Beggars and Choosers s-2

by Nancy Kress

  The Supers built their compound under cover of the most sophisticated energy fields in existence. Impenetrable. Apparently the Supers, with their unimaginably boosted brainpower, weren’t geniuses at only genemodification; they included among their number geniuses at everything. Y-energy. Electronics. Grav tech. From their island, officially if unimaginatively named La Isla, they have sold patents throughout a world market on which the U.S. can offer only the same tired recycled products at inflated prices. The U.S. has 120 million nonproductive Livers to support; La Isla has none. I’d never before heard it called Huevos Verdes. Which translated as “green eggs” but in Spanish slang meant “green testicles.” Fertile and puissant balls. Did Colin know this?

  I stooped to pick a blade of very green, genemod grass. “Colin, don’t you think that if the Supers wanted Jennifer Sharifi and their other grandparents out of prison, they’d get them out? Obviously the successful counterrevolutionaries want the senior gang right where you’ve got them.”

  He looked even more annoyed. “Diana, the SuperSleepless are not gods. They can’t control everything. They’re just human beings.”

  “I thought the GSEA says they’re not.”

  He ignored this. Or maybe not. “You told me yesterday you believed in stopping illegal genemod experiments. Experiments that could irrevocably change humanity as we know it.”

  I pictured Katous lying smashed on the sidewalk, Stephanie laughing above. Cookie! Please! I had indeed told Colin that I believed in stopping genetic engineering, but not for reasons as simple as his. It wasn’t that I objected to irrevocable changes to humanity; in fact, that frequently seemed to me like a good idea. Humanity didn’t strike me as so wonderful that it should be forever beyond change. However, I had no faith in the kinds of alterations that would be picked. I doubted the choosers, not the fact of choice. We’d already gone far enough in the direction of Stephanie, who considered sentient life-forms as disposable as toilet paper. A dog today, expensive and nonproductive Livers tomorrow, who the next day? I suspected Stephanie was capable of genocide, if it served her purposes. I suspected many donkeys were. There were times I’d thought it of myself, although not when I genuinely thought. The nonthought appalled me. I doubted Colin could understand all this.

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “I want to help stop illegal genemod experiments.”

  “And I want you to know that I know that under that flip manner of yours, there’s a serious and loyal American citizen.”

  Oh, Colin. Not even boosted IQ let him see the world other than binary. Acceptable/not acceptable. Good/bad. On/off. The reality was so much more complicated. And not only that, he was lying to me.

  I’m good at detecting lies. Far better than Colin at implying them. He wasn’t going to trust me with anything important in this project, whatever it was. I was too hastily recruited, too flip, too unreliable. That I had left my training before its completion was de facto unreliability, disloyalty, unacceptability for anything important. That’s the way government types think. Maybe they’re right.

  Whatever surveillance Colin gave me would be strictly backup, triple redundancy. There was a theory for this in surveillance work: cheap, limited, and out of control. It started as a robot-engineering theory but pretty soon carried over into police work. If there are a lot of investigators with limited tasks, they won’t cohere into a single premature viewpoint about what they’re looking for. That way, they might turn up something totally unexpected. Colin wanted me for the equivalent of a wild card.

  I didn’t mind. At least it would get me out of San Francisco.

  Colin said, “For the last two years the Supers have been entering the United States, in ones and twos, heavily disguised both cosmetically and electronically. They travel around to various Liver towns or donkey enclaves, and then go home, to La Isla. We want to know why.”

  I murmured, “Maybe they have Gravison’s disease.”

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “I said, have you made any progress penetrating Huevos Verdes?”

  “No,” he said, but then he wouldn’t have told me if they have. The sexual innuendo he missed completely.

  “And who will I be keeping under surveillance?” The excite-ment was a little bubble in my throat now, still surprising. It had been a long time since anything had excited me. Except David, of coure, who had taken his sexy shoulders and verbal charm and sense of superiority to hold in readiness for plunking down temporarily in the middle of some other woman’s life.

  He said, “You’ll be following Miranda Sharifi.”

  “Ah.”

  “I have full ID information and kit for you in a locker at the gravrail station. You’ll pass as a Liver.”

  This was a slight insult; Colin was implying my looks weren’t spectacular enough to absolutely mark them as genemod. I let it pass.

  Colin said, “She’s only made one trip off the island herself. We think. When the next one happens, you go with her.”

  “How will you be sure it’s her? If they’re using both cosmetic and electronic disguises, she could have different features, hair, even brain-scan projection all masking her own.”

  “True. But their heads are slightly misshapen, slighty too big. That’s hard to disguise.”

  I knew that, of course. Everybody did. Thirteen years ago, when the Supers had first come down from Sanctuary, their big heads had given rise to a lot of bad jokes. The actuality was that their revved-up metabolism and altered brain chemistry had caused other abnormalities, the human genemod being a very complex thing. Supers are not, I remembered, an especially handsome people.

  I said, “Their heads aren’t that big, Colin. In some lights it’s even hard to tell at all.”

  “Also, their infrared body scans are on file. From the trial. You can’t move the position of your liver, or mask the digestive rate in your duodenum.”

  Which are both pretty generic anyway. Infrared scans aren’t even admissible in court as identity markers. They’re too unreliable. Still, it was better than nothing.

  All of this was better than the nothing with David. The nothing of Stephanie. The something of Katous. Thank you, lady.

  Colin said, “The trips off Huevos Verdes are increasing. They’re planning something. We need to find out what.”

  “Si, senor,” I said. He wasn’t amused.

  We’d walked nearly to the perimeter of the security bubble.

  Beyond its faint shimmer, a body pod had arrived for the dead scooter racer. I could just see some Livers loading him into the pod, at the very edge of my range of genemod-enhanced vision. The Livers were crying. They got the body into the pod, and the pod started down the track. After fifteen feet there was a sudden grinding sound and the pod stopped. Livers pushed. The pod didn’t move. The funeral machinery, like so much other more important machinery lately, had apparently broken down.

  The Livers stood staring at it, bewildered and helpless.

  I walked with Colin inside Building G-14 looking dizzy, as a victim of Gravison’s disease occasionally should.

  Two

  BILLY WASHINGTON: EAST OLEANTA, NEW YORK

  When I found out, me, about the rabid raccoon, first thing I did was run straight down to the cafe to tell Annie Francy. I ran all the way, me. That ain’t so easy no more. All I could think was maybe Lizzie was already safe, her, with Annie in the kitchen, maybe Lizzie wasn’t in the woods. Maybe.

  “Run, old man! Run, old fuck!” a kid yelled from the alley between the hotel and the warehouse. They stood there, the stomps, when the weather was nice. The weather was nice. I forgot, me, that they’d be there, or I’d of gone around the long way, by the river. But this afternoon they was too lazy, them, or too splintered, to chase me. I didn’t tell them shit about the raccoon.

  At the servoentrance to the cafe, where only ’bots supposed to go, I pounded, me, as hard as I could and the hell with who heard. “Annie Francy! Let me in!”

  The bushes to my right ru
stled and I almost keeled over, me. The coons come there for the stuff that drops off the delivery ’bots. But it was only a snake. “Annie! It’s me — Billy! Let me in!”

  The low door swung open. I crawled through on hands and knees. It was Lizzie, her, who figured out how to get the servoentrance to open without no ’bot signal. Annie could no more do that than grow leaves.

  They were both there. Annie was peeling apples and Lizzie was tinkering with the ’bot that was supposed to peel apples. Which ain’t worked in a month. Not that Lizzie could fix it. She was smart, her, but she was still only eleven years old.

  “Billy Washington!” Annie said. “You’re shaking, you! What happened?”

  “Rabid raccoons,” I gasped. My heart was going, it, like a waterfall. “Four of them. Reported on the area monitor. By the river, where Lizzie… Lizzie goes to play…”

  “Ssshhhh,” Annie said. “SSShhhh, dear heart. Lizzie’s here now. She’s safe, her.”

  Annie put her arms around me where I sat panting on the floor like some humping bear. Lizzie watched, her, with her big black eyes wide and sparkly. She probably thought a rabid raccoon was interesting. She ain’t never seen one, her. I have.

  Annie was big and soft, a chocolate-colored woman with breasts like pillows. She wouldn’t tell me, her, how old she was, but of course all I had to do was ask the terminals at the cafe or the hotel. She was thirty-five. Lizzie didn’t look nothing like her mother. She was light-skinned and skinny, her, with reddish hair in tight braids. She didn’t have no hips or breasts yet. What she had was brains. Annie worried about that a lot. She couldn’t remember, her, a time when we was just people, not Livers. I could remember, me. At sixty-eight, you can remember a lot. I could remember, me, a time when Annie might of been proud of Lizzie’s brains.

  I could remember a time when being held by a woman like Annie would of meant more than panting from a bad heart.

  “You all right, dear heart?” Annie said. She took her arms away and right away I missed them. I’m an old fool, me. “Now tell us again, real slow.”

  I had my breath back. “Four rabid raccoons. The area monitor was wailing like death. They must of come down, them, from the mountains. The monitor showed them by the river, moving toward town. The biowarnings was flashing deep red. Then the monitor quit again and this time nothing couldn’t get it started again. Jack Sawicki kicked it, him, and so did I. Them coons could be anywhere.”

  “Did the warden ’bot get sent to kill them, it, before the monitor quit?”

  “The warden ’bot’s broke too.”

  “Shit.” Annie made a face. “Next time I’m voting, me, against Samuelson.”

  “You think it’ll make any difference? They’re all alike. But you keep Lizzie inside, you, until somebody does something about them coons. Lizzie, you stay inside, you hear me?”

  Lizzie nodded. Then, being Lizzie, she argued. “But who, Billy?”

  “Who what?”

  “Who will do something about them raccoons? If the warden ’bot’s broke?”

  Nobody answered. Annie picked up her knife, her, and went back to peeling apples. I settled myself more comfortable against the wall. No chairs, of course — nobody’s supposed to be in the cafe kitchen except ’bots. Annie broke in, her, for the first time last September. She didn’t bother the ’bots while they prepared food for the foodbelt. She just took a bit of sugar here, some soysynth there, some of the fresh fruit from the servobin shipments, and cooked up things. Delicious things — nobody could cook like Annie. Fruit cobblers that made your mouth fill with sweet water just to look at them. Meat loaf hot and spicy. Biscuits like air.

  She added them, her, right onto the foodbelt cubbies going out into the cafe, to be clicked off on people’s meal chips. Fools probably didn’t even notice, them, how much better her dishes tasted than the usual stuff going round and round on the belt day and night. And of course with the holoterminal going full blast, and the dance music playing all the time, nobody would of heard her and Lizzie back here even if they was blowing up the whole damn kitchen.

  Annie liked to cook, she said. Liked to keep busy. I sometimes thought, me, that for somebody trying so hard to bring up Lizzie to be a good Liver, Annie herself was more than a little bit donkey. Of course I didn’t say that, me, to Annie. I wanted to keep my head.

  Annie started to hum, her, while she peeled apples. But Lizzie don’t give up on questions. She said again, “Who will do something about them raccoons?”

  Annie frowned. “Maybe somebody’ll come to fix the warden ’bot.”

  Lizzie’s big black eyes didn’t blink. It’s spooky, sometimes, how she can stare so hard without never blinking. “Nobody came to fix the peeler ’bot. Nobody came to fix the cleaner ’bot in the cafe. You said yesterday, you, that you didn’t think the donkeys would send nobody even if the mainline soysynth ’bot broke.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean it, me,” Annie said. She peeled faster. “That breaks and nobody in this town eats!”

  “They could share, them. Share the food that people took off the foodbelt before it broke.”

  Annie and I looked at each other. Once I saw a town, me, where a cafe broke down. Six people ended up killed. And that was when the gravrail worked regular, so people could leave, them, for another town in the district.

  “Yes, dear heart,” Annie said. “People could share, them.”

  “But you and Billy don’t think they would, them.”

  Annie didn’t answer. She don’t like to lie to Lizzie, her. I said, “No, Lizzie. A lot of people wouldn’t share, them.”

  Lizzie turned her bright black eyes on me. “Why wouldn’t they share?”

  I said, “ ‘Cause people out of the habit of sharing, them. They expect stuff now. They got a right to stuff — that’s why they elect politicians. The donkey politicians pay their taxes, them, and the taxes are the cafes and warehouses and medunits and baths that let Livers get on with serious living.”

  Lizzie said, “But people shared more, them, when you was young, Billy? They shared more then?”

  “Sometimes. Mostly they worked, them, for what they wanted.”

  “That’s enough,” Annie said sharply. “Don’t you go filling her head with what’s past, Billy Washington. She’s a Liver. Don’t go talking, you, like you was a donkey yourself! And you, Lizzie, don’t you talk about it no more.”

  But nobody can’t stop Lizzie when she’s started. She’s like a gravrail. Like a gravrail used to be, before this last year. “School says I’m lucky, me, to be a Liver. I get to live like an aristo while the donkeys got to do all the work, them. Donkeys serve Livers, Livers hold the power, us, by votes. But if we hold the power, us, how come we can’t get the cleaner ’bot and the peeler ’bot and the warden ’bot fixed?”

  “Since when you been at school?” I joked, trying to derail Lizzie, trying to keep Annie from getting madder. “I thought you just played, you, down by the river with Susie Mastro and Carlena Terrell. You’re an agro Liver, you!”

  She looked at me, her, like I was a broken ’bot myself.

  Annie said shortly, “You are lucky, you to be a Liver. And you say so if anybody asks you.”

  “Like who?”

  “Anybody. You shouldn’t go to school so much anyway. You don’t never see the other children, you, going so much. Do you want to be a freak?” She scowled.

  Lizzie turned to me. “Billy, who’s going to do something about them rabid raccoons if nobody fixes the warden ’bot?”

  I glanced at Annie. I got to my feet, me, puffing. “I don’t know, Lizzie. Just stay inside, you, all right?”

  Lizzie said, “But what if one of them raccoons bites somebody?”

  I had the sense, me, to stay quiet. Finally Annie said, “The medunit still works.”

  “But what if it breaks?”

  “It won’t break.”

  “But what if it does?”

  “It won’t!”

  “How do you know?” Lizzie
said, and I finally saw, me, that this was some sort of private scooter race between mother and daughter. I didn’t understand it, me, but I could see Lizzie was ahead. She said again, “How do you know, you, that the medunit won’t break too?”

  “Because if it did, Congresswoman Land would send somebody, her, to fix it. The medunit is part of her taxes.”

  “She didn’t send nobody to fix the cleaning ’bot. Or the peeler ’bot. Or the—”

  “The medunit’s different!” Annie snapped. She hacked at an apple so hard that pulp flew off the table I stole for her from the cafe.

  Lizzie said, “Why is the medunit so different?”

  “Because it just is! If the medunit breaks, people could die, them. No politician is going to let Livers die. They’d never get elected again!”

  Lizzie considered this. I thought, me, that the scooter race was over, and I breathed more easy. Lately it seemed like they fought all the time. Lizzie was growing up, her, and I hated it. It made it harder to keep her safe.

  She said, “But people could die from rabid raccoons, too. So how come you said District Supervisor Samuelson probably won’t send nobody to fix the warden ’bot, but Congresswoman Land would send somebody to fix the medunit ’bot?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it — she was so smart, her. Annie scowled at me and right away I was sorry I laughed. Annie snapped, “So maybe I was wrong, me! Maybe somebody’ll fix the warden ’bot! Maybe I don’t know nothing, me!”

  Lizzie said calmly, “Billy said too, him, that nobody would fix it. Billy, how come you—”

  I said, “Because even donkeys don’t got the money, them, that they used to have to pay taxes with. And too much stuff gets broke nowadays. They got to make choices, them, about what to fix.”

  Lizzie said, “But why do the donkey politicians got less money for taxes, them? And how come more stuff gets broke?”

  Annie flung her peeled apples into a belt dish and dumped dough on them like it was mud.