Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  Where the hell was Vicki?

  Annie bustled out of the building, with Dirk in her arms. She saw Jackson, scowled ferociously, and then remembered she wasn’t supposed to know him. Immediately she looked disdainfully away, like a fastidious duchess ignoring a dead fish. Her gaze landed on another party of slumming donkey kids, sneering from the safe shadow of a flashy aircar. Two of the kids carried inhalers. The second reporter was interviewing them; fortunately, Jackson was too far away to hear the conversation.

  And then another car landed, and Cazie leaped out with the new TenTech chief engineer.

  Jackson turned his back. Purposefully he strode toward the building and ducked inside.

  What was she doing here? Since the meeting a few months ago about TenTech’s political connections, of which Jackson had understood about half, he’d had Caroline, his personal system, do some research. TenTech had a diversified portfolio, but much of it Caroline couldn’t trace through legal deebees, even with Jackson’s access codes. Jackson had never paid much attention to TenTech. His father had done that until he died, then his father’s attorney had managed most of it while Jackson was in medical school; when he’d married Cazie, she had gradually taken over, and Jackson had been glad to let her. Where was TenTech’s money, and why was so much of it seemingly connected to the state of Pennsylvania, when TenTech was incorporated in New York? Cazie seemed to have a lot of personal friends in various Pennsylvania corporations and government agencies. Jackson had finally, without telling Cazie, hired an independent accountant, who had yet to report back to him. Maybe Cazie had detected the accountant’s inquiries.

  Or maybe she came just to look for him.

  He cracked the door, peering from dimness into sunlight. Cazie stood talking with Billy Washington. Lizzie’s stepfather. At least it was Billy, the sanest person in the tribe. Cazie couldn’t follow Jackson into the camp building; Vicki had insisted that no outsiders, under any circumstances, be allowed inside. She’d installed a primitive scanning system; if anyone not carrying a sensitized chip tried to pass the door, an alarm sounded. It was a simple system to fool, but so far no one had bothered. Jackson fingered the chip in his pocket.

  Cazie’s dark curls gleamed in the spring sunshine. Her high white boots and severe black suit looked fresh and trim. Gesturing at Billy, she flung up on arm, and her full right breast lifted, trembled, fell.

  What was she doing here? What was he doing here? Through the cracked door, Jackson saw Shockey stroll in from the woods. The donkey beauty wasn’t with him. Sharon stormed toward Shockey across the withered grass, her face furious. Annie yelled at a reporter. Billy left Cazie, started toward Annie, and was waylaid by a sneering slummer who ventured away from his aircar long enough to thrust his inhaler under Billy’s nose. Billy reeled. Scott Morrison lunged at the donkey kid, tackling him. Both robocams zoomed in on the fight. The candidate jumped another donkey teenager, and Sharon screamed. Annie, still carrying Dirk, rushed to Billy, now smiling emptily. Dirk began to wail. Sharon went on screaming. Cazie threw back her head and laughed, an ugly sound that somehow carried over the other din. She mouthed something at the TenTech engineer, and Jackson read the words on her lips: “The American political process in action.”

  He closed the battered building door.

  All of them were fools. Jackson had been a little surprised to find that so many Livers stuck doggedly to voting for Shockey, even as they accepted bribes from the other side. Shockey would clearly win the election. But in the long run, he was afraid, it would make no difference whatsoever. Shockey would win not because Livers were in the power ascendancy, but because the donkeys had taken this campaign only half seriously. They’d used the carrot but not the stick, spreading around their baubles and assuming the problem was solved. When, on election day, they learned it wasn’t, they would retire the carrots. Liver camps were unprotected, untechnological, unarmed. The next Liver candidate for any public office would lose. Jackson was assisting at an historical fluke, an unrepeatable improbability for which he was risking all status with his own people. Which made him the biggest fool of all.

  Somewhere in the building, someone was weeping.

  He made his way through the gloom, past the decrepit communal furniture, through the maze of makeshift walls of boards, upended sofas, broken shelving, strung homespun curtains. The sobbing grew louder. He passed the tribe’s weaving ’bot, patiently turning out yards of ugly dun cloth from whatever raw organic materials were dumped into the hopper. The ’bot hummed softly. Behind them, in the farthest of the ramshackle cubicles against a windowless wall, Jackson found them.

  A boy, facing away from Jackson, bent over almost double. The boy’s back was thin and, through the holes in the clothing, deeply freckled. Vicki stood beside the boy, one arm around his skinny shoulders, almost holding him up. When the two turned, Jackson saw that the boy huddled over a baby in his arms.

  Vicki said somberly, “I was just coming to look for you.”

  Jackson reached for the baby. He saw immediately that it was dying, probably of some mutated microorganism that had already destroyed the immune system. The infant’s mouth was patchy with candidiasis. Its skin was mottled with subcutaneous hematomas. The wasted little cheeks stretched tightly over the small skull. Jackson heard the baby’s lungs labor to keep breathing. On its neck stuck two patches, blue and yellow: broad-spectrum antibiotics and antivirals. Vicki always carried them. They wouldn’t help; it was far too late.

  The boy gasped, “You the doctor? This is my daughter, her. Can you give her a Change syringe? We didn’t have none in my tribe…no place else neither…I heard, me, about this place…”

  “No,” Jackson said, “I don’t have any more syringes.” Vicki stared at him, stunned. Clearly she had expected a different answer, not of course knowing that Theresa had cleaned out Jackson’s meager supply.

  The boy said, “You don’t have no syringes, you? Really?”

  “Really,” Jackson said.

  “But ain’t you a doctor…a donkey doctor?”

  Jackson didn’t answer. No one else spoke. The silence stretched on, painful. Finally Jackson nodded, miserably, and then shook his head. He couldn’t meet the young father’s eyes.

  The boy didn’t argue, or explode, or even start sobbing again. In the slump of his thin shoulders Jackson saw resignation: the boy hadn’t actually expected real help. He’d never had it. He’d come here because he hadn’t known what else to do.

  Vicki said tightly, “Will you do what you can, Jackson?”

  She had already fetched his bag from its pocket in the tribal junk. Jackson went through futile motions. When he’d finished, the boy said, “Thank you, Doctor,” and Jackson’s humiliation was complete.

  “Come with me,” Vicki said, and he followed her, basely glad to go, not caring where. Livers had come in from outside and sat talking animatedly in the communal chairs. Vicki led him around the maze of cubicles, through a curtain stretched between a wall and a long upended table.

  “No one will come here, Jackson.”

  “Where’s that baby’s mother?”

  Vicki shrugged. “You know how it is. They get pregnant so easily, nothing can go wrong in their bodies, everyone raises the kids tribally. Anyone who doesn’t want to be bothered with an infant doesn’t have to be.”

  “Then it’s wrong. This new social organization the Change has created—it’s all wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “You know? I thought you were the biggest advocate of what Miranda Sharifi gave the world!”

  “I’m the biggest advocate of adjusting to it. So far, we haven’t done that.”

  He hadn’t ever seen her like this: somber, straightforward, unprotected by amused detachment. He didn’t like it. She was unsettling, like this. To escape her eyes, he looked around the cubicle, and realized it must be hers. The cubicle held nothing different from any other tribe member’s: pallet on the floor, scarred bureau cluttered with handmade jewelry
, clothes hanging on pegs. Nothing as expensive or incongruous as the Jansen-Sagura terminal and crystal library in Lizzie’s cubicle. Yet the small space looked donkey, not Liver. In the colors, muted and harmonious. In the arrangement of furniture. In the single spray of willow, placed in a black clay bowl with an almost Oriental spareness and grace.

  She said, “Did you realize you were crying, holding that baby?”

  He hadn’t. He swiped at his wet cheeks, disliking her for having noticed, at the same time that he was grateful for her not exposing his tears to the Livers laughing in the middle of the building.

  He said, because he had to say something, “They suffer. Not here, in this tribe, but other places without as many resources they live so—”

  “The poor have always lived in a different country from the rich. In every age, and no matter how physically close their houses were.”

  “Please don’t lecture me on—”

  “Look at this, Jackson.” She opened her top bureau drawer, pulled out a holo recorder, and said to it, “Play recording three.” When she handed it to Jackson, he took it.

  The miniature screen replayed a newscast. From a donkey channel, the tone hovered somewhere between bemusement and contempt. The program, no more than two minutes long, interviewed one of a group of doctors in Texas, who had set up a Y-shielded clinic just outside the Austin Enclave to treat unChanged Liver children. “It’s necessary,” said a tired-looking young physician who needed a haircut. “They’re in pain. What Miranda Sharifi is letting happen here is criminal.” The recorder stage went dark.

  Vicki snorted. “‘What Miranda is letting happen.’ We still don’t take responsibility.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” he snapped. “Sometimes you use ‘we’ for Livers, sometimes for donkeys.”

  “So what? Jackson, there are more and more unChanged kids. They need doctors.”

  He saw again the weary face of the physician in the holo, the security shield around the clinic, the Livers who had attacked his apartment building while Theresa was there. Despite his fondness for the irrepressible Lizzie, he didn’t want to practice among Livers. It wasn’t what he had trained for.

  “Compassion is a lot easier to feel than act on, isn’t it?” Vicki said. “But not nearly as satisfying in the long run. Believe me, I know.”

  He said dryly, “I haven’t yet seen you when you thought you didn’t.”

  Vicki laughed. “You’re right.” She leaned over and kissed him.

  It caught Jackson by surprise. What was she doing? Surely she wasn’t kissing him just because he’d been crying over a Liver kid…was she? She didn’t seem the—but then all thought left him. Her lips were soft, thinner than Cazie’s, her body taller and less rounded. Her mouth clung briefly, pulled away, returned. Jackson pulled her to him and a shock went through his torso, sweeping downward from his mouth through his chest to end with a sharp pleasurable jolt in his penis. He tightened his arms around her.

  Vicki pulled away. “Give a clinic some thought,” she said. “Between your other worries, of course. Here she comes.”

  Jackson became aware that an alarm was sounding, had been sounding just beyond the edge of his attention. Over it he heard Cazie yelling, “Jackson! I know you’re in here someplace! Jack, damn it, I want to talk to you!”

  Vicki smiled. Very deliberately she drew back her curtain and called, “Over here, Cazie. We’re over here.”

  Cazie strode through the ridiculous maze of shabby furniture. She took in the scene all at once: Jackson beside Vicki’s bed, Vicki standing with one hand gracefully holding back the curtain, Jackson’s face flustered and Vicki’s sly. Cazie stood very still.

  “We’re finished here,” Vicki cooed. “See you later, Jackson.” She winked at him.

  He was afraid to meet Cazie’s eyes.

  April 1, election day, was wet. When Jackson woke in a stuffy cubicle in the tribe building in Willoughby County, he heard the rain clattering on the roof.

  He had not planned to be here. But yesterday he’d hiked into a barrage of robocams and reporters, two of whom had tried to pin him against the building wall to identify him. They’d been close enough to see his genemod eyes. He’d shoved them off and escaped into the building, where Lizzie insisted that if he didn’t want to be recognized, he should stay all night. Vicki was gone to another tribe. Jackson was just as glad.

  He lay on the hard pallet of nonconsumable fabric, staring in the dim gloom at two walls made of foamcast, one of what appeared to be discarded sheet metal braced with broken chair rungs, and one of dun homespun curtain. Hanging on the sheet metal was a handworked sampler in lavender yam and crimson: WELCOME STRANGER. From this he deduced that he had been put in the tribe’s guest room.

  He stood up, stretched, pulled on his pants, and followed the general morning noise to the center of the cavernous building.

  “Morning!” Lizzie sang. Her black eyes sparkled. She wore outdoor clothes and hiking boots. Dirk lay in a turquoise plastic box on the floor, waving his fat fists and trying to capture his bare toes. “Today’s the day!”

  “Where’s Shockey?” Jackson asked. He badly wanted a cup of coffee, which he was not going to get.

  “At breakfast. So’s nearly everybody else who wants to be naked on the newsgrid. Are you hungry?”

  “No,” Jackson lied.

  “Good. This would be a good time to get you away, before the reporters really arrive. Most of them went home for the night, and the rest are at the feeding ground. Polls are open from nine to noon. I’m going to duck out the back way to meet Vicki at your car, and then we’re both going to check on the Wellsville tribe. Want to come?”

  “If you’re meeting at my car, I guess I’m walking with you that far. Did you eat, Lizzie?”

  “I can’t. I’m too excited. Oh, Mama, here’s Dirk—I nursed him already.”

  Annie emerged from her cubicle, frowned at Jackson, and picked up her grandson. The frown wasn’t serious. Annie was uneasy around donkeys, but she’d softened toward Jackson when she realized he disliked Vicki. Did he dislike Vicki? He hadn’t seen her in the last week, since he’d kissed her. He didn’t want to see her. Or Cazie. Or even Lizzie. He wanted to find his car, fly home, and have a cup of coffee.

  He knew he was lying to himself.

  “Morning, Annie,” he said. “Are you headed out for breakfast?”

  “Not with them cameras, me,” she sniffed. “Billy, he went to fetch us some good soil and bring it inside. We’ll eat, us, in decent privacy, thank you very much.”

  Lizzie hid a grin. She grabbed Jackson’s hand and led him to a small door, so far undetected by the robocams, cut by Billy in the back of the building and hidden behind weeds and bushes. The door was so low that Lizzie and Jackson had to crawl through on hands and knees. Foamcast didn’t cut easily.

  “Lizzie, where did Billy get a tunable lasersaw to cut this door with?”

  Lizzie grinned back over her shoulder. “I found a way to dip one. Just last month. But I’m not going to tell you how.”

  They escaped into the rain, which had lessened to a drizzle. Even so, Jackson was wet and cold by the time they reached the aircar, which was disguised under an opaqued Y-shield. Vicki sat on the shield, smearing mud across it with her jacks-covered rump.

  “Morning, Lizzie, Jackson!”

  “Vicki! How is everything at Max and Farla’s camp?”

  “Fine. Everybody up, dressed in their best clothes and finest jewelry, gathered around the terminal and ready for political immortality.” She smiled at Jackson, who smiled thinly back.

  “Fifteen minutes till the poll opens,” Lizzie said. “I guess I’m going to vote at Wellsville.”

  Vicki said, “Let’s do it here.”

  “Here? How?”

  “I’m sure Jackson has a comlink in the car capable of official channels. Don’t you, Jackson? We can sit right here in a donkey vehicle and elect the first Liver politician in decades.”

  Lizzie laugh
ed. “Let’s do it!”

  Vicki said, “Jackson?”

  He looked at all three of their mud-stained, rain-soaked clothing, and decided he must be nuts. “Sure, why not?”

  “Oh, I’m so excited!” Lizzie burbled.

  He unlocked the car and they crowded in. Jackson activated the comlink, asked for the official government channel, and accessed the polling program. At nine o’clock he looked at Lizzie.

  She leaned solemnly forward. “Lizzie Francy, Citizen ID CLM-03-9645-957, to vote in the special election for district supervisor of Willoughby County, Pennsylvania.”

  “Citizen number verified. Please place your left eye against the icon for retina scan.” She did. “Verified. The registered candidates for district supervisor of Willoughby County are Susannah Wells Livingston, Donald Thomas Serrano, and Shockey Toor. For which candidate do you vote?”

  Lizzie said clearly, “For Shockey Toor.”

  “One vote for Shockey Toor. Officially recorded.”

  “I did it!” Lizzie breathed. “Vicki, you next.”

  Vicki voted. Jackson, not registered in Willoughby County, felt his chest tighten. Lizzie would have her win, but it was the only one the Livers would get. She had no idea the forces that the established power structure could bring to bear once they took a threat seriously. He looked out at the dreary rain-soaked woods. A bedraggled chipmunk darted by.

  “Quick!” Lizzie said. “Get a running total!”

  “Lizzie, it’s only 9:03!”