Shikibu gaped at me, his microcam eyes askew. A couple of kids clapped.
“There’s someone else here who has not yet joined us.” I turned on Tree. “Another spectator.” Her smile faded.
“You leave her alone,” said Janet. “What are you, crazy?”
“I’m not going to touch her.” I held up empty hands. “No, I just want her to ruin something. That’s why you came, isn’t it, Tree? To get a taste?” I rifled through the box until I found what I wanted. “How about this?” I thrust it at her.
“Oh yeah,” said Stennie, “I meant to tell you . . .”
She took the record and scoped it briefly. When she glanced up at me, I almost lost my nerve.
“Matsuo Shikibu, meet Treemonisha Joplin.” I clasped my hands behind my back so no one could see me tremble. “The great-great-great-granddaughter of the famous American composer, Scott Joplin. Yes, Japan, we’re all celebrities here in New Canaan. Now please observe.” I read the record for him. “Piano Rags by Scott Joplin, Volume III. Who knows, this might be the last copy. We can only hope. So, what are you waiting for, Tree? You don’t want to be a Joplin anymore? Just wait until your folks get a peek at this. We’ll even send GD a copy. Go ahead, enjoy.”
“Smash it!” The kids around us took up the chant. “Smash it!” Shikibu adjusted his lenses.
“You think I won’t?” Tree pulled out the disk and threw the sleeve off the balcony. “This is a piece of junk, Mr. Boy.” She laughed and then shattered the album against the wall. She held on to a shard. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
I heard Janet whisper. “What’s going on?”
“I think they’re having an argument.”
“You want me to be your little dream cush.” Tree tucked the piece of broken plastic into the pocket of my baggies. “The stiff from nowhere who knows nobody and does nothing without Mr. Boy. So you try to scare me off. You tell me you’re so rich, you can afford to hate yourself. Stay home, you say, it’s too dangerous, we’re all crazy. Well, if you’re so sure this is poison, how come you’ve still got your wiseguy and your cash cards? Are you going to move out of your mom, leave town, stop getting stunted? You’re not giving it up, Mr. Boy, so why should I?”
Shikibu turned his camera eyes on me. No one spoke.
“You’re right,” I said. “She’s right.” I could not save anyone until I saved myself. I felt the wildness lifting me to it. I leapt onto the balcony wall and shouted for everyone to hear. “Shut up and listen, everybody! You’re all invited to my place, okay?”
There was one last thing to smash.
“Stop this, Peter.” The greeter no longer thought I was cute. “What’re you doing?” She trembled as if the kids spilling into her were an infection.
“I thought you’d like to meet my friends,” I said. A few had stayed behind with Happy, who had decided to sulk after I hijacked her guests. The rest had followed me home in a caravan so I could warn off the sentry robots. It was already a hall-of-fame bash. “Treemonisha Joplin, this is my mom. Sort of.”
“Hi,” Tree held out her hand uncertainly.
The greeter was no longer the human doormat. “Get them out of me.” She was too jumpy to be polite. “Right now!”
Someone turned up a boombox. Skitter music filled the room like a siren. Tree said something I could not hear. When I put a hand to my ear, she leaned close and said, “Don’t be so mean, Mr. Boy. I think she’s really frightened.”
I grinned and nodded. “I’ll tell Cook to make us some snacks.”
Bubba and Mike carried boxes filled with the last of the swag and set them on the coffee table. Kids fanned out, running their hands along her wrinkled blood-hot walls, bouncing on the furniture. Stennie waved at me as he led a bunch upstairs for a tour. A leftover cat had gotten loose and was hissing and scratching underfoot. Some twisted kids had already stripped and were rolling in the floor hair, getting ready to have sex.
“Get dressed, you.” The greeter kicked at them as she coiled her umbilical to keep it from being trampled. She retreated to her wall plug. “You’re hurting me.” Although her voice rose to a scream, only half a dozen kids heard her. She went limp and sagged to the floor.
The whole room seemed to throb, as if to some great heartbeat, and the lights went out. It took a while for someone to kill the sound on the boombox. “What’s wrong?” Voices called out. “Mr. Boy? Lights.”
Both doorbones swung open, and I saw a bughead silhouetted against the twilit sky. Shikibu in his microcams. “Party’s over,” Mom said over her speaker system. There was nervous laughter. “Leave before I call the cops. Peter, go to your room right now. I want to speak to you.”
As the stampede began, I found Tree’s hand. “Wait for me?” I pulled her close. “I’ll only be a minute.”
“What are you going to do?” She sounded frightened. It felt good to be taken so seriously.
“I’m moving out, chucking all this. I’m going to be a working stiff.” I chuckled. “Think your dad would give me a job?”
“Look out, dumbscut! Hey, hey. Don’t push!”
Tree dragged me out of the way. “You’re crazy.”
“I know. That’s why I have to get out of Mom.”
“Listen,” she said, “you’ve never been poor, you have no idea . . . Only a rich kid would think it’s easy being a stiff. Just go up, apologize, tell her it won’t happen again. Then change things later on, if you want. Believe me, life will be a lot simpler if you hang on to the money.”
“I can’t. Will you wait?”
“You want me to tell you it’s okay to be stupid, is that it? Well, I’ve been poor, Mr. Boy, and still am, and I don’t recommend it. So don’t expect me to stand around and clap while you throw away something I’ve always wanted.” She spun away from me, and I lost her in the darkness. I wanted to catch up with her, but I knew I had to do Mom now or I would lose my nerve.
As I was fumbling my way upstairs, I heard stragglers coming down. “On your right,” I called. Bodies nudged by me.
“Mr. Boy, is that you?” I recognized Stennie’s voice.
“He’s gone,” I said.
Seven flights up, the lights were on. Nanny waited on the landing outside my rooms, her umbilical stretched nearly to its limit. She was the only remote that was physically able to get to my floor, and this was as close as she could come.
It had been a while since I had seen her; Mom did not use her much anymore and I rarely visited, even though the nursery was only one flight down. But this was the remote who used to pick me up when I cried and who had changed my diapers and who taught me how to turn on my roombrain. She had skin so pale you could almost see veins and long black hair piled high on her head. I never thought of her as having a body because she always wore dark turtlenecks and long woolen skirts and silky panty hose. Nanny was a smile and warm hands and the smell of fresh pillowcases. Once upon a time, I thought her the most beautiful creature in the world. Back then I would have done anything she said.
She was not smiling now. “I don’t know how you expect me to trust you anymore, Peter.” Nanny had never been a very good scold. “Those brats were out of control. I can’t let you put me in danger this way.”
“If you wanted someone to trust, maybe you shouldn’t have had me stunted. You got exactly what you ordered, the never-ending kid. Well, kids don’t have to be responsible.”
“What do you mean, what I ordered? It’s what you wanted, too.”
“Is it? Did you ever ask? I was only ten, the first time, too young to know better. For a long time I did it to please you. Getting stunted was the only thing I did that seemed important to you. But you never explained. You never sat me down and said, ‘This is the life you’ll have and this is what you’ll miss and this is how you’ll feel about it.’ ”
“You want to grow up, is that it?” She was trying to threaten me. “You want to work and worry and get old and die someday?” She had no idea what we were talking about.
“I
can’t live this way anymore, Nanny.”
At first she acted stunned, as if I had spoken in Albanian. Then her expression hardened when she realized she had lost her hold on me. She was ugly when she was angry. “They put you up to this.” Her gaze narrowed in accusation. “That little black cush you’ve been seeing. Those realists!”
I had always managed to hide my anger from Mom. Right up until then. “How do you know about her?” I had never told her about Tree.
“Peter, they live in a mall!”
Comrade was right. “You’ve been spying on me.” When she did not deny it, I went berserk. “You liar.” I slammed my fist into her belly. “You said you wouldn’t watch.” She staggered and fell onto her umbilical, crimping it. As she twitched on the floor, I pounced. “You promised.” I slapped her face. “Promised.” I hit her again. Her hair had come undone and her eyes rolled back in their sockets and her face was slack. She made no effort to protect herself. Mom was retreating from this remote too, but I was not going to let her get away.
“Mom!” I rolled off Nanny. “I’m coming up, Mom! You hear? Get ready.” I was crying; it had been a long time since I had cried. Not something Mr. Boy did.
I scrambled up to the long landing at the shoulders. At one end another circular stairway wound up into the torch; in the middle, four steps led into the neck. It was the only doorbone I had never seen open; I had no idea how to get through.
“Mom, I’m here.” I pounded. “Mom! You hear me?”
Silence.
“Let me in, Mom.” I smashed myself against the doorbone. Pain branched through my shoulder like lightning, but it felt great because Mom shuddered from the impact. I backed up and, in a frenzy, hurled myself again. Something warm dripped on my cheek. She was bleeding from the hinges. I aimed a vicious kick at the doorbone, and it banged open. I went through.
For years I had imagined that if only I could get into the head I could meet my real mother. Touch her. I had always wondered what she looked like; she got reshaped just after I was born. When I was little I used to think of her as a magic princess glowing with fairy light. Later I pictured her as one or another of my friends’ moms, only better dressed. After I had started getting twanked, I was afraid she might be just a brain floating in nutrient solution, like in some pricey memory bank. All wrong.
The interior of the head was dark and absolutely freezing. There was no sound except for the hum of refrigeration units. “Mom?” My voice echoed in the empty space. I stumbled and caught myself against a smooth wall. Not skin, like everywhere else in Mom – metal. The tears froze on my face.
“There’s nothing for you here,” she said. “This is a clean room. You’re compromising it. You must leave immediately.”
Sterile environment, metal walls, the bitter cold that super-conductors needed. I did not need to see. No one lived here. It had never occurred to me that there was no Mom to touch. She had downloaded, become an electron ghost tripping icy logic gates. “How long have you been dead?”
“This isn’t where you belong,” she said.
I shivered. “How long?”
“Go away,” she said.
So I did. I had to. I could not stay very long in her secret place, or I would die of the cold.
As I reeled down the stairs, Mom herself seemed to shift beneath my feet and I saw her as if she were a stranger. Dead – and I had been living in a tomb. I ran past Nanny; she still sprawled where I had left her. All those years I had loved her, I had been in love with death. Mom had been sucking life from me the way her refrigerators stole the warmth from my body.
Now I knew there was no way I could stay, no matter what anyone said. I knew it was not going to be easy leaving, and not just because of the money. For a long time Mom had been my entire world. But I could not let her use me to pretend she was alive, or I would end up like her.
I realized now that the door had always stayed locked because Mom had to hide what she had become. If I wanted, I could have destroyed her. Downloaded intelligences have no more rights than cars or wiseguys. Mom was legally dead and I was her only heir. I could have had her shut off, her body razed. But somehow it was enough to go, to walk away from my inheritance. I was scared, and yet with every step I felt lighter. Happier. Extremely free.
I had not expected to find Tree waiting at the doorbone, chatting with Comrade as if nothing had happened. “I just had to see if you were really the biggest fool in the world,” she said.
“Out.” I pulled her through the door. “Before I change my mind.”
Comrade started to follow us. “No, not you.” I turned and stared back at the heads on his window coat. I had not intended to see him again; I had wanted to be gone before Montross returned him. “Look, I’m giving you back to Mom. She needs you more than I do.”
If he had argued, I might have given in. The old unregulated Comrade would have said something. But he just slumped a little and nodded and I knew that he was dead, too. The thing in front of me was another ghost. He and Mom were two of a kind. “Pretend you’re her kid, maybe she’ll like that.” I patted his shoulder.
“Prekrassnaya ideya,” he said. “Spaceba.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
Tree and I trotted together down the long driveway. Robot sentries crossed the lawn and turned their spotlights on us. I wanted to tell her she was right. I had probably just done the single most irresponsible thing of my life – and I had high standards. Still, I could not imagine how being poor could be worse than being rich and hating yourself. I had seen enough of what it was like to be dead. It was time to try living.
“Are we going someplace, Mr. Boy?” Tree squeezed my hand. “Or are we just wandering around in the dark?”
“Mr. Boy is a damn stupid name, don’t you think?” I laughed. “Call me Pete.” I felt like a kid again.
BEGGARS IN SPAIN
Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the midseventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, SCI FICTION, and elsewhere. Her books include the novel version of her Hugo and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, and a sequel, Beggars and Choosers, as well as The Prince Of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths and Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, Probability Moon, Probability Sun, Probability Space, Crossfire, and Nothing Human. Her short work has been collected in Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, and Beaker’s Dozen. Her most recent book is the novel Crucible. In addition to the awards for “Beggars in Spain,” she has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison.”
Here, in what may well be her single most famous story, and perhaps her best as well (high praise indeed!), she takes us to the near future for a hard-hitting, provocative look at the uneasy social consequences of difference.
With energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.
– Abraham Lincoln, to Major General Joseph Hooker, 1863
1
They sat stiffly on his antique Eames chairs, two people who didn’t want to be here, or one person who didn’t want to and one who resented the other’s reluctance. Dr. Ong had seen this before. Within two minutes he was sure: the woman was the silently furious resister. She would lose. The man would pay for it later, in little ways, for a long time.
“I presume you’ve performed the necessary credit checks already,” Roger Camden said pleasantly, “so let’s get right on to details, shall we, doctor?”
“Certainly,” Ong said. “Why don’t we start by your telling me all the genetic modifications you’re interested in for the baby.”
The woman shifted suddenly on her chair. She was in her late twenties – clearly a second wife – but already had a faded look, as if keeping up with Roger Camden was wearing her out. Ong could easily believe that. Mrs. Camden’s hair was brown, her
eyes were brown, her skin had a brown tinge that might have been pretty if her cheeks had had any color. She wore a brown coat, neither fashionable nor cheap, and shoes that looked vaguely orthopedic. Ong glanced at his records for her name: Elizabeth. He would bet people forgot it often.
Next to her, Roger Camden radiated nervous vitality, a man in late middle age whose bullet-shaped head did not match his careful haircut and Italian-silk business suit. Ong did not need to consult his file to recall anything about Camden. A caricature of the bullet-shaped head had been the leading graphic of yesterday’s on-line edition of the Wall Street Journal: Camden had led a major coup in cross-border data-atoll investment. Ong was not sure what cross-border data-atoll investment was.
“A girl,” Elizabeth Camden said. Ong hadn’t expected her to speak first. Her voice was another surprise: upper-class British. “Blonde. Green eyes. Tall. Slender.”
Ong smiled. “Appearance factors are the easiest to achieve, as I’m sure you already know. But all we can do about ‘slenderness’ is give her a genetic disposition in that direction. How you feed the child will naturally—”
“Yes, yes,” Roger Camden said, “that’s obvious. Now: intelligence. High intelligence. And a sense of daring.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Camden – personality factors are not yet understood well enough to allow genet—”
“Just testing,” Camden said, with a smile that Ong thought was probably supposed to be light-hearted.
Elizabeth Camden said, “Musical ability.”
“Again, Mrs. Camden, a disposition to be musical is all we can guarantee.”
“Good enough,” Camden said. “The full array of corrections for any potential gene-linked health problem, of course.”
“Of course,” Dr. Ong said. Neither client spoke. So far theirs was a fairly modest list, given Camden’s money; most clients had to be argued out of contradictory genetic tendencies, alteration overload, or unrealistic expectations. Ong waited. Tension prickled in the room like heat.
“And,” Camden said, “no need to sleep.”
The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels Page 34
