Beggars and Choosers

by Nancy Kress

  “Y-yes, ma’am. But Doug Kane there—I think his heart…”

  She walked over to Doug, her, knelt, and felt his pulse. She looked up at me. “I want you to do something, please. Drop this on the dead raccoon, right on top of the body.” She handed me a smooth gray disk the size of a coin. I remember coins, me.

  She kept on looking at me, not even blinking, and so I did it. I just turned my back, me, on her and Doug both, and did it. Why? Annie asked me later, and I didn’t have no answer. Maybe it was the girl’s eyes. Donkey, and not. No Janet Carol Land facing no camera with well done good and faithful servant.

  The gray disk hit the coon’s damp fur and stuck. It shimmered, it, and in a second that coon was cased in a clear shell that went right down to the ground and, it turned out, sliced through an inch underground. Maybe Y-energy, maybe not. A leaf blew against the shell and slid right off. I touched the shell. I don’t know, me, where I got the nerve. The shell was hard as foamcast.

  Made out of nothing.

  When I turned back the girl was putting something, her, in her shorts pocket, and Doug’s eyes were coming clear. He gasped, him.

  “Don’t move him yet,” the girl said, still not smiling. She didn’t look like she smiled much. “Go get help. He’ll be safe until you get back.”

  “Who are you, ma’am?” It came out squeaky. “What did you do to him, you?”

  “I gave him some medicine. The same injection the medunit would have given him. But he needs a stretcher to be carried back to your town. Go get help, Mr. Washington.”

  I took a step, me, right toward her. She stood up. She didn’t seem afraid, her—just went on looking at me with those eyes with no smile. After seeing the coon, it came to me that she had a shell, too. Not hard like the coon’s, and maybe not away from her body neither. Maybe close on it like a clear glove. But that was why she was out in the woods in shorts and flimsy sandals, and why she wasn’t bit up, her, by no blackflies, and why she wasn’t afraid of me.

  I said, “You…you’re from Eden, ain’t you? It’s really here someplace, in these woods, it’s really here…”

  She got a funny expression on her face. I didn’t know, me, what it meant, and it came to me that I could better guess what a rabid coon was thinking than what this girl was.

  “Go get help, Mr. Washington. Your friend needs it.” She stopped, her. “And please tell the townspeople…as little as you feel you can.”

  “But, ma’am—”

  “Uuuhhhmmmm,” Doug moaned, not like he was in pain, him, but like he was dreaming.

  I stumbled back to East Oleanta as fast as I could, me, puffing until I thought we’d have two heart attacks for the medunit. Just beyond the scooter track I met Jack Sawicki and Krystal Mandor, hot and sweaty, them, straggling back to town. I told them, me, about old man Kane’s collapse. They had to make me start over twice. Jack set off, him, by the sun—he’s maybe the only other good woodsman East Oleanta’s got. Krystal ran, her, for the medunit and more help. I sat down, me, to catch my breath. The sun was hot and blinding on the open field, the lake sparkled down past town, and I couldn’t find no balance no place in my mind.

  Maybe I never did. Nothing ever looked the same to me after that day.

  The medunit found Doug Kane easy enough, skimming above the brush on its gravsensors, smelling me and Doug’s trail in the air. Four men followed, them, and they carried Kane home. He breathed easy. That night near everybody else in town gathered, us, in the café. There was dancing and accusing and yelling and a party. Nobody had shot no raccoons, but Eddie Rollins shot a deer and Ben Radisson shot Paulie Cenverno. Paulie wasn’t hurt bad, him, just a graze on the arm, and the medunit fixed him right up. I went to see Doug Kane, me.

  He didn’t remember no girl in the woods. I asked him, me, while he lay on his plastisynth sleeping platform, propped up on extra pillows and covered with an embroidered blanket like the one Annie made for her sofa. Doug loved the attention, him. I asked him, me, real careful, not exactly saying there was a girl in the woods, just hinting around the edges of what happened. But he didn’t remember nothing, him, after he collapsed, and nobody who went to bring him home mentioned finding any raccoon in a hard shell.

  She must of just picked up the whole shell, her, safe as houses, and just walked off with it.

  The only person I told, me, was Annie, and I made sure Lizzie was nowhere near. Annie didn’t believe me, her. Not at first. Then she did, but only because she remembered the big-headed girl in green jacks in the café two nights before. This girl had a big head too, her, and somehow to Annie that meant all the rest of my story was true. I told Annie not to say nothing to nobody. And she never did, not even to me. Said it gave her the willies, her, to think of some weird outcast donkeys living in the woods with genemod machinery and calling it Eden. Blasphemous, almost. Eden was in the Bible and no place else. Annie didn’t want to think about it, her.

  But I thought about it, me. A lot. It got so for a while I couldn’t hardly think about nothing else. Then I got a grip on myself, me, and went back to normal living. But the big-headed girl was still in my thoughts.

  We didn’t have no more trouble that whole summer and fall with rabid raccoons. They all just disappeared, them, for good.

  But machines kept breaking.

  II

  AUGUST 2114

  He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

  —Francis Bacon, Of Innovations

  Six

  DIANA COVINGTON: WASHINGTON

  The first person I saw at Science Court, walking up the broad shallow white stone steps that were supposed to evoke Socrates and Aristotle, was Leisha Camden.

  Paul, who came before Anthony and after Rex, and I used to enjoy intellectual arguments. He enjoyed them because he won; I enjoyed them because he won. This was, of course, before I understood how deeply rooted, like a cancer, was my desire to lose. At the time the arguments seemed amusing, even daring. The people Paul and I knew considered it rather bad form to debate abstract questions. We donkeys, with our genemod intelligence, were all so good at it—like showing off the fact that you could walk. No one wished to appear ridiculous. Much better to publicly enjoy body surfing. Or gardening. Or even, God help us, sensory deprivation tanks. Much better.

  But one night Paul and I, daring nonconformists right up to our banal end, debated who should have the right to control radical new technology. The government? The technocrats, mostly scientists and engineers, who were the only ones who ever really understood it? The free market? The people? It was not a good night. Paul wanted to win more than usual. I, for reasons connected to a gold-eyed slut at a party the night before, was not quite as eager as usual to lose. Things got said, the kinds of embarrassing things that don’t go away. Tempers ran high. My paternal grandfather’s teak desk required a new panel, which never quite matched the others. Intellectual debate can be very hard on furniture.

  In a subtle way, I blame the Sleepless for Paul’s and my breakup. Not directly, but a désastre inoffensif, like the final small program that crashes an overloaded system. But, then, for the last hundred years, what haven’t we blamed on the Sleepless?

  They even caused the creation of the science courts: another désastre inoffensif. A hundred years ago, nobody ever made a decision that is was acceptable to engineer human embryos to be Sleepless. Genemod companies just did it, the way they did all those other embryonic genemods in the unregulated days before the GSEA. You want a kid who’s seven feet tall, has purple hair, and is encoded with a predisposition for musical ability? Here—you got yourself a basketball-playing punk cellist. Mazel tov.

  Then came the Sleepless. Rational, awake, smart. Too smart. And long-lived, a bonus surprise—nobody knew at first that sleep interfered with cell regeneration. Nobody liked it when they found out. Too many Darwinian advantages piling up in one corner.

  So, this being the United States and not some sixteenth-century
monarchy or twentieth-century totalitarian state, the government just didn’t outlaw radical genetic modifications outright. Instead, they talked them to death.

  The Federal Forum for Science and Technology follows due process. A jury composed of a panel of scientists, arguments and rebuttals, cross-examination, final written opinion with provision for dissenting opinions, the whole ROM. Science Court has no power. It can only recommend, not make policy. Nobody on it can tell anybody to do or not do anything about any thing.

  But no Congress, president, or GSEA board has ever acted contrary to a Science Court recommendation. Not once. Not ever.

  So I had all the force majeure of the status quo on my side that furniture-wrecking night when I declared that the government should control human genetic modification. Paul wanted absolute control by scientists (he was one). We both were right, as far as actual practice. But of course practice didn’t matter; neither did theory, really. What we’d really wanted was the fight.

  Did Leisha Camden ever wreck furniture or put her fist through walls or hurl antique wineglasses? Watching her walk into the white-columned Forum building on Pennsylvania Avenue, I thought not. Washington in August is hot; Leisha wore a sleeveless white suit. Her bright blonde hair was cut in short, shining waves. She looked composed, beautiful, cool. She reminded me, probably unfairly, of Stephanie Brunell. All that was missing was the pink huge-eyed, doomed little dog.

  “Oyez, oyez,” the clerk called, as the technical panel filed in. And then they get huffy when the press calls it “science court.” Washington is Washington, even when it’s rising to its feet for Nobel laureates.

  There were three of them this time, on an eight-person panel: heavy artillery. Barbara Poluikis, chemical biology, a diminutive woman with hyperalert eyes. Elias Maleck, medicine, who radiated worried integrity. Martin Davis Exford, molecular physics, looking more like an overage ballet dancer. Nobody, of course, in genetics. The United States hasn’t won there in sixty years. The panelists had been agreed to by the advocates for both sides. Panelists were presumed to be impartial.

  I sat in the press section, courtesy of credentials from Colin Kowalski, credentials so badly faked that anybody who checked them would have to conclude they’d been faked by me, the person incapacitated by Gravison’s disease, and not by some competent agency. There was a lot of press, live and robotic. Science Court goes out on various donkey grids.

  After the panel sat down, I stayed standing—very gauche—to scan the spectators for Livers. There might have been one or two in the gallery; the room was so big it was hard to tell. “Please sit down,” my seat said to me in a reasonable voice, “others may have trouble seeing over you.” That I could believe. In my bright purple jacks and soda-can-and-plastic jewelry I was one of a kind in the press box.

  In the front of the chamber, behind a low antique-wood railing and an invisible high-security Y-shield, sat the advocates, expert testimony, panel, and VIPs. Leisha Camden sat next to amateur advocate Miranda Sharifi, who had suddenly appeared in Washington from God-knows-where. Not from Huevos Verdes. For days the press had been watching the island with the avidity of moonbase residents monitoring dome leaks. So from what geographical forehead had Miranda Sharifi sprung, helmeted to do battle for her corporation’s product?

  She had refused a professional lawyer to argue her case. She’d even refused Leisha Camden, which had caused much snickering in the press bar. Apparently they felt a SuperSleepless was inadequate to convincingly present the technology her own people had invented. I never ceased to be amazed at the stupidity of my fellow IQ-enhanced donkeys.

  I studied Miranda carefully. Short, big-headed, low of brow. Thick unruly black hair tied back with a red ribbon. Despite the severe, expensive black suit, she looked like neither a Liver nor a donkey. I saw her furtively wipe the palms of her hands on her skirt; they must be damp. I’d seen pictures of the notorious Jennifer Sharifi, and Miranda had inherited none of her grandmother’s coolness, height, or beauty. I wondered if she minded.

  “We’re here today,” began moderator Dr. Senta Yongers, a grandmotherly type with the perfect teeth of a grid star, “to determine the facts concerning Case 1892-A. I would like to remind everyone in this chamber that the purpose of this inquiry is three-fold. First, to identify agreed-upon facts concerning this scientific claim, including but not limited to its nature, actions, and replicable physical effects.

  “Second, to allow disagreements about this scientific claim to be discussed, debated, and recorded for later study.

  “And third, to fulfill a joint request from the Congressional Committee on New Technology, the Federal Drug Administration, and the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency to create a recommendation for the further study, for the licensing within the United States, or for the denial of Case 1892-A, which has already been awarded patent status. Further study, I may remind you, allows the patent’s developers to solicit volunteers for beta testing of the patent. Licensing is virtually equivalent to federal permission to market.” Yongers looked around the chamber gravely over the tops of her glasses—a currently fashionable affectation for donkeys with perfect vision—to emphasize the seriousness of this possibility. This is important, folks—you could get Case 1892-A dumped square in your laps. As if anybody here didn’t already realize that.

  I looked back at Miranda Sharifi, holding a thick printout bound in black covers. It was clear to me that the Sleepless are a different species from donkeys and Livers. I mention this only because of the large number of people to whom it is, inexplicably, not clear. Miranda undoubtedly understood everything in that stupendously complex printout, which was, after all, in her own field, and at least partly of her own devising. But she probably also understood everything important in my field (all my purported fields, pathetic kitchen gardens that they were). Plus everything important in art history, in law, in early-childhood education, in international economics, in paleolithic anthropology. To me, that added up to a different species. Donkeys have brains fully adapted to their needs, but then so did the stegosaurus. I was looking at a multi-adapted mammal.

  Feeling spiny, I watched a grid journalist in front of me flick a finger to direct his robocam to zoom in on the legend carved across the chamber’s impressive dome: THE PEOPLE MUST CONTROL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. A nice journalistic touch, that. I approve of irony.

  “The chief advocate for Case 1892-A,” continued Moderator Yongers, “is Miranda Sharifi, of Huevos Verdes Corporation, the patent holders. Chief opposition is Dr. Lee Chang, GSEA Senior Geneticist and holder of the Geoffrey Sprague Morling Chair in Genetics at Johns Hopkins. The following stipulations have already been agreed to by both sides—for details please consult the furnished hard copy, the master screen at the front of the chamber, or channel 1640FORURM on Govnet.”

  The “furnished hard copy” was four hundred pages of cell diagrams, equations, genome tables, and chemical processes, all with numerous journal citations. But in front was a one-page list somebody had prepared for the press. I would bet my purple jacks that its simplifications had been paid for in hours of screaming by technical experts who didn’t want their precious facts distorted just so they could be understood. But here the simplified distortions were, ready for the newsgrids. Washington is Washington.

  “Pre-agreed upon by both sides,” read Moderator Yongers, “are the following nine points:

  “One—Case 1892-A describes a nanodevice designed to be injected into the human bloodstream. The device is made of genetically modified self-replicating proteins in very complex structures. The process which creates these structures is proprietary, belonging to Huevos Verdes Corporation. The device has been named by its creators the ‘Cell Cleaner.’ This name is a registered trademark, and must be indicated as such whenever used.”

  Always good to have your commercial bases covered. I scanned the faces of the Nobel laureates. They showed nothing.

  “Two—Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated th
e capacity to leave the bloodstream and travel through human tissue, as do white blood cells. Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner also has demonstrated the capacity to penetrate a cell wall, as do viruses, with no damage to the cell.”

  No problem there—even I knew that the FDA had already licensed a batch of drugs that could do those things. I switched my contact lenses to zoom and saw Miranda Sharifi’s hand steal into Leisha Camden’s. Bad move—every grid journalist and online watcher could see it, too. Didn’t Miranda know any better than to show signs of weakness to the enemy? How had she brought down the entire pseudo-government of Sanctuary, anyway?

  “Three—Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner occupies less than one percent of a typical cell’s volume. Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to be powered by chemicals naturally present in cells.”

  Yongers paused and looked challengingly around the room; I didn’t know why. Did she expect any of us to challenge what eight scientists had already stipulated? The Cell Cleaner could have been powered by gerbils on treadmills for all any of us laymen could prove. But only under laboratory conditions, of course.

  It was already clear where the opposition would attack.

  “Four—Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to replicate at slightly slower than the rate at which bacteria replicate—about twenty minutes per complete division. Under laboratory conditions, this replication has demonstrated the capacity to occur for several hours using only those chemicals normally found in human tissue plus those chemicals contained in the fluid of the original injection. Under laboratory conditions, the Cell Cleaner has demonstrated the capacity to stop replicating after several hours, and to then replicate only to replace damaged units.”