Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  Jennifer sat motionless, considering. Paul said, “In terms of our interests, there are two ways to look at this. One is that the more dissension among the Sleepers, the more attention they’ll devote to struggling with each other and the less attention they could ever devote to us—no matter what we choose to do. The other, negative view is that Livers in power creates a second entity we have to protect against, and an unknown and less predictable one than the Sleeper aristocracy. And those newsgrids do seem to assume that Liver power is a possibility. Even allowing for their hysterical exaggerations.”

  Jennifer glanced again at the printout headlines:

  THE THREAT TO EFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT: “WE WANT TO RUN THINGS THE LIVER WAY FOR A CHANGE” SAYS PA CANDIDATE FOR DISTRICT SUPERVISOR

  LETTING THE CHILDREN RUN THE ORPHANAGE: A REVERSAL OF FOURTEENTH-AMENDMENT PRIORITIES

  LEGAL OLIGARCHY: A GOVERNMENT WHOSE BIOLOGICAL TIME HAS FINALLY COME?

  HOW DID IT HAPPEN? INDEPENDENT COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE PA CAMPAIGN OUTRAGE

  “LET MY PEOPLE GO”—THE INAPPROPRIATE FORMULA THAT MASKS GOVERNMENTAL DISASTER

  “TIME TO RECONSIDER VOTER REGISTRATION TESTS,” DECLARES MAJORITY LEADER BENNETT

  Paul said, “I ran the probabilities through an Eisler significance program. If this Liver candidate wins the election, the system effects come out far more far-reaching than one county. It has an event index of 4.71. A Liver win stands an eighty-seven percent chance of becoming the nucleus of a fundamentally transformed system.”

  “Can he win?” Jennifer said.

  “No.”

  “Money?”

  “Of course. The donkey candidates will buy the election.”

  “Then our concern is…”

  “A test site.” Paul ran his hand through his hair, still thick and glossy brown. Sanctuary men wore their hair short and simply cut; so did Sanctuary women. Jennifer’s long black hair was an anomaly. She kept it in a knot low on her neck; Will said it made her look like a Roman matron. This was one of the few things Will had said lately that pleased her.

  Paul continued, “I know we’d planned on testing Strukov’s compound on a donkey enclave. After all, they’re the target population. But using this Liver tribe may be even better. We’ve had nothing to do with the election, neither incumbent nor challenger. No one would have reason to think us involved.”

  “But don’t the Liver voters winter in widely scattered places? Delivery of the compound would be much more difficult.”

  “Not really,” Paul said. “Willoughby County is mostly hills and low mountains. The winter climate is tedious. There are only twenty-one Liver camps in the county. All of them have plastic-tented feeding grounds, easily penetrated by drones. And none of them have any kind of radar, which of course the donkey enclaves do. There’s a map on the last page of the printout.”

  Jennifer studied the map, and then the page of Eisler equations. She nodded. “Yes. I see. If the Livers lose this election, the system effects are negated?”

  “Everything is as it was before. And then we can go ahead with the enclaves.”

  “Yes. Go ahead. This will make an interesting little pre-test, as well as averting a large-scale systems change.”

  Paul nodded. “We want as few variables as possible for the big campaign. I’ll advise Robert. He’s handling the delivery negotiations. He’ll have a report for you by the end of the week.”

  “Not Arab, Russian, French, or Chinese. And no one who is known to have ever before worked, however remotely, with Strukov.”

  “These men are Peruvian.”

  “Good. La Guerra de Dios?”

  “No. Freelancers.”

  “And Strukov has agreed to work with them?”

  “He has. Although only with his procedures, his locations, his security team.”

  “Naturally,” Jennifer said. “Schedule a meeting with Robert.”

  “For you and me and Caroline?”

  “Also Barbara, Raymond, Charles, and Eileen. I want everyone to know everything the others do.”

  Paul nodded, less happily, and left. He didn’t understand, Jennifer thought. Paul would rather apportion knowledge according to each individual’s contribution, as if it were money. Why was it so hard for some of them—Paul, even Will—to grasp the moral principle of this? Sanctuary was a community. Those who led the community must act from responsibility, duty, loyalty. And no one could owe one-third less loyalty or duty than the others. Therefore, all twelve of the people who were going to make Sanctuary safe from the United States must share equally in the risks, the planning, and the knowledge. Anything less was to act not from morality, but from a desire for rank. That was what the Sleepers did. The immoral ones.

  Jennifer swiveled her chair back to face her office window. It was full of stars: Rigel, Aldebaran, the Pleiades. Suddenly she remembered something she’d once said to Miranda, so long ago, when Miri had been just a little girl. Jennifer had lifted Miri to the window in the Sanctuary Council, and a meteor had streaked past. Miri laughed and reached out her fat little arms to touch the beautiful lights in the sky. “They’re too far for your hand, Miri. But not for your mind. Always remember that, Miranda.”

  Miranda had not remembered. She had used her mind, yes, but not to reach outward, upward. Instead, she’d used her boosted intelligence—which Jennifer Sharifi had given her—to wallow in the muck and dirt of Sleeper biology. For the benefit of the Sleepers who had betrayed Sanctuary. As had Miranda herself.

  “The friend of my enemy is likewise my enemy,” Jennifer recited aloud. Beyond the window, Earth moved into view. Sanctuary orbited over Africa, another place the Sleepers had ruined.

  Her screen brightened. Caroline again. But this time the communications chief looked shaken. “Jennifer?”

  “Yes, Caroline?”

  “We have some…new data.”

  “Yes? Go ahead.”

  “Not on link,” Caroline said. “I’ll come to you. Immediately.”

  Jennifer didn’t allow her composure to slip. “As you wish. Can you say what the new data concern?”

  “They concern Selene.”

  The screen blanked. While she waited for Caroline, Jennifer wiped the nib of her calligraphy pen. Her twenty minutes were long since up. Looking down, she saw that while thinking about Miranda she had gone on drawing, not even aware of what her hand sketched. On the thick white paper, outlined and crosshatched, were the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes of a human brain.

  I N T E R L U D E

  TRANSMISSION DATE: February 12, 2121

  TO: Selene Base, Moon

  VIA: Lyons Ground Station, Satellite E-398 (France), GLO Satellite 62 (USA)

  MESSAGE TYPE: Unencrypted

  MESSAGE CLASS: Not Applicable; Foreign Transmission

  ORIGINATING GROUP: Unnamed group, Ste. Jeanne, France

  MESSAGE:

  Nous sommes les gens d’une petite ville en France qui s’appelle Ste. Jeanne. Nous n’avons plus de seringues de la santé. Maintenant, ici, il n’y a pas beaucoup d’enfants qui ne sont pas changés, mais que ferons-nous demain? S’il vous plaît, Mademoiselle Sharifi, donnez-nous plus de seringues de la santé. Que somme-nous obligés faire pour vous persuader? Nous sommes pauvres, mais vous aurez les remerciements. Commes les riches, nous aimons les enfants, and nous avons peur de l’avenir.

  S’il vous plaît, n’oubliez-nous pas!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

  Eleven

  You can’t,” Lizzie said to the sullen Liver. Jackson, standing seventy-five yards away in a stand of oak still tattered with last year’s withered leaves, wore zoom lenses and a receiver the size of a pea. He watched Lizzie’s face struggle not to set itself into ridges of disapproval. She smiled the most hollow smile he’d ever seen.

  The man said, even more sullenly, “Shockey said, him, that I can.”

  “Shockey said you can?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just a minute, please,” Lizzie
said. She walked away from the man, who stood just outside his tribe’s feeding area, the usual stretched plastic tent. Inside, twenty naked Livers were having lunch. It seemed to Jackson that every time he checked on Lizzie’s tribe, he ended up watching naked Livers have lunch. This time, however, three donkey reporters with cameras stood outside the enclosure, fully clothed, recording the meal. More robocams hovered inside. This particular group of Livers, unlike some other tribes in Willoughby County, was enjoying its temporary notoriety. Jackson noted that two of the women had gold barrettes in their hair. Another, he suddenly saw, wore a necklace with what looked to the zoom like a diamond. More trouble.

  Lizzie walked up to Jackson, who was disguised as a Liver. In the last three weeks he’d grown a scraggly beard. He wore baggy blue jacks, a battered hat pulled low over his forehead, and the heaviest boots he’d ever had on in his life. The ground was a sea of mud; it had rained for two days straight, a hard-driving late March rain that threatened to resume. Jackson’s boots were caked with mud. He’d walked with Lizzie over a mountain to this tribe; Livers didn’t use aircars, and he was passing as a Liver. So far, none of the swarming reporters had noticed him. He felt ridiculous.

  Lizzie leaned close to him in despair and whispered, “He says Shockey said it was all right for them to accept the scooters!”

  “Well, do you think Shockey really said it?” Jackson asked. His own opinion was yes. Shockey hadn’t seemed to grasp Lizzie’s idea that if the Livers were going to vote for their own candidate on April 1, they couldn’t accept material objects or credit accounts from the other two candidates on March 25. “Reparations,” Shockey called them, and where had he even learned the word? “Bribes,” Lizzie said, and she was right.

  Lizzie chewed her bottom lip. “Harry Jenner says Shockey told him to accept the gifts, make no real promises, and then just vote for Shockey anyway.”

  That was the way donkeys had done it for decades. Jackson said as much to Lizzie.

  “But it isn’t right,” she said, and he was suddenly impatient. For her, so invested in this innocent, doomed legal revolution. For himself, standing here in the concealing shade of trees that didn’t offer much shade because it was only March, itching in his nonporous synthetic jacks caked with mountain mud.

  “The important thing is,” he said, “will Harry and his tribe actually vote for Shockey after accepting scooters and jazzy clothes and perfumed soaps and diamond necklaces? Or will they vote for the candidate giving them all this loot?”

  “Diamond necklaces?” Lizzie said blankly.

  “That girl closest to the plastic, the one with the long brown hair, is wearing a diamond necklace. Tiffany, I believe.”

  “Oh, my dear Lord.”

  Jackson smiled. Lizzie would be upset to know that in moments of stress, even when she didn’t talk Liver, she sounded like her mother, the formidable Annie. Jackson didn’t tell her. In the last three months, hanging around this ridiculous campaign, he’d become fond of Lizzie. She was an odd combination of toughness and vulnerability. Sometimes, she even reminded him of Theresa.

  Which was not nearly reason enough to have gotten involved in this quixotic project. So why was he?

  “Look, Lizzie, it’s six days until the election. You’ll just have to trust Harry Jenner and all the rest of them that they’ll vote for Shockey despite the…gifts.” Gifts. Bribes. Reparations.

  “Do you think they’ll vote for Shockey?” Her black eyes pleaded.

  “Actually,” he said slowly, “I do. I think the hatred left over from the Change Wars is stronger than Liver greed.” Or Liver gratitude. Livers were exactly the opportunists that donkeys had made them.

  “That’s what Vicki says, too,” Lizzie said.

  Jackson didn’t want to discuss Vicki, who’d been left behind to keep order in “campaign headquarters,” and who was so much a part of Shockey’s tribe that she didn’t have to stand here in the mud dressed like something she was not. We don’t need the adverse effect of your known presence, she’d said to Jackson, and you don’t need the adverse effect on your, ah, medical career. Yeah. Right.

  “Okay,” Lizzie said. “I won’t tell them to give back the scooters and other things. But I will tell them again how much they need to vote for Shockey!”

  “Well, do it now. That reporter is starting to look interested in you again. And in me.”

  “See you back at camp.”

  “Right,” Jackson said, and tramped off back through the woods.

  After a few miles, he was hot enough to open his jacket, and then to remove it. The hat he kept on; reporters with no better story to pursue had used aircars and zoom cams to record this campaign. Which was, depending on the newsgrid channel, an outrage against common sense, a threat to what remained of civil order, an unimportant footnote to political history, or a cosmic joke. Sometimes all at once.

  Even to Susannah Wells Livingston and Donald Thomas Serrano. Last week Jackson, a spy in the enemy camp, had attended a fund-raiser for Don Serrano. He’d learned that the donkey candidate wasn’t really worried. “I’ve spread around all kinds of ‘benefits’ to my constituency,” Serrano told him. “Since when can’t you buy a Liver?” Jackson had just nodded. Wasn’t that exactly what he himself had believed, until Lizzie Francy tumbled into his life from eight feet up a factory wall?

  The election, however, was not a cosmic joke to Cazie. To avoid her, Jackson had temporarily moved out of his apartment and, under another name, into a hotel in Pittsburgh Enclave. Not a luxury hotel, the place served mostly techs, those marginal donkeys whose parents had been able to afford only limited genemods, usually for appearance. Techs worked for a living but never ran anything. Jackson came and went quietly among them. He talked to Theresa, the only person with his physical address, daily, on what he hoped was a sufficiently shielded link. That Cazie couldn’t find him gave Jackson an odd satisfaction, almost as great as the satisfaction of knowing she was looking.

  It took him three hours to hike back to Lizzie’s tribe. The late afternoon sun slanted over the mountaintops, dark green with pine and white with lingering patches of snow. The other “voter checking teams” would be straggling in as well, after arduous trips to check the loyalty of the other voters.

  So why was he involved in all this? Because Cazie hated it? Not reason enough, not nearly enough.

  Because he was sick of his life, his class, his pointless activities? Not reason enough.

  Because babies without Change syringes were dying across the country? This election wouldn’t help those suffering infants. Even if Livers won every goddamn election for the next six years and controlled every political office from President to game warden, ungenemod carpetbaggers in their own appalled capitals, it wouldn’t create more Change syringes. Only Miranda Sharifi and the Supers could do that. And they had not. They didn’t even answer the transmissions to Selene, city of exile under the surface of the moon.

  Jackson stopped in the shadow of a huge fragrant pine, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and braced himself for the hallucinogenic-holo reality of “campaign headquarters.”

  It started a quarter mile before the camp, with the candidate.

  “Who the hell are you?” the girl said. She raised her face from Shockey’s, who chivalrously had chosen to lie underneath, separated from the mud by a blanket of blaring orange. The girl, naked from waist to expensive boots, sat astride him. She didn’t move off when Jackson bumbled over a slight rise between the trees and into their barely hidden dell.

  Jackson dropped his eyes—not to avoid looking at her, but vice versa. He’d already seen her. Maybe seventeen, with genemod green eyes and long black hair. A donkey girl, slumming. Jackson was supposed to be a Liver; how would a Liver react? Jackson shuffled his feet, as if embarrassed, and kept his eyes on her boots. They were calf-high, Italian leather undoubtedly nanocoated so her feet wouldn’t consume them, caked with mud. Above them the girl’s perfect thighs prickled with goose bumps. The March air was
cool.

  She said slyly, “You a reporter?”

  Not genemod for IQ, clearly. Jackson mumbled, “No, I’m not, me.”

  Shockey had recognized him. He pulled the girl back toward himself. “Just a gawker, him, Alexandra. Come gawk instead at me.”

  She giggled. “In this position?” But she kissed him. Shockey kept his eyes open and glared at Jackson: Go away.

  He did, wondering if Alexandra was a thrill seeker, a political distraction, a professional bribe, or an attempt at scandal. Jackson hadn’t seen any robocams. Still…hadn’t Vicki Turner warned Shockey? Some of his constituents wouldn’t be pleased to see their Liver candidate, the antidote to donkey corruption, rolling around in the concupiscent mud with a donkey who looked like Alexandra.

  Jackson turned, cupped his hands, and yelled. “Shockey! Company coming, you! Sharon and the baby!” Maybe that would do it.

  At the camp, only two reporters roamed around. One was interviewing Scott Morrison, a buddy of Shockey’s. “We’re going to win this here election, us. And next year we’ll take the goddamn presidency!”

  “I see you’re wearing a gold chain,” the reporter said smoothly. “A contribution from Citizens For Serrano, perhaps?”

  “It’s an heirloom,” Morrison said solemnly. “From my great-grandmother, her. She was a flat-screen actress.”

  “And the scooter beside you?” The robocam whirred; the reporter didn’t bother to hide his sneer.

  “Also left over from Great-grandmama.”

  What had happened to Vicki?

  A group of Livers whom Jackson had never seen before slouched sulkily outside the plastic-tented feeding ground. Travel-stained, dirty. The tribe got a few such groups each week. Coming from beyond Willoughby County, they’d seen the fuss on the newsgrids. Some groups looked thoughtfully interested. Some were contemptuous of Livers willing to soil themselves with the donkey work of politics. Some had just heard about the scooters and jewelry and wine from the “non-candidate-affiliated citizen groups for Serrano.” Already one scooter had been stolen. Tribe members stuck together now in clumps, which was why all of them were within filming distance of the feeding ground. Except, of course, the candidate, who was enjoying the benefits of fame on his back in the woods.