In the next six weeks, Lizzie spent all her free time at the hotel terminal, accessing education software in the vast donkey public library system. She appeared at the hotel at odd times, in the early morning with her hair wet from the baths, or at twilight, times I suspected Annie thought she was playing with her friends Carlena and Susie, a pair of dumb chirps. Lizzie disappeared just as abruptly, an outlaw running from the scene of the scholastic crime to report for dinner or for church. I don’t know if she accessed in the middle of the night or not; I was, sensibly, asleep. She learned at a frightening rate, once she had something substantial to learn. I didn’t control what she accessed, and I only commented when she had questions. After the first day she zeroed in on computer systems, both theory and applications.

Within a week she showed me how she’d reprogrammed a still-functional cleaning ’bot to dance, by combining, speeding up, and sequencing its normal movements. The thing jigged around my dismal hotel room as if it had a metallic seizure. Lizzie laughed so hard she fell off the bed and lay helplessly shrieking on the floor, her arms wrapped around her negligible middle, and again that unwelcome something turned over, blood warm, in my chest.

Within a month she had worked through the first two years of the American Education Association-accredited secondary school software for computer science.

After six weeks she showed me, gleefully, how she’d broken in to the Haller Corporation data banks. I peered over her shoulder, wondering if the Haller security software would trace the intrusion to East Oleanta, where there should not have existed anyone capable of data bank intrusion. Did the GSEA monitor corporate break-ins?

I was being paranoid. There must be a quarter million teenage net busters snooping around in corporate data banks just to count technological coup.

But those kids were donkeys.

“Lizzie,” I said, “no more net busting. I’m sorry, honey, but it’s dangerous.”

She pressed her lips together, a suspicious little Annie. “Dangerous how?”

“They could trace you, come here, and arrest you. And send you to jail.”

Her black eyes widened. She had some respect for authority, or at least for power. A cowardly little Annie.

“Promise,” I said, relentless.

“I promise, me!”

“And I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow I’ll go to Albany on the gravrail” — it was working again, briefly — “and buy you a handheld computer and crystal library. It has far more on it than you can access here. You won’t believe what you’ll learn to do.” And a free-held unit couldn’t be traced. I could use the “Dark Jones” account, which the high cost of a crystal library and compatible unit would just about empty. Maybe I’d better go farther than Albany to buy it. Maybe New York.

Lizzie stared at me, for once speechless. Her pink mouth made a little “O.” Then she was hugging me, smelling of warehouse distrib soap, her voice muffled against my neck.

“Vicki… a crystal library… oh, Vicki. . .”

For you. I didn’t say more. I couldn’t.

Anthony, who came before Russell and after Paul, once told me that there was no such thing as a maternal instinct, nor a paternal one either. It was all intellectual propaganda designed to urge humans toward a responsibility they didn’t really want, but couldn’t admit not wanting. It was a PR tour de force without genuine biological force.

I used to love some very stupid men.

Three days after I brought Lizzie her crystal library, I was up by 4:00 A.M., ready to follow Billy yet again into the deep woods.

This was my third trip in six weeks. Lizzie kept me informed, per our bargain, of Billy’s plans. She told me he used to go every few months, but now he went far more often. Maybe he had even made a few short trips Lizzie and I missed. Something was stepping up his scouting schedule, and I hoped it would lead me to “Eden,” careful hints about which were increasing on the local Liver channels. Broadcast from where? By whom? I’d bet anything they weren’t part of the regularly organized broadcasting from Albany.

This morning it was snowing in a desultory, nonserious way, even though it was only mid-October. In San Francisco, I hadn’t paid much attention to the “coming mini-ice age” stuff. In the Adirondacks, however, there wasn’t much choice. Everyone went around bundled in winter jacks, which were surprisingly warm, although no more tastefully dyed than summer jacks. Marigold, crimson, electric blue, poison green. And for the conservative, a dun the color of cow piles.

Which was what Billy wore when he emerged from his apartment building at 4:45 A.M. He carried a plasticloth sack. It was still dark out. He walked toward the river, which flowed by the edge of the village, only five or six blocks from what passed as downtown. I followed him unseen while there were buildings for cover. When there weren’t, I let him get out of sight and then followed his footprints in the light snow. After a mile the footsteps stopped.

I stood under a pine whose branches started ten feet up the trunk, pondering my choices. From behind me Billy said quietly, “You ain’t gotten any better, you, in the woods. Not since your first time.”

I turned. “How did you do that?”

“Don’t matter how / did it, me. The question is what you think you’re doing here.”

“Following you. Again.”

“Why?”

He had never asked before. The other times I’d followed him, he’d refused to talk to me at all. He looked unusually impressive, standing there in the bleak landscape with his wrinkled face stern and judgmental: a Liver Moses. I said, “Billy, where is Eden?”

“That what you after, you? I don’t know where it is, me, and if I did I wouldn’t take you there.”

This was promising; when someone has reasons not to do something, he has at least conceived that it’s possible to do it. From possibility to agreement isn’t nearly as large a leap as from denial to possibility. “Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why wouldn’t you take me to Eden if you knew where it was?”

“Because it ain’t no donkey place, it.”

“Is it a Liver place?”

But he seemed to realize he’d said too much. Deliberately he put down his sack, brushed the snow off a fallen tree, and sat down with the air of a man who wasn’t going to move until I left. I would have to prod him by offering more.

“It’s not a Liver place, either, is it, Billy? It’s a Sleepless place. You’ve seen a SuperSleepless from Huevos Verdes, or more than one, in these woods. They have larger heads than normal, and they talk like they’re slowing down their speech, because they are. They think so much faster and more complexly than we do — you or me — that it’s an effort for them to choose a few simple-enough words for us to understand. You saw one, didn’t you, Billy? A man or a woman?”

He stared at me, a wrinkled somber face against the gray and white woods.

“When was this, Billy? In the summer? Or longer ago than that?”

He said, with transparent effort and equally transparent mendacity, “I never saw nobody, me.”

I walked toward him and put my hand firmly on his shoulder. “Yes, you did, you. When was it?”

He stared at the snowy ground, angry but unwilling, or unable, to show it.

“Okay, Billy,” I sighed. “If you won’t tell me, you won’t. And you’re right — I can’t follow you unseen through the woods because I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m already cold.”

Still he said nothing. I trudged back to town. Lizzie’s computer and crystal library wasn’t all that Dark Jones had bought in New York. The homing device I’d stuck on the back of his plastisynth jacket, behind the shoulder and below the neck where he wouldn’t see it until he removed the jacket, registered as a motionless dot on my handheld monitor. It stayed a motionless dot for over an hour. Wasn’t he cold?