Beggars and Choosers (14 page)

He hit the invisible Y-energy shield in front of the participants‘

tables, and spread-eagled against it with an audible crack of skull
or other bone. Dazed, the man slid down the shield exactly as down a
brick wall. A security ‘bot dragged him away.

“—restore
order
to these proceedings
now
—”

“A smile, Miranda! Just one smile!”

“—unwarranted assumption of moral superiority, and contempt for
United States law, when in reality—”

“—and it looks, newsgrid viewers, as if the fracas were deliberately
created by Miranda Sharifi for hidden Huevos Verdes motives about which
we can only—”

Miranda Sharifi never moved.

Eventually Moderator Yongers, having no real choice, recessed for
lunch.

I pushed my way to the front of the chaotic Forum chamber, trying to
shadow Miranda Sharifi, which was of course impossible. The Y-shield
stood between us, and spectacularly built bodyguards muscled her and
Leisha Camden out a rear door. I caught sight of them again on the
roof, having knocked over four people to get there. They climbed into
an aircar. Several other cars followed in close pursuit, but I was
convinced it wasn’t going to do any of them—reporters, GSEA, FBI, rogue
geneticists, whoever—any good. They weren’t going to learn any more
than I had.

What had I learned?

The journalist in yellow stripes was right. Miranda Sharifi’s
performance had just ensured that Case 1892-A was dead. She had
insulted not only the intellectual and technical competence of eight
scientists, but their characters as well. I had cursorily researched
three of those scientists, the Nobel laureates, and I knew they were
not venial sellouts but people of integrity. Miranda must know that,
too. So—why?

Maybe, despite any research she’d done, she genuinely believed all
Sleepers were corrupt. Her grandmother, a brilliant woman, had believed
it. But somehow I didn’t think Miranda did.

Maybe she believed the five non-laureate scientists, mediocrities
with good political connections, would inevitably outvote the impartial
laureates. But if so, why alienate her three potential allies? And why
agree to seating the five mediocrities in the first place? All
panelists had been agreed upon by both sides.

No. Miranda Sharifi
wanted
to lose this case. She wanted a
decision against the Cell Cleaner.

But maybe I was being too anthropomorphic. Miranda Sharifi was,
after all, completely different from me. Her mental processes were
different, which included her motives. Maybe she’d alienated the panel
to… what? To make it harder to obtain official approval for the patent.
Maybe she only valued victory if it was hard won. Maybe making
everything as difficult as possible was part of some Sleepless Code of
Honor, built upon the fact that things came so easily to them. How the
fuck would I know?

All this ratiocination translated itself into self-disgust. Despite
the heat, it was a gorgeous day in Washington, one of those
clear-blue-sky-and-golden-light afternoons that seem to have blown in
from some more favored city. I walked along the mall, attracting
attention: the crazy donkey dressed like a gone-native Liver. Drug
dealers and lovers and gravboarding teenagers left me alone, which was
just as well. I was having one of those brief, sharp self-questionings
that leave you both enervated and embarrassed afterwards. What was I
doing
skulking around in these silly plastic clothes, trying to manufacture
some difficult personal meaningfulness out of following around people
who were clearly my superiors?

For the Sleepless were my superiors, and in more than intelligence.
In discipline, in sheer sweep of vision. In the enviable certainty that
accompanies purpose, even if I didn’t know what that purpose was,
whereas all I had was an aimless, drifting alarm about where my country
was headed. An alarm set off by a semi-sentient pink dog hurling over a
terrace railing. When I thought of that now, it sounded silly.

I couldn’t even define where I thought my country ought to head. I
could only impede, not propel, and I wasn’t even sure what I was
impeding. It was sure as hell more than Case 1892-A.

I didn’t know what the Sleepless were trying to do. Nobody knew. So
what made me so damn sure I should be stopping them from doing it?

On the other hand, nothing I had done so far, or seemed likely to do
in the near future, had had the slightest effect on Miranda Sharifi’s
plans. I had not reported on her to the GSEA, not kept her under
constant surveillance, not even reached a coherent conclusion about her
in the private and unsought-after recesses of my mind. I was completely
irrelevant. So there was nothing for me to regret, nothing to agonize
over doing or not doing, nothing to change.
Zero
, whatever
you multiply or divide it by, is still zero. Somehow this failed to
cheer me up.

==========

The next four days were a letdown. People primed for scientific
theater—I include myself—instead received hours of incomprehensible
graphs, tables, equations, explanations, and holomodels of cells and
enzymes and such. Much time was given to the tertiary and quaternary
structure of proteins. There was a spirited and incomprehensible debate
on Worthington’s transference equations as applied to redundant RNA
coding. I fell asleep during this. I was not alone. Fewer people showed
up each day. Of those who did, only the scientists looked rapt.

It didn’t seem fair, somehow. Miranda Sharifi had told us we were
looking at the greatest medical breakthrough in two hundred years, and
to most of us it looked like alchemy. THE PEOPLE MUST CONTROL SCIENCE
AND TECHNOLOGY. Yes, right. How do churls make decisions about wizardry
we can’t understand?

In the end, they rejected it.

Two of the Nobel laureates wrote dissenting opinions, Barbara
Poluikis and Martin Exford. They favored allowing beta testing on human
volunteers, and didn’t rule out possible future licensing. They wanted
the scientific knowledge. You could see, even through the formal
wording of their brief, joint opinion, that they panted for it. I saw
Miranda Sharifi watching them carefully.

The majority opinion did everything but print copies of itself on
the American flag. Safety of United States citizens, sacred trust,
preservation of the identity of the human genome, blah blah blah.
Everything, in fact, that had led me to join the GSEA the day Katous
hurled himself off my balcony.

At some deep level, I still believed the majority opinion was right.
Unregulated biotech held the potential for incredible disaster. And
nobody could really regulate Huevos Verdes biotech because nobody could
really understand it. SuperSleepless intelligence and American patent
protection combined to ensure that. And if you can’t regulate it,
better to keep it out of the country entirely.

Nonetheless, I left the courtroom profoundly depressed. And
immediately learned that my ignorance about cellular biology was not my
only, or worst, ignorance. I’d thought I was a cynic. But cynicism is
like money: somebody else always has more of it than you do.

I sat on the steps of the Science Court, my back to a Doric column
the thickness of a small redwood. A light wind blew. Two men paused in
the shelter of the column to light sunshine pipes; I’d noticed that
Easterners like it smoked. In California, we preferred to drink it. The
men were genemod handsome, dressed in the severe sleeveless black suits
fashionable on the Hill. Both ignored me. Livers noticed instantly that
I wasn’t one of them, but donkeys seldom looked past the jacks and
soda-can jewelry. Sufficient grounds for dismissal.

“So how long do you think?” one man said.

“Three months to market, maybe. My guess is either Germany or
Brazil.”

“What if Huevos Verdes doesn’t do it?”

“John, why
wouldn’t
they? There’s a fortune to be made,
and that Sharifi woman is no fool. I’m going to be watching the
investment trends very carefully.”

“You know, I don’t even really care about the investment factor?”
John’s voice was wistful. “I just want it for Jana and me and the
girls. Jana’s had these growths on and off for years… what we’ve got
now only restrains them so far.”

The other man put a hand on John’s arm. “Watch Brazil. That’s my
best guess. It’ll be quick, quicker than if we’d licensed it here. And
without all the complications of every blighted Liver town clamoring
for it for their medunit, at some undoable cost.”

Pipes lighted, they left.

I sat there, marveling at my own stupidity. Of course. Turn down the
Cell Cleaner for American development, make huge political capital from
your “protection” of Livers, save a staggering amount of credits from
not offering it to your political constituency, and then buy the
medical breakthrough for yourself and your loved ones overseas. Of
course.

The people must control science and technology.

Maybe Dr. Lee Chang was right. Maybe the Cell Cleaner would run amok
and kill them all. All but the Livers. Who would then rise up to
establish a just and humane state.

Yes. Right. Desdemona’s mommy and the other Livers I’d seen on the
train controlling biotech that could eventually alter the human race
into something else. The blind splicing genes, blindly. Right.

Inertia, first cousin to depression, seized me. I sat there, getting
colder, until the sky darkened and my ass hurt from the hard marble.
The portico was long since deserted. Slowly, stiffly, I got my body to
its feet—and had my first piece of luck in weeks.

Miranda Sharifi walked down the wide steps, keeping to the shadows.
The face wasn’t hers, and the brown jacks weren’t hers, and I had seen
her and Leisha Camden climb into an aircar, which took off two hours
ago, pursued by half of Washington. This Liver had pale skin and a
large nose and short dirty-blonde hair. So why was I so sure this was
Miranda? The big head, and the tip of red ribbon that I, zoom-lensed,
saw peeking from her back hip pocket. Or maybe it was just that I
needed it to be her, and the “Miranda” who took off with Leisha Camden
to be a decoy.

I groped in my pocket for the mid-range infrared sensor Colin
Kowalski had given me and surreptitiously aimed it at her. It went off
the scale. Miranda or no, this person had the revved metabolism of a
SuperSleepless. And no GSEA agents in sight.

Not, of course, that I would see them.

But I refused to give in to negativity. Miranda was mine. I followed
her to the gravrail station, pleased at how easily all my old training
returned. We boarded a local train traveling north. We settled into a
crowded, malodorous car with so many children it seemed the Livers must
be breeding right there on the uncleaned floor.

We stopped every twenty minutes or so at some benighted Liver town.
I didn’t dare sleep; Miranda might get off someplace without me. What
if the trip lasted days? By morning I had trained myself to nap between
stops, my unconscious set like an edgy guard dog to nip me awake each
time the train slowed and lurched. This produced very strange dreams.
Once it was David I was following; he kept shedding his clothes as he
danced away from me, an unreachable succubus. Once I dreamed I’d lost
Miranda and the Science Court had me on trial for uselessness against
the state. The worst was the dream in which I was injected with the
Cell Cleaner and realized it was in fact chemically identical with the
industrial-strength cleaner used by the household ‘bot in my

San Francisco enclave, and every cell in my body was painfully
dissolving in bleach and ammonia. I woke gasping for air, my face
distorted in the black glass of the window.

After that I stayed awake. I watched Miranda Sharifi as the grav
train, miraculously not malfunctioning, slid through the mountains of
Pennsylvania and into New York State.

DREW ARLEN: SEATTLE

There was a latticework in my head. I couldn’t make it go away. Its
shape floated there all the time now, looking a little like the
lattices that roses grow on. It was the dark purple color that objects
take on in late twilight when it’s hard to see what color anything
really is. Miri once told me that nothing “really” is any color—it was
all a matter of “circumstantial reflected wave-lengths.” I didn’t
understand what she meant. To me, colors are too important to be
circumstantial.

The lattice bent around and met itself to form a circle. I couldn’t
see what was inside the circle, even though the lattice had
diamond-shaped holes. Whatever was inside remained completely hidden.

I didn’t know what this graphic was. It suggested nothing to me. I
couldn’t will it to suggest anything, or to change form, or to go away.
This hadn’t ever happened to me before. I was the Lucid Dreamer. The
shapes that came from my deep unconscious were always meaningful,
always universal, always malleable. I shaped them. I brought them
outward, to the conscious world. They didn’t shape me. I was the Lucid
Dreamer.

==========

I watched Miri’s final day in Science Court on hologrid in a hotel
room in Seattle, where I was scheduled to give the revised “The
Warrior” concert tomorrow afternoon. The robocams zoomed in close on
Leisha and Sara as they climbed into their aircar on the Forum roof.
Sara looked exactly like Miri. The holomask over her face, the wig, the
red ribbon. She even walked like Miri. Leisha’s eyes had the pinched
look that meant she was furious. Had she already discovered the switch?
Or maybe that would come in the car. Leisha wouldn’t take it well.
Nothing frustrated her more than being lied to, maybe because she was
so truthful herself. I was glad I wasn’t there.

Spiky red shapes, taut with anxiety, sped around the purple
latticework that never went away.

Sara/Miri closed the car door. The windows, of course, were opaqued.
I turned off the newsgrid. It might be months before I saw Miri again.
She could slip in and out of East Oleanta—she had, in fact, come to
Washington from there—but Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer in his
state-of-the-art powerchair, followed everywhere by the GSEA, could
not. And even if I went to Huevos Verdes, Nikos Demetrios or Toshio
Ohmura or Terry Mwakambe might decide a shielded link with East Oleanta
was too great a risk for just personal communication. I might not even
talk with Miri for months.