Beggars and Choosers (25 page)

“And can you?”

“No. Can you?” She looked at me with hungry brown eyes. Billy left
the apartment.

“Probably not,” I said. I’m not a ‘bot tech. But let me see.“

“I’ll show you, me.”

She did. She put together the pieces of the peeler ‘bot, which had a
simple standard Kellor chip powered by Y-energy. I went to school with
Alison Kellor, who always professed a world-weary disdain for the
electronic empire she would inherit. Lizzie assembled the ’bot in about
two minutes and showed me how it wouldn’t work despite an active chip.
“See this little teeny bit here, Vicki? Where the peeler arm fits onto
the ‘bot? It’s sort of melted, it.”

I said, “What do you think did that?”

The big brown eyes looked at me. “I don’t know, me.”

“I do.” The destroyed joint was duragem.
Had been
duragem,
until attacked by the renegade replicating dissembler.

“What melted it, Vicki?”

I turned the ‘hot over in my hands, looking for other duragem
joints. They were there, between the less durable but cheaper nonmoving
plastics. The others weren’t “sort of melted, them.” But neither were a
few of the duragem parts.

“What melted it, Vicki? Vicki?” I felt a hand on my arm.

Why hadn’t the other duragem joints been attacked? Because the
dissembler was clocked. It had self-destructed after a certain time,
and had also stopped replicating after making a certain number of
copies of itself. Much—maybe even most—nanotech had this safety feature.

Lizzie shook my arm. “
What
melted it, Vicki? What?”

“A tiny little machine. Too small to see.”

“The duragem dissembler? The one I saw, me, on the newsgrid?”

Then I did look up. “You watch the donkey newsgrids?”

She gave me a long, serious look. I could see this was an important
decision for her: to trust me or not. Finally she said, as if it were
an answer, “I’m almost twelve, me. My mama, she still thinks I’m six.”

“Ah,” I said. “So how does a twelve-year-old see donkey news-grids?
They’re never on at the cafe.”

“Nothing’s on in the middle of the night. Some nights. I go there,
me, and watch.”

“You sneak out?”

She nodded solemnly, sure that this admission would bring down the
world. She was right. I had never imagined a Liver kid with that much
ambition or curiosity or intelligence or guts.
Lizzie
Francy
was not supposed to exist. She was as much a wild card as the duragem
dissembler, and as unwelcome. To both Livers and donkeys.

And then I saw a way to use her difference.

“
Lizzie
, how’d you like to make a bargain with me?”

She looked wary.

“If you tell me what I want to know, I’ll help you learn as much as
I can about how machines work.”

Lizzie’s face changed. She leapt on my words like the promising
little piranha she was.

“You promised, you. Vicki, I heard you, me, and that was a promise.
You say you’ll help me find out everything about how machines work!”

“I said, ”as much as I can.“ Not everything.”

“But you
promised
, you.”

“Yes, yes, I promised. But in return you have to answer all the
questions
I
have.”

She considered this, her head cocked to one side, the sixteen
pink-tied braids all sticking out in different directions. She didn’t
see any major trap. “All right.”

“Lizzie, have you ever heard of Eden?”

“In the Bible?”

“No. Here, near East Oleanta.”

Despite our agreement, she hesitated. I said, “You promised, too.”

“I heard, me, Billy and Mama talking about it. Mama said Eden don’t
never exist except in the Bible. Billy, he said he wasn’t so sure, him.
He said maybe it was a place in the mountains or the woods that donkeys
don’t know about, and Livers might work there, them. They thought I was
asleep.”

A place donkeys don’t know about. Meaning, to East Oleanta,
government donkeys, practically the only kind a town like this ever saw.

“Does Billy ever go off alone into the woods? Without your mama?”

“Oh, yeah, he likes it, him. Mama wouldn’t never go off in the
woods. She’s too fat.” Lizzie said this matter-of-factly; for some
reason I thought suddenly of Desdemona, seizing my soda-can bracelet
without guilt or evasion.

“How often does he go? How long does he stay?”

“Every couple of months, him. For five or six days. Only now he’s
getting too old, him, Mama says.”

“Does that mean he won’t go any more?”

“No, he’s going next week, him. He told her he got to, unless
something important breaks down and he’s afraid, him, to leave us
alone. But we got the food.” She pointed to the pathetic piles of
tasteless synthetic food rotting in buckets in the corners.

“When next week?”

“Tuesday.”

Lizzie knew everything. But more to the point—what did Billy know?
Did he know where Miranda Sharifi was?

“What time does Billy leave when he goes to the woods?”

“Real early in the morning. Vicki, how are you going to teach me,
you, everything about machines? When do we start, us?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Today.”

“You’re still recovering. You had pneumonia, you know. Do you know
what that is?”

She shook her head. The silly pink ribbons bobbed. If this were my
kid, I’d tie up her braids with microfilaments.

If this were
my
kid? Jesus.

“Pneumonia is a disease caused by bacteria, which is itself a tiny
little living machine, which got destroyed in your body by another tiny
living machine engineered to do that. And that’s where we’ll start
tomorrow. If you have the right codes there are programs you can access
on the hotel terminal, where people hardly ever go…” For the first time
it occurred to me that Annie would object vigorously to this tutorial
program. I might be educating
Lizzie in
the middle of the
night.

“What codes?” Her eyes were bright and sharp as carbon-rod needles.

“I’ll show you tomorrow.”

“I already reprogrammed, me, the servoentrance door at the cafe to
let me and Mama in. I can understand about the hotel terminal. Just
say, you, a little bit
how . .
.”

“Good-bye,
Lizzie
.”

“Just say how—”

“Good-bye.”

As I closed the door, she was once more taking apart the peeler ‘bot.

==========

In the next six weeks,
Lizzie
spent all her free time at
the hotel terminal, accessing education software in the vast donkey
public library system. She appeared at the hotel at odd times, in the
early morning with her hair wet from the baths, or at twilight, times I
suspected Annie thought she was playing with her friends Carlena and
Susie, a pair of dumb chirps. Lizzie disappeared just as abruptly, an
outlaw running from the scene of the scholastic crime to report for
dinner or for church. I don’t know if she accessed in the middle of the
night or not; I was, sensibly, asleep. She learned at a frightening
rate, once she had something substantial to learn. I didn’t control
what she accessed, and I only commented when she had questions. After
the first day she zeroed in on computer systems, both theory and
applications.

Within a week she showed me how she’d reprogrammed a
still-functional cleaning ‘bot to dance, by combining, speeding up, and
sequencing its normal movements. The thing jigged around my dismal
hotel room as if it had a metallic seizure. Lizzie laughed so hard she
fell off the bed and lay helplessly shrieking on the floor, her arms
wrapped around her negligible middle, and again that unwelcome
something turned over, blood warm, in my chest.

Within a month she had worked through the first two years of the
American Education Association-accredited secondary school software for
computer science.

After six weeks she showed me, gleefully, how she’d broken in to the
Haller Corporation data banks. I peered over her shoulder, wondering if
the Haller security software would trace the intrusion to East Oleanta,
where there should not have existed anyone capable of data bank
intrusion. Did the GSEA monitor corporate break-ins?

I was being paranoid. There must be a quarter million teenage net
busters snooping around in corporate data banks just to count
technological coup.

But those kids were donkeys.

“Lizzie,” I said, “no more net busting. I’m sorry, honey, but it’s
dangerous.”

She pressed her lips together, a suspicious little Annie. “Dangerous
how?”

“They could trace you, come here, and arrest you. And send you to
jail.”

Her black eyes widened. She had some respect for authority, or at
least for power. A cowardly little Annie.

“Promise,” I said, relentless.

“I promise, me!”

“And I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow I’ll go to Albany on the
gravrail”—it was working again, briefly—“and buy you a handheld
computer and crystal library. It has far more on it than you can access
here. You won’t believe what you’ll learn to do.” And a free-held unit
couldn’t be traced. I could use the “Dark Jones” account, which the
high cost of a crystal library and compatible unit would just about
empty. Maybe I’d better go farther than Albany to buy it. Maybe New
York.

Lizzie stared at me, for once speechless. Her pink mouth made a
little “O.” Then she was hugging me, smelling of warehouse distrib
soap, her voice muffled against my neck.

“Vicki… a crystal library… oh, Vicki…”

For you. I didn’t say more. I couldn’t.

Anthony, who came before Russell and after Paul, once told me that
there was no such thing as a maternal instinct, nor a paternal one
either. It was all intellectual propaganda designed to urge humans
toward a responsibility they didn’t really want, but couldn’t admit not
wanting. It was a PR tour de force without genuine biological force.

I used to love some very stupid men.

==========

Three days after I brought
Lizzie
her crystal library, I
was up by 4:00 A.M., ready to follow Billy yet again into the deep
woods.

This was my third trip in six weeks.
Lizzie
kept me
informed, per our bargain, of Billy’s plans. She told me he used to go
every few months, but now he went far more often. Maybe he had even
made a few short trips
Lizzie
and I missed. Something was
stepping up his scouting schedule, and I hoped it would lead me to
“Eden,” careful hints about which were increasing on the local Liver
channels. Broadcast from where? By whom? I’d bet anything they weren’t
part of the regularly organized broadcasting from Albany.

This morning it was snowing in a desultory, nonserious way, even
though it was only mid-October. In San Francisco, I hadn’t paid much
attention to the “coming mini-ice age” stuff. In the Adirondacks,
however, there wasn’t much choice. Everyone went around bundled in
winter jacks, which were surprisingly warm, although no more tastefully
dyed than summer jacks. Marigold, crimson, electric blue, poison green.
And for the conservative, a dun the color of cow piles.

Which was what Billy wore when he emerged from his apartment
building at 4:45 A.M. He carried a plasticloth sack. It was still dark
out. He walked toward the river, which flowed by the edge of the
village, only five or six blocks from what passed as downtown. I
followed him unseen while there were buildings for cover. When there
weren’t, I let him get out of sight and then followed his footprints in
the light snow. After a mile the footsteps stopped.

I stood under a pine whose branches started ten feet up the trunk,
pondering my choices. From behind me Billy said quietly, “You ain’t
gotten any better, you, in the woods. Not since your first time.”

I turned. “How did you do that?”

“Don’t matter how I did it, me. The question is what
you
think you’re doing here.”

“Following you. Again.”

“Why?”

He had never asked before. The other times I’d followed him, he’d
refused to talk to me at all. He looked unusually impressive, standing
there in the bleak landscape with his wrinkled face stern and
judgmental: a Liver Moses. I said, “Billy, where is Eden?”

“That what you after, you? I don’t know where it is, me, and if I
did I wouldn’t take you there.”

This was promising; when someone has reasons not to do something, he
has at least conceived that it’s possible to do it. From possibility to
agreement isn’t nearly as large a leap as from denial to possibility.
“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why wouldn’t you take me to Eden if you knew where it was?”

“Because it ain’t no donkey place, it.”

“Is it a Liver place?”

But he seemed to realize he’d said too much. Deliberately he put
down his sack, brushed the snow off a fallen tree, and sat down with
the air of a man who wasn’t going to move until I left. I would have to
prod him by offering more.

“It’s not a Liver place, either, is it, Billy? It’s a Sleepless
place. You’ve seen a SuperSleepless from Huevos Verdes, or more than
one, in these woods. They have larger heads than normal, and they talk
like they’re slowing down their speech, because they are. They think so
much faster and more complexly than we do—you or me—that it’s an effort
for them to choose a few simple-enough words for us to understand. You
saw one, didn’t you, Billy? A man or a woman?”

He stared at me, a wrinkled somber face against the gray and white
woods.

“When was this, Billy? In the summer? Or longer ago than that?”

He said, with transparent effort and equally transparent mendacity,
“I never saw nobody, me.”

I walked toward him and put my hand firmly on his shoulder. “Yes,
you did, you. When was it?”

He stared at the snowy ground, angry but unwilling, or unable, to
show it.