Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  “I know you! We met years ago someplace…at some party…Diana Something.”

  “Not anymore,” the woman said sourly. “Look, Jackson, this is all lovely and social, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a crisis on my hands just now.”

  Cazie laughed. Her dark eyes shone with malicious pleasure. “You certainly do. Criminal trespass. How’d you pull it off? You don’t look like a dipper.”

  “I’m not. But my friend is, and she’s lost someplace in here…she’s just a kid.”

  “Ah, a kid after all,” Cazie said. “Well, let’s find her.” She did something with her mobile and all activity in the factory ceased. Robots froze in midmotion. The noise cut off. In the silence, Cazie yelled, “Yoo hoo, Diana’s young friend! Come out, come out, wherever you are! Allee allee oxen free!”

  Diana smiled; Jackson had the impression it was in spite of herself. No one answered.

  Cazie said casually, “Is your friend armed?”

  “Only with hubris,” Diana said, and for half a minute Jackson wasn’t sure which of them had spoken. It was something Cazie might have said. Then Diana called, “Lizzie! Where are you? It’s all right, Lizzie, come on out. We’re not going to gain anything by postponing the inevitable. Lizzie?”

  No answer.

  “Lizzie!” Diana called again, and this time Jackson heard the note of fear. “This is Vicki! Come on out, honey!”

  Behind them, something clattered to the floor. Jackson turned. Eight feet up the wall, a hole had appeared, framing a scared brown face and crouching body. The girl had wiry black hair sticking out in all directions. She looked about fifteen. And she wasn’t the donkey college dipper he’d expected; she was a Liver.

  “Good God,” Cazie muttered.

  Diana/Vicki—what the hell was her name?—called, “Lizzie? How did you get up there?”

  “Programmed the forklift,” the girl said. Her voice was less scared than her face. Bravado? She glared at the three below her. “Send it back over.”

  Nobody moved. Jackson saw that none of them knew how to do that—even Cazie could only manipulate the commands she knew, not reprogram on the spot. How come this girl could? A Liver?

  Cazie put her mobile and gun in her pocket, walked over to the closest motionless forklift, and pushed it. Her face turned red; the machinery barely budged. Diana/Vicki and Jackson joined her. Together they hauled the cumbersome thing to under the hole in the wall. Nobody spoke. Through his annoyance Jackson suddenly felt weird—the three donkeys performing manual labor in the silent factory to rescue a criminal Liver. The whole situation was surreal.

  He suddenly thought of something Theresa had once said to him: I never feel anyplace is really normal.

  “Okay,” Diana/Vicki said when the forklift was against the wall, “come on down, Lizzie. And for God’s sake be careful.”

  The girl was facing outward. Carefully, she turned herself in the narrow cubbyhole. As her bottom came into view, Jackson saw that she was mostly naked. Of course Livers didn’t seem to care that their bodies consumed their clothes, at least not the Livers who’d grown up since the Change. When they didn’t wear pre-Change synthetic jacks, they went half-naked in their wandering “tribes.” Sometimes it seemed to Jackson that Miranda Sharifi had reversed evolution, turning a stationary industrial population back into hunter-gatherer nomads. Who neither hunted nor gathered—at least, not food.

  The girl in the wall stretched out her legs, feeling with her feet for the forklift behind her. She extended her body full-length, unrolling from the cubbyhole like a printout, and Jackson saw that she was heavily pregnant.

  “Careful,” Diana/Vicki repeated.

  As the girl’s toes touched the forklift, it began to roll away from the wall. No other machinery in the factory resumed operations.

  Cazie grabbed for the forklift and tried to shove it back against the wall. After a moment of shock the other two sprang forward to help. It was too late. The forklift rolled back to its pointless duties as if the humans weren’t there. The girl screamed and tumbled eight feet to the foamcast floor.

  She landed on her right arm. Jackson dropped beside her and restrained her from moving. His voice was level and calm. “Cazie, get my bag from the car. Now.”

  She went immediately. Jackson said, “Don’t move. I’m a doctor.”

  “My arm,” the girl said, and started to cry.

  Jackson checked her pupil reaction: both pupils round, the same size, equally reactive to light. He didn’t think she’d hit her head. The arm was a compound radial fracture, the bone sticking whitely through the skin.

  “It hurts, me…”

  “Just lie still, you’ll be fine,” Jackson said, more confidently than he felt. He put a hand on her abdomen. The fetus kicked back, and he breathed out in relief.

  Cazie returned with his bag. Jackson slapped a pain patch on the girl’s neck and almost instantly her face relaxed. The patch was a potent mixture of pain-nerve blockers, endorphins, and the highest legally allowable dose of pleasure-center stimulators. Lizzie began to grin idiotically.

  He palpated her arm and asked her to shift her shoulders through a range of motion. She could. Her other limbs were undamaged. He bioscanned her neck, spine, and internal organs: no damage. The portable trauma unit imaged the fracture, guided the two pieces into alignment, and sprayed instacast from elbow to wrist and between two fingers for anchor. Jackson rocked back on his heels.

  That was it. The cast, Cell Cleaner, and the girl’s own body would do the rest.

  “Lizzie…” Diana/Vicki said, reminding Jackson that she was there. Her voice broke. Jackson looked at her. He had no idea what the relationship between them was, but on the older woman’s face was naked fear and love. It gave him a little shock. Could the girl be her daughter…an ungenemod Liver? From before the Change? It didn’t seem likely.

  “Lizzie, are you all right?”

  “Of course she’s not all right, her arm’s broken,” Cazie said tartly, at the same moment that Jackson said with professional soothing, “Everything’s under control.” Diana/ Vicki swept them both a look of scorn.

  “Lizzie, honey?”

  Cazie said sarcastically, “‘Diana, honey’? You have some explaining to do here, both of you. Public records show you changed your name to ‘Victoria Turner.’ It doesn’t say what you’re doing trespassing in my factory.”

  Vicki, who’d been kneeling beside the dreamy girl, stood up and faced Cazie. Vicki was taller, older, wilder-looking in her eaten Liver tunic and cropped, sleep-matted hair. Her jaw hardened, and Jackson had the sudden impression that she had faced challenges that he couldn’t imagine. There was a nasty lift to her eyes as she squared off with Cazie.

  To Jackson, it looked like an even match.

  “What I’m doing ‘trespassing in your factory,’” Vicki said distinctly, “is seeing that an entire tribe doesn’t freeze this winter. Not that I would expect that to concern you.”

  “You have no idea what does or does not concern me,” Cazie said coolly. “What should concern you is felony charges. Breaking and entering, criminal trespass.”

  “Oh. I’m terrified. Look, Cazie Sanders, how long is your kind going to—”

  “‘My’ kind? Unlike you, I suppose?”

  “—going to go on blind to what’s happening all around you? The easy answers are over. No more trade goods, colored beads and energy cones, in return for the votes that keep your kind in power.”

  “Oh, my God, recycled Marxism,” Cazie said scornfully. “Seize the means of production, right? And you two are the advance army.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “That’s obvious. Who are you, anyway? Some renegade donkey gone native among the Livers to feed her own ego? A white goddess among the savages, hmmm? Pathetic.”

  Vicki looked at Cazie a long time. Her face changed. Then she said quietly, “Who am I? I’m the person who led the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency to arrest Miranda Sharifi. And the
n led the citizen legal fight to free her.”

  It was the first time Jackson had ever seen Cazie at a disadvantage. Her small vivid face registered shock, disbelief, reluctant acceptance. Something about Vicki Turner compelled belief—the way she stood with her feet braced wearily apart, as if she’d been resisting strong winds a long time. Or the way she stood guard over Lizzie, lying on the floor in a glowing stupor from Jackson’s painkillers. Or maybe just Vicki’s face, full of a complex regret. Not the expression Jackson would have expected.

  Vicki said quietly, “We still need Y-energy. It’s the only thing we do need from you. And we’ll try to take it, and you’ll try to stop us, and a lot more lives will be lost in the process. Just as in the Change Wars. Lives that might have gone on, with the Cell Cleaner, for a hundred years. You have the weapons, the enclaves, the sophisticated electronic security systems you’ve never let Livers learn. But they are learning, Cazie Sanders. I didn’t datadip your system—Lizzie did. There are a lot of young Lizzies out there, learning more every day. And we have the numbers on our side. There are ten of us for every one of you.”

  She had said it—every donkey’s nightmare. The fear that rested under the frantic parties and disdainful fashions and stupid time-wasting social competition: Don’t look behind you. They may be gaining on us. There are a lot more of them than us.

  “And you know the worst part?” Vicki said, still in that quiet deadly voice. “You can’t even see it. Not from stupidity, God knows. From willful blindness, for which you are going to deserve exactly the price you end up paying.”

  “Oh, God, spare me the melodramatic rhetoric,” Cazie said. She had recovered from the unexpectedness of Vicki’s attack. “The law is perfectly clear. And you’re in violation of it.”

  To Jackson’s surprise, Vicki smiled. “Law only works if the majority agree to let it. Don’t you know that? No, of course you don’t. You’re a simple binary code. On for your own interest, off for everybody else. You could be dipped by a child. And you were.”

  Cazie said angrily, “Ad hominem sophistry isn’t argument.”

  “You’re not a hominem. You’re not even a synonym. You’re redundant code in the human information, and you’re already obsolete.”

  The woman was playing. Standing there, laughing at his ex-wife, this ragged renegade was playing with Cazie, with the situation. How much self-assurance did it take to play like that? Or was it not self-assurance but self-righteousness? Suddenly Jackson wasn’t sure he could recognize the difference.

  Cazie said, “Defiant words. Not power.” She keyed her mobile, and a security ’bot came to life. It lifted itself off the littered factory floor and sped toward them. A faint shimmer marked the edges of the energy bubble it threw over Vicki.

  “You are intruding on TenTech private property,” the ’bot droned. “You are being held immobile until further instruction.”

  Vicki went on smiling. Jackson saw Cazie’s face darken.

  “You are intruding on TenTech private property. You are being held—”

  “Shut it off,” Jackson said, before he knew he was going to. Both women looked at him; it was clear that, absorbed in their battle, they’d forgotten he was there. Cazie smiled and keyed her mobile; the ’bot stopped reciting.

  “No,” Jackson said. “I meant—turn it off completely. We’re not arresting her.”

  “Oh, yes, we are,” Cazie said.

  Reaction welled up in Jackson, a gush of pure hormones he couldn’t label. Or didn’t want to. It poured out in a single sentence, which even as he said it, he knew didn’t mean what the words said: “You don’t run TenTech.”

  She said. “That’s exactly what I do. Who else? You? You never even look at the financial dailies, let alone the operational data. Leave this to me, Jack. Stick to your medical knowledge.”

  His obsolete medical knowledge, she meant. Baiting him again, but this time not affectionately, which meant she felt cornered. Cazie cornered. Suddenly he loved the idea.

  “I’m not leaving this to you, Cazie. I’m overruling you. Turn off the security bubble.”

  She keyed her mobile. The ’bot started to move toward the entrance. Vicki, encased in the shimmering hollow energy field as if in a translucent box, was carried along toward the factory doors.

  “Cazie. Turn the ’bot off.”

  “Bring that stuffed and trussed child, Jack. We’re leaving.”

  “Turn it off. I own TenTech, not you.”

  “We each own a third of TenTech,” she said evenly. The ’bot continued to move toward the door, encapsulating Vicki.

  Jackson said, “I’m voting Theresa’s third.” And just like that, just that easily, he reached out and took the mobile from Cazie’s hand before she knew he would. Or could.

  “Give me that back!”

  “No,” he said, and gazed at her steadily, and saw the storm coming. Despite himself, his own blood surged. God, she was beautiful…the most desirable woman he’d ever seen. She grabbed for the mobile in his right hand. He gripped her upper arm with his left hand and held her off easily. Why hadn’t he ever thought about how much stronger he was than Cazie? He should have gotten physically assertive with her years ago. His penis stiffened.

  “I. Said. Give. Me. That. Now.”

  “No,” Jackson said, smiling. Damn, he didn’t know the codes or he would turn it off himself. Well, he could figure it out. Or—strange thought—ask Lizzie. Cazie stood still, not struggling in his grip, her golden skin flushed with anger, the green-flecked eyes burning.

  He had never felt such power over her.

  Cazie bent her head toward his left hand, which was still clenched on her upper arm. Pain tore through him, surprising him into opening his fingers. Blood poured over them. She had bitten him. Below him, the girl on the floor said something.

  “That’s your trouble, Jackson,” Cazie said. “You’re never prepared for the counterattack.”

  Two long slashes slanted across the back of his hand. Clean slashes, not tooth-jagged, and deep. Cazie had retractable blades implanted between her teeth.

  Venous blood pooled dark red on the floor beside Lizzie, who again said something. Jackson couldn’t take it in. Was he going into shock? No, no light-headedness or nausea, and the wound wasn’t serious. Cazie must be able to control the retraction of her blades. His shock was all emotional; no one was behaving consistently.

  Including the girl on the floor. She looked up at him—dopey-eyed, in a smiling haze of neuropharms—from a sudden pool of water between her legs, and chuckled. “The baby’s coming.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Cazie said. “All right, you fly the girl back to her ‘tribe,’ and I’ll stay here with Ms. Champion-of-the-Downtrodden until the cops arrive. There must be somebody in the Liver camp who can do whatever it is they do for childbirth.”

  “That someone is me,” Vicki said, kneeling beside Lizzie, holding both her hands. Something in her tone moved Jackson. Or maybe he was moved by nothing more than his need to oppose Cazie on medical grounds, his only sure landscape.

  “Ms. Turner’s right, Cazie. She needs to stay with the girl.”

  “Charming maternal solicitude,” Cazie said. “So what do you want me to do, Jackson, arrest them both?”

  “Neither. Not until this is over.”

  “And you’re just going to deliver a baby here on the factory floor.”

  “Of course not. She’s not going to deliver for hours yet.” Jackson’s hands probed gently. And found that the baby was a breech.

  The Change, he reflected grimly, had not reversed certain key aspects of human evolution. The birth canal was still considerably narrower than an infant head, and the cervix still not designed for anything but headfirst delivery. And Lizzie, prima gravida, was only eight months along.

  Still, it could have been worse. Jackson’s fetal dermalyzer showed a frank breech presentation—buttocks first, hips flexed, knees extended, feet up near the shoulders—rather than the more dangerous footli
ng or complete breech. The head was flexed forward, ballottable in the fundal region. The fetus, a boy, weighed a viable 2800 grams, heart rate a steady 160, growth normal. The cord wasn’t prolapsed, and the placenta wasn’t previa; it would decently follow the birth, which, Jackson estimated, was still a few hours off. Although she was already five centimeters dilated. Halfway.

  It could have been much worse.

  “Lizzie,” Jackson said, “I’m going to lift you. We’re going to take you somewhere more comfortable.”

  “Which is where?” Cazie said. “You’re not taking her—them—to the enclave!”

  Lizzie said, without urgency, “I want to go home.” She didn’t look like a mother-to-be; she looked like a smiling, slumberous child. Jackson sighed.

  “All right. We’ll take you home. But, Lizzie, listen to me, I’m going to stay there with you. The baby is upside down—do you understand? I’m going to stay with you so I can rotate him at the proper times.”

  The girl looked up at him. In her drugged black eyes, Jackson was startled to see a flash of coherent relief. He had expected her to protest, however languorously, against having a donkey doctor attend her. Hadn’t she grown up with mechanical medunits, when politicians still supplied those? But maybe Lizzie was different from most Livers, because of this Vicki Turner. Or maybe Jackson didn’t know as much about Livers as he thought.

  Cazie said, “You’re just going to walk into a Liver camp with nothing but a pistol? Accompanying a criminal that I’m damn well going to have arrested?”

  Jackson stood, lifting Lizzie in his arms. She could walk, but pulling her upright would hasten delivery. He didn’t want to deliver a breech, even a frank breech, in an aircar. He faced Cazie. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. And you can come with me or not. Just as you choose.”

  Cazie hesitated. In that moment of her hesitation, Jackson felt a surge of hope. Was that actually respect in her eyes? For him? Whatever it was, it vanished.