Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  She found Shockey with Sharon and Sharon’s baby, nine-month-old Callie, fishing by the river in the mild weather. Sharon and Shockey wore winter jacks with the coats unbuttoned. Lizzie saw that Sharon’s shirt was unbuttoned as well. So that’s how it was.

  Callie sat on the riverbank in a blue plastic clothes basket, turning a grimy plastic duck over and over in her fat little fists. She was a pretty baby, with Sharon’s soft brown hair and big eyes, but when she caught sight of Lizzie, she screwed up her face to cry and looked frantically around for her mother. Annie said babies got this way at Callie’s age. They got shy of strangers and nervous about new things. Callie would outgrow it, Annie said. Well, Lizzie didn’t spend a lot of time with Sharon but she wasn’t exactly a stranger, either; they belonged to the same tribe. She hoped Dirk didn’t go through a stage like this when he was older. She moved out of Callie’s line of sight.

  Sharon and Shockey bent over their fishing lines. Sharon giggled and guided Shockey’s hand from his line to her open shirt.

  “Hello!” Lizzie said loudly.

  “Hey. Liz,” Shockey said, straightening. “If we catch anything, us, want to share a real meal for a change?”

  There was nothing wrong with the words. The tribe ate by mouth often: berries or nuts, roasted rabbit, wild apples. Sometimes Lizzie got a longing in her mouth that nothing but the sharp bite of wild onions would satisfy. The Change just meant that nobody had to bother with getting food; not that they couldn’t. There was nothing wrong with Shockey’s offer of fish. It was the way he said it—his eyes bold on Lizzie, his mouth half smiling, half sneering, his hand still on Sharon’s bare breast. Sex bareness was different from eating bareness; it should be private. And Shockey acted like he owned Sharon. Well, he didn’t own Lizzie.

  But she made herself smile. “Sure, if you catch anything, you. But that’s not why I’m here. I have an offer, me, to make to you.”

  Shockey’s smile widened and his dark eyes blinked slowly. Lizzie said quickly, “Billy told me you used to be mayor of a town someplace.”

  Shockey’s smile vanished. “Yeah? So what? Somebody had to be mayor, them.”

  “You’re right, you,” Lizzie said. She looked levelly into Shockey’s face. “And somebody still does.”

  Sharon said, “We don’t need no mayors, us, anymore.”

  “But we need a district supervisor, us. Harold Winthrop Wayland is dead.”

  Sharon’s voice scaled upward. “Shockey ain’t no donkey, Lizzie Francy, and don’t you forget it, you!”

  “Of course he ain’t,” Lizzie said. “He’s a Liver, him—that’s the whole point.”

  “What whole point?” Sharon said, so loudly that Callie, alarmed, looked up from her rubber duck. “Livers don’t work, them, at no jobs like district supervisor!”

  “A district supervisor controls the warehouse distrib. Willoughby County ain’t got no supervisor, us, so there ain’t nothing in the warehouse. But if we elect one of our own, then—”

  “Then there still ain’t nothing in the warehouse! Dip your brain, you, for a change, instead of donkey nets! Shockey can’t put no goods in no warehouse!”

  “Yes, he could,” Lizzie said. She was suddenly tired of talking Liver to this stupid girl. She’d known Sharon all her life, and Sharon had always been stupid. “There’s a tax pool of credit from the state, collected from corporate taxes, that’s divided up between all the counties. A credit base that donkey taxes add to. But if we can get enough Livers registered and get Shockey elected, he can use Willoughby’s share to stock a warehouse for us.”

  “But if he—”

  “Shut up, Sharon, and let Shockey talk.” Lizzie hoped this would make Shockey mad—the hint that Sharon was controlling him. But Shockey wasn’t mad. His bold eyes, under heavy brows, had a faraway look, and his hand moved from Sharon to stroke his dark beard. Both women stared at him.

  Finally he said, “Yeah.”

  “‘Yeah’?” Sharon shrieked.

  “Shut up, Sharon. Yeah, I’ll do it, Liz.” Abruptly he swooped down on the baby and lifted her high above his head. “How about it, Callie—you want, you, to see your big buddy a district supervisor?”

  The baby squealed happily. Apparently little Callie didn’t consider Shockey a “stranger.” Sharon sulked. But Lizzie, watching, thought that Shockey wasn’t seeing either of them. His eyes gazed at something else, and he smiled the same half sneer as when he offered Lizzie the fish. What was it Vicki’d said? In her list of kinds of human relationships? A covert struggle for dominance, without much outbreak of actual fighting…

  “Liz, you just tell me what to do first. I’m all ready, me, and I’m all yours.”

  Eight

  When the security alarm sounded, Theresa was sitting in her new study, working at a terminal.

  She had made the study from a maid’s room in the middle of the apartment’s upper floor, unused probably since before house ’bots. Theresa had chosen it because it had no window, only a skylight set small and high on the wall and angled into an airshaft, from which she could see nothing but a patch of artificial sky. She’d had the building ’bot clean the room and paint it white, and she had moved in a terminal and an old-fashioned, inflexible chair. The only other thing in the room were the printies.

  They were tacked on every wall, full-color flat printouts of whatever holoscenes she selected from the newsgrids. In one, three abandoned Liver children huddled together, dead, in a snowbank, their frozen and well-fed faces smooth with Cell Cleaner health.

  In another, a baby lay in its grieving Liver mother’s arms. The mother, who looked about fifteen, was clearly Changed. The baby’s face was ravaged by some disease; its skin had turned mottled and pulpy, and blood oozed from its closed eyes. The camera had caught the mother with one cupped palm upraised, empty of a Change syringe.

  In a wide-angle shot from an aerial camera, a shimmering Y-shield enclosed a beautiful valley in the Ozarks. The entire valley. One rich donkey lived there, a former financier whom no one had seen since the Change, when he gave a press conference exulting that now he would never need to have contact with another human being again.

  In a small printie on the far wall, four emaciated adults, elbows like chisels, ate meager bowls of mush and drank water under a cross wood-burned with the words THE DAILY BREAD HE MEANT FOR US. Malnutrition marked their bowed legs and thin hair. All four smiled beatifically at the camera, smiles with missing teeth and swollen gums.

  A large printie behind the terminal stand showed Miranda Sharifi’s face, overlaid with a blue veil, three lilies, and an open prayer book. Beside it an equally large printie showed the same holo, overlaid with gravestones and coffins and black candles and implements of torture along with the words WHEN IMMORTALITY, BITCH?

  The pictures went on. Two donkey children lying naked and laughing on the corpse of a slaughtered deer sliced open from breast to tail, body-feeding directly on the blood and flesh. Another diseased Liver child, in a French town where there had been no Change syringes for four years. An ad for Endorkiss, the colors glowing and seductive, in which three incredibly perfect donkey bodies ground-fed quietly, their faces blissful, nobody looking at anyone else and clearly not needing to.

  Jackson had not seen the room. Theresa went there only when he wasn’t home, and she’d asked Jones, the house system, to admit no one but herself to this room. Of course, Jackson probably knew how to override that, but even if he could, maybe he wouldn’t. Jackson wouldn’t understand the room. He would think it was a medical problem, like what he called Theresa’s “neurochemical anguish.” He wouldn’t see that the room was necessary.

  The system in front of Theresa was in screen mode, its flat energy “surface” divided in half vertically by a thick black line. Above the line was a quote in severe dark blue letters: “‘Even an animal can get lost in unfamiliar terrain, but only men and women can lose themselves.’ Christopher Caan-Agee, 2067.” Below was the last paragraph Theresa had wr
itten in her book on Leisha Camden:

  Leisha had a friend. His name was Tony Indivino. Tony was much angrier than Leisha about a lot of things. It didn’t seem right to Tony that some people had so much money and others had so little. Leisha had never thought about that before Tony made her think. Leisha wrote later that Tony said to her, “What if you walk down a street in a poor country like Spain and you see a beggar? Do you give him a dollar? What if you see a hundred beggars, a thousand beggars, and you don’t have as much money as Leisha Camden? What do you do? What should you do?” Leisha didn’t know answers to Tony’s questions.

  Theresa studied her paragraph. She said to her personal system, Thomas, “Put ‘important’ before ‘friend.’” It did, changing the “a” to “an.” Leisha studied her sentence again. Then she looked at the sentence above: Even an animal can get lost in unfamiliar terrain, but only men and women can lose themselves. She said, “Thomas, bring me the second quote in my list.”

  Thomas brought up the words, reading them aloud in its rich male voice: “‘But man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make the angels weep.’ William Shakespeare, 1564-1616.”

  “The next quote.”

  “‘Man’s unhappiness comes, as I construe, of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the finite.’ Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881.”

  Again Theresa read her own paragraph, with “important” inserted before “friend.” Then she listened again to Carlyle’s sentence.

  Why was it so hard to write a book? She could see so clearly what she needed to say about Leisha Camden, could feel it so clearly. She could even talk about it, at least with Jackson. But when she sat down in front of the terminal, the words she spoke were stiff and cold and it would be better if she never tried to show the world at all why Leisha Camden mattered, why a life given to something as large as keeping Sleepless and Sleepers as one people mattered Even if Leisha had failed. Despite Leisha’s efforts, the Sleepless had gone to Sanctuary. The country had gone into a long bitter divide. Jennifer Sharifi had gone to prison. And Leisha had gone to her death in a Georgia swamp, murdered by Livers who despised Sleepless even more than Theresa despised herself.

  But Leisha had at least tried. And so saved herself from what the rest of them had become. No, Theresa had to write this book about Leisha. She had to. But why was it so hard to find words as wonderful as Thomas brought back when she sent him out on a quote search?

  Theresa rubbed tears from her cheeks and looked again at the printies around the walls…most ignorant…like an angry ape plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make the angels weep.

  “Take a neuropharm,” Jackson would say. “I can custom order you one that—”

  “Building security has been breached,” the house system said loudly from Theresa’s terminal. “This is not a drill, Ms. Aranow. Repeat, building security has been breached and this is not a drill. What would you like me to do?”

  Breached? How could building security be breached? There were Y-shields, there were locks…What should she do? Jackson was gone somewhere with Cazie. Theresa didn’t know what to tell the system. It wasn’t supposed to be breachable.

  She said, “Lock all the doors!”

  “They are always locked, Ms. Aranow.”

  Of course they were. Theresa thought wildly. “Show me the breach!”

  Prose, hers and Carlyle’s, disappeared from the screen. It went holo and transmitted a wide-angle view of the building foyer. People—Livers!—pushed toward the elevator, which said, “I’m sorry—this elevator opens only for authorized residents and guests.” A man with a handheld terminal did something to it and the elevator door opened.

  Theresa stood, knocking over her chair. Her heart thudded. Five Livers, four men and a woman, people with squat foreheads or knobbly chins or hairy ears or thick necks, dressed in old winter jackets. In her building. Their faces were focused and intent, and one had a mobile. Where had he gotten it? The Change Wars? But those were over years ago…weren’t they? What should she do?

  “What…what should I do, Jones? Is there a standard security procedure?”

  “A standard intruder-repellant sequence exists, in escalating stages. Shall I begin it? Or do you wish to speak to the unauthorized intruders first?”

  “No! No…I…what do they want?”

  “Shall I put front-door visual and audio through to Thomas?”

  “No…yes. And start the intruder-repellent sequence!”

  “All levels, on automatic?”

  “Yes!”

  The display stage showed the corridor outside the apartment door. Three of the people, including the woman, now held guns. Theresa felt her throat close and she gasped for breath. No, not now, not now…The Livers weren’t shouting. The one with the mobile spoke calmly but loudly, in their street talk: “—get for our kids, us, more Change syringes. That’s all we want, us. We won’t hurt nobody. I tell you again, me, that all we want is more Change syringes, we know you got them. Dr. Aranow, you’re a doctor, you—”

  “Go away!” Theresa called. The words came out strangled, unable to force themselves past her panic attack. She tried again. “Go away! No Change syringes here! My brother doesn’t keep them at home!” Which wasn’t true. There were sixteen Change syringes in the house safe.

  “What? Is that Dr. Aranow, you? Open the door!”

  “No,” Theresa whimpered. She couldn’t breathe.

  “Then we’re coming in, us!”

  The front door clicked open. The security procedure…why wasn’t Jones responding? What had these people had time to do to Jones…and how did they know how to do it? Theresa wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth. Jones said, “You are unauthorized intruders. If you don’t leave immediately, this system will activate its bio-based defenses.”

  “Wait, Elwood, don’t—”

  “I knocked out the defenses, them. Come on!”

  “But you—”

  “The syringes—”

  “Activating now,” Jones said, and abruptly the holostage was full of a dark yellow gas, coming from everywhere at once. And it was everywhere. Theresa’s study was suddenly full of it Gasping for air, she drew gas into her lungs and—

  —and her arms and legs fell off.

  Theresa tumbled to the floor. She could see her arms and legs lying beside her, clearly detached…But, no, they couldn’t be hers, because there was no blood. They were somebody’s else’s arms and legs…the intruders’? But how had they gotten as far as her upper-floor study, without their legs? How odd! But interesting, actually. Although maybe they weren’t the intruders’ arms and legs. But, then, whose could they be?

  She pushed the nearest leg away from herself. Really, the disgusting thing shouldn’t be lying around on the floor. Where was the cleaning ’bot? Perhaps it was broken…

  As she shoved the stray leg hard, Theresa was astonished to feel her own body jerk. Now, what was that all about? Nothing seemed normal today. Although Jackson always said that normal was a huge warehouse…he must be right, if “normal” had to include arms and legs that weren’t even hers cluttering up her study.

  Theresa grasped a detached arm and tried to throw it across the room. Again her torso jerked, and pain tore through her shoulder, which didn’t make sense. And how had the intruder dressed his arm in one of Theresa’s flowered sleeves? He must have gone first to her bedroom, changed clothes, and then come in here to fall apart. Maybe Leisha had sent him. Yes, that would make sense—Leisha was always compassionate to Livers. Compassionate and unafraid.

  “Theresa!” someone called. “Tess!”

  Although now that she thought of it. Theresa wasn’t afraid either. Really, she was very calm. Jackson would be proud of her. She was staying calm and thinking what to do. First, get the cleaning �
�bot to clear up these extra arms and legs off the floor. Then, notify the enclave police about the intruders. Third, figure out what made Thomas Carlyle’s sentences so good, so that she could write ones just as good. Or so her personal system could. Yes, that made sense—she would ask her system to duplicate Carlyle’s prose. After all, they both were named Thomas.

  “Tess! Where are—oh, my God!”

  Theresa looked up. Cazie stood over her, wearing a Y-shield helmet with air filter. Cazie seemed to have all her arms and legs. This was interesting…how had Cazie hung on to hers when both Theresa and the intruders hadn’t been able to? Fourth on her list would be to ask Jackson about this. It was probably a medical problem.

  “Here, breathe deep…hold still, Tessie, just breathe as deep as you can, the gas only needs a few minutes to leave your body…just breathe…”

  There was something over her head, although it must be made of Y-energy because through it Theresa could still see Cazie. Cazie looked so concerned…but she needn’t, really. Theresa was fine. Jackson would be proud of how fine she was, staying calm in an emergency, breathing normally, making a rational list of what to do and what order to do it in…But she should speak the list to Thomas. That way she would be sure to remember everything on it. Thomas could write it down.

  She crawled toward her terminal to do this. “Breathe deep.” Cazie said again, but before Theresa could, everything went black.

  She awoke on the living-room sofa. Jackson and Cazie stood over her. Cazie said, “How do you feel, Tessie?”

  “I…there were Livers…”

  “Gone now. No, don’t get upset, Tess, it’s all right. Enclave security has them all, and nobody was hurt. It won’t happen again.”

  “But how…what…”

  Jackson sat beside her and took her hand. “They dipped the building entry codes, Theresa. Nobody knows how they got into the enclave. But all our systems have been reprogrammed—building, elevator, and Jones. Cazie’s right, it won’t happen again.”