Beggars and Choosers (40 page)

I was the only passenger. The train was direct. It was just barely
the beginning of sunset when I stepped off onto the deserted main
street of East Oleanta.

Annie’s apartment on Jay Street was empty, the door ajar. Nothing
had been taken. Not the ugly garish wall hanging, not the water
buckets, not the plasticloth throw pillows, not Lizzie’s discarded
doll. I went in and lay down on Lizzie’s bed. After a while I walked to
the Cafe.

Nobody was there, either. The foodbelt was stopped and empty, the
holoterminal off. The Cafe hadn’t been trashed. It had just been
evacuated, like the rest of the town. The government wanted everything
extraneous cleared out for a while, which did not include me. I was not
extraneous. From their point of view, I was one of the five most
important people in the world: four walking biological laboratories and
their captured mad scientist. I

had the run of the laboratory, and so probably did three of the
others. I only had to wait for them to arrive.

Before the light failed, I walked through the snow to the flat,
stony riverbank where Billy had poked at the brown snowshoe rabbit with
the stick Lizzie had given him. The rabbit was gone. I sat for a long
time on the embankment, watching the cold water, until the sun set and
the rock chilled my butt.

I spent the night in Annie’s apartment, on the sofa. The heat unit
still worked. Although I woke often during the night, it was only for
brief periods. It wasn’t true insomnia. Each time, I listened carefully
in the darkness. There was nothing to hear.

Once, from some half-conscious impulse, I fingered my ears. The
holes for my earrings had closed. I ran a finger over my thigh,
searching for the scar from a childhood accident. The scar was gone.

I spent the next morning watching the holoterminal. Bannock Falls,
Ohio, had been wiped out by plague in twenty-four hours. Camera ‘bots
showed bodies dead where they’d fallen outside the Senator Ellen Piercy
Devan Cafe, sprawled across each other in heavy winter jacks like
fourteenth-century victims of bubonic plague.

Jupiter, Texas, had rioted, blowing up their town with nanotech
explosives that Livers should not, could not, have obtained. The
townspeople promised to move on Austin if 450,000 cubits of food,
apparently a biblical measure, was not delivered within twenty-four
hours.

The donkey enclave of Chevy Chase, Maryland, had imposed quarantine
on itself: nobody in, nobody out.

Most of Europe, South America, and Asia had imposed embargoes on
anything coming from North America, violations punishable by death.
Half the countries claimed the embargoes were working and their borders
were clean; the other half claimed legal vengeance for their failing
infrastructures and dying people. Much of Africa made both claims at
once.

Washington, D.C., outside of the Federal Protected Enclave, was in
flames. It was hard to know how much government remained to answer
claims of legal vengeance.

Timonsville, Pennsylvania, had disappeared. The entire town of
twenty-three hundred people had just packed up and dispersed. That was
the closest any newsgrid came to hinting at vast changes in where
people went, or why, or what microorganisms they carried with them in
their diaspora.

Nobody mentioned East Oleanta at all.

In the afternoon it started to snow, even though the temperature was
just barely above freezing. I’d thought about hiking into the
mountains, looking for the place Billy had led us to over a month ago,
but the weather made that impossible.

All night I lay awake, listening to the silence.

In the morning I took a shower at the Salvatore John DeSanto Public
Baths, which were mysteriously working again. Then I returned to the
cafe. East Oleanta was still deserted. I sat on the edge of a chair,
like an attentive donkey schoolgirl, and watched the HT as my country
disintegrated into famine, pestilence, death, and war, and the rest of
the world mobilized its most advanced technology to seal us within our
own borders. If there was other news, the newsgrids weren’t reporting
it. By 11:00 A.M. only three channels still transmitted.

At noon I felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to sit by the river. This
urge struck me with the force of a religious revelation. It was not
arguable. I must go sit by the river.

Once there, I took off my clothes, an act as uncharacteristic and as
unstoppable as public diarrhoea. It was forty degrees and sunny, but I
had the feeling it wouldn’t have mattered if it were below zero. I
had
to take off my clothes. I did, and stretched full length on an expanse
of exposed mud.

I lay on my back in the sun-softened mud, shivering violently, for
maybe six or seven minutes. Stones poked into my shoulder blades, the
backs of my thighs, the small of my back. The river mud smelled
pungent. I was
cold
. I have never been so uncomfortable in my
life. I lay there, one arm flung over my face to shield my eyes from
the bright noon sun, unwilling to move. Unable to move. And then it was
over, and, still shivering, I sat up and dressed again.

It was over.

Eat me
, said the vials Alice found at the bottom of the
rabbit hole.
Drink me
.

It had been two full days since I’d devoured the chicken and rice
and genuine new peas in the Albany government hospital. I hadn’t felt
hungry: shock, anxiety, depression. All those can arrest appetite. But
the body needs fuel. Even when hunger is absent, glucose levels fall.
There are hidden storages of starch in the liver and muscles, but
eventually these get used up. The blood needs new sources of glucose to
send to the body.

Glucose is nothing but atoms. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. Arranged one
way in food. Arranged another way in mud and water and air. Just as
energy exists in one form in chemical bonds, and another in sunlight.

Y-energy rearranged the forms of energy so there would always be a
readily available, cheap supply.

Nanotechnology rearranged atoms, which could be found everywhere and
anywhere.

Under my clothes, I could feel the mud still caking the backs of my
thighs. I tried to remember what those openings were called through
which plants took in air, those minute orifices in the epidermis of
leaves and stems. The word wouldn’t come. My mind was watery.

My body had fed.

I walked carefully, setting my foot down cautiously on each step,
transferring my weight slowly from one foot to the other. My arms
hovered protectively six inches from my side, to catch myself if I
fell. I held my head stiffly. I made very slow progress up the
embankment, and it felt excruciating. It seemed to me I had no choice.
I moved as if I were something rare and fragile that I myself were
carrying, as if I shouldn’t jar myself. Nothing must happen to my body.
I was the answer to the starving world. No. Huevos Verdes was the
answer.

Once that thought came, I could walk normally. I scrambled up the
hill to town. I was not the only one. By now there were hundreds,
thousands of us. Eden existed in a gravrail station in Albany, beside
the sunshine machine. The entire town of Timonsville, Pennsylvania, had
disappeared. Miranda Sharifi had gone public with the Cell Cleaner, the
most comprehensible part of her project, over three months ago. And in
the last month Huevos Verdes could have stockpiled oceans of serum in
forests of slim black syringes. That’s what they were doing all over
the country, in all those places the plague was
not
killing
people. I was not the only one. I had only been the first. Except for
the Sleepless themselves.

My body felt good, which is to say it felt like nothing at all. It
disappeared from my consciousness, as healthy and fed bodies do. It was
just there, ready to climb or run or work or make love, without
depending on the Congresswoman Janet Carol Land Cafe. Without depending
on CanCo Franchise agrobots on political food distribution systems, on
the FDA, on controlling the means of production, on harvesters and
combines and the banks you owed them to, on forty acres and a mule, on
the threshing floor, on the serfs in the field, on the rains coming
this year and the locusts staying away, on Demeter and Indra and the
Aztec corn gods. Seven thousand years of civilization built on the need
to feed the people.

More in the syringe.

I could still eat normally—I had eaten chicken and rice and peas in
the Albany hospital. But I didn’t
have
to. From now on, my
body could “eat” mud.

I thought wildly of all the food I had consumed in my one single
life. Beef Wellington, the pastry flaky around succulent medium-rare
roast. Macaroons chewy with fresh-grated coconut. Potatoes Anna, crisp
and crunchy. Bittersweet Swiss chocolate. Cassoulet. Alaskan crab as
they did it at Fruits de la Mer in Seattle. Deep-dish apple pie…

My mouth watered. And then it stopped. A programmed biological
counterresponse? I would probably never know.

Biscuits dripping with butter. But I could still have them. Lamb
Gaston. Fresh arugula.
If
they were available. Strawberries
in cream. But would anybody grow or raise the ingredients without a
captive market?

A sudden wave of dizziness overtook me. I must have been in shock,
or some kind of quiet hysteria. It was lightheadedness at the sheer
size
of the thing, the audacity. Miranda Sharifi and her twenty-six inhuman
Supergeniuses, thinking in ways fundamentally different from ours,
aided by technology they themselves built so that each step ahead
opened six more pathways, and twenty-seven Superminds added to those
branching possibilities… Miranda Sharifi and Jonathan Markowitz and
Terry Mwakambe and the others whose names I didn’t remember from old
newsgrids, whom I would never meet, who were not like us and never had
been, and yet who had seen what would happen to a society they didn’t
belong to and had planned a countermeasure. Planned, probably, for
years, and carried out the unimaginably complex plans that would change
everything for everybody—

And I had once thought that
donkeys
were perpetually
dissatisfied and never found anything to be enough.

“How
could
she?” I said aloud, to nobody.

Dazed, I wandered past the station. A train pulled in and Annie and
Billy and Lizzie stepped off the otherwise empty gravrail, carrying
bundles. Lizzie saw me, shrieked, and ran toward me. I stood watching
them, feeling lighter and lighter in the head, my cranium swelling like
a balloon. Lizzie hurtled herself into my arms. She was taller,
stronger, filled out, all in just a month. Billy’s face broke into a
huge grin. He loped toward me like a man half his age, Annie trailing.

“Billy,” I said. “Billy—”

He went on grinning.

“We’re home now, us,” Billy said. “We’re all home.”

Annie sniffed. Lizzie squeezed me tight enough to crush ribs. Under
my jacks I felt mud flake off the skin of my thighs.

“Hurry,” Annie said. “I want to get to the cafe, me, before the
broadcast.”

“What broadcast?” I said.

All three of them looked at me, shocked. Lizzie said, “The
broadcast
,
Vicki. From Huevos Verdes. The one all the Liver channels been talking
about, them, for days. Everybody’s going to watch it!”

“I’ve been watching only donkey channels.” But if it were coming
from Huevos Verdes, they could use all channels at once, Liver and
donkey. They’d done it once before, thirteen years ago.

“But, Vicki, it’s the Huevos Verdes
broadcast”
Lizzie
repeated.

“I didn’t know,” I said, lamely.

“Donkeys,” Annie said. “They never know nothing, them.”

MIRANDA SHARIFI: TAPED BROADCAST FROM HUEVOS VERDES VIA SANCTUARY,
SIMULTANEOUS ON ALL FCC NEWSGRID CHANNELS

This is Miranda Serena Sharifi, speaking to you on an unedited holo
recorded six weeks ago. You will want to know what has been done to you.

I am going to explain, as simply as I can. If the explanation is not
simple enough, please be patient. This broadcast will play over and
over again for weeks, on Channel 35. Perhaps parts of it will become
clearer as you hear it more than once. Or perhaps as more technically
trained people—donkeys—use the syringes we are making available
everywhere, some donkeys will explain to you in easier words.
Meanwhile, these are the simplest words I can find for these concepts
without losing scientific accuracy.

Your body is made of cells. A cell, any cell, is basically a complex
of systems for transforming energy. So is an organism, including a
human being.

Humans get their basic energy from plant food, either directly or
indirectly, through a process called oxidative phosphorylation. Your
bodies break down the bonds of carbon-containing molecules, and a
significant portion of the food’s potential energy is repackaged into
the phosphate bonds of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). When human cells
need energy, they get it from ATP.

Plants get their basic energy from sunlight. They use water from the
soil and carbon dioxide from the air to form glucose. Glucose can then
be repackaged as ATP. Most plants use chlorophyll to carry on this
photophosphorylation.

Some bacteria, the halobacteria, can carry on both oxidative
phosphorylation and photophosphorylation. They can both ingest
nutrients and, under the right conditions, create ATP through a
photosynthetic mechanism. In other words, they can get basic energy
from either food
or
sunlight.

The halobacteria don’t use chlorophyll to do this. Instead, they use
retinal, the same pigment that responds to light in the human eye. The
retinal exists in conjunction with protein molecules in a complex
called bacteriorhodopsin.

Your bodies have been modified to include a radically genetically
engineered from of bacteriorhodopsin.