Beggars and Choosers

by Nancy Kress

  “’Bots,” I said.

  “Who would make the ’bots?”

  “Maybe us?”

  “Livers work? But why, in God’s name? We don’t got to work, us—we got donkeys to do all that for us. We got a right to be served by donkeys and their ’bots—we elect them! Why would we want to go, us, to some place without public servants?”

  She was too young, her. Annie don’t remember a time before the voting came on HT and the franchises made cheap ’bots and the Mission for Holy Living was all over the place, them, contributing lots of money to all the churches and explaining about the lilies of the field and the sacredness of joy and the favor of God to Mary over Martha. Annie don’t remember, her, all the groups for all the kinds of democracy, each showing us how in a democracy the common man was the real aristo and master of his public servants. Schools for democracy. Irish-Americans for Democracy. Hoosiers for Democracy. Blacks for Democracy. I don’t know, me. The ’bots took over the hard work, and we were happy, us, to give it to them. The politicians started talking, them, about bread and circuses, and calling voters “sir” and “ma’am” and building the cafés and warehouses and scooter tracks and lodge buildings. Annie don’t remember, her. She likes to cook and sew and she don’t spend all her time at races and brainie parties and lodge dances and lovers, like some, but she still ain’t never held an ax in her hand and swung it, or a hoe or a hatchet or a hammer. She don’t remember.

  And then suddenly I knew, me, what an old fool I really was, and how wrong. Because I did swing heavy tools, me, on road crews in Georgia, when I was just a few years older than Lizzie. And when I wasn’t being an ass I could remember, me, how my back ached like it was going to break, and my skin blistered under the sun, and the blackflies bit, them, on the open sores where they’d bit before, and at night I was so tired and hurting, me, I’d cry for my mother into my pillow, where the older men couldn’t hear me. That’s the work we did, us, not some quiet clean assembling of donkey ’bots. I remembered the fear of losing that lousy job when there wasn’t no Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Café, no Senator Mark Todd Ingalls meal chip, no Senator Calvin Guy Winthop Jay Street Apartment Block. The fear was like a knife behind your eyes when the foreman come over, him, on a Friday to say, “That’s it, Washington. You through,” and all you wanted to do was take that knife out from behind your eyes and drive it hard through his heart because now how you going to eat, pay the rent, stay alive. I remembered, me, how it was, all in a second after I opened my big mouth to Annie.

  “You’re right,” I said, not looking at her. “There ain’t no Eden for us. I should go home now, me.”

  “Stay,” Annie said kindly. “Please, Billy. In case there’s trouble at the café.”

  Like anybody could break into a foamcast apartment. Or like a broke-down old man could be any real help to her or Lizzie. But I stayed.

  In the darkness I could hear, me, how Annie and Lizzie moved in their bedrooms. Walking around, laying down, turning and settling into sleep. Sometime in the night the temperature must of dropped because I heard the Y-energy heater come on. I listened, me, to their breathing, a woman and a child, and pretty soon I slept.

  But I dreamed about dangerous raccoons, sick and full of death.

  Three

  DREW ARLEN: HUEVOS VERDES

  I never get used to the way other people don’t see colors and shapes.

  No. That’s not right. They see them. They just don’t see them, in the mind, where it matters. Other people can’t feel colors and shapes. Can’t become colors and shapes. Can’t see through the colors and shapes to the trueness of the world, as I do, in the shapes it makes in my mind.

  That’s not it either.

  Words are hard for me.

  I think words were hard even before the operation that made me the Lucid Dreamer.

  But the pictures are clear.

  I can see myself as a dirty, dumb, hungry ten-year-old, traveling alone halfway across the country to Leisha Camden, the most famous Sleepless in the world. I can see her face as I ask her to make me “be somebody, me.” I can see her eyes when I boasted, “Someday, me, I’m gonna own Sanctuary.”

  Sanctuary, the orbital where all the Sleepless except Leisha Camden and Kevin Baker had exiled themselves. My grandfather, a dumb laborer, had died building Sanctuary. And I thought, in my pathetic ten-year-old arrogance, that I could own it. I thought that if I learned to talk like donkeys and Sleepless, learned to behave like them, learned to think like them, I could have what they had. Money. Power. Choices.

  When I picture that child now, the shapes in my mind are sharp and small, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The shapes are the pale lost gold of remembered summer twilight.

  Miranda Sharifi will inherit a controlling interest in Sanctuary stock. When her parents, Sleepless, eventually die. If they ever do. “What belongs to me belongs to you, Drew,” Miranda said. She has said it several times. Miranda, a SuperSleepless, often explains things to me several times. She is very patient.

  But even with her explanations, I don’t understand what Miri and the Supers are doing at Huevos Verdes. I thought I did eight years ago, when the island was created. But since then there have been a lot more words. I can repeat the words, but I can’t feel their shapes. They’re words without solid form: Auxotrophes. Allosteric interactions. Nanotechnology. Photophosphorylation. Law-son conversion formulas. Neo-Marxist assisted evolution. Most of the time I just nod and smile.

  But I am the Lucid Dreamer. When I float onstage and put a raucous Liver crowd into the Lucid Dreaming trance, and the music and words and combination of shapes flow from my subconscious through my Super-designed hardware, I touch their minds in places they didn’t know they had. They feel more deeply, exist more blissfully, become more whole.

  For at least the length of the concert.

  And when the concert’s over, my audience is subtly changed. They might not realize it. The donkeys who pay for my performances, considering them bread-and-circus occult trash for the masses, don’t realize it. Leisha doesn’t realize it. But I know I’ve controlled my audience, and changed them, and that I am the only one in the world with that power. The only one.

  I try to remember that, when I am with Miranda.

  Leisha Camden sat across the table from me and said, “Drew—what are they doing at Huevos Verdes?”

  I sipped my coffee. On a plate were fresh genemod grapes and berries, with small buttery cookies smelling of lemon and ginger. There was fresh cream for the coffee. The library in Leisha’s New Mexico compound was airy and high-ceilinged, its light, earthy colors echoing the New Mexico desert beyond the big windows. Here and there among the monitors and bookshelves stood stark, graceful sculptures by artists I didn’t know. Some sort of delicate, old-fashioned music played.

  I said, “What’s that music?”

  “Claude de Courcy.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Her. A sixteenth-century composer for the lute.” Leisha said this impatiently, which only showed how tense she was. Usually the shapes she made in my mind were all clean and hard-edged, rigid, glowing with iridescence.

  “Drew, you’re not answering me. What are Miri and the Supers doing at Huevos Verdes?”

  “I’ve been answering you for eight years—I don’t know.”

  “I still don’t believe you.”

  I looked at her. Sometime in the last year she had cut her hair; maybe a woman got tired of caring for her hair after 106 years. She still looked thirty-five. Sleepless didn’t age, and so far they didn’t die, except through accidents or murder. Their bodies regenerated, an unexpected side effect of their bizarre genetic engineering. And the first generation of Sleepless, unlike Miranda’s, hadn’t been so complexly altered that physical appearance couldn’t be controlled. Leisha would be beautiful until she died.

  She had raised me. She had educated me, to the limits of my intelligence, which might once have been normal but could nev
er compare to the genemod-boosted IQ of donkeys, let alone Sleepless. When I became crippled in a freak accident, at the age of ten, Leisha had bought me my first powerchair. Leisha had loved me when I was a child, and had declined to love me when I became a man, and had given me to Miranda. Or Miranda to me.

  She put both palms flat on the table and leaned forward. I recognized what was coming. Leisha was a lawyer. “Drew—you never knew my father. He died when I was in law school. I adored him. He was the most stubborn human being I ever met. Until I met Miri, anyway.”

  The spiky pain-shapes again. When Miri came down from Sanctuary thirteen years ago, she came to Leisha Camden, the only Sleepless not financially or ethically bound to Miri’s horror of a grandmother. Miri came to Leisha for help in starting a new life. Just as I once had.

  Leisha said, “My father was stubborn, generous, convinced he was always right. He had boundless energy. He was capable of incredible discipline, manic reliance on will, complete obsessiveness when he wanted something. He was willing to bend any rules that stood in his way, but he wasn’t a tyrant. He was just implacable. Does that sound like anybody you know? Does that sound like Miri?”

  “Yes,” I said. Where do they get all these words, Leisha and Miri and the rest of them? But these particular words fit. “It sounds like Miranda.”

  “And another thing about my father,” Leisha said, looking directly at me. “He wore people out. He wore out two wives, one daughter, four business partners, and, finally, his own heart. Just wore them out. He was capable of destroying what he passionately loved just by applying his own impossible standards toward improving it.”

  I put down my coffee cup. Leisha put her palms flat on the table and leaned toward me.

  “Drew—I’m asking for the last time. What is Miri doing at Huevos Verdes? You have to understand—I’m scared for her. Miri’s not like my father in one important way. She’s not a loner. She’s desperate for a community, growing up the way she did on Sanctuary, with Jennifer Sharifi for a grandmother…but that’s not the point. Or maybe it is. She yearns to belong the way only an outsider can. And she doesn’t. She knows that. She put her grandmother and that gang in jail, and so the Sleepless have rejected her. She’s so superior to the donkeys they can’t accept her on principle; she’s too much of a threat. And the idea of her trying to find common ground communicating with Livers is ludicrous. There’s no common language.”

  I looked carefully away, out the window, at the desert. You never see that clear crystalline light anywhere else. Like the air itself, the light is both solid and yet completely transparent.

  Leisha says, “All Miri has, outside of you, is twenty-six other SuperSleepless. That’s it. Do you know what makes a revolutionary, Drew? Being an outsider looking in, coupled with the idealistic desire to create the one true, just community, coupled with the belief that you can. Idealists on the inside don’t become revolutionaries. They just become reformers. Like me. Reformers think that things need a little improvement, but the basic structure is sound. Revolutionaries think about wiping everything out and starting all over. Miri’s a revolutionary. A revolutionary with Superintelligent followers, unimaginable technology, huge amounts of money, and passionate ideals. Do you wonder that I’m scared?

  “What are they doing in Huevos Verdes?”

  I couldn’t meet Leisha’s eyes. So many words pouring out of her, so much argument, so many complicated definitions. The shapes in my mind were dark, confused, angry, with dangerous trailing cables hard as steel. But they weren’t Leisha’s shapes. They were mine.

  “Drew,” Leisha said, softly now, the outsider pleading with me. “Please tell me what she’s doing?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  Two days later I sat in a skimmer speeding over the open sea toward Huevos Verdes. The sun on the Gulf of Mexico was blinding. My driver, a freckled kid of about fourteen whom I’d never seen before, was young enough to enjoy skimming water. He edged the gravboat’s nose downward to just touch the ocean, and blue-white spray flew. The kid grinned. The second time he did it, he suddenly turned his head to make sure I wasn’t getting wet, sitting in my powerchair in the back of the skimmer. Clearly he’d forgotten I was there. Sudden guilt and the new angle changed his face, and I recognized him. One of Kevin Baker’s great-grandchildren.

  “Not wet at all,” I said, and the kid grinned again. A Sleepless, of course. I could see that now in the shape of him in my mind: compact and bright-colored and brisk-moving. Born owning the world. And, of course, no security risk for Huevos Verdes.

  But with their defenses, Huevos Verdes wouldn’t be risking security even if passengers were being ferried by the director of the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency.

  I had worked hard to understand the triple-shield security around Huevos Verdes.

  The first shield, a translucent shimmer, rose from the sea a quarter mile out from the island. Spherical, the shield extended underwater, cutting through the rock of the island itself, an all-enveloping egg. Terry Mwakambe, the Supers’ strangest genius, had invented the field. Nothing else like it existed anywhere in the world. It scanned DNA, and nothing not recorded in the data banks got through. Not dolphins, not navy frogmen, not seagulls, not drifting algae. Nada.

  The second shield, a hundred yards beyond, stopped all nonliving matter not accompanied by DNA that was stored in the data banks. No unmanned ’bot vessel carrying anything—sensors, bombs, spores—passed this field. No matter how small. If there wasn’t a registered DNA code accompanying it, it didn’t get through. We skimmed through the shield’s faint blue shimmer as if through a soap bubble.

  The third shield, at the docks, was manually controlled and visually monitored. The registered DNA had to be alive and talking. I don’t know how they checked for a drugged state. Nothing touched us, at least nothing I felt. The design was Terry Mwakambe’s. The monitoring was shared by everybody, in shifts. The paranoia was Miri’s. Unlike her grandmother, she didn’t want the Supers to secede permanently from the United States. But like her grandmother, she’d nonetheless constructed a defended refuge that government officials couldn’t touch. A sanctuary. She’d just done it better than Jennifer Sharifi had.

  “Permission to dock,” the freckled kid said seriously. He gave a little half-mocking salute and grinned. This was still an adventure for him.

  “Hi, Jason,” Christy Demetrios said. “Hello, Drew. Come on in.”

  Jason Reynolds. That was the kid’s name. I remembered now. Kevin’s granddaughter Alexandra’s son. Something about him tugged at my memory, a nervous quick shape like a string of beads. I couldn’t remember.

  Jason docked the boat expertly—they all did everything expertly—and we went ashore, Jason with quick bounds and me in my powerchair.

  A hundred feet of genemod greenery, flowers and bushes and trees, all of it part of the project. Plants grew right to the water’s edge. When the sea threatened, a Y-shield switched on, capable of protecting even the most fragile genemod rose from a hurricane. Beyond the garden, the compound walls rose abruptly, thin as paper, stronger than diamonds. Miri told me they were only a dozen molecules thick, constructed by second-generation nanomachines that had themselves been made from nanomachines. In my mind I saw the walls’ glossy whiteness, to which no dirt could adhere, as hot dark red motion, thick and unstoppable as lava.

  Nothing here was stoppable.

  “Drew!” Miri ran to meet me, wearing white shorts and a loose shirt, her masses of dark hair tied back with a red ribbon. She had put on red lipstick. She still looked more like sixteen than twenty-nine. She threw her arms around me in my chair, and I felt the quick beating of her heart against my cheek. Super metabolism is revved up a lot higher than ours. I kissed her.

  She murmured into my hair, “This time was too long. Four months!”

  “It was a good tour, Miri.”

  “I know. I watched sixteen performances on the grid, and the performance stats look good.”

&
nbsp; She nestled into my lap. Jason and Christy had discreetly vanished. We were alone in the bright, newly created garden. I stroked Miri’s hair, not wanting to hear just yet about performance stats.

  Miri said, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  I kissed her again, this time to keep from looking at her face. It would be blinding, white hot with love. It always was, when she saw me. Always. For thirteen years. He was capable of complete obsessiveness, Leisha had said about her father. He just wore people out.

  “I miss you so much when you’re away, Drew.”

  “I miss you, too.” This was true.

  “I wish you could stay longer than a week.”

  “Me, too.” This was not true. But there were no words.

  She looked at me, then, a long moment. Something shifted behind her eyes. Carefully, so as not to hurt my crippled legs, she climbed off my lap, held out her hands, and smiled. “Come see the lab work.”

  I recognized this for what it was: Miri offering me the best she had. The most valuable present in the world. The thing I desperately wanted to be part of, even though I wouldn’t understand it, because not to be part of it was to be unimportant. Insignificant. She was offering me what I needed most.

  I couldn’t do less.

  I pulled her back onto my lap, forced my hands to move over her breasts. “Later. Can we be alone first…”

  Her face was the curving shape of joy, too bright to be any color at all.

  Miri’s bedroom, like every other bedroom at La Isla, was spartan. Bed, dresser, terminal, an oval green rug made of some soft material Sara Cerelli had invented. On the dresser was a green pottery vase of fragrant genemod flowers I didn’t recognize. These people, who could command all luxury, rarely indulged in any. The only jewelry Miri ever wore was the ring I had given her, a slim gold band set with rubies. I had never seen the other Sleepless wear any jewelry at all. All their extravagances, Miri had told me once, were mental. Even the light was ordinary: flat, without shadows.