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prewar form of justice. She knew that she preferred Wild Country and the barter system over the kind of regulation imposed to the North. Any system that would take Childe away to a Mormon orphanage was one Sandy intended to avoid—and so Sandy Grange's personal combat against Streamlined America had begun as flight; South from the few tentacles of officialdom, from her home in Sutton County. Too many acquaintances there would have helped take Childe away 'for her own good', and those Sandy trusted had all been taken by the war. Their father, dead of radiation sickness; their mother, shotgunned by bandits; Sandy's friend, Ted Quantrill, perhaps dead on some Asian battlefield.
    On balance, Sandy preferred to live on her land, bought with contraband she had found. Increasingly she lived with books:
The Way Things Work; Five Acres and Independence; Baby and Child Care
, Twain and Doyle, Traven and Dostoyevsky; and of course the poetry, Benton and Reiss, Neruda, Durrell, and the bits she wrote in her daily journal. Language, she decided, could be a luxury that paid for itself.
    Presently, Sandy placed the sleeping Childe on their bed, unplugged the holo, took her journal from the high shelf of valuables and sat cross-legged with the Lectroped's lamp to illumine the pages. Sandy's journal was no longer the product of indifferent grammar multiplied by creative spelling. Her books, her teachers, tutored her daily. Not that isolation and spare time for books could entirely explain Sandy's astonishing grasp of language; it may have been a genetic gift.
    Between her twelfth and fourteenth birthdays Sandy knew a verbal blossoming, a becoming, that she could not explain. To call it a sea change would be to ravage a metaphor; for Sandy had never seen a body of salt water larger than a pot of soup. All right, then: demonstrably a South Texas
land
change; a broken prairie change. A Wild Country change.
     
    Sandy's journal, 16 May
    Replanted tomatoes from coldframes. Popcorn & peppers flourishing. Childe is wiser than I in ecology, for however sad his harmonies, that coyote is my garden sentry!
    Thoughts on holo: it furnishes more lies than laughter. Surely no announcer can love language, the way they all butcher it. I hear so many castoff holo phrases when in town. No wonder I sorrow for the users. It must show in my face, and I cannot afford to be haughty. N.B.: ck. 'haughty' vs. 'haut'. French? Latin?
    Childe's expertise in tracking brought me a queasy moment at dusk. Why? I have seen enough violence to harden me—or have I
?
    Childe reads animal signatures, crossing, doubling back; A fable of flight from cruel attack. Ebony droplets end one track—For, in moonlight, blood is black
.

Chapter 8
    The holo image of Eve Simpson, once a buxom child star and now IEE's director of media research, was familiar to millions; a sultry-voiced pneumatic package and, by remote means, frequent FBN interviewer of important people. Few, including those interviewed, would have recognized the hundred kilos of Eve's real flesh which had swollen with her clout.
    The public Eve, interviews and all, was an electronically-managed image. The private Eve was bloated, brilliant, willful, and in some ways unmanageable.
    Boren Mills had lusted first for her famous body, enjoyed it less as he wallowed in it more, and had finally turned toward still younger, less pillowy embraces. But by that time Mills knew the inner Eve, her mind incisive as a microtome, as voracious for media techniques as she was for sex. Mills's intellectual arrogance was tempered by the knowledge that Eve Simpson's subtleties rivaled his own. By now each knew the others uses. And abuses.
    "You're going too far," Eve snapped, thumbing the fax sheet Mills had carried to her condominium-sized office.
    "Don't tell me the system can't handle a message uniquely tailored to each household," Mills wagged a finger in warning. "I've channeled too much money into your media research and read too many