Beggars and Choosers (27 page)

Rex, who came before Paul and after Eugene, once told me something
interesting about organizations. There are essentially only two types
in the entire world, Rex had said. When people in the first type of
organization either don’t follow the organization’s rules or otherwise
become too great a pain in the ass, they can be kicked out. After that
they cease to be part of the organization. These organizations include
sports teams, corporations, private schools, country clubs, religions,
cooperative enclaves, marriages, and the Stock Exchange.

But when people in the second type of organization don’t follow the
rules, they can’t be kicked out because there isn’t any place to send
them. No matter how useless or aggravating or dangerous are the
unwanted members, the organization is stuck with them. These
organizations include maximum-security prisons, families with
impossible nine-year-olds, nursing homes for the terminally ill, and
countries.

Had I just seen my country kick out an unwanted and aggravating town
of voters who had been following the rules?

Most donkeys were not cruel. But desperate people—and most
especially desperate politicians—had been known to act in ways they
might not usually act.

I settled my back against the wall and watched the automated kitchen
turn soysynth into chocolate chip cookies.

BILLY WASHINGTON: EAST OLEANTA

The day after East Oleanta wrecked the warehouse, them, food started
coming in by air. Like I told Dr. Turner, it wasn’t all of us in East
Oleanta. Only some stomps, plus the people like Celie Kane who was
always angry anyway, plus a few good people who just couldn’t take it
no more, them, and went temporary crazy. They all calmed down when the
plane started coming every day, without no warehouse goods but with
plenty of food. The tech who ran the delivery ‘bots smiled wide, her,
and said, “Compliments of Congresswoman Janet Carol Land.” But she had
three security ’bots with her, and a bluish shimmer that Dr. Turner
said was a military-strength personal shield.

Dr. Turner moved, her, out of the space behind the kitchen just an
hour before the delivery ‘bots started marching in. She just barely
didn’t get caught, her. “All of Rome meets in the Forum,” she said,
which didn’t make no sense. She moved back to the State Representative
Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel.

Then the women’s shower in the baths broke. A security ‘bot broke.
The streetlights broke, or something that controlled the streetlights.
We got a cold stretch of Arctic air, and the snow wouldn’t stop, it.

“Damn snow,” Jack Sawicki grumbled every time I saw him. The same
words, them, every time, like the snow was the problem. Jack had lost
weight. I think he didn’t like being mayor no more.

“It’s the donkeys doing it to us,” Celie Kane shrilled. “They’re
using the fucking weather, them, to kill us all!”

“Now, Celie,” her father said, reasonable, “can’t nobody control the
weather.”

“How do
you
know what they can do, them? You’re just a
dumb old man!” And Doug Kane went back to eating his soup, staring at
the holoterminal show of a Lucid Dreamer concert.

At home, Lizzie said to me, “You know, Billy, Mr. Kane is right.
Nobody
can
control the weather. It’s a chaotic system.”

I didn’t know what that meant.
Lizzie
said a lot of things
I didn’t know, me, since she’d been doing software every day with Dr.
Turner. She could even talk like a donkey now. But not around her
mother. Lizzie was too smart, her, for that. I heard her say to Annie,
“Nobody can’t control the weather, them.” And Annie, counting sticky
buns and soyburgers rotting in a corner of the apartment, nodded
without listening and said, “Bed time. Lizzie.”

“But I’m in the middle of—”

“Bed time”

In the middle of the night somebody pounded on the apartment door.

“B-B-Billy! Annie! L-L-Let me in!”

I sat up on the sofa where I slept, me. For a minute I thought I was
dreaming. The room was dark as death.

“L-Let m-m-me in!”

Dr. Turner. I stumbled, me, off the sofa. The bedroom door opened
and Annie came out in her white nightdress, Lizzie stuck behind her
like a tail wind.

“Don’t you open that door, Billy Washington,” Annie said. “Don’t you
open it, you!”

“It’s Dr. Turner,” I said. I couldn’t stand up straight, me, so
fuddled with dreaming. I staggered and grabbed the corner of the sofa.
“She don’t mean no harm, her.”

“Nobody comes in here! We won’t understand none of it, us!”

Then I saw she was fuddled with dreaming, too. I opened the door.

Dr. Turner stumbled in, her, carrying a suitcase but wearing a
nightdress, covered with snow. Her beautiful donkey face was white and
her teeth chattered. “L-L-Lock the d-door!”

Annie demanded, “You got people hunting you, them?”

“No. N-N-No… j-just let me g-g-get warm…”

It hit me then. From the hotel to our apartment wasn’t all that far,
even if it was freezing out. Dr. Turner shouldn’t be that cold, her. I
grabbed her shoulders. “What happened at the hotel, doctor?”

“H-H-Heating unit qu-quit.”

“Heating unit can’t quit, it,” I said. I sounded like Doug Kane
trying to talk to Celie. “It’s Y-energy.”

“N-N-Not the circulating equipment. It m-m-must have duragem
p-parts.” She stood by our unit, rubbing her hands together, her face
still the same white-gray as all the snow piled in the streets.

Lizzie said suddenly, “I hear screaming!”

“Th-they’re b-burning the hotel.”

“
Burning
it?” Annie said. “Foamcast don’t burn!”

Dr. Turner smiled, her, one of those twisted donkey smiles that said
Livers just now caught on to what donkeys already knew. “They’re trying
anyway. I told them it won’t eradicate the duragem dissembler, and
somebody will likely get hurt.”

“
You
told ‘em,” Annie said, one hand on her wide hip. “And
then you come here, you, with a
mob
following you—”

“No one’s following me. They’re far too busy trying to contravene
the laws of physics. And Annie, I’m freezing. Where else would I go?
The tech reprogrammed the entrance codes for the kitchen, and anyway
it’s still full of delivery ‘bots whenever that unpredictable plane
comes.”

Annie looked at her, and she looked at Annie, and I could see, me,
that there was something wrong with Dr. Turner’s speech. It wasn’t no
plea for help, even if the words said that. And it wasn’t trying to
sound reasonable, either. Dr. Turner really was asking
Where else
would I go? Can you tell me some other place I ain’t mentioned
?
Only it wasn’t Annie she was asking, her. It was me.

And I wasn’t about to tell her, me, that finally I knew. After all
my looking, I knew where Eden was.

“You can stay here with us,” Lizzie said, and her big brown eyes
looked at her mother. I felt my back muscles knot, them. This was it,
the big Armaggedon between Annie and Dr. Turner. Only it wasn’t. Not
yet. Maybe because Annie was afraid, her, of whose side Lizzie would
take.

“All right,” Annie said, “but only because I can’t stand, me, to see
nobody freeze to death, or get tore apart by them damn stomps. But I
don’t like it, me.”

Like anybody ever thought she did. I was careful, me, not to meet
nobody’s eyes.

Annie gave Dr. Turner a few blankets off the stockpile along the
west wall. We had everything there, us, crowding out the space:
blankets and jacks and chairs and ribbons and rotting food and I don’t
know what else. I wondered, me, if I should give Dr. Turner the sofa,
but she spread her blankets in a nest on the floor, her, and I figured
that she might be company but she was also thirty years younger than
me. Or twenty, or fifty—with donkeys you can’t never really tell.

We all got back to sleep, us, somehow, but the shouts outside went
on a long time. And in the morning the State Representative Anita Clara
Taguchi Hotel was wrecked. Still standing, because Dr. Turner was right
and foamcast don’t burn, but the doors and windows were tore off the
hinges, and the furniture was all broke up, and even the terminal was a
twisted pile of junk in the street. Jack Sawicki looked serious, him,
about that. Now all he had to talk to Albany on was the cafe terminal.
Besides, them things are expensive. State Representative Taguchi was
going to be mad as hell, her.

Snow blew in the hotel windows and drifted on the floor, and you’d
of thought the place had been deserted for years, the way it looked. It
kind of twisted my chest to see it. We were losing more and more, us.

That afternoon the plane didn’t come, it, and by dinner the next day
the cafe was out of food.

==========

There’s a place upriver, about a half mile from town, where deer go,
them. When we had a warden ‘bot, it put out pellets for the deer in the
winter. The pellets had some kind of drug inside, so the deer couldn’t
never breed, them, more than the woods can feed. The warden wasn’t
never replaced, it, since before them rabid raccoons in the summer. But
the deer still come to the clearing. They just do what they always did,
them, because they don’t know no better.

Or maybe they do, them. Here the river flowed fast enough that it
didn’t freeze completely through unless the temperature got down in the
single numbers. The snow blew across the clearing, it, and piled up
against the wooded hill beyond, so plants were easy to uncover. You
could usually spot two or three deer without waiting very long.

When I went there, me, with Doug Kane’s old rifle, somebody else had
already got there first. The snow was bloody and a mangled carcass laid
by the creek. Most of the meat was spoiled, it, by somebody too lazy or
too stupid to butcher it right. Bastards didn’t even bother to drag the
carcass away from the water.

I walked, me, a little ways more. It was snowing, but not hard. The
ground crunched under my feet and my breath smoked. My back-hurt and my
knees ached and I didn’t even try, me, to walk without any noise.
“Don’t go alone, you,” Annie’d said, but I didn’t want Annie to leave
Lizzie by herself. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to take Dr. Turner.
She’d moved in with us, her, and that was probably good because donkeys
got all kinds of things you don’t never suspect until you need them,
like medicine for
Lizzie
last summer. But Dr. Turner was a
city woman, her, and she scared away the game, crashing through the
brush like an elephant or dragon or one of them other old-time
monsters. I needed to kill something today. We needed the meat, us.

In a week, all out stockpiled food had gotten eaten up. One lousy
week.

No more came, by rail or air or gravsled, from Albany. People tore
into the cafe, them, to the kitchen where Annie used to cook apple
pudding for the foodbelt, but there wasn’t nothing left there.

I walked farther upstream. When I was a young boy, me, I used to
love being in the woods in winter. But then I wasn’t scared out of my
skull. Then I wasn’t an old fool with a back that hurts and who can’t
see nothing in his mind but Lizzie’s big dark eyes looking hungry. I
can’t stand that, me. Never.

Lizzie
. Hungry…

When I left town, the rifle under my coat, people were hurrying to
the cafe. Something was going on, I didn’t know what. I didn’t want to
know. I just wanted, me, to keep
Lizzie
from going hungry.

I could only think, me, of two ways to do that. One was to hunt for
food in the woods. The other was to take
Lizzie
and Annie to
Eden. I’d found it, me, just before the gravrail quit this last time. I
found that big-headed girl in the woods, and I followed her, me, and
she let me follow her. I watched a door in the mountain open up, where
there couldn’t be no door, and her go inside, and the door close up
again like it was never there in the first place. But just before it
closed, the Sleepless girl turned, her, right toward me. “Don’t bring
anyone else here, Mr. Washington, unless you absolutely must. We’re not
quite ready for you yet.”

Those were the scariest words, me, I ever heard.

Ready for us for
what
?

But I’d bring Lizzie and Annie there if I had to, me. If they got
too hungry. If there wasn’t no other way for me to feed them.

I came to a place where dogtooth violets used to grow, them, back in
June. I dropped to my knees. They sang out in pain, them, but I didn’t
care. I dug up all the dogtooth violet bulbs I could find and stuffed
them into my pockets. You can roast them. My jacks already held acorns,
to pound into flour—wearying work, it—and some hickory twigs to boil
for salt.

Then I settled down, me, on a rock, to wait. I held as quiet as I
could. My knees hurt like hell. I waited, me.

A snowshoe rabbit came out of the brush, him, on the opposite bank,
like he was right at home. Casual, easy. A rabbit ain’t much food to
use up a bullet. But I was cold enough, me, so I knew I’d start
shivering soon, and then I wouldn’t never be able to hit nothing.

Bullet or rabbit? Old fool, make up your mind.

I saw Lizzie’s hungry eyes.

Slowly, slowly, I raised the gun, me, and squeezed off the shot. The
rabbit never heard it. He flew up in the air and come down again,
clean. I waded across the creek and got him.

One good thing—he fit under my coat, him. A deer wouldn’t of fit. I
didn’t want nobody hungry to see my rabbit, and I didn’t want to stay
around, me, near where the gun fired. An old man is just too easy to
take things away from.

But nobody tried, until Dr. Turner.

“You’re going to
skin it
?” she said, her voice going up at
the end. I could of laughed, me, at the look on her face, if anything
could of been funny.

“You want to eat it, you, with the skin on?”