Beggars and Choosers

by Nancy Kress

  Annie said, through her tears and still kneeling, “Please.” Just that word. In that place, it had a surprising dignity.

  A door appeared in the wall behind Miranda, a door that a moment before had not existed even in outline, and a man stuck his head through. “Miri, they’re on the way—”

  “You go, Jon,” she said. They were the first words she’d spoken. Jon had the same misshapen head as Miranda but handsome features, a bizarre and dissettling combination, like a manticore with the face of a domestic collie. His mouth tightened.

  “Miri, you can’t—”

  “That’s already settled!” she snapped, and for the first time I saw she was under tremendous tension. But then she turned to him and uttered a few words I didn’t catch, so rapidly did she speak. Despite her speed, the words had the curious feel of being separate, each a discreet communication rather than part of a grammatical flow…I was only guessing. Miranda wore a single ring, a slim gold band set with rubies, on the ring finger of her left hand.

  Jon withdrew, and the “door” disappeared. There was no sign it had ever existed.

  Miranda put her hand on Annie’s shoulder. The hand trembled. “Don’t cry. I can help them both, I think. Certainly your daughter.”

  But it was Billy she knelt next to first. She held a small box to his heart and studied its miniature screen; she put the box against his neck and studied the screen again; she fastened a medicine patch on his neck. Watching, I was obscurely reassured. This was known. She was treating Billy for his heart attack, if that was what it was.

  He started to breathe more easily, and moaned.

  Miranda turned to Lizzie. From her pocket she drew a long, thin black syringe, opaque. Very little medication is given by syringe rather than patch. Something turned over in my chest.

  I said, “She’s already had wide-spectrum antibiotic and antiviral from a K-model medunit. The unit said this was an unknown virus, outside the configuration of any known tailored microorganism, you’d have to build it fresh if you can—”

  I was babbling. Miranda didn’t look up. “This is the Cell Cleaner, Dr. Turner. But I think you already guessed that.” There was something deliberate about her speech, as if the words were chosen carefully, and yet she felt they were completely inadequate to whatever she wanted to say. I hadn’t noticed that in Washington, where her speeches to the Science Court must have all been carefully prepared in advance. The slowness was in marked contrast to the way she’d spoken to “Jon.”

  Annie watched the needle disappear into Lizzie’s neck. Annie was completely still, kneeling on the hem of her muddy parka, smearing dead leaves across the featureless white floor.

  The moment was surreal. Miranda hadn’t even hesitated. I choked out, “Aren’t you even going to explain it to them give them a choice…”

  Miranda didn’t answer. Instead she pulled a second syringe from her pocket and injected Billy.

  I thought crazily of all the fatty deposits in the arteries of his heart, all the lethal viral copies that can lie in wait for years in lymph nodes until the body weakens, all the toxic mismultiplications of normal DNA over the sixty-eight years of Billy’s bone and flesh and blood…I couldn’t speak.

  Miranda pulled out a third syringe and turned to Annie, who put out a warding-off hand. “No, ma’am, please, I ain’t sick—”

  “You will be,” Miranda said, “without this. Soon.” She waited.

  Annie bowed her head. It looked to me like prayer, which suddenly enraged me for no reason I could understand. Miranda injected Annie.

  Then she turned to me.

  “How toxic is the mutated vir—”

  “Fatal. Within twenty-four hours. And easily transmitted. You will become infected.”

  “How do you know? Did your people engineer and release the virus? Did you?”

  “No,” she said, as calmly as if I’d asked her if it was raining. But a pulse beat in her throat, and she was taut as harpstrings, and as ready to vibrate at a touch. I just didn’t know whose. I stared at the syringe in her hand: long, thin, black, the fluid hidden inside. What color was it? That fluid had already gone into Lizzie, into Billy, into Annie.

  I whispered, before I knew I was going to, “But I’m a donkey—”

  Miranda said, “I have already been injected myself. Months ago. This is not an untested procedure.”

  She had missed completely what I had meant. It lay outside her range of vision. Apparently, then, some things did. I said, “You’re so—” without knowing how I was going to finish the sentence.

  “We don’t have much time. Lower your head, please, Dr. Turner.”

  I blurted out—this is to my everlasting shame, it was so inane, and at such a moment—“I’m not really a licensed doctor!”

  For the first time, she smiled. “Neither am I, Diana.”

  “Why don’t we have much time? What’s going to happen? I’m not sick yet, you’re going to alter my entire biochemistry, let me at least think a moment—”

  A screen suddenly appeared on the wall. Even though this—unlike the door—was certainly a normal technology, I nonetheless jumped as if an angel had appeared with flaming sword. But the angel was in front of me, staring at the screen as if in pain, and the sword trembled in her hand, and I was going to die not because I’d eaten of this particular genetically-engineered apple, but because I didn’t.

  She didn’t give me a choice. The screen showed a plane landing where no plane should have been able to land, a folded thing setting straight down like a rotorless coptor but far more precisely than any coptor, on the same small flat patch of ground between stream and mountain where I had screamed for Eden to open. The same naked birch tree, shivering white. The same tattered oak. I raised my head to stare at the four men climbing out of the unfolded cylinder of the government plane, and Miranda pushed the syringe into my neck. With her other hand on my shoulder, she held me still while the fluid drained.

  She was very strong.

  Somehow, that one fact cleared my head, which just shows how crazed was the whole situation. I said, almost as if we were coconspirators, “They can’t get in, can they? They couldn’t even find it before, they blew up the wrong installation. They must have followed us here, Billy and Annie and Lizzie and me—oh, I’m sorry, Miranda—”

  She wasn’t listening. To my complete shock—it was the weirdest thing that had happened yet, because after all, I’d known about the Cell Cleaner, I’d seen her explain it in Washington—to my utter shock, tears glittered in her eyes. She circled the fingers of her right hand around her left. Covering the ring.

  A fifth man was helped out of the plane, and into a powerchair someone else swiftly unfolded. I saw with yet another shock that it was Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer.

  He put his hand on the birch tree. I didn’t know—and never found out—if it was to steady himself, or if it was part of the entry procedure, an activator or a skin-recognition system or just a failsafe of some unimaginable kind. Then he spoke a series of words, very clear, in that famous voice. The door above our heads opened.

  Miranda made no effort to stop him, if she could have. Of course she could have. There must have been shields, counter-shields, something. They were SuperSleepless.

  The four GSEA agents came down the stairs as if this were a root cellar in Kansas. They had drawn their guns, which filled me with sudden contempt. Drew Arlen stayed outside.

  “Miranda Sharifi, you are under arrest for violations of the Genetic Standards Act, Sections 12 through 34, which state—”

  She completely ignored them. She pushed past the four men as if they weren’t there, a sudden fire glowing around her that had to be some sort of electrified personal shield. One of the agents reached for her, cried out, and cradled his burned hand, his face distorted by pain. The agent blocking the steps hesitated. I saw him think for half a second about firing, and then change his mind. I could almost see the report later: “Civilians were present, making it inadvisable to—�
� Or maybe they realized that whoever officially killed Miranda Sharifi was dead himself careerwise, forever, a scapegoat. The agent moved off the steps.

  Miranda ascended them slowly, heavily, the tears sparkling in her dark eyes. Three of the agents followed. After a stunned moment I bolted after them.

  Drew Arlen sat in the cold November woods in a powerchair. Miranda faced him. A slight wind shook the oak tree, and the dead leaves rattled. A few fell.

  “Why, Drew?”

  “Miri—you don’t have the right to choose for 175 million people. Not in a democracy. Not without any checks and balances. Leisha said—”

  “Kenzo Yagai did. He chose. He created cheap energy, and changed the world for the better.”

  “You could have stopped the duragem dissembler. And didn’t. People died, Miranda!”

  “Not as many as if we had stopped it. Not in the long run.”

  “That wasn’t your reason! You just wanted control of the situation! You Supers, who don’t ever have to die!”

  There was a noise behind me. I didn’t turn around. What I was looking at was more important than any noise. The questions Drew and Miranda hurled at each other were the same public question I had struggled with ever since I’d seen the Cell Cleaner in Washington: Who should control radical technology? Only they were making of it a private weapon, as lovers can make private weapons of anything. Who should control technology…

  And—make no mistake—technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.

  The GSEA had hoped to keep radical tech from falling into the wrong hands. But Huevos Verdes was the right hands: the hands that used nanotech to strengthen human beings, not destroy them. That was what the GSEA could not admit. It wasn’t their place to judge, they claimed; they only carried out the law. Maybe they were right.

  But somebody, somewhere, sometime, had to judge, or we’d end up with pure Darwinian jungle, red in byte and assembler.

  Huevos Verdes had judged. And I, by not summoning the GSEA a second time, along with them. And there was no clear way to know whether either of us was right.

  All this I realized, with that peculiar clarity that comes in bodily crisis, as I watched Drew Arlen and Miranda Sharifi tear each other apart in the cold woods.

  He said, “You don’t have the right to carry out this project. You never did. No more than Jimmy Hubbley—”

  She said, “It was supposed to be ‘we,’ not ‘you.’ You were part of this.”

  “Not any more.”

  “Because you fell into the hands of some scientific crazies. God, Drew, to equate Jimmy Hubbley with us—”

  “So you did know about him. And left me there all these months.”

  “No! We knew about the counterrevolution, but not specifically where you were—”

  “I don’t believe you. You could have found me. You Supers can do anything, can’t you?”

  “You think I’m lying to you—”

  “Yes,” Drew said. “I think you’re lying.”

  “But I’m not. Drew—” It was a cry of pure anguish. I couldn’t look at her face.

  “You could have stopped the duragem dissembler, too, couldn’t you? You knew it came from the underground. But you let it encourage social breakdown because that prepared the way better for the project. For your plans. Isn’t that true, Miranda?”

  “Yes. We could have stopped the dissembler.”

  “And you didn’t tell me.”

  “We were afraid—” She stopped.

  “Afraid of what? That I’d tell Leisha? The newsgrids? The GSEA?”

  She said, more quietly, “Which is just what you did. The first chance you got. We did look for you, Drew, but we’re not omnipotent. There was no way of knowing which bunker, where…And meanwhile you did exactly what Jon and Nick and Christy said you would—betray the project to the GSEA.”

  “Because I started to think for myself. Again. Finally. And that’s not what Supers want, is it? You want to think for all of us, and us to obey you, without question. Because you always know best, don’t you? God, Miranda, aren’t you ever wrong?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was wrong about you.”

  “That won’t be a problem for you any longer.”

  She cried, “You said you loved me!”

  “Not any more.”

  They went on looking at each other. Drew’s face I couldn’t read. Miranda’s had turned stony, her tears gone. Her eyes were lasers.

  She said, “I loved you. And you couldn’t stand being inferior. That’s what your betrayal to the GSEA is really about. Jon was right. You can’t ever really understand. Anything.”

  Drew didn’t answer. The wind picked up, smelling of cold water. More leaves blew off the oak. The birch tree shuddered. There was more noise behind me. I didn’t turn around.

  A GSEA agent said, “I arrest you, Miranda Sharifi, for violations of the—”

  She cried out, just as if the agent hadn’t spoken, “I can’t help it that I know more and think better than you, Drew! I can’t help what I am!”

  He said, his voice unsteady but angry, the way men are when they know they look weak, “Who should control the technology—”

  “Shit!” someone called. I turned. Billy sat dazed on the ground, holding his chest. The noise had been him and Annie, pulling the unconscious Lizzie up from the underground bunker, which they didn’t understand and must have feared. Or maybe Annie had pulled Lizzie up the steps, and the agent with the burned hand had helped Billy. The agent stood there beside the old man, looking dazed. But there was nothing dazed about Billy. He sat in the frozen mud, an old man with a body about to be the most biologically efficient machine on the planet, and I saw that he, too, knew what he was looking at. Billy Washington, the Liver. His wrinkled old-man’s gaze moved from Drew to Miranda—the latter, I saw, with adoration—then back to Drew again, then to Miranda. “Shit,” he said again, and there were layers and layers in his tone, unsortable.

  “You’re fighting, you, about who should control this technology—but don’t you see, it don’t matter who should control it, them? It only matters who can?” And he put his gnarled, grateful, hand on the crumpled sleeping form of Lizzie, lying in the mud, her small face peaceful and cool and damp as her lethal fever broke.

  Sixteen

  DIANA COVINGTON: ALBANY

  There was nothing to confiscate for evidence. More planes came, and Drew used the codes that made the door appear in the far wall of the bunker. I contrived to be present for this. Security was chaotic, except for Miranda Sharifi, electrocuffed to the birch tree, whom agents watched as if they expected an anti-grav heavenly ascension, tree and all. Maybe they did. But Miranda allowed herself to be captured. And everybody understood that’s what happened: she allowed it.

  But nobody, including me, understood why.

  Behind the bunker door lay nothing. Even the sterile, fortifying walls that had probably been there were self-consuming by the same nanotechnology that had built them. There were only a series of earth-packed tunnels and caves extending back into the mountain, dangerous to explore without proper equipment because the dirt walls crumbled and threatened to cave in. It was impossible to tell how extensive the caves/tunnels were. It was impossible to tell what had been nano-destroyed in them, or removed from them before their collapse. Miri, they’re on the way—Miri, you can’t—

  I looked for the slim black syringes that had injected the four of us, but all I saw was smudges of melted black, like metallic candle wax, on the floor at the bottom of the steps where Lizzie and Billy had lain.

  There was more. And it happened, incredibly, almost as an afterthought.

  But first one of the agents arrested me. “Diana Arlene Covington, you are under arrest for violations of the United States Code, Title 18, Sections 1510, 2381, and 2383.”

  Obstruction of criminal investigations. Assisting rebellion or insurrection. Treason. I was, after all, supposed to be a
GSEA agent.

  Miranda watched me intently from her birch tree. Too intently. Drew had gone into the plane. We awaited a second plane, either for more space or more security. With a sudden feint that surprised the agent, I ducked around him and sprinted toward Miranda.

  “Hey!”

  She had time to say to me only, “More in the syringe—” before the outraged agent had me again and dragged me grimly into the plane. His grip bruised my arms.

  I barely noticed. More in the syringe—

  The whole extent of the project, she had said to Drew Arlen.

  So not just the Cell Cleaner, which was staggering enough. Not just that. Something else.

  Some other biological technology: radical, unexpected. Unimaginable.

  Something more.

  Huevos Verdes had not needed to set up this elaborate underground lab to perfect or test the Cell Cleaner. They had already done that, openly, before the Science Court hearing last fall.

  Huevos Verdes had expected to lose their case in front of the Science Court. That had been clear at the time, to nearly everybody. What had not been clear was why they were presenting the case at all, given the foregone conclusion. It was because Miranda wanted the moral reassurance that all legitimate paths for this larger project were closed, before she completed her stroll down illegitimate paths at East Oleanta.

  How much did the agent know? The GSEA top brass, of course, would know everything. Arlen would have told them.

  This intellectual speculation lasted only a moment. It was replaced almost instantly with a freezing fear, the kind that doesn’t melt your bones but stiffens them, so it seems you won’t ever move, or breathe, again.

  Whatever bioengineering project Huevos Verdes had been built for, the charade of the Science Court had been staged for, Drew Arlen had performed concerts for, the duragem dissembler had not been stopped for—whatever bioengineering project had occupied all of the SuperSleepless’s unfathomable energies—whatever that bioengineering project was, I had been injected with it. It was in my body. In me. Becoming me.

  You don’t have the right to choose for 175 million people. Not in a democracy. Not without any checks and balances—