Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  She looks at me like she thinks I don’t remember. I nod, hating her, to show I do. Tony Indivino wasn’t like this.

  “Here is the crucial piece. In sleepless canines, there’s no REM sleep. When that’s removed, so is dreaming. And when dogs don’t dream, the alternate-reality imagining slowly disappears from their brain scans. The function is still there when they’re born, but over the next several months it fades. Without reinforcement from dreaming, imagination—as humans know the term—disappears. Without imagination, the bond with man weakens and the older limbic behavior takes over. Dreaming made all the difference. Its absence is what killed your sister.”

  I struggle to understand. “You mean…because the dog couldn’t imagine people and dogs together in ways that weren’t happening at just that minute…it wouldn’t take its training and it didn’t care about Precious? She died because Leisha’s pup couldn’t dream—”

  “What?” Jennifer says sharply. “Who couldn’t dream?”

  I remember that she and Leisha Camden, who Donna named the pup after, are enemies. They have different dreams for the Sleepless. Jennifer wants them all in Sanctuary; Leisha wants them to live outside in the real world with us, the inferior animals.

  “The dog,” I stumble on, “my sister named the pups, my other sister, not me—”

  “That’s all I have to tell you, Ms. Benson,” Jennifer Sharifi says. She stands crisply. “I hope the information explains what happened. Sanctuary is sorry for your loss. If you’ll step back into the security elevator—”

  “No, wait! You didn’t tell me what I have to know!”

  “I’ve told you all I can. Good-bye.”

  “But I need to know the name and location of the company that sold Daddy the embryos! They were called Arrowgene then, but now I can’t track them on the Subnet, they’ve changed their name or shut down…but I have their truckers’ business records! Only they’re in code and I don’t know anybody else who could figure out—”

  “I can’t give you that information. Good-bye, Ms. Benson.”

  I spring toward her. It’s a mistake. I hit an invisible barrier that’s apparently been there the whole time, unseen. It doesn’t hurt me, but I can’t move any farther toward Jennifer Sharifi.

  She turns. “If you don’t get into the elevator, Ms. Benson, the field will carefully push you into it. And don’t bother leaving any more messages for Tony. He’s not here, and if he were, he would tell you that Sanctuary is about survival. Not revenge.”

  She leaves. The Y-field pushes me into the security box and then opens on the other side, and I’m back in the Allegheny hills.

  Later that day, on a bus going home, I hear on vid that Sleepless activist Tony Indivino has been arrested. The FBI linked him to a kidnapping four years earlier. He abducted a four-year-old boy named Timmy DeMarzo, a Sleepless child whose normal parents had beaten him for disturbing them in the middle of the night nearly every night. Tony Indivino had hidden the kid with people who had taken much better care of him. But now he’s been caught and arraigned, and is being held without bail in the Conewango County jail.

  There must be other ways beside the Subnet to find an underground genemod lab. But I don’t know what they are. I’ve done everything I can think of to do. But how can I give up the search for Precious’s killer? If I give up the search…

  Outside the bus windows, the road climbs higher into the mountains. Already it’s June. The woods are in full leaf, although they’re not yet deep green but instead that tender yellow-green you see only a week or ten days every year. The sunny roadside bursts with daisies and butter-cups and Queen Anne’s lace. Creeks rush; streams burble.

  If I lose my anger, there won’t be anything of me left.

  For just a second I look into a black place so deep and cold that my breath freezes. Then it’s gone and the bus keeps on climbing the mountain road.

  It lets me off in Kellsville and I walk the rest of the way up the mountain, which takes until sunset. Daddy’s yard looks just the same. Straggly grass, deep ruts, sagging porch. But it’s not Daddy sitting on the porch. It’s Donna.

  “I thought you’d come here,” she says, not standing up. “Or did you go by my place first?”

  “No.” In the shadows I can’t see her face.

  “Did you go by the hospital to see how Jim’s doing?”

  “No.”

  “‘No.’ ’Course not. He don’t concern you, does he?”

  I ignore this. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “Asleep. No—passed out. Let’s be honest for once, okay, Carol Ann?”

  But it was always Donna who wasn’t honest. Who insisted on being sunny in a world where the sun only really shines on the rich. I don’t say this.

  She continues, “You’re the reason Jim got hurt, aren’t you? And the reason my place got trashed. You’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing, and somebody important don’t like it.”

  “It’s none of your business, Donna.”

  “‘None of my business.’” She stands up then, in the porch shadows. “‘None of my business!’ Who the fuck do you think you are to tell me what’s my business and what isn’t? How much more family do you think I got to lose?”

  This isn’t Donna. This is somebody else. I climb the porch steps and turn her face toward the sunset. She hasn’t been crying, but in the red light she starts to shake all over with a fury I never in a million years thought she was capable of.

  “You stupid fuck—what do you think you’re doing? You got Jim hurt and you’re going to get yourself hurt next, or Daddy, or me! Whatever you’re doing, it isn’t going to bring Precious back, and it isn’t going to get even because there isn’t no ‘even.’ Don’t you even know that? You can’t beat those people; all you can do is try and stay away from them, and when you do brush up against them you get out quick and forget anything you learned or they’ll wreck whatever you got left of your life!”

  “Donna, you don’t know—”

  “No, it’s you who don’t know! You don’t know nothing about how the world works! You’re supposed to be the smart one, and I’m supposed to be dumb as a bucket of hair, poor old dumb Donna, but I know you can’t fight them and win. You can only lose more’n you already did and I’m not going to do that—I’m not going to lose everything else I got left. And you’re not going to lose it for me neither, Carol Ann. Promise me right here and now, on Precious’s grave, that you’ll leave this alone.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I said I can’t!”

  We stare at each other in the dying light, and I see that we’re never going to agree, never going to understand each other. We’re made too different. She lives in a world where when you get slammed hard, you pick yourself up and go on. I don’t live in that world. I don’t want to. That’s what makes all the difference.

  But it’s her that crumbles first. “All right, Carol,” she says wearily, not meaning it. “All right.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, not meaning it either.

  We don’t say anything more. The sun goes down, and somewhere down the mountain, a dog barks.

  I move back to the city, and go back to work at my old housecleaning company. Whenever I can I sign up for double shifts, houses in the day and offices at night. It makes me tired enough to sleep. Donna visits me once. I cook her dinner, we go to a vid, she takes the gravtrain back the next day. The whole time, she chats and laughs and hugs me. The guy in the apartment next door watches her like she’s a vid star.

  I’m hanging on. Trying not to think. Not to feel. Waiting, although I don’t know for what. The days are frozen and the nights dreamless.

  It’s not that way for the rest of the country. Every day something else happens. A Sleepless teenager dies in a car crash in Seattle, and doctors take apart his body and brain. They find that every bit of tissue is perfect. Not just in good shape—he’s only seventeen—but perfect. Sleepless tissue regenerates. The Sleepless won’t
age. An unexpected side effect, the scientists say.

  A county in New York says Sleepless can’t serve on juries because they aren’t “peers” of everybody else.

  A scientist in Illinois publishes a study on sparrows made to be sleepless. Their metabolism is so high they can’t eat enough to keep themselves alive. They die, eating and eating, of starvation.

  Pollux, Pennsylvania, votes a law that Sleepless can be refused apartment rentals. They’re awake too much, which would run up landlords’ utility bills.

  Some institute in Boston proves that sleepless mice are unable to contract or carry hantoviruses.

  A vid preacher declares Jennifer Sharifi the Antichrist, sent to Earth to represent ultimate evil just before the final Armageddon.

  The New York Times prints an editorial that says, essentially, that everybody should take a deep breath and calm down about sleeplessness.

  And in July, the inmates of the Conewango County Jail kill Tony Indivino in the recreation yard. They beat him to death with a lead pipe.

  I learn this on the eleven o’clock news, drinking a beer and cleaning my own apartment. The terminal is a cheap standard wallscreen, rimmed in black plastic. The news has no pictures of the death.

  “…promised a full investigation of the incident, which occurred at twelve-twenty this afternoon Eastern Standard Time. The inspector general of the New York State Correctional System—”

  If they knew the exact time the “incident” was occurring, why didn’t somebody stop it?

  I stand there, staring at the screen, a glass of beer in one hand and a cleaning rag in the other. The red message light on the side of the terminal blinks. These cheap systems can’t split the screen. I choose the message, and the Sanctuary logo fills the black rim.

  “Message for Carol A. Benson,” says a pleasant computer voice, “from Jennifer Sharifi of Sanctuary, Incorporated, New York State. This message is shielded to Class One-A. It will not record on any system and will repeat only once. The message is: Arrowgene operating as Mountview Bionetics, Sarahela, Pennsylvania. Chief scientist is Dr. Tyler Robert Wells, 419 Harpercrest Lane. End message.”

  The screen blanks.

  If Tony Indivino were here, he would tell you that Sanctuary is about survival. Not revenge.

  Not anymore.

  I fiddle with the terminal for half an hour, but the computer voice was accurate. The message hasn’t been recorded. There’s no trace of it anywhere, in my system or in the retrievables off the parent system. I’m the only one who will ever hear it.

  Daddy’s gun is where I left it, and in the same condition. So is he.

  “Hey, Daddy.”

  It takes him a minute to focus. “Carol Ann.”

  “It’s me.”

  “Welcome home.” Suddenly he smiles, and I see a flash of what he was, the old cheerful sweetness, before it sinks under the heavy smell of whiskey. “You here? Long?”

  “No,” I say. “Just overnight.”

  “Well, ’night. Sleep tight.” It’s seven o’clock in the evening.

  “Sure, Daddy. You, too.”

  “Gonna sit up. Little longer.”

  “You do that.”

  The next morning, I’m gone by five. The gun comes apart, and it’s in my duffel bag. I wear jeans and good shoes. By seven I’m in Kellsville. The bus south leaves at eight. I drink a cup of coffee and watch the headlines circle the news kiosk.

  NO SUSPECTS IDENTIFIED IN

  INDIVINO MURDER

  “NO ONE IS TALKING,” SAYS CONEWANGO WARDEN (STORY 1—click here)

  FBI RECEIVES ANON CALL TO BOMB SANCTUARY (STORY 2)

  INDIVINO DEATH CALLED NATIONAL DISGRACE (STORY 3)

  RAIN PUMMELS SOUTHEAST (STORY 4)

  FRANCE CALLS FOR MAJOR EUROCREDIT REFORM (STORY 5)

  SCIENTISTS CREATE GENEMOD ALGAE. POTENTIAL FOR FEEDING THE WORLD IS ENORMOUS, SAYS NOBELIST (STORY 6)

  I put in a credit chip and press button six. The flimsy prints out, but there’s not time to read it before my bus leaves. I shove the flimsy in my duffel and sleep all the way to Sarahela, Pennsylvania.

  Four-nineteen Harpercrest Lane is in a shielded community. From beyond the gate I can see streets running down to a river park. The houses are tall, narrow, and stuck together in fours and fives. There are trees, small playgrounds, beds of perfect genemod flowers. The river, which I don’t know the name of, sparkles blue.

  It’s the kind of community that cooperates, that relies on word of mouth. A single day of loitering outside the gate gives me the name of the most commonly used residential cleaning company: Silver’s Polish. The next day I’m hired. They’re glad to have such an experienced cleaning tech.

  The Dr. Tyler Wellses have a tech come every Thursday. On my second week I trade shifts with another worker, two for one, telling him I need Wednesday off to see a doctor. By eight o’clock I’m in the house. I set the vacuuming bot to snuffling around the kitchen floor and spray the sink with organic-molecule-eating foam. Four littered places on the breakfast table. I go through the rest of the house.

  Two kids’ rooms, toys and small clothing. They’ve already left for school.

  A woman singing in the master-bedroom shower.

  Nobody else is home. I go back down the stairs. Halfway down, on a landing with a sculpture of a Greek wrestler below a cool blue-tinted window, I see him come out of a backyard shed, carrying a trowel and wearing gloves. Short, skinny, slightly balding. Dr. Tyler Robert Wells, scientist, gardens by hand, without bots.

  I slip the gun from my cleaning kit, push the parts together, and raise it to the window. Once he’s in the crosshair, I tell the chip to take over, keeping centered on his head. It’s in his head, the knowledge that genemods animals to kill other people’s children. I sit the gun on the wide polished windowsill, where it follows Wells’s every move on its all-directional swivel. I programmed it to my voice, within a five-foot radius. All I have to do is say “Fire.”

  “Don’t,” a voice says.

  I look up, expecting to see the woman from the shower standing above me. But she’s still singing in a distant room. The female voice is below, a much older woman dressed like a bodyguard. Her gun is the handheld kind. “Carol, don’t say it. Listen first.”

  A bodyguard shouldn’t know my name. And I shouldn’t take time to listen. She’s too late to stop my verbal command to my gun, and that’s all that matters. It never mattered whether or not I got out.

  “Don’t say your gun codeword because we’re going to get him anyway. The government is. Yes, we know who you are, ever since you tried to use Bent to decode Red Goldfish Trucking. We went back and put it together then. We’ll get Wells, I promise you. But if you kill him now, there’s a lot of information we won’t get. Don’t say the codeword. Just come down the stairs and I’ll deprogram the gun.”

  “No.”

  “Carol, if you kill him we’ll prosecute you. We’ll have to. But if you leave, I’ll get immunity for you. And your father, too, about the sleepless dog embryos. Come down.”

  “No.”

  “I know about your little sister. But our chances of getting the right evidence against Wells are stronger if we have more time with him. It will make all the difference to our case.”

  “Fire,” I say to the gun, and close my eyes.

  Nothing happens.

  My eyes fly open. The gun still sits on the windowsill, swiveling to follow the back of Wells’s head. The FBI agent has climbed the stairs between us. She puts a hand on my arm. I feel the biometal joints augmenting her grip. Her eyes are sad. “I gave you the chance to get out. Now please come quietly.”

  “What…how…”

  “We have counterfields you couldn’t possibly know about. Don’t you realize you’re way over your head? Weapons get more complex every day. And you’re not even a pro.”

  I let her lead me quietly out of the house, into an aircar marked BLAISEDELL BODYGUARDS, INCORPORATED. Nobody pays any attention to us. As we lif
t above Harpercrest Lane, the last two things I notice are Wells, bent happily over his garden, and a dog, a collie, lying on the bright green genemod grass on somebody’s front lawn, asleep.

  The FBI agent turns out not to be an FBI agent after all. She works for something called the United States Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency, something new, something created because of the eruption of genemod, legal and illegal. The GSEA is going to prosecute me. They have to, my new lawyer says. But they’ll do it slowly, to give themselves more time to nail Wells and Mountview Bionetics and Bent and all the other companies woven together with underground labs. The government will get Wells eventually, my lawyer says. The GSEA agent was right about that.

  But she was wrong about something else. Every day I sit in my cell, on the edge of my cot, and think about how wrong she was.

  Nothing makes all the difference. To anything. The systems are too complex. You genemod dogs for sleeplessness and you destroy their imagination. You genemod people for sleeplessness and you get super-people, who can imagine everything and invent anything. But Tony Indivino was killed by the lowest scum there is, and Jennifer Sharifi is taking Sanctuary from purposes of safety to purposes of revenge. Donna chooses to deny anything that makes her unhappy, but the deep black frozen place is in her just as much as in me. Daddy survives his wife’s death but breaks down at his daughter’s. Sleepless mice have great immune systems; sleepless sparrows starve to death; Sleepless humans regenerate tissue. Genemod algae will end world hunger. Dogs genemod for IQ go catatonic, and guard dogs with the best training in the world will revert to pack pecking order if the omega animal smells right.

  No one factor can make all the difference. There are too many different factors, now. Maybe there always were.

  So I’ll let my lawyer, who is a Sleepless named Irving Lewis, defend me. He wants the case for what he calls “the eventual chance to set significant Constitutional precedents.” Except for court appearances, he does most of his work inside Sanctuary.