“Annie doesn’t want me here.”

“Well,” I said, “we don’t get many donkeys, us.”

“No, I imagine not.”

We stood in silence. I didn’t have nothing to say to her, or her to me. Except one thing. “Dr. Turner—”

“Call me Vicki.”

I knew, me, that I wasn’t going to do that. “What you watched, you, on that donkey channel, the stuff you said wasn’t more of the same old government shit — what was it? What’s happening?”

She looked up from the doll, then, more sharp than before. “What do you think it meant?”

“I don’t know, me. I don’t know those words. It sounded like just more worry over the economy, more excuses why the government can’t get things working right, them.”

“This time it’s not an excuse. Maybe. Do you know what a dissembler is?”

“No.”

“A molecule?”

“No.”

“An atom?”

“No.”

Dr. Turner shook Lizzie’s doll. “This is made of atoms. Everything is made of atoms. They’re very tiny pieces of matter. Atoms clump together into molecules like… like snow sticking together into a snowball. Only there’s all kinds of atoms, and they stick together in different ways, so you get different kinds of matter. Wood or skin or plastic.”

She looked at me hard, her, trying to see if I understood. I nodded.

“What holds molecules together are molecular bonds. Sort of a … an electrical glue. Well, dissemblers take those bonds apart. Different kinds of dissemblers take different kinds of molecular bonds apart. Enzymes in your stomach, for instance, break the bonds on food so you can digest it.”

I heard Lizzie laugh, her, behind the bedroom door. It was a tired kind of laugh, and the worry about her started up in my gut again. And in another few minutes Annie would come out. I didn’t know, me, what to say to Annie. But I knew what Dr. Turner was saying was important — I could see it on her donkey face — and I tried, me, to listen. To understand.

“We can make dissemblers, and have for years. We use them for all kinds of things: disposing of toxic waste, recycling, cleaning. The dissemblers we make are pretty simple, and each one can only break one kind of bond. They’re made out of viruses, mostly — that means they’re genemod.”

“Could a … dissembler break bonds, it, that cause rabies?”

“Rabies? No, that’s a complex organic condition that — why do you ask, Billy?” Her look was sharp again.

“No reason.”

“No reason?”

“No.” I stared her down, me.

“Anyway,” she said, “the making of dissemblers is very carefully controlled by the GSEA. The Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency. Naturally they have to control anything that can go around dissembling things. But the GSEA is constantly ferreting out and busting illegal genemod operations, run outside the law for profit or even pure research, creating things without proper controls. Including dissemblers. A lot of them are self-replicating, that means they can reproduce themselves like small animals—”

“Animals? Sex?” I could feel, me, the surprise on my face.

She smiled. “No. Like… algae on a pond. But GSEA-approved dissemblers have built-in clocking mechanisms for control. After a certain number of replications, they stop reproducing. Illegal ones sometimes don’t. Now there are rumors — still just rumors — that an ilegal replicator without a clocking mechanism is loose. It attacks the molecular bonds of an alloy called duragem that’s used in many machines. Many machines. It—”

I suddenly saw. “It’s causing all these breakdowns, it. The gravrail and the foodbelt and the warden ’bot and the medunit. My God, some crazy donkey germ is breaking everything!”

“Not exactly. Nobody knows yet. But maybe.”

“You people are doing it to us again!”

She stared at me, her. I said, “You take everything, you, away from us and call it aristo Living, and then you wreck the what’s left!”

“Not me,” she said, hard. “Not the government. The government is what kept all of you alive after you became utterly unnecessary to the economy. Rather than just eliminate seventy percent of the population the way they did in Kenya and Chile. Donkey genemod science could do that, too. But we didn’t.”

The bedroom door opened and Lizzie came out, cleaned up, leaning on Annie. Lizzie laid on the couch and said, “Tell me something, Vicki.”

“Tell you what?” Dr. Turner said. She was still mad, her.

“Anything. Anything I don’t know, me. Anything new.”

Dr. Turner’s expression changed again. For a second she almost looked afraid, her. Annie said, “Can I see you a minute, Billy?”

This was it, then. Annie was ready, her, to send me away. I followed her into Lizzie’s bedroom. She shut the door.

“Billy, what we did, us, last night…” She didn’t look at me. I couldn’t help her, me, even if I’d of wanted to. My throat was too closed up. And I didn’t want to.

“Billy, I’m sorry. I behaved, me, like a fool. It just been too long. I didn’t mean to make you … I can’t. . . Can we just go back, us, to the way we was before? Friends? Partners, sort of, but not. . .” She raised her beautiful chocolate eyes to me.

I felt light, me, filled with light, like I might float off the floor. She wasn’t going to send me away. I could stay, me, with her and Lizzie. Just like we were before.

“Sure, Annie. I understand, me. We won’t never talk about it again.”

She let out a long sigh, her, like she’d been holding it in since last night. Maybe she was. “Thank you, Billy. You’re a good friend, you.”

We went back out to Lizzie, who was listening hard to Dr. Turner talk donkey talk. Here was more trouble.

“. . . isn’t like that, Lizzie. The basic principle of the computer is binary, which just means ‘two.’ Tiny switches, too small to see, with two positions: on and off. They make a code.”

“Like base two in math,” Lizzie said eagerly, but underneath her eagerness she was tired so deep, her, she could hardly keep her eyes open.

Annie said sharply, “She has to sleep now, her. Is the examination done, Doctor?”

“Yes,” Dr. Turner said, standing up. She looked bewildered, her; I didn’t see no reason why. “But I’ll come back this afternoon.”

“Medunit don’t see people twice a day,” Annie said.

“No,” Dr. Turner said, still looking bewildered. She stared at Lizzie, who was already asleep, her. “That’s a remarkable child.”

“Bye, doctor,” Annie said.

Dr. Turner ignored her. She stood quiet, her, but tensed up inside, like she was making some kind of important decision. “Billy — listen to what I’m going to tell you. Stockpile whatever you can from the food line here in this apartment. And if the warehouse reopens, stockpile blankets and jacks and — oh — toilet paper and soap and whatever else occurs to you. And buckets for water — lots of buckets. Do it.” She said it like nobody else but her could of thought of all that. Like / couldn’t of thought of it.

Annie said, “Folks start stockpiling, them, there ain’t going to be enough for everybody else.”

Dr. Turner stared at Annie bleakly. “I know, Annie.”

“Ain’t right.”

The doctor said softly, “A lot of things ain’t right.”

“So you telling us, you, to make it more not right?”

Dr. Turner didn’t answer. I had the weird feeling, me, that she didn’t have an answer. A donkey without an answer.

With a last look at Lizzie, Dr. Turner left. Annie said, “I don’t want her around here no more! She can just leave Lizzie alone!”

I could of told Annie, me, that wasn’t going to happen. Not from the look in Lizzie’s tired, sick eyes when the donkey doctor was telling her about that computer code. This was what Lizzie’d been looking for, her, all her life. Looking in the school software that Dr. Turner talked down, and in the East Oleanta library when we still had one, and in taking apart the apple peeler ’bot in the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe kitchen. This. Somebody who could tell her, them, what that smart little throwback mind wanted to know. And Annie wasn’t going to be able to stop it. Annie didn’t know that, her, but I did. Lizzie was already nearly twelve years old, her, and ain’t nobody been able to really stop her from anything since she was eight.