Beggars and Choosers

by Nancy Kress

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll tell you what happens.” Lizzie subsided, grumbling.

  Annie was not grateful.

  A small crowd, twenty or so, battered on the foamcast door of the warehouse, using a sofa as battering ram. I knew this was hopeless; if the Bastille had been made of foamcast, Marie Antoinette would have gone on needing wigs. I lounged across the street, leaning against a turquoise apartment building, and watched.

  The door gave way.

  Twenty people gave a collective shout and rushed inside. Then twenty people gave another shout, this one furious. I examined the door hinges. They had been duragem, taken apart atom by atom by dissemblers.

  “There’s nothing in here!”

  “They cheated us, them!”

  “Fucking bastards—”

  I peered inside. The first small room held a counter and terminal. A second door led to the depository, which was lined with empty shelves, empty bins, empty overhead hooks where jacks and vases and music chips and chairs and cleaning ’bots and hand tools should go. I felt a chill prickle over me from neck to groin, an actual frisson complexly made of fear and fascination. It was true then. The economy, the political structure, the duragem crisis, were actually this bad. For the first time in over a hundred years, since Kenzo Yagai invented cheap energy and remade the world, there really was not enough to go around. The politicians were conserving production for the cities, where larger numbers of voters resided, and writing off less populous or less easily reached areas with fewer votes. East Oleanta had been written off.

  No one was going to come to fix the gravrail.

  The crowd howled and cursed: “Fucking donkeys! Fuck them all, us!” I heard the sound of shelves ripping from the walls; maybe they’d had duragem bolts.

  I walked rapidly but calmly back outside. Twenty people is enough to be a mob. A stun gun only fires in one direction at a time, and a personal shield, although unbreachable, does not prevent its wearer from being held in one place without food or water.

  The hotel or Annie’s? Whichever I chose, I might be there semipermanently.

  The hotel had a networked terminal I could use to call for help, if I chose my moment well. Annie’s apartment was on the edge of town, which suddenly seemed safer than dead center. It also had food, doors whose hinges were not duragem, and an owner already hostile to me. And Lizzie.

  I walked quickly to Annie’s.

  Halfway there, Billy rounded the corner of a building, carrying a baseball bat. “Quick, doctor! Come this way, you!”

  I stopped cold. All my fear, which had been a kind of heightened excitement, vanished. “You came to protect me?”

  “This way!” He was breathing hard, and his old legs trembled. I put a hand on his elbow to steady him.

  “Billy…lean against this wall. You came to protect me?”

  He grabbed my hand and pulled me down an alley, the same one the stomps used for creative loitering when the weather had been warm. I heard it, then—the shouts from the opposite end of the street from the warehouse. More angry people, screaming about donkey politicians.

  Billy led me through the alley, behind a few buildings, on our hands and knees through what seemed to be a mini-junkyard of scrapped scooters, chunks of plastisynth, mattresses, and other large unlovely discards. At the back of the café he did something to the servoentrance used by delivery ’bots; it opened. We crawled into the automated kitchen, which was busily preparing soysynth to look like everything else.

  “How—”

  “Lizzie,” he gasped, “before she even…learned nothing…from you,” and even through his incipient heart attack I heard his pride. He slid down the wall and concentrated on breathing more slowly. His hectic color subsided.

  I looked around. In one corner was a second, smaller stockpile of food, blankets, and necessities. My eyes prickled.

  “Billy…”

  He was still catching his breath. “Don’t nobody know…about this, so they won’t think, them…to look for you here.”

  Whereas they might have in Annie’s apartment. People had seen me with Lizzie. He wasn’t protecting me; he was protecting Lizzie from being associated with me.

  I said, “Will the whole town go Bastille now?”

  “Huh?”

  I said, “Will the whole town riot and smash things and look for somebody to blame and hurt?”

  He seemed astounded by the idea. “Everybody? No, of course not, them. What you hear now is just the hotheads that don’t never know, them, how to act when something’s different. They’ll calm down, them. And the good people like Jack Sawicki, he’ll get them organized to seeing about getting useful things done.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh,” he waved a hand vaguely. His breathing was almost normal again. “Putting by blankets for anybody who really needs one. Sharing stuff that ain’t going to be coming in. We had a shipment of soysynth, us, just last week—the kitchen won’t run out for a while, though there won’t be no extras. Jack will make sure, him, that people know that.”

  Unless the kitchen broke, of course. Neither of us said it.

  I said quietly, “Billy, will they look for me at Annie’s?”

  He looked at the opposite wall. “Might.”

  “They’ll see the stockpiled stuff.”

  “Most of it’s here. What you saw is mostly empty buckets, them. Annie, she’s putting them in the recycler now.”

  I digested this. “You didn’t trust me to know about this place. You were hoping I’d leave before I had to know.”

  He went on staring at the wall. Conveyer belts carried bowls of soysynth “soup” toward the flash heater. I looked again at the stockpile; it was smaller than I’d thought at first. And if the kitchen did break, then of course it would be only a matter of time before the homegrown mob remembered the untreated soysynth that must be behind their foodbelt somewhere. Billy must have other piles. In the woods? Maybe.

  “Will anybody bother you or Annie or Lizzie because I used to be with you, even if I’m not now?”

  He shook his head. “Folks ain’t like that.”

  I doubted this. “Wouldn’t it be better to bring Lizzie here?”

  His furrowed face turned stubborn. “Only if I have to, me. Better I bring food and stuff out.”

  “At least make her hide that terminal and crystal library I gave her.”

  He nodded and stood. His knees weren’t trembling anymore. He picked up his baseball bat and I hugged him, a long hard hug that surprised him so much he actually staggered. Or maybe I pushed him slightly.

  “Thank you, Billy.”

  “You’re welcome, Doctor Turner.”

  He gave me the code to the servoentrance door, then crawled cautiously out. I made a blanket nest on the floor and sat in it. From my jacks I pulled out the handheld monitor. The homer I’d fastened firmly inside his deepest pocket when he staggered off balance showed Billy walking back to Annie’s. He wouldn’t go anywhere else today, maybe for several days. When he did, I wanted to know about it.

  Rex, who came before Paul and after Eugene, once told me something interesting about organizations. There are essentially only two types in the entire world, Rex had said. When people in the first type of organization either don’t follow the organization’s rules or otherwise become too great a pain in the ass, they can be kicked out. After that they cease to be part of the organization. These organizations include sports teams, corporations, private schools, country clubs, religions, cooperative enclaves, marriages, and the Stock Exchange.

  But when people in the second type of organization don’t follow the rules, they can’t be kicked out because there isn’t any place to send them. No matter how useless or aggravating or dangerous are the unwanted members, the organization is stuck with them. These organizations include maximum-security prisons, families with impossible nine-year-olds, nursing homes for the terminally ill, and countries.

  Had I just seen my cou
ntry kick out an unwanted and aggravating town of voters who had been following the rules?

  Most donkeys were not cruel. But desperate people—and most especially desperate politicians—had been known to act in ways they might not usually act.

  I settled my back against the wall and watched the automated kitchen turn soysynth into chocolate chip cookies.

  Eleven

  BILLY WASHINGTON: EAST OLEANTA

  The day after East Oleanta wrecked the warehouse, them, food started coming in by air.

  Like I told Dr. Turner, it wasn’t all of us in East Oleanta. Only some stomps, plus the people like Celie Kane who was always angry anyway, plus a few good people who just couldn’t take it no more, them, and went temporary crazy. They all calmed down when the plane started coming every day, without no warehouse goods but with plenty of food. The tech who ran the delivery ’bots smiled wide, her, and said, “Compliments of Congresswoman Janet Carol Land.” But she had three security ’bots with her, and a bluish shimmer that Dr. Turner said was a military-strength personal shield.

  Dr. Turner moved, her, out of the space behind the kitchen just an hour before the delivery ’bots started marching in. She just barely didn’t get caught, her. “All of Rome meets in the Forum,” she said, which didn’t make no sense. She moved back to the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel.

  Then the women’s shower in the baths broke. A security ’bot broke. The streetlights broke, or something that controlled the streetlights. We got a cold stretch of Arctic air, and the snow wouldn’t stop, it.

  “Damn snow,” Jack Sawicki grumbled every time I saw him. The same words, them, every time, like the snow was the problem. Jack had lost weight. I think he didn’t like being mayor no more.

  “It’s the donkeys doing it to us,” Celie Kane shrilled. “They’re using the fucking weather, them, to kill us all!”

  “Now, Celie,” her father said, reasonable, “can’t nobody control the weather.”

  “How do you know what they can do, them? You’re just a dumb old man!” And Doug Kane went back to eating his soup, staring at the holoterminal show of a Lucid Dreamer concert.

  At home, Lizzie said to me, “You know, Billy, Mr. Kane is right. Nobody can control the weather. It’s a chaotic system.”

  I didn’t know what that meant. Lizzie said a lot of things I didn’t know, me, since she’d been doing software every day with Dr. Turner. She could even talk like a donkey now. But not around her mother. Lizzie was too smart, her, for that. I heard her say to Annie, “Nobody can’t control the weather, them.” And Annie, counting sticky buns and soyburgers rotting in a corner of the apartment, nodded without listening and said, “Bed time. Lizzie.”

  “But I’m in the middle of—”

  “Bed time”

  In the middle of the night somebody pounded on the apartment door.

  “B-B-Billy! Annie! L-L-Let me in!”

  I sat up on the sofa where I slept, me. For a minute I thought I was dreaming. The room was dark as death.

  “L-Let m-m-me in!”

  Dr. Turner. I stumbled, me, off the sofa. The bedroom door opened and Annie came out in her white nightdress, Lizzie stuck behind her like a tail wind.

  “Don’t you open that door, Billy Washington,” Annie said. “Don’t you open it, you!”

  “It’s Dr. Turner,” I said. I couldn’t stand up straight, me, so fuddled with dreaming. I staggered and grabbed the corner of the sofa. “She don’t mean no harm, her.”

  “Nobody comes in here! We won’t understand none of it, us!”

  Then I saw she was fuddled with dreaming, too. I opened the door.

  Dr. Turner stumbled in, her, carrying a suitcase but wearing a nightdress, covered with snow. Her beautiful donkey face was white and her teeth chattered. “L-L-Lock the d-door!”

  Annie demanded, “You got people hunting you, them?”

  “No. N-N-No…j-just let me g-g-get warm…”

  It hit me then. From the hotel to our apartment wasn’t all that far, even if it was freezing out. Dr. Turner shouldn’t be that cold, her. I grabbed her shoulders. “What happened at the hotel, doctor?”

  “H-H-Heating untit qu-quit.”

  “Heating unit can’t quit, it,” I said. I sounded like Doug Kane trying to talk to Celie. “It’s Y-energy.”

  “N-N-Not the circulating equipment. It m-m-must have duragem p-parts.” She stood by our unit, rubbing her hands together, her face still the same white-gray as all the snow piled in the streets.

  Lizzie said suddenly, “I hear screaming!”

  “Th-they’re b-burning the hotel.”

  “Burning it?” Annie said. “Foamcast don’t burn!”

  Dr. Turner smiled, her, one of those twisted donkey smiles that said Livers just now caught on to what donkeys already knew. “They’re trying anyway. I told them it won’t eradicate the duragem dissembler, and somebody will likely get hurt.”

  “You told ’em,” Annie said, one hand on her wide hip. “And then you come here, you, with a mob following you—”

  “No one’s following me. They’re far too busy trying to contravene the laws of physics. And Annie, I’m freezing. Where else would I go? The tech reprogrammed the entrance codes for the kitchen, and anyway it’s still full of delivery ’bots whenever that unpredictable plane comes.”

  Annie looked at her, and she looked at Annie, and I could see, me, that there was something wrong with Dr. Turner’s speech. It wasn’t no plea for help, even if the words said that. And it wasn’t trying to sound reasonable, either. Dr. Turner really was asking Where else would I go? Can you tell me some other place I ain’t mentioned? Only it wasn’t Annie she was asking, her. It was me.

  And I wasn’t about to tell her, me, that finally I knew. After all my looking, I knew where Eden was.

  “You can stay here with us,” Lizzie said, and her big brown eyes looked at her mother. I felt my back muscles knot, them. This was it, the big Armageddon between Annie and Dr. Turner. Only it wasn’t. Not yet. Maybe because Annie was afraid, her, of whose side Lizzie would take.

  “All right,” Annie said, “but only because I can’t stand, me, to see nobody freeze to death, or get tore apart by them damn stomps. But I don’t like it, me.”

  Like anybody ever thought she did. I was careful, me, not to meet nobody’s eyes.

  Annie gave Dr. Turner a few blankets off the stockpile along the west wall. We had everything there, us, crowding out the space: blankets and jacks and chairs and ribbons and rotting food and I don’t know what else. I wondered, me, if I should give Dr. Turner the sofa, but she spread her blankets in a nest on the floor, her, and I figured that she might be company but she was also thirty years younger than me. Or twenty, or fifty—with donkeys you can’t never really tell.

  We all got back to sleep, us, somehow, but the shouts outside went on a long time. And in the morning the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel was wrecked. Still standing, because Dr. Turner was right and foamcast don’t burn, but the doors and windows were tore off the hinges, and the furniture was all broke up, and even the terminal was a twisted pile of junk in the street. Jack Sawicki looked serious, him, about that. Now all he had to talk to Albany on was the café terminal. Besides, them things are expensive. State Representative Taguchi was going to be mad as hell, her.

  Snow blew in the hotel windows and drifted on the floor, and you’d of thought the place had been deserted for years, the way it looked. It kind of twisted my chest to see it. We were losing more and more, us.

  That afternoon the plane didn’t come, it, and by dinner the next day the café was out of food.

  There’s a place upriver, about a half mile from town, where deer go, them. When we had a warden ’bot, it put out pellets for the deer in the winter. The pellets had some kind of drug inside, so the deer couldn’t never breed, them, more than the woods can feed. The warden wasn’t never replaced, it, since before them rabid raccoons in the summer. But the deer still co
me to the clearing. They just do what they always did, them, because they don’t know no better.

  Or maybe they do, them. Here the river flowed fast enough that it didn’t freeze completely through unless the temperature got down in the single numbers. The snow blew across the clearing, it, and piled up against the wooded hill beyond, so plants were easy to uncover. You could usually spot two or three deer without waiting very long.

  When I went there, me, with Doug Kane’s old rifle, somebody else had already got there first. The snow was bloody and a mangled carcass laid by the creek. Most of the meat was spoiled, it, by somebody too lazy or too stupid to butcher it right. Bastards didn’t even bother to drag the carcass away from the water.

  I walked, me, a little ways more. It was snowing, but not hard. The ground crunched under my feet and my breath smoked. My back-hurt and my knees ached and I didn’t even try, me, to walk without any noise. “Don’t go alone, you,” Annie’d said, but I didn’t want Annie to leave Lizzie by herself. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to take Dr. Turner. She’d moved in with us, her, and that was probably good because donkeys got all kinds of things you don’t never suspect until you need them, like medicine for Lizzie last summer. But Dr. Turner was a city woman, her, and she scared away the game, crashing through the brush like an elephant or dragon or one of them other old-time monsters. I needed to kill something today. We needed the meat, us.

  In a week, all out stockpiled food had gotten eaten up. One lousy week.

  No more came, by rail or air or gravsled, from Albany. People tore into the café, them, to the kitchen where Annie used to cook apple pudding for the foodbelt, but there wasn’t nothing left there.

  I walked farther upstream. When I was a young boy, me, I used to love being in the woods in winter. But then I wasn’t scared out of my skull. Then I wasn’t an old fool with a back that hurts and who can’t see nothing in his mind but Lizzie’s big dark eyes looking hungry. I can’t stand that, me. Never.

  Lizzie. Hungry…

  When I left town, the rifle under my coat, people were hurrying to the café. Something was going on, I didn’t know what. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted, me, to keep Lizzie from going hungry.