by Nancy Kress
Brad said, “That holo didn’t come from the prison.”
I’d never thought it did. But I wanted to hear his reasoning. “How do you know?”
He smiled patiently, the newly fledged techie addressing his illiterate elder. The little prick. I had forgotten more tech than he had yet learned in his belated post-syringe love affair with actual knowledge. He was sixteen. Still, I had no real right to contempt. I hadn’t noticed where the holo originated.
“Laser holos have feeds,” he said. “You know, those skinny little lines of radiation you can only see kind of sidewise, and only if you’re looking—”
“Peripheral vision. Yes, I know, Brad. Where were they coming from, if not the prison?”
“Lizzie and me only studied about them last week.” He put a proprietary hand on Lizzie’s knee. Annie scowled.
“Where were the feeds coming from, Brad?”
“At first I hardly noticed them at all. Then I remembered the—”
“From where, damn it!”
Startled, he pointed. Horizontally, to the top of a not-very-near mountain I couldn’t name. I stared at the mountain, silhouetted in moonlight.
“I don’t see why you’re yelling at me, you,” Brad said, somewhere between a sulk and a sneer. I ignored him. I hoped Lizzie was losing interest in him. He wasn’t nearly as bright as she was.
0 same new world.
1 stared at the dark nameless mountain. That’s where they were, then. The Will-and-Idea underground, which Drew Arlen had hinted at, and of which Billy had met a member weeks ago. But that man had been syringed. Did that mean you could be syringed, with all its changes to basic biological machinery, and still be considered human by the underground? Or was the man being used as an informer, who would be dealt with for his turncoat treason once the war was over? Such things were not unknown in history.
This movement had loosed the duragem dissembler. They were killing donkeys. They had successfully hidden Drew Arlen for two months from Huevos Verdes. They armed their soldiers with United States military weapons.
It was dawn before I slept.
The next night, the holo was back, but changed.
The double helix, red and blue in white light, was still there. But this time the flashing letters read:
DON’T TREAD ON ME
WILL AND IDEA
Don’t tread on me? What pseudo-revolutionary group could possibly have the demented idea that a bunch of pastoral dirt-feeding chanters were treading on them? Or even interested in them?
I had a sudden insight. It wasn’t only that Livers, due to using the syringes, may or may not have become non-human. That alone hadn’t provoked the underground’s hatred. The Liver’s non-interest had. Syringed people not only didn’t pay the established government much attention, most of them were equally uninterested in its would-be replacements. They didn’t need any replace-ment, or thought they didn’t. And for some people, being hated is preferable to being irrelevant. Any action that provokes response, no matter how irrational, is better than being irrelevant. Even if the response is never enough.
Another thing: These holos were not trying to convert anyone. There were no broadcasts explaining why people should join the underground. There were no simply worded leaflets. There were no cell members furtively reaching out to the susceptible, persuading in hushed voices. The people projecting these holos were not interested in recruitment. They were interested in self-righteous violence.
The Livers gazing upward at the sky responded to this second holo exactly as they had the night before. Orderly, without confusion, without any signal given, they began to move toward the prison. There was no haste. Mothers took the time to wrap up babies against the night chill, to finish breast-feeding, to arrange who would stay with sleeping toddlers. Fires were banked. Knitters did whatever they do at the end of a row of stitches. But within ten minutes every adult in the camp had started to move, ten thousand strong, toward the walls. They moved courteously around the tents and temporary hearths of those camped hard by the prison, careful not to step on anything. As soon as they were shoulder-to-shoulder, they started to chant.
“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”
The holo pulsed for fifteen minutes, then changed:
LIBERTY OR DEATH
WILL AND IDEA
The white light changed to an American flag, stars and bars su-perimposed over the double helix.
“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…” Fifteen minutes later the holo words changed again:
HOPE
WILL AND IDEA
“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…” The American flag became a rattlesnake, poised to strike. It looked so real that a few children started to cry.
Another fifteen minutes and the snake was replaced by the original double helix and holy white light. This time we got three lines:
DEATH TO ABOMINATIONS
POWER TO TRUE LIVERS
WILL AND IDEA
The double helix rotated slowly. I wondered how many of the chanters even knew what it was.
“Free Miranda…”
At the end of an hour, it was over. It took another hour for the huge crowd to quietly disperse, which it started to do the moment the holo vanished.
Back in my tent, I borrowed Lizzie’s terminal, with its library crystal. “Don’t tread on me” was first used on flags in the Colonial South, as relations with Great Britain deteriorated, and later adopted as Revolutionary slogan in much of New England. “Liberty or Death” appeared on flags in Virginia, following Patrick Henry’s exhortation to turn on the British masters. “Hope” was the legend on the flag of the Colonial armed schooner Lee, the first flag to also feature thirteen stars. I couldn’t find a record anywhere of “Will and Idea.”
These maniacs considered themselves colonists in their own country, fighting to overthrow a donkey establishment that was largely in passive hiding and, maybe, a syringed Liver population that was essentially defenseless. Unless you count chanting as a weapon.
The government existed, in part, to defend its citizens against this sort of demented civil insurrection. Did we have a government left? Did we have a country left?
The only official representative of that country in sight, Oak Mountain Maximum Security Federal Prison, sat silent and dark. Maybe it was even empty.
I walked back toward the prison walls. This time I went right up to them, borrowing a torch from some obliging camper who asked mildly, without insistence, that I return it when I was done. I walked along the prison walls, inspecting.
A few graffiti, not very many. Few Livers could write. What graffiti there was hadn’t been written on the walls themselves, which of course shimmered with a faint Y-energy shield. Instead river boulders had been rolled laboriously against the shield, the earth scraped raw from their passage. On the rocks was painted FREEE MARANDA. WE R PEEPLUL TO. TAK DOWN THEEZ WALLZ.
A pathetic scratching in one rock, a half-inch deep, where some group had begun, symbolically at least, to tak down theez wallz.
The prison door, facing the river, blank and impenetrable. Thirty feet up the security screens, which may or may not have been recording, were dark blank patches.
Above the walls the shimmer, hard to see unless you used your peripheral vision, extended outward a few feet, like eaves. I couldn’t imagine why.
Towers loomed at each of the four corners. They had no windows, or else windows holoed to look like they didn’t exist.
I walked back to my tent, returning the torch on the way. Annie, Billy, Lizzie, and Brad had already disappeared into their tents, two by two. Clouds were rolling in from the west. I sat outside for a long time, wrapped in a plasticloth tarp, cold even though it was at least seventy degrees out. The prison, too, sat massive and silent, not even flying a holographic flag. Dead.
“Lizzie, I need you to do something for me. Something tremendously important.”
She looked up at me. I’d found her deep in the wo
ods, after hours of patiently asking total strangers if they’d seen a thin black girl with pink ribbons tying up her two braids. Lizzie sat on a fallen log, which the backs of her thighs were probably eating. She’d been crying. Brad, of course. I’d kill him. No, I wouldn’t. There was no other way for her to learn. Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David.
The timing was good for me. I could make use of these tears.
I said, “There’s a message I have to get to Charleston. I can’t go myself because the GSEA is monitoring me remotely; I told you that. They’d know. And there’s nobody else I can trust. Annie wouldn’t do it, and Billy won’t leave Annie…”
She went on looking at me, not changing expression, her eyes swollen and her nose red.
“It’s about Miranda Sharifi,” I said. “Lizzie, it’s unbelievably important. I need you to walk to Charleston, and I’ll time-encode in your terminal what you need to do after you arrive. In fact, I’ve already done that. I know this sounds mysterious, but it’s essential.” I put everything I had — or once had — into that last sentence. The donkey authority. The adult tone of command. The confidence that this girl loved me.
Lizzie went on gazing at me, expressionless.
I handed her the terminal. “You walk along the gravrail track until it branches at Ash Falls. Then you—”
“There’s no message about Miranda Sharifi,” Lizzie said.
“I just told you there was.” Donkey authority. Adult command.
“No. There’s nothing anybody can do about Miranda. You just want me out of here because you’re afraid that underground will attack tonight.”
“No. It’s not that. Why would you think—” you, who owe me so much, my tone said ” — that I don’t have resources you don’t understand? If I say there is a crucial message about Miranda, there is a crucial message about Miranda.”
Lizzie stared at me emptily, hopelessly.
“Lizzie—”
“He left me. Brad. For Maura Casey!”
It’s wrong to laugh at puppy love. For one thing, it’s not that different from what most adults do. I sat on the log next to her.
“He says … he says, him… that I’m too smart for my own good.”
“Livers always say that,” I said gently. “Brad just hasn’t caught on yet.”
“But I am smarter than he is, me.” She sounded like the child she still was. “Lots smarter. He’s so stupid about so many things!”
I didn’t say, Then why do you want him; I recognized a hopeless arena for logic when I saw one. Instead I said, “Most people are going to look stupid to you, Lizzie. Starting with your mother. That’s just the way you are, and the way the world is going to be now. For you.”
She blew her nose on a leaf. “I hate it, me! I want people to understand me!”
“Well. Better get used to it.”
“He says, him, I try to control him! I don’t, me!”
Who should control the technology? Paul’s voice said to me, lying in bed, pleased to be instructing the person he had just fucked.
Pleased to be on top. Lizzie probably did try to control Brad. Whoever can, Billy said.
“Lizzie … in Charleston…”
She jumped up. “I said I’m not going, me, and I’m not! I hope there is an attack tonight! I hope I die in it!” She ran off, crashing through the woods, crying.
I took after Lizzie at a dead run. At ten yards, I started gaining. She was fast, but I was more muscled, with longer legs. She was within a yard of my grasp. It was six hours before dark. I could tie her up and physically carry her as far from Oak Mountain, from danger, as I could get in six hours. If I had to, I’d knock her out to let me carry her.
My fingers brushed her back. She spurted forward and leaped over a pile of brush. I leaped, too, and my ankle twisted under me as I fell.
Pain lanced through my leg. I cried out. Lizzie didn’t even falter. Maybe she thought I was faking. I tried to call out to her, but a sudden wave of nausea — biological shock — took me. I turned my head just in time to vomit. Lizzie kept running, and disappeared among the trees. I heard her even after I couldn’t see her anymore. Then I couldn’t hear her either.
Slowly I sat up. My ankle throbbed, already swollen. I couldn’t tell if it was sprained or even fractured. If it was, Miranda’s nan-otech would fix it. But not instantly.
I felt cold, then sweaty. Don’t pass out, I told myself sternly. Not now, not here. Lizzie…
Even if I could find her again, I couldn’t carry her anywhere.
When the biologic shock passed, I limped back to camp. Every step was painful, and not just to my ankle. When I reached the outskirts of the camp, some Livers helped me get to my tent. By the time I got there, the pain was already muted. It was also dark. Lizzie wasn’t there, and neither was Annie nor Billy. Lizzie’s terminal and library crystal were gone from her tent.
I sat huddled in front of my tent, watching the sky. Tonight was cloudy, without stars or moon. The air smelled of rain. I shivered, and hoped I was wrong. Completely, spectacularly, om-nisciently wrong. About the underground nobody admitted actually existed, about their targets, about everything.
After all, what did I know?
# # *
“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”
The red-and-blue helix pulsed, overlaid by the red, white, and blue flag. WILL AND IDEA, no other legend. Whose will? What idea? Oak Mountain Prison sat dark and still under the rhythmical light.
“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”
I still sat in front of my tent, nursing my ankle. Annie had wrapped it tightly in a strip of woven cloth, which my skin was probably consuming. I sat perhaps a quarter mile from the ten thousand chanters. Their chant carried to me clearly.
The sky’was dark, overcast. The summer air smelled of rain, of pine, of wildflowers. I realized for the first time that these scents were as strong as ever, whereas the stink of human bodies was muted in my altered olfactory nerves. Miranda Company knew their business.
The torches held by the chanters mixed with Y-energy cones: wavering primitive light and steady high tech. And above it, the red-and-blue glare. Broad stripes and bright stars.
The first plane came from Brad’s nameless mountain, flying without lights, a metallic glint visible only if you were looking for it. They didn’t need planes; they could have used long-distance artillery. Somebody wanted to record the action close up. I staggered to my feet, already crying. The plane came in over the top of the prison and swept low, buzzing the chanters. People screamed. It dropped a single impact bomb, which went off in the middle of the crowd. Barely enough to cause fifty deaths, even in that mass of bodies. They were playing.
People started to shove and push, screaming. Those fortunates on the edge of the crowd ran free, toward the distant wooded slopes. I could see figures behind them, distant but separate, stumble over each other. Miranda had left me with 20/20 vision.
A second plane, that I hadn’t seen in advance, flew over me from the opposite direction and disappeared over the prison walls. I didn’t hear the second bomb, which must have fallen on the other side of the walls. The explosion was drowned out by the screaming.
People started to trample each other.
Billy. Annie. Lizzie…
The first plane had wheeled and was returning from behind me. This time, I knew, it wouldn’t be to play. Too many people from the edges of the crowd were scrambling to safety. Would the bomb take out Oak Mountain itself? Of course. That’s where the chief abomination was. I didn’t know what kinds of shields the prison had, but if the attack was nuclear…
The holo above the prison changed for the last time:
THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE
THE IDEA OF HUMAN PURITY
I thought I saw Lizzie. Insane — it wasn’t possible to distinguish individuals at this distance. My mind merely wanted me to die in as much dramatic anguish as possible. And so I thought I saw Lizzie run forward, and be tramp
led by people panicked to escape what had been inevitable since the creation of the first genemod.
I squeezed my eyes shut to die. And then opened them again.
In time to see the nanosecond in which it happened.
The shield around Oak Mountain glowed brighter than the holo in the sky. One moment the prison was wrapped in silvery light. The next the same silvery light shot out from the prison walls over the crowd below, in grotesquely elongated eaves of pure energy. The bomb, or whatever it was, hit the top of the energy shield and detonated, or ricocheted, or was thrown back. The plane exploded in a light that blinded me, but wasn’t quite nuclear. An instant later a second explosion: the other plane. Then dead silence.
People had stopped running, most of them. They looked up at the opaque silver roof protecting them, the roof of manmade high-tech radiation.
I cried out and staggered forward. Immediately my ankle gave way and I fell. I raised myself chest-high off the ground and stared up. The “roof extended all the way to the lowest slopes of the mountain. I couldn’t see through it. But I heard the subsequent explosions, artillery or radiation or something that must have been directed from the top of the distant mountain.
People were screaming again. But the shoving and trampling had stopped. Huddled under this high-energy umbrella was the safest place to be.
I thought: Huevos Verdes protects their own.
I lay back down on the ground, my cheek pressed against the hard-packed dirt. It felt as if I had no bones; I literally couldn’t move. Small children could have trampled on me. Huevos Verdes had protected their own, incidentally saving the lives of nine or ten thousand Livers while wiping out some other unknown number of Livers. That was who made the laws now: Huevos Verdes. Twenty-seven Sleepless plus their eventual offspring, who did not consider themselves part of my country. Or any other. Not donkeys, not Livers, not the Constitution, which even to donkeys had always been silent in the background but fundamental, like bedrock. No longer.