Beggars and Choosers s-2

by Nancy Kress

  “No. Can you?” She looked at me with hungry brown eyes. Billy left the apartment.

  “Probably not,” I said. I’m not a ’bot tech. But let me see.”

  “I’ll show you, me.”

  She did. She put together the pieces of the peeler ’bot, which had a simple standard Kellor chip powered by Y-energy. I went to school with Alison Kellor, who always professed a world-weary disdain for the electronic empire she would inherit. Lizzie assembled the ’bot in about two minutes and showed me how it wouldn’t work despite an active chip. “See this little teeny bit here, Vicki? Where the peeler arm fits onto the ’bot? It’s sort of melted, it.”

  I said, “What do you think did that?”

  The big brown eyes looked at me. “I don’t know, me.”

  “I do.” The destroyed joint was duragem. Had been duragem, until attacked by the renegade replicating dissembler.

  “What melted it, Vicki?”

  I turned the ’bot over in my hands, looking for other duragem joints. They were there, between the less durable but cheaper nonmoving plastics. The others weren’t “sort of melted, them.” But neither were a few of the duragem parts.

  “What melted it, Vicki? Vicki?” I felt a hand on my arm.

  Why hadn’t the other duragem joints been attacked? Because the dissembler was clocked. It had self-destructed after a certain time, and had also stopped replicating after making a certain number of copies of itself. Much — maybe even most — nanotech had this safety feature.

  Lizzie shook my arm. “What melted it, Vicki? What?”

  “A tiny little machine. Too small to see.”

  “The duragem dissembler? The one I saw, me, on the newsgrid?”

  Then I did look up. “You watch the donkey newsgrids?”

  She gave me a long, serious look. I could see this was an important decision for her: to trust me or not. Finally she said, as if it were an answer, “I’m almost twelve, me. My mama, she still thinks I’m six.”

  “Ah,” I said. “So how does a twelve-year-old see donkey news-grids? They’re never on at the cafe.”

  “Nothing’s on in the middle of the night. Some nights. I go there, me, and watch.”

  “You sneak out?”

  She nodded solemnly, sure that this admission would bring down the world. She was right. I had never imagined a Liver kid with that much ambition or curiosity or intelligence or guts. Lizzie Francy was not supposed to exist. She was as much a wild card as the duragem dissembler, and as unwelcome. To both Livers and donkeys.

  And then I saw a way to use her difference.

  “Lizzie, how’d you like to make a bargain with me?”

  She looked wary.

  “If you tell me what I want to know, I’ll help you learn as much as I can about how machines work.”

  Lizzie’s face changed. She leapt on my words like the promising little piranha she was.

  “You promised, you. Vicki, I heard you, me, and that was a promise. You say you’ll help me find out everything about how machines work!”

  “I said, ‘as much as I can.’ Not everything.”

  “But you promised, you.”

  “Yes, yes, I promised. But in return you have to answer all the questions I have.”

  She considered this, her head cocked to one side, the sixteen pink-tied braids all sticking out in different directions. She didn’t see any major trap. “All right.”

  “Lizzie, have you ever heard of Eden?”

  “In the Bible?”

  “No. Here, near East Oleanta.”

  Despite our agreement, she hesitated. I said, “You promised, too.”

  “I heard, me, Billy and Mama talking about it. Mama said Eden don’t never exist except in the Bible. Billy, he said he wasn’t so sure, him. He said maybe it was a place in the mountains or the woods that donkeys don’t know about, and Livers might work there, them. They thought I was asleep.”

  A place donkeys don’t know about. Meaning, to East Oleanta, government donkeys, practically the only kind a town like this ever saw.

  “Does Billy ever go off alone into the woods? Without your mama?”

  “Oh, yeah, he likes it, him. Mama wouldn’t never go off in the woods. She’s too fat.” Lizzie said this matter-of-factly; for some reason I thought suddenly of Desdemona, seizing my soda-can bracelet without guilt or evasion.

  “How often does he go? How long does he stay?”

  “Every couple of months, him. For five or six days. Only now he’s getting too old, him, Mama says.”

  “Does that mean he won’t go any more?”

  “No, he’s going next week, him. He told her he got to, unless something important breaks down and he’s afraid, him, to leave us alone. But we got the food.” She pointed to the pathetic piles of tasteless synthetic food rotting in buckets in the corners.

  “When next week?”

  “Tuesday.”

  Lizzie knew everything. But more to the point — what did Billy know? Did he know where Miranda Sharifi was?

  “What time does Billy leave when he goes to the woods?”

  “Real early in the morning. Vicki, how are you going to teach me, you, everything about machines? When do we start, us?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Today.”

  “You’re still recovering. You had pneumonia, you know. Do you know what that is?”

  She shook her head. The silly pink ribbons bobbed. If this were my kid, I’d tie up her braids with microfilaments.

  If this were my kid? Jesus.

  “Pneumonia is a disease caused by bacteria, which is itself a tiny little living machine, which got destroyed in your body by another tiny living machine engineered to do that. And that’s where we’ll start tomorrow. If you have the right codes there are programs you can access on the hotel terminal, where people hardly ever go…” For the first time it occurred to me that Annie would object vigorously to this tutorial program. I might be educating Lizzie in the middle of the night.

  “What codes?” Her eyes were bright and sharp as carbon-rod needles.

  “I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  “I already reprogrammed, me, the servoentrance door at the cafe to let me and Mama in. I can understand about the hotel terminal. Just say, you, a little bit how…”

  “Good-bye, Lizzie.”

  “Just say how—”

  “Good-bye.”

  As I closed the door, she was once more taking apart the peeler ’bot.

  In the next six weeks, Lizzie spent all her free time at the hotel terminal, accessing education software in the vast donkey public library system. She appeared at the hotel at odd times, in the early morning with her hair wet from the baths, or at twilight, times I suspected Annie thought she was playing with her friends Carlena and Susie, a pair of dumb chirps. Lizzie disappeared just as abruptly, an outlaw running from the scene of the scholastic crime to report for dinner or for church. I don’t know if she accessed in the middle of the night or not; I was, sensibly, asleep. She learned at a frightening rate, once she had something substantial to learn. I didn’t control what she accessed, and I only commented when she had questions. After the first day she zeroed in on computer systems, both theory and applications.

  Within a week she showed me how she’d reprogrammed a still-functional cleaning ’bot to dance, by combining, speeding up, and sequencing its normal movements. The thing jigged around my dismal hotel room as if it had a metallic seizure. Lizzie laughed so hard she fell off the bed and lay helplessly shrieking on the floor, her arms wrapped around her negligible middle, and again that unwelcome something turned over, blood warm, in my chest.

  Within a month she had worked through the first two years of the American Education Association-accredited secondary school software for computer science.

  After six weeks she showed me, gleefully, how she’d broken in to the Haller Corporation data banks. I peered over her shoulder, wondering if the Haller security software would trace the intrusion to E
ast Oleanta, where there should not have existed anyone capable of data bank intrusion. Did the GSEA monitor corporate break-ins?

  I was being paranoid. There must be a quarter million teenage net busters snooping around in corporate data banks just to count technological coup.

  But those kids were donkeys.

  “Lizzie,” I said, “no more net busting. I’m sorry, honey, but it’s dangerous.”

  She pressed her lips together, a suspicious little Annie. “Dangerous how?”

  “They could trace you, come here, and arrest you. And send you to jail.”

  Her black eyes widened. She had some respect for authority, or at least for power. A cowardly little Annie.

  “Promise,” I said, relentless.

  “I promise, me!”

  “And I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow I’ll go to Albany on the gravrail” — it was working again, briefly — “and buy you a handheld computer and crystal library. It has far more on it than you can access here. You won’t believe what you’ll learn to do.” And a free-held unit couldn’t be traced. I could use the “Dark Jones” account, which the high cost of a crystal library and compatible unit would just about empty. Maybe I’d better go farther than Albany to buy it. Maybe New York.

  Lizzie stared at me, for once speechless. Her pink mouth made a little “O.” Then she was hugging me, smelling of warehouse distrib soap, her voice muffled against my neck.

  “Vicki… a crystal library… oh, Vicki. . .”

  For you. I didn’t say more. I couldn’t.

  Anthony, who came before Russell and after Paul, once told me that there was no such thing as a maternal instinct, nor a paternal one either. It was all intellectual propaganda designed to urge humans toward a responsibility they didn’t really want, but couldn’t admit not wanting. It was a PR tour de force without genuine biological force.

  I used to love some very stupid men.

  Three days after I brought Lizzie her crystal library, I was up by 4:00 A.M., ready to follow Billy yet again into the deep woods.

  This was my third trip in six weeks. Lizzie kept me informed, per our bargain, of Billy’s plans. She told me he used to go every few months, but now he went far more often. Maybe he had even made a few short trips Lizzie and I missed. Something was stepping up his scouting schedule, and I hoped it would lead me to “Eden,” careful hints about which were increasing on the local Liver channels. Broadcast from where? By whom? I’d bet anything they weren’t part of the regularly organized broadcasting from Albany.

  This morning it was snowing in a desultory, nonserious way, even though it was only mid-October. In San Francisco, I hadn’t paid much attention to the “coming mini-ice age” stuff. In the Adirondacks, however, there wasn’t much choice. Everyone went around bundled in winter jacks, which were surprisingly warm, although no more tastefully dyed than summer jacks. Marigold, crimson, electric blue, poison green. And for the conservative, a dun the color of cow piles.

  Which was what Billy wore when he emerged from his apartment building at 4:45 A.M. He carried a plasticloth sack. It was still dark out. He walked toward the river, which flowed by the edge of the village, only five or six blocks from what passed as downtown. I followed him unseen while there were buildings for cover. When there weren’t, I let him get out of sight and then followed his footprints in the light snow. After a mile the footsteps stopped.

  I stood under a pine whose branches started ten feet up the trunk, pondering my choices. From behind me Billy said quietly, “You ain’t gotten any better, you, in the woods. Not since your first time.”

  I turned. “How did you do that?”

  “Don’t matter how / did it, me. The question is what you think you’re doing here.”

  “Following you. Again.”

  “Why?”

  He had never asked before. The other times I’d followed him, he’d refused to talk to me at all. He looked unusually impressive, standing there in the bleak landscape with his wrinkled face stern and judgmental: a Liver Moses. I said, “Billy, where is Eden?”

  “That what you after, you? I don’t know where it is, me, and if I did I wouldn’t take you there.”

  This was promising; when someone has reasons not to do something, he has at least conceived that it’s possible to do it. From possibility to agreement isn’t nearly as large a leap as from denial to possibility. “Why not?”

  “Why not what?”

  “Why wouldn’t you take me to Eden if you knew where it was?”

  “Because it ain’t no donkey place, it.”

  “Is it a Liver place?”

  But he seemed to realize he’d said too much. Deliberately he put down his sack, brushed the snow off a fallen tree, and sat down with the air of a man who wasn’t going to move until I left. I would have to prod him by offering more.

  “It’s not a Liver place, either, is it, Billy? It’s a Sleepless place. You’ve seen a SuperSleepless from Huevos Verdes, or more than one, in these woods. They have larger heads than normal, and they talk like they’re slowing down their speech, because they are. They think so much faster and more complexly than we do — you or me — that it’s an effort for them to choose a few simple-enough words for us to understand. You saw one, didn’t you, Billy? A man or a woman?”

  He stared at me, a wrinkled somber face against the gray and white woods.

  “When was this, Billy? In the summer? Or longer ago than that?”

  He said, with transparent effort and equally transparent mendacity, “I never saw nobody, me.”

  I walked toward him and put my hand firmly on his shoulder. “Yes, you did, you. When was it?”

  He stared at the snowy ground, angry but unwilling, or unable, to show it.

  “Okay, Billy,” I sighed. “If you won’t tell me, you won’t. And you’re right — I can’t follow you unseen through the woods because I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m already cold.”

  Still he said nothing. I trudged back to town. Lizzie’s computer and crystal library wasn’t all that Dark Jones had bought in New York. The homing device I’d stuck on the back of his plastisynth jacket, behind the shoulder and below the neck where he wouldn’t see it until he removed the jacket, registered as a motionless dot on my handheld monitor. It stayed a motionless dot for over an hour. Wasn’t he cold?

  Russell, who came before David and after Anthony, had a theory about body temperature. He said that we donkeys, who are used to having instant adjustments in anything that happens to distress us, have lost the ability to ignore slight fluctuations in body temperatures. Constant environmental pampering had softened us. Russell saw this as a positive, because it made very easy identification of the successful and the genetically highly tuned (who naturally were one and the same). Watch a person pull on a sweater for a one-degree temperature drop and you know you’re looking at a superior person. I lacked the strength of will to avoid responding to this. Sort of a Princess and the Centigrade Pea, I said, but whimsey was wasted on Russell. We parted shortly afterwards when I accused him of inventing even more artificial social gradations than the ridiculous number that already existed, and he accused me of being jealous of his superior genemod left-brain logic. The last I heard, he was running for congressional representative from San Diego, which has possibly the most monotonous climate in the country.

  Maybe Billy Washington made a fire; the monitor wouldn’t show that. After an hour, as I sat in warmth in my East Oleanta hotel room, the Billy-dot moved. He walked several more miles over the course of the day, in easy stages, in various directions.

  A man looking for something. At no point did the dot disappear, which would have meant he’d disappeared behind a Y-energy security shield. The same thing happened for three more days and nights. Then he came home.

  Incredibly, he didn’t confront me about the homer. Either he never found it, even after he took his jacket off (hard to believe), or he did but had no idea what it was and decided not to wonder. Or — and this only occurred
to me later — he saw it but thought someone else had put it there, maybe while he was sleeping, and wanted it left alone. Someone out in the woods. Someone he wanted to please.

  Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. What did I know about how a Liver thought? What, in fact, did I know about how anybody thought? Would somebody who had the ability to discern that knowledge on short acquaintance have actually spent eighteen months with Russell?

  Two days after Billy’s return from the woods, Annie said, “The gravrail’s broke again, it.” She didn’t say it to me. I sat in her apartment, visiting Lizzie, but Annie had yet to acknowledge directly that I was there. She didn’t look at my face, she didn’t speak to me, she maneuvered her considerable bulk around the space I occupied as if it were an inexplicable and inconvenient black hole. Probably Billy had let me in only because I’d brought a double armful of food and warehouse goods, obtained on “Victoria Turner’s” chip, to contribute to the growing stockpiles along the walls. The place smelled vaguely like a landfill where the waste-eating microorganisms had fallen behind.

  “Where’s it at?” Billy said. He meant the actual train, sitting somewhere along its magnetic track.

  “Right here,” Annie said. “About a quarter mile outside town, that’s what Celie Kane said, her. Some of them are mad enough to burn it.”

  Lizzie looked up with interest from the handheld terminal with her precious crystal library. I hadn’t witnessed Annie’s reaction to my gift, but Lizzie had told me about it. The only reason Lizzie still owned the thing was that she’d threatened to run away on a gravrail otherwise. She was twelve, she’d told her mother — a lot of kids left home at twelve. I suppose Liver kids did, coming and going with their portable meal chips. That was when Annie had stopped speaking to me.

  Lizzie said, “Can trains burn, them?”

  “No,” Billy said shortly. “And it’s against the law to do hurt to them anyway.”

  Lizzie digested this. “But if nobody can’t come, them, from Albany on the train to punish people who break the law—”

  “They can come, them, on a plane, can’t they?” Annie snapped. “Don’t you be thinking about breaking no laws, young lady!”