Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  Annie said, “You watch your language, you. Here, come to Grandma, Dirk, this is our block time, isn’t it? Come to Grandma.”

  The baby stopped crying. Happily he began to pile blocks on top of each other. Annie smiled at him from her chair.

  Despair took Lizzie.

  “Where are you going now, child?” Annie said. “Sit down, you, and talk with me.”

  “I’m going back outside.”

  Alarm filled Annie’s dark eyes. “No, stay here, you. Lizzie, sit here with Dirk and me…”

  Lizzie bolted out the door.

  The sun had come out from behind gray clouds. She began walking aimlessly, anywhere to get away from the placid, safe routine behind her. Which would go on day after day after day, until everybody died.

  Striding the path up the mountain, she kicked at twigs fallen in the winter winds. Would the path just become more and more unused, if it wasn’t part of anyone’s routine to walk on it? Would the neuropharm spread? Maybe she, Lizzie, would get infected if it came back a second time. And she wouldn’t even mind, that was the worst of it. She’d be like Annie, grateful for safety and peace.

  Lizzie stopped and punched a birch sapling. No. She was eighteen years old, and she couldn’t just give up. She never had, not in her whole life. There had to be something she could do about this. There had to be.

  But what?

  She couldn’t look for some antidote to the neuropharm; Jackson and Vicki and Thurmond Rogers were already doing that. She couldn’t start another election; the way everybody was now, there was even less chance than before that she could get people to vote a Liver into power. This had all worked out pretty well for the donkey candidate!

  Was that why it had happened? Had Donald Thomas Serrano arranged for the safety-first neuropharm so that a donkey would win the election? But Jackson had said this was a completely new kind of neuropharm, one that the Cell Cleaner didn’t eliminate because it must get the body to permanently change the proteins the body itself made. No one would waste a new neuropharm like that on a dinky election for Willoughby County district supervisor.

  Unless they were just testing it? Unless who was just testing it?

  This was getting her nowhere! She was just too stupid to figure anything out. Who did she think she was, Miranda Sharifi?

  She was Lizzie Francy, that’s who. The best datadipper in the country. Maybe in the whole goddamn world!

  All right, she jeered at herself, if she was such a hotshot dipper, why wasn’t she dipping? Why was she standing here in the April woods punching baby trees when she should be doing the one goddamn thing she knew how to do? She should, first, protect herself against getting the neuropharm, by finding a place to live apart from the tribe. There were all kinds of abandoned cabins up here in the mountains. Other tribes wouldn’t be back from the south until the weather warmed up in a few months. She would be safe enough. She could take a spare Y-cone and her terminal, and spend eighteen hours a day searching the Net for answers.

  Without Dirk?

  Lizzie’s stride faltered. She couldn’t take him. If she did, he’d spend his whole time wailing in fear of the new surroundings. And she’d spend her whole time caring for him. Nobody had told her, when she’d so blithely gotten pregnant, how much sheer time a baby took. Especially one that was crawling and putting everything in his mouth. She couldn’t take Dirk. She’d have to leave him with Annie and the tribe, where he belonged until she could somehow find out what she needed to do to help cure him.

  And she would find out. Because she was Lizzie Francy. They—whoever they were!—were not going to defeat her!

  At a headlong run Lizzie started back to the camp.

  She found a foamcast cabin about two miles from the camp. It looked like it had once belonged to a family of Livers, the kind of stubborn people who before the Change Wars had lived alone on the side of a mountain rather than in a government-supported town. When they’d left, they’d taken or burned for heat everything in the cabin. There was no furniture, no plumbing. Lizzie didn’t need them. The door still closed snugly and the plastic windows were intact. There was a stream in the woods.

  She cleared out the wildlife living in corners: a raccoon, a snake, newly hatching spiders. She moved in a Y-cone, her bedding, and a plastic water jug. Then she sat cross-legged on her bedding, back against the plain foamcast wall, and talked to her terminal.

  She started, because she had to start somewhere, with Donald Serrano. The new Willoughby County district supervisor was running his office the same way as had the dead Harold Winthrop Wayland. Nothing in Lizzie’s careful tracings of Serrano’s financial holdings or personal records led, even indirectly, to a drug company. If that link existed, Serrano had hidden it better than Lizzie could dip. She didn’t think the link existed.

  Next she tried the major biotech companies. This was much trickier. She didn’t want any dipping traced back to her. It took weeks of slow, painstaking work to break all the security codes and get into the deebees. She used phantom searchers, which she constructed in other people’s systems chosen at random. The searchers in turn constructed elaborate programs of clones, worms, encryptions, and blind alleys. Lizzie secreted the files thus pirated in yet other randomly chosen systems, and accessed them only through phantoms. She was very, very careful.

  But once she had the information, another problem arose: she didn’t have the scientific background to know what she was looking at. It did help that she knew what she was looking for: any line of development for neuropharms that changed the brain’s permanent reactions in the direction of greater fear. A few companies were working on long-lasting pleasure drugs that could evade the Cell Cleaner; nobody, as far as Lizzie could tell, was succeeding.

  She paid special attention to Kelvin-Castner. Their data banks were full of esoteric reports on what was being done with Dirk’s and Shockey’s tissue samples. Every day, it seemed, more researchers joined the team. More equipment paid for, more interim reports filed, more lab notes she couldn’t read. The doctors were doing something at Kelvin-Castner, something big and growing bigger exponentially. TenTech was funding some of it. But whether it was just more pleasure-drug research or whether K-C was trying to find a counteragent to the fear neuropharm, Lizzie simply couldn’t tell. She didn’t have the science.

  Every day she trudged down the mountain to see Dirk for a few minutes. There was never any message for her from Dr. Aranow on the camp terminal, telling her what was going on.

  Why should he tell her? She was nobody.

  She turned next to dipping other Liver camps. This was both easier and harder. The temporary camps, always moving, usually had one or two young people who could exploit a terminal. Some dipped extensively and deeply; some merely scanned other camps’ postings. There were few patterns to look for. On the other hand, almost no Liver users knew how to cover their electronic tracks. The data was disorganized, massive, and ragged, but it wasn’t encrypted.

  She wrote programs to access and analyze dozens of different kinds of data, looking for…what? How could you use the Net to notice fear of new things? If people were afraid of new areas, they simply didn’t access them. How did you find an absence of subsets of people, across a whole continent?

  Slowly, her probability programs began yielding patterns.

  A Liver camp in someplace called Judith Falls, Iowa, dipped the accounts of nearby donkey warehouses at exactly the same time every day, for exactly the same duration. The repetitious pattern had not existed before April.

  A tribe roaming across Texas sent greetings to exactly the same list of distant relatives in exactly the same order, with essentially the same wording, on the same days every week. Starting April 3.

  A town, apparently pre-Change Wars and still occupied by the same people in northern Oregon, datadipped only on Thursday afternoons. Each Thursday, some dipper—whose technique wasn’t bad, Lizzie noted approvingly—broke into the same nearby biotech data banks. As near as Lizzie could fo
llow the dipper’s tracks, he or she was checking various inventories for Change syringes. There never were any.

  Sitting cross-legged on her pallet, Lizzie pulled at her hair. The cabin door stood wide open; spring had given way to an early, abrupt summer, even though it was only May. The scent of wild mint blew in on a warm breeze. Birds, nesting, sang in the leafing trees. Lizzie ignored it all.

  Suppose that these Liver camps had been infected with the neuropharm, just like Lizzie’s camp. Suppose that was why they showed repeated actions—safe, routine actions. Suppose further that they were test sites, too. What good did knowing this do her? Lizzie couldn’t travel to Iowa or Texas or Oregon to investigate these camps. And even if she could—so what? She might find that other Livers were lab rats, too. Like her Dirk. But knowing that wouldn’t help change anything.

  Her neck and back ached from sitting so long, and her left foot was asleep.

  She had to figure out something else to try. All right, forget the Livers who’d been infected and the drug companies that might have made the drug. Who else? Who wanted everything to stay exactly the same? Donkey politicians, yes. Shockey’s non-election had proved that. But how to find out which politicians could create such a political weapon? No monitor and flagging programs, no Leland-Warner decision algorithms, and no probability equations had yielded anything significant. So now what?

  Follow the money. Something Vicki always said. But she’d tried to do that, through the drug-company investments, and gotten nowhere. Or nowhere she could understand. So now what?

  Don’t start with the end product, the neuropharm, and follow it to the money. Start with the money, and follow it to the neuropharm.

  But that was impossible. Lizzie could dip the records of the world’s major banks—or most of them, anyway—but she often couldn’t follow the transactions she uncovered. She lacked the financial sophistication. And not once had she been able to change anything in any bank records. Well, she didn’t need to do that now. The problem was something else: the sheer volume of daily transfers of money around the Earth, Moon, Mars, and orbital accounts. How was she supposed to tell which ones had anything to do with a secret neuropharm developed who-knew-where by who-knew-who? It was impossible.

  She couldn’t follow the drug development. She couldn’t follow the money. All right, then—try again. If those camps in Iowa and Texas and Oregon were test sites for the neuropharm, the people who tested would want to know the results. They’d be observing, probably by robocam. Maybe by high-zoom, low-orbit satellite.

  Which meant they would also be observing her tribe.

  A shiver ran over Lizzie. Were stealth probes, disguised by Y-shields, observing her “hiding place” in the mountain cabin? Did they watch her go back and forth to see Dirk every day? Was someone amused at the idea that Lizzie thought she could escape infection that easily, if they decided they wanted her infected? Worse—was someone, despite all her care, following her electronic footsteps as she datadipped day and night?

  She got up, stamped her sleeping foot, and went to the door of the cabin. She looked, stupidly, up at the bright blue sky. Of course there was nothing to see. The fresh scent of mint made her remember that she hadn’t bathed of washed her hair in days. She smelled like something hit by a maglev train.

  She went back inside and sat on her dirty pallet, staring at her terminal.

  It didn’t have radar capability, especially not if the probes were actually in orbit, and actually stealth. Visual monitoring was beyond her. But she could detect a ground-source data stream within a mile or so radius. If there were implanted transmitters of any kind monitoring the camp, she could find them if she just moved her terminal to various points around the woods. Unless, of course, the theoretical hidden probes found her first and stopped sending.

  On the third night, she found it. A steady data stream, heavily encrypted, from a source in a thick pine tree forty yards away from the tribe building. It had a clear scan of the feeding ground. Lizzie wasn’t sure what the data were; she couldn’t dip the stream. That itself was scary.

  But even if she couldn’t break the coding—and she tried!—she could at least determine where the data stream went. It beamed itself upward, undoubtedly to a relay satellite in orbit. From there, its destination was theoretically so scrambled it was unknowable. But not to Lizzie. Relay data were old news to her.

  She worked at the problem an entire morning, while warm rain pattered on the roof and her heart ached to hold Dirk. Eventually, as she knew she would, she dipped the transmission data.

  She gasped and glanced wildly around, although of course there was nobody to see. Then, heart pounding as badly as Dirk’s whenever she took him away from his blocks, she shut down her entire system. She even closed and locked the Jansen-Sagura terminal. Sitting cross-legged, staring at nothing at all, she tried to think about implications, and meanings, and safeguards. And couldn’t.

  The observations about her tribe were indeed being transmitted to orbit. To Sanctuary.

  “I have to find Dr. Aranow,” Lizzie said to Billy Washington, because she had to tell somebody. She’d found Billy where he always was in the early afternoon, fishing in the creek.

  “No, you best stay here, you,” Billy said, but more mildly than Annie would have. Individual biochemical differences, Dr. Aranow had said. People reacted differently, sometimes very differently, to any drug.

  “I can’t stay here, Billy. I have to find Dr. Aranow and Vicki.”

  “Speak up, you. I can’t hardly hear you.”

  “No, I’m not going to speak louder, Billy.” The monitor was a quarter mile away, but Lizzie wasn’t taking chances. “How can I get to Manhattan East Enclave?”

  “Manhattan? You can’t, you. You know that.”

  “I don’t believe that. You know a lot more than you let on, Billy. You talked to strangers all the time, before we settled here for the winter.” She saw the alarm flickering in his eyes at the mention of strangers. “The gravrail doesn’t run, it, I checked, but there must be some way!”

  Something tugged on his line. Billy pulled it out of the creek, but the line was empty and the bait gone. He stuck another worm on his hook. “You got a baby now, Lizzie. You got no business, you, going off someplace dangerous when you got Dirk to take care of.”

  “How can I get to Manhattan East?”

  “You can’t, you.”

  Even before the neuropharm, Billy had been stubborn.

  When Lizzie said nothing, the old man finally said, “You got to talk to Dr. Aranow, you, then call him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Because anything that went out over her terminal would be overheard by Sanctuary. She couldn’t say that. Billy, the neuropharmed Billy, would have heart failure. “I just can’t, Billy. Don’t ask me questions.”

  Again he looked alarmed. Billy jerked up his line, even though there had been no tug, and looked at his worm. He put the line back in the water.

  “Billy, I know that you know. How can I get to Manhattan East?”

  “You got no business even—”

  “How?”

  Light sweat filmed Billy’s cheeks. Lizzie fought down her impatience. By now Annie would have been in full-blown panic. So would Shockey, that once-swaggering braggart. Individual chemical differences.

  Finally Billy said, “A man, he told me last fall, him, that the gravrail tracks east of the river go directly into Manhattan East. But you can’t get through the enclave shield, Lizzie. You know that, you!”

  “What river? Where?”

  “What river? We only got but one, us. The one this here creek flows into.”

  Only got but one. What didn’t exist in Billy’s world since the neuropharm just didn’t exist. And yet, once, he’d probably been the only one in camp to explore any larger geography.

  “How many days’ walk?” Lizzie said.

  Now he did start to panic. He put a trembling hand on her arm. “Lizzie, you
can’t go, you! It’s too dangerous, a young girl alone, and besides you got Dirk…”

  His breathing accelerated. Suddenly Lizzie remembered how Billy had been when Lizzie was a child, before the Change, when Billy’s heart had been clogged and weak. He’d gotten gasping and dizzy, just like this. Love flooded her, and compassion, and exasperation. “Okay, Billy, okay.”

  “Promise me, you…promise me you won’t…go alone!”

  “I promise,” Lizzie said. Well, she wouldn’t go alone. She’d take her terminal, plus the personal shield Vicki had left with her.

  “Okay,” Billy said. His breathing eased. He’d always trusted her word. In a few more minutes, he was absorbed again in his fishing.

  Lizzie watched him. His dark eyes, alert in their sunken face, watched the water. He’d taken off his hat so his nearly bald head, fringed with gray curls above his ears, could absorb the soft sunlight. The hat hung on a tree branch. Every day at this time he must make the decision to leave the hat on or take it off. Every day he must place the plastic bucket for fish in the same place on the grass. Every day he must dig the same number of worms, methodically baiting the hook in the same way until the worms were gone. Every day.

  What was Jennifer Sharifi doing?

  Lizzie didn’t know. She could datadip as well as anybody in the country, but Jennifer Sharifi was a Sleepless. Not a Super like Miranda, but still a Sleepless. And she had all the money in the world. She was changing the people Lizzie loved, tacking them down to one place and one routine, like they were so many programmed ’bots. Lizzie wasn’t going to be fool enough to think she knew why, or what to do about it. Jennifer Sharifi had once tried to force the United States to let Sanctuary secede, and had held five cities hostage to a terrorist virus that could kill everyone in those cities, and had gone to jail for longer than Lizzie’s whole life. Lizzie knew when she was out of her depth. She needed help.

  It was almost a relief to finally admit it. Almost.

  She left that night, skirting the hidden transmitter by walking in a wide circle down the mountain. She stayed away from the old broken roads—that was where Sanctuary would expect people to walk, wasn’t it, and so would logically set their monitors? Walking through the woods in the dark, keeping the creek in sight, wasn’t easy. Terminal in her backpack, she made slow progress. She couldn’t have done it at all if a full moon hadn’t shone brightly, aided by what looked like millions of stars. Struggling through the brush, Lizzie tried to stay under trees, in case Sanctuary was using high-resolution space imaging.