Beggars and Choosers s-2

by Nancy Kress

  This was a fair hit; not even the GSEA flattered itself that it could outinvent Supers. Prescott showed no reaction.

  “You were in violation of every Agency procedure.”

  “I’m not a regular agent. I run wild-card for Colin Kowalski, under informant status. You wouldn’t even know about me now if he hadn’t told you.”

  Still no reaction. She had the ability, like some reptiles, to just draw a nicitating membrane between herself and any blowing insinuating sand. I saw this about her: her limitations, her rigidity born of the automatic assumption of superiority. Yet I still couldn’t help feeling unworthy beside her, in a way I hadn’t felt unworthy in months. Me in my rumpled turquoise jacks and untrimmed hair, she looking like something off a holovid ad for the Central Park East Enclave. Even her fingernails were perfect, genemod rose so they never had to be painted.

  The questions went on. I was as honest as I could be, except for Billy. It didn’t help my mood, which was middling lousy. I was doing what I should, what I needed to do, what was right and patriotic for my country three cheers and “Hail to the Chief.” No, I don’t mean that cynicism — it was right. So why did I feel so terrible?

  Colin Kowalski arrived about 9:00 P.M. I was still under house arrest, or whatever, but Charlotte Prescott had apparently run out of questions. The foodbelt was working, serving an insatiable line of the hungry, who peered curiously at the Y-shield cramping them into half their cafe but could see nothing because the outer layer had been one-way opaqued.

  “Colin. I’m glad you’re here.”

  He was angry, not hiding it, but keeping it under control. I gave him points for all three.

  “You should have contacted me in August, Diana. Maybe we could have stopped release of the duragem dissembler sooner.”

  “Can you stop it now?” I said, but he didn’t answer. I wasn’t having any of that. I grabbed both his lapels — or what passes for lapels in the new fall fashions — and said, slowly and with great distinctness, “You’ve found something. Already. Colin, you have to tell me what you’ve found so far. You have to. I got you all this far, and besides there’s no earthly reason not to tell me. You know damn well you’ve got reporters all over every place out there by now.”

  He stepped back a pace and pulled his lapels free. Billy and Doug Kane and Jack Sawicki and Annie and Krystal Mandor had been all over each other constantly. I was a little shocked at how quickly I’d forgotten the donkey intolerance for being touched.

  But I was not going to give up. Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to involve Billy more than he already was by having taken me into Annie’s apartment for the last month. “What have your agents found, Colin?”

  “Diana—”

  “What?”

  He told me, not because of my persistence but because there really wasn’t any reason not to. He even gave me the lattitude and longitude, to the minutes and seconds. Proud of himself. And yet, somehow, not. I listened harder.

  “Just what you suspected, Diana, an underground lab. Shielded. We broke the shield half an hour ago, once we knew the general area to look. The Supers had fled, but the duragem dissembler originated there, all right. Bastards didn’t even bother to destroy the evidence. The dangerous recombinant and nanotech stuff in that lab…”

  I had never seen words fail Colin Kowalski before. He didn’t sputter, or twitch. Instead his mouth just clamped shut on the last word with a small audible pop! as if naming these words had hurt his lip and he was protecting it. I felt sick inside. The dangerous recombinant and nanotech stuff. . . “What else have they got cooked up for us?”

  “Nothing that’s going to get out,” he said, and looked straight at me. Too straight. I couldn’t tell what the look meant.

  And then I could.

  “Colin, no, if you don’t examine it all minutely—”

  The explosion rocked the cafe, even though we were probably miles away and undoubtedly the GSEA had thrown a blast shield around the area first. But a blast shield only contains flying debris, and anyway nothing really muffles a nuclear blast. People at the foodbelt screamed and clutched their bowls of soysynth soup and soysnth steak. The holoterminal, which was in the food-line half of the cafe and which someone had turned to the National Scooter Championships, flickered momentarily.

  Colin said stiffly, “It was too dangerous to examine minutely. Anything could have escaped from there. Anything they were working on.”

  I stood up unsteadily. There was no reason for the unsteadiness. I kept my voice level. “Colin — was the lab really empty? Did Miranda Sharifi and the other Supers really get out before you got there? Before you blew it up, I wanted to say.

  “Yes, they were gone,” Colin said, and met my eyes so steadily, so guilessly, that I immediately knew he was lying.

  “Colin—”

  “Your service with the GSEA is terminated, Diana. We appreciate your help. Six months’ pay will be deposited to your credit account, and a discreet and nonspecific letter of commendation provided if you ever want one. You are, of course, constrained from selling your story to the media in any form whatsoever. Should you break this prohibition, you could be subject to severe penalties up to and including imprisonment. Please accept the Department’s warmest thanks for your assistance.”

  “Colin—”

  For just a second there was a flash of a real person on his face. “You’re done, Diana. It’s over.”

  But, of course, it wasn’t.

  I slipped through the general street pandemonium — reporters, townspeople, agents, even the first sightseers on the newly fixed gravrail — without notice. In my rumpled winter jacks, a scarf over the bottom half of my face, my hair as dirty as everyone else’s in East Oleanta, I looked like just one more confused Liver. This might have pleased me, if I had been capable of being pleased by anything just then. Something was terribly wrong, wrong in my head, and I didn’t know what. I had gotten what I wanted: Huevos Verdes was stopped from releasing destruction such as the dur-agem dissembler. The country, unchanged economic problems notwithstanding, now stood at least a chance of recovery, once the clocking mechanism on all the released dissemblers ran through its set number of replications. Twelve-year-old girls could eat; old men would not have to trudge through the snow along disabled rail tracks, attacked for food. I had gotten what I wanted.

  Something was very wrong.

  The guards were just leaving Annie’s apartment. I passed them in the hall. Neither one gave me a second glance. Billy lay on the sofa, with Annie seated on a chair at his head, her lips pressed together tightly enough to create a vacuum. Lizzie sat on the floor, gnawing on something that was probably supposed to be a chicken leg.

  “You. Get out,” Annie said.

  I ignored her, drawing up a second chair beside Billy. It was the same kind of plastisynth chair I’d sat in opposite Charlotte Prescott of the perfect nails, the only kind of chair I’d ever sat on in East Oleanta. Only this one was poison green. “Billy. You know what happened?”

  He said, so quietly I had to lean forward to hear him, “I heard, me. They blew up Eden.”

  Annie said, “And how’d they know, them, there was anything to blow up? You told them, Dr, Turner! You brought them government men to East Oleanta!”

  “And if I hadn’t, you’d still all be starving,” I snapped. Annie always brought out the worst in me. She never doubted herself.

  Annie subsided, fuming. Billy said, “It’s really gone, it? They really blew it up?”

  “Yes.” My throat felt thick. God knows why. “Billy, that’s where they were making the duragem dissembler. The thing that was causing so many breakdowns. Of all kinds of machinery.”

  He didn’t answer for a long time. I thought he’d fallen asleep. His wrinkled eyelids were at half mast, and the sag of his jowls hurt my chest.

  Finally he said, almost in a whisper, “She saved old Doug Kane’s life, her… And they were going to save ours, too…”

  I said sharply, �
��How do you know that?”

  He answered simply, with a guileness so different from Colin Kowalski’s that English should have different words for it. “I don’t know, me. But I saw her. She was kind to us, her, even though we ain’t got no more in common with her than… than with beetles. They knew things, them people. If you say she made the duragem dissembler, well, then maybe she did, her. But it’s hard to believe. And even if they did make it, them, by mistake, say…”

  “Yes? Yes, Billy?”

  “If Eden’s all blown up, it, how we ever going to find out how to unmake it?”

  “I don’t know. But there were other dangerous nanotechnol-ogy projects under way in … in Eden, Billy. Stuff that if it had gotten loose, could have caused even more destruction.”

  He considered this. “But Doctor Turner—”

  I said wearily, “I’m not a doctor, Billy. I’m not anything.”

  “If the government just goes around, them, blowing up all the illegal Edens, then don’t we lose the good things, us, as well as the bad ones? There was them rabid raccoons—”

  I said impatiently, “You have to have controls of genetic and nanotech research, Billy. Or any lunatic will go around inventing things like dissemblers.”

  “Seems to me some lunatic was,” he said, more tartly than I’d ever heard him. “And look what happened. The real scientists can’t invent no way to stop it, because they ain’t allowed, them, to do no experiments themselves!”

  No permitted antidotal research. It wasn’t a new argument. I’d heard it before. Never, however, from such a person, in such a situation. Billy had glimpsed Eden, and he thought the gods there were not only omnipotent but benevolent. Capable of antidotes to the evil they themselves had caused. Maybe I had thought so fleetingly, too, at the patent hearing for Miranda Sharifi’s Cell Cleaner. But SuperSleepless didn’t make mistakes, at least not on this order. If Huevos Verdes had released the duragem dissembler, it must have been deliberate, in order to destroy the culture that hated them. I couldn’t imagine any other reason. And Huevos Verdes had almost succeeded.

  “Go to sleep, Billy,” I said, and rose to leave. But the old man was disposed to talk.

  “I know, me, they weren’t bad. That girl, the day she saved Doug Kane’s life… and now it’s gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I ain’t never going to go down that mountain trail, me, and splash across that creek, me, and see that door in the hill open and go inside with her…”

  He was maundering. Of course: The agents had given him a truth drug. Whatever he had been asked, he’d answered. A talking jag was one of the side effects when those Pharmaceuticals wore off.

  “Good-bye, Billy. Annie.” I moved to the door.

  Lizzie heard something in my voice. She scuttled over to me, “chicken bone” in her hand, all big eyes and thin hands. But already she looked healthier. Children respond quickly to good food.

  “Vicki, we’ll have our lesson in the morning? Vicki?”

  I looked at her, and suddenly I had the completely insane sensation that I understood Miranda Sharifi.

  There exists a kind of desire I had never experienced, and never expected to experience. I have read about it. I have even seen it, in other people, although not many other people. It is desire so piercing, so pointed, so specific, that there is no stopping it, any more than you could stop a lance hurtled unerringly at your belly. The lance propels your whole body forward, according to the laws of physics. It changes the way your blood flows. You can die from it.

  Mothers are said to feel that raw agony of longing to save their infants from deadly harm. I have never been a mother. Lovers are said to feel it for each other. I never loved like that, despite shoddy imitations with Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David. Artists and scientists are said to feel it for their work. This last was true of Miranda Sharifi.

  What / had felt about Miranda Sharifi, ever since Washington, had been envy. And I hadn’t even known it.

  But not now. Looking at Lizzie, knowing I would leave East Oleanta in the morning, seeing from the corner of my eye the way Annie’s bulk shifted in her chair as she watched us, the lance changed the way my blood flowed and I put both hands convulsively over my belly. “Sure, Lizzie,” I gasped, and Colin Kowalski was in my voice, guileless with donkey superiority, lying like the pigs we are.

  But sometime near dawn, five or six in the morning, I woke abruptly from a blotchy sleep. Billy’s voice filled my mind: and now it’s gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I ain’t never going to go down that mountain trail, me, and splash across that creek, me, and see that door in the hill open and go inside with her…

  I crept out of my room in the hastily repaired hotel. A new terminal sat on the counter, but that was far too risky. I went down to the cafe. People were there, queuing at the foodbelt, a donkey newsgrid playing animatedly on the holoterminal. Liver channels almost never ran news. If East Oleanta wanted to see itself on a grid, it would have to be a donkey grid.

  I crouched in a corner, unobtrusively, and watched. Eventually the explosion came on, the sensational tracking of the duragem dissembler source that had so plagued the country, close-ups of Charlotte Prescott and of Kenneth Emile Koehler, GSEA director, in Washington. Then the explosion again. I wanted to freeze-frame the HT, but didn’t dare. Instead, I listened carefully.

  A gravrail left at 7 A.M. By eight I was in Albany. There was a public library terminal at the station, for the use of Livers who were fuzzy about their destinations and wanted to look up such vital information about them as the average mean rainfall, location of public scooter tracks, or longitude and lattitude. A sign said THE ANNA NAOMI COLDWELL PUBLIC LIBRARY. Cobwebs draped the sign. Few Livers were fuzzy about their destinations, or at least about what they wanted to know about them.

  I slipped in one of the credit chips the GSEA didn’t know I had. Maybe didn’t know. The terminal said, “Working. What town, city, county, or state are you interested in?”

  “Collins County, New York.” My voice was slightly unsteady.

  “Go ahead with your request, please.”

  “Display a map of the whole county, with natural features and political units.”

  When the map appeared, I asked to have sections of it enlarged, then enlarged again. The hypertext gave it to me. The map displayed lattitude and longitude.

  The explosion destroying the illegal lab had not been at the base of a hill, nor anywhere near a creek.

  . . . and now it’s gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I ain’t never going to go down that mountain trail, me, and splash across that creek, me, and see that door in the hill open, and go inside with her…

  I believed that the GSEA had destroyed an illegal genemod lab. I believed that it was the lab that had released the duragem dissemblers. But whatever, and whosever, that lab was, it wasn’t Billy Washington’s Eden. Not the Eden at the base of a mountain and beside a creek, the Eden that had permitted Billy to see its door opening, the Eden of the big-headed savior of old men who collapse in the woods. That Eden was still there.

  Which meant that whoever had released the duragem dissembler, it hadn’t been Huevos Verdes.

  So who had? And was Huevos Verdes with them or against them?

  On the one hand, the duragem destruction had started in East Oleanta, right around the corner from Eden. Coincidence? I doubted it. And yet Miranda Sharifi had done nothing to stop the dissembler release.

  On the other hand, if the Supers were interested in destruction, why had one of them allowed Billy Washington to see the entrance to their Adirondack outpost, and to walk away with that knowledge? Why hadn’t they killed him? And why had Miranda Sharifi tried to gain legal clearance for the Cell Cleaner, a clear boon to us ordinary mortals? The Sleepless already had that biological protection, and they sure the hell didn’t need the money.

  And what about the fact — Billy was right about this — that if some illegal lab did come up with something even worse than a duragem dissembler — a retrovirus tha
t made us all zombies, say — only Huevos Verdes had the brainpower to design a counter-microorganism fast enough to prevent a whole country of ambulatory idiots.

  But would they?

  Was Huevos Verdes my country’s enemy, or its covert friend?

  These weren’t the sort of questions a field agent was supposed to ask. A field agent was supposed to do what she was told and report any significant new developments up the chain of command. A field agent in my position should immediately call the GSEA. Again.

  But if I did that, the questions would never get answered. Because Colin Kowalski already thought he knew the answer: Bomb anything too unfamiliar.

  I must have stood, motionless, for fifteen minutes in front of the Anna Naomi Coldwell Public Library. Livers rushed by, hurrying to make their trains. A cleaning ’bot ambled along, scrubbing the floor. A sunshine dealer glanced at me, then away. A tech, genemod handsome, spoke into his terminal as he strode the platform.

  I have never felt so alone.

  I got back on the gravrail and returned to East Oleanta.

  IV

  OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2114

  The personal is political, and the political is always personal.

  —American folk saying

  Thirteen

  DREW ARLEN: FLORIDA

  I was underground with the Francis Marion Freedom Outpost for two months, throughout September and October. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to hide for days, weeks, months, from the GSEA. The Outpost was a bunch of nuts; what possible chance could they have of evading the government after killing three GSEA agents, murdering Leisha Camden, and blow-ing up an agency rescue plane? None. Nada. It wasn’t possible. That’s what I would have believed.

  Nor did I believe it was possible to hide from Huevos Verdes. Daily, hourly, I expected them to come for me.

  The shapes in my head were thin and fragile, like nervous membranes. Vulnerable. Uncertain. These shapes swam around the immobile green lattice like spooked fish. Sometimes they had faces, or the sketches effaces, on the uncertain shapes. Sometimes the faces were mine.