Beggars and Choosers (23 page)

I gasped, which sent unexpected pain through my left side. Jimmy
sank immediately to his waist in black, jellylike muck that lay beneath
the moss. His only hope now was to stay absolutely still and let
Campbell pull him out. But instead he gave a jaunty little wiggle of
his upper shoulders, one hand holding his nose, the other nonchalantly
clamped to his side. He stayed motionless for maybe ten seconds, and
then something sucked him down into the muck. His chest disappeared,
and then his shoulders, and then his head. The moss, lightly spattered
with muck, closed over him.

My heart hammered against my lungs.

Abigail went next. She shoved her Harrison Pheromone Obliterator
into a plastisynth pouch and sealed it. Then she jumped onto the moss
and disappeared.

“Hold your nose, you,” Campbell said—the first words he had spoken.

“Wait.
Wait
. I—”

“Hold your nose, you.” He threw me out over the muck.

My left side screamed. My feet hit the moss first, but there was no
feeling there, had been no feeling there for decades. It wasn’t until
I’d sunk to my waist that I felt the clammy muck, sucking against me
like feces, cool after the hot air. It smelled of rot, of death. Black
shapes flooded my mind and I struggled, even while a part of me knew I
must hold absolutely still, there was no help unless I held absolutely
still,
Leisha . .
. Somebody chuckled.

Then something grabbed me from below, something incorporeal but
powerful, like a wind. It sucked me down. The muck rose above my
shoulders, and then to my mouth. It covered my eyes, filling the world
with the same fecal shapes as my mind. I went under.

For the third time, as I expected death, the purple lattice
disappeared.

And then I was lying on the floor of an underground room, while
gloved hands seized me and dragged my mucky body. Pain spasmed my left
side. Someone wiped my face. The hands stripped my clothes from me and
thrust me naked into a sonar shower, and the muck dropped from my head
and clothing in dry, scaly flakes that were in turn sucked into a
vacuum at the shower’s floor. Someone slapped a medpatch on my spine,
and the pain disappeared.

“Y’all can have a real shower, too, if y’all want,” Jimmy Hubbley
said kindly. “Some folks need one. Or think they do.” He stood before
me already dressed in clean jacks, not at all raggedy,
indistinguishable from any other Liver except by his uncared-for teeth.

Abigail emerged from the water shower, unselfconsciously naked,
drying her hair. Her pregnant belly waggled slightly from side to side.
A bell rang, high and sweet, and Campbell was sucked down onto the
landing stage, which I saw now extended only a few feet under a low
overhang. Two men immediately pulled Campbell off the stage, wiping his
eyes and nose. Campbell stood, covered with the shiny muck, and
lumbered into the sonar shower.

“Take off them gloves, boys, and help Mr. Arlen, here. Joncey, y’all
just have to take your eyes off your lovely bride.”

One of the two men reddened slightly. Hubbley seemed to think this
was funny, breaking into a guffaw, but I felt in my mind the shapes of
Joncey’s anger. He said nothing. Abigail went on coolly drying her
hair, her face expressionless. Joncey and the other man seized me under
the armpits, carried me between them out of the sonar shower, and set
me down in the middle of the room. Joncey handed me a set of clean
jacks.

“What size boots you wear, you?” He was younger than Abigail, with
black hair and blue eyes, handsome in a rough way that had nothing to
do with genetic engineering.

I said, “I’d like my own boots back.” They were Italian leather.
Leisha had given them to me. “Put them in the sonar shower.”

“Better you wear our boots, you. What size?”

“Ten and a half.”

He left the room. I dressed. The lattice was back in my head, closed
tight as one of Leisha’s exotic flowers.

She was really dead.

Joncey returned, with a pair of boots and a wheelchair. It wasn’t
even grav-powered; it had actual wheels that apparently you turned by
hand.

“An antique,” Jimmy Hubbley said. “Sorry, Mr. Arlen, sir, that here
thing is the best we can do on such short notice. But y’all just give
us a little time.”

He beamed at me, obviously expecting some surprise that this
underground bunker was well enough equipped that an unexpected crippled
captive could be provided with a wheelchair. I didn’t react. A faint
disappointment shimmered over his face.

I had his shape, then. He wanted to be admired. James Francis Marion
Hubbley. And he didn’t even know that at least two of his followers,
Abigail and Joncey, already resented him.

How much?

I would find out.

Joncey and the other man lifted me into the wheelchair. I pulled on
the Liver boots. Dressed, seated instead of flopping on the floor like
a fish, I felt less hopeless. Leisha was dead. But I was going to
destroy the bastards who’d killed her.

I studied the room. It was low, no more than six and a half feet
high; Campbell had to stoop. Corridors radiated off in five directions.
The walls were nanotech smooth. I knew from Miranda that the weak point
of any shielded underground bunker is the entrance. That’s what’s most
likely to be detected by GSEA experts. The lab in East Oleanta had an
elaborate entrance shield created by Terry Mwakambe; no chance the GSEA
would get through that. But these people were not Supers. They would
have no more advanced technology than the government did. I guessed,
however, that the swamp-pool entrance was a use of technology that the
government hadn’t yet thought of, adapted by some crazy scientist who’d
grown up in swamp country, and that it was virtually undetectable. So
far.

How far did the underground tunnel system extend? With nanodiggers,
additional construction could be going on even now, miles from here,
without much disturbance on the surface. Hubbley had said his
“revolution” had been in progress for over five years.

And these people had loosed the duragem dissembler on the country.
Without the GSEA ever figuring out that it was not Huevos Verdes.

Or did the GSEA know that, and nonetheless leak to the press that
the Supers were responsible? Because it was all right to blame
Sleepless, but embarrassing to admit you couldn’t catch a bunch of
Livers with captured or renegade nanoscientists on their side.

I didn’t know. But I did know that in a war this advanced, these
tunnels would contain terminals. Miri had made me memorize override
codes for most standard programming. And even if the programming wasn’t
standard, Jonathan Markowitz had made me memorize, over and over,
access tricks that would get through to Huevos Verdes. And Huevos
Verdes monitored everything. There had to be a way to reach them. All I
needed was a terminal.

If Huevos Verdes monitored everything, wouldn’t they know about the
underground movement?

They must know. I remembered Miranda bending over printouts at
Huevos Verdes: “We can’t locate the epicenter of the duragem problem.”
But the Supers must have at least been aware that the dissembler was
being released by some nationwide, organized group. Their intelligence
was too good not to know it.

And Miranda hadn’t told me.

“Are you hungry, you?” Joncey said. He spoke to Abigail, now dressed
in green jacks, but Hubbley answered.

“Hail, yes. Let’s have at it, boys.”

He pushed my chair himself. I let him, passive, feeling the shapes
in my mind hard as carbon-fiber rods. We all went down the left-hand
tunnel, passing several closed doors. Eventually everyone else went
through one door, Hubbley and I through another. A small white room was
furnished with wood—not plastisynth—table and chairs. On the wall hung
a large holo portrait of a big-nosed, dark-eyed soldier in some sort of
antique uniform.

“Brigadier General Francis Marion himself,” Hubbley said, with
satisfaction. “I always eat separate from the troops, Mr. Arlen. It
makes for better morale. Did y’all know, sir, that General Marion was a
fanatic on cleanliness? God’s own truth. He dry-shaved any soldier who
didn’t appear neat and clean on parade, and he himself drank vinegar
and water every day of his life, pretty near, for his health. Drink of
the Roman soldiers. Did you know that, sir?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. My hatred for him burned cold, sleek
shapes in my mind. The room held no terminal.

“As early as 1775 one British general wrote, ”Our army will be
destroyed by damned driblets‘—and Francis Marion was the damndest
driblet those poor redcoats ever saw. Just like this war will be won by
damned driblets, sir.“ Hubbley laughed, exposing his brown teeth. His
pale eyes crinkled. He never took them off me.

“Will and idea, son. We got them both. Will and idea. You know what
makes the Constitution so great?”

“No,” I said. A young boy entered, dressed in turquoise jacks, his
long hair tied back with a ribbon. He carried bowls of hot stew.
Hubbley paid him as much attention as a ‘bot.

“What makes the Constitution so great is it brought the common man
into the decision-making process. It let
us
decide what kind
of country we want. Us, the common man. Our will, and our idea.”

Leisha had always said that what made the Constitution so great was
its checks and balances.

She was dead. She was really dead.

“That’s why, sir,” Hubbley continued, “it’s so all-fired necessary
that we take back this great country from the donkey masters who would
enslave us. By driblets, if necessary. Yes, by God, by driblets.” He
attacked his stew with gusto.

“In fact, preferably by driblets,” I said. “You wouldn’t like this
war nearly as much if you fought it aboveground, in the courts.”

I had expected to make him angry. Instead he laid down his spoon and
squinted thoughtfully.

“Yes, I do believe y’all are right, Mr. Arlen. I do believe y’all
are right. We each have our God-given temperament, and mine is for
fighting in driblets. Just like General Marion. Now, that’s a real
interesting insight.” He went back to spooning stew.

I tasted mine. Standard Liver soy base, but with chunks of real meat
added, gamy and a little tough. Squirrel? Rabbit? It had been decades
since I’d had to eat either.

“Not that the Constitution don’t have its own limits,” Hubbley
continued. “Now y’all take Abigail and Joncey. They understand exactly
what those limits need to be. They’re manipulatin‘ gene combinations in
the right way: through human procreation.” He dragged out the last two
words, savoring each syllable. “Some of Joncey’s genes, some of Abby’s,
and the final shuffle in God’s hands. They respect the clear line in
the Constitution between what is God’s and what is man’s to manipulate.”

I needed to know everything I could about him, no matter how nutty,
because I didn’t know yet what I would need to kill him. “Where in the
Constitution does it draw that line?”

“Ah, son, don’t they teach you nothin‘ in them fancy schools? It
oughtn’t be allowed, no, it ought not. Why, right there in the
Preamble, it announces clear as daylight that ’We the People‘ are
writin’ the thing ‘in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish
Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,”
and et cetera. What’s a perfect union about letting donkeys control the
human genome? It just drives people farther apart. What’s Justice about
not letting Joncey and Abby’s babe start life on an equal footin’ with
a donkey child? How does that make for domestic tranquility? Hail, it
makes for envy and resentment, that’s what it makes for. And what on
God’s green earth is the ‘common defence’ if it ain’t the defence of
the common people, the Livers, to have their kids count just as much as
a genemod babe? Abby and Joncey are fightin‘ for their own, just like
natural parents everywhere, and the Constitution gives ’em the right to
do that right there in its first sacred paragraph.“

I had never heard anyone use the word ‘babe’ before. He sat there
spooning his wretched stew, Jimmy Hubbley, as artificial and as sincere
as anyone I had ever met.

Intellectual arguments confuse me. They always have. I felt the
helpless feeling rise in me, the one I’d always had arguing with
Leisha, with Miranda, with Jonathan and Terry and Christy. The best I
could answer, out of confusion and hatred, was, “What gives
you
the right to decide what’s right for 175 million people?”

He squinted at me again. His apologetic voice returned. “Why,
son—ain’t that what your Huevos Verdes was doin‘?”

I stared at him.

“Sure it is. Only they cain’t decide for common people, ”cause
they
ain’t. Clearly. Not like us. Not like
him
.“ He waved his
spoon at the portrait of Francis Marion. Stew dribbled off the spoon
onto the table.

“But—”

“Y’all need to examine your premises, son,” he said very gently.
“Will and idea.” He went back to eating.

The boy returned, carrying two mugs. Still-brewed whiskey. I left
mine untouched, but I made myself eat the stew. I might need my
strength. Hatred shone in me like suns.

Hubbley talked more about Francis Marion. His courage, his military
strategy, his ways of living off the land. “Why, he wrote to General
Horatio Gates to send him supplies because ‘we are all poor
Continentals without money.” Poor Continentals! Ain’t that a great one?
Poor Continentals! And so we are.“ He drained his whiskey. So much for
vinegar and water.

I choked out, “The GSEA will stop you. Or Huevos Verdes will.”

He grinned. “You know what the Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton
of His Majesty’s army said about Francis Marion? ”But as for this
damned old fox, the Devil himself could not catch him.“‘

I said, “Hubbley—
you aren’t Francis Marion
.”