Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  “The daily lab records—”

  “Have been carefully examined by you, right? Bullshit. You’ve hardly looked at them.”

  He was silent, trying to take it in.

  “I looked at them,” Vicki said, “for all the good it did me. I’m not trained; to me they’re just rows of charts, gibberish of equations, and models of incomprehensible substances. Jackson, you’re going to have to live on top of Kelvin-Castner if you care about a counteragent. You.”

  “Theresa—”

  “—is healing. Dirk and Billy and Shockey aren’t. After all”—she raised both hands, palm up, in a humble pleading gesture Jackson had never seen from her and hadn’t thought her capable of—“after all, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not a medical researcher!”

  “You are now,” Vicki said. And then suddenly, shockingly, she smiled. “Welcome to personal evolution.”

  There were weeks of reports. Each day the number of primary researchers grew, starting at seventeen and escalating to an incredible two hundred forty-one at ten different sites around the country. Everyone had sent copies of everything to Jackson: every recorded conference, every procedure, every speculation, every version of every electronic model. Variances in absorption rate, bioavailability, protein binding, receptor-subtype mechanisms, efferent nerve equations, Meldrum models, gangloid ionization, ribosome protein synthesis, Cell Cleaner interaction rates—no one person could possibly have processed it all. As he tried, Jackson began to suspect that was the point.

  He also began to suspect that some of what he’d been sent was bogus. But he didn’t have the time, the expertise, or the patience to determine exactly what.

  Sitting at the terminal in his study, scanning printouts, he realized that the only way to wade through all of this was by using programs written to search for specific patterns, specific lines of research. Or possible research. Or maybe a direction that research could go, perhaps. Such customized programs didn’t exist. And Jackson, no software expert, couldn’t write them. Let alone dip the records he suspected he wasn’t getting from Kelvin-Castner.

  “Send for Lizzie,” he told Vicki, wearily.

  “Lizzie? She doesn’t know anything about brain-chemistry research.”

  “Well, neither do I. Or at least, not enough. Call her and tell her I’ll send a car for her right away. She’s going to have to help me write specialized intent-software. If she can’t do that, she can at least dip K-C’s closed records. God knows she’s good enough at dipping. I don’t want to bring in an outside dipper who might resell the information. At least, not yet.”

  Vicki’s eyes gleamed. “All right. And, by way of information, Jones says that Cazie is on her way up to see you.”

  Jackson looked up from the toppling piles of printouts all over his antique Aubusson. Vicki’s face was carefully neutral. Once more he could feel her arms around him, warm and solid, beside the terrace railing.

  Maybe help from Lizzie wasn’t the only way through.

  He said quietly, “Cazie. She’s been here regularly, hasn’t she? To see Theresa.”

  “This time she wants to see you.”

  “How do you know?”

  Vicki smiled sourly. “I know.”

  And then Cazie was there, striding into his study as if she owned it, electric blue dress rustling and dark curls swirling, a vivid presence igniting the dim room to a dangerous glow that seemed capable of consuming the nonconsumable plastic printouts. Cazie scowled. “Jack! If I could see you alone…”

  Vicki murmured, “Only if you can see past yourself,” and left the room.

  Jackson stood, for the fragile advantage of height.

  “How are you. Jack?”

  “I’m fine.” He waited. This was going to be it, then. It really was. He wondered if Cazie realized.

  “And Tessie?”

  “She’s progressing right on schedule.”

  Cazie’s smile was genuine. “I’m so glad! Our Tessie…remember how we used to think of her as the child we hadn’t yet had? Unearned sentiment, but not totally false.” She moved a step closer to him. He could smell her perfume, like flowers in animal heat.

  Jackson said, “Kelvin-Castner isn’t developing the counteragent. And I can prove that you know it.”

  It was his only real shot—catch her by surprise, counting on the fact that she didn’t expect duplicity from him, or unsubstantiated accusations, or lies. She trusted him, even though she’d always let him know he couldn’t trust her. He was Jackson: solid, honest, dazzled by her. Easy to fool. Easy to control.

  He watched closely. She was good—just a slight widening of the huge gold-green eyes, an involuntary change in the shining pupils. It was enough. Jackson suddenly felt punched in the stomach.

  Cazie said evenly, “That’s not true, Jack. You’ve been sent the lab reports every day.”

  “They’re faked. All the effort in understanding the permanence factor is going toward its use as a basis for a pleasure drug.”

  “You haven’t had time for that kind of analysis. And even if you had, you’re wrong. Come over to K-C and see for yourself. Thurmond will show you—”

  “—actual experiments. Yes, I don’t doubt it. A few kept for show. Cazie…how could you? You know what this new neuropharm did to the Livers in Vicki’s camp. What it could do everywhere. No one able to adapt, to modify their daily routines. When the Change syringes are all gone and kids can’t count on the Cell Cleaner to zap every harmful organism they pick up, or on trophoblastic tubules to feed them, nobody will be able to innovate enough to relearn how! Within a generation—”

  “Oh, God, Jack, you’ll never change, will you? You just gaze at your tiny specialty, the sacred medical model, and never even glance at the larger picture. Look up—literally! The Livers don’t exist all by themselves, some little helpless endangered lizards alone on a barren desert! They have Miranda Sharifi as guardian angel. With a whole host of SuperSleepless seraphs and cherubs. Miranda will fly out of Selene when she’s goddamn good and ready, burn a few bushes and hand down a counteragent, and that’ll be that. K-C doesn’t have to do anything for Livers. And there’s no reason why we should.”

  “Well, there’s the little fact that you promised me.”

  Cazie looked at him. God, she was beautiful. The most desirable woman he’d ever known. Beautiful, smart, tender when she felt like it. His wife—once, anyway—with everything Jackson had once thought that word meant. Something under his ribs twisted sharply. It physically hurt to know that he’d never hold her in his arms again.

  “Jack—”

  “Tell Thurmond Rogers, my old university pal, that I’m moving into Kelvin-Castner. Immediately. With a datadipper and a lawyer. I’m going over every report personally, visiting every lab in the biohazard complex, fucking haunting him with consultant experts. And if—”

  “You can’t bring outsiders into K-C! Nondisclosure—”

  “—if I don’t find substantial, scientifically valid progress, daily, toward a counteragent to the inhibition neuropharm. I’m tying up K-C in contract-violation lawsuits that will prevent old Alex from getting a patent until the millennium. Even if I bankrupt TenTech in the process.”

  Cazie stared at him. It seemed to Jackson that suddenly she stood behind a Y-shield, invisible but unbreakable. His shield, or hers? Bleakly, he realized that it no longer mattered which.

  She had always been quick. She said softly, “You’re through with me this time, aren’t you, Jack? For good.”

  “Tell Rogers what I said.”

  “Something’s changed in you. You really would sacrifice TenTech for this quixotic gesture. Why?”

  “Because you’re incapable of seeing that it’s not a gesture.”

  She said, not moving, “I never pretended to be anything besides what I am, Jack.”

  He said painfully, “No. You never did.”

  Suddenly Cazie threw back her head and laughed, a high full laugh with no hint
of hysteria. Jackson felt something then, a quick flash of old fear—I can’t let her go—and felt just as clearly the moment it died, leaving him empty.

  She said lightly, “I’m going to visit Theresa now.”

  He stood there after she left, waiting. Now Vicki would come in, with some sardonic, provocative remark. That was how it went: he quarreled with Cazie, Vicki listened at doors, then she came in and poked the wound. That was how it went.

  But this wasn’t just another routine quarrel with Cazie. And in a few minutes Vicki did come in, but not to poke. She was pulling a sweater over her head, her hair made wild by her roughness, her eyes not focused on him at all.

  “I’m taking your car, Jack. Lizzie’s gone.”

  “Lizzie? Gone where?”

  “Annie doesn’t know. But Lizzie left the camp a week ago and hasn’t called since. Two strangers, genemod, came looking for Lizzie right after she’d gone. Annie was terrified of them, of course.”

  “A week—listen, Vicki, I can’t go with you, I have to go to Kelvin-Castner—”

  That distracted her for just a moment; the cold determination on her face lifted and her eyes gleamed. For just a moment.

  Jackson finished, “—but I can let you have a gun. A Larsen-Colt laser that—”

  “You don’t have any weapons comparable to what I can get,” Vicki said with the same efficient coldness, and left Jackson staring after her as she left the study cluttered with printouts he hadn’t yet read.

  I N T E R L U D E

  TRANSMISSION DATE: May 13, 2121

  TO: Selene Bose, Moon

  VIA: Dallas Enclave Ground Station, GEO Satellite C-1867 (U.S.), Satellite E-643 (Brazil)

  MESSAGE TYPE: Encrypted

  MESSAGE CLASS: Class C, Private Paid Transmission

  ORIGINATING GROUP: Gregory Ross Elmsworth

  MESSAGE:

  Ms. Sharifi—Undoubtedly you know who I am; I wouldn’t insult your intelligence by suggesting otherwise. The people of the United States chose to reject my bid for the presidency, but that does not mean that I still don’t stand ready to serve this great country of ours any way I can. I therefore am prepared to offer you one billion dollars—a third of my private fortune—in return for a complete scientific explanation of your Change syringes, sufficient for commercial duplication. I will make this information, without charge, freely available to all pharmaceutical companies in the United States. Although your own fortune is of course large, I can’t believe you will be indifferent to my offer.

  Addresses and encryptions to reach my lawyers are attached.

  Let history fondly recall both of us.

  Sincerely,

  Gregory Ross Elmsworth

  Gregory Ross Elmsworth

  Elmsworth Enterprises International, Inc.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received

  III

  MAY 2121

  It is impossible for such a creature as man to be totally indifferent to the well- or ill-being of his fellow-creatures, and not readily, of himself, to pronounce, where nothing gives him any particular bias, that which promotes their happiness is good, and what tends to their misery is evil.

  —David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

  Nineteen

  Lizzie shrank back farther into the shadows of the building. The tribe was just around the corner. No, it wasn’t a “tribe”—a tribe had rules and order and kindness. This was just a…a…she didn’t know what.

  The scum of the Earth, them, she heard inside her head, and it was her mother’s voice. Who had Annie been talking about? Nobody like these people—there’d been nobody like this in East Oleanta or Willoughby County. Lizzie couldn’t remember who Annie had called scum. She couldn’t remember anything. She was too scared.

  “My turn, me,” a man’s voice said. “Get off her, you!”

  “Hold your horses, I’m getting…All yours.”

  A third voice laughed. “Didn’t leave much, did you, Ed? Hope Cal don’t like them feisty, him.”

  “Fuck, she ain’t even breathing!”

  “Sure she is, her. Climb on, Cal.”

  “Christ!”

  “You go last, you, you take wet decks.”

  Lizzie fingered her belt, with its reassuring slight bulge of the personal-shield casing. The shield was on. She could see its faint shimmer around her hands. The men out there couldn’t hurt her, even if they caught her. The most they could do would be knock the shield around awhile, with her in it like sausage in a casing. Lizzie remembered sausage. Annie used to make it. Sausage…what was she doing thinking of sausage? The girl out there was being…and there was nothing Lizzie could do to help her. She couldn’t even help herself by hiding inside this building she cowered behind. The building, like all the others in the abandoned gravrail yard, was Y-shielded. She pressed her own shield tight against the building’s shield.

  The other girl screamed.

  Lizzie closed her eyes. But she could still see the girl inside her eyelids. She could see all of it: the girl tied naked on the ground, the four men, the rest of the tribe a little way off. Other women, ignoring what was happening because the girl had been stolen from another tribe, wasn’t one of their own. And children, glancing at the four men, curious…

  How could they? How could they?

  “You got enough,” one of the men said. “Come on, we gotta move out, us.”

  “Give him a minute, Ed. Old guys need time, them.”

  A bark of laughter.

  What if one of those curious children came around the edge of the building and saw Lizzie? She could grab him and knock him out before he called to the others.

  No, she couldn’t. A little boy, like Dirk would be in a few years…she couldn’t. How impenetrable was a personal shield, anyway? She’d been wearing Vicki’s for two weeks now, and she didn’t really know. It kept out insects and raccoons and rain and brambles. Those were the only tests she’d given it.

  “Come on, Cal!” one of the men shouted. “We’re moving out, us!”

  Slowly the tribe straggled past Lizzie’s building. Seventeen, twenty, twenty-five. They wore ragged jacks and carried tarps and water jugs. No Y-cones, no terminals that she could see. Four filthy, Changed small children, but no babies. When they were all out of sight and sound, Lizzie ventured around the corner of the building.

  The girl was dead. Blood from her cut throat drained into the ground. Her eyes were wide open, her face contorted into terror and pleading. She looked about Lizzie’s age, but smaller, with lighter hair. In one ear was a small tin earring in the shape of a heart.

  I can’t bury her, Lizzie thought. The ground was hard; it hadn’t rained in a week. Lizzie had nothing to dig with. And if she stayed here much longer, she’d lose her nerve for the bridge. Oh, God, what if those people were going over the bridge? If they caught her on it?

  No. She wouldn’t let that happen. She wasn’t as helpless as this poor girl had been. And it wouldn’t be a good idea to bury her even if Lizzie could. The girl’s own tribe might come looking for her, and it would be better if they knew what happened to her than if they had to wonder forever if she was still alive. That would be intolerable. If it were Dirk…

  She thrust the obscene thought away, knelt on the bloody ground, and untied the girl’s hands and feet from the crude wooden stakes. She pulled the stakes from the ground; she could spare the girl’s people that much. Grateful for the shield protecting her from contact with the streaming blood, Lizzie lifted the girl’s body and staggered with it to the shadow of the building. She rolled the body against the Y-dome and covered the torso with a shirt from her backpack, knotted loosely around the girl’s waist to keep it from blowing away.

  Then she set out for the bridge, before it got too dark, or she got too scared.

  She knew exactly where she was. Although she didn’t dare use her terminal to open a link of any kind that could be traced, she could use it to access information in the crystal library, including
detailed atlases. This was the New Jersey tech yard of the Senator Thomas James Corbett Gravrail. Of course, the gravrail had stopped running during the Change Wars. But the shielded buildings were still here, probably with the trains inside, and nothing could destroy the maglev lines themselves. Shining twin lines of some material Lizzie couldn’t identify, they’d run all the way here from Willoughby County. They ran across the bridge spanning the Hudson River into Manhattan; they would run, according to her atlas, north to Central Park and straight to a ground gate of Manhattan East Enclave.

  And then what?

  First, just get there.

  Lizzie stared at the bridge, and then at the sky. About three hours until sunset. She could cross under cover of dusk, hide on the other side. The trestle bridge itself provided little cover. It was narrow, no more than ten feet across, with no visible protrusions or supports. How did it stay up? Probably the same way the gravrails had stayed up. Neither physics nor engineering much interested Lizzie—only computers. Still, she should gather all the information she could before the crossing.

  The Hudson shimmered bright in the sunshine. By the river, half-hidden by an embankment, Lizzie found a patch of weedy ground. She drank from the Hudson, turned off her shield, and stripped. As she lay on the ground to feed, she raised her head every few seconds to be sure no one approached. The sun felt good on her bare skin, but she couldn’t let herself enjoy it. As soon as her Changed biochemistry signaled satiety, she jumped up, dressed, and turned on the personal shield. Then she settled into work with her computer. By sunset, she knew as much as was in her crystal library about the Governor Samantha Deborah Velez Memorial Gravrail Trestle.

  At the eastern end of the trestle, in the deep shadow of a building, Lizzie listened as hard as she could. An hour ago she’d heard people start across the bridge. But now there was no one in sight, and all she heard was the cry of wheeling gulls and the lapping of the river against the shore. She dropped to her hands and knees and started to crawl across the bridge, presenting as inconspicuous a silhouette as possible.