Beggars and Choosers s-2

by Nancy Kress

  Who was the statesman whose last, dying words concerned the fate of the United States? Adams? Webster? I’d always thought it was a stupid story. Shouldn’t his last words have concerned his wife or his will or the height of his pillow — something concrete and personal? How grandiose to think oneself large enough to match the fate of a whole country — and at such a moment! Pretentious, inflated. Also silly — the man wasn’t going to pass any more laws or influence any more policy, he was dying. Silly.

  Now I understood. And it was still silly. But I understood.

  I think I have never felt such desolation.

  There was a final explosion that left my ear, the one not pressed to the ground, completely deaf. I struggled to turn my head and look up. The shield had disappeared, and so had the holo and the entire top of the distant mountain. I had never even learned its name.

  More screaming. Now, when it was all over. The Livers probably didn’t realize that, might never even realize what had been lost. Small bands of roaming, self-sufficient tribes, not needing that quaint entity, “the United States,” any more than Huevos Verdes did. Livers.

  The first fleeing people ran past me, toward the dark hills. I stumbled to my feet, or rather foot. If I didn’t put my full weight on the self-healing ankle, I could hop forward. After a few yards I actually found a dropped torch. I extinguished it and leaned on it like a cane. It wasn’t quite long enough, but it would do.

  It was slow work being the only person moving toward the prison. People had stopped shoving, and some kind or guilty souls started to carry away the trampled dead. But a crowd that size takes a long time to disperse. The noise from the crying and the shouting was overwhelming, especially after I started pressing my way through the narrow capillaries between people. My ankle throbbed.

  It was at least an hour before I reached the prison itself.

  I hobbled the length of the wall and turned the corner toward the river. It was somehow astonishing to me that the water continued to flow and murmur, the rocks to sit in their usual dumb fashion. For a second I saw not this river but another, with a dead snowshoe rabbit beside it — which river did I hear murmur in the darkness? There were no people left on this side of the walls, but I thought I saw dead bodies on the ground. They were actually shadows. Even after I realized this, they went on looking like corpses. They went on looking like Lizzie, all of them, at different moments. The pain had spread from my ankle to my whole leg. I wasn’t quite sane.

  When I reached the prison doors, I looked up at the blank security screens, angled out from the wall much as the silvery shield has been. I said to them, “I want to come in.”

  Nothing happened.

  I said, louder — and even I heard the edge of hysteria in my voice — “I’m coming in now. I am. Now. Coming in.”

  The river murmured. The screens brightened slightly — or maybe not. After a moment the door swung open.

  Just like Eden.

  I limped into a small antechamber. The door swung closed behind me. A door opened on the far wall.

  I have been in prisons before, as part of my long-ago intelligence training. I knew how they worked. First the computer-run automated doors and biodetectors, all of which passed me through. Then the second set of doors, which are not Y-energy but carbon-alloy barred doors, run only manually because there are always people who can crack any electronic system, including retina prints. It’s been done. The second set of doors are controlled by human beings behind Y-energy screens, and if there are no human beings, nobody gets in. Or out. Not without explosives as large as the ones the Will and Idea people had already tried.

  I stood in front of the first barred door and peered through the cloudy window to the guard station, a window constructed of plasticlear and not Y-energy, because Y-energy, too, is vulnerable to enough sophisticated electronics. There was a figure there.

  Somehow Huevos Verdes must have brought in their own people — when? How? And what had they done with the donkey prison officials?

  The barred door opened.

  Then the next one.

  And the next.

  There was no one in the prison yard. Recreation and dining halls on the right, administrative and gym on the left. I hobbled toward the cellblocks, at the far end. A solitary small building sat behind them. Solitary. The door opened when I pushed it.

  I half expected, when I reached her cell, to find it empty, a rock rolled away from the tomb door. Playing with cultural icons…

  But the SuperSleepless don’t play. She was there, sitting on a sleeping bunk she would never use, in a space ten by five, with a lidless toilet and a single chair. Stacked on the chair were books, actual bound hard copy printouts. They looked old. There was no terminal. She looked up at me, not smiling.

  What do you say?

  “Miranda? Sharifi?”

  She nodded, just once, her slightly too large head. She wore prison jacks, dull gray. There was no red ribbon in her dark hair.

  “They… your… the doors are open.”

  She nodded again. “I know.”

  “Are you … do you want to come out?” Even to myself I sounded inane. There were no precedents.

  “In a minute. Sit down, Diana.”

  “Vicki,” I said. More inanity. “I go by Vicki now.”

  “Yes.” She still didn’t smile. She spoke in the slightly hesitant manner I remembered, as if speech were not her natural manner of communication. Or maybe as if she were choosing her words carefully, not from too few but from an unimaginable too many. I moved the books off the chair and sat.

  She said the last thing I could have anticipated. “You’re troubled.”

  “I’m…”

  “Aren’t you troubled?”

  “I’m stunned.” She nodded again, apparently unsurprised. I said, “Aren’t you? But no, of course not. You expected this to happen.”

  “Expected which to happen?” she said in that slow speech, and of course she was right. Too much had happened. I could be referring to any of it: the biological changes since Before, the attack by the Will and Idea underground, the rescue.

  But what I said was, “The disintegration of my country.” I heard my own faint emphasis on “my” and was instantly ashamed: my country, not yours. This woman had saved my life, all our lives.

  But not completely ashamed.

  Miranda said, “Temporarily.”

  “Temporarily? Don’t you know what you’ve done?”

  She went on gazing at me, without answering. I suddenly wondered what it would be like to encounter that gaze day after day, knowing she could figure out anything about you, while you could never understand the first thing she was thinking. Possibly not even if she told you.

  All at once, I understood Drew Arlen, and why he had done what he had.

  Miranda said — the perfect proof, although of course I didn’t think of that until much later — “Huevos Verdes didn’t extend that shield.”

  I gaped at her.

  “You thought they did. But we at Huevos Verdes agreed not to defend you against your own kind. We agreed it would be better to let you find your own way. If we do everything, you will just. . . resent. . .” It was the only time I ever felt she was genuinely at a loss for words.

  “Then who extended the shield?”

  “The Oak Mountain federal authorities. On direct order of the President, who’s down but not out.” She almost smiled, sadly. “The donkeys protected their own American citizens. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it, Vicki?”

  “What I want to hear? But is it true?”

  “It’s true.”

  I stared at her. Then I stood up and hobbled out of the cell. I didn’t even say good-bye. I didn’t know I was going. I limped so fast across the prison yard that I almost fell. I didn’t have to cross the whole yard; they were there, conferring in a huddle. They stopped when they saw me, stared stonily, waited. Two techies in blue uniforms, and a man and a woman in suits. Tall, genemod handsome. With head
s of ordinary size. Donkeys.

  Federal officials of the United States, protecting citizens under the high-tech shield of the laws and on the subterranean bedrock of the Constitution of the United States. “The right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

  “The President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall so Commission all the Officers of the United States.”

  “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government, and shall protect each of them… against domestic Violence.” Each of them. The donkeys glared at me, clearly unhappy that I was there.

  I turned and limped back to Miranda’s cell. She didn’t seem surprised.

  “Why did they let me into the prison? And where were they when I came in?”

  “I asked them to let you in, and to let you bring your questions directly to me.”

  She’d asked them. I said, “And why didn’t Huevos Verdes…” But she had already answered that. We agreed it would be better to let you find your own way.

  I said quietly, “Like gods. Set above us.”

  She said, “If you want to think of it that way.”

  I went on gazing at her. Two eyes, two arms, a mouth, two legs, a body. But not human.

  I said — made myself say — “Thank you.”

  And she smiled. Her whole face changed, opened up, became planes of light. She looked like anyone else.

  “Good luck to you, Vicki.”

  I heard, To all of you. Miranda Sharifi would never need luck. When you controlled that much tech, including the tech of your own mind, luck became irrelevant. What happened was what you wanted to happen.

  Or maybe not. She had loved Drew Aden.

  “Thank you,” I said again, formally, inanely. I left the cell.

  They would go back to Sanctuary, I suddenly knew. When they agreed the time was right they would, by some unimaginable technology that would look to us godlike, snatch Miranda out of Oak Mountain and return to their orbital in the sky. They should never have left Sanctuary. Whatever they wanted to do for us, down here, for whatever reasons, they could probably do just as well from Sanctuary. Where they would be safe. Where they belonged.

  Not on Earth.

  I realized, then, that in my preoccupation with the United States I had failed to ask Miranda about the rest of the world. But it didn’t matter. The answer was already clear. The SuperSleepless would supply the rest of the world with syringes, as soon as they had manufactured enough of them. Miranda would not make distinctions among nationalities — not in the face of the much greater distinction between all of us and the twenty-seven of them. And then the rest of the world, like the United States, would undergo the cataclysmic political changes that came from changing the very nature of the species. They would have no choice.

  Nobody spoke to me as I made my way back through the barred doors and the automated doors and the biodetectors. That was all right with me; they didn’t have to speak. All they had to do was be there, officially there, upholding the laws, keeping law itself in existence. Even when the technology couldn’t be controlled, or even understood by most of us. The effort to include all of us humans in the law was what counted. The effort to understand the law, not just follow it. That might save us.

  Maybe.

  The doors all locked audibly behind me.

  Outside it had started to rain. I hobbled through the drizzle, through the dark, toward the Y-lights of the camp. They shone brightly, but my ankle still ached and twice I almost stumbled. Nearly everyone was under cover. From one tent I heard crying, wailing for someone dead in the panic after the air attack. It started to rain harder. The earths beneath my feet, one whole and one temporarily smashed, started to turn to nourishing mud.

  I had almost reached my tent when I saw them rushing toward me. Billy in the lead, waving a torch in the rain, his young-old face creased with relief. Annie, whom I didn’t like and probably never would. And Lizzie, leaping like a young gazelle, quickly overtaking and passing the other two, shouting and crying my name, so glad that I was here, that I was alive on Earth. My people.

  It was enough.

  Twenty-two

  DREW ARLEN: GSEA

  Oh, Miranda… I’m sorry. I never intended… But I would try to stop you again.

  And I don’t expect you to understand.

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