Beggars and Choosers

  I had never heard anyone use the word ‘babe’ before. He sat there spooning his wretched stew, Jimmy Hubbley, as artificial and as sincere as anyone I had ever met.

  Intellectual arguments confuse me. They always have. I felt the helpless feeling rise in me, the one I’d always had arguing with Leisha, with Miranda, with Jonathan and Terry and Christy. The best I could answer, out of confusion and hatred, was, “What gives you the right to decide what’s right for 175 million people?”

  He squinted at me again. His apologetic voice returned. “Why, son—ain’t that what your Huevos Verdes was doin’?”

  I stared at him.

  “Sure it is. Only they cain’t decide for common people, ’cause they ain’t. Clearly. Not like us. Not like him.” He waved his spoon at the portrait of Francis Marion. Stew dribbled off the spoon onto the table.

  “But—”

  “Y’all need to examine your premises, son,” he said very gently. “Will and idea.” He went back to eating.

  The boy returned, carrying two mugs. Still-brewed whiskey. I left mine untouched, but I made myself eat the stew. I might need my strength. Hatred shone in me like suns.

  Hubbley talked more about Francis Marion. His courage, his military strategy, his ways of living off the land. “Why, he wrote to General Horatio Gates to send him supplies because ‘we are all poor Continentals without money.’ Poor Continentals! Ain’t that a great one? Poor Continentals! And so we are.” He drained his whiskey. So much for vinegar and water.

  I choked out, “The GSEA will stop you. Or Huevos Verdes will.”

  He grinned. “You know what the Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton of His Majesty’s army said about Francis Marion? ‘But as for this damned old fox, the Devil himself could not catch him.’”

  I said, “Hubbley—you aren’t Francis Marion.”

  Immediately he grew serious. “Well, of course not, son. Anybody can see that, so clear it don’t hardly need commentin’ on, does it, except by somebody crazy. Clear as day I’m not Francis Marion. I’m Jimmy Hubbley. What’s wrong with you, Mr. Arlen? You feelin’ all right?”

  He leaned across the table, his bony face creased with concern.

  I could feel my heart thud in my chest. He was impenetrable, as impenetrable as Huevos Verdes. After a moment he patted my arm.

  “That’s all right, Mr. Arlen, sir, y’all just a little shocked by events is all. Y’all will be fine in the mornin’. It’s just real upsettin’, discoverin’ the truth after all this time of believin’ falsehoods. Perfectly natural. Now don’t you worry none; y’all be fine in the mornin’. You just sleep, and please excuse me, I got a council of war to attend to.”

  He patted my arm again, smiled, and left. The boy wheeled my chair to a bedroom with a single bed, a chemical toilet, and a deadbolt on the door that could only be unlocked from the outside.

  In the morning the doctor came to check me. He turned out to be the small man who had helped Joncey at the landing stage. Joncey was with him. I saw that Joncey was guarding him; apparently the doctor was not here of his own Will and Idea. But he was allowed to roam the underground compound, which meant he probably knew where the terminals were.

  “Leg looks good,” he said. “Any pain in your neck?”

  “No.” Joncey leaned against the doorjamb, smiling. The smile deepened and I glimpsed Abigail pass by in the corridor. Joncey stepped away from the door. Giggles and a tussle.

  I said, quickly and very low, “Doctor—I can get us out of here, if you can get me to a terminal. I know ways to call for help that will override anything they can possibly have—”

  His small face wrinkled in alarm. Too late I realized that, of course, he was monitored. Hubbley’s people would overhear everything he heard or said.

  Joncey came back and the doctor hurried off by his side, interested only in staying alive.

  The lattice in my mind had circled tighter than ever, a huddled closed shape, hiding whatever was inside. Even the diamond patterns on its outer surface looked smaller. Angry, ineffective shapes flopped sluggishly around it, like beached fish.

  Hubbley left me to my sour shapes until midmorning. When he opened my door he looked stern. “Mr. Arlen, sir, I understand y’all want to get to a terminal and set your friends at Huevos Verdes on us.”

  I stared at him with open hatred, sitting in my antique wheelchair.

  He sighed and sat on the edge of my cot, hands on his long knees, body bent earnestly forward. “It’s important that y’all understand, son. Contactin’ the enemy in wartime is treason. Now I know y’all ain’t a regular soldier, leastways not yet, y’all are more like a prisoner of war, but just the same—”

  “You know Francis Marion never talked like that, don’t you?” I said brutally. “That kind of speech only dates from maybe a hundred fifty years ago, from movies. It’s phony. As phony as your whole war.”

  He didn’t change expression. “Why, of course General Marion didn’t talk this way, Mr. Arlen. Y’all think I don’t know that? But it’s different from how my troops talk, it’s old-fashioned, and it ain’t neither donkey nor Liver. That’s enough. It don’t matter how truth gets expressed, long as it does.”

  He gazed at me with kindly, patient eyes.

  I said, “Let me wheel my chair around the compound. I’m not going to learn your truths locked in this room. Give me a guard, like the doctor has.”

  Hubbley rubbed the lump on his neck. “Well—could do, I suppose. It ain’t like y’all are going to overpower anyone, sittin’ in that chair.”

  The shapes in my mind abruptly changed. Dark red, shot with silver. Hubbley’s people didn’t do very deep background checks. He didn’t realize I’d trained my upper body with the best martial arts masters Leisha’s money could buy. She’d wanted to give me an outlet for my adolescent anger.

  What else didn’t he know? Leisha, unable to alter my non-Sleepless DNA, had nonetheless done what she could for me. My eyes had implanted corneas with bifocal/zoom magnification; my arm muscles had been augmented. Probably these things counted as abominations, crimes against the common humanity in the Constitution.

  I tried to look wistful. “Can I have Abigail for my guard?”

  Hubbley laughed. “Won’t do y’all no good, son. Abby’s goin’ to marry Joncey in a couple of months. Give that baby a real daddy. Abby’s got a whole lot of lace around here someplace, for a weddin’ dress.”

  I saw Abigail in her waders and torn shirt, firing a rocket launcher at the rescue plane. I couldn’t picture her in a wedding gown. Then it came to me that I couldn’t picture Miranda in one either.

  Miranda. I had hardly thought of her since Leisha’s death.

  “But I’ll tell you what,” Hubbley said, “seein’ as y’all are so starved for feminine company, I’ll assign a woman to guard you. But, Mr. Arlen, sir—”

  “Yes?”

  His eyes looked grayer, harder. “Keep in mind that this is a war, sir. And grateful as we are for the help your concerts gave us, y’all are expendable. Just keep that in mind.”

  I didn’t answer. In another hour the door opened again and a woman entered. She was, must have been, Campbell’s twin. Nearly seven feet tall, nearly as muscled as he was. Her short shit-brown hair was plastered flat around a sullen face with Campbell’s heavy jaw.

  “I’m the guard, me.” Her voice was high and bored.

  “Hello. I’m Drew Arlen. You’re…”

  “Peg. Just behave, you.” She stared at me with flat dislike.

  “Right,” I said. “And what natural combination of genes produced you?”

  Her dislike didn’t deepen, didn’t waver. I saw her in my mind as a solid monolith, granite, like a headstone.

  “Take me to whatever your café is, Peg.”

  She grasped the wheelchair and pushed it roughly. Beneath her green jacks, her thigh muscles rippled. She outweighed me by maybe thirty pounds; her reach was longer; she was in superb shape.

  I saw Leisha?
??s body, light and slim, slumped against the custard-apple tree, two red holes in her forehead.

  The café was a large room where several tunnels converged. There were tables, chairs, a holoterminal of the simplest, receive-only kind. It showed a scooter race. No foodbelt, but several people were eating bowls of soystew. They stared frankly when Peg wheeled me in. At least half a dozen faces were openly hostile.

  Abigail and Joncey sat at a far table. She was actually sewing panels of lace together—by hand. It was like watching someone make candles, or dig a hole with a shovel. Abigail glanced at me once, then ignored me.

  Peg shoved my chair against a table, brought me a bowl of stew, and settled down to watch the scooter race. Her huge body dwarfed the standard-issue plastisynth chair.

  I watched the race, while observing everything through the zoom area of my corneas. Abby’s lace was covered with a complex design of small oblongs, no two the same, like snowflakes. She snipped out an oblong and presented it, laughing, to Joncey. Three men played cards; the one whose hand I could see held a pair of kings. After a while I said to Peg, “Is this how you spend all your days? Contributing to the revolution?”

  “Shut up, you.”

  “I want to see more of the compound. Hubbley said I could if you take me.”

  “Say ‘Colonel Hubbley,’ you!”

  “Colonel Hubbley, then.”

  She seized my chair hard enough to rattle my teeth and shoved it along the nearest corridor. “Hey! Slow down!”

  She slowed to an insolent crawl. I didn’t argue. I tried to memorize everything.

  It wasn’t easy. The tunnels all looked the same: featureless white, nanoperfect, lined with dirt-resistant alloy and identical white, unmarked doors. I tried to memorize tiny bits of dropped food, boot scuffs. Once I saw a small oblong bit of lace half caught under a door, and I knew Abigail must have come that way. Peg pushed me like a ’bot, impassive and tireless. I was losing track of what I’d tried to memorize.

  After three hours, we passed a cleaning ’bot, whirling up the things I had used as markers.

  In the whole tour, I saw only two open doors. One was to a common bath. The other was only opened for a moment, then closed, allowing the fastest glimpse of high-security canisters, rows and rows of them. Duragem dissemblers? Or some other nonhuman-genome destruction that Jimmy Hubbley thought ought to be unleashed on his enemies?

  “What was that?” I said to Peg.

  “Shut up, you.”

  An hour later, we returned to the commons area. Lunch was still in progress. Peg shoved me to an empty table and plunked another bowl of stew in front of me. I wasn’t hungry.

  A few minutes later Jimmy Hubbley sat down with me. “Well, son, I hope y’all are satisfied with your tour.”

  “Oh, it was great,” I said. “I saw all kinds of contributions to the revolution.”

  He laughed. “Oh, it’s happenin’, all right. But y’all ain’t goin’ to provoke me into showing y’all before I’m ready. Time enough, time enough.”

  “Aren’t you afraid your troops will get restless, doing nothing like this? What did General Marion do with his men between battles?” I put down my spoon; I hated him too much to even pretend to eat in his presence. God, I wanted a drink.

  He seemed surprised. “Why, Mr. Arlen, sir, they don’t ordinarily do nothin’. This here’s Sunday, the Sabbath. Come tomorrow, we go back to regular drill. General Marion knew the value of a day for rest and recuperation of the human spirit.”

  He looked around with satisfaction at the desultory gambling, scooter watching, slumped figures probably on sunshine. Only three faces in the whole damn room showed any real animation. Joncey and Abigail, smiling at each other, Abby still sewing on billowing patterned lace. And Peg.

  “Eat your stew, son,” Hubbley said kindly. “Y’all will need food to keep your strength up.”

  I left my spoon where it lay. “No,” I said. “I won’t.”

  Of course he didn’t understand that. But Peg, with animal alertness, caught something in my tone. She looked at me hard, before she went back to watching Jimmy Hubbley, her sullen face transformed by awe and respect and the hopeless, longing love of an ordinary person for one clearly as far above her as a god.

  III

  OCTOBER 2114

  The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

  —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address

  Ten

  DIANA COVINGTON: EAST OLEANTA

  The most remarkable thing about being in an off-line dump like East Oleanta was my realization that the GSEA didn’t know where Miranda Sharifi was. They were a sophisticated and determined agency, but apparently they didn’t know where I was either. I wasn’t using any of the identities that Colin Kowalski had issued me, and I had changed personae three times on the way to East Oleanta. “Victoria Turner” had credentials with the IRS, the state of Texas, the bank where her family trust was stashed, educational software franchises, the National Health Care Institute, grocery stores…My larcenous friend was good at what he did. Good enough to convince Huevos Verdes…who knew? But I felt confident the GSEA didn’t.

  The second most remarkable thing was that I didn’t call up the GSEA and tell them where I was and what I suspected. I put this down to hubris. I wanted to be able to say, “Here is Miranda Sharifi, latitude 43°45’l6” longitude 74°50’86”, it’s an illegal genemod lab, go get her, boys,” instead of saying, “Well, I think she’s here someplace nearby, possibly, although I have no proof.” If I were a regular agent, my silence would have been intolerable. But I wasn’t a regular agent. I wasn’t a regular anything. And I wanted, once in my ineffectual life, to succeed at something by myself. I wanted that very badly.

  Of course, like the GSEA, I didn’t exactly know where Miranda was, either, although I suspected she was underground somewhere in the wooded Adirondack Mountains near East Oleanta. But I didn’t have the faintest idea how to actually find her.

  Until Lizzie Francy.

  I went back to see Lizzie Francy the same evening I first told her about simple computer operations, the day after I’d put a medpatch on her. I’d seen how Billy Washington changed color when I’d asked about Eden. That old man was the worst liar I’d ever seen. He knew something about Eden; he was hopelessly in love with the much tougher and more conventional Annie; Lizzie could do anything with him she chose. Poor Billy.

  Lizzie still sat on the spectacularly ugly plastisynth sofa, dressed in a pink nightshirt, her hair in sixteen braids tied with pink ribbon. Electronic parts lay scattered over her blanket. I viewed her around Billy, who opened the door but didn’t want to let me in.

  “Lizzie’s asleep, her.”

  “No, she isn’t, Billy. She’s right there.”

  “Vicki!” Lizzie cried in her little-girl voice, and something unexpected turned over in my chest. “You’re here!”

  “She’s sick, her, too sick for no company.”

  “I’m fine, me,” Lizzie said. “Let Vicki in, Billy. Pleeeaasse?”

  He did, unhappily. Annie wasn’t around. I said, “What have you got there, Lizzie?”

  “The apple peeler ’bot from the café kitchen,” she said promptly, and without guilt. Billy winced. “It broke and I took it apart, me, to see if I can fix it.”

  “And can you?”

  “No. Can you?” She looked at me with hungry brown eyes. Billy left the apartment.

  “Probably not,” I said. “I’m not a ’bot tech. But let me see.”

  “I’ll show you, me.”

  She did. She put together the pieces of the peeler ’bot, which had a simple standard Kellor chip powered by Y-energy. I went to school with Alison Kellor, who always professed a world-weary disdain for the electronic empire she would inherit. Lizzie assembled the ’bot in about two minutes and showed me how it wouldn’t work despite an active chip. “See this
little teeny bit here, Vicki? Where the peeler arm fits onto the ’bot? It’s sort of melted, it.”

  I said, “What do you think did that?”

  The big brown eyes looked at me. “I don’t know, me.”

  “I do.” The destroyed joint was duragem. Had been duragem, until attacked by the renegade replicating dissembler.

  “What melted it, Vicki?”

  I turned the ’bot over in my hands, looking for other duragem joints. They were there, between the less durable but cheaper nonmoving plastics. The others weren’t “sort of melted, them.” But neither were a few of the duragem parts.

  “What melted it, Vicki? Vicki?” I felt a hand on my arm.

  Why hadn’t the other duragem joints been attacked? Because the dissembler was clocked. It had self-destructed after a certain time, and had also stopped replicating after making a certain number of copies of itself. Much—maybe even most—nanotech had this safety feature.

  Lizzie shook my arm. “What melted it, Vicki? What?”

  “A tiny little machine. Too small to see.”

  “The duragem dissembler? The one I saw, me, on the newsgrid?”

  Then I did look up. “You watch the donkey newsgrids?”

  She gave me a long, serious look. I could see this was an important decision for her: to trust me or not. Finally she said, as if it were an answer, “I’m almost twelve, me. My mama, she still thinks I’m six.”

  “Ah,” I said. “So how does a twelve-year-old see donkey newsgrids? They’re never on at the café.”

  “Nothing’s on in the middle of the night. Some nights. I go there, me, and watch.”

  “You sneak out?”

  She nodded solemnly, sure that this admission would bring down the world. She was right. I had never imagined a Liver kid with that much ambition or curiosity or intelligence or guts. Lizzie Francy was not supposed to exist. She was as much a wild card as the duragem dissembler, and as unwelcome. To both Livers and donkeys.