Beggars and Choosers (31 page)

“Seems to me some lunatic
was
,” he said, more tartly than
I’d ever heard him. “And look what happened. The real scientists can’t
invent no way to stop it, because they ain’t allowed, them, to do no
experiments themselves!”

No permitted antidotal research. It wasn’t a new argument. I’d heard
it before. Never, however, from such a person, in such a situation.
Billy had glimpsed Eden, and he thought the gods there were not only
omnipotent but benevolent. Capable of antidotes to the evil they
themselves had caused. Maybe I had thought so fleetingly, too, at the
patent hearing for Miranda Sharifi’s Cell Cleaner. But SuperSleepless
didn’t make mistakes, at least not on this order. If Huevos Verdes had
released the duragem dissembler, it must have been deliberate, in order
to destroy the culture that hated them. I couldn’t imagine any other
reason. And Huevos Verdes had almost succeeded.

“Go to sleep, Billy,” I said, and rose to leave. But the old man was
disposed to talk.

“I
know
, me, they weren’t bad. That girl, the day she
saved Doug Kane’s life… and now it’s gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I
ain’t never going to go down that mountain trail, me, and splash across
that creek, me, and see that door in the hill open and go inside with
her…”

He was maundering. Of course: The agents had given him a truth drug.
Whatever he had been asked, he’d answered. A talking jag was one of the
side effects when those Pharmaceuticals wore off.

“Good-bye, Billy. Annie.” I moved to the door.

Lizzie
heard something in my voice. She scuttled over to
me, “chicken bone” in her hand, all big eyes and thin hands. But
already she looked healthier. Children respond quickly to good food.

“Vicki, we’ll have our lesson in the morning? Vicki?”

I looked at her, and suddenly I had the completely insane sensation
that I understood Miranda Sharifi.

There exists a kind of desire I had never experienced, and never
expected to experience. I have read about it. I have even seen it, in
other people, although not many other people. It is desire so piercing,
so pointed, so specific, that there is no stopping it, any more than
you could stop a lance hurtled unerringly at your belly. The lance
propels your whole body forward, according to the laws of physics. It
changes the way your blood flows. You can die from it.

Mothers are said to feel that raw agony of longing to save their
infants from deadly harm. I have never been a mother. Lovers are said
to feel it for each other. I never loved like that, despite shoddy
imitations with Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David. Artists
and scientists are said to feel it for their work. This last was true
of Miranda Sharifi.

What I had felt about Miranda Sharifi, ever since Washington, had
been envy. And I hadn’t even known it.

But not now. Looking at
Lizzie
, knowing I would leave East
Oleanta in the morning, seeing from the corner of my eye the way
Annie’s bulk shifted in her chair as she watched us, the lance changed
the way my blood flowed and I put both hands convulsively over my
belly. “Sure,
Lizzie
,” I gasped, and Colin Kowalski was in my
voice, guileless with donkey superiority, lying like the pigs we are.

==========

But sometime near dawn, five or six in the morning, I woke abruptly
from a blotchy sleep. Billy’s voice filled my mind:
and now it’s
gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I ain’t never going to go down that
mountain trail, me, and splash across that creek, me, and see that door
in the hill open and go inside with her . .
.

I crept out of my room in the hastily repaired hotel. A new terminal
sat on the counter, but that was far too risky. I went down to the
cafe. People were there, queuing at the foodbelt, a donkey newsgrid
playing animatedly on the holoterminal. Liver channels almost never ran
news. If East Oleanta wanted to see itself on a grid, it would have to
be a donkey grid.

I crouched in a corner, unobtrusively, and watched. Eventually the
explosion came on, the sensational tracking of the duragem dissembler
source that had so plagued the country, close-ups of Charlotte Prescott
and of Kenneth Emile Koehler, GSEA director, in Washington. Then the
explosion again. I wanted to freeze-frame the HT, but didn’t dare.
Instead, I listened carefully.

A gravrail left at 7 A.M. By eight I was in Albany. There was a
public library terminal at the station, for the use of Livers who were
fuzzy about their destinations and wanted to look up such vital
information about them as the average mean rainfall, location of public
scooter tracks, or longitude and latitude. A sign said THE ANNA NAOMI
COLDWELL PUBLIC LIBRARY. Cobwebs draped the sign. Few Livers were fuzzy
about their destinations, or at least about what they wanted to know
about them.

I slipped in one of the credit chips the GSEA didn’t know I had.
Maybe didn’t know. The terminal said, “Working. What town, city,
county, or state are you interested in?”

“Collins County, New York.” My voice was slightly unsteady.

“Go ahead with your request, please.”

“Display a map of the whole county, with natural features and
political units.”

When the map appeared, I asked to have sections of it enlarged, then
enlarged again. The hypertext gave it to me. The map displayed
latitude. and longitude.

The explosion destroying the illegal lab had not been at the base of
a hill, nor anywhere near a creek.

…
and now it’s gone. Eden’s really gone, it. I ain’t never
going to go down that mountain trail, me, and splash across that creek,
me, and see that door in the hill open, and go inside with her . .
.

I believed that the GSEA had destroyed an illegal genemod lab. I
believed that it was the lab that had released the duragem dissemblers.
But whatever, and whosever, that lab was, it wasn’t Billy Washington’s
Eden. Not the Eden at the base of a mountain and beside a creek, the
Eden that had permitted Billy to see its door opening, the Eden of the
big-headed savior of old men who collapse in the woods. That Eden was
still there.

Which meant that whoever had released the duragem dissembler, it
hadn’t been Huevos Verdes.

So who had? And was Huevos Verdes with them or against them?

On the one hand, the duragem destruction
had
started in
East Oleanta, right around the corner from Eden. Coincidence? I doubted
it. And yet Miranda Sharifi had done nothing to stop the dissembler
release.

On the other hand, if the Supers were interested in destruction, why
had one of them allowed Billy Washington to see the entrance to their
Adirondack outpost, and to walk away with that knowledge? Why hadn’t
they killed him? And why had Miranda Sharifi tried to gain legal
clearance for the Cell Cleaner, a clear boon to us ordinary mortals?
The Sleepless already had that biological protection, and they sure the
hell didn’t need the money.

And what about the fact—Billy was right about this—that if some
illegal lab did come up with something even worse than a duragem
dissembler—a retrovirus that made us all zombies, say— only Huevos
Verdes had the brainpower to design a counter-microorganism fast enough
to prevent a whole country of ambulatory idiots.

But
would
they?

Was Huevos Verdes my country’s enemy, or its covert friend?

These weren’t the sort of questions a field agent was supposed to
ask. A field agent was supposed to do what she was told and report any
significant new developments up the chain of command. A field agent in
my position should immediately call the GSEA. Again.

But if I did that, the questions would never get answered. Because
Colin Kowalski already thought he knew the answer: Bomb anything too
unfamiliar.

I must have stood, motionless, for fifteen minutes in front of the
Anna Naomi Coldwell Public Library. Livers rushed by, hurrying to make
their trains. A cleaning ‘bot ambled along, scrubbing the floor. A
sunshine dealer glanced at me, then away. A tech, genemod handsome,
spoke into his terminal as he strode the platform.

I have never felt so alone.

I got back on the gravrail and returned to East Oleanta.

IV

OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2114

The personal is political, and the political is always personal.

—American folk saying

DREW ARLEN: FLORIDA

I was underground with the Francis Marion Freedom Outpost for two
months, throughout September and October. I wouldn’t have believed it
was possible to hide for days, weeks, months, from the GSEA. The
Outpost was a bunch of nuts; what possible chance could they have of
evading the government after killing three GSEA agents, murdering
Leisha Camden, and blowing up an agency rescue plane? None. Nada. It
wasn’t possible. That’s what I would have believed.

Nor did I believe it was possible to hide from Huevos Verdes. Daily,
hourly, I expected them to come for me.

The shapes in my head were thin and fragile, like nervous membranes.
Vulnerable. Uncertain. These shapes swam around the immobile green
lattice like spooked fish. Sometimes they had faces, or the sketches
effaces, on the uncertain shapes. Sometimes the faces were mine.

==========

At 5:00 A.M. of my second day underground an alarm had sounded. My
heart had leapt: their defenses were breached. But it was reveille.

Peg slouched in, sullen. She wheeled me to a common bath, dumped me
in, pulled me out. I didn’t reveal that I could easily have done this
for myself. She wheeled me to commons, jammed with people hastily
eating, so many people that some gulped their food standing up. Then
she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and thrust it at me angrily.

“Here. Yours.”

It was a printout of a schedule, headed ARLEN, DREW, TEMPORARY
ASSIGNMENT COMPANY 5. “I’m assigned to Company 5. Is that your group,
Peg?”

She snorted in derision and wheeled me around so hard I nearly
tumbled out of the chair.

Company 5 assembled in a huge barren underground room: a parade
ground. I didn’t see Joncey, Abigail, or anyone else I recognized. For
two hours twenty people did calisthenics. I did intentionally feeble
imitations in my chair. Peg grunted and sweated.

Next came two hours of holo instruction on weapons—propellant,
laser, biological, grav—I was amazed Hubbley let me see this, and then
I wasn’t. He didn’t expect me to ever have the chance to tell anyone.

As the holo explained weapon charging, care, and use, the twenty
members of Company 5 practiced with the real thing. I was ten feet away
from wresting a gun from Peg and shooting her dead. She didn’t seem
bothered by this, although I saw a few others glance at me, hard-eyed.
Probably Peg didn’t object because these were Hubbley’s orders. Perhaps
this was the way that Francis Marion had converted his prisoners of war.

Lunch, then more physical training, then a holo on living off the
land. Incredibly, it came from the Government Document Office. I fell
asleep.

Peg kicked my chair. “Political Truth, you.”

She pushed me closer into the company, who sat on the floor in a
semicircle, facing the holostage. Everyone sat straight. I could feel
taut shapes grow tauter in my mind. The atmosphere prickled and
thickened. We were in for something more interesting than the
Government Document Office.

Jimmy Hubbley came in and sat with the company. Nobody addressed
him. Another holo began.

It had the deliberately grainy texture reserved for real-time
unedited filming. There’s no way to alter any part of it without
destroying the whole thing. It’s the same holo-creation technique I use
in my concerts, although my equipment compensates for the graininess
with deliberately softened edges, like a dream. But it’s important to
people to see a real-life concert, not some patched together and edited
version afterwards. They need to know it’s really me.

This holo had really happened.

It showed the underground, including James Hubbley, capturing the
duragem dissembler in an outlaw lab. The captured inventors were then
forced to manufacture dissemblers in huge quantities, which were stored
in small canisters completely dissolvable once opened. None had been
released until the canisters had been stockpiled all over the United
States. Then the clocked dissembler had been released simultaneously
everywhere, so no source could be traced. I was looking at information
the GSEA would give its collective life to know.

The original outlaw lab had been located in Upstate New York, in the
Adirondack Mountains, near a small town called East Oleanta.

I sat quietly, letting the shapes in my mind overwhelm me. There was
no use fighting them. Miranda had always said East Oleanta had been
chosen at random for the Huevos Verdes project, picked by a
computer-generated random program to avoid the GSEA deductive-locale
programs. That’s what she had told me.

You’re a necessary part of the project, Drew, A full member.

“Okay,” Jimmy Hubbley said, when the holo had finished, “now who can
tell me why we all see this here holo over and over again like this,
pretty near every damn day?”

A young girl said fervently, “Because we share knowledge, us,
equally. Not like the donkeys.”

“That’s fine, Ida.” Hubbley smiled at her.

A man said in a deep, upcountry voice, “We need, us, to know the
facts so’s we can make good decisions about our country. The idea of an
America for real human Americans. The will to get us there.”

“That’s fine,” Hubbley said. “Don’t it sound fine, soldiers?”

Someone said hesitantly, “But don’t that mean, it, that we should
ask everybody in the whole country what they think? For a vote?”