Beggars and Choosers (3 page)

Spectators perched on flimsy benches along the scooter track. They
cheered and screamed. The driver was halfway through the course when a
second scooter shot out of the pod. My car had been cleared by the
governmet security field, which locked onto my controls and guided me
in. I twisted in my seat to keep the scooter track in view. At this
lower altitude I could see the first driver more clearly. He increased
the tilt of his scooter, even though this part of the track was rough,
snaking over rocks and repressions and piles of cut brush. I wondered
how he knew the second scooter was gaining on him.

I saw the first driver race toward a half-buried boulder. The yellow
line of track snaked over it. The driver threw his weight toward
center, trying to slow himself down. He’d waited too long. The scooter
bucked, lost its orientation toward the track, and flipped. The driver
was flung to the ground. His head hit the edge :: the boulder at over a
mile a minute.

A moment later the second scooter raced over the body, its energy
cones a perfect six inches above the crushed skull.

My car descended below the treetops and landed between two beds of
bright genemod flowers.

Colin Kowalski met me in the lobby, a severe neo-Wrightian atrium in
a depressing gray. “My God, Diana, you look pale. What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said. Scooter deaths happen all the time. Nobody tries
to regulate scooter races, least of all the politicians who pay for
them in exchange for votes. What would be the point? Livers choose that
stupid death, just as they choose to take sunshine or drink themselves
to oblivion or waste their little lives destroying the countryside
marginally faster than the ‘bots can clean it up. Envirobots used to be
able to keep up, when there was enough money. Stephanie was right about
one thing: I don’t care what Livers do. Why should I? Whatever my
mother might have done forty years ago, today Livers are politically
and economically negligible. Ubiquitous, but negligible. It was just
that I had never seen a scooter death that close before. The crushed
skull had looked no more substantial than a flower.

“You need fresh air,” Colin said. “Let’s go for a walk?”

“A what?” I said, startled. I’d just had fresh air. What I wanted
was to sit down.

“Didn’t the doctor recommend easy walks? In your condition?” Colin
took my arm, and this time I knew better than to say
My what
?
The old training returns fast. Colin was afraid the building wasn’t
secure.

How could a government complex under a maximum-security Y-field not
be secure? The place would be multishielded, jammed, swept constantly.
There was only one group of people who could even remotely be suspected
of developing monitors so radically undetectable—

I was surprised at myself. My heart actually skipped a beat.
Apparently I could still feel an interest in something besides myself.

Colin walked me past a lovely meditation garden out to an expanse of
open lawn. We walked slowly, as befitted someone with my condition,
whatever it was.

“Colin, darling, am I pregnant?”

“You have Gravison’s disease. Diagnosed just two weeks ago, at the
John C. Fremont Medical Enclave, from your repeated complaints of
dizziness.”

“There’s no complaint files in my medical records.”

“There are now. Three complaints over the last four months. One
misdiagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Your medical problems are one
reason David Madison left you.”

Despite myself, I flinched at the sound of David’s name. Some
locales are full of gleaming skyscrapers built on infertile,
treacherously shifting ground. Japan, for instance. And then there are
places like the Garden of Eden—lush, warm, vibrant with color— where
only bitterness is built. Whose fault? The Garden dwellers, obviously.
They certainly couldn’t claim deprived childhoods.

Nothing is more bitter than to know you could have had Eden, but
turned it into Hiroshima. All by your two unaided selves.

Colin and I walked a little farther. The weather under the dome was
mild and fresh smelling, without wind. Colin’s hand on my arm felt
pleasant. Stephanie was wrong; he was handsome, even if his looks
weren’t genemod. Thick brown hair, high cheekbones, a strong body. Too
bad he was such a prig. Religious reverence for one’s own job, even if
the job is worth doing, is a sexual turnoff. I could picture Colin
inspecting his naked lovers for GSEA violations. And then turning them
in.

I said, “You’re rushing ahead, darling. Why the medical record
changes? I haven’t even said I’m willing to play.”

“We need you, Diana. You couldn’t have contacted me at a better
time. Washington has cut our funds again, a ten percent drop from—”

“Spare me the political lecture, Col. What do you need me for?”

He looked slightly offended. A prig. But of course his funds had
been cut. Everybody’s funds had been cut. Washington is a binary
system; money can only go in and out. More was going out than was
coming in. Lots more: supporting a nation of Livers was expensive when
the U.S.A. no longer held the only world patents for the cheap Y-energy
that had made it possible in the first place. Plus, aging industrial
machinery, long kept underrepaired, was breaking down at an
accelerating rate. Even Stephanie, with all her money, had complained
about that. The public sector must feel it even more. And deficit
spending had been illegal for nearly a century. Didn’t Colin think I
knew all that?

He said stiffly, “I didn’t mean to lecture. I need you for
surveillance. You’re trained, you’re clean, nobody will be tracking
your moves electronically. And if they do come to anybody’s attention,
Gravison’s disease is the perfect cover.”

This was true, as far as it went. I was “trained” because fifteen
years ago I’d taken part in an unrecorded training program so secret
its agents had never actually been used for anything. Or at least I
hadn’t, but, then, I’d dropped out before the end. Claude had come
along. Or maybe it had been somebody else. Colin Kowalski had also been
in that program, which marked the start of his government career. I was
clean because nothing about the program appeared in anybody’s data
banks, anywhere.

But there was something Colin wasn’t telling me, something slightly
wrong in his manner. I said, “Who, specifically, is it that I won’t
come to the attention of?” but I think I already knew.

“Sleepless. Neither Sanctuary nor that group on Huevos Verdes. La
Isla, I mean.”

Huevos Verdes. Green Eggs. I bent over and pretended to adjust my
sandal, to hide my grin. I’d never heard that Sleepless had a sense of
humor.

I said, through rising excitement, “Why does Gravison’s disease
provide the perfect cover? What
is
Gravison’s disease?”

“A brain disorder. It causes extreme restlessness and agitation.”

“And immediately you thought of me. Thank you, darling.”

He looked annoyed. “It often leads to aimless travel. Diana, this
isn’t a joking matter. You’re the last of the underground agents who
we’re positive doesn’t show up on any electronic record anywhere before
Sanctuary cultured these so-called SuperSleepless on their protected
orbital. Well, it’s not protected anymore. We’ve got it crawling with
GSEA personnel. The labs we dismantled completely; Sanctuary will never
pull those dangerous genemod tricks again. And that treasonous Jennifer
Sharifi and her revolutionary cell will never get out of jail.”

Colin’s words struck me as understatement: a peculiarly gray-toned,
governmental sort of understatement. What he’d called Jennifer
Sharifi’s “dangerous genemod tricks” had been a terrorist attempt to
use lethal, altered viruses to hold five cities hostage. This
incredible, daring, insane terrorism had been an attempt to coerce the
United States into letting Sanctuary secede. The only reason Sanctuary
hadn’t succeeded was that Jennifer Sharifi’s granddaughter Miranda,
from God-knows-what twisted family politics, had betrayed the
terrorists to the feds. This had all happened thirteen years ago.
Miranda Sharifi had been sixteen years old. She and the other
twenty-six children in on the betrayal had supposedly been so
genetically altered they don’t even think like human beings anymore. A
different species.

Exactly what the GSEA was supposed to prevent.

Yet here the twenty-seven SuperSleepless were, walking around alive,
a fait accompli. And not even “here”—a few years ago the Supers had all
moved to an island they’d built off the coast of Yucatan. That was the
word: “built.” One month it was international ocean, no “there” there,
the next month there existed a genuine island. It wasn’t a floating
construct, like the Artificial Islands, but rock that went all the way
down to the continental shelf, which was not especially shallow at that
point. Luckily. Nobody knew how the Sleepless had developed the
nanotechnology to do it. A lot of people passionately wanted to know.
Nanotechnology was still in its infancy. Mostly, nanoscientists could
take things apart, but not build them. This was apparently not true on
La Isla.

An island, says international law, which predates the existence of
people who can create one, is a natural feature. Unlike a ship or an
orbital, it doesn’t fall under the Artificial Construct Tax Reform Law
of 2050, and it doesn’t have to be chartered under a national flag. It
can be claimed by, or for, a given country, or can be assigned to it as
a protectorate by the UN. The twenty-seven Supers plus hangers-on
settled on their island, which was shaped roughly like two interlocking
ovals. The United States claimed La Isla; the potential taxes on
SuperSleepless corporate businesses were enormous. However, the UN
assigned the island to Mexico, twenty miles away. The UN was
collectively unhappy with Americans, in one of those downward cycles of
international opinion. Mexico, which had been getting fucked over by
the United States regularly for several centuries, was happy to receive
whatever monies La Isla paid to leave the inhabitants strictly alone.

The Supers built their compound under cover of the most
sophisticated energy fields in existence. Impenetrable. Apparently the
Supers, with their unimaginably boosted brainpower, weren’t geniuses at
only genemodification; they included among their number geniuses at
everything. Y-energy. Electronics. Grav tech. From their island,
officially if unimaginatively named La Isla, they have sold patents
throughout a world market on which the U.S. can offer only the same
tired recycled products at inflated prices. The U.S. has 120 million
nonproductive Livers to support; La Isla has none. I’d never before
heard it called Huevos Verdes. Which translated as “green eggs” but in
Spanish slang meant “green testicles.” Fertile and puissant balls. Did
Colin know this?

I stooped to pick a blade of very green, genemod grass. “Colin,
don’t you think that if the Supers wanted Jennifer Sharifi and their
other grandparents out of prison, they’d get them out? Obviously the
successful counterrevolutionaries want the senior gang right where
you’ve got them.”

He looked even more annoyed. “Diana, the SuperSleepless are not
gods. They can’t control everything. They’re just human beings.”

“I thought the GSEA says they’re not.”

He ignored this. Or maybe not. “You told me yesterday you believed
in stopping illegal genemod experiments. Experiments that could
irrevocably change humanity as we know it.”

I pictured Katous lying smashed on the sidewalk, Stephanie laughing
above.
Cookie! Please
! I had indeed told Colin that I
believed in stopping genetic engineering, but not for reasons as simple
as his. It wasn’t that I objected to irrevocable changes to humanity;
in fact, that frequently seemed to me like a good idea. Humanity didn’t
strike me as so wonderful that it should be forever beyond change.
However, I had no faith in the kinds of alterations that would be
picked. I doubted the choosers, not the fact of choice. We’d already
gone far enough in the direction of Stephanie, who considered sentient
life-forms as disposable as toilet paper. A dog today, expensive and
nonproductive Livers tomorrow, who the next day? I suspected Stephanie
was capable of genocide, if it served her purposes. I suspected many
donkeys were. There were times I’d thought it of myself, although not
when I genuinely thought. The nonthought appalled me. I doubted Colin
could understand all this.

“That’s right,” I agreed. “I want to help stop illegal genemod
experiments.”

“And I want you to know that I know that under that flip manner of
yours, there’s a serious and loyal American citizen.”

Oh, Colin. Not even boosted IQ let him see the world other than
binary. Acceptable/not acceptable. Good/bad. On/off. The reality was so
much more complicated. And not only that, he was lying to me.

I’m good at detecting lies. Far better than Colin at implying them.
He wasn’t going to trust me with anything important in this project,
whatever it was. I was too hastily recruited, too flip, too unreliable.
That I
had
left my training before its completion was de
facto unreliability, disloyalty, unacceptability for anything
important. That’s the way government types think. Maybe they’re right.

Whatever surveillance Colin gave me would be strictly backup, triple
redundancy. There was a theory for this in surveillance work: cheap,
limited, and out of control. It started as a robot-engineering theory
but pretty soon carried over into police work. If there are a lot of
investigators with limited tasks, they won’t cohere into a single
premature viewpoint about what they’re looking for. That way, they
might turn up something totally unexpected. Colin wanted me for the
equivalent of a wild card.

I didn’t mind. At least it would get me out of San Francisco.

Colin said, “For the last two years the Supers have been entering
the United States, in ones and twos, heavily disguised both
cosmetically and electronically. They travel around to various Liver
towns or donkey enclaves, and then go home, to La Isla. We want to know
why.”