Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  “Not before the shield collapses. That happens right…now.”

  Lizzie slumped against the door. Slowly her body sank to the floor, like a rag doll, the sack of precious Y-cones clutched in her arms. She hadn’t done it, after all. She had failed—she, Lizzie Francy!—and now Vicki and she were trapped inside the cone factory, an impenetrable foamcast building. And even if they could get out of the building, they were stuck inside a ten-foot dirt moat around that building by a Y-energy shield that no molecule larger than air could get through. Trapped.

  “Vicki.” she whispered, and she wasn’t the girl-genius datadipper, she was a scared seventeen-year-old girl clutching at an adult, “Vicki—what are we going to do, us?”

  “We’re going to wait,” Vicki said matter-of-factly. She settled down beside Lizzie, her back also to the door. “Until somebody shows up.”

  Lizzie reached out one hand to a patch of floor just beyond the door. She scraped her finger across the foamcast. It came up dusty. “And how long you think it’s been, you, since anyone was here, them?” She heard her speech sound Liver again, the way it did when she was upset. She hated that.

  Vicki said, “Someone will come to check on the security breach. Some tech supervisor dispatched by TenTech. The dust isn’t significant—it doesn’t mean no one ever comes. The whole air filter system could have blown at the same time as the rest of the ’bots, and spewed all its accumulated dust back in again.”

  Lizzie frowned. Arguing made her feel less hopeless. “But the ’bots been malfunctioning, them, for a long while. Look at all them ruined cones…”

  “Not that long. We found the whole cones in the top tier of crates, remember.”

  “And how do we know, us, that these cones even work?” Lizzie demanded. She sat up straighter, hauled one out of her sack, and turned it on. Immediately it radiated heat. She switched it to light, then both at once. “It works.”

  “Well, good.”

  “Maybe whoever comes will let us keep these few cones.”

  Vicki just looked at her. The hopeless feeling washed back over Lizzie again. No, of course they wouldn’t let her keep the cones. They were donkeys. They would arrest her and Vicki for breaking in, and stealing, and whatever else they decided to, and Lizzie and Vicki would go to jail. Her baby would be born in jail. And the tribe wouldn’t have heat after all for the winter, and so would have to migrate south, like most other tribes had already done. Well, that wouldn’t be so bad, the weather was warm in the south and there weren’t so many people left after the awful Change Wars that there wasn’t room…but Lizzie’s mother and Billy wouldn’t go. Not if Lizzie were in jail here in the north. Would it be up here? Sometimes they sent people to distant prisons. The donkey cops could send her anywhere.

  She said miserably, “They still control us, them, don’t they? Despite the Change. And the Cell Cleaner. And…everything.”

  Vicki didn’t answer. She just sat there, a renegade donkey herself, living with Livers, watching the insane forklift lift and transport and stack empty air while damaged cones rolled past and clattered into corners.

  They waited all night, sleeping a few hours on the factory floor. Toward morning a cone rolled into Lizzie and nudged her from fragmented dreams into fragmented wakefulness. She shoved the cone away and considered disabling the forklift. But why bother? She curled up tighter around the still-unfamiliar mass of her swollen belly. The factory floor was cold. Beside her, Vicki snored gently, but Lizzie couldn’t make sleep return.

  She sat up. During the night more of her tunic had disappeared. The belt she wore tied under it, now riding high over her belly, was made of a nonorganic synthetic from before the Change. From it hung a pouch of the same material, holding her tools. If only she had a tunable lasersaw! A lasersaw would have cut them out of here in no time. But only donkeys had lasersaws. That had been true even during the Change Wars, when there’d been warehouse looting and fighting and what Vicki called “the monumental civil upheaval of a dying order.” Donkeys stayed in their impenetrable enclaves, and their lasersaws stayed right in there with them. Besides, a lasersaw wouldn’t get them through the outer security shield. Nothing but a nuclear weapon shattered that kind of Y-shield.

  The factory lights had stayed on all night. Probably they were programmed to do that whenever the building detected human presence. In the soft glow the ’bots performed busily, doing everything wrong. Stupid machines.

  But no stupider than Lizzie had been, her.

  As long as she could remember, Lizzie had felt to herself like two people. One of them had always been asking questions, pestering her mother and Billy and later Vicki, tearing through the pathetic educational software at school, taking ’bots apart whenever she could, listening, listening, listening. There was so much she wanted to know. And until Vicki and the Change, no way to find it out. So when Vicki Turner had left the enclaves and come to live with Livers and given Lizzie a good terminal and crystal library, there was everything to learn. Lizzie—one of the two Lizzies—grew almost frantic, working the terminal every waking minute, trying to make up for lost time. And when she had—when she’d first learned how to use the Net, and then how to master it, and finally how to dip it for any information she wanted, anywhere—when she’d learned all that, it was like she was drunk. Drunk with power, drunk with doing. She’d designed the weaving ’bot for the tribe, and dipped unshielded warehouses until she found all the necessary parts to build it, and located the abandoned factory for their winter home, and gotten pregnant by a boy she’d never see again and didn’t need to. Lizzie Francy had decided she wanted a baby, just like she’d decided she wanted a weaving ’bot, so she got it. She could do that, she could do anything, and nobody better tell her otherwise, them!

  But every minute, underneath, there was this whole other Lizzie that nobody saw. Who was scared all the time. Who knew she was going to mess up eventually, it was only a matter of time. And then everybody would know that she was really a fake, and couldn’t do anything right, and didn’t belong. This second Lizzie was frightened to datadip important corporations like TenTech, and afraid that once her baby was born she wouldn’t be able to take good enough care of it, and terrified that Vicki and Billy and her mother would somehow go away and leave her all alone. Alone with a baby. Which two other girls her age in the tribe, Tasha and Sharon, managed just fine, but which Lizzie Francy couldn’t. Because Lizzie—this other Lizzie—only wanted to curl up in a ball and stop being the person a whole tribe looked to for answers stolen from a Net she didn’t really own after all. Donkeys owned it. Just like they always had.

  Sitting with her back against the cold foamcast wall, watching ’bots destroy Y-cones, she suddenly couldn’t take the two Lizzies inside. Both making her throat tight and her head hurt. I can do anything! I can’t do anything right! Both pressing on her chest. She had to get up, get away from them both.

  She left Vicki sleeping. Vicki looked beautiful sleeping—she always looked beautiful. Genemod. Lizzie would never look like that. She was too short and her chin looked funny and her wiry black hair stuck out in all directions because she pulled at it while she was dipping. But Vicki was asleep and Lizzie wasn’t, so it was up to her to do something about their situation. Something, anything.

  Restlessly she prowled the perimeter of the huge room, where fewer cones rolled underfoot. Past the main doors, that she had spent a futile hour last night trying to dip. Past the panel over the narrow air-filter ducts, which Vicki had pried open. The air-filter system had indeed blown with the rest of the programming. Lizzie’s bare feet smeared dirty tracks on the floor.

  But then on the far wall she noticed something that, in her exhaustion and discouragement, she’d missed last night. Eight feet up from the floor, a metal panel about a yard square, the exact color of the gray foamcast wall.

  Not storage, not way up there. Not the sealed Y-energy housing; that was clearly marked and anyway impenetrable. This panel didn’t look impenetrable, at
least not from down here. Small bolts secured each corner.

  Lizzie stalked the second forklift, busily lifting and sorting and packing empty air. When it rolled to a stop at the end of the assembly line for another nonexistent load, she climbed aboard its flat squat motor housing. It took her three minutes to reprogram the machine to carry her to the wall, lift her up seven feet, and stand motionless while she unbolted the nearly invisible panel, putting the bolts in her pouch. The panel, made of some light alloy, she set carefully behind her on her metal pedestal.

  Behind the panel lay a foamcast indentation shaped like a squared funnel. About four feet deep, it narrowed at the far end to a square only eight or ten inches. The indentation hadn’t been on the building plans Lizzie had dipped while planning this raid. At the end of the funnel was another bolted panel.

  She leaned into the indentation. But she couldn’t quite reach the small panel, especially over the awkward bulge of her belly. She heaved herself into the opening and crawled forward.

  These bolts wouldn’t unscrew. If only she had a lasersaw! Doggedly she worked the bolts, but they wouldn’t loosen. Yet they weren’t nanofitted; the building was sixteen years old, too old for most nanotech.

  Finally, in frustration, Lizzie whacked the panel with the butt of her screwdriver. “Damn it all to stinking hell!” Billy’s favorite oath.

  “Awaiting instruction,” the panel said.

  She stared. She’d never even considered that the thing might be a screen or voice-activated. Stupid, stupid. What if she’d damaged it by her pounding?

  “Awaiting instruction,” the panel repeated.

  “Run test sequence.” Find out what she was dealing with.

  “Running test sequence.”

  The lights in the factory turned off. Five seconds, ten, then back on. Next the noise of the robotic line ceased—a silence shocking as an explosion. Before the din started again she heard Vicki yell, “Hey! Lizzie?”

  Lizzie, intently studying the small screen, didn’t answer. Elation ballooned in her. It was running the entire sequence—including the outer security shield. She knew what it was now. Part of the backup system, minimally accessible from the outside of the building for safety control but physically unreachable by any of the line ’bots—which, as Lizzie had just demonstrated, were all too easy to reprogram. Some of the old-style factory systems had experimented with all sorts of weird redundancies to take physical control back from mischievous disablers. If she could dip this auxiliary system, she could control the Y-shield from here.

  And she would be able to dip the system. She was the unbeatable Lizzie Francy.

  “Repeat test sequence,” she said, intending to call out to Vicki at the next silence. But right after the lights check, the little wall panel blanked. Then it flashed, without vocals, TEST SEQUENCE ABORTED. 65-B.

  65-B. A standard industrial code for a microwaved master signal from a supervising, physically present source outside all systems. It was a common fail-safe for any process involving radiation. The entire operation could be halted by the right signal from a handheld remote at close range. Donkeys had arrived at the factory.

  Lizzie backed out of her cramped hole eight feet above the floor. Her feet felt for the metal platform of the forklift. It wasn’t there.

  Frantically she twisted her pregnant body until she faced outward. The forklift had rolled three feet away from the wall, probably as part of the machinery test sequence. Balancing precariously, Lizzie stretched out both arms full-length. She could just grasp the edge of the alloy panel resting on the forklift’s raised platform. But the panel wasn’t fastened to the forklift itself, and she couldn’t use it to pull the machine forward. And then suddenly the fork-lift came to life again and started to roll toward the line, returning to its normal work, and Lizzie was left with the alloy panel dangling from her fingers eight feet above the floor.

  Below, the demented nonwork continued: ’bots assembled Y-energy works and then smashed them against misaligned cones; cone shells rolled across the floor; forklifts stacked air. From behind a pile of packing crates Vicki raced into view, yelling something over the din. Probably Lizzie’s name. And then the main doors, on the adjacent factory wall, sprang open and two donkeys walked in, a man and a woman, with drawn guns.

  Immediately, not even thinking about it, Lizzie pulled the alloy panel back into place, holding it from the inside with her fingernails. Heart hammering, she cowered high inside the foamcast wall.

  I N T E R L U D E

  TRANSMISSION DATE: November 4, 2120

  TO: Selene Base, Moon

  VIA: Toledo Enclave Ground Station, GEO Satellite C-1494 (U.S.), Satellite E-398 (France)

  MESSAGE TYPE: Unencrypted

  MESSAGE CLASS: Class D, Public Service Access, in accordance with Congressional Bill 4892-18, May 2118

  ORIGINATING GROUP: “Roy L. Spath’s tribe,” Ohio

  MESSAGE:

  Mother Miranda! Blessed are the poor in spirit, them, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven! We are the poor, us, and we beg you for mercy! You gave us God’s gift, you, with them Change syringes, and we honor you! Blessed are thou amongst women! You gave us freedom from the Horsemen of Famine and Pestilence, and so now we ask you, us, for freedom from Death! Give us this day our immortal life, and send syringes that can Change us to live like you do, forever and ever world without end amen! Pray for us, you, that we have no hour of death! Thank you!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

  Three

  Fifty miles from Willoughby, Cazie said, “The factory security shield’s down.”

  Jackson glanced at his ex-wife, her face intent on the screen of her handheld mobile. The aircar flew on automatic and he had been half-asleep, secretly pleased with his ability to doze in her presence. That meant her effect on him was lessening—didn’t it? Or maybe it just meant he wasn’t used to being awake and in the air at 6:29 in the morning. In the east the sky was lightening, and in the pearly light Cazie’s profile looked pure and luminous. Theresa would say Cazie looked like a saint. At this thought, Jackson snorted.

  She said, “You don’t believe me? Look for yourself.” She thrust the mobile at him.

  He thrust it back. “I believe you. The program must be malfunctioning. Nobody can break into a Y-shielded factory.”

  “God, Jackson, your faith in technology is touching. Especially for a scientist. The program is not malfunctioning. The shield went down for a thirty-second manually controlled test sequence. Not only that, it went down last night as well, that time triggered by an outside system with the proprietary aircar signal. I wonder why they collapsed the shield entirely, instead of just opening a car passage?”

  “Nobody has the proprietary signal but you and me and the chief tech. Who, you told me, is in the Mexico complex this week.”

  “He is. Somebody must have dipped the data banks. God, that dipper must be good. Maybe we can hire him. He’s in there now.”

  “In there now?”

  “Two human bodies recorded on infrared,” Cazie said. She was smiling, presumably at the drama. In the face of her enjoyment, Jackson felt ashamed to say he wasn’t keen on confronting two possibly armed intruders. Who were probably crazy. What could anybody want inside a cone factory? Cones were cheap: TenTech shipped all over the northeast (or so Cazie had told him); no donkey would break in just for the hell of it. Except kids, of course. It must be hotshot kids, counting datadipping coup.

  He said, “What are they doing in there?”

  “Jackson, infrared scans aren’t detailed enough to show what people are doing. I thought doctors were supposed to be good at machines.”

  “I’m good at the machines I need to be good at. They don’t happen to include factory robotics.”

  “Well.” said Cazie sweetly, “maybe you should broaden your horizons.”

  Jackson folded his arms and resolved to say no more. Cazie could always make him feel like a fool. Well, this was her party. Let her run it.

>   She opened a passage through the shield for their aircar. His laser signal lit up the bioelectronic receiver high on the factory facade. The car landed on the ground in front of the main doors.

  “Locked,” Cazie said, with relish. “There’s an off-line security redundancy. Evidently our young dippers aren’t that good.”

  “Ummmmmm,” Jackson said, noncommittally.

  She reached inside her shirt, a nonconsumable synthetic, and drew out two pistols. Grinning, she handed one to Jackson, who took it with what he hoped was lofty indifference. He didn’t like guns. Did Cazie remember that? Of course she did. Her IQ was genemod. She seldom forgot anything.

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s reclaim the Alamo.”

  “You shoot anybody and I’ll bring charges against you myself. I swear it, Cazie.”

  “Good old Jackson. Champion of the underdog. Even when the underdog is overprivileged kids guilty of criminal trespass. Come on, let’s go.”

  She unlocked the doors and strode down the corridor. Jackson hurried to catch up with her, so it wouldn’t look as if he was cowering behind. At the factory floor he stopped. The whole place had gone crazy. Robots malfunctioning, debris all over the floor…how long had this been going on? Why hadn’t the chief tech picked it up?

  Cazie laughed. “Jesus Christ, look at it! Just look at it!”

  “It’s not—”

  “Funny? Of course it is. Wait…look over there.”

  A man raced toward them. Jackson’s grip tightened on his gun, until he saw the man wasn’t armed. Then he saw it wasn’t even a man, but a woman or boy dressed in a head-to-toe holosuit of a man dressed in a brown business suit. The figure spotted them and stopped running.

  Cazie raised her gun. “Come here. Slowly, and with your hands high in the air. Now.”

  The figure put his hands over his head and walked slowly forward.

  “Now turn off the holosuit,” Cazie said. “One hand only, moving slowly.”

  The button was at his waist. The holosuit vanished and Jackson saw not the college kid he’d expected but a woman in her thirties, genemod, dressed in a skimpy homespun eaten into fresh-looking holes. Tall, violet eyes, small nose…Jackson was good with faces.