Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  “Ms. Aranow?”

  “Say I’m coming, Jones.”

  Theresa climbed off the window seat. Her head swam. Leaning against the wall until her vision cleared, she felt her knees wobble. She locked them and took the call in the bathroom, where she wouldn’t have to send her image, it wasn’t Jackson.

  “Tess? Where’s visual?” Cazie, looking crisp and fierce in a severe black suit.

  “I just got out of the shower.” Cazie knew that Theresa didn’t like her body on display.

  “Oh, sorry. Listen, where’s Jackson?”

  “Isn’t he with you?” Theresa said.

  “You know quite well he’s not with me; I can hear it in your voice. Don’t play games with me, Tess. Where did he take those Livers?”

  “I don’t…which Livers?”

  Cazie’s face changed. This, Theresa thought, must be the face that Jackson saw when he and Cazie fought: high, sharp cheekbones sprung out of soft skin, eyes as hard as the marble floor beneath Theresa’s bare feet. Theresa shrank back a little against the sink.

  “Tell. Me. Theresa. Where. Jackson. Is.”

  Theresa squeezed her eyes shut.

  “You won’t tell me. All right, I’m coming over there now.”

  “No! I’m…I’m on my way out!”

  “Oh, right. When was the last time you went out? Ten minutes, Tess.” The screen blanked.

  Panic seized Theresa. Cazie would get it out of her, Cazie could get anything out of her, she’d tell Cazie that Jackson had taken Lizzie and the others to Kelvin-Castner in Boston…Jackson had said not to say anything. To anyone. Especially not to Cazie. But Cazie was on her way…Theresa would order Jones not to let her in.

  Cazie would know the overrides. For the apartment, for the building. For Theresa’s mind.

  All right, then—Theresa wouldn’t be here when Cazie came.

  The moment the thought came, Theresa knew it was right. She needed to leave before Cazie arrived. Also, she needed to do what the message on her system told her to do—get to Miranda Sharifi and make her give out more Change syringes. You’re a donkey, you have all this money, you can get to Miranda, you, in ways we can’t—Theresa had spent two days (three?), she now saw, trying to push what she had to do out of her mind. And it hadn’t worked—it never did. Ignoring the summons to pain only made the pain worse. The summons was a gift, she’d somehow overlooked that, and not acting on the gift had only made her crazy.

  Crazier.

  But not now.

  Quickly, with a smoothness that surprised her, Theresa darted from the bathroom. No time for a shower now. But shoes—she’d need shoes. And a coat. It was April outside the enclave—wasn’t April cold? She grabbed shoes and coat. “The roof,” she told the elevator. “Please.”

  And it wasn’t just her muscles that suddenly worked smoothly. Her mind did, too, in efficient autonomous plans that amazed herself. To get to Miranda Sharifi, Theresa needed to start at the last place Miranda had been seen on Earth. That was the Liver compound where people bonded in threes, where Patty and Josh and Mike could never be alone again because they were forced to be with each other. Miranda had been there, leaving a tape explaining the new red syringes. To use the new syringes, you had to be Changed. That’s what Josh had said. So Miranda might have also left more Change syringes there than anywhere else. Or, she might even have come back, or sent somebody else back, to bring more, after the fighting broke out over Change syringes. If bonding was Miranda’s latest plan for people, then surely Miranda would monitor the place (places?) she was testing it. Even Theresa knew that much about how science worked.

  On the roof, she blinked in the bright warm sunshine. Her heart speeded up, and her breath caught in her throat. Outside the enclave, the last time she’d tried that she’d blacked out, the panic had been so bad, seizure after seizure…

  But Cazie was coming here. If Theresa didn’t leave, she’d have to see Cazie.

  Theresa closed her eyes, bent over from the waist to put her head between her knees, and breathed deeply. After a few moments, the panic lessened. Or maybe it didn’t; maybe it just seemed less because facing a camp full of wild, bonded Livers was less scary than facing Cazie Sanders in a rage.

  Maybe that was how people made themselves face dangerous things. By running away from things more dangerous.

  In the bright sunshine, walking through the roof garden toward the aircars, Theresa whimpered. Then she climbed into the car and retrieved from its memory the district coordinates for the camp of the biochemically bonded Livers, trying to breathe evenly and deeply, trying not to give in to the chemistry of her own mind.

  The Livers hadn’t moved camp. Theresa was afraid they might have gone somewhere else—Livers did that—but from the air she could see small human figures moving around in groups of three. How far away could they get from each other before they died? Theresa couldn’t remember the exact distance.

  She landed, breathing deeply and evenly, but this time no one came running toward the car. Instead, all the triads immediately vanished into the building and closed the door.

  She forced herself to get out of the car and walk toward the building, then around it. Under the plastic tarp of the feeding ground sat three naked people who hadn’t noticed the aircar: two women and a man. When they saw Theresa their faces froze, and then she saw the kind of look she usually only saw in the mirror.

  They were afraid. Of her. Like Lizzie’s baby had been afraid. This camp had been infected just like Lizzie’s had.

  “Hello? Is Josh here?” Josh had been kind to her, before.

  The three people stood, huddled close together, and clutched each other’s hands. In a naked tangle they inched toward the flap of plastic that served as the feeding-ground door. Theresa moved in front of the flap, and they halted.

  “I want to speak to Josh. And Patty and Mike.”

  The names seemed to reassure at least one of the triad. The older woman took a step forward, still holding both her partners’ hands, and said fearfully, “Do you know Jomp, you?”

  Jomp. It took Theresa a minute to realize this was Josh-Mike-Patty. She felt a flicker of distaste.

  “Yes. I know Josh, and I’m here to see him. Take me to him, please.”

  Despite the pounding in her chest, Theresa marveled at herself. She sounded like Cazie. Well, no, maybe not. But at least like Jackson.

  The woman hesitated. She was about thirty, small and fair, with a bony face and short hair as pale as Theresa’s own. “Jomp are inside, them. I’ll go in, me, and get them.”

  “You might not come back,” Theresa said. “I’m going with you.”

  “No! No, no. You stay here, you.”

  Theresa merely stepped aside. The triad squeezed past her. As they left the warmth of the sun-magnified enclosure, their naked skin dimpled and goose-bumped. Theresa watched them pull on the jacks dumped in a pile on a wooden shelf, before she moved closer to the fair-haired woman, who shrunk back.

  “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you, any of you. I just…want to see Josh. He’ll remember me.” Would he? “What’s your name?”

  “We’re Peranla, us.” It came out in a whisper.

  Peranla. Percy-Anne-Laura. Or Pearl-Andy-Lateesha. Or…it didn’t matter.

  But it should.

  “Peranla, I’m going with you to see Josh.”

  The triad stopped moving. Almost they stopped breathing. What if they went into a seizure, like Theresa did when she got too frightened? What would Theresa do then? But they didn’t. After a minute they moved in their huddle past Theresa and broke into a clumsy group run around the corner of the factory. Theresa ran after them.

  “Open the door! It’s Peranla, us! Open up!”

  The door opened, and Peranla tumbled inside. Theresa, astonished at herself, squeezed in with them.

  Her eyes took a minute to accustom themselves to the gloom. Over a hundred people, grouped in threes, staring at her. The triads pulled closer together and looked
uneasy, but nobody looked terrified. Even Peranla looked less anxious than they had outside. Of course. When Theresa was at home, with familiar people among familiar things, she was less frightened, too. Safer.

  Her heart quickened and her throat tightened around her windpipe. “Is…Josh here? Josh?”

  “You better leave, you,” said an old man. Several other people nodded.

  “Josh? Jomp?”

  He came forward slowly, dragging Patty and Mike by the hand. Mike scowled faintly, but Patty, whom Theresa remembered as a scary bitch, trembled and hid her head in Mike’s shoulder. That calmed Theresa’s breathing.

  Maybe being the least scared person in a group was almost the same as not being scared at all.

  “Josh, I’m Theresa Aranow. I was here last fall. I brought you clothes and Y-cones. You told me about the bonding here, and…and the red syringes.”

  Josh nodded, without meeting her eyes.

  “And the holo, Josh. You showed me a holo of Miranda Sharifi. She was explaining the new syringes, the ones that she left with you to cause bonding.”

  Mike growled, “It don’t having nothing to do with you.”

  “I want to see the holo again, Josh. Please. You’ve all seen it lots of times, haven’t you?”

  Josh nodded again. Patty looked up from Mike’s shoulder.

  “Well, then,” Theresa said as firmly as she could, “you can see it again. Just like you always do. And I’ll watch, too.”

  “Okay,” Josh said. “Everybody, you—it’s Miranda time. We are the life and the blood, us.”

  “We are the life and the blood,” the crowd responded raggedly, and Theresa could feel relief running over them, clear as falling water. This was a known routine: comforting, safe. The triads moved and jiggled, settling down in front of an ancient holostage in what Theresa would bet were the same places they always sat. After a minute, she sat beside Josh, nearest to the door.

  “On,” Mike said. “Miranda time.”

  The holostage sprang to life. A pretty, meaningless swirl of color, and then Miranda appeared, head and shoulders only, the background a plain dark recording booth designed for anonymity. Miranda wore a sleeveless white suit; a red ribbon held back her unruly black hair.

  “This is Miranda Sharifi, speaking to you from Selene. You will want to know what this new syringe is. It’s a wonderful new gift, designed especially for you. A gift even better than the Change syringes were. Those set you free biologically, but also led to much isolation when you no longer needed each other for food and survival. It’s not good for man to be alone. So this syringe, this wonderful gift—”

  Something was wrong with the holo.

  Since her first visit to this camp five months ago, Theresa had spent weeks, months, watching newsholos. They replayed at night behind her eyelids. This one was subtly wrong. The voice was Miranda’s and words were synchronized with Miranda’s moving lips, but not with her body. No, that wasn’t it. Her body didn’t move very much. That was it. The stiffness of Miranda’s body on certain words, plus her movements on others…the rhythm was wrong. And the rhythms in the words, too…Theresa had perfect pitch. She heard the very slight flattening in the wrong places. The holo had been created, not recorded.

  Which meant that Miranda had not given this message. Or these red syringes.

  Theresa glanced around. The Liver faces were rapt, almost as if they were watching a Lucid Dreamer concert. There must be subliminals in the holo. She lowered her eyes and listened to the rest of the message without watching the visuals.

  If the bonding syringes weren’t from Miranda, then who were they from?

  Maybe the same people who made the neuropharm these people had breathed in. The neuropharm that made people so afraid of new things. But why?

  Jackson had said that nobody except SuperSleepless could create such neuropharms. Nobody but Miranda Sharifi knew enough about the Cell Cleaner to make something that wouldn’t be destroyed by the Change nanos in everybody’s body. Everybody’s but Theresa’s.

  “—be together in a new way, a way that creates community, that roots that community in biology itself—”

  Doubt grabbed Theresa. What did she know about “biology itself,” or community, or SuperSleepless? Who was she to decide that this recording wasn’t really Miranda? Theresa was a crazy, fearful, unChanged person who had seizures whenever anything got too unfamiliar, who had left her apartment only three times in the last year, who was afraid to go home because her ex-sister-in-law, who was also her only friend, was looking for her. Theresa didn’t know anything.

  Except every recorded detail of the life of Leisha Camden.

  And with that realization, Theresa knew what she was going to do.

  She stood up just as the recording ended. All around her Livers gazed misty-eyed and smiling at their bonded triads. Without which they would die. Wicked, wicked. It wasn’t bonding, it was bondage.

  “Give me the holo cartridge, Josh,” Theresa said as firmly as she could manage. She tried to sound like Leisha Camden when Leisha gave orders. Nobody knew Leisha’s life better than Theresa; nobody knew Leisha herself better.

  A hundred misty faces stared at her.

  “I’m taking it. I need it. I’ll bring it back.” Leisha, decisively telling Jennifer Sharifi that Sanctuary was wrong. Or Leisha telling Calvin Hawke that his anti-Sleepless movement was finished. Leisha: calm, firm, cool. Theresa started, knees shaky, toward the holostage.

  “You leave our Miranda-time holo alone, you!” somebody said.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t. I need it.” Theresa reached the terminal. But she wasn’t Theresa, she was Leisha. That was the trick. Be Leisha, feel like her. If Theresa could watch a newsgrid and feel what the mother of a dying unChanged baby felt—could feel like she was that mother—then she could be Leisha Camden. It was no different. No different…

  Now people stood up, some milling fearfully in tight groups of three, some starting toward her. Mike hesitated, then he and Josh moved in, dragging Patty with them. Mike’s trowel-shaped head was lowered into his neck, his eyes were terrified. For a second, through her own trembling vision, Theresa saw them all as they must look from the outside: four wide-eyed freaks jittering around each other, smelling of fear. No, don’t think like that, don’t see yourself from the outside, see yourself as Leisha. She was Leisha Camden.

  “Don’t stop me.” Theresa quavered. Mike broke stride for a moment, then continued toward her.

  “I mean it!”

  “Mike,” Patty whimpered, “don’t…you can’t…”

  Mike whispered, “She can’t take our holo, her…she can’t have it…” He grabbed Theresa’s arm.

  The vertigo started, blackness swooping over her brain. Theresa tried to push the vertigo away—Leisha had never fainted!—along with Mike’s hand. She couldn’t. She wasn’t Leisha, calm and firm and cool, she couldn’t ever be Leisha, that was more self-control than she could ever have. Even though being Leisha had seemed to work for a few minutes, Theresa wasn’t Leisha—

  Then be somebody not calm and cool.

  “Let go of that fucking holo or I’ll tie you in naval knots!” Theresa yelled, and the words were Cazie’s.

  Mike dropped her arm and stared at her.

  “Get out of my fucking way!”

  Part of the crowd drew back; the rest surged timidly forward. Murmurs rose, within and among triads: “Don’t let her take it, us”…“Stop her, you”…“What right does she got”…

  In a minute they would overcome their fear and grab her again. No—grab Cazie. She was Cazie. And these people’s brain chemistry now made them afraid of anything unfamiliar, anything they weren’t used to.

  “I’m going to cry!” Theresa screamed at top volume. “I’m going to melt the floor! There is nanotech you’ve never seen that lets me do that, I can do that! All I have to do is sing!” She started singing, some song her nanny used to sing to her, only it was too gentle so she started jumping up and down and
then spinning around, screaming the words and then changing them to the kinds of obscenities Cazie used when she was mad at Jackson for not doing what Cazie wanted. “You poor deluded son of a bitch, your vision about reality is so limited you don’t see even a fraction of it, let alone a fraction of me, you lack irony Jackson goddamn it to Liver hell can’t you even see that! You pathetic cosseted baby, you’d think you…get the fuck out of my way!”

  They did. The crowd shrank back, and some children started to cry. Triads clutched at each other. Screaming, singing, jumping, cursing, whirling, Theresa moved to the door, the cartridge in her hand, while a hundred people—but there must be ninety-nine, right, or a hundred two—looked at her with the same anxious dread Theresa saw daily in the mirror.

  She made it outside just before her own nerve broke.

  Still, she was able to stumble to the aircar. “Lift!” she gasped at it. “Home…” and then her breath caught and the seizure started and all she could do while it lasted was try to breathe, the car flying itself away from the Liver camp where no small figures sixty feet below came out of the building to watch her leave.

  Just before reaching Manhattan East, Theresa gained control of herself. She leaned back against the seat of the car and tried to think.

  She couldn’t go home. Cazie might still be there. She had the car fly to the first large empty place, which turned out to be a deserted scooter-race field, and set down where she could see in all directions. She sat clutching the holo cartridge of Miranda and breathing as evenly and deeply as she could.

  What had just happened?

  She had been Cazie. It had only been pretending, of course, but she had been able to pretend powerfully enough to hold off her fear for a little while, and behave in a way she never could have otherwise. But how could that be? Holo actors, of course, pretended to be other people all the time, so they could be convincing in stories…but Theresa wasn’t a holo actor. And she certainly wasn’t anything like Cazie. Her brain chemistry was different, was damaged somehow so that she was always afraid and anxious and what Jackson called “severely inhibited in the face of novelty”…Had pretending to be somebody else actually changed her brain chemistry for a few minutes? But how could that be?