Beggars and Choosers (30 page)

I activated the transmitter by touch code and said clearly, “Special
Agent Diana Covington, 6084 slash A, to Colin Kowalski, 83 slash H.
Emergency One priority: sixteen forty-two. Repeat, sixteen forty-two.
Send large task force.”

“I’m so
hungry,” Lizzie
sobbed against my knees.

I put the transmitter in my pocket and pulled her onto my lap. She
buried her head in my neck; her nose felt cold. I looked at the river
choked with ice, at the blood from the wrapper on the dirty snow, at
the uncharacteristically blue sky. It would take the GSEA maybe a few
hours to arrive from New York. But the

SuperSleepless, at their hidden Eden, were already here. And of
course there was no way they would not have picked up my message. They
picked up everything. Or so I had been told.

I held Lizzie and made pointless maternal noises. Her cold nose
dribbled into my neck.

“Lizzie, did I ever tell you about a dog I saw once? A genemod pink
dog that should never have existed, poor thing?”‘

But she only went on sobbing, cold and hungry and betrayed. It was
actually just as well. The story about Stephanie Brunell’s dog seemed,
at this point, lame even to me, something I had once believed in,
probably still did, but could no longer clearly recall.

Like so much else.

==========

The GSEA showed up within the hour, which I have to admit impressed
me. First came the planes, then the aircars, and by nightfall, the
gravrail was up, roaring into East Oleanta with a complement of thirty
calm-eyed agents, some techs, and a lot of food. Government types work
best on a full stomach. The techs went around town repairing things.
The GSEA commandeered the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe, threw a
Y-shield around the half of it farthest from the techs stocking the
foodbelt, and ordered everybody else to stay out, which the good
citizens were happy to do because food was being dispensed from the
ruins of the warehouse. God knows how they were cooking it. Maybe they
were eating soysynth raw.

“Ms. Covington? I’m Charlotte Prescott. I’m in temporary command
here, until the arrival of Colin Kowalski from the West Coast. Come
with me, please.”

She was tall, flame-haired, absolutely beautiful. Expensive genes.
She had the accent that goes with the monied Northeast, and eyes like
the Petrified Forest. I went with her, but not without a patented
little Diana-protest: spirited but essentially ineffectual.

“I don’t want to talk until I’m sure that two people are getting
fed. Three actually. An old man and a little girl and the girl’s
mother… they might not be able to handle being part of that mob
outside…” What was I saying? Annie Francy could handle being part of
Custer’s Last Stand, protesting all the while that the Indians weren’t
behaving properly.

Charlotte Prescott said, “Lizzie Francy and Billy Washington are
being seen to. The guard at the apartment will procure them food.”

And she had only been in East Oleanta ten minutes.

Charlotte Prescott and I sat opposite each other in two plastisynth
cafe chairs and I told her everything I knew. That I had followed
Miranda Sharifi from Washington to East Oleanta, after which she had
disappeared. That I’d been searching the woods for her. That some of
the locals half believed there was a place in the mountains they called
Eden, probably a shielded underground illegal genemod lab, and that I
believed that was where Huevos Verdes was releasing the duragem
dissembler. That I’d followed various locals into the woods in the
hopes of discovering Eden, but had never seen anything, and was now
convinced nobody knew where, or if, this mythical place existed.

This last wasn’t strictly true. I still suspected Billy Washington
knew something. But I wanted to tell that directly to Colin Kowalski,
whom I halfway trusted, rather than to Charlotte Prescott, whom I
trusted not at all. She reminded me of Stephanie Brunell. Billy was an
ignorant and exasperating old man, but he was not a pink dog with four
ears and overly big eyes, and I was not going to watch him go over any
metaphorical terrace railing.

Prescott said, “Why didn’t you report your whereabouts, and Miranda
Sharifi’s suspected whereabouts, as soon as you reached East Oleanta?
Or even en route?”

“I was fairly sure that the SuperSleepless outpost would be able to
monitor any technology I used.”

This was a fair hit; not even the GSEA flattered itself that it
could outinvent Supers. Prescott showed no reaction.

“You were in violation of every Agency procedure.”

“I’m not a regular agent. I run wild-card for Colin Kowalski, under
informant status. You wouldn’t even know about me now if he hadn’t told
you.”

Still no reaction. She had the ability, like some reptiles, to just
draw a nicitating membrane between herself and any blowing insinuating
sand. I saw this about her: her limitations, her rigidity born of the
automatic assumption of superiority. Yet I still couldn’t help feeling
unworthy beside her, in a way I hadn’t felt unworthy in months. Me in
my rumpled turquoise jacks and untrimmed hair, she looking like
something off a holovid ad for the Central Park East Enclave. Even her
fingernails were perfect, genemod rose so they never had to be painted.

The questions went on. I was as honest as I could be, except for
Billy. It didn’t help my mood, which was middling lousy. I was doing
what I should, what I needed to do, what was right and patriotic for my
country three cheers and “Hail to the Chief.” No, I don’t mean that
cynicism—it
was
right. So why did I feel so terrible?

Colin Kowalski arrived about 9:00 P.M. I was still under house
arrest, or whatever, but Charlotte Prescott had apparently run out of
questions. The foodbelt was working, serving an insatiable line of the
hungry, who peered curiously at the Y-shield cramping them into half
their cafe but could see nothing because the outer layer had been
one-way opaqued.

“Colin. I’m glad you’re here.”

He was angry, not hiding it, but keeping it under control. I gave
him points for all three.

“You should have contacted me in August, Diana. Maybe we could have
stopped release of the duragem dissembler sooner.”

“Can you stop it
now
?” I said, but he didn’t answer. I
wasn’t having any of that. I grabbed both his lapels—or what passes for
lapels in the new fall fashions—and said, slowly and with great
distinctness, “You’ve found something. Already. Colin, you have to tell
me what you’ve found so far. You have to. I got you all this far, and
besides there’s no earthly reason not to tell me. You know damn well
you’ve got reporters all over every place out there by now.”

He stepped back a pace and pulled his lapels free. Billy and Doug
Kane and Jack Sawicki and Annie and Krystal Mandor had been all over
each other constantly. I was a little shocked at how quickly I’d
forgotten the donkey intolerance for being touched.

But I was not going to give up. Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to
involve Billy more than he already was by having taken me into Annie’s
apartment for the last month. “What have your agents found, Colin?”

“Diana—”

“What?”

He told me, not because of my persistence but because there really
wasn’t any reason not to. He even gave me the lattitude and longitude,
to the minutes and seconds. Proud of himself. And yet, somehow, not. I
listened harder.

“Just what you suspected, Diana, an underground lab. Shielded. We
broke the shield half an hour ago, once we knew the general area to
look. The Supers had fled, but the duragem dissembler originated there,
all right. Bastards didn’t even bother to destroy the evidence. The
dangerous recombinant and nanotech stuff in that lab…”

I had never seen words fail Colin Kowalski before. He didn’t
sputter, or twitch. Instead his mouth just clamped shut on the last
word with a small audible pop! as if naming these words had hurt his
lip and he was protecting it. I felt sick inside.
The dangerous
recombinant and nanotech stuff. .
. “What else have they got
cooked up for us?”

“Nothing that’s going to get out,” he said, and looked straight at
me. Too straight. I couldn’t tell what the look meant.

And then I could.

“Colin, no, if you don’t examine it all minutely—”

The explosion rocked the cafe, even though we were probably miles
away and undoubtedly the GSEA had thrown a blast shield around the area
first. But a blast shield only contains flying debris, and anyway
nothing really muffles a nuclear blast. People at the foodbelt screamed
and clutched their bowls of soysynth soup and soysynth steak. The
holoterminal, which was in the food-line half of the cafe and which
someone had turned to the National Scooter Championships, flickered
momentarily.

Colin said stiffly, “It was too dangerous to examine minutely.
Anything could have escaped from there. Anything they were working on.”

I stood up unsteadily. There was no reason for the unsteadiness. I
kept my voice level. “Colin—was the lab really empty? Did Miranda
Sharifi and the other Supers really get out before you got there?
Before
you blew it up
, I wanted to say.

“Yes, they were gone,” Colin said, and met my eyes so steadily, so
guilessly, that I immediately knew he was lying.

“Colin—”

“Your service with the GSEA is terminated, Diana. We appreciate your
help. Six months’ pay will be deposited to your credit account, and a
discreet and nonspecific letter of commendation provided if you ever
want one. You are, of course, constrained from selling your story to
the media in any form whatsoever. Should you break this prohibition,
you could be subject to severe penalties up to and including
imprisonment. Please accept the Department’s warmest thanks for your
assistance.”

“Colin—”

For just a second there was a flash of a real person on his face.
“You’re done, Diana. It’s over.”

But, of course, it wasn’t.

==========

I slipped through the general street pandemonium—reporters,
townspeople, agents, even the first sightseers on the newly fixed
gravrail—without notice. In my rumpled winter jacks, a scarf over the
bottom half of my face, my hair as dirty as everyone else’s in East
Oleanta, I looked like just one more confused Liver. This might have
pleased me, if I had been capable of being pleased by anything just
then. Something was terribly wrong, wrong in my head, and I didn’t know
what. I had gotten what I wanted: Huevos Verdes was stopped from
releasing destruction such as the duragem dissembler. The country,
unchanged economic problems notwithstanding, now stood at least a
chance of recovery, once the clocking mechanism on all the released
dissemblers ran through its set number of replications. Twelve-year-old
girls could eat; old men would not have to trudge through the snow
along disabled rail tracks, attacked for food. I had gotten what I
wanted.

Something was very wrong.

The guards were just leaving Annie’s apartment. I passed them in the
hall. Neither one gave me a second glance. Billy lay on the sofa, with
Annie seated on a chair at his head, her lips pressed together tightly
enough to create a vacuum. Lizzie sat on the floor, gnawing on
something that was probably supposed to be a chicken leg.

“You. Get out,” Annie said.

I ignored her, drawing up a second chair beside Billy. It was the
same kind of plastisynth chair I’d sat in opposite Charlotte Prescott
of the perfect nails, the only kind of chair I’d ever sat on in East
Oleanta. Only this one was poison green. “Billy. You know what
happened?”

He said, so quietly I had to lean forward to hear him, “I heard, me.
They blew up Eden.”

Annie said, “And how’d they know, them, there was anything to blow
up?
You
told them, Dr, Turner! You brought them government
men to East Oleanta!”

“And if I hadn’t, you’d still all be starving,” I snapped. Annie
always brought out the worst in me. She never doubted herself.

Annie subsided, fuming. Billy said, “It’s really gone, it? They
really blew it up?”

“Yes.” My throat felt thick. God knows why. “Billy, that’s where
they were making the duragem dissembler. The thing that was causing so
many breakdowns. Of all kinds of machinery.”

He didn’t answer for a long time. I thought he’d fallen asleep. His
wrinkled eyelids were at half mast, and the sag of his jowls hurt my
chest.

Finally he said, almost in a whisper, “She saved old Doug Kane’s
life, her… And they were going to save ours, too…”

I said sharply, “How do you know that?”

He answered simply, with a guileness so different from Colin
Kowalski’s that English should have different words for it. “I don’t
know, me. But I saw her. She was kind to us, her, even though we ain’t
got no more in common with her than… than with beetles. They knew
things, them people. If you say she made the duragem dissembler, well,
then maybe she did, her. But it’s hard to believe. And even if they did
make it, them, by mistake, say…”

“Yes? Yes, Billy?”

“If Eden’s all blown up, it, how we ever going to find out how to
unmake it?”

“I don’t know. But there were other dangerous nanotechnology
projects under way in… in Eden, Billy. Stuff that if it had gotten
loose, could have caused even more destruction.”

He considered this. “But Doctor Turner—”

I said wearily, “I’m not a doctor, Billy. I’m not anything.”

“If the government just goes around, them, blowing up all the
illegal Edens, then don’t we lose the good things, us, as well as the
bad ones? There was them rabid raccoons—”

I said impatiently, “You have to have controls of genetic and
nanotech research, Billy. Or any lunatic will go around inventing
things like dissemblers.”