Beggars and Choosers

by Nancy Kress

  When it rained, we put up the tents, us, and waited it out. We weren’t in no hurry. Getting there would take as long as it took.

  But Annie was right. Nobody had no plan, them. Miranda Sharifi, who gave us back our lives, sat there in Oak Mountain, and nobody had the foggiest idea, them, how we were supposed to get her out.

  I never saw, me, other donkeys beside Vicki, who laid pretty low. A few times strangers gave her dirty looks, them, but me and Ben Radisson and Carl Jones from East Oleanta sort of stood up, us, near her, and there wasn’t no trouble. Some other people didn’t even seem to realize, them, that Vicki was a donkey. Since the syringes, a lot more women got bodies, them, almost good enough to be genemod. Almost. I told Vicki, me, to keep her sun hat pulled low enough to shade them violet genemod eyes.

  Then we came, us, to some town with a HT in the café. Vicki insisted, her, on watching one whole afternoon of donkey newsgrids. Lizzie sat with her. So did me and Ben and Carl, just to be safe.

  That night, around our campfire, Vicki sat slumped over, her, more depressed than before.

  There was her, me, Annie, Lizzie, and Brad. Brad was a kid, him, who joined us a week ago. He spent a lot of time, him, bent over a terminal close to Lizzie. Annie didn’t like it, her. I didn’t like it neither. Lizzie’s body was feeding on her dress faster than mine or Annie’s, the way the young bodies did, them. Her little breasts were half hanging out, all rosy in the soft firelight. I could see she didn’t care, her. I could see Brad did. There wasn’t a damn thing Annie or I could do.

  Lizzie said, “The Carnegie-Mellon Enclave hasn’t lowered its shield once. Not once, in nine months. They have to be out of food completely, which means they have to have used the syringes.”

  She didn’t even talk, her, like us anymore. She talks like her terminal.

  Annie said sharply, “So? Donkeys can use syringes. Miranda said so, her. Just so long as they stay, them behind their shields, and leave us alone.”

  Vicki said sharply, “You didn’t want them to leave you alone when they were providing everything you needed. You were the one, in fact, who had the most reverence for authority. ‘Give us this day our daily bread…’”

  “Don’t blaspheme, you!”

  “Now, Annie,” I said, “Vicki don’t mean nothing, her. She just wants—”

  “She just wants you to stop apologizing for her, Billy,” Vicki said coldly. “I can apologize myself for my outworn caste.” She got up, her, and walked off into the darkness.

  “Can’t you stop bothering her?” Lizzie said furiously to her mother. “After all she’s done for us!” She jumped up and followed Vicki.

  Brad looked helplessly after her, him. He stood up, sat down, half got up again. I took pity, me. “Don’t do it, son. They’re better off, them, alone for a while.”

  The boy looked at me gratefully, him, and went back to his everlasting terminal.

  “Annie…” I said, as gently as I could.

  “Something’s wrong with that woman, her. She’s jumpy as a cat.”

  So was Annie. I didn’t say so, me. Their jumpiness wasn’t the same kind. Annie was thinking, her, about Lizzie, just like she’d always been. But Vicki was thinking, her, about a whole country. Just like donkeys always did.

  And if they didn’t, them, who would?

  I thought, me, about Livers not needing donkeys no more, and donkeys hiding behind their shields from Livers. I thought about all the fighting and killing we’d watched, us, that afternoon on the newsgrids. I thought about the man who’d called donkeys “abominations” and said the syringes was from God. The man who said he’d got the Will and the Idea.

  I got up, me, to go look for Vicki and make sure she was all right.

  Twenty-one

  VICTORIA TURNER: WEST VIRGINIA

  They don’t understand. None of them. Livers are still Livers, despite the staggering everything that’s happened, and there’s a limit to what you can expect.

  I walked toward West Virginia wearing my new legal name and my rapidly decaying dress, full of health and doom. Where was Huevos Verdes in all this? Miranda Sharifi had been tried under the most spectacular security known to man, and the press from thirty-four countries had waited breathlessly for the Lancelotian high-tech rescue, the snatching from the legal fire, that had never materialized. Miranda herself had said not one word throughout the trial. Not one, not even on the stand, under oath. She had, of course, been found in contempt, and the crowds of Livers outside—syringed, all—had raised enough un-Liver-like howls to compensate for the silence of ten sacrificial lambs. But not for Huevos Verdes’s silence. No rescue. No defense, to speak of. Nada, unless you count syringes raining from the sky, pushing up from the earth, appearing like alchemy out of the very stones and fields and pavements of the country the Supers were utterly, silently, invisibly transforming.

  Drew Arlen had testified. He’d described the illegal Huevos Verdes genemod experiments in East Oleanta, in Colorado, in Florida. The last two labs were apparently only backup locations to East Oleanta and Huevos Verdes, but Jesus Christ, there were only twenty-seven Supers. How in hell had they staffed four locations?

  They weren’t like us.

  That became clearer and clearer, as the trial progressed. It became clear, too, that Arlen was like us: stumbling around in the same swamp of good intentions, moral uncertainties, limited understanding, personal passions, and government restrictions about what he could or could not say on the stand.

  “That information is classified,” became his monotonous response to Miranda Sharifi’s defense attorney, who was surely the most frustrated man on the planet. Arlen sat in his powerchair, his aging Liver face expressionless. “Where were you, Mr. Arlen, between August 28 and November 3?” “That information is classified.” “With whom did you discuss the alleged activities of Ms. Sharifi in Upstate New York?” “That information is classified.” “Please describe the events that led to your decision to notify the GSEA about Huevos Verdes.” “That information is classified.”

  Just like wartime.

  But not my war. I had been declared a noncombatant, removed lock and stock and retina print from any but the most public databases, in perpetuity. Three times over the last year I had been picked up, transported to Albany, and knocked out, while biomonitors gave up their secrets to scientists who, most probably, had by now syringed themselves with the same thing. The results of the biomonitoring were not shared with me. I was a government outcast.

  So why did I even care that the United States, qua United States, was on the verge of nonexistence, the first nationalistic snuff job brought about by making government itself obsolete? Why should I care?

  I don’t know. But I did. Call me a fool. Call me a romantic. Call me stubborn. Call me a deliberate, self-created anachronism.

  Call me a patriot.

  “Billy,” I said as we trudged along the endless gravrail track in the high rolling hills of Pennsylvania, “are you still an American?”

  He gave me a Billy-look, which is to say intelligent without the remotest glimmer of vocabular understanding. “Me? Yes.”

  “Will you be an American if you are killed by some fanatic last-ditch legalistic donkey defense at Oak Mountain?”

  He took a minute to sort this out. “Yes.”

  “Will you still be an American if you’re killed by some attack by a purist Liver-government underground that thinks you’ve sold out to the genetic enemy?”

  “I ain’t going, me, to be killed by no other Livers.”

  “But if you were, would you die an American?”

  He was losing patience. His old eyes with the young energy roamed over our fellow walkers, looking for Annie. “Yes.”

  “Would you still be an American if there is no America, no central government left and nobody to administer it if there were, the Constitution forgotten, the donkeys wiped out by some fanatic revolutionary underground, and Miranda Sharifi rotting in a prison run exclusively by ’bots?”<
br />
  “Vicki, you think too much, you,” Billy said. He turned his concern on me, that agápé concern off which I’d been living, out of caste, for so long. It didn’t help. “Think about whether we’re going to stay alive, us—that makes sense. But you can’t take on the whole damn country, you.”

  “The human mind, Charles Lamb once remarked, can fall in love with anything. Call me a patriot, Billy. Don’t you still believe in patriotism, Billy?”

  “I—”

  “Besides, I once saw a genemod dog fall to its death off a balcony.” But Billy suddenly spotted Annie. He smiled at me and moved off to walk by his beloved, whose dress, despite her best efforts, was being consumed by her big-breasted body. She looked like a pastoral goddess, utterly unaware that the industrial revolution has begun and the looms are clacking like gunfire.

  We reached Oak Mountain July 14, which only I found funny, or even notable. There were already ten thousand people there, by generous estimate. They ringed the flat land around the prison and spread up the sides of the surrounding mountains. Brush had been cleared for feeding for miles around, although the trees remained for shade. No one was on solid food; there was little shit. Tents in the wild colors of Before jacks dotted the grounds: turquoise, marigold, crimson, kelly green. At night, there were the usual campfires or Y-energy cones.

  World War I lost more soldiers to disease, the result of being messed together in unsanitary conditions, than to guns. At the siege of Dunmar, they had eaten the rats, and then each other. During the Brazilian Action, the damage to the rain forest was greater than the damage to the combatants as high tech destroyed everything it touched. Never again, none of it.

  Did history still apply? Human history?

  Billy was right. I thought too much. Concentrate on staying alive.

  “Put more dirt on your face,” Lizzie said, peering at me critically. This seemed superfluous; everyone was constantly covered in dirt, which had become acceptable. Dirt was clean. Dirt was mother’s milk. I suspected that Miranda and Company had altered our olfactory sense with her magic brew. People did not seem to smell bad to each other.

  “Put more leaves in your hair,” Lizzie said, tipping her head critically to study me. Her pretty face was creased with worry. “There are some weird people here, Vicki. They don’t understand that donkeys can be human, too.”

  Can be. On sufferance. If we join the Livers and give up the institutions by which we controlled the world.

  Lizzie’s lip quivered. “If anything happened to you…”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I said, not believing it for half a minute. Too much already had. But I hugged her, this daughter slipping rapidly away from both Annie and me, who nonetheless fought over her just as if she weren’t already a different species. Lizzie was almost completely naked now, her “dress” reduced to a few courtesy rags. Unselfconsciously naked. There were thirteen-year-olds in this camp who were just as unself-consciously pregnant. No problem. Their bodies would take care of it. They anticipated no danger in childbirth, had no fears about supporting a baby, counted on plenty of people around all the time to help care for these casual offspring. It was no big deal. The pregnant children were serene.

  “Just be careful,” Lizzie said.

  “You be careful,” I retorted, but of course she only smiled at this.

  That night the first holo appeared in the sky.

  It appeared to be centered above the prison itself. Eighty feet up and at least fifty feet tall—it was hard to judge from the ground—it was clearly visible for miles. The laser lighting was intricate and brilliant. It was around ten o’clock, dark enough even in summer for the holo to dominate even a nearly full moon. It consisted of a red-and-blue double helix bathed in a holy white light, like some biological Caravaggio. Below it letters pulsed and flashed:

  DEATH TO NON-HUMANS

  WILL AND IDEA

  People screamed. In a year, they had apparently forgotten how ubiquitous political holes used to be.

  Death to non-humans. Cold seeped along my spine, starting in the small of my back and traveling upwards.

  “Who’s making that holo them?” a nearby man called indignantly. There was a frenzied babble of answers: the government, the food franchises nobody needed anymore, the military. The donkeys, the donkeys, the donkeys…

  I didn’t hear anyone say, “The underground, them.” Did that mean there were no members of it present, not even informers? There must be informers; every war had them.

  Informers would have to fit in, which meant they’d have to be syringed. Did that mean they, too, were non-humans? Who exactly qualified as “non-human”?

  I saw Lizzie fighting through the crowd, felt her hands drawing me back into our tent. If she was saying anything, it was lost in the noise. I shrugged off her small insistent hands and stayed where I was.

  The holo continued to flash. Then there was a general surge forward, toward the prison. It didn’t happen all at once; nobody was in danger of being trampled. But people began to move around tents and campfires toward the prison walls. By the garish pulsing light I could see similar movements down the sides of the distant wooded slopes. The Livers were moving to protect Miranda, their chosen icon.

  “Anybody tries, them, to give death to her…”

  “She’s as human, her, as anybody with fancy holos!”

  “Just let them try to get at her…”

  What on earth did they think they could actually do to help her?

  Then the chanting started, first closest to the prison walls and quickly spreading outward, drowning out the more random babble of discussion and protest. By the time I reached the edge of the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, it was strong, rising from thousands of throats: “Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”

  Torches appeared. Within a half hour every human being in miles stood packed by the prison walls, faces grim and yet exalted in that way people get when they’re intent on something outside themselves. Firelight turned some of their homely Liver faces rosy; others were striped red and blue from the flashing holo above us. Free Miranda, Free Miranda, Free Miranda…

  There was no response at all from the silent gray walls.

  They kept it up for an hour, which was the same length of time the holo flashed its message of death to those like Miranda.

  And me.

  And the syringed Livers?

  When the holo finally disappeared, the chanting did, too, almost as if cut off from above. People blinked and looked at each other, a little dazed. They might have been coming off a Drew Arlen lucid dreaming.

  Slowly, without haste, ten thousand people moved away from the prison, back to their tents, spreading out over miles. It took a long time. People moved slowly, subdued, talking softly or not at all. As far as I knew, nobody got pushed or hurt. Once, I would not have believed this possible.

  People sat up very late, huddled around common fires, talking.

  Brad said, “That holo didn’t come from the prison.”

  I’d never thought it did. But I wanted to hear his reasoning. “How do you know?”

  He smiled patiently, the newly fledged techie addressing his illiterate elder. The little prick. I had forgotten more tech than he had yet learned in his belated post-syringe love affair with actual knowledge. He was sixteen. Still, I had no real right to contempt. I hadn’t noticed where the holo originated.

  “Laser holos have feeds,” he said. “You know, those skinny little lines of radiation you can only see kind of sidewise, and only if you’re looking—”

  “Peripheral vision. Yes, I know, Brad. Where were they coming from, if not the prison?”

  “Lizzie and me only studied about them last week.” He put a proprietary hand on Lizzie’s knee. Annie scowled.

  “Where were the feeds coming from, Brad?”

  “At first I hardly noticed them at all. Then I remembered the—”

  “From where, damn it!”

  Startled, he pointed. Hor
izontally, to the top of a not-very-near mountain I couldn’t name. I stared at the mountain, silhouetted in moonlight.

  “I don’t see why you’re yelling at me, you,” Brad said, somewhere between a sulk and a sneer. I ignored him. I hoped Lizzie was losing interest in him. He wasn’t nearly as bright as she was.

  O same new world.

  I stared at the dark nameless mountain. That’s where they were, then. The Will-and-Idea underground, which Drew Arlen had hinted at, and of which Billy had met a member weeks ago. But that man had been syringed. Did that mean you could be syringed, with all its changes to basic biological machinery, and still be considered human by the underground? Or was the man being used as an informer, who would be dealt with for his turncoat treason once the war was over? Such things were not unknown in history.

  This movement had loosed the duragem dissembler. They were killing donkeys. They had successfully hidden Drew Arlen for two months from Huevos Verdes. They armed their soldiers with United States military weapons.

  It was dawn before I slept.

  The next night, the holo was back, but changed.

  The double helix, red and blue in white light, was still there. But this time the flashing letters read:

  DON’T TREAD ON ME

  WILL AND IDEA

  Don’t tread on me? What pseudo-revolutionary group could possibly have the demented idea that a bunch of pastoral dirt-feeding chanters were treading on them? Or even interested in them?

  I had a sudden insight. It wasn’t only that Livers, due to using the syringes, may or may not have become non-human. That alone hadn’t provoked the underground’s hatred. The Liver’s non-interest had. Syringed people not only didn’t pay the established government much attention, most of them were equally uninterested in its would-be replacements. They didn’t need any replacement, or thought they didn’t. And for some people, being hated is preferable to being irrelevant. Any action that provokes response, no matter how irrational, is better than being irrelevant. Even if the response is never enough.