Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  “It’s a two-person car, Jack.”

  He’d forgotten that. “All right…I’ll take them both to their camp—three can squeeze into my car. You stay here and call for another car.”

  “I’ll call for the cops, is what I’ll do.”

  “Fine. Call for the cops. They can come to the camp, too. We’ll have a party.”

  He carried Lizzie across the factory, now frozen except for the forklift Lizzie had reprogrammed, which went on lifting nothing. Had it resumed work because Lizzie had made an error? Maybe she wasn’t as good a dipper as Vicki claimed. Or maybe Cazie’s signal from the aircar had set up some kind of interference or override. Jackson didn’t know enough about industrial systems to guess. Behind him he heard Cazie on her comlink. “Police emergency, code 655, damn it, Robert, answer me…”

  Vicki sat on the passenger seat cradling Lizzie on her lap. Two half-naked women in tattered clothes, wet from Lizzie’s burst water, hair matted, smelling of blood and sweat and dirt and amniotic fluid. It was close in the car.

  Vicki had a mocking tendency to catch his thoughts. As the aircar lifted she said, “And when was the last time you played doctor to Livers, Doctor?”

  He didn’t answer. The car flew through the passage he opened in the security shield. Lizzie said dreamily, “Another one’s coming. It’s so weird, I feel it but I don’t…”

  Jackson looked at the aircar console. The interval between contractions had shortened: ten minutes. That fast. He speeded up. “Fly west,” Vicki said. “Follow that river…”

  The “camp” turned out to be an abandoned soy-processing factory. Only Livers had ever eaten soy; now no one did, and all the soy franchises had gone bankrupt. The building was windowed gray foamcast, decayed and badly patched. All around stretched fields returning to weeds, bushes, saplings of maple and sycamore. Their scrawny branches were bare. Jackson had forgotten how ugly ungenemod nature was in November, especially in these high hills, or low mountains, or whatever they were.

  He set the aircar down in front of the building’s main door, which had fallen—or been torn—off its hinges, and then clumsily wired back on. Inside, Jackson knew, the machinery would have long since been removed for retooling. Or looted during the Change Wars. Or vandalized. Nothing was less necessary now than large-scale agriculture.

  The moment the aircar landed, they were surrounded. The horde—it seemed like a horde, even though Jackson counted only eleven people—shoved their faces against the windows, grimacing. Dressed in warmer clothes than Vicki and Lizzie, they nonetheless looked primitive: old synthetic jacks in garish colors over or under woven tunics; ungenemod faces with a weak chin or low beetling brow or too broad forehead or small squinty eyes. An older man was actually missing a front tooth. And this was post-Change. What had these people looked like before the Cell Cleaner?

  “Lizzie!”

  “It’s Lizzie and Vicki!”

  “They’re back, them.”

  “Lizzie and Vicki…”

  Vicki said, “Release the door, Jackson.” How had she come to be the one in charge?

  The horde threatened to spill into the car itself. Vicki handed Lizzie out; the girl grinned dopily as her all-but-naked belly tightened in another contraction. Jackson made himself climb out the other door. A young man—large, heavy, strong—glared at him. A teenage boy scowled and clenched his fists.

  Vicki said, “He’s a doctor. Leave him alone, Scott. Shockey, you take Lizzie. Carry her carefully, she’s in labor.”

  The boy said, “I don’t care, me, if he’s a doctor. What’d you bring one of them here for, Vicki? And where’s the cones, them?”

  “Because Lizzie needs him. We didn’t get any cones.”

  The crowd made a subverbal noise Jackson couldn’t interpret.

  The inside of the building was dark—Jackson realized that the lights no longer worked, and the only illumination came from the plastic windows. It took his eyes a minute to adjust to the gloom. The room was large, although not as large as the Willoughby factory. Three sides of the perimeter had been divided into curtained cubicles made of shelving, of old furniture, of broken sections of foamcast, of dead and gutted machinery, even of roughly cut logs. Inside each cubicle were makeshift pallets and personal possessions. Through the south window Jackson saw a tent of clear flexible plastic, probably stolen, stretched four feet above the churned-up earth. A natural-light feeding ground.

  In the open middle of the floor sprawled dilapidated sofas, chairs, tables, all surrounding a small portable Y-energy cone of the sort used on camping trips. This communal room was warmer than the outside, but nowhere near what Jackson thought of as room temperature.

  Vicki said, “That’s the only cone still working in the camp, and it’s not designed for a space this big. Fires are problematic because it’s so hard to ventilate properly through foamcast, Although we have a design for a Franklin stove, which is our auxiliary plan to TenTech cones. Meanwhile, we share the one cone we have. You, of course, would simply have had it seized by the richest family among you.”

  “You could have migrated south,” Jackson retorted.

  “Safer here. Everybody else is migrating south for the winter. We’re not heavily armed.”

  “Ooohhhhhh,” Lizzie said, in hazy appreciation. “Ooohhhhh…I feel another one coming…”

  A handsome middle-aged black woman came running across the floor. “Lizzie! Lizzie!”

  “It’s all right, Annie,” Vicki said. “Doctor, this is Lizzie’s mother.”

  Lizzie’s mother didn’t even glance at him. She grabbed whatever portion of Lizzie, still carried in the enormous young man’s arms, she could reach, and held on tight. “You bring her in here, Shockey—careful, you! She ain’t no gunnysack, her!” Jackson saw Vicki smile, an unamused, turned-down smile. Some history between the two women. Three women. Shockey concentrated on maneuvering his swollen, limp, smiling burden into one of the sleeping cubicles.

  Annie blocked the narrow passage with her ample body. “Thank you, Doctor, but you can leave now, you. We don’t need no help, us, with our own. ’Bye.”

  “Yes, you do, Ms…You do. It’s going to be a breech birth. I have to rotate the fetus at the proper times to—”

  “Ain’t no fetus, it’s a baby!”

  Vicki said, “For God’s sake, Annie, get out of the way. He’s a doctor.”

  “He’s a donkey, him.”

  “If you don’t move, I’ll move you myself.”

  Despite himself—the scowling boy had moved closer—Jackson felt a surge of impatience. Were Livers always threatening physical violence? It was tiresome. He said firmly, “Madam, I will move you if you don’t let me at my patient.”

  “Why, Jackson,” Vicki said, “I didn’t know you had it in you.” Her tone, so much like Cazie’s, infuriated him. He pushed Lizzie’s mother aside and knelt beside Lizzie, who lay smiling on her bed A thin mattress of nonconsumable plastic, blankets of recycled plastic jacks. The only other furniture was a battered chest and a molded plastic chair that looked like it had once been used for target practice. The walls were hung with the kind of gaudy-colored metal-on-fake-wood art that Livers liked, depicting a scooter race on fluffy yam clouds. On the bureau lay a Jansen-Sagura terminal and crystal library, of the kind used by the most well-funded scientists. Jackson blinked at it.

  Lizzie’s dark eyes were merry with cheating pain. “It don’t hurt at all, me. When Sharon had her baby, she hollered, her…”

  “No meds for Sharon,” Vicki said. “No profit in it for donkeys.”

  Jackson said, “You people shouldn’t have destroyed the warehouses.”

  “Why not? You people had stopped shipping to them.”

  He hadn’t come here to argue politics with a renegade donkey. Jackson reached inside his bag. “What’s that, it?” Annie said. She loomed over the bed like an avenging angel. A strong female odor came from her, musky and strangely erotic. Jackson thought about what it would have been like
trying to maintain asepsis in these conditions. Before the Cell Cleaner.

  “It’s a local muscle-relaxant patch. To expand the vaginal opening as much as possible and prevent tearing before I do the episiotomy.”

  “No knife,” Annie said. “Lizzie’ll be just fine, her! You get out!”

  Jackson ignored her. A hand gripped his shoulder and jerked him backward just as he applied the patch to Lizzie. Then Vicki grabbed Annie and the two women tussled until behind him Jackson heard a voice say, “Annie. You stop that, love.”

  Lizzie still smiled at Jackson in drugged serenity, while her enormous belly stretched and contracted, shuddering with fleshy quakes. She held his hand. Jackson turned to see a stately black man, at least eighty years old in the strong and healthy mode eighty had become, leading Annie firmly from the cubicle. Behind the retreating Annie stood a whole crowd of Livers, silent and hostile.

  He turned back to Lizzie.

  “What can I do?” Vicki said briskly.

  “Nothing. Stay out of the way. Lizzie, turn on your left side…good.”

  It was another hour before he had to do the episiotomy. Through his quick, large cut—there would be no infant head out first to widen the passage—Lizzie smiled and hummed. The old man, Billy, had miraculously kept Annie quiet. There, but quiet.

  “Okay, Lizzie—push.” This was the drawback of the neuropharms swarming through her system. They were selected to not cross the placental barrier, but they vastly reduced Lizzie’s need, or desire, to do anything as focused as pushing. “Come on, push…pretend you’re shitting a pumpkin!”

  Lizzie giggled. The baby’s little ass presented itself, through his mother’s blood. Jackson waited until the infant’s umbilicus had passed the perineum, then grasped the baby’s hips and applied downward traction until the scapulae appeared. Carefully he rotated the baby so its shoulders were anterior-posterior. When the shoulders were delivered, he rotated the squirming small body back, for a facedown delivery, the least likely to cause head trauma.

  “Push again, Lizzie, harder…harder…”

  She did. The baby’s head finally squeezed out. No visible head trauma, good muscle tone, minimal ecchymosis and edema. Cradling the baby’s soft wet buttocks in his hand, Jackson felt his throat suddenly tighten. He checked the child with his monitor and then laid him, slimed with blood and vernix, on his mother’s chest. The cubicle was again full of people. Privacy was evidently not a Liver value. He delivered the placenta, cut the cord. And drew a Change syringe from his bag.

  The entire crowd drew a collective breath: “Aaaahhhhhhhh…!” Jackson looked up in surprise.

  Vicki said, in a voice completely different from any he’d heard from her, “You have one!”

  “A Change syringe? Of course—” Then it hit him. “You don’t. Outside the enclaves.”

  “Our birth rate is higher than yours,” she said wryly. “And our supply less. When the syringes just stopped appearing a few years ago, you donkeys scavenged and stockpiled them all.”

  “So your children—”

  “Get sick. Some, anyway. Could die. Don’t you know armed battles are being fought over the remaining syringes?”

  He did, of course. But watching it on the newsgrids was different from seeing this crowd eye the syringe hungrily, from feeling their tension, smelling their desperate avidity. He said quickly, “How many unChanged children are in your…your tribe?”

  “None yet. But we only had one syringe left, for Lizzie. Next pregnancy…How many syringes have you got, Jackson?”

  “Three more…” He almost added with me, saw his mistake in time. “You can have them.”

  He injected the baby, who predictably started yelling. Somewhere outside the cubicle, a man’s voice said harshly, “Donkey cops here, them!”

  Vicki smiled at him. The smile surprised him: frank, weary, and yet somehow comradely, as if his delivering Lizzie’s baby and handing over the other syringes had changed things between Jackson and the Liver tribe. It took him a minute to realize the smile was a put-on. But she said softly, “You going to let that bitch arrest your patient, Jackson?”

  Lizzie lay laughing maniacally over her baby—either the neuropharm company had put too much pleasure stimulant in the patch or Lizzie was especially maternal. The baby wailed loudly. People called and argued in the tiny space, some congratulating Lizzie, some threatening the cops (absurd—they’d be armed and shielded like fortresses), some demanding to know why there weren’t new Y-cones. The smell of packed-in humanity was overwhelming. Jackson looked at Vicki’s smile. He thought of Cazie’s anger, her mockery of him.

  Vicki said, under cover of the din, “You told Cazie that you vote two thirds of TenTech stock—yours and your sister’s. You could drop the charges.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  She merely waved her hand to indicate all of it: the baby, the cold room, the ragged Livers, the arguing, the cops he knew must be standing beyond the wall of people who were biologically impervious to disease and hunger but not to cold or violence or other people’s greed. Suddenly he thought of Ellie Lester. Who thought that natives, second-class subjects, slaves—Livers—were ever so witty. Who thought that powerlessness was funny. Unlike Cazie, who merely thought it was boring.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll drop the charges.”

  “Yes,” Vicki echoed, and stopped smiling, her eyes narrowing as she regarded him closely, as if wondering what use it might be possible to make of him next.

  Four

  Today, Theresa thought. Today’s the day.

  Lying in bed in the early morning, she felt the familiar dark cloud descend over her mind. Heavy, queasy, hopeless. “The black dog that doesn’t let go,” somebody from old times had called it. “The dark woods than which death is scarcely more bitter.” That was “Dante”—she remembered that name. “The gnawing beast in the brain.” She didn’t remember that one. Thomas, her personal system, had found the quotes for her in some deebee, and now Theresa couldn’t forget them. Dogs, beasts, woods, clouds—she had lived with the darkness for so long she no longer needed names for it, yet she had them. Like the fear itself.

  But today the queasy fear wouldn’t stop her. She wouldn’t let it stop her. Today was the day.

  “Take a neuropharm,” Jackson always urged her. “I can prescribe…Tessie, it’s an imbalance in brain chemistry. No different from diabetes or anemia. You right the chemistry. You fix it.” And Theresa could never find the words to make him understand.

  Because words weren’t important. Action was. She had come to see that only recently. When she had realized it, a deep shame had swept over her. How could she have been so self-indulgent, so pampering of her own weak soul? It had been over a year since she’d even left the apartment…and she’d never left Manhattan East Enclave. Never, her whole life. No wonder she was what Jackson called “clinically depressed.”

  Today.

  Jackson had gone with Cazie, very early, to check on a factory someplace. Theresa had heard him leave. She was uneasy whenever he left the apartment, but she tried very hard not to let him see that. It wouldn’t be fair. Jackson already stayed home too much for her sake. Hovered over her, worried about her. I can prescribe…He worried about her, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t see what he called a “brain-chemistry imbalance” really was. Only Theresa knew what it really was.

  It was a gift. Her soul’s way of telling her that she had better change her ways and pay attention to what really mattered.

  Theresa swung her feet over the side of the bed and waited for the daily anxiety to subside. If she let herself, she could stay in bed all day. It was so safe there. Instead, she walked into the sonar shower, took a thirty-second wash, and walked out again. In the bedroom she caught sight of herself naked in the long mirror on the west wall, and stopped.

  She didn’t even look like everybody else. Her body was beautiful, she supposed—everybody was beautiful. But she somehow looked…not there. Pale
hair and eyes, pale small face, pale skin—what had her parents been thinking of? A fairy. A ghost. An insubstantial holo, fuzzy at the edges. No wonder she didn’t belong anywhere, didn’t know even a single person who could understand her struggle for what it really was. Not even Jackson, loving brother though he was.

  Even Jackson thought that Theresa had been born wrong. That she’d been damaged somehow during her in vitro genemod. Even Jackson couldn’t see the nature of the gift that Theresa had been handed. Because it was a gift, no matter what anyone said. Pain always was.

  Pain meant that you had to change something, had to learn to think differently about the world. Seeds, Theresa imagined, felt tremendous pain when they burst their husks in the cold dark earth and began to push blindly toward a light they had never seen. Pain was what made you grow. No one seemed to understand that. Everyone she knew, as soon as they were in pain, did everything they could to make it go away. Medicine. Recreational drugs. Sex. Frantic parties. Which were all, when you got right down to it, the same thing. Distractions from pain. How come nobody else in this century thought like that? Only her.

  “Each environment,” Jackson had said once, in the slow, careful way he always talked to her, “rewards different personality profiles. Ours rewards vivaciousness, aggressiveness coupled with the appearance of not caring, a certain careless cruelty…you’re not like that, Tess. You’re a different kind of person. Not a worse kind, just different. It’s all right to be different.”

  Yes, it was. But only because she’d come to believe that her differentness had a point. The black cloud in her brain, the fear of everything new, the attacks of anxiety so strong that she sometimes couldn’t breathe—their point was to make Theresa break her lazy husk and push blindly toward the light. She believed that. Even though she’d never seen it and didn’t know quite what she was pushing toward. Even though sometimes she despaired that the light was even there But that was part of the gift, too. It made her question everything that happened around her, in case she missed a vital clue to what she was supposed to do next.