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at
Lizzie
. It hurt my heart. Old fool.
    Lizzie
saw it. She was like that, her: all pushing and
pushing one minute, all sweetness the next. She put her arms around me.
“It’s all right, Billy. She ain’t mad, her, at you. Nobody’s mad at
you
.
We love you, us.”
    I held her, me. It was like holding a bird—thin bones and fluttery
heart in your hand. She smelled of apples.
    My dead wife Rosie and me never wanted kids. I don’t know, me, what
we was thinking.
    But all I said out loud was, “You don’t go outside, you, until them
rabid raccoons are killed by somebody.”
    Annie shot me a look. It took me a minute to figure out she was
afraid, her, that
Lizzie
was just going to start all over
again:
    killed by who, Billy
? But Lizzie didn’t start. She just
said, sweet as berries, “I won’t, me. I’ll stay inside.”
    But now it was Annie who couldn’t let it go. I don’t understand
mothers, me. Annie said, “And you stay away from school for a while,
too, Lizzie. You ain’t no donkey, you.”
    Lizzie didn’t answer.
    Annie only wanted what was best for Lizzie. I knew that, me. Lizzie
had to live in East Oleanta, join a lodge, go to scooter races, hang
around the cafe, choose her lovers here, have her babies here. Annie
wanted Lizzie to belong. Like an agro Liver, not some weird fake-donkey
freak nobody would want. Any mother would. Annie might sneak, her, into
the kitchen of the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe to do some
cooking, but she was still all Liver, all the way through.
    And Lizzie wasn’t.
    A long time ago, when I was in school myself, me, and the country
was different, I learned something. It’s fuzzy now, but it keeps
hanging in my head. It was from before donkeys and Livers. Before cafes
and warehouses. Before politicians paid taxes to us, instead of the
other way around. It was from back when they were still making
Sleepless, and you could read about them in newspapers. When there
was
newspapers. This thing was a word about genemod, but it meant something
that wasn’t genemod. Was natural. Lizzie learns at school that donkeys
are inferior, them, because donkeys have to be made genemod so they can
be put to work providing all the things Livers need. But this word
wasn’t about the kind of natural that makes us Livers superior to
donkeys. It was about a different kind of natural, a kind that happens
by itself but makes you different from other natural Livers around you.
The word explained why Lizzie asked so many donkey questions, her, when
she wasn’t no donkey and didn’t have no donkey genemods, although the
word was in her genes. How could that be? Like I said, I was fuzzy, me,
about the word, and about how it worked. But I remembered it.
    The word was
throwback
.
    I watched Lizzie watch her mother put the apple dish on the
foodbelt. It went under the flash heater and out through the wall into
the cafe. Somebody would choose it, them, on their Senator Mark Todd
Ingalls meal chip. Annie went on to cooking something else.
Lizzie
sat on the floor, her, with the pieces of the broken peeler ‘hot. When
her mother wasn’t looking she studied each one, her, figuring out how
it might go together, and when she grinned at me, her black eyes
sparkled and darted, shiny as stars.
    ==========
    That night we had a meeting, us, in the cafe, to talk about the
rabid raccoons. Forty people, not counting kids. Paulie Cenverno
actually seen one of the sick raccoons, hind legs twitching like it was
splintered, mouth foaming, down near the State Senator James Richard
Langton Scooter Track on the other side of town from the river.
Somebody said, them, that we should put chairs in a circle to make a
real meeting, but nobody did. At the other end of the cafe the
holoterminal played and the dance music blasted. Nobody danced but the
holos, life-sized smiling dolls made of light, pretty enough to be
donkeys. I don’t like them, me. Never did. You can see right through
the edges.
    “Turn down that music so