Beggars and Choosers (37 page)

DIANA COVINGTON: EAST QUANTA

I had completely lost my composure, my rationality, and my common
sense, and then the door to Eden opened. This bothered me. I stood
there with a dying child and an old man whom I had—against all
odds—come to love, at the threshold of the technological sanctum my
entire government had been seeking for God knows how long, facing the
single most powerful woman in the entire world—and I was bothered that
it was my irrational class-based screaming that had caused the gates of
Eden to swing wide. Only it wasn’t that, of course. I
knew
it
wasn’t that. I wasn’t quite that many standard deviations along the
irrationality curve. But the feeling persisted, because nothing was
normal and when nothing’s normal, nothing seems any more abnormal than
anything else. The measuring scales break down. Miranda Sharifi did
that to things.

Up close, she looked even plainer than she had in Washington. Big,
slightly misshapen head, wild clouds of black hair, body too short and
too heavy to be a donkey yet clearly not a Liver. She wore white pants
and shirt, generic looking but not jacks, and her face was pale. The
only spot of color was a red ribbon in her hair. I remembered what I’d
thought on the steps of Science Court— that she was too old for hair
ribbons—and I felt obscurely ashamed. It was difficult to keep my mind
on serious subjects. We had too many of them. Or maybe it was just the
nature of my mind.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I stood staring at the red hair
ribbon.

She was everything I was not.

Annie fell to her knees. The hem of her muddy parka pooled
ungracefully on the shining floor and her eyes turned upwards as if to
an angel. Maybe that’s what she thought Miranda was.

“Ma’am, you have to help us, you. My Lizzie’s dying, her, with some
disease, Billy says she’s dying, Dr. Turner says it ain’t natural, this
disease, it’s
genemod
, it… and Billy, he’s been so good to
us, him, and he ain’t hardly even got nothing out of it—but Lizzie, my
little girl—” She started to cry.

At the words “Dr. Turner,” Miranda’s eyes moved to me for a moment,
then back to Annie. It was like having a laser sweep over you. I felt
she suddenly knew everything there was to know about me: my aliases, my
supposedly secret and pathetically marginal GSEA affiliation, the
entire history of my residences, pseudo-jobs, pseudo-loves. I felt
naked, clear to the cellular level. I told myself to stop it
immediately. She wasn’t a psychic; she was a human being, a woman with
awesome technology behind her and a super-heightened brain and thoughts
I would never have and would not understand if they were explained to
me…

This was how Livers felt about donkeys like me.

Annie said, through her tears and still kneeling, “Please.” Just
that word. In that place, it had a surprising dignity.

A door appeared in the wall behind Miranda, a door that a moment
before had not existed even in outline, and a man stuck his head
through. “Miri, they’re on the way—”

“You go, Jon,” she said. They were the first words she’d spoken. Jon
had the same misshapen head as Miranda but handsome features, a bizarre
and dissettling combination, like a manticore with the face of a
domestic collie. His mouth tightened.

“Miri, you
can’t
—”

“That’s already settled!” she snapped, and for the first time I saw
she was under tremendous tension. But then she turned to him and
uttered a few words I didn’t catch, so rapidly did she speak. Despite
her speed, the words had the curious feel of being separate, each a
discreet communication rather than part of a grammatical flow… I was
only guessing. Miranda wore a single ring, a slim gold band set with
rubies, on the ring finger of her left hand.

Jon withdrew, and the “door” disappeared. There was no sign it had
ever existed.

Miranda put her hand on Annie’s shoulder. The hand trembled.

“Don’t cry. I can help them both, I think. Certainly your daughter.”
But it was Billy she knelt next to first. She held a small box to his
heart and studied its miniature screen; she put the box against his
neck and studied the screen again; she fastened a medicine patch on his
neck. Watching, I was obscurely reassured. This was known. She was
treating Billy for his heart attack, if that was what it was.

He started to breathe more easily, and moaned. Miranda turned to
Lizzie. From her pocket she drew a long, thin black syringe, opaque.
Very little medication is given by syringe rather than patch. Something
turned over in my chest.

I said, “She’s already had wide-spectrum antibiotic and antiviral
from a K-model medunit. The unit said this was an unknown virus,
outside the configuration of any known tailored microorganism, you’d
have to build it fresh if you can—”

I was babbling. Miranda didn’t look up. “This is the Cell Cleaner,
Dr. Turner. But I think you already guessed that.” There was something
deliberate about her speech, as if the words were chosen carefully, and
yet she felt they were completely inadequate to whatever she wanted to
say. I hadn’t noticed that in Washington, where her speeches to the
Science Court must have all been carefully prepared in advance. The
slowness was in marked contrast to the way she’d spoken to “Jon.”

Annie watched the needle disappear into Lizzie’s neck. Annie was
completely still, kneeling on the hem of her muddy parka, smearing dead
leaves across the featureless white floor.

The moment was surreal. Miranda hadn’t even hesitated. I choked out,
“Aren’t you even going to
explain
it to them give them a
choice
…”

Miranda didn’t answer. Instead she pulled a second syringe from her
pocket and injected Billy.

I thought crazily of all the fatty deposits in the arteries of his
heart, all the lethal viral copies that can lie in wait for years in
lymph nodes until the body weakens, all the toxic mismultiplications of
normal DNA over the sixty-eight years of Billy’s bone and flesh and
blood… I couldn’t speak.

Miranda pulled out a third syringe and turned to Annie, who put out
a warding-off hand. “No, ma’am, please, I ain’t sick—”

“You will be,” Miranda said, “without this. Soon.” She waited.

Annie bowed her head. It looked to me like prayer, which suddenly
enraged me for no reason I could understand. Miranda injected Annie.

Then she turned to me.

“How toxic is the mutated vir—”

“Fatal. Within twenty-four hours. And easily transmitted. You will
become infected.”

“How do you know? Did your people engineer and release the virus?
Did
you?”

“No,” she said, as calmly as if I’d asked her if it was raining. But
a pulse beat in her throat, and she was taut as harpstrings, and as
ready to vibrate at a touch. I just didn’t know whose. I stared at the
syringe in her hand: long, thin, black, the fluid hidden inside. What
color was it? That fluid had already gone into Lizzie, into Billy, into
Annie.

I whispered, before I knew I was going to, “But I’m a
donkey
—”

Miranda said, “I have already been injected myself. Months ago. This
is not an untested procedure.”

She had missed completely what I had meant. It lay outside her range
of vision. Apparently, then, some things did. I said, “You’re so—”
without knowing how I was going to finish the sentence.

“We don’t have much time. Lower your head, please, Dr. Turner.”

I blurted out—this is to my everlasting shame, it was so inane, and
at such a moment—“I’m not really a licensed doctor!”

For the first time, she smiled. “Neither am I, Diana.”

“Why don’t we have much time? What’s going to happen? I’m not sick
yet, you’re going to alter my entire biochemistry, let me at least
think a moment—”

A screen suddenly appeared on the wall. Even though this— unlike the
door—was certainly a normal technology, I nonetheless jumped as if an
angel had appeared with flaming sword. But the angel was in front of
me, staring at the screen as if in pain, and the sword trembled in her
hand, and I was going to die not because I’d eaten of this particular
genetically-engineered apple, but because I didn’t.

She didn’t give me a choice. The screen showed a plane landing where
no plane should have been able to land, a folded thing setting straight
down like a rotorless coptor but far more precisely than any coptor, on
the same small flat patch of ground between stream and mountain where I
had screamed for Eden to open. The same naked birch tree, shivering
white. The same tattered oak. I raised my head to stare at the four men
climbing out of the unfolded cylinder of the government plane, and
Miranda pushed the syringe into my neck. With her other hand on my
shoulder, she held me still while the fluid drained.

She was very strong.

Somehow, that one fact cleared my head, which just shows how crazed
was the whole situation. I said, almost as if we were coconspirators,
“They can’t get in, can they? They couldn’t even find it before, they
blew up the wrong installation. They must have followed us here, Billy
and Annie and Lizzie and me—oh, I’m sorry, Miranda—”

She wasn’t listening. To my complete shock—it was the weirdest thing
that had happened yet, because after all, I’d known about the Cell
Cleaner, I’d seen her explain it in Washington—to my utter shock, tears
glittered in her eyes. She circled the fingers of her right hand around
her left. Covering the ring.

A fifth man was helped out of the plane, and into a powerchair
someone else swiftly unfolded. I saw with yet another shock that it was
Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer.

He put his hand on the birch tree. I didn’t know—and never found
out—if it was to steady himself, or if it was part of the entry
procedure, an activator or a skin-recognition system or just a failsafe
of some unimaginable kind. Then he spoke a series of words, very clear,
in that famous voice. The door above our heads opened.

Miranda made no effort to stop him, if she could have. Of course she
could have. There must have been shields, counter-shields,
something
.
They were SuperSleepless.

The four GSEA agents came down the stairs as if this were a root
cellar in Kansas. They had drawn their guns, which filled me with
sudden contempt. Drew Arlen stayed outside.

“Miranda Sharifi, you are under arrest for violations of the Genetic
Standards Act, Sections 12 through 34, which state—”

She completely ignored them. She pushed past the four men as if they
weren’t there, a sudden fire glowing around her that had to be some
sort of electrified personal shield. One of the agents reached for her,
cried out, and cradled his burned hand, his face distorted by pain. The
agent blocking the steps hesitated. I saw him think for half a second
about firing, and then change his mind. I could almost see the report
later: “Civilians were present, making it inadvisable to—” Or maybe
they realized that whoever officially killed Miranda Sharifi was dead
himself careerwise, forever, a scapegoat. The agent moved off the steps.

Miranda ascended them slowly, heavily, the tears sparkling in her
dark eyes. Three of the agents followed. After a stunned moment I
bolted after them.

Drew Arlen sat in the cold November woods in a powerchair. Miranda
faced him. A slight wind shook the oak tree, and the dead leaves
rattled. A few fell.

“Why, Drew?”

“Miri—you don’t have the right to choose for 175 million people. Not
in a democracy. Not without any checks and balances. Leisha said—”

“Kenzo Yagai did. He chose. He created cheap energy, and changed the
world for the better.”

“You could have stopped the duragem dissembler. And didn’t. People
died, Miranda!”

“Not as many as if we had stopped it. Not in the long run.”

“That wasn’t your reason! You just wanted control of the situation!
You Supers, who don’t ever have to die!”

There was a noise behind me. I didn’t turn around. What I was
looking at was more important than any noise. The questions Drew and
Miranda hurled at each other were the same public question I had
struggled with ever since I’d seen the Cell Cleaner in Washington: Who
should control radical technology? Only they were making of it a
private weapon, as lovers can make private weapons of anything.
Who
should control technology . .
.

And—make no mistake—technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves.
It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.

The GSEA had hoped to keep radical tech from falling into the wrong
hands. But Huevos Verdes was the
right
hands: the hands that
used nanotech to strengthen human beings, not destroy them. That was
what the GSEA could not admit. It wasn’t their place to judge, they
claimed; they only carried out the law. Maybe they were right.

But somebody, somewhere, sometime, had to judge, or we’d end up with
pure Darwinian jungle, red in byte and assembler.

Huevos Verdes had judged. And I, by not summoning the

GSEA a second time, along with them. And there was no clear way to
know whether either of us was right.

All this I realized, with that peculiar clarity that comes in bodily
crisis, as I watched Drew Arlen and Miranda Sharifi tear each other
apart in the cold woods.

He said, “You don’t have the right to carry out this project. You
never did. No more than Jimmy Hubbley—”

She said, “It was supposed to be ‘we,” not ’you.“ You were part of
this.”

“Not any more.”

“Because you fell into the hands of some scientific crazies. God,
Drew, to equate Jimmy Hubbley with
us
—”

“So you did know about him. And left me there all these months.”

“No! We knew about the counterrevolution, but not specifically where
you were—”