Beggars and Choosers

by Nancy Kress

  Four

  DIANA COVINGTON: KANSAS

  One night in another lifetime Eugene, who came before Rex and after Claude, asked me what the United States reminded me of. That was the sort of question to which Gene was given: inviting metaphorical grandiosity, which in turn invited his scorn. I replied that the United States had always seemed to me like some powerful innocent beast, lushly beautiful, with the cranial capacity of a narrow-headed deer. Look how it stretches its sleek muscles in the sunlight. Look how it bounds high. Look how it runs gracefully straight into the path of the oncoming train. This answer had the virtue of being so inflatedly grandiose that to object to it on those grounds became superfluous. It was beside the point that the answer was also true.

  Certainly from my gravrail I could see enough of the lush, mangled carcass. We’d come over the Rockies at quarter speed so the Liver passengers could enjoy the spectacular view. Purple mountain majesties and all that. Nobody else even glanced out the window. I stayed glued to it, savoring all the asinine superiority of genuine awe.

  At Garden City, Kansas, I changed to a local, zipping through gorgeous countryside at 250 miles an hour, crawling through crappy little Liver towns at nothing an hour. “Why not just fly to Washington?” Colin Kowalski had said, incredulous. “You’re not supposed to be pretending to be a Liver, after all.” I’d told him I wanted to see the Liver towns whose integrity I was defending against potential artificial genetic corruption. He hadn’t liked my answer any better than Gene had.

  Well, now I was seeing them. The mangled carcass.

  Each town looked the same. Streets fanning out from the gravrail station. Houses and apartment blocks, some pure foamcast and some foamcast added onto older buildings of brick or even wood. The foamcast colors were garish, pink and marigold and cobalt and a very popular green like lobster guts. Aristocratic Liver leisure did not confer aristocratic taste.

  Each town boasted a communal café the size of an airplane hangar, a warehouse for goods, various lodge buildings, a public bath, a hotel, sports fields, and a deserted-looking school. Everything was plastered with holosigns: Supervisor S. R. ElectMe Warehouse. Senator Frances Fay Family Money Café. And beyond the town, barely visible from the gravrail, the Y-energy plant and shielded robofactories that kept it all going. And, of course, the scooter track, inevitable as death.

  Somewhere in Kansas a family climbed onto the train and plunked themselves down on the seats across from me. Daddy, Mommy, three little Livers, two with runny noses, everybody in need of a diet and gym. Rolls of fat bounced under Mommy Liver’s bright yellow jacks. Her glance brushed me, traveled on, reversed like radar.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She scowled and nudged her mate. He looked at me and didn’t scowl. The cubs gazed silently, the boy—he was about twelve—with a look like his daddy’s.

  Colin had warned me against even trying to pass for a Liver; he said there’d be no way I could fool Sleepless. I’d said I didn’t want to fool Sleepless; I only wanted to blend into the local flora. He said I couldn’t. Apparently he was right. Mommy Liver took one look at my genemod-long legs, engineered face, and Anne Boleyn neck that cost my father a little trust fund, and she knew. My poison-green jacks, soda-can jewelry (very popular; you made it yourself), and shit-brown contact lenses made not a bit of difference to her. Daddy & Son weren’t so sure, but, then, they didn’t really care. Breast size, not genescan, was on their mind.

  “I’m Darla Jones, me,” I said cheerfully. I had a lock-pocket full of various chips under various names, some of which the GSEA had provided, some of which they knew nothing about. It’s a mistake to let the agency provide all of your cover. The time might come when you want cover from them. All of my identities were documented in federal databases, looking as if they had long pasts, thanks to a talented friend the GSEA also knew nothing about. “Going to Washington, me.”

  “Arnie Shaw,” the man said eagerly. “The train, it break down yet?”

  “Nah,” I said. “Probably will, though, it.”

  “What can you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Keeps things interesting.”

  “Arnie,” Mommy Liver said sharply, interrupting this mild conversational excursion, “back here, us. There’s more seats.” She gave me a look that would scorch plastisynth.

  “Plenty of seats up here, Dee.”

  “Arnie!”

  “’Bye,” I said. They walked away, the woman muttering under her breath. Bitch. I should let the SuperSleepless turn her descendants into four-armed tailless guard dogs. Or whatever they had in mind. I leaned my head against the back of the seat and closed my eyes. We slowed down for another Liver town.

  As soon as we left it, the littlest Shaw was back. A girl of about five, she crept along the aisle like a kitten. She had a pert little face and long dirty brown hair.

  “You got a pretty bracelet, you.” She looked longingly at the soda-can atrocity on my wrist, all curling jangles of some lightweight alloy bendable as warm wax. Some besotted voter had sent it and the matching earrings to David when he was running for state senator. He’d kept it as a joke.

  I slipped the bracelet off my wrist. “You want it, you?”

  “Really?” Her face shone. She snatched the bracelet from my outstretched fingers and scampered back down the aisle, blue shirt-tail flapping. I grinned. Too bad kittens inevitably grow up into cats.

  A minute later Mommy Liver loomed. “Keep your bracelet, you. Desdemona, she got her own jewelry!”

  Desdemona. Where do they ever hear these names? Shakespeare doesn’t play at scooter tracks.

  The woman looked at me from very hard eyes. “Look, you keep, you, to your kind, and we keep to ours. Better that way all around. You understand, you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and popped out my lenses. My eyes are an intense, genemod violet. I gazed at her calmly, hands folded on my lap.

  She waddled away, muttering. I caught the words, “These people…”

  “If I find I can’t pass for a Liver,” I’d told Colin, “I’ll pass for a semi-crazy donkey trying to pass for a Liver. I wouldn’t be the first donkey to go native. You know, the working-class person pathetically trying to pass for an aristo. Hide in plain sight.”

  Colin had shrugged. I’d thought he already regretted recruiting me, but then I realized that he hoped my antics would draw attention away from the real GSEA agents undoubtedly heading for Washington. The Federal Forum for Science and Technology, popularly known as the Science Court, was hearing Market Request no. 1892-A. What made this market request different from numbers 1 through 1891 was that it was being proposed by Huevos Verdes Corporation. For the first time in ten years, the SuperSleepless were seeking government approval to market a patented genemod invention in the United States. They didn’t have a fish’s chance on the moon, of course, but it was still pretty interesting. Why now? What were they after? And would any of the twenty-seven show up personally at the Science Court hearing?

  And if anybody did, would I be able to keep him or her under surveillance?

  I gazed out the train window, at the robo-tended fields. Wheat, or maybe soy—I wasn’t sure what either looked like, growing. In ten minutes, Desdemona was back. Her face appeared slowly between my outstretched legs; she’d crawled along the floor, under the seats, through the mud and spilled food and debris. Desdemona raised her little torso between my knees, balancing herself with one sticky hand on my seat. The other hand shot out and closed on my bracelet.

  I unfastened it and gave it to her again. The front of her blue jacks was filthy. “No cleaning ’bot on this train?”

  She clutched the bracelet and grinned. “It died, him.”

  I laughed. The next minute the gravrail broke down.

  I was thrown to the floor, where I swayed on hands and knees, waiting to die. Under me machinery shrieked. The train shuddered to a stop but didn’t tip over.

  “Damn!” Desdemona’s father shouted. “Not
again!”

  “Can we get some ice cream, us?” a child whined. “We’re stopped now!”

  “Third time this week! Fucking donkey train!”

  “We never get no ice cream!”

  Apparently the trains didn’t tip over. Apparently I wasn’t going to die. Apparently this shrieking machinery was routine. I followed everyone else off the train.

  Into another world.

  A fever wind blew across the miles of prairie: warm, whispering, intoxicating. I was staggered by the size of the sky. Endless bright blue sky above, endless bright golden fields below. And all of it caressed by that blood-warm wind, impregnated with sunlight, gravid with fragrance. I, a city lover to equal Sir Christopher Wren, had had no idea. No holo had ever prepared me. I resisted the mad idea to kick off my shoes and dig my toes into the dark earth.

  Instead I followed the grumbling Livers along the tracks to the front of the train. They gathered around the holoprojection of an engineer, even though I could hear his canned speech being broadcast inside each car. The holo “stood” on the grass, looking authoritative and large. The franchise owner was a friend of mine; he believed that seven-foot-high swarthy-skinned males were the ideal projection to promote order.

  “There is no need to be alarmed. This is a temporary malfunction. Please return to the comfort and safety of your car, and in a few moments complimentary food and drinks will be served. A repair technician is on the way from the railroad franchise. There is no need to be alarmed—”

  Desdemona kicked the holo. Her foot passed through him and she smirked, a pointless saucy smile of triumph. The holo looked down at her. “Don’t do that again, kid—you hear me, you?” Desdemona’s eyes widened and she flew behind her mother’s legs.

  “Don’t be so scaredy, you—it’s just interactive,” Mommy Liver snapped. “Let go, you, of my legs!”

  I winked at Desdemona, who stared at me sullenly and then grinned, rattling our bracelet.

  “—to the comfort and safety of your car, and in a few moments complimentary food—”

  More people approached the engine, all but two complaining loudly. The first was an older woman: tall, plain-faced, and angled as a tesseract. She wore not jacks but a long tunic knitted of yarn in subtle, muted shades of green, too uneven to be machine-made. Her earrings were simple polished green stones. I had never before seen a Liver with taste.

  The other anomaly was a short young man with silky red hair, pale skin, and a head slightly too large for his body.

  The back of my neck tingled.

  Inside the cars, server ’bots emerged from their storage compartments and offered trays of freshly synthesized soy snacks, various drinks, and sunshine in mild doses. “Compliments of State Senator Cecilia Elizabeth Dawes,” it said over and over. “So nice to have you aboard.” This diversion took half an hour. Then everyone went back outside and resumed complaining.

  “The kind of service you get these days—”

  “—vote next time, me, for somebody else—anybody else—”

  “—a temporary malfunction. Please return to the comfort and safety of—”

  I walked over the scrub grass to the edge of the closest field. The Sleepless-in-inadequate-disguise stood watching the crowd, observing as pseudocasually as I was. So far he had taken no special notice of me. The field was bounded by a low energy fence, presumably to keep the agrobots inside. They ambled slowly between the rows of golden wheat, doing whatever it was they did. I stepped over the fence and picked one up. It hummed softly, a dark sphere with flexible tentacles. On the bottom a label said CANCO ROBOTS/LOS ANGELES. CanCo had been in the Wall Street Journal On-Line last week; they were in trouble. Their agrobots had suddenly begun to break down all over the country. The franchise was going under.

  The warm wind whispered seductively through the sweet-scented wheat.

  I sat on the ground, cross-legged, my back to the energy fence. Around me adults settled into games of cards or dice. Children raced around, screaming. A young couple brushed past me and disappeared into the wheat, sex in their eyes. The older woman sat by herself reading a book, an actual book. I couldn’t imagine where she’d gotten it. And the big-headed Sleepless, if that’s what he/she was, stretched out on the ground, closed his eyes, and pretended to sleep. I grimaced. I’ve never liked self-serving irony. Not in other people.

  After two hours, the server ’bots again brought out food and drinks. “Compliments of State Senator Cecilia Elizabeth Dawes. So nice to have you aboard.” How much soysynth did a Liver gravrail carry? I had no idea.

  The sun threw long shadows. I sauntered to the woman reading. “Good book?”

  She looked up at me, measuring. If Colin had sent me to the Science Court in Washington, he probably had sent some legitimate agents as well. And if Big Head was a Sleepless, he might have his own personal tail. However, something in the reading woman’s face convinced me it wasn’t her. She wasn’t genemod, but it wasn’t that. You can find donkey families who refuse even permitted genemods, and then go on existing very solidly corporate but on the fringe socially. She wasn’t that, either. She was something else.

  “It’s a novel,” the woman said neutrally. “Jane Austen. Are you surprised there are still Livers who can read? Or want to?”

  “Yes.” I smiled conspiratorially, but she only gave me a level stare and went back to her book. A renegade donkey didn’t arouse her contempt, or indignation, or fawning. I genuinely didn’t interest her. I felt unwitting respect.

  Apparently I didn’t know as much about the variety of Livers as I’d thought.

  The sunset ravished me. The sky turned lucid and vulnerable, then streaked with subtle colors. The colors grew aggressive, followed by wan and valedictory pastels. Then it grew cold and dark. An entire love affair, empyrean, in thirty minutes. Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David.

  No repair technician appeared. The prairie cooled rapidly; we all climbed back onto the train, which turned on its lights and heat. I wondered what would have happened if those systems—or the server ’bots—had failed as well.

  Someone said, not loudly and to no one in particular, “My meal chip, it came late from the capital last quarter.”

  Pause. I sat up straighter; this was a new tone. Not complaint. Something else.

  “My town got no more jacks. The warehouse donkey says, him, that there’s a national shortage.”

  Pause.

  “We’re going, us, on this train to get my old mother from Missouri. Heat blower in her building broke and nobody else took her in. She got no heat, her.”

  Pause.

  Someone said, “Does anybody know, them, how far it is to the next town? Maybe we could walk, us.”

  “We ain’t supposed to walk, us! They supposed to fix our fucking train!” Mommy Liver, exploding in rage and saliva.

  The quiet tone was over. “That’s right! We’re voters, us!”

  “My kids can’t walk to no next town—”

  “What are you, a fucking donkey?”

  I saw the big-headed man gazing from face to face.

  The holo of the tall swarthy engineer appeared suddenly inside the car, standing in the center aisle. “Ladies and Gentlemen, Morrison Gravrail apologizes once more for the delay in service. To make your wait more enjoyable, we are privileged to present a new entertainment production, one not yet released to the holo-grids, compliments of Congressman Wade Keith Finley. Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer, in his brand-new concert ‘The Warrior.’ Please watch from the windows on the left side of the gravrail.”

  Livers looked at one another; instantly happy babble replaced rage. Evidently this was something new in breakdown diversions. I calculated the cost of a portable holoprojector capable of holos big enough to be seen from windows the length of a train, plus the cost of an unreleased vid from the country’s hottest Liver entertainer. I compared the total to the cost of a competent repair team. Something was very wrong here. I knew nothing about Hollywood, but an unrele
ased concert from Drew Arlen must be worth millions. Why was a gravrail carrying it around as emergency diversion to keep the natives from getting too restless?

  The big-headed man quietly watched his fellow travelers press their faces to the left windows.

  A long rod snaked from the roof of the car behind ours, which sat in the center of the train. The rod rose at an obtuse angle to the ground and extended almost to the wheat field. Light fanned from the end of the rod downward, forming a pyramid. Everyone went “Ooooohhhhh!” Portable projectors never deliver the clarity of a good stationary unit, but I didn’t think this audience would care. The holo of Drew Arlen appeared in the center of the pyramid, and everyone went “Oooooohhhhhh” again.

  I slipped out of the train.

  In the dark and up close, the holo looked even stranger: a fifteen-foot-high, fuzzy-edged man sitting in a powerchair, backed by miles of unlit prairie. Above, cold stars glittered, immensely high. I unfolded a plasticloth jacket from the pocket of my jacks.

  The holo said, “I’m Drew Arlen. The Lucid Dreamer. Let your dreams be true.”

  I’d seen Arlen perform live once, in San Francisco, when I’d been slumming with friends. I was the only person in the Congressman Paul Jennings Messura Concert Hall not affected. Natural hypnotic resistance, my doctor said. Your brain just doesn’t possess the necessary fine-tuned biochemistry. Do you dream at night?

  I have never been able to recall a single one of my dreams.

  The pyramidal light around Arlen changed somehow, flickered oddly. Subliminal patterns. The patterns coalesced slowly into intricate shapes and Arlen’s voice, low and intimate, began a story.

  “Once there was a man of great hopes and no power. When he was young, he wanted everything. He wanted strength, him, that would make all other men respect him. He wanted sex, him, that would make his bones melt with satisfaction. He wanted love. He wanted excitement. He wanted, him, for every day to be filled with challenges only he could meet. He wanted—”