Beggars and Choosers

by Nancy Kress

  Kenzo Yagai did.

  I swayed against the metal bulkhead, then caught myself. My fingers were faintly blue with cold. The nail on the middle finger had broken. The flesh was smooth except for one tiny cut on the index finger. Mud, now dried, made a long arc from wrist to nails. My hand. Alien.

  I said aloud to Miranda, “What was it?”

  In my mind she turned her misshapen head to look at me. Tears, which still didn’t fall, brightened her eyes. She said, “Only for your good.”

  “By whose definition!”

  Her expression didn’t change. “Mine.”

  I went on staring at her. Then she dissolved, because of course she was an illusion, born of shock. She wasn’t really inside my head. She couldn’t ever be inside my head. It was way too small.

  The plane lifted, and I was transported to Albany to be arraigned in a court of law.

  Billy, Annie, Lizzie, and I were taken to the Jonas Salk United States Research Hospital in Albany, a heavily shielded edifice conspicuous for security ’bots. I was led down a different corridor. I craned my neck to keep Lizzie’s gurney in sight as long as I could.

  In a windowless room Colin Kowalski waited for me, with a man I recognized instantly. Kenneth Emile Koehler, director, Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency. Colin said nothing. I saw that he never would; he was too outranked, included only because he had had the bad judgment to hire me, the wildcat agent who could have led the GSEA to Miranda Sharifi before Drew Arlen did, and hence just as much an official quisling. But, of course, for the other side. Colin was in disgrace. Arlen was probably a hero who had belatedly but righteously seen the light. I was under arrest for treason. One loser, one winner, one who doesn’t know how to play the game.

  “All right, Diana,” Kenneth Emile Koehler said: a bad beginning. I’d been reduced to a first name. Like a ’bot. “Tell us what happened.”

  “Everything?”

  “From the beginning.”

  The recorders were on. Drew Arlen had undoubtedly spilled his brain cells already. And I myself could think of no reason not to tell the truth: Something bioengineered had been injected into my veins. More in the syringe—

  But I didn’t want to start there. I felt instead an overwhelming desire to begin at the beginning, with Stephanie Brunell and her illegal genemod pink poodle hurtling itself over my terrace railing. I needed to tell it all, every last action and decision and intellectual argument that had brought me from disgust at illegal bioengineering to championing it. I wanted to explain clearly to myself as well as to these men exactly what I had done, and why, and what it meant, because that was the only way I would fully understand it myself.

  That was the moment I realized the GSEA had already gotten a truth drug into me. Which was, of course, a completely illegal violation of the Fifth Amendment, a fact too insignificant to even comment on. I didn’t comment on it. Instead I gazed at Koehler and Kowalski and the others who had suddenly appeared and then, wrapped in the glow of absolute truth and in the tender and selfless desire to share it, I talked on and on and on.

  Seventeen

  DREW ARLEN: WASHINGTON

  There were human guards, robot guards, guard shields. But it was the human guards I noticed. Techs, mostly, although at least one was donkey. I noticed them because there were so many. Miranda had more human guards than the entire population of Huevos Verdes, even including the Sleepless hangers-on like Kevin Baker’s grandchildren. She awaited her trial in a different prison from her grandmother, whose treason conviction was ancient history now. Jennifer probably had fewer guards.

  “Put your eye directly up to the ’scope, sir,” one of them said. He wore the drab blue prison uniform, cut like jacks but not jacks. I let my retina be scanned. Huevos Verdes had passed this level of identification ten years ago.

  “You, too, ma’am.”

  Carmela Clemente-Rice stepped closer to the scope. When she stepped back, I felt her hand on my shoulder, cool and reassuring. I felt her in my mind as a series of perfectly balanced interlocking ovals.

  I felt the prison as hot blue confusion. Mine.

  “This way, please. Watch the steps, sir.”

  They evidently didn’t see too many powerchairs here. Inanely, I wondered why. My chair skimmed down the steps.

  The warden’s office showed no signs of security or surveillance, which meant there was plenty of both. It was a large room, furnished in the currently popular donkey style, simple straight-lined tables of teak or rosewood combined with some fancy antique chairs with cloth seats and carved arms. I didn’t know what period they were from.

  Miranda would have known.

  The warden didn’t rise as Carmela and I were shown in. He was donkey to his blond hair roots. Tall, blue-eyed, heavily muscled, a genemod re-creation of a Viking chief by parents with more money than imagination. He spoke directly to Carmela, ignoring me.

  “I’m afraid, Dr. Clemente-Rice, that you are unable to see the prisoner after all.”

  Carmela’s voice remained serene, with steel. “You’re mistaken, Mr. Castner. Mr. Arlen and I have clearance from the Attorney General herself to see Ms. Sharifi. You’ve received both terminal and hard copy notification. And I have copies of the paperwork with me.”

  “I already received this notification from Justice, doctor.”

  Carmela’s expression didn’t change. She waited. The warden leaned back in his antique chair, hands laced behind his head, eyes hostile and amused. He waited, too.

  Carmela was better at it.

  Finally he repeated, “Neither of you can see the prisoner, despite what Justice says.”

  Carmela said nothing.

  Slowly his amused look vanished. She wasn’t going to either ask or beg. “You can’t see the prisoner because the prisoner doesn’t choose to see you.”

  I blurted, despite myself, “At all?”

  “At all, Mr. Arlen. She refuses to see either of you.” He leaned back in his chair even farther, unlacing his hands, his blue eyes small in his handsome face.

  Maybe I should have expected it. I had not. I laid my hands, palms flat, on his desk.

  “Tell her…tell her just that I…tell her…”

  “Drew,” Carmela said softly.

  I pulled myself together. I hated that the smirking bastard had seen me stammer. Supercilious donkey prick…In that moment I hated him as much as I had hated Jimmy Hubbley, as much as I had hated Peg, that poor ignorant hopeless slob pathetically trying to measure up to Jimmy Hubbley…I can’t help it that I know more and think better than you do, Drew! I can’t help what I am!

  I turned the powerchair abruptly and moved toward the door. After a moment I felt Carmela follow me. Warden Castner’s voice stopped us both.

  “Ms. Sharifi did leave a package for you, Mr. Arlen.”

  A package. A letter. A chance to write back, to explain to her what I’d done and why I’d done it.

  I didn’t want to open the package in front of Castner. But I might need to make arrangements to answer her letter, now, here, and the letter might have some clue to that…It had taken Carmela three weeks to get us this far. A direct favor from the Attorney General. Besides, Castner had undoubtedly already read whatever Miranda had to say. Hell, entire computer-expert security teams had undoubtedly analyzed her words for code, for hidden nanotech, for symbolic meaning. I turned my back to Castner and ripped open the slightly padded envelope.

  What if she’d written words too hard for me to read—

  But there were no words. Only the ring I’d given her twelve years ago, a slim gold band set with rubies. I stared at it until the ring blurred and only its image filled my empty mind.

  “Is there an answer?” Castner said, his voice smooth. He’d scented blood.

  “No,” I said. “No answer.” I went on looking at the ring.

  You said you loved me!

  Not any more.

  Carmela had her back to me, giving me the illusion of privacy. Castner stared, smiling
faintly.

  I put the ring in my pocket. We left the federal prison. Now there were no shapes in my mind, nothing. The dark lattice, that had dissolved in Jimmy Hubbley’s underground bunker to show me my own hemmed-in isolation, had never reappeared. I was no longer sealed in by Huevos Verdes. But Miranda was gone. Leisha was gone. Carmela was there, but I didn’t feel her in my mind, didn’t even really see her.

  I was alone.

  We went back through the security system and out of the prison, into the cold bright Washington sunlight.

  Eighteen

  DIANA COVINGTON: ALBANY

  I blinked and shut my eyes against the glare of a wall that seemed excessively white. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was, or who I was. This information returned. I sat up, too quickly. Blood rushed from my head and the room swirled.

  “Are you all right?”

  A pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman, with a thick body and deep lines from nose to mouth. Minimally genemod, if at all, but not a Liver. She wore a security uniform. She was armed.

  I said, “What day is it?”

  “December tenth. You’ve been here thirty-four days.” She spoke to the wall. “Dr. Hewitt, Ms. Covington is back.”

  Back. Where had I been? Never mind, I knew. I sat on a white hospital bed in a white hospital room thick with medical and surveillance equipment. Under the disposable white gown my arms and legs and abdomen were covered with small clear globs of blood-clotter. Somebody had been taking many many samples.

  “Lizzie? Billy? The Livers who came in with me, there were three of them…”

  “Dr. Hewitt will be here in a minute.”

  “Lizzie, the little girl, was sick, is she—”

  “Dr. Hewitt will be here in a minute.”

  He was, with Kenneth Emile Koehler. Immediately my head cleared.

  “All right, Dr. Hewitt. What did Huevos Verdes do to me?”

  My directness seemed expected. Why not? We’d spent thirty-four days in intimate communion, none of which I could remember. He said, “They injected you with several different kinds of nanotechnology. Some are built from bioengineered organisms, primarily viruses. Some apparently are completely machines, created one atom at a time, that have lodged in your cells. Most seem self-replicating. Some, we guess, are clocked for replication. We have everything under study, trying to determine the exact nature of—”

  “What do the machines do? What’s been changed in my body?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “You don’t know?” I heard my own shrillness. I didn’t care.

  “Not completely.”

  “Lizzie Francy? Billy Washington? Lizzie was sick—”

  “A part of the injection you received is the Cell Cleaner mechanism, as you already know. But the rest…” A strange look passed over Hewitt’s face, resentful and yearning. I didn’t want to pursue this look. I was in a sudden frenzy, the kind that makes you think you can’t live through the next five minutes without hearing information that you know you will reject in the five minutes after that.

  “Doctor—what do you think this fucking injection will do?”

  His face closed. “We don’t know.”

  “But you must know something—”

  A ’bot rolled through the door. It was table-shaped, with an unnecessary grille suggesting a smiling face. On its surface was a covered tray. “Lunch for Room 612,” the ’bot said pleasantly. I smelled chicken, rice—the real thing, not soysynth, foods I hadn’t tasted for months. Suddenly I was ravenous.

  Everybody watched me eat. They watched with peculiar intensity. I didn’t care. Chicken juices trickled down my chin; rice grains fell from my lips. My teeth tingled with the thick sweetness of ripping meat. Fresh sweet peas, spiced applesauce. I was greedy for food, consumed by what I was consuming. No amount could be enough.

  When I had finished, I lay back on the pillows, curiously exhausted. Hewitt and Koehler wore identical expressions, and I couldn’t read either of them. There was a long, pregnant silence—pointlessly so, it seemed to me.

  I said, “So now what? When am I going to be arraigned?”

  “Not necessary,” Koehler said. His face was still inscrutable. “You’re free to leave.”

  My sudden exhaustion just as suddenly departed. This was not how the system worked.

  “I’m under arrest for obstructing justice, conspiring to overthrow—”

  “Charges have been dropped.” Hewitt this time. It was as if they’d switched roles. Or as if roles no longer mattered. I lay there, thinking about this.

  I said slowly, “Let me have a newsholo.”

  Koehler repeated Hewitt’s line, tonelessly, “You’re free to go.”

  I swung my feet over the sides of the bed. The hospital gown tented shapelessly around me. In big moments, small things matter: the world’s way of keeping us petty. I demanded, “Where are my clothes?” Just as if I wanted the muddy cheap jacks and parka I’d worn to the hospital.

  There would be body monitors, of course. Subepidermal homers, radioactive blood markers, who knew what else. I’d never find them.

  A ’bot brought me my clothes. I put them on, not caring that the men watched. The usual rules did not apply.

  “Lizzie? Billy?”

  “They left two days ago. The child is recovered.”

  “Where did they go?”

  Koehler said, “We do not have that information.” He was lying. His information was closed to me. I was off the government net.

  I walked out of the room, expecting to be stopped in the corridor, at the elevator, in the lobby. I walked out the front door. There was absolutely nobody around: nobody crossing from the parking lot, nobody hurrying in to visit a brother or wife or business partner. A ’bot groomed the spring grass, which to my East Oleanta eyes looked aggressively genemod green. The air was soft and warm. Spring sunlight slanted over it, making long late-afternoon shadows. A cherry tree bloomed with fragrant pink flowers. My parka was far too heavy; I took it off and dropped it on the sidewalk.

  I walked the length of the building, wondering what I was going to do next. I was genuinely curious, in a detached way that should have alerted me to how quietly and numbly crazed I actually was. Reality could only interest me, not surprise me. Even the interest was precarious. The next step would have been catatonia.

  I reached the corner of the building and turned it. A shuttle bus sat there, compact, green as the engineered grass. The door was open. I climbed in.

  The bus said, “Credit, please.”

  My hands fumbled in the pocket of my jacks. There was a credit chip there: not a Liver meal chip, but donkey credit. I pushed it into the slot. The shuttle said, “Thank you.”

  “What name is on that chip?”

  “You have exceeded this unit’s language capacity. Destination, please? Civic Plaza, Hotel Scheherazade, Ioto Hotel, Central Gravrail Station, or Excelsior Square?”

  “Central Gravrail Station.”

  The shuttle doors closed.

  There were people in the station, Livers dressed in bright jacks and a few government donkeys; this was Albany, the state capital. Everybody seemed in a hurry. I walked into the Governor John Thomas Lividini Central Gravrail Café. Three men huddled at a corner table, talking intently. The foodbelt had stopped. The hologrid showed a scooter race, and none of the men looked up when I changed it to a donkey news channel.

  “—continues to spread in the midwestern and southern states. Because the engineered virus can be carried by so many different species of animals and birds, the Centers for Disease Control recommend avoidance of all contact with wildlife. Since the plague is also highly contagious among humans—”

  I switched channels.

  “—strict embargo on all physical trade, travelers, mail, or other entrance of any object whatsoever into France from North America. As with other nations, French fear of contamination has led to an hysteria that—”

  I switched channels.

&
nbsp; “—apparently ended. Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have issued a statement that the duragem dissembler’s clocked nanomechanisms have not run their programmed course, but rather have failed over time because of faulty understanding of the complex scope of their construction. Department of Engineering Chairman Myron Aaron White spoke with us at his office in the—”

  I switched channels.

  “—chronic food shortages. The situation, however, is expected to ease now that the so-called duragem dissembler crisis has slowed, apparently due to—”

  I watched for an hour. Famine was easing; famine was increasing. The engineered plague was spreading; the engineered plague had been checked. The rest of the world had been infected by American goods and travelers; the rest of the world showed only minor signs of either duragem contamination or the “wildlife plague.” There was less breakdown from the duragem dissemblers; there was more breakdown in some areas, but scientists were close to a solution to the problem, which was actually difficult to understand because of the advanced nature of the science, for which experts were on the verge of a major breakthrough. Albany was Albany.

  But not once was an underground organization of nanotech saboteurs mentioned. Not once was the overground organization of Huevos Verdes mentioned. The SuperSleepless might not have existed. Nor Miranda Sharifi.

  I walked over to the table of men in the corner. They looked up, not smiling. I wore purple jacks and genemod eyes. I didn’t even feel to see if there was a personal shield on my belt. There would be. Koehler wanted me alive; I was an expensive walking laboratory.

  “You men know, you, where I can get to Eden?”

  Two faces remained hostile. On the third, the youngest, the eyes flickered and the mouth softened at the corners. I spoke to him.

  “I’m sick, me. I think I got it.”

  “Harry—she’s genemod, her,” the oldest man said. Nothing in his voice showed fear of infection.

  “She’s sick,” Harry said. His voice was older than his face.

  “You don’t know who—”