Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  “Of course,” Jennifer said composedly. “But when I do, it will be after a long and productive life as a full member of my community—Sanctuary, our heart’s blood. I would want no less for my children or grandchildren. I would settle for no less. Neither would Joan’s mother.”

  Miri considered. Complex nets of thought knotted themselves in her head. Finally, painfully, she nodded.

  Jennifer said, just as if she had not won, “I think, Miri, that you are old enough to start viewing broadcasts from Earth. We made the rule about being fourteen because we thought it would be best to form your principles first, you and the other children, before showing you their violation on Earth. Perhaps we were wrong, especially with you Supers. We’re still groping our way with you, dear heart. But perhaps it would be best if you saw the kind of wasted, parasitic lives that beggars—they call themselves ‘Livers’ now—actually prefer.”

  Miri felt a strange reluctance to watch the Earth broadcasts, a reluctance she certainly had not felt before today. But again she nodded. Her grandmother smelled of some scented soap, light and clean; her long hair, bound in a twist, gleamed like black glass. Miri put one hand shyly on Jennifer’s knee.

  “And one more thing, dear heart,” Jennifer said. “Twelve is too old to cry, Miri, especially over hard necessity. Survival alone demands too much of us for tears. Remember that.”

  “I w-w-will,” Miri said.

  The next day she saw Joan, walking from her parents’ dome to the park. Miri called to her, but Joan kept walking and didn’t turn her head. After a moment, Miri lifted her chin and walked in the other direction.

  20

  THE FIVE YOUNG MEN CREPT TOWARD THE CHAIN-LINK FENCE, keeping to the shadows of unpruned bushes, trees, and an abandoned and sagging bench in what might once have been a park. The moon rode high in the east, gilding the fence with silver. The fence links were wide apart, worked in scrolls that were both uneven and insubstantial; the fence was undoubtedly only a marker, with a Y-field providing the real security. If so, the field’s faint shimmer wasn’t visible in the darkness and there was no way to assess its height.

  “Throw high,” Drew whispered from his powerchair to the boy next to him, whoever it was. All five wore dark plasti-suits and black boots. Drew could only remember three of their names. He had met them this afternoon at a bar, shortly after he’d drifted into town. He guessed they were younger than his nineteen; it didn’t matter. They had Dole credits for liquor and brainies, so why should it matter? Why should anything matter?

  “Now!” somebody yelled.

  They rushed forward. Drew’s chair caught on a clump of tough, uncut weeds and he pitched forward. The straps caught him and the chair righted itself and drove on, but the others reached the Y-shield first. They hurled their makeshift bombs, made with gasoline foraged from an abandoned field-style farm. No one but Drew had known what the stuff was, just as no one but Drew had ever heard of a “Molotov cocktail.” He was the only one who could read.

  “Shit!” screamed the youngest boy. His bomb hit what might have been the top part of the energy fence, exploded, and rained fire and plastic back onto the dry grass. It caught. Two of the other bombs did the same; the fourth boy dropped his and ran screaming. His shirt had caught fire from an exploding fragment.

  Drew raced his chair to six feet from the fence, pulled back his arm, and threw. His heavily muscled arms, the result of unremitting exercise, sent the bomb sailing over the top of the Y-fence. Grass on both sides of the shield blazed.

  “Karl’s hit!” someone yelled. The three other boys rushed back toward their scooters. One of them tackled Karl and rolled him, screaming, in the grass. Drew sat in his chair, unmoving, watching the fire and listening to the alarm shriek even louder than the burning boy.

  “SOMEONE TO GET YOU OUT, FARTSUCKER,” the deputy sheriff said. He released the Y-lock and banged the jail door open. Drew looked up insolently from the foamstone cot, a look that vanished when his rescuer entered.

  “You! What for?”

  “Expecting Leisha again?” Eric Bevington-Watrous said. “Too bad. This time you get me.”

  Drew drawled, “She get tired of bailing me out?”

  “If she isn’t, she should be.”

  Drew studied him, trying to match Eric’s cool contempt. The furious boy who had fought him beside the cottonwood might never have existed. Eric wore black cotton pants, ruffled bodystretch, and a black bias-cut coat, all conservative but fashionable. His boots were Argentinian leather, his hair barbered, his skin glowing. He looked like a handsome, decisive donkey used to running things, while Drew knew he looked like a Liver gone too bad to do any Living. Which he was. Stepping outside his own field of vision, which was the only way he cared to see anything these days, Drew saw Eric and himself as a smooth cool ovoid floating beside a ragged misshapen pyramid, every point dented or spiked or saw-toothed.

  Who had done the misshaping in the first place? Who had crippled him? Whose fucking charity had shown him just how worthless he was next to all the fartsucking donkeys in the world?

  “What if I don’t want to be bailed out?”

  “Then rot here,” Eric said. “I don’t care.”

  “Why should you? In your take-charge donkey suit and your Sleepless superiority and your aunt’s money?”

  Eric was beyond that kind of taunt. “My money, now. I earn it. Unlike you, Arlen.”

  “It’s a little harder for some of us.”

  “Oh, and aren’t we supposed to feel sorry for you because of that? Poor Drew. Poor stinking crippled petty-criminal Drew.” Eric said this in a disinterested tone, so adult that Drew blinked. Eric was only two years older than Drew; not even Leisha managed that much detachment.

  Would either of them be here in this cell if she did?

  The thought was a spiny worm, sliding through his mind, leaving a trail of slime that glowed even in the dark.

  “Jailer,” Eric said, “we’re going.”

  No one answered. No one mentioned criminal charges, lawyers, bail money, the whole legal system that was supposed to function with equal justice for all men fucking-shit equal.

  Drew dragged himself on his elbows across the floor and climbed into his chair, parked just beyond the bars. No one helped him. He followed Eric—why not? What the fuck did it matter if he were in jail or out, rotting in this one-scooter town or rotting somewhere else? By his sheer indifference he demonstrated the stupidity of either choice.

  “If you really thought that, you’d stay here,” Eric said over his shoulder, not breaking stride, and Drew had his face rubbed in it all over again: They were just smarter. They knew. Fucking Sleepless.

  A groundcar waited. Drew turned his chair in another direction, but before he moved it Eric had slapped a Y-lock over the control panel on the chair’s arm.

  “Hey!”

  “Shut up,” Eric said. Drew aimed a right cross but Eric was quicker, and had the advantage of mobility. His fist caught Drew under the chin, not hard enough to break his jaw but sufficient to send pain lancing through his face clear to the temples. When the pain receded slightly, Drew was manacled.

  He started cursing, summoning every filth he had learned in eighteen months on the road. Eric ignored him. He picked Drew out of his chair and threw him in the back seat of the car, already occupied by a bodyguard who righted Drew, looked him deeply in the eyes, and said simply, “Don’t.”

  Eric slid behind the wheel. This was new among donkeys: driving themselves. Drew ignored the guard and raised both arms, manacled together, over his head to bring them down hard on Eric’s neck. Eric never even turned around. The guard caught Drew’s arms at the top of their swing and did something so painful to his shoulder that he collapsed, blinded by agony, in the back seat. He started to sob.

  Eric drove.

  They took him to a Liver motel, the kind rented for brainie or sex parties on Dole credit. Eric and the guard stripped him and dumped him into the cheap, oversized bathtub me
ant for four. Drew’s head went under. He breathed water until he could pull himself up; neither of them helped him. Eric poured a half bottle of genemod dirt-eaters into the water. The bodyguard stripped, climbed in with Drew, and started to scrub him down.

  Later, there were straps on the bed.

  Tied down, helpless without his chair, Drew lay cursing his own tears while Eric loomed above him and the bodyguard took a walk.

  “I don’t know why she wants to bother with you, Arlen. I do know why I’m here. First, because otherwise she would have to be, and second, because otherwise you would be on your feet and I could knock you down the way you deserve. You’ve been given every opportunity, every consideration, and you burned them all. You’re stupid and you’re undisciplined and at nineteen years old you don’t have even the minimum ethics that would let you ask what happened to your friend back there who got set on fire by your pointless destruction. You’re a disaster as a human being, even a Liver human being, but I’m giving you one more chance. Note this well: None of what’s going to happen to you is Leisha’s idea. She doesn’t even know about it. This is my present to you.”

  Drew spat at him. The spittle fell short, landing on the foamstone floor. Eric didn’t even grimace before he turned away.

  They left him there, tied, all night.

  The next morning the bodyguard fed Drew from a spoon, like a baby. Drew spat the food back in his face. The bodyguard, expressionless, slugged him in the jaw, to the right of where Eric had hit him, and threw the rest of the breakfast in the disposal chute. He threw Drew a clean set of jacks, the cheapest possible Dole clothing, drawstring pants and loose shirt in undyed, biodegradable gray. Drew struggled to pull on the pants only because he suspected they would otherwise throw him into the car naked. He couldn’t manage the shirt over his manacles. He clutched it to his chest as the bodyguard carried him, barefoot, outside.

  They drove for four or five hours, stopping once. Just before they stopped, the guard blindfolded Drew. He listened intently as Eric got out of the car, but all he heard was soft murmuring in what might or might not have been Spanish. The car started again. Eventually the guard removed the blindfold; the flat desert countryside hadn’t changed. Drew’s bladder ached, until he finally just let go in the car. Neither of the others commented. The plastic pants held the piss against his skin.

  They stopped again in front of a low, large, windowless building like a sealed airport hangar. Drew didn’t know what town they were in, what state. Eric had said nothing the entire morning.

  “I’m not going in there!”

  “Strip off those wet pants first, Pat,” Eric said, with disgust. The bodyguard grabbed the hem of his pants and yanked. Drew struggled, but his ineffective thrashing stopped when a roadrunner walked casually across his line of vision. A snake dangled from the roadrunner’s beak, half eaten. The snake’s skin was green, with orange letters spelling out “puta.”

  They were someplace where illegal genetic engineering didn’t even have to be hidden from the cops.

  Inside were endless gray corridors, each blocked with a Y-field. At each checkpoint Eric stepped up to the retina scanner and was cleared without saying a word. This, whatever it was, had all been arranged.

  The fear in Drew was a gray spreading ooze, shapeless, and its lack of shape was what made it fearsome.

  A small room, finally, with a clean white stretcher. Pat dumped him onto it. Drew rolled off, hitting the floor with an unprotected splat. He tried to drag himself, naked, toward the door. Pat scooped him up effortlessly—augmented muscles—threw him back on the gurney, and strapped him down. Someone he couldn’t see touched his head with an electrode.

  Drew screamed. The room turned orange, then red with bright hot dots, each a burn on flesh. But that was in his mind, nothing had touched him yet but cold metal. But they were going to, they were going to bum out his mind—

  “Drew,” Eric said softly, very close to his ear, “listen to me. This is not an electronic lobotomy. This is a new genemod technique. They’re going to infect your brain with an altered virus that will make it impossible for you to block the flow of images to the cortex from the limbic. That’s the older, more primitive part of the brain. Then biofeedback adjusts your brainwaves until the cortex learns the pathways for processing the images into theta activity. Do you understand?”

  He understood nothing. The fear engulfed the rest of his mind, gray bubbling ooze shot through with hot red burns, and when someone screamed he was flooded with shame that it was himself. Then the machine turned on, and the room was gone.

  He lay on the stretcher for six days. An IV dripped nutrients into his arm; a catheter removed urine. Drew was aware of neither. For six days subtle electrochemical pathways in his brain were reinforced, widened as a highway is widened by a road crew that builds sturdily but doesn’t know what will march over the road. Images flowed freely, without chemical inhibitors, from Drew’s subconscious mind, from his racial memory, from the older reptilian parts of the brain to the newer, society-conditioned cortex, which usually received them unfiltered through dreams and symbols and would have broken down in shrieking confusion without the strong scaffolding of genemod drugs holding it together.

  He crouched on a rock in the sunlight and he had claws, teeth, fur, feathers, scales. His jaws tore and rendered the thing wailing helplessly, and the blood flew in his face, snout, crown. The blood-smell excited him, and the wordless rushing in his ears said, “Mine, mine, mine, mine…”

  He reared up on his hind legs, powerful as pistons, and brought the rock down again on the other’s head. His father, writhing in the vomit of his last drunk, held up clasped hands and pleaded for mercy. Drew brought the rock down hard, and in the corner of the den his mother crouched, her fur glistening with brainies, waiting for the penis that was already engorged with killing…

  They were chasing him, all of them, Leisha and his father and the howling things that wanted to cut his throat, and he was running running through a landscape that kept shifting: trees that would not hold still, bushes that opened jaws and snapped at him, rivers that tried to suck him under into blackness…then the landscape became the desert compound and Leisha was there; too, screaming at him that he was a failure and he deserved to die because he could never do anything right, could not even stay awake the way real people could. He grabbed Leisha and threw her down and with the action came such astonishing freedom, such an exultant state of potency that he laughed out loud and then both he and Leisha were naked and she was tied up and he looked around her study and said gloatingly “All of this is mine, mine, mine…”

  “He isn’t in pain,” the doctor said. “The writhing is no more than stepped-up muscular reflexes in response to cortical bombardment. Not unlike dreaming.”

  “Dreaming,” Eric repeated, staring at Drew’s writhing body. “Dreaming…”

  The doctor shrugged, a gesture not of indifference but of tremendous tension. This was only the fourth time the experimental psychiatric technique had been used. The other three people had had no powerful relatives, or whatever this Mr. Smithson was to Bevington-Watrous. The doctor didn’t care what he was. They were outside United States borders, and in Mexico the genemod laws functioned by expensive permits. The doctor had a permit. Not to do what he was doing, of course, but then who ever had that sort of permit? He shrugged again.

  “It’s been three days,” Eric said. “When does this phase…stop?”

  “We start the artificial reinforcement this afternoon. We—yes, nurse, what is it?”

  “Comlink for Mr. Bevington-Watrous.” The young Mexican nurse sounded scared. “It’s Ms. Leisha Camden.”

  Eric turned slowly. “How did she find us?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Will you…will you come to the terminal?”

  “No,” Eric said.

  The nurse was back in ninety seconds. “Sir, Ms. Camden says if you don’t talk to her she’ll be here in two hours.”

  “I won’t ta
lk to her,” Eric said stubbornly, but the pupils of his eyes widened, making him suddenly look much younger. “Doctor, what happens if this treatment is interrupted now?”

  “It cannot be interrupted now. We don’t know exactly how the—but there would certainly be grave mental consequences. Certainly.”

  Eric went on staring at Drew.

  The images became shapes. In doing that they didn’t lose identity but gained it: The shapes were the images plus more. The shapes were the essence of the images, and they were both Drew’s and not Drew’s: both his personal angels, demons, heroes, fears, yearnings, drives, and everyone’s. No one saw them but him, no one had ever seen them, but they were his translations of universals: he knew that. Even through the strange drugs and electrodes and semitrance state, a part of his conscious mind knew that. It recognized the images and Drew knew he would never forget them, and that he was not done with making them.

  “We’re introducing theta activity now,” the doctor said. “We’re electronically forcing his cortex into brain waves characteristic of slow-wave sleep.”

  Eric said nothing. A clock on the wall flashed the time, and he seemed unable to take his eyes off it.

  “Of course, Mr. Bevington-Watrous, you signed all the legal waivers for this treatment for Mr. Smithson, but you also assured us that if there were extradition ramifications you are in a position to—”

  “Not all Sleepless are equally powerful, Doctor. I, for instance, am as powerful as the extradition authorities, but not as powerful as my aunt. You might as well accept that fact now. Because she’ll make sure we both do.”

  Drew slept. And yet it was not sleep. The images kept marching over the reinforced highway from the limbic to his accessible mind, and he saw them, and he knew them. But now he moved among them, Drew, a sleepwalker with a sleepwalker’s privileged duality: asleep and yet in control of his muscles. He moved among the shapes, and he changed them, remade them, and shaped them through lucid dreaming.