl she must have been on some forgotten Liver summer night decades ago.

I turned back to Arlen, still spinning his simple story. His voice was musical. The story was a sort of pseudo-folk tale without subtlety, without resonance, without detail, without irony, without art. The words were merely the bare bones over which the graphics shimmered, calling forth the real meaning from the watchers’ hypnotized minds. I’d been told that each person experienced a Drew Arlen concert differently, depending on the symbols freed and brought forward from whatever powerful childhood experiences stocked each mind. I’d been told that, but I hadn’t believed it.

I walked along the outside of the train, in the dark, scanning the Liver faces behind the windows. Some were wet with tears. Whatever they were experiencing, it looked more intense than anything I had felt in the Sistine chapel, at Lewis Darrell’s King Lear, during the San Francisco Philharmonic’s Beethoven festival. It looked more intense than sunshine, or even nervewash. As intense as orgasm.