Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  If this humility was a posture, it was a new one. Jackson didn’t trust it, didn’t trust her. He didn’t answer.

  Cazie said, “Should I go after Tess?”

  “No. Give her some time.” But from behind him came Theresa’s soft voice; she must have heard the door slam and crept out.

  “Did they leave?”

  “Yes, pet,” Cazie said. “I’m sorry I brought them here. I didn’t think. They’re real asses. No, not even that—just assholes. Fragments. Partial people.”

  Theresa said eagerly, “But that’s just what I was saying earlier to Jackson! There’s something…not whole about people now. Why, this afternoon Jackson saw—”

  “I can’t discuss a confidential medical case,” Jackson said harshly, although of course he already had. Theresa bit her lip. Cazie smiled, humility already replaced by mockery.

  “A murder, Jack? I can’t think what else they’d need you for that you can’t discuss. A little off your usual practice of the once-monthly accident and the twice-monthly newborn Change?”

  He said evenly. “Don’t needle me, Cazie.”

  “Ah, Jackson darling, why couldn’t you be so assertive when we were married? Although I really do think we’re better off as friends. But Tess, honey”—she turned back to his sister, suddenly kind again, while Jackson was left wanting to hit her, or convince her, or rape her—“you have a point. We donkeys are just coming apart since the Change. Joining Liver cults, or doing brain-deadening neuropharms, or marrying a computer program—did you hear about that? For dependability. ‘Your AI will never leave you.’” She laughed, throwing back her head. The dark curls danced, and her elongated eyes narrowed to slits.

  Theresa said, “Yes, but…but we don’t have to be that way!”

  “Sure we do,” Cazie said. “We’re bred to be forthrightly self-serving, even the best of us. Jackson, did you vote today?”

  He hadn’t. He tried to look condescending.

  “Did you, Tess? Never mind, I know you didn’t. The whole political system is dead, because everyone knows it isn’t where power is anymore. The Change took care of that. The Livers don’t need us, they’re managing quite well in their own lawless little ground-feeding pseudo-enclaves. Or they think they are. Which is, incidentally, why I’m here. We have a crisis.”

  Cazie’s dark eyes sparkled; she loved crises. Theresa looked frightened. Jackson said, “Theresa, did you show Cazie your new bird?”

  “I’ll get him,” Theresa said, and escaped.

  Jackson said, “Who has a crisis?”

  “Us. TenTech. We have a factory break-in.”

  “That’s impossible,” Jackson said. And then, because Cazie usually had her facts straight, “Which factory?”

  “The Willoughby, Pennsylvania, plant. Well, it’s not exactly a break-in yet. But somebody was just outside the Y-shield this afternoon with bioelectric and crystal equipment. The sensors picked them up. If you’d check your business net, Jack, you’d know that. But oh, I forgot—you were out investigating murders.”

  Jackson kept his temper. Cazie had received a third of TenTech in the divorce settlement, since her money had kept the company afloat during the disastrous year when a nanodissembler plague had attacked the ubiquitous alloy duragem, and businesses had died like Livers. He said evenly, “Nobody got inside, did they? Nobody can breach security on a Y-energy shield. At least, not…”

  “Not Livers, you mean, and who else would be out in the wilds of central Pennsylvania? I think you’re probably right. But that’s why we should go have a look. If it’s not Livers, who is it? Kids from Carnegie-Mellon, sharpening their datadipping skills? Industrial espionage by CanCo? SuperSleepless like—gasp!—Miranda Sharifi, obscurely interested in our little family-owned firm? What do you think, Jack? Who’s messing with our factory?”

  “Maybe the biosensors are malfunctioning. Another failure like duragem.”

  “Maybe,” Cazie said. “But I checked around. Nobody else is having sensor failure. Just us. So I think we better go have a look. Okay, Jackson? Tomorrow morning?”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Doing what? You’re not busy—that’s the trouble, none of us are busy enough. Here’s something to do, something that impacts our finances, something with actual substance. Come with me.”

  She smiled at him, full voltage, her long golden eyes full of the sly pleading missing from her brash words. Jackson knew that later, when he lay in bed going over and over this conversation, he wouldn’t be able to re-create the compelling quality of her. Of her eyes, her body language, her tone. He would remember only the words themselves, without grace or subtlety, and so would curse himself for saying yes.

  Cazie laughed. “Nine o’clock, then. I’ll drive. Meanwhile, I’m starving. Oh, Tessie, here you are. What a pretty little genemod bird. Can you talk, cage bird? Can you say ‘social dissolution’?”

  Theresa held up the Y-energy cage and said, “He only sings.”

  “Like most of us,” Cazie said. “Desperate discordant tunes. Jackson, I am hungry. And not for mouth food, either, tonight. I think we should keep Tessie company while she eats, and then you should invite me to dinner in your so-tasteful feeding ground.”

  “I’m going out,” Jackson said quickly. Theresa looked at him in quick surprise, as quickly veiled. He never knew how much she knew, or guessed, about his feelings for Cazie. Theresa was so sensitive to distress; she must intuit that it would be impossible for Jackson to go calmly with Cazie to the dining room, take off most of his clothes, and lie on the nutrient-enriched soil while his Changed body absorbed everything it needed, in perfect proportions, through his feeding tubules. Jackson couldn’t do it. Although the lure was powerful. To lie there under the warm lights, their changing wavelengths carefully selected for a relaxing effect on the mind, to breathe the perfumed air, to turn on one elbow to talk casually to Cazie, to watch Cazie feed, lying on her stomach, her small firm breasts bared to the earth…

  Impossible.

  He waited until his erection had subsided before he stood and stretched with elaborate nonchalance. “Well, people are waiting on me. Good night, Cazie. Theresa, I won’t be late.”

  “Be careful, Jackson,” Theresa said, as she always did, as if there could be any danger inside the Manhattan East Enclave, protected by a Y-shield from even unwanted weather. Theresa had not left the apartment in over a year.

  “Yes, be careful, Jack,” Cazie mocked tenderly, and his heart caught when it seemed he heard regret mixed with the tenderness. But when he turned back, she was fussing again over Theresa’s bird, and didn’t even look at him.

  There was tomorrow.

  Damn tomorrow. It was a business trip, to find out what was going wrong at the Willoughby plant. He owned the damn company—or at least a third of it—he should check the factories’ printouts more, give orders to the AI running it, link with the TenTech chief engineer, check up on problems. He should be more responsible about his and Theresa’s money. He should…

  He should do a lot of things.

  He walked out into the cold November night, which under the dome felt like a warm September night, and tried to think up someplace he might actually want to go to dinner besides home.

  Two

  Lizzie Francy halted on the rough grass of the dark Pennsylvania field and put a warning hand on Vicki Turner’s arm. A cold wind blew. A hundred feet ahead the TenTech Y-energy cone factory loomed in the moonlight, a windowless foamcast rectangle, blank and featureless as a prison.

  “No farther,” Lizzie said. “The security shield starts four feet ahead. See the change in the grass?”

  “Of course not, I can’t see anything,” Vicki said. “How can you?”

  “I was here in daytime,” Lizzie said. “We have to move, a little left…I left a marker. You’re shivering, Vicki—you cold?”

  “I’m freezing. We’re all freezing. That’s the point of this whole illegal nocturnal burglary, isn’t it? God, I must be cra
zy to do this…How far left?”

  “Right here. Don’t go any closer, the infrared detectors will pick us up.”

  “Not me, I’m too cold. I’d register as rock. No, I don’t want your cape, you need it.”

  “I’m not cold,” Lizzie said. She opened a gunny sack and started pulling out equipment.

  “That’s your hormones surging. Pregnancy’s little Y-energy cones. All right, I’ll take the cape…How come your skin doesn’t eat clothes as fast as mine? Or does it just seem that way…Lizzie, baby, don’t get too excited. This isn’t going to work. Nobody, no matter how good a datadipper, can break into a Y-energy factory.”

  “I can,” Lizzie said.

  She grinned at Vicki. Vicki didn’t know. Vicki was smart, was educated, was a donkey, those people who used to run the world. Vicki had given Lizzie her first terminal, and taught her to use it. Lizzie owed Vicki everything. But Vicki didn’t know. Vicki was old, maybe even forty, and she’d grown up before the Change, when everything was different. Lizzie had spent the last five years on datanets, and she knew how good she was. There wasn’t anything she couldn’t dip (except of course Sanctuary, which didn’t count). It was Lizzie’s world now, and she could do anything. She was seventeen.

  The two women unwrapped Lizzie’s equipment from more rough-woven sacking. Crystal library, system terminal, laser transmitter, full-body holosuits. Some of the equipment was jerry-fitted, some was stolen, all was old. Lizzie, her enormous belly pushing out the woven tunic already eaten into holes, worked at fitting the equipment together and aiming it at the building. Vicki, wrapped in Lizzie’s cape, suddenly chuckled. “I met Jackson Aranow once.”

  “Who’s Jackson Aranow?”

  “The owner of this factory we’re about to rob. Or at least his family is. Know your unwitting and unwilling patrons, I say. The Aranows are old-line conservative, stuffy, boring. And rich as Sanctuary.”

  Lizzie looked up from the decryptions on her screen. “Really?”

  “No, of course not really. God, don’t be so literal. Nobody’s as rich as Sanctuary.”

  “Okay, we’re ready,” Lizzie said. She grinned, a flash of white teeth in the gloom. “You got your sack? Now remember, the shield will only be down for ten seconds before the system resets. You armed?”

  “If you call this ‘armed,’” Vicki said, hefting the metal pipe she carried in her right hand. “Did you have to make it so heavy? If I’m going to die, I want to die light.”

  “You’re not going to die. And you’re all but naked, isn’t that light enough?” Lizzie laughed, a low reckless giggle, and her fingers flew over her equipment. “Okay—now!”

  A laser beam pierced the darkness, straight and hard-looking as a diamond-filament rod. It shot through the invisible energy shield to an exact, virtually indistinguishable site high on the building. A second beam followed. Multiple data addresses, their bioelectric molecules excited by the first laser array, absorbed additional energy from the second in a different region of the spectrum. The absorbed energy initiated a branching reaction, a sequential one-photon architecture—a set of wavelength keys fitted across the darkness into a self-repairing chromophore lock originally built of bacterial protein. The night filled with invisible information, some of it sent to other reception sites, farther relays, terminals in other states. There was nothing Lizzie could do about that; security systems, by their nature, alerted other systems. But the air shimmered briefly, and the Y-energy security shield dissolved.

  In ten seconds it had reset itself into other codes, other patterns. Lizzie and Vicki, carrying their sacks, had already run across the rough grass and through the information failure.

  It was all done in silence. No floodlights came on, no alarms sounded. Factories were fully automated, managed by systems based in distant enclaves, which the owners could consult and direct. Or not.

  The first security ’bot skimmed toward the two women almost immediately, terrifyingly fast, a soundless metal shape speeding over the grass. Vicki pointed her EMF disrupter at it and it stopped, sank to the grass, and fell over. Vicki laughed, a little too wildly. “Die, impudent upstart!”

  “Come on!” Lizzie urged. She scrambled a second security ’bot and raced for the factory doors.

  They had locked, of course, when the Y-shield went down. Lizzie punched in the manual overrides, and held her breath. It had taken months to dip the TenTech security data, and even though she could do anything, somehow she had never quite found the resets for the manual overrides if the security breach had automatically reset them. She hoped that meant there weren’t any resets, that the designers were so arrogant or so cheap they’d gone with faith that the complex Y-system was enough, that no one could breach it. Except, of course, Sanctuary, who had no reason to try.

  Sanctuary, and Lizzie Francy.

  The doors opened, and Lizzie took a precious moment to squeeze her eyes shut in a brief prayer of thanksgiving to a God she didn’t believe in. Billy’s God, her mother’s God. Lizzie didn’t need Him. She’d done it.

  Actually done it—broken into a donkey factory where energy cones were manufactured, to steal enough of them to take her tribe through the winter. They had everything else they needed, since the Change. A plastic polymer tarp for the feeding grounds. Water that no longer had to be clean. An abandoned soy-processing factory from before the Change, with more than enough space to house their tribe. A weaving ’bot that could easily turn out enough clothes and blankets for everyone, even young people whose bodies ate clothes fast. But they had no Y-cones, and winter in the Pennsylvania hills was cold. Now that donkeys no longer shipped things like cones and blankets in exchange for votes, tribes just had to take care of themselves. Nobody else would.

  Lizzie opened her eyes. Another security ’bot darted from an alcove, and she zapped it with the disrupter. Hidden monitors were of course recording the break-in, but both she and Vicki were enveloped in head-to-foot holosuits. To the monitors, Lizzie appeared to be a twelve-year-old blonde girl eight months pregnant. Vicki was a redheaded male donkey dressed in a business suit. And all the infrared detectors would get were two heat patterns of human shape, female gender, a certain size and mass and metabolism—but not a certain identity.

  It was so easy! Dart in, stuff seven or eight cones from the end of the line into their sacks, run back outside to wait for her equipment to fire a second laser array and bring down the shield for another ten seconds, dart back out. Pretty good for a Liver brat! She ran down the short corridor to the factory floor, her belly swaying from side to side like a bonga rhythm.

  And stopped dead, in front of a place gone mad.

  Two forklifts rolled across the floor. One lifted, stacked, sorted, and removed nothing at all—batches of empty air. The other carried a single packing case to the end of the robotic line, placed it there, received empty energy cones, carried the same case to the center of the factory and dumped the cones out. Then the forklift rolled through them, sending them clattering over the floor, while it carried the empty case back to the end of the line. The case was dented in a hundred places, folded in at one corner, missing both sealing flaps. It looked as if it had been through a war. On the line itself, robotic arms lifted the delicate cone innards fed to them from the sealed cold-fusion unit—and missed stuffing the power packs into the cones by six inches. The packs, crushed, dropped to the side of the line. The empty cones sailed on, to the waiting demented forklift at the end, which packed, transported, and spilled them before going back for more.

  Vicki said, “What…”

  “The ranging algorithms are messed up,” Lizzie said, with great disgust. “God, the waste…your owner friends must only check the output figures, not the quality control or even the—Vicki, it’s not funny!”

  “Of course it is!” Vicki said. She doubled over with laughter, barely able to get the words out. “It’s…hysterical. The high-tech donkey world…it looks like a ’bot Holy War on Endorkiss…and…that stuffed shirt Jackso
n…Aranow…”

  “We only have a few more minutes, and we need cones! Help me find the cones packed before this all went diseased, it can’t have been going on that long…”

  “No? Look…at the dust on everything!” And she was off again, holding her belly, laughing like some crazy in a bedlam holo. Sometimes it seemed to Lizzie that she was the adult and Vicki, with her weird donkey humor, was the child. Then, other times, Vicki became the woman Lizzie remembered from her childhood: scary, knowing, poised, a being from that other world that ran the world. Why couldn’t people be as easy to dip as systems? Lizzie jabbed Vicki in the shoulder.

  “Come on! Help me look!”

  Vicki did. The two women raced to the packing crates stacked by one of the forklifts before (when?) they went crazy. Fortunately, the sealer ’bot must have malfunctioned as well: none of the crate flaps were fastened, which made it easier to yank them open. The first crate on the top tier was empty. So was the second. The third was stuffed with crushed energy packs, smeared against and around cone casings like smashed yolk on unsmashable eggshells. Lizzie marveled. What could have messed up the programming this bad?

  “Vicki—time is running out! The laser array only fires once more, resets are paired but the next pair is random-generated, I couldn’t program for it—”

  “Here!” Vicki said, no longer laughing. “This crate is good. Grab three or four cones—go! Go!”

  They stuffed cones into their sacks, then ran for the corridor, dodging rolling empty cones from the forklift. At the corridor’s end, the factory doors were closed.

  “What—Lizzie! They locked automatically!”

  Lizzie clawed at the manual override, punching in various standard “open doors” codes. Nothing happened. The security system had reset the door closings, but not the openings. It made sense. If the shield was breached, let whoever had breached it go in—but not out.

  Vicki said, “Can you get in and get the code?”