Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  By the end of the month, half his body juts through the Y-fence, which from the inside he doesn’t know is there, while he rolls me around on the ground. Sometimes he’s rough, sometimes just playful. I have deep scratches on my neck and hands. I try to keep him away from my face, and when I fail, I wear heavy makeup at work. When the dog’s on top of me, snapping and fake-growling, I try to never remember Precious.

  It’s not the dog’s fault. His brain is hard-wired. All the dogs in a pack pick on one dog. That’s the function of the omega dog, the last and lowest: to give all the other dogs something to pick on and exploit. The pack needs that outlet to work off tension they might otherwise use fighting each other. The omega dog is in their genes.

  Sometimes, when Alpha takes my arm in his jaws and shakes it, I put my hand on his neck. I can feel the beeper, just under his skin. It’s transmitting the electronic signal that lets him penetrate the fence if he happens to brush up against it without setting off alarms. And anything attached to him would also penetrate: you don’t want the alarms going off just because your guard dog’s tail brushed a Y-field and that tail just happens to have a burr stuck on it.

  On the thirty-third day, I roll through the fence, smelling like a female wolf, my arms wrapped around the Alpha guard dog. Inside, he cuffs me sharply on the shoulder and leaves me there. He’s been trained never to let a stranger inside. But I’m a member of his pack filling a necessary position. It makes all the difference.

  The Subnet claims, over and over, that it keeps no records. But the Subnet itself is a record, endlessly down-loaded. If there’s one, there’ll be others. Nobody can remember every business deal without help. Especially if you need to know who you had better not try to deal with a second time.

  Nothing inside Red Goldfish Trucking is locked. But nothing gives me what I want, either. The windowless building is mostly used for storing cargo and fixing trucks, with a tiny, filthy office walled off in one corner. There’s a terminal, although I know better than to think I’ll find anything on that. It’s free-standing, but the government has new microwave equipment that can lift data off even free-standing terminals, as long as the terminal’s switched on. The Subnet says it also has that equipment for sale. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe anything on the Subnet unless I try it out for myself, like I did the dog attractant. However, I know the Red Goldfish records won’t be electronic.

  They’re plastic, written by hand on stiff blue cards stored in a blue box in the back of the closet. And they’re in code.

  Beta dog comes into the office. He’s off duty. I have to let him knock me around for a few minutes before he curls up in the corner and goes to sleep.

  I take the whole box with me, ride Alpha back through the fence, and catch the next bus out. On the bus I fall into the deepest sleep of my life. It feels like a reward.

  There are five blue plastic cards, headed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That could mean chronological order, or groupings of different kinds of trucking jobs, or almost anything else. Each card is densely covered in small neat handwriting, row after row of it, letters and numbers and symbols with no breaks between. Card 5 is covered only two-thirds of the way down.

  Donna stares as I walk with my suitcase into the Kellsville restaurant where she works. It’s not a cheap table-delivered soysynth place; it has real food and human servers, including Donna. She wears a black uniform with a blue apron. Her red hair is piled on top of her head. She looks like Mama.

  “Carol! What on God’s green earth…Daddy said you went clean over into Ohio to work!”

  “I did. I’m back. Can I stay with you a bit?”

  “’Course you can, honey! And I want you to meet my boyfriend Jim, he’s a real sweetie and I just know you two’ll—”

  “Is there a housecleaning firm in town? I’ve been working as a maid.”

  Donna laughs. “In Kellsville? You got to be kidding. But in the city, maybe…there’s a gravtrain goes back and forth every day now, they just started it. But honey, you look terrible. You all right?”

  I look at her. It’s like looking at Mama: just as dead to me, just as far away. Donna’s put Precious clean out of her mind. She doesn’t know anything about deep black places you can fall into and never get out. She just doesn’t know.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Tell me your address and give me your key. You have a terminal, Donna?”

  “One came with the apartment,” she says proudly. “Though I don’t use it much except for vid. You’re welcome to it, honey. You’re welcome to anything you find there, except Jim.”

  She laughs, and I try to smile, and then I go to her place and get to work cleaning it up.

  The next three months I work as fiendishly as I did at Denny’s. Every day I take the new gravtrain to the city and work my cleaning job. They’re glad to have me; I’m experienced with every kind of maintenance bot they have. Every night I sit at the terminal in the ten-by-ten living room of Donna’s apartment, trying not to hear Donna and Jim making love in the ten-by-ten bedroom.

  I start with free code programs off the Net. I feed in all the data from the five blue plastic cards and run the programs. None of them makes any sense out of the data.

  After a month I’ve saved up enough credits to download programs that cost money. None of them works either.

  “What’re you doing on that terminal all night every night, honey?” Donna asks. “You’re getting circles under your pretty eyes. Don’t you want to come out dancing with us and have a little fun? Jim’s got some pretty peccy friends!”

  “No, thank you,” I say. “You seen Daddy lately?”

  Her face goes flat. “Tomorrow. You know I go every Tuesday. You want to come with me?”

  I shake my head and go back to the terminal. Donna doesn’t say anything more. After she leaves, I can still smell her perfume, flimsy and sweet, in the stale air.

  The best code breakers aren’t programs you can buy. They’re netsites that take your data and run it through their own decryption algorithms. All are very expensive, although you can negotiate with them. They’re on the Subnet, of course. From what I read, some of them use programs stolen from the government. The best ones might even be stolen from the military. Maybe.

  The problem is guessing which ones might be best. Housemaids don’t make a lot of money, not even when they’re called cleaning bot technicians.

  Finally I contract with a Subnet site called Bent. They seem to do business in Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. It’s a heavily shielded transaction, although it uses regular credit, not a cash drop. I give them the data off the blue plastic cards, and they empty my bank account. Afterwards I close the account and open a new one with a different e-bank.

  That night, for the first time ever, I dream about Precious. She’s sitting in her high chair, dressed in pink overalls, laughing. Whatever she’s laughing at is behind me, and when I try to turn around, I’m frozen in place. Frantically I twist my body, but no muscles will move. Precious goes on laughing.

  Donna and Jim bring home a chair. They’ve been saving to buy it. It’s bright screaming green, and it gives off eight different scents, including sex pheromones. They spend ten minutes trying to decide where to put it.

  “In this corner, sweetie,” Donna says.

  “In the bedroom would be better.” Jim leers.

  “Carol Ann, what do you think?”

  I think it’s the ugliest piece of furniture I’ve ever seen. “I don’t care.”

  “About anything,” Jim says under his breath. I pretend not to hear him. He’s getting a little impatient with me living here so long. But he won’t say anything, because it’s what Donna wants.

  Donna says, “Okay, the bedroom,” and she and Jim look at each other in a way that says I should leave the apartment for an hour or so.

  I leave for three, walking the streets more or less aimlessly. When Bent tells me who the bastards are who sold Daddy the sleepless dogs…Daddy’s gun is one thing he hasn’t sold for whiskey.
I know because I buried it before I left, well oiled, behind the place the dog pens used to be. Ammunition doesn’t cost that much. It can be ordered off the Subnet, no questions asked, no records kept. (Right.)

  I would recognize the Arrowgene scientist anywhere. His appearance, his voice, his supercilious manner with people who are ignorant. Scientists aren’t cops. They don’t go around armed. They don’t walk wary. I’m not a good shot, but with this gun, I don’t need to be.

  It’s not what I’d prefer, of course. I’d prefer to get him somewhere isolated, tie him up, smear him with blood from a freshly killed rabbit. Let loose a pack of dogs that have been starved for a week…

  These imaginings fill up three hours. They’ve filled up whole nights, weeks, months. I walk until the sun starts to set, and then I go back to Donna’s apartment building. Outside sit two police aircars. A stretcher bot rolls out beside an orderly.

  “Jim! What—”

  But his stretcher rolls on past. A cop moves in beside me. “Who are you, miss?”

  “I live here! He’s…where’s my sister?”

  Donna isn’t inside. She’s already gone to work. The cop tells me they’ve sent for her, she’s on her way, she’s safe.

  “Jim…”

  “The medic says he’ll be all right. Just roughed up some. Now you tell me, miss. Is anything missing?”

  I look around Donna’s apartment. Drawers have been pulled out, furniture turned over, the bed flung apart. I pretend to study the mess, but I already know. Everything’s still here except five blue plastic cards, and the next time I try to find Bent on the Subnet, it’ll be gone.

  Arrowgene must not’ve been a small underground lab after all. It must’ve been part of a bigger organization, with terminal-trace programs. With enforcers. With the idea of protecting their truckers and scientists and anonymity.

  “Miss?”

  There was no way I could fight that sort of organization. Nobody could, not even the government, or the FBI would have shut it down by now. Nobody with enough power and information…except maybe one other organization.

  “Miss, I asked you if you notice anything missing.”

  “No,” I say. “Everything here is just the way it always was.”

  Tony Indivino was already living in Sanctuary when he visited us last spring. We didn’t know that then. We didn’t care, then.

  Sanctuary is nearly completed by the time I arrive there. It’s huge, half of a rural New York State county circled by a Y-field. Most of the Sleepless in the United States are moving inside, where they feel safe. They trade with the rest of the world, information and inventions and money deals I don’t understand. Mostly they trade data, but you can also find a few tangible Sleepless products on the Net. The ones on the Subnet are fakes.

  I stand at the front gate of Sanctuary in a crowd of tourists who’ve gotten off bus after bus. They mutter and glare.

  “Walling themselves in, and us out.”

  “They better stay the fuck in there if they know what’s good for them.”

  “A monument to genemod narcissism.”

  I look at the man who says that. He looks genemod himself, handsome and well dressed, but apparently not a Sleepless. And just as resentful as the rest of the haters who still spent their good money to travel here to a place full of people they’re jealous of. Go figure.

  On the front of the gate is a big screen with the Sleepless, Inc. logo on it: an open eye. Some kids throw rocks at it, big ones, but the screen doesn’t waver. Protected by a Y-field. It says quietly, over and over, “To leave a message for Sanctuary, Incorporated, or for any individual inside, please speak clearly into one of the five recorders below. Thank you. To leave a message for Sanctuary, Incorporated—”

  People are lined up to leave messages, mostly nasty. I can guess how this works. A smart system sorts through the messages, flagging them by key word, choosing the ones that actually get delivered. If any do. People with real business with Sanctuary don’t use this channel.

  Except that I have real business with Sanctuary.

  When it’s my turn, I speak quietly, so the jerks behind me can’t hear.

  “This is a message for Tony Indivino, from Carol Benson. You came to our house in Forager County, Pennsylvania, last March to warn us about the genemod dogs my Daddy bought on the Subnet. They were Sleepless embryos implanted in a mongrel bitch, bought from a company called Arrowgene. You were right about the dogs, and now I need to talk with you. Just for a minute. Please see me.” And then, after I could get the words up my throat, “My baby sister was killed by one of those sleepless dogs.”

  I wait. Nothing happens. The man in line behind me finally says, “I think it’s my turn now.” When he repeats it, I step aside.

  How long does the smart program take? And what if Tony Indivino isn’t inside Sanctuary? He must leave sometime; he came to us.

  Five minutes later the large screen flashes a different icon: my name. It says, “Will Ms. Carol Benson please step into the elevator.” And there it is, a sudden dimple in the gate like a small elevator, complete with wood-paneled walls. Before the surprised people around me can react, I dart inside. The “door” closes. I touch it, and the walls, too; they’re pure force field, with holos of wooden paneling. The whole thing doesn’t move at all. It just “opens” on the other side, into a real room with white foamcast walls, clean-lined white sofas, and a wall screen which says, “Please wait, Ms. Benson, a few minutes longer.”

  I want to try the door at the far end of the room, to see if it’s real. To see if it’s locked. To see if I can really go into Sanctuary, where sleepers aren’t allowed. But I don’t dare. I’m a beggar here.

  The door opens and a woman walks in, alone. Tall, with long black hair, dressed in jeans and sweater. She is more beautiful, and more exotic, for real than on vid.

  “Ms. Benson, I’m Jennifer Sharifi, Tony Indivino’s associate. Tony cannot come himself. Please tell me what happened with the sleepless dogs.”

  She’s nothing like Tony Indivino. He was friendly. She’s cold, like some queen talking to a grubby peasant. But there’s a weird nervousness to her, too. She keeps pushing back that long black hair, even when it’s not in her face. I don’t like her. But I need her.

  I say, “My father ordered the embryos on the Subnet, from Arrowgene. The dogs were engineered to not—”

  “I know all that,” Jennifer Sharifi interrupts. “Tony told me about his visit to you. What happened subsequently?”

  Does she remember everything “Tony” ever told her? Maybe she does. She’s genemod for every ability possible. Suddenly I remember a story Mama read to Donna and me when we were small. “Sleeping Beauty.” Fairy-blessed at her christening with beauty, intelligence, grace, talent, fortune…

  “How did your sister die?” Jennifer Sharifi asks, and pushes back her long hair. “Did a Sleepless dog kill her?”

  “Yes. No. Not deliberately. Precious—she was two—was bothering the dog while it ate, and it just cuffed her and she fell and she hit the ground at an angle where her neck…” I can’t finish.

  “Had the dogs been acting out of character before that?”

  “Yes. My sister—my other sister—couldn’t get them trained right. She said they were more like cats. They just didn’t…want to be trained.”

  She was silent so long I finally said, “Ms. Sharifi, I came here to—”

  “Biological systems are very complex,” she says. “And species are not identical in their neural inheritance, even when structures seem completely analogous. A dog is not a human being, and sleeplessness doesn’t affect both equally.”

  “I already know that!” I snap. It’s what Tony Indivino said last March, in easier words. “Tell me now what killed my sister! If you know!”

  “We know,” she says, precisely. But her hand goes again to her long dark hair. “We keep track of all research worldwide on sleeplessness, even that not yet published on the Net. A Danish institute is doing wo
rk on canine sleeplessness. The key is dreaming.”

  “Dreaming?” I don’t expect this.

  “Yes. Let me try to explain it in terms you can understand.” She thinks a minute, and I see she doesn’t know how she sounds. Or else she doesn’t care.

  “One facet of the human brain is its ability to imagine different realities. Today I don’t have a cake. I picture the cake I want, and tomorrow I construct it. Or a house, or a concerto, or a city. That’s one way the brain uses its ability to imagine alternate realities. Another way is to think up fantasies that never will or could be, like stories about magic. Another way is through dreaming, asleep at night. Are you following me?”

  I’m not stupid. But all I say is, “Yes.”

  “We Sleepless don’t dream, obviously. But we do all the other methods of imagining alternate reality. Better, in fact, than you do. So the basic ability gets ample exercise.

  “Now consider canine species. They evolved from wolves, but they’re not wolves. They’ve been domesticated by humans for at least twenty thousand years. During that time—did you hear something?”

  “No,” I say. Her eyes dart toward the door, then the wallscreen. She pushes her hair back.

  She’s waiting for something, and jumpy as a cat. But she goes on.

  “During the time the dog was domesticated, it developed the ability to do as humans do, and visualize an altered reality. To some undefined extent, anyway. A dog doesn’t just remember its master. And it doesn’t just respond to Pavlovian conditioning, either. There’s evidence from advanced neurological imagining that parts of a dog’s brain activate when the animal interacts with humans. When, for instance, a human pets a dog, the dog actually pictures itself in an alternate reality with the human. Maybe at home in front of a fire. Maybe rolling around on the ground playing. There’s no way to deduce specifics, but the chemical, electromagnetic, and cerebral imaging evidence is all quite strong.”

  I nod, listening hard, making sure I understand it all.

  “And there’s one more piece of research that’s relevant here. These same brain functions go on during REM sleep, when dogs dream. That, too, is an imaging of alternate reality, as I already said.”