Beggars Ride

  Theresa suddenly panicked. “And the baby! Let me take the baby home, too, Lizzie’s baby, I forget his name…the baby!”

  The system did not respond.

  Theresa closed her eyes, fighting for control. Cazie would not panic. Cazie would wait and see if Lizzie came out of one of these doors carrying the baby. Cazie would wait, and then decide what to do next…She was Cazie.

  “Ms. Aranow?” Lizzie said. “Theresa?”

  Theresa opened her eyes. Lizzie stood there, without the baby. She stared at Theresa from wide shocked eyes, and Theresa remembered how she must look. She said, “Where’s…where’s the baby?”

  “Baby? My baby, you mean? Home with my mother, him. Why?”

  “I thought—”

  “What happened to you?”

  And at that, Theresa crumpled. She wasn’t Cazie. Now that someone else was here, someone stronger…now that Lizzie had reminded Theresa of how she looked…now that she’d succeeded in getting Lizzie out…she wasn’t Cazie anymore. She was Theresa Aranow, and she could feel her breathing start to go ragged and could watch her scrawny arm clutch at the disheveled Liver girl who for all Theresa knew might be the only other human left in an enclave about to be hit by a nuclear bomb. Theresa moaned.

  “No, don’t do that here,” Lizzie said from far away. “God, it’s just like Shockey, isn’t it? And you never even breathed a neuropharm…come on, don’t fall, lean on me…no, wait, I need my terminal back—building system! I want the backpack, me, that I come in here with!”

  Theresa’s weakened legs gave way. Her crutches clattered to the floor, and she with them. Later—how much?—she felt herself half dragged, half carried, outside. Dumped into a go-’bot. Held firmly around the shoulders.

  “Come on, girl, it’s all right. Come on, girl,” Lizzie was saying, over and over. “Don’t be like this, you. You can’t be like this, I need you!”

  I need you. It got through to her. I need you. Like people needed Cazie, like people needed Jackson…but not Theresa. People never needed Theresa because she was always the one doing the needing.

  Not this time.

  She concentrated on once more being Cazie. Her breathing slowed, the streets came back into focus, her fingers unclutched Lizzie. The click went on in her brain.

  Lizzie was staring at her. “How did you do that?”

  “I can’t…explain.”

  “Well, don’t then, you. We have more important things. Where can you make this thing go so we can talk?”

  “Home!”

  “No. Probably monitored. What’s all that woods?”

  “Central Park. But we can’t—”

  “’Bot,” Lizzie said, “go into Central Park and stop someplace private. With a lot of trees, and no people within a hundred yards.”

  The go-’bot whizzed through the streets of the enclave, entered the park, and stopped under a huge maple near the East Green. With one hand Lizzie dragged Theresa away from the go-’bot. With the other she carried a purple backpack, which she opened on the grass to pull out a terminal. The go-’bot whizzed off.

  “I wanted it to wait!” Lizzie said. “Oh, never mind, we’ll call another one. I have to find Dr. Aranow right away, I’ll have to take the risk of a call—”

  “Jackson’s at Kelvin-Castner,” Theresa said. She wrapped her arms around herself; her wasted body felt cold and exhausted. “But you can’t reach him. Cazie’s intercepting his calls, even emergency ones. She didn’t want me to know, but…but Sanctuary was bombed and destroyed.”

  Lizzie didn’t answer. She didn’t look surprised. But then she said slowly, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” Theresa felt the tears start again. “I saw…the newsgrids.”

  “Who did it?”

  Theresa could only shake her head.

  Lizzie demanded, “Why are you crying? There were only Sleepless on Sanctuary, right?”

  “Leisha…Miranda…”

  “Miranda Sharifi’s on the moon. At Selene. And who’s Leisha? Never mind, let me think, you.”

  Lizzie sat over her unactivated terminal, silent. Theresa fought for control of herself. She was Cazie…she was Cazie…no, she wasn’t. She was Theresa Aranow, sick and weak and exposed in Central Park, and she wanted passionately to go home and go to sleep.

  Lizzie said slowly, “Sanctuary made the fear neuropharm that infected my baby. And my mother, and Billy, and…all of them. At least, I think it was Sanctuary. They were monitoring my tribe afterward, with heavily encrypted and shielded data streams, and I don’t know how they’d even know we were infected if they hadn’t done it. Only…only if they’re all dead, all the Sleepless…God, Theresa, don’t cave in now, you!”

  “I want…to go home.”

  “No, we can’t. I have to find Dr. Aranow. If we can’t call him, we’ll have to go there, us…Look, I’ll call a go-’bot on my terminal. Just hang on.”

  Theresa didn’t. But she didn’t panic, either; she was too exhausted, clear down to her weakened bones. She tried to tell Lizzie that a go-’bot wouldn’t take them to Kelvin-Castner in Boston because the go-’bots couldn’t leave the enclave, but she was too exhausted to form the words. The last thing she remembered was falling asleep on the grass in Central Park, genemod and fragrant, while she wept wearily for the Sleepless, who were all gone and would never come again.

  Twenty-two

  Jackson sat in the atrium of Kelvin-Castner on a white marble bench, surrounded by white marble columns, a decorative pool filled with milky white water, and his lawyer. The surface of the white water was occasionally broken by darting silver fish, genemod and shining. The white columns were subtly laced with silver threads. The last time Jackson had sat here, the lobby had been all paisley double helixes. Somebody had reprogrammed.

  Jackson’s lawyer, in severe black business coat buttoned to his chin, was costing TenTech triple legal fees for “immediate, exclusive, and overriding service.” Jackson had summoned him from Manhattan’s best law firm an hour before, causing several other cases to be postponed. For this situation, Jackson didn’t want a TenTech lawyer. Who might have slept with Cazie.

  “They can’t keep us waiting out here indefinitely, can they?” he demanded.

  “No,” said Evan Matthew Winterton, of Cisneros, Linville, Winterton and Adkins. He was genemod for a certain kind of eighteenth-century handsomeness: long bony aristocratic face, sharp deepset eyes, delicate long fingers with tensile strength. Winterton flicked through a handheld terminal in write mode. “Contractually, you have guaranteed physical access to the premises as well as the data. Not, however, to the person of Alex Castner. He doesn’t have to see you.”

  “But Thurmond Rogers does.”

  “Yes. Although the wording here in section five paragraph four is ambiguous on a few points…Why didn’t you come to me in the first place, to have this drawn up?”

  “I didn’t know I’d need you. Or anyone like you. I trusted Kelvin-Castner to do what they said they’d do.”

  The lawyer just looked at him.

  “All right, I was a fool,” Jackson said, and hoped the building was recording. Let Cazie and Rogers know that he knew it. “I won’t be a fool again. Which is why I’ve hired a systems expert on the same basis as you.”

  “You can have a systems expert,” Winterton said, with the patience of someone who’s already said it several times. “A systems expert to write flagging, data-organization, and data-summary algorithms. What you can’t have is a systems expert to dip private corporate records, unless you have sufficient evidence for a court order that Kelvin-Castner is in violation of contract. I’ve already explained, Jackson, that you don’t have such evidence.”

  No. All he had was the look in Cazie’s eyes, to which years of watching had attuned him as sensitively as a brain scan. Not the sort of thing that led to a court order. It led only to truth.

  “However,” Winterton continued, in his pedantic style that Jackson suspected covered the instincts of a ki
ller shark, “if your professional examination of the data offered, plus that of the systems expert, shows sufficient cause to suspect that Kelvin-Castner is not complying with contractual promises of disclosure, then a subpoena duces tecum is certainly possible.”

  So Winterton, too, expected the building to be recording. He was warning Castner.

  The wall brightened and a holo of Thurmond Rogers appeared, smiling warmly. “Jackson! I’m so glad you finally dropped by to see our progress personally!”

  “No, I don’t think you will be,” Jackson said. “This is my lawyer, Evan Winterton. A systems expert is en route from New York, along with two medical consultants. We’re going to be going very carefully over your data, Thurmond, to be sure you’re in contractual compliance.”

  Rogers’s smile didn’t waver. “Certainly. Jackson. Standard procedure when there’s this much at stake, isn’t it? You’re more than welcome.”

  “Then let us in.”

  “Now, Jackson, this is a level-four biohazard facility. The air is sealed, you know that, and we have U.S. Installation A decontamination procedures. No researcher has left the building since the start of the project. Once in, you’re in. But Alex Castner has authorized complete terminal facilities for you in the unsealed portion of Kelvin-Castner. The rooms are quite comfortable. So if you’ll just follow my holo—”

  “No,” Jackson said. “My team will use the comfortable facilities, but I’m coming inside. To the labs.”

  Thurmond’s face turned grave. “Jackson, that’s not advisable. Particularly with your sister so sick and susceptible to infection. She’s not Changed, is she? Cazie told me. Although the neuropharm isn’t transmissible in its current form, there’s no guarantee that a version might not mutate, or even be deliberately created, that is transmissible by direct contact.”

  “I’m coming in,” Jackson said. “It’s in my contract.”

  “Then I can’t stop you,” Rogers said, and from the lack of hesitation Jackson knew that this had been discussed before he even arrived. If he insists, legally we have to admit him, someone had decided: Castner or K-C counsel or even judicial-probability software. “But of course you’ll have to go through decontamination procedures, and quarantine before you can leave again. If you’ll both follow the holo, I’ll conduct you each to the appropriate corridor for—”

  The holo froze.

  At the same moment, Winterton’s comlink shrilled. “Code One call, Mr. Winterton. Repeat, Code One call…”

  Winterton said, “Go ahead. By cable, please.” Only then did Jackson notice the thin, insulated wire running discreetly from the collar of Winterton’s coat to his left ear. His law firm’s Code One calls must come in heavily encrypted. But once the remote in his pocket had unscrambled them, the data was vulnerable to field interception. Unless it traveled to his brain not in any radiated form but by old-fashioned insulated cable. Sometimes, Jackson reflected coldly, the old-fashioned method was the best. Such as visually inspecting K-C’s experiments for himself.

  Evan Winterton’s long aristocratic face suddenly trembled. The deepset eyes widened, then closed. Jackson understood that he was looking at an extreme emotional reaction. Thurmond Rogers’s frozen holo abruptly vanished.

  “What is it?” Jackson said. “What’s happened?”

  Winterton took a moment to answer. His voice sounded scraped. “Someone has blown up Sanctuary.”

  “Sanctuary?”

  “Nuclear. From the outside, missile trajectory originating in Africa. The President has declared a national alert.” Winterton stood up, took a pointless step forward, and began flicking rapidly through his remote, still listening to the ear implant. Jackson tried to take it in. Sanctuary gone. And La Solana as well. All the Sleepless, or pretty close to it…but only Theresa and Vicki and he knew that. The rest of the world thought Miranda Sharifi was safe at Selene Base.

  “Who…?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Winterton said, and Jackson saw that to him, it didn’t. Cisneros, Linville, Winterton and Adkins must have many clients who dealt, directly or indirectly, with Sanctuary. Jennifer Sharifi’s tangle of corporations, lobbyists, investors, holding companies, and data-atoll activities would of course need a legion of lawyers, both Sleepless and, as blinds, Sleepers. Every financial institution in the world would react to the massacre at Sanctuary. The legal implications would take decades to unravel.

  The Livers didn’t have decades. Not if the neuropharm spread.

  “I’m sorry, Jackson, I have to leave,” Winterton said. “Urgent business at my firm.”

  “I’ve retained you!” Jackson said. “You’re obligated to stay until we—”

  “I’m sorry, but I am not,” Winterton said. “As yet we have nothing in writing. If it weren’t for the overriding need at my firm…but surely you see that this changes everything. Sanctuary is destroyed.”

  Not even Evan Matthew Winterton, Jackson noted as the lawyer left, could keep the note of awe from his voice.

  Jackson stared into the atrium pool, with its clouded white water. The silver fish darted and leaped ceaselessly. Their metabolism must be genetically accelerated, to keep up that activity level. He wondered what they ate.

  Sanctuary is destroyed. This changes everything. And, in Vicki’s voice, It’s up to you, Jackson.

  He didn’t want it to be up to him. He was one individual, not particularly effective in the world, and his professional training had only underscored his belief that no one individual made much difference. Science argued against it. Evolution was never interested in the individual, only in the survival of the species. Brain chemistry shaped the individual’s choice of actions, no matter how much that person might believe in free will. Even the great scientific discoveries, if they had not been made by the men and women who made them, would eventually have been discovered by somebody else. When the slow accretion of tiny bits of knowledge reached critical mass, then you got steamships, or relativity, or Y-energy. The individual wasn’t really important for radical change. Perhaps a Miranda Sharifi was the exception—but Miranda Sharifi had not been human. And there were no more like Miranda Sharifi left.

  And Jackson didn’t want this. He wanted to live quietly with Theresa, and to be able to love Cazie again, and to practice medicine, conventional medicine, the kind he’d been trained for before these Sleepless started remaking the world. As it happened, he couldn’t have any of those things, but they were nonetheless what he wanted.

  Or did he?

  If he had wanted to practice conventional medicine, he could have joined Doctors for Human Aid, left his comfortable enclave, and practiced among the Liver children dying for want of medical care. If he had really wanted Cazie back, he wouldn’t have opposed her on TenTech’s role in adapting the neuropharm delivery targets. If he had wanted to live quietly with Theresa, why wasn’t he there now, doing that, in their apartment overlooking the carefully guarded Eden of Central Park?

  Welcome to personal evolution.

  He stood. The silver fish continued to cavort frantically in their white pool. Probably their genemod metabolism didn’t permit them to stop.

  “Building,” Jackson said, “tell security I’m ready to begin decontamination for the sealed biohazard labs.”

  A remote holo of Cazie appeared at his elbow. Jackson had just emerged from Decon, dressed in a disposable suit of Kelvin-Castner green. The suit wasn’t in any way protective. Maybe K-C wasn’t concerned about what might infect him as much as they were about what he might have carried in with him. Or maybe he would have to go through yet more Decon before he inspected the biohazard labs supposedly re-creating the inhibition neuropharm. If there were any such labs.

  Cazie’s holo—projected from inside Kelvin-Castner, or outside?—said, “Hello, Jackson. Despite everything, it’s good to see you again in actual flesh.”

  Her manner was perfect. Not seductive—she must sense he’d moved beyond that susceptibility. Not cold, not accusing, not ingratiating, not f
alsely friendly. Cazie spoke gravely, quietly, with just a shade of regret that things could not be different, a shade of respect for Jackson’s right to do what he was doing. Perfect.

  “Hello, Cazie.” Astonishingly, he felt for her a sudden stab of pity. Because he felt nothing else. “Shall we get started?”

  “Yes. There’s a lot to show you, and someone will be here soon to do that. But while you were in Decon, a complication arrived.”

  “‘Arrived’?”

  “Your friend Victoria Turner. With that Liver girl, the mother of the juvenile tissue samples. Ms. Turner is demanding to be admitted wherever you are. Demanding it somewhat vociferously, I might add.”

  The Cazie projection looked at Jackson meaningfully, sudden vulnerability in her holographic eyes. Deliberate, or genuine? He’d never been able to tell, with Cazie. And now it no longer mattered.

  He considered rapidly. “Admit Vicki through Decon. She can assist me in my inspection. Put Lizzie in the outside room with the systems experts from New York—are they here yet?”

  “No. But I’m afraid Ms. Turner can’t blithely walk through Kelvin-Castner proprietary labs just because you have a—”

  “An assistant inspector is in my contract. Read it again.”

  “A trained assistant, not some amateur—”

  “Vicki once worked for the Genetics Standards Enforcement Agency. She’s trained in espionage. Now show me where I can link with Lizzie immediately. While Vicki’s in Decon.”

  Cazie bit her bottom lip, hard enough to draw a single bright drop of red blood. Then she said coldly, “Go down this corridor and through the last door on your left.” Jackson understood that Cazie had absorbed the changes between them, and moved on. That single drop of holographic blood was the only acknowledgment that he would ever see. Or possibly that Cazie would let herself feel.

  The door led to an alcove-sized room with a standard, self-contained, building-system terminal. Jackson said, “Call to Lizzie Francy, on premises.”

  “Dr. Aranow! Don’t worry about Theresa, she’s back home and asleep.”