by Nancy Kress
We plunged through the clouds. There was a shrieking high in the air, almost sounding above us, as if it were coming from some entirely different machinery. Then the plane hit flat on its belly on marshy ground. I felt the hit in my teeth, in my bones. Leisha, thrown once more against me, said something very low, a single word; it might have been “Daddy.”
The second the plane smashed into the ground, the sides lifted. But it couldn’t have been the same second, I thought later, because nobody would design crash equipment that way. But it seemed only a second until the sides lifted and the passenger restraints sprang free. Leisha pushed me out of the plane, the same moment I caught the acrid smell of smoke.
I dropped on my belly into four inches of water covering mucky ground. Leisha splashed down beside me, falling to her knees. Without my powerchair I felt myself flailing, a desperate fish, holding myself above water on my elbows. I crawled forward, pulling myself with my upper arms through the muck and away from the plane dragging my useless legs behind.
Leisha staggered to her feet and tried to lift me. “No, run!” I screamed, as if the smoke billowing out from the plane blocked sound and not sight. “Not without you,” she said. I could feel the plane behind me, a bomb. I screamed, “I can go faster on my own!” Maybe it was true.
She kept on tugging at my body, though I was far too heavy for her. The smoke thickened. I didn’t hear the pilot climb out — was he hurt? My left palm slipped in the mud and I fell face first into it. Frantically I tried to get back up on my hands and drag myself forward. “Run!” I screamed again at Leisha, who wouldn’t leave. Hopeless, hopeless. She wasn’t strong enough to carry me, and the plane was going to blow.
The thread snapped. The lattice in my mind, as in Seattle, disappeared.
Someone ran toward Leisha from the other side of the plane. The pilot? But it wasn’t. The man tackled Leisha and she fell on top of me. Once more my face was pushed into the mud. Then I heard a faint pop. When I fought my eyes free of the mud, I saw the air around the three of us shimmering. A force shield. Y-energy. How strong was it? Could it withstand—
The plane exploded in light and heat and blinding color.
I fell back into the muck, pinned under Leisha. The world rocked and I saw a tiny black water snake, terrified at the intrusions into its swamp, dart forward and bite me on the cheek. The snake started as a thin thread, then became a blur of close motion, and then the world went black as its shiny scales and I didn’t know if the thread held or not.
He was a GSEA agent. When I came to, three of them stood around me in a circle, like the ring of doctors around my bed decades ago, when I was crippled. I lay on my back on a patch of relatively dry, spongy ground at the edge of the shallow lake. Leisha sat a little way off, her back against a custard-apple tree, her head bent forward on her knees. Across the swamp, Kevin Baker’s plane burned, its smoke rising in billowy clouds.
“Leisha?” I heard myself croak. My voice sounded as alien as everything else. Only it wasn’t alien at all. I recognized the heaviness of the muggy air, the whine of insects, the scummy pools and waxy-white ghost orchids. And over everything, the gray dripping beards of Spanish moss. I had been raised in upcountry Louisiana. This was — had to be — Georgia, but much of the swampy country is the same. It was I who had become the alien.
“Ms. Camden will be all right in a moment,” an agent answered. “Probably just a concussion. There’s help on the way. We’re GSEA, Mr. Arlen. Lie still — your leg is broken.”
Again. But this time I felt no pain. There were no nerves left to feel pain. I raised my chin slightly, feeling the pull in my stomach muscles. My left leg lay bent at a sharp, unnatural angle. I lowered my chin.
The shapes slithering through my mind were gray and indistinct on the outside, spiked within. They had a voice. Can’t do anything right, can you, boy? Who d’you think you are — some goddamn donkey?
I said aloud, like a little boy, “A snake bit my cheek.”
A second man bent to squint at my face. It was covered with mud. He said, not harshly, “There’s a doctor on the way. We’re not going to move you until she gets here. Just lie still and don’t think.”
Don’t think. Don’t dream. But I was the Lucid Dreamer. I was. I had to be.
Leisha’s voice said thickly behind me, “Are we under arrest? On what charges?”
“No, of course not, Ms. Camden. We’re happy to be able to assist you,” said the man who had squinted at my cheek. The other two agents stood blank-faced, although I saw one of them blink. You can convey contempt with a blink. Leisha and I consorted ” with, assisted, Huevos Verdes. Gene manipulators. Destroyers of the human genome.
I saw Carmela Clemente-Rice standing beside the lattice in my mind, a clean cool shape, vibrating softly.
“You are Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency,” Leisha said. It wasn’t a question. But she was a lawyer: she waited for an answer.
“Yes, ma’am. Agent Thackeray.”
“Mr. Arlen and I are grateful for your assistance. But by what right—”
I never found out what legal point Leisha had been going to make.
Men dressed in rags burst from behind trees, through tangled vines, from the mucky ground itself. One moment they weren’t there, the next they were — that’s how it felt. They hollered and shrieked and whooped. Agent Thackeray and his two comtemp-tuous deputies didn’t even have time to draw their guns. Lying flat on my back, I saw the ragged men foreshortened as they raised pistols and fired at what seemed like, but couldn’t have been, point-blank range. Thackeray and the two agents went down, the bodies twitching. I heard somebody say, “Hail, yes, she’s an abomination, that there’s Leisha Camden,” and a gun fired again: once, twice. The first time, Leisha screamed.
I jerked my head toward her. She still sat with her back against the custard-apple tree, but now her upper body leaned forward, gracefully, as if she had fallen asleep. There were two red spots on her forehead, one below the other, the higher spot matting a strand of bright blonde hair that had somehow escaped the mud. I heard a long low moan and I thought “She’s alive!” — the thought a desperate bright bubble — until I realized the moan was mine.
The man who had said “Hail, yes” leaned over me. His breath blew in my face; it smelled of mint and tobacco. “Don’t you worry none, Mr. Arlen. We know you ain’t no abomination against nature. You’re safe as houses.”
“Jimmy,” a woman’s voice said sharply, “Here they come!”
“Well, Abigail, y’all are ready for ’em, ain’t you?” Jimmy said in a reasonable voice. I tried to crawl toward Leisha. She was dead.
Leisha was dead.
A plane droned overhead. The medical team. They could help Leisha. But Leisha was dead. But Leisha was a Sleepless. Sleepless didn’t die. They lived, on and on, Kevin Baker was 110. Leisha couldn’t be dead—
The woman called Abigail stepped off the high ground into the swamp. She wore hip-high waders and tattered pants and shirt, and she carried a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, ancient in design but gleaming with spit and polish. The medical plane folded its wings for a grav-powered landing. Abigail aimed, fired, and blew it into a second torch in the swamp.
“Okay,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “That’s it. Come on y’all, make tracks, they’ll be all over here in no time. Mr. Arlen, I’m sorry this is going to be a rough ride for y’all, sir.”
“No! I can’t leave Leisha!” I didn’t know what I was saying. I didn’t know—
“Sure you can,” Jimmy said. “She ain’t going to get no deader. And you ain’t none of her kind anyways. You’re with James Francis Marion Hubbley now. Campbell? Where you at? Carry him.”
“No! Leisha! Leisha!”
“Have a little dignity, son. You ain’t no child bawlin’ after its mama.”
A huge man, fully seven feet high, picked me up and swung me over his shoulder. There was no pain in my leg but as soon as my body struck his, red fire darted up my spine to
my neck and I screamed. The fire filled my mind, and the last view I ever had of Leisha Camden was of her slumped gracefully against the custard-apple tree, enveloped in the red fire of my mind, looking as if she had just fallen quietly asleep.
I woke in a small, windowless room with smooth walls. Too smooth — not a nanodeviance from the smooth, the perpendicular, the unblemished. I didn’t realize at the time that I noticed this.
My mind filled with grief, welling up in spurts, geysers, rivers of hot lava the color of the two spots on Leisha’s forehead.
She really was dead. She really was.
I closed my eyes. The hot lava was still there. I beat on the ground with my fists, and cursed my useless body. If I could have moved to shield her, to put myself between her and the ragged gunmen…
Not even trained GSEA agents had been able to shield her. Or themselves.
I couldn’t hold back my tears, which embarrassed me. The lava had swamped the furled lattice in my mind, buried it, as it was burying me. Leisha…
“Now, y’all stop that, son. Keep a little dignity. Ain’t no woman sired by man worth that kind of carry in’ on.”
The voice was kind. I opened my eyes, and hatred replaced the hot lava. I was glad. Hatred was a better shape: sharp, and cold, and very compact. That shape would not bury me. I looked at the concerned face of James Francis Marion Hubbley looming over me, and I let the cold compact shapes slide through me, and I knew that I was going to stay alive, and stay alert, and stay in control of myself, because otherwise I might not be able to kill him. And I knew I was going to kill him. Even if that meant his was the last face I ever saw.
“That’s better,” Hubbley said genially, and sat down on a tree stump, hands on his knees, nodding encouragingly.
It really was a tree stump. The walls snapped into sharp focus, then, and I knew what kind of place I was in. I had seen the same kind of walls with Carmela Clemente-Rice, and at Huevos Verdes. This was an underground bunker, dug out of the earth by the tiny precise machines of nanotechnology, plastered over with alloy by other tiny precise machines. Eating dirt and laying down a thin layer of alloy were not hard, Miri had told me once. Any competent nanoscientist could create nonorganic mechanisms to do that. Corporations did it all the time, despite government regulations. It was only organic-based replicating nanotechnology that was hard. Anyone could dig a hole, but only Huevos Verdes could build an island.
But Hubbley didn’t look like a scientist. He leaned forward and smiled at me. His teeth were rotten. Wisps of graying hair hung on either side of a long, bony face with .deeply sunburned skin and pale blue eyes. An odd lump under the skin disfigured the right side of his neck. He might have been forty, or sixty. He wore cloth rags, not jacks, of a streaky dull brown, but his boots, whole and high, were almost certainly from some goods warehouse someplace. I had never seen him before, but I recognized him. He belonged to the backwater South.
In most of the country, the donkey-run District Supervisor This Warehouse or Congressman That Cafe had forced out all independent businesses. Livers could get everything they needed for free, so why pay for it? But in the rural South, and sometimes in the West, you still found hardscrabble businesses, weedy motels and chicken farms and whorehouses, getting poorer and poorer over forty years but hanging on, because damn it the gov’mint don’t have no business runnin’ our lives, them. Such people didn’t mind much being poor. They were used to being poor. It was better than being owned by the donkeys. They took handicrafts or chickens or beans or other services in trade. They disdained jacks and medunits and school software. And wherever these pathetic business held on, so did criminals like Hubbley. Stealing, too, was outside the gov’mint, and so a mark of pride.
Hubbley and his band would rob warehouses, apartment blocks, even gravrails, for what they absolutely needed. They would hunt in the deep swamps, and fish, and maybe grow a little of this and that. There would be a still someplace. Oh, I knew Jimmy Hubbley, all right. I’d known him all my life, before Leisha took me in. My daddy was a Jimmy Hubbley without the independence to break free from the system he cursed until the day free government whiskey — not even home-distilled — killed him.
And this was the man that had killed Leisha Camden.
The shapes of hatred have great energy, like robotic knives.
I said, “This is an illegal genemod lab.”
Hubbley’s face creased into a huge grin. “That’s exactly right! Y’all are sharp, boy. Only this is just a bitty little outstation, where Abigail can see to her equipment and we can pick up supplies. And this place ain’t used by the gene abominators no more. Y’all are visitin’ the Francis Marion Freedom Outpost, Mr. Arlen. And let me say we’re honored to have y’all. We all seen all your concerts. You’re a Liver, all right. Livin’ with the donkeys and the Sleepless ain’t harmed you at all. But then that’s the way with the true blood, ain’t At?”
There was something wrong with his speech. I fumbled, then got it. He didn’t talk like a Liver — none of what Miri called “intensifying reflexive pronouns” — but he didn’t talk like a donkey, either. There was something artificial about his sentences. And I’d heard this kind of speech before, but I couldn’t remember where.
I said, to keep him talking, “The Francis Marion Freedom Outpost? Who was Francis Marion?”
Hubbley squinted at me. He rubbed the lump on the side of his neck. “Y’all never heard of Francis Marion, Mr. Arlen? Really? An educated man like you? He was a hero, maybe the biggest hero this here country ever had. Y’all really never heard of him, sir?”
I shook my head. It didn’t hurt. I realized then that my leg had been set. I was on painkillers. A doctor must have seen me, or at least a medunit.
“Now I don’t want to make y’all feel bad,” Hubbley said earnestly. His long bony face radiated regret. “Y’all’s our guest, and it ain’t right to make a guest feel bad about his ignorance. Especially ignorance he cain’t help. It’s the school system, a sorry disgrace for a democracy, that’s entirely to blame here. Entirely. So don’t you fret, sir, about ignorance that just ain’t your fault.”
He had killed Leisha. He had killed the GSEA agents. He had kidnapped me. And he sat there concerned about my feeling bad over not knowing who Francis Marion was.
For the first time, I realized I might be dealing with a madman.
“Francis Marion was a great hero of the American Revolution, son. The enemy called him the ‘Swamp Fox.’ He’d hide in the swamps of South Carolina and Georgia and just swoop down on them British, hit ’em when they was least expectin’ it, and then melt back into the swamp. Couldn’t never catch him. He was fightin’ for freedom and justice, and he was usin’ nature to help him. Not hinder.”
I had his speech now.
Once Leisha and I had spent a whole night watching ancient movies about a civil rights movement. Not civil rights for Sleepless but a movement before that — a hundred years earlier? — about blacks or women. Or maybe Asians. I was never too good at history. But I had to do a paper for one of the schools Leisha kept trying to get me through. I don’t remember the history, but I remember that Leisha searched for old movies adapted for decent technology because she thought I wouldn’t read through the assigned books. She was right, and I resented that. I was sixteen years old. But I liked the movies. I sat in my powerchair, pleased because it was 3:00 A.M. and I wasn’t sleepy, I was keeping up with Leisha. I still thought, at sixteen, that I could.
All night we watched sheriffs in groundcars busting up places where voters registered in person — this was even before computers. We watched old women sit at the backs of buses. We watched black Livers denied seats in cafes, even though they had meal chips. They all talked like James Francis Marion Hubbley. Or, rather, he talked like them. His speech was a deliberate creation, a reenactment of an earlier time: history as far back as it was electronically available. Maybe he thought they talked like that in the American Revolution. Maybe he knew better. Either way, it wa
s disciplined and deliberate.
He was an artist.
Hubbley said, “Marion was puny, and none too firm in his education, and bad-tempered, and given to black moods. His knees were made wrong, right from the day his mother bore him. The British burned his plantation, his men deserted him whenever they got a hankerin’ after their families, and his own commandin* officer, Major General Nathanael Greene, wasn’t none too fond of him. But none of that slowed down Francis Marion. He did his duty by his country, his duty as he saw it, whether all hail busted out or not.”
I said, forcing the words out, “And what are you imagining is your duty by your country?”
Hubbley’s eyes gleamed. “I said y’all was sharp, son, and you are. Y’all got it right off. We’re doin’ our same duty as the Swamp Fox, which is to fight off foreign oppressors.”
“And this time the foreign oppressors are anybody genemod.”
“Y’all got that right, Mr. Arlen. Livers are the true people of this country, just like Marion’s army was. They had the will to decide for themselves what kind of country they wanted to live in, and we got the will to decide for ourselves, too. We got the will, and we got the idea of what this glorious nation ought to look like, even if it don’t look like it right now. We. Livers. And y’all don’t believe it, hail, just look at the mess the donkeys made of this great country. Debt to foreign nations, entanglin’ alliances that sap us dry, the infrastructure crumblin’ in our faces, the technology misused. Just like the British misused the cannons and guns of their day.”
My hip began to throb, distantly. The painkiller wasn’t quite strong enough. I had heard all this before. It was nothing more than anti-research hatred, dressed up as patriotism. They had gotten Leisha after all, the haters. I couldn’t stand to look at Hubbley, and I turned my head away.
“Course,” he said, “you cain’t stop genetic engineering. And nobody should stop it. We sure aren’t, or we wouldn’t have let go this here duragem dissembler.”
I turned my head slowly to stare at him. He grinned. His pale blue eyes gleamed in his sunburned face.