Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  Jackson stared at her.

  “No, we shouldn’t keep it secret, Jackson. We need to tell K-C. We need to call the newsgrids and the government and all the people counting desperately on Miranda Sharifi to rescue us one more time. Because K-C isn’t going to get any help from the sky. And the government has to break into Selene to verify missing persons. And people might as well stop beaming messages to Miranda, because there won’t be any dea ex machina this time. The machina broke down, and the dea is dead. Jackson…please hold me. I don’t care who’s watching.”

  He did. And although Vicki felt warm in his arms, it didn’t really help. Not really.

  “Jack,” Cazie said from the terminal screen, her face grim, “tell me what you think you know about Miranda Sharifi and Selene.”

  He went over it for Cazie, in the middle of the night. He went over it for Alex Castner, also in the middle of the night. He went over it for the FBI and the CIA late the next morning—late because, it turned out, Kelvin-Castner did not call the feds until K-C had had a board meeting. Jackson was grateful for the prolonged sleep. For the FBI and CIA, he had to go over it a lot.

  After that, he tried to push the investigation out of his mind. He spent his days with the data Kelvin-Castner now freely gave him. No reason not to. As Vicki had said, now they were all on the same side.

  The twenty-first day of his quarantine, the last day, and he had worked his way through all the data K-C had. He didn’t go into the labs themselves; he was not a trained researcher. He confined himself to the medical models, which were inconclusive. Maybe a reverser to the neuropharm could be found. But they didn’t yet know where, or how.

  Or when.

  The cold black anger stayed with him. The anger wasn’t because devising a cure was hopeless. It wasn’t hopeless. Nor was the anger because someone had created this dangerous and cruel neuropharm, unknown in nature. For four thousand years men had created poisons unknown in nature to incapacitate each other. Nor was the anger because Kelvin-Castner had put its own profits ahead of public good, until the public good suddenly became identical with its own good. That was how corporations worked.

  On the twenty-first day, as Jackson was leaving K-C for a brief trip to see Theresa, Thurmond Rogers stopped him just short of the security lock into the bio-unshielded part of the building. Thurmond Rogers in person, not holo or comlink. “Jackson.”

  “I don’t think we have anything to say to each other, Rogers. Or are you a messenger boy for Cazie?”

  “No,” Rogers said, and at his tone Jackson looked closer. Rogers’s skin, genemod for a light tan meant to contrast with the golden curls, looked blotched and pasty. The pupils of his turquoise eyes were dilated, even in the simulated sunlight of the corridor.

  “What is it?” Jackson said, but he already knew.

  “It’s gone to direct transmission.”

  “Where?”

  “The Chicago North Shore Enclave.”

  Not even among the Livers. Someone had gone outside North Shore—or someone else had come in—and contracted the neuropharm from blood, semen, urine, saliva, breast milk. It was in non-inhalant form.

  He said crisply to Rogers, “Behavior of the victim?”

  “Same severe inhibition. Panic anxiety at new actions.”

  “Medical models?”

  “All match known effects. Cerebrospinal fluid, brain scans, heart rate, amygdalae activity, blood hormone levels—”

  “All right,” Jackson said, meaninglessly, since it was not all right. But all at once he knew why he was so angry.

  “It’s the same thing, over and over,” Jackson said to Vicki. They sat side by side in his aircar, lifting off from Boston. This month the Public Gardens below them bloomed yellow: daffodils and jonquils and roses and pansies in artful genemod confusion. The dome of the State House gleamed gold in the late afternoon sun, and beyond the dome the ocean brooded gray-green. After a month in front of terminals, Jackson’s fingers felt awkward on the car console. He set it for automatic and flexed his shoulders against the back of the seat. He was very tired.

  Vicki said, “What’s the same thing over and over?”

  “People. They just go on doing the same thing over and over, even if it doesn’t work.”

  “What specific people are we talking about here?” Vicki laid her hand on Jackson’s thigh. He covered with his own, and immediately thought, Where are the monitors? Twenty-one days of holding back, self-conscious about being observed…Only there were no monitors in his aircar. Or were there? The car had been sitting for three weeks under the Kelvin-Castner dome. Of course there were monitors. And anyway, he was too tired for sex.

  “All people,” he said. “Everyone. We just go on doing whatever we’ve always done, even if it doesn’t work. Jennifer Sharifi just went on trying to control everything that might threaten Sanctuary. Miranda Sharifi just went on relying on better technology to lift up us poor benighted beggars who have to sleep. Kelvin-Castner just goes on following profits, no matter where they lead. Lizzie goes on datadipping whatever system’s in front of her. Cazie—” He stopped.

  “—goes on performing for whatever audience feeds her hunger for applause,” Vicki said, more tartly. “And what about you? What do you go on doing, Jackson?”

  He was silent.

  “Didn’t think of applying your own theory to yourself? Well, then, I will. Jackson goes on assuming that the medical model can explain everything about people. Profile the biochemistry and you understand the person.”

  He glanced sideways at Vicki. Her eyes were closed; Jackson was suddenly sorry not to see their pure violet. She had removed her warm fingers from his. He said, “You sound like Theresa.”

  “Theresa,” Vicki said, not opening her eyes, “is learning to do something different. Very different.”

  “It’s still just a biofeedback control of the brain chemistry that—”

  “You’re a fool, Jackson,” Vicki said. “I don’t know how I can be so much in love with a man who’s such a fool. Watch Theresa when she learns that the inhibition neuropharm is transmissible. Just watch her. And meanwhile—car; land there, in that soonest clearing at two o’clock.”

  The flowers in the clearing weren’t genemod. The grass was rough, smelling of wild mint. The air was a little too cold, at least for naked bodies. But Jackson discovered that he wasn’t nearly as tired as he thought.

  Afterward, Vicki clung to him, her long body imprinted with marks from grass and weeds, smelling of crushed mint. He stroked her goose-pimpled skin. Against his shoulder, he felt her lips curve into a smile.

  “Solely biochemistry, Jackson?”

  He laughed, feeling too good for annoyance. “You never give up, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t appeal to you if I did. Solely biochemistry?”

  He wrapped his arms around her. They had to return to the aircar; this scraggly field was hard ground. Also exposed. Also blanketed with biting insects. In addition, he had to see Theresa, get back to Kelvin-Castner, launch the legal fight to get K-C to share data with the CDC now that the neuropharm had moved from random terrorism to public health crisis…

  Vicki’s voice held sudden uncertainty, that unexpected quality that emerged in her at unexpected times. “Jackson? Biochemistry?”

  He held her tighter. “Not biochemistry. Love.”

  And that both was, and was not, the truth. Like everything else.

  EPILOGUE

  NOVEMBER 2128

  All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious.

  —Homer, The Iliad

  Jackson waited beside the ugly bulk of a destroyed building, his equipment well back in the shadows. The usual procedure. The building had been foamcast, which meant it couldn’t bum, but everything else had been done to it. Smashing, ramming, looting, maybe even shelling. Old destruction, starting to be covered by the mutated form of kudzu covering the rest of St. Louis, possibly the ugliest place Jackson had ever been.
/>   In the last seven years, he’d been a lot of ugly places.

  Theresa and Dirk had finished their readying and started their walk forward. Dirk, eight years old and new to readying, clung tightly to his mother’s hand. Lizzie, of course, had not needed to ready; she’d never contracted the inhibition virus. But she was guiding Dirk, who over the past year had made tremendous progress in sustaining another persona—he called his “Treeboy.” Dirk had learned readying with the adaptability of the young, apparently still present under the panicky inhibition artificially hardwired into his amygdalae. “Treeboy,” created by imagination but neurochemically real, was braver and freer than Dirk was. Jackson had the brain scans to prove it.

  Theresa led the way. Theresa, dressed in the most ragged of all three of their pathetic rags. Theresa, whose fair hair, grown out from baldness, was the most matted of the three. Theresa, with the emptiest hands, for whom this was harder than for anyone else.

  Theresa, who was finally happy.

  The three beggars approached the semi-whole building where the infected tribe camped. All the Livers, of course, had fled inside. Theresa, Lizzie, and Dirk squatted in front of the closed door and began to beg.

  “Warm clothing, please. Oh, please give us some warm clothing if you can spare it, the nights are so cold…”

  They would stay there, Jackson knew, for days, if days were necessary. This time, he didn’t think they would be. The beggars had a child with them. All the inhibited, in and out of the enclaves, were more likely to open to women and children. The Order of the Spiritual Brain—Jackson hated the name, but it had been Theresa’s choice—had three thousand members across the country, not counting affiliated doctors and corporate sponsors, but only twenty-eight percent were male. Still, the number was growing. The Order was growing.

  Almost as fast as the inhibition was spreading.

  Still, the major pharmaceutical companies—Kelvin-Castner, Lilly, Genentech Neuropharm, Silverstone Martin—were close to a reverser. They might have been closer still if the inhibition plague had been easier to transmit. But the human race had been lucky. If one person in a camp or enclave got it, usually everyone did, due to the poor sanitation and feeding habits of the Changed. But transmission between camps and enclaves was slow, because once infected, the inhibited neither became nor received visitors.

  Theresa was changing that.

  “Please, just a warm coat…” little Dirk begged.

  Sometimes the camp would just open the door and throw out whatever was being begged: clothing, a jug of water, a spare Y-cone for warmth. The beggars didn’t go away. The one thing about religious orders, Jackson thought, awaiting his part in the shadows, was that they were persistent. Nuts, maybe, but persistent.

  And, sometimes, effective.

  The door of the Liver building opened a crack. A man squeezed through, followed by a child. Jackson switched his eyes to zoom augments. The child wasn’t Changed. Jackson studied the bare, inflamed patches on the side of her scalp: rounded lesions, crusty in the middle and scaly at the edges. Most likely ringworm. But otherwise the little girl looked healthy, if inhibited. Although not as inhibited as some others. The renegade neuropharm, like every other drug, affected different people differently. There were even a few cases of natural immunity, studied eagerly by the pharmaceuticals and the CDC.

  The little girl ducked behind the man’s legs, but peeped out between them at Dirk.

  Treeboy smiled.

  Maybe Jackson wouldn’t have to wait too long to do his part, after all.

  The equipment stood ready, loaded onto a floater. Medicines, nursing ’bot. And, most important, holo cartridges to play on the camp’s very own terminal, a terminal they were used to, that was a part of the usual routine. Theresa would start them with the holos on medical care for the unChanged children. Even the most inhibited would try something new when their children’s lives were at stake. The more unChanged children were born, the more desperate the inhibited came—and that need was the key to getting into their lives.

  Once in, Theresa would gradually introduce the holos on readiness. She, herself constantly afraid, would teach them to overcome fear by imagining a different self. Then, later, they would learn the biofeedback techniques that could make that different self neurochemically real. Temporary—but real. And ready when you needed it.

  Or until somebody found a medical solution to the same problem.

  A medical solution would of course be simpler, easier, faster. Just take a neuropharm. With the right neuropharm, you could become less fearful, more fearful, more lusty, more hopeful, less angry, more lethargic…anything. But Theresa and her disciples weren’t using neuropharms. So the question wasn’t, as Jackson had always assumed, how neurochemically driven were humans? The question was, why were they ever driven by anything but neurochemicals? Why—and how—could men and women choose against their own fear, lust, hope, anger, inertia? Because clearly they could choose that. Theresa was doing so, right in front of his eyes. So not—isn’t man just a bunch of chemicals? Rather—how could man ever be anything else?

  Jackson didn’t know the answers. He was, after seven years, still uneasy with the questions.

  He blew on his hands; it was getting colder. Jackson turned on the Y-heat filaments woven fluidly into his clothes. Theresa, Dirk, and Lizzie vanished inside the building; a good thing, too, since beggars’ rags carried no Y-heat weaving. Nor personal shields. The beggars wore remotes monitored by the backup doctors and nurses—themselves backed up by carefully concealed, highly equipped security ’bots. In the seven years of Theresa’s Order of the Spiritual Brain, the security ’bots had only been needed three times. The inhibited were not notable fighters.

  The sun began to set over the rubble of St. Louis. Another night vigil. Jackson sighed, activated the Y-shield tent, and moved the floater inside it. He called Vicki.

  “Hello, Jackson. How is the assault going? Has Troy fallen yet?”

  Jackson grinned. “We just wheeled in the wooden horse. Don’t let Lizzie hear you call it that.”

  “People in the grip of temporary religious mania have no sense of humor. Even seven-year temporary mania. How are you, love?”

  “Lonely.” Jackson looked more sharply at Vicki’s face on the small portable screen. “How are you? You look…something’s happened.”

  “Yes,” Vicki said. Her violet eyes reflected light, like purple wine.

  Jackson said, “Someone’s found the reverser.”

  “No. Not that. Although K-C keeps saying how close they are. Something else—clearly you haven’t been watching the newsgrids. The Chicago School of Medicine has made an announcement.”

  “An announcement? Of what?”

  “Egg and sperm. Frozen for seven years, unknown until they arrived by time-activated ’bot last week.”

  A slow pounding filled Jackson’s ears. In the distance, beyond the shadows, the door of the Liver building opened again. “Egg and sperm. Whose?”

  “You can guess, Jackson. All of the SuperSleepless. Miranda Sharifi, Terry Mwakambe, Christina Demetrios, Jonathan Markowitz…all the dead geniuses that we normals didn’t know how to engineer for ourselves.”

  Jackson said nothing. A small figure slipped out the camp door into the long twilight shadows.

  Vicki said, “The Chicago School of Medicine is where the original Sleepless were engineered one hundred twenty-five years ago. Leisha Camden, Kevin Baker, Richard Keller…Miranda Sharifi must have had a sentimental streak after all.”

  “So it will start all over.”

  “If they fertilize, it will. The debate will be fierce. Do we need more dei from rediscovered machinae? Or are we better off blundering along alone?”

  The small figure was Dirk. On zoom, Jackson could see that the little boy was terrified, exhilarated, proud of himself, longing to run back inside. Dirk waved frantically for Jackson to come to the building.

  “Vicki, I have to go. They’re ready to let me inside.”


  “Already?”

  “Already. Theresa’s getting very good at this.”

  “Saint Theresa. All right, Jackson, go convert. I love you.” The screen blanked.

  Now Dirk waved both hands. Jackson put away his comlink, waved back, and summoned the floater. The equipment to teach people to take back their own lives was ready: medicine, teaching holos, nursing ’bot, seeds, crystal library. All following the chemically inhibited Dirk, who had turned himself into Treeboy, who had become a beggar because only with empty, open hands could any of them reach each others.

  Dr. Jackson Aranow moved forward with his gifts.

  SLEEPING DOGS

  by Nancy Kress

  “The new technologies will be dangerous as well as liberating. But in the long run, social constraints must bend to new technologies.”

  —Freeman Dyson

  This is going to make all the difference in the world to us,” Daddy says when the truck pulls into our yard. “All the difference in the world.”

  I pull my sweater tighter around me. Cool spring air comes in at my elbow, where the sweater has a hole. The truck, which is covered with mud from its trip up the mountain, bumps into a ditch in our driveway and then out of it again. Behind his glass window the driver makes a face like he’s cursing, but I can’t hear him. What I can hear is Precious crying in the house. We don’t have any more oatmeal left, and only a little milk. We surely need something to make all the difference in the world.

  “Closer, closer…hold it!” Daddy yells. The driver ignores him. He stops the truck where he chooses, and the back door springs open. In the pens our dogs are going crazy. I walk around the back of the truck and look in.

  Inside, there’s nothing to see except a metal cage, the kind everybody uses to ship dogs. In the cage a bitch lies on her side. She’s no special kind of dog, maybe some Lab, for sure some German shepherd, probably something else to give her that skinny tail. Her eyes are brown, soft as Precious’s. She’s very pregnant.