Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  Margaret Ruth Streibel,

  President, AMA

  Ryan Arthur Anderson,

  Vice President, AMA

  Theodore George Milgate,

  Secretary, AMA

  …and the 114,822 members of the American Medical Association

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

  Thirteen

  The drone came in low over the trees, no faster than a bird and with no greater mass. The tiny camcorder on its front showed the enclave below, leisurely growing larger. Jennifer Sharifi, alone in her office on Sanctuary, leaned toward the screen.

  She had opaqued the office wall facing deep space. For this moment, she wanted no competition from the stars. Just as she wanted no company, not even her husband Will. Especially not Will. The rest of the project team was watching the test from the Sharifi Labs. It seemed to Jennifer that she had earned this personal indulgence.

  The California enclave came in closer and closer. Sixteen Liver camps so far, but those had been only trials. This was the first donkey enclave to be penetrated with Strukov’s virus, and the first to test the correspondingly more sophisticated delivery drone created by Jennifer’s Peruvian contractor. To infect Livers, all one needed to do was puncture a plastic tent. Y-shielded enclaves were a much different matter. The California enclave was a comparatively easy first step.

  “Fifty-eight minutes,” said an uninflected voice from a different terminal wedged into a corner across the room. Jennifer didn’t turn around.

  The north California enclave was small, originally a vacation colony clinging to the Pacific coast. Four hundred seventy donkeys lived under a Y-shield that extended a quarter mile over the ocean and well into the ground beneath it. Under the invisible dome were lush genemod gardens, a dazzling and artificial beach, nanobuilt houses of fantastic dimensions and luxuries, and only minor weaponry. During the Change Wars, security had been augmented, but not defense. Why would there ever be any heavy-duty attack on a small vacation enclave of mostly retired people? Thieves couldn’t penetrate the Y-shield. Nothing else was necessary.

  But the enclave liked birds. Gulls, condors, woodpeckers, swallows, more exotic engineered seabirds. And there was no reason to fear birds—Livers didn’t have the technology for biological warfare, and weren’t capable of stealing it, or of understanding it if they did. Everybody knew that. Sixty feet above ground the shield admitted birds.

  The drone flew slowly through the shield, as slowly as a bird. None of the inhabitants noticed it. Slowly the drone descended, its zoom camera displaying increasingly more detail. The last picture transmitted came from forty feet above a fashionably purple garden: violet-watered swimming pool, masses of violet flowers, even the stems and leaves subtly blending shades of lavender, mauve, lilac, orchid, heliotrope. A genemod plum-colored rabbit turned its violet eyes upward to the sky. The lens showed the dark soft pupils of its eyes, like ink on tinted satin.

  The drone exploded soundlessly. A fine mist blanketed a much larger area than would have seemed possible. At the same moment, all remnants of the probe itself dissolved into its component atoms. Artificial breezes inside the enclave, joined by natural ones from the ocean, spread the mist farther. The enclave was always seventy-two degrees; windows in the luxurious homes were open to the flower-scented air. On a screen to Jennifer’s right, a chime sounded.

  “Ms. Sharifi, you have a call from Dr. Strukov.”

  Jennifer turned toward the screen. Before she could say she would accept the call, Strukov’s holo was there, wordlessly proving the superiority of his overrides. Jennifer let no reaction show on her face.

  “Good morning, Ms. Sharifi. Of course you watched the transmission?”

  “Yes.”

  “Without flaw, isn’t it? I trust the payment has wired itself to Singapore.”

  “It has.”

  “Good, good. And the schedule of delivery remains unaltered?”

  “Yes.” More test enclaves, better shielded, working up to military and government targets. Those, of course, would be the hardest to penetrate, and the most crucial. If Strukov could infect the federal enclaves of Brookhaven, Cold Harbor, Bethesda, New York, and the Washington Mall, and the military bases in California, Colorado, Texas, and Florida, he could infect anything.

  The door to her office opened, closed. Against her express wishes. Will said to Strukov’s image, “Very good, so far. But of course there’s no proof yet that this version of your virus will work.”

  She never could teach Will the tactical advantage to not revealing rivalry.

  Strukov said, “But yes, it will work.” His smile showed perfect teeth. “Or perhaps you doubt the mechanisms of the delivery. Of course, that responsibility belongs not to me, but to your Peruvian engineers. Perhaps you should discuss your concerns about that technology with your so brilliant granddaughter, Miranda Sharifi?”

  Jennifer said, “That’s all, Dr. Strukov.”

  “À bientôt, madame.”

  “I don’t trust him,” Will said after the comlink broke.

  “There is no reason not to,” Jennifer said calmly. She was going to have to think again about Will Sandaleros as partner and husband. If he could not contain his dislike and jealousy…

  “He still won’t release a virus sample to Sharifi Labs for analysis. And our geneticists can’t come up with a congruent speculative model. The biochemistry is so damn indirect…”

  “We asked for indirect effects,” Jennifer said. She spoke to her screen. “Newsgrid mode. Channel 164.” It was the most reliable of the donkey stations, broadcasting from New York.

  “I just don’t trust him,” Will repeated.

  “Fifty minutes,” said the terminal in the corner.

  “—outbreak of fighting among Livers in Iowa,” said the newsgrid. “Security officers have assured all channels that there is no danger to the Peoria Enclave, or to the shielded agri-areas of southern Illinois. Robocam monitoring of the fighting shows several Liver camps to be involved, possibly banded together. The cause, as elsewhere in the country, seems to be the shortage of Change syringes among those unfortunate Liver camps that—”

  Jennifer concentrated on the images, transmitted unedited except for rapid-rotation selection among a number of cams. A daylight attack—yesterday?—by thirty or forty Livers on one of their squalid little “camps.” The resident Livers sat naked under the clear tarp from which they constructed their feeding grounds. Why hadn’t they gone south for the winter, like so many others? It didn’t matter. The second group of Livers, dressed in old government-issued synthetic clothing and a bizarre assortment of homespun consumables, rushed into sight and opened fire. People screamed, blood spurted in red jets against the low tarp. A baby shrieked before it was shot.

  Jennifer froze the image and studied it. The attackers were armed with AL-72s, a military assault weapon. That meant either they had donkey allies or they’d been able to datadip a federal or state armory somewhere, probably the latter. Their dippers were getting bolder. And as they acquired more knowledge and more weapons, they became more potentially dangerous to not only donkeys but to Sanctuary’s financial holdings in the United States, and conceivably, to Sanctuary itself.

  “—another group of Doctors for Human Aid have already left for the tri-county area from—”

  “Forty minutes,” said the terminal in the corner.

  Jennifer changed newsgrid channels with metronomic regularity, two minutes for each. Of course, flag programs compiled hourly summaries for her. But it was important to keep personally informed as well, for those nuances of tone that the compilations could not pick up.

  A Liver raid on the Miami Enclave; thirty Change syringes stolen, fifty-two people dead. More pictures of unChanged babies in Texas, dying of some unnamed virus or toxin. President Garrison, declaring a state of emergency, which the all-but-self-governing enclaves would ignore. More broadcasts to Selene, pleading with Miranda for additional Change syringes. Another bizarre religious cult in
Virginia, this one notable for being made up of donkeys rather than Livers. They believed that Jesus Christ was preparing the Earth for the return of angels from the Orion Nebula.

  Jennifer watched composedly, not allowing her emotions to show. What was Miranda doing? Miranda had given the Change to the enemy…why was she now withdrawing it?

  Inconsistent people were dangerous. You could not anticipate how to block their actions.

  “Thirty minutes,” said the terminal in the corner.

  “Jennifer, it’s time for the second penetration,” Will said. His voice was high and tight. Jennifer turned off the newsgrid.

  This time the target was a less rich enclave, outside the main dome of St. Paul, Minnesota. The enclave housed mostly techs, who kept the machines of the city running and programmed. Techs, skilled and genemod, were part of the donkey economy, although never decision-makers. The drone camera showed rows of small neat houses under an energy dome, genemod lawns and flowers, a playground and a church and community center. The Y-shield did not admit birds. Techs were not much interested in birds.

  Nonetheless, the second drone flew through the shield as easily as the first had flown into the opulent retirement enclave by the Pacific. Soundlessly the drone dissolved, and soundlessly the viral mist floated down over houses and playground.

  Techs worked for a living. They couldn’t be rendered as fearful as Livers or they would refuse to leave their small enclave and would not report to work. But Strukov, learning from the sixteen Liver beta-tests, had refined his product. This version was subtler.

  But just as difficult to pin down with biochemical analysis. Not even Sharifi Labs had succeeded. The virus initiated the manufacture and release of a biogenic amine natural to the brain, which in turn caused the manufacture and release of another, which affected multiple receptor sites and caused further electrochemical reactions…it was a long and twisted skein of cerebral events. The end result would be that the techs, without realizing it directly, would simply come to prefer the familiar. Routines they already knew, faces they saw every day, tasks they were used to. The old friend, the known line of thought, the conventional attitude, the incumbent politician. It would just feel too unsettling to initiate, or learn, or change.

  And then Jennifer Sharifi and the rest of her people would be safe. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t know.

  Safe. Was that actually possible? There had been times, in Allendale Federal Prison, when she’d despaired of ever feeling safe again, or of ever making her people safe. Her previous efforts to safeguard Sleepless had been both crude and naive. Sanctuary, removed from Earth but vulnerable, as all orbitals were vulnerable. Financial power, necessary but not sufficient for protection. Finally, secession from a corrupt government, through terrorism that had only called such blatant attention to itself that it had been bound to fail.

  This time would be different. No threats of biological warfare. No demands for freedom. No worldwide broadcasts to try to make the enemy see what they were incapable of seeing. No. This time, stealth and stasis. Freeze the world into biological inhibition, but so subtly that they would never even recognize it. Will was right—they’d never know what hit them.

  Except for twenty-seven people.

  Those twenty-seven, if they so chose, probably could stop her. As they had once before. That they hadn’t interfered yet perhaps meant that their own complex and devious goals dovetailed with hers to a certain point…could that be true? What was Miranda doing?

  Whatever it was, Jennifer would not let it wreck her own plans. Could not let it.

  That was the most painful part: Jennifer’s lack of real choice. Miranda was her granddaughter; Nikos and Christina the grandchildren of her oldest friend; Toshio Ohmura her great-nephew by marriage. She could not, without pain, simply turn her back on them. That was what Sleepers did: destroyed kinship ties, destroyed community itself, with no sense of loss. That deadened self was what Jennifer fought against.

  Still—there was no choice. Not if she was going to make her people safe.

  She felt Will’s hands on her shoulders. “Jenny—it’s time,” he said, and she thought he’d spoken the words earlier, but suddenly she couldn’t remember. She hadn’t heard the terminal in the corner. For a moment the room blurred. She closed her eyes.

  “Thirty seconds,” said the terminal in the corner. Jennifer forced herself to open her eyes. Her screen had brightened. No drone-mounted camera, this time. The hidden monitor was a mile away, showing only empty desolate landscape, and, on zoom, the faint shimmer of a Y-shield. No, not a Y-shield but something else entirely, designed by genius, unduplicated by anyone else anywhere. Something no drone could penetrate, ever.

  “Twenty seconds.”

  Will’s hands tightened on her shoulders. She thought of shrugging the hands off, but somehow she couldn’t move. She couldn’t think. Her mind, that precision tool, felt clogged with confusion, vaporizing out of the new data Caroline Renleigh had brought her about Selene. Selene, where the traitor Miranda Sharifi hid from the world.

  Her granddaughter Miranda. Richard’s daughter. Richard, her son, who had chosen to side with Miranda’s treachery against his own mother. Richard, who was there with Miranda now.

  “Ten seconds.”

  She couldn’t remember Richard as a baby. She had been so young, and so involved in creating Sanctuary, and she had not yet trained herself to the discipline of remembering everything. It was Miranda’s babyhood that she recalled. Miranda, with her dark eyes and unruly black hair, laughing at the stars as Jennifer held her to the window in this very room. Miranda.

  Miri—

  “No!” Jennifer cried, and her cry blotted out the calm voice of the terminal in the corner.

  “It’s over, Jenny,” Will said softly. “It’s over.” But Jennifer was crying, sobbing so hard she barely heard the system add, “New Mexico operation complete.” Later, she would resent that she had sobbed, and resent Will for seeing it. It was a disgrace to her own discipline, but now she cried like a two-year-old because it shouldn’t have to be this way, the choices shouldn’t have to be so hard. The terrible choices of war.

  Miri—

  Will held her as if she were a frightened child, and even through her sobbing and resentment and her inexcusable weakness she knew that as long as he, with his despised kindness, still did this for her, she was going to keep Will Sandaleros around.

  Fourteen

  Light on her face woke Theresa, and she cried out.

  A moment later, she remembered where she was. Slumped on the window seat at the end of the upper-floor hallway—since last night? All night? She’d only meant to sit down a minute, look out at the park, escape her study for a little while.

  Painfully she uncramped her body from the narrow seat. Her back ached, her neck felt stiff, her mouth tasted horrible. How long since she’d slept, before last night? How long since she’d eaten? She had lost track. Jackson hadn’t been home for days. Theresa had been alone, locked in her study, watching the news grids and printing pictures for her wall. Pictures of dying unChanged babies, of adults fighting each other savagely for nonexistent Change syringes, of raids for Y-cones, for furniture, for terminals, on dipped enclaves in Oregon, in New Jersey, in Wisconsin…Theresa had watched it all.

  I am come to bear witness to the destruction of worlds. Thomas had found her the quote. Theresa had stared at it until her eyes blurred. Then she had stared at the newsgrids some more. Then she had stared at the message on her system, the message that should not have been there:

  I saw the pictures of the Liver babies. You have to find Miranda Sharifi and make her give us some more Change syringes. You’re a donkey, you have all this money, you can get to Miranda, in ways we can’t—

  The message had been spoken, of course, but Theresa had asked Thomas to write it out. Then Theresa had stared at it, sleepless, for however many days it had been since Jackson was home. At first she’d tried to pretend that the message was
a mistake, a fluke, one of the thousands of messages people all over the country were composing to beam up to Selene, and that it had leaked onto Theresa’s personal system through some weird Net error. But even while she told herself that, Theresa knew she wasn’t crazy enough to believe it.

  Too bad.

  The message was from that girl that Jackson had brought home, the Liver girl with the baby made fearful by neuropharms, and the message was intended for Theresa. Jackson always wanted her to face facts; those were the facts. The message was for her.

  Of course, that didn’t mean she had to do anything about it.

  She had been staring at the message, away from it, at the newsholos of the dying babies, away from them, at the walls of her study, away, for two days. Or three. Until last night she’d suddenly thought that if she didn’t get out of that room, she would go crazy. Crazier. And she’d stumbled to the window seat, and looked down at the night-lighted park and up through the enclave dome at the stars, and she’d started to sob until she couldn’t stop. For no reason, no reason at all…

  Take a neuropharm, Jackson said in her mind. Tessie, it’s biochemical, you don’t have to feel this way…

  “Fuck off,” Tessie said aloud, for the first time in her life, and started to cry again.

  No. Enough of that. She had to pull herself together, take a bath, eat something…She had to return to her study. Babies were dying, little children being scarred and disfigured by horrible diseases, mothers like that girl Lizzie holding babies writhing in pain…Why couldn’t she forget about it? Other people did! Just push it out of her mind, stay out of her stupid study…

  Take a neuropharm, Tessie.

  “Ms. Aranow,” Jones said, “you have a priority-one call.”

  “Tell them I’m dead.”

  “Ms. Aranow?”

  It could only be Jackson. She mustn’t worry him. She mustn’t…shouldn’t…couldn’t…