Beggars and Choosers

by Nancy Kress

  “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 illegal 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 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 I 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 Café 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.

  But I didn’t say nothing, me, to Annie. Not then. Annie watched Lizzie sleep with her whole heart in her eyes, and I couldn’t say nothing, because I was too busy, me, watching them both.

  That afternoon, though, I did hunt up Jack Sawicki, me, and ask him for a terminal password. He gave it to me, him, without asking too many questions. We go back a long way, Jack and me, and besides he had his hands full. A technician actually arrived, her, from Albany to fix the medunit. And there was supposed to be a big all-lodge dance that night in the café. Three lodges combined, them, to give the party. There was a dance jam, and betting games, and some kind of bare-breasted beauty contest, and most of the young people in town were going, which meant testing all the security ’bots. Especially since the gravrail was running again, it, and word of the dance might of traveled to other towns. Jack didn’t even ask, him, why I wanted the password.

  I walked, me, to the hotel. Dr. Turner wasn’t around. It had turned cool for August; maybe she went for another walk in the woods, looking for Eden. She wasn’t going to find it. I had looked, me, and there wasn’t nothing nowhere near where Doug Kane had keeled over beside that rabid raccoon. No place that big-headed girl could of come from.

  I said to the hotel HT, “Newsgrid mode. Password Thomas Alva Edison.” Jack don’t want the whole town knowing the hotel HT can go newsgrid; you’d have every Tom, Dick, and Harry in here, them, who want to watch a different channel than the HT at the café or the lodge houses.

  “Newsgrid mode,” the HT said cheerfully. It’s always cheerful, it. “What channel, please?”

  “Some donkey channel.”

  “What channel, please?”

  I tried different numbers, me, until I found a donkey newsgrid. Then I sat and watched, me, for an hour, trying to remember the words Dr. Turner explained. Molecular bonds. Dissemblers. Alloy. Duragem. Only the newsgrid didn’t use those words, it, except for “duragem.” Ins
tead it used words like “proposed epicenter” and “replication rate equations” and “Stoddard equations for field failure curves” and “manual replacement efforts falling behind incident rate.” I watched anyway, me. After an hour I got up and said, “Information mode.”

  I went home, me, and got Lizzie’s and Annie’s meal chips. When nobody in the café was near the foodbelt, I took everything the chips would give me and put it all in a clean covered bucket and carried it home. Lizzie was still asleep, her, holding her doll. I went to the warehouse, which was opened again after a new shipment came on the gravrail, and got two more buckets, three blankets, and three sets of jacks on all our chips. Plus a new door lock, flowerpots, and a suitcase. The tech there looked at me funny, him, but didn’t say nothing. I filled all the buckets with clean water, one at a time, and lugged them, me up the stairs to Annie’s apartment. At the end my back ached and I was panting like the old fool I was.

  But I didn’t stop, me. I rested for ten minutes and then borrowed Annie’s broom. I took it down to the hotel. People were carrying plasticloth banners into the café to decorate for the dance. They laughed and joked, them; a young girl flashed her breasts. Getting ready for tonight’s contest. A few strangers checked themselves into the hotel on their New York State chips. They chattered on about the dance. Dr. Turner was still gone, her.

  I took Annie’s broom, me, and swept all the dead leaves out of the hotel lobby, all the leaves left by the broken cleaning ’bot that wasn’t never going to get fixed now because it wasn’t all that important compared to other breakdowns, all the leaves that had died, them, since last year, before all the breakdowns started and the rabid coons first come to East Oleanta.

  Nine

  DREW ARLEN: FLORIDA

  When I left Seattle for Huevos Verdes, it was on a plane from Kevin Baker’s corporate fleet. Kevin’s reasons for not following the rest of the Sleepless to Sanctuary, unlike Leisha’s, were not idealistic. He was Sanctuary’s financial liaison with the rest of the planet. I figured that a Sleepless plane was the least likely in the world to crash from duragem dissembler damage. The plane would have been checked and rechecked compulsively; the Sleepless do safety very well. “Because we’ve had so little of it,” Kevin said somberly when I phoned him and begged the use of plane and pilot. I was not interested at that moment in the social problems of the Sleepless. Kevin had never liked me, and I’d never asked him for any favors before. But I did now. I was going to force a showdown at Huevos Verdes, learn some important answers. Maybe Kevin knew that. You never know how much they know.

  The unceasing lattice, closed tight, swayed in my mind.

  “There’s just one thing, Drew,” Kevin said, and I thought I saw the shades and shapes of apology flit across his face on the vidscreen. Like all his generation of Sleepless, he looks a handsome thirty-five. “Leisha insists on going with you.”

  “How did Leisha even know I was going to Huevos Verdes? As far as she knows, I’m on a concert tour!”

  “I don’t know,” Kevin said, which may or may not have been true. Maybe Leisha had her own electronic spies in my hotel room, or at the Seattle concert. Although it was hard to imagine she and Kevin could do that without Huevos Verdes knowing. Maybe the Supers did know, and tolerated Leisha’s information system. Maybe Leisha just knew me so well that she guessed what I was feeling. Maybe she had some kind of probability program predicting what I would do, what any Norm would do. You never know what they know.

  “And if I say no to Leisha?” I said.

  “Then no plane,” Kevin said. He didn’t meet my eyes. I saw that he felt he owed her this, for old debts, things that had happened before I was born. I saw, too, that there was just the slightest sign of puffiness along his jaw, the very beginning of a sag to his handsomeness. He was 110 years old. Flat, low shapes slid through my mind, the color of tarnished silver. Kevin was not going to change his mind.

  Before Huevos Verdes, the plane went to Atlanta, to drop off something very secret and very industrial, in which I was not interested at all. Before that, it landed in Chicago to pick up Leisha. There were no reporters. The GSEA agents must have been there, of course, somewhere, but I didn’t see them. Leisha climbed on board with a lawyerly briefcase and a small green overnight case, her golden hair blowing in the brisk wind off Lake Michigan. She wore white pants, sandals, and a thin yellow shirt. I stared straight ahead.

  “I have to go with you, Drew,” Leisha said with no hint of apology. This was her straight-forward, reasonable voice. It made me feel like a kid again, being chided for flunking out of the expensive donkey schools she’d sent me to. Schools no Liver could have succeeded in—or so I’d told myself at the time. “I love Miranda, too, you know. And I have to know what you and she and the other Supers are up to. Because if it’s what I think it is…”

  A hint of anger had crept into her voice. Leisha would feel entitled to anger, just for being excluded from knowledge. I didn’t answer her.

  Miri once told me that there were only four important questions you could ask about any human being: How does he fill up his time? How does he feel about how he fills up his time? What does he love? How does he react to those he perceives as either inferior or superior to him?

  “If you make people feel inferior, even unintentionally,” she had said, her dark eyes intense, “they will be uncomfortable around you. In that situation, some people will attack. Some will ridicule, to ‘cut you down to size.’ But some will admire, and learn from you. If you make people feel superior, some will react by dismissing you. Some by wielding power—just because they can—in greater or lesser ways. But some will be moved to protect and help. All this is just as true of a junior lodge clique as of a group of governments.”

  I had wondered how she could possibly know anything about junior lodge cliques. But, admiring her and wanting to learn, I hadn’t said anything.

  “I only want to protect you and Miranda, Drew,” Leisha said, “and to help any way I can.”

  I looked out the plane window, at the sunlight reflected blindingly on the metal wings, until the shapes behind my eyelids blotted out the ones in my mind.

  The plane, which had been so carefully checked for duragemdissembler contamination in Seattle, must have become contaminated in Atlanta. It went down over up-country Georgia.

  It was the KingDome all over again, except that this pilot didn’t pray or curse or moan, and we were flying at twenty thousand feet. The sky was a hazy blue, with clouds below that blocked any view of the ground. The plane listed to the left, just slightly, and I saw the flesh on the back of the pilot’s neck change from light brown to a mottled maroon. Leisha looked up from her briefcase. Then the plane righted and I could feel my mind, which had clenched into a tight hard shape like constipation, open again.

  But the next moment the plane lurched again, and began to shudder. The pilot spoke to his console in low, urgent orders, simultaneously punching in manual commands. The plane nosedived.

  The pilot pulled it up so hard I was thrown against Leisha. Her bright hair filled my mouth. Her briefcase hurled forward, against the back of the front seat. The briefcase said, “For maximum utility, please hold this unit steady.” A long, thin, thread spun itself in my mind.

  Leisha grabbed the back of the front seat and pulled herself off me. “Drew! Are you all right?”

  The plane dropped. The pilot stayed with it, issuing orders in a monotonous voice controlled as machinery, manipulating the manual. Leisha’s briefcase said, “This unit is deactivating,” in a clear high voice like a trained soprano. Leisha’s hand groped to check my restraints. “Drew!”

  “I’m all right,” I said, thinking, This is not all right. The thread spun itself out, stretching tauter and tauter.

  We plunged through the clouds. There was a shrieking high in the air, almost sounding above us, as if it were coming from some entirely different machinery. Then the plane hit flat on its belly on marshy ground. I felt the hit in my teeth, in my b
ones. Leisha, thrown once more against me, said something very low, a single word; it might have been “Daddy.”

  The second the plane smashed into the ground, the sides lifted. But it couldn’t have been the same second, I thought later, because nobody would design crash equipment that way. But it seemed only a second until the sides lifted and the passenger restraints sprang free. Leisha pushed me out of the plane, the same moment I caught the acrid smell of smoke.

  I dropped on my belly into four inches of water covering mucky ground. Leisha splashed down beside me, falling to her knees. Without my powerchair I felt myself flailing, a desperate fish, holding myself above water on my elbows. I crawled forward, pulling myself with my upper arms through the muck and away from the plane dragging my useless legs behind.

  Leisha staggered to her feet and tried to lift me. “No, run!” I screamed, as if the smoke billowing out from the plane blocked sound and not sight. “Not without you,” she said. I could feel the plane behind me, a bomb. I screamed, “I can go faster on my own!” Maybe it was true.

  She kept on tugging at my body, though I was far too heavy for her. The smoke thickened. I didn’t hear the pilot climb out—was he hurt? My left palm slipped in the mud and I fell face first into it. Frantically I tried to get back up on my hands and drag myself forward. “Run!” I screamed again at Leisha, who wouldn’t leave. Hopeless, hopeless. She wasn’t strong enough to carry me, and the plane was going to blow.

  The thread snapped. The lattice in my mind, as in Seattle, disappeared.

  Someone ran toward Leisha from the other side of the plane. The pilot? But it wasn’t. The man tackled Leisha and she fell on top of me. Once more my face was pushed into the mud. Then I heard a faint pop. When I fought my eyes free of the mud, I saw the air around the three of us shimmering. A force shield. Y-energy. How strong was it? Could it withstand—

  The plane exploded in light and heat and blinding color.