Beggars and Choosers (24 page)

Immediately he grew serious. “Well, of course not, son. Anybody can
see that, so clear it don’t hardly need commentin‘ on, does it, except
by somebody crazy. Clear as day I’m not Francis Marion. I’m Jimmy
Hubbley. What’s wrong with you, Mr. Arlen? You feelin’ all right?”

He leaned across the table, his bony face creased with concern.

I could feel my heart thud in my chest. He was impenetrable, as
impenetrable as Huevos Verdes. After a moment he patted my arm.

“That’s all right, Mr. Arlen, sir, y’all just a little shocked by
events is all. Y’all will be fine in the mornin‘. It’s just real
upsettin’, discoverin‘ the truth after all this time of believin’
falsehoods. Perfectly natural. Now don’t you worry none; y’all be fine
in the mornin‘. You just sleep, and please excuse me, I got a council
of war to attend to.”

He patted my arm again, smiled, and left. The boy wheeled my chair
to a bedroom with a single bed, a chemical toilet, and a deadbolt on
the door that could only be unlocked from the outside.

==========

In the morning the doctor came to check me. He turned out to be the
small man who had helped Joncey at the landing stage.

Joncey was with him. I saw that Joncey was guarding him; apparently
the doctor was not here of his own Will and Idea. But he was allowed to
roam the underground compound, which meant he probably knew where the
terminals were.

“Leg looks good,” he said. “Any pain in your neck?”

“No.” Joncey leaned against the doorjamb, smiling. The smile
deepened and I glimpsed Abigail pass by in the corridor. Joncey stepped
away from the door. Giggles and a tussle.

I said, quickly and very low, “Doctor—I can get us out of here, if
you can get me to a terminal. I know ways to call for help that will
override anything they can possibly have—”

His small face wrinkled in alarm. Too late I realized that, of
course, he was monitored. Hubbley’s people would overhear everything he
heard or said.

Joncey came back and the doctor hurried off by his side, interested
only in staying alive.

The lattice in my mind had circled tighter than ever, a huddled
closed shape, hiding whatever was inside. Even the diamond patterns on
its outer surface looked smaller. Angry, ineffective shapes flopped
sluggishly around it, like beached fish.

Hubbley left me to my sour shapes until midmorning. When he opened
my door he looked stern. “Mr. Arlen, sir, I understand y’all want to
get to a terminal and set your friends at Huevos Verdes on us.”

I stared at him with open hatred, sitting in my antique wheelchair.

He sighed and sat on the edge of my cot, hands on his long knees,
body bent earnestly forward. “It’s important that y’all
understand
,
son. Contactin‘ the enemy in wartime is treason. Now I know y’all ain’t
a regular soldier, leastways not yet, y’all are more like a prisoner of
war, but just the same—”

“You know Francis Marion never talked like that, don’t you?” I said
brutally. “That kind of speech only dates from maybe a hundred fifty
years ago, from movies. It’s phony. As phony as your whole war.”

He didn’t change expression. “Why, of course General Marion didn’t
talk this way, Mr. Arlen. Y’all think I don’t know that? But it’s
different from how my troops talk, it’s old-fashioned, and it ain’t
neither donkey nor Liver. That’s enough. It don’t matter how truth gets
expressed, long as it does.”

He gazed at me with kindly, patient eyes.

I said, “Let me wheel my chair around the compound. I’m not going to
learn your truths locked in this room. Give me a guard, like the doctor
has.”

Hubbley rubbed the lump on his neck. “Well—could do, I suppose. It
ain’t like y’all are going to overpower anyone, sittin‘ in that chair.”

The shapes in my mind abruptly changed. Dark red, shot with silver.
Hubbley’s people didn’t do very deep background checks. He didn’t
realize I’d trained my upper body with the best martial arts masters
Leisha’s money could buy. She’d wanted to give me an outlet for my
adolescent anger.

What else didn’t he know? Leisha, unable to alter my non-Sleepless
DNA, had nonetheless done what she could for me. My eyes had implanted
corneas with bifocal/zoom magnification; my arm muscles had been
augmented. Probably these things counted as abominations, crimes
against the common humanity in the Constitution.

I tried to look wistful. “Can I have Abigail for my guard?”

Hubbley laughed. “Won’t do y’all no good, son. Abby’s goin‘ to marry
Joncey in a couple of months. Give that baby a real daddy. Abby’s got a
whole lot of lace around here someplace, for a weddin’ dress.”

I saw Abigail in her waders and torn shirt, firing a rocket launcher
at the rescue plane. I couldn’t picture her in a wedding gown. Then it
came to me that I couldn’t picture Miranda in one either.

Miranda. I had hardly thought of her since Leisha’s death.

“But I’ll tell you what,” Hubbley said, “seein‘ as y’all are so
starved for feminine company, I’ll assign a woman to guard you. But,
Mr. Arlen, sir—”

“Yes?”

His eyes looked grayer, harder. “Keep in mind that this
is
a war, sir. And grateful as we are for the help your concerts gave us,
y’all are expendable. Just keep that in mind.”

I didn’t answer. In another hour the door opened again and a woman
entered. She was, must have been, Campbell’s twin. Nearly seven feet
tall, nearly as muscled as he was. Her short shit-brown hair was
plastered flat around a sullen face with Campbell’s heavy jaw.

“I’m the guard, me.” Her voice was high and bored.

“Hello. I’m Drew Arlen. You’re…”

“Peg. Just behave, you.” She stared at me with flat dislike.

“Right,” I said. “And what natural combination of genes produced
you
?”

Her dislike didn’t deepen, didn’t waver. I saw her in my mind as a
solid monolith, granite, like a headstone.

“Take me to whatever your cafe is, Peg.”

She grasped the wheelchair and pushed it roughly. Beneath her green
jacks, her thigh muscles rippled. She outweighed me by maybe thirty
pounds; her reach was longer; she was in superb shape.

I saw Leisha’s body, light and slim, slumped against the
custard-apple tree, two red holes in her forehead.

The cafe was a large room where several tunnels converged. There
were tables, chairs, a holoterminal of the simplest, receive-only kind.
It showed a scooter race. No foodbelt, but several people were eating
bowls of soystew. They stared frankly when Peg wheeled me in. At least
half a dozen faces were openly hostile.

Abigail and Joncey sat at a far table. She was actually sewing
panels of lace together—by hand. It was like watching someone make
candles, or dig a hole with a shovel. Abigail glanced at me once, then
ignored me.

Peg shoved my chair against a table, brought me a bowl of stew, and
settled down to watch the scooter race. Her huge body dwarfed the
standard-issue plastisynth chair.

I watched the race, while observing everything through the zoom area
of my corneas. Abby’s lace was covered with a complex design of small
oblongs, no two the same, like snowflakes. She snipped out an oblong
and presented it, laughing, to Joncey. Three men played cards; the one
whose hand I could see held a pair of kings. After a while I said to
Peg, “Is this how you spend all your days? Contributing to the
revolution?”

“Shut up, you.”

“I want to see more of the compound. Hubbley said I could if you
take me.”

“Say ‘Colonel Hubbley,” you!“

“Colonel Hubbley, then.”

She seized my chair hard enough to rattle my teeth and shoved it
along the nearest corridor. “Hey! Slow down!”

She slowed to an insolent crawl. I didn’t argue. I tried to memorize
everything.

It wasn’t easy. The tunnels all looked the same: featureless white,
nanoperfect, lined with dirt-resistant alloy and identical white,
unmarked doors. I tried to memorize tiny bits of dropped food, boot
scuffs. Once I saw a small oblong bit of lace half caught under a door,
and I knew Abigail must have come that way. Peg pushed me like a ‘bot,
impassive and tireless. I was losing track of what I’d tried to
memorize.

After three hours, we passed a cleaning ‘bot, whirling up the things
I had used as markers.

In the whole tour, I saw only two open doors. One was to a common
bath. The other was only opened for a moment, then closed, allowing the
fastest glimpse of high-security cannisters, rows and rows of them.
Duragem dissemblers? Or some other nonhuman-genome destruction that
Jimmy Hubbley thought ought to be unleashed on his enemies?

“What was that?” I said to Peg.

“Shut up, you.”

An hour later, we returned to the commons area. Lunch was still in
progress. Peg shoved me to an empty table and plunked another bowl of
stew in front of me. I wasn’t hungry.

A few minutes later Jimmy Hubbley sat down with me. “Well, son, I
hope y’all are satisfied with your tour.”

“Oh, it was great,” I said. “I saw all kinds of contributions to the
revolution.”

He laughed. “Oh, it’s happenin‘, all right. But y’all ain’t goin’ to
provoke me into showing y’all before I’m ready. Time enough, time
enough.”

“Aren’t you afraid your troops will get restless, doing nothing like
this? What did General Marion do with his men between battles?” I put
down my spoon; I hated him too much to even pretend to eat in his
presence. God, I wanted a drink.

He seemed surprised. “Why, Mr. Arlen, sir, they don’t ordinarily do
nothin‘. This here’s Sunday, the Sabbath. Come tomorrow, we go back to
regular drill. General Marion knew the value of a day for rest and
recuperation of the human spirit.”

He looked around with satisfaction at the desultory gambling,
scooter watching, slumped figures probably on sunshine. Only three
faces in the whole damn room showed any real animation.

Joncey and Abigail, smiling at each other, Abby still sewing on
billowing patterned lace. And Peg.

“Eat your stew, son,” Hubbley said kindly. “Y’all will need food to
keep your strength up.”

I left my spoon where it lay. “No,” I said. “I won’t.” Of course he
didn’t understand that. But Peg, with animal alertness, caught
something in my tone. She looked at me hard, before she went back to
watching Jimmy Hubbley, her sullen face transformed by awe and respect
and the hopeless, longing love of an ordinary person for one clearly as
far above her as a god.

III

OCTOBER 2114

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance
of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who
have too little.

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address

DIANA COVINGTON: EAST QUANTA

The most remarkable thing about being in an off-line dump like East
Oleanta was my realization that the GSEA didn’t know where Miranda
Sharifi was. They were a sophisticated and determined agency, but
apparently they didn’t know where I was either. I wasn’t using any of
the identities that Colin Kowalski had issued me, and I had changed
personae three times on the way to East Oleanta. “Victoria Turner” had
credentials with the IRS, the state of Texas, the bank where her family
trust was stashed, educational software franchises, the National Health
Care Institute, grocery stores… My larcenous friend was good at what he
did. Good enough to convince Huevos Verdes… who knew? But I felt
confident the GSEA didn’t.

The second most remarkable thing was that I didn’t call up the GSEA
and tell them where I was and what I suspected. I put this down to
hubris. I wanted to be able to say, “Here is Miranda Sharifi, latitude
43°45’l6” longitude 74°50’86“, it’s an illegal genemod lab, go
get her, boys,” instead of saying, “Well, I think she’s here
someplace
nearby, possibly, although I have no proof.” If I were a regular agent,
my silence would have been intolerable. But I wasn’t a regular agent. I
wasn’t a regular anything. And I wanted, once in my ineffectual life,
to succeed at something by myself. I wanted that very badly.

Of course, like the GSEA, I didn’t exactly know where Miranda was,
either, although I suspected she was underground somewhere in the
wooded Adirondack Mountains near East Oleanta. But I didn’t have the
faintest idea how to actually find her.

Until
Lizzie
Francy.

==========

I went back to see
Lizzie
Francy the same evening I first
told her about simple computer operations, the day after I’d put a
medpatch on her. I’d seen how Billy Washington changed color when I’d
asked about Eden. That old man was the worst liar I’d ever seen. He
knew something about Eden; he was hopelessly in love with the much
tougher and more conventional Annie;
Lizzie
could do anything
with him she chose. Poor Billy.

Lizzie
still sat on the spectacularly ugly plastisynth
sofa, dressed in a pink nightshirt, her hair in sixteen braids tied
with pink ribbon. Electronic parts lay scattered over her blanket. I
viewed her around Billy, who opened the door but didn’t want to let me
in.

“Lizzie’s asleep, her.”

“No, she isn’t, Billy. She’s right there.”

“Vicki!”
Lizzie
cried in her little-girl voice, and
something unexpected turned over in my chest. “You’re here!”

“She’s sick, her, too sick for no company.”

“
I’m fine
, me,”
Lizzie
said. “Let Vicki in,
Billy. Pleeeaasse?”

He did, unhappily. Annie wasn’t around. I said, “What have you got
there, Lizzie?”

“The apple peeler ‘bot from the cafe kitchen,” she said promptly,
and without guilt. Billy winced. “It broke and I took it apart, me, to
see if I can fix it.”