Beggars and Choosers (43 page)

So why did I even care that the United States, qua United States,
was on the verge of nonexistence, the first nationalistic snuff job
brought about by making government itself obsolete? Why should I care?

I don’t know. But I did. Call me a fool. Call me a romantic. Call me
stubborn. Call me a deliberate, self-created anachronism.

Call me a patriot.

“Billy,” I said as we trudged along the endless gravrail track in
the high rolling hills of Pennsylvania, “are you still an American?”

He gave me a Billy-look, which is to say intelligent without the
remotest glimmer of vocabular understanding. “Me? Yes.”

“Will you be an American if you are killed by some fanatic
last-ditch legalistic donkey defense at Oak Mountain?”

He took a minute to sort this out. “Yes.”

“Will you still be an American if you’re killed by some attack by a
purist Liver-government underground that thinks you’ve sold out to the
genetic enemy?”

“I ain’t going, me, to be killed by no other Livers.”

“But if you
were
, would you die an American?” He was
losing patience. His old eyes with the young energy roamed over our
fellow walkers, looking for Annie. “Yes.”

“Would you still be an American if there
is
no America, no
central government left and nobody to administer it if there were, the
Constitution forgotten, the donkeys wiped out by some fanatic
revolutionary underground, and Miranda Sharifi rotting in a prison run
exclusively by ‘bots?”

“Vicki, you think too much, you,” Billy said. He turned his concern
on me, that
agape
concern off which I’d been living, out of
caste, for so long. It didn’t help. “Think about whether we’re going to
stay alive, us—that makes sense. But you can’t take on the whole damn
country, you.”

“The human mind, Charles Lamb once remarked, can fall in love with
anything. Call me a patriot, Billy. Don’t you still believe in
patriotism, Billy?”

“Besides, I once saw a genemod dog fall to its death off a balcony.”
But Billy suddenly spotted Annie. He smiled at me and moved off to walk
by his beloved, whose dress, despite her best efforts, was being
consumed by her big-breasted body. She looked like a pastoral goddess,
utterly unaware that the industrial revolution has begun and the looms
are clacking like gunfire.

We reached Oak Mountain July 14, which only I found funny, or even
notable. There were already ten thousand people there, by generous
estimate. They ringed the flat land around the prison and spread up the
sides of the surrounding mountains. Brush had been cleared for feeding
for miles around, although the trees remained for shade. No one was on
solid food; there was little shit. Tents in the wild colors of Before
jacks dotted the grounds: turquoise, marigold, crimson, kelly green. At
night, there were the usual campfires or Y-energy cones.

World War I lost more soldiers to disease, the result of being
messed together in unsanitary conditions, than to guns. At the siege of
Dunmar, they had eaten the rats, and then each other. During the
Brazilian Action, the damage to the rain forest was greater than the
damage to the combatants as high tech destroyed everything it touched.
Never again, none of it.

Did history still apply? Human history?

Billy was right. I thought too much. Concentrate on staying alive.

“Put more dirt on your face,” Lizzie said, peering at me critically.
This seemed superfluous; everyone was constantly covered in dirt, which
had become acceptable. Dirt was clean. Dirt was mother’s milk. I
suspected that Miranda and Company had altered our olfactory sense with
her magic brew. People did not seem to smell bad to each other.

“Put more leaves in your hair,”
Lizzie
said, tipping her
head critically to study me. Her pretty face was creased with worry.
“There are some weird people here, Vicki. They don’t understand that
donkeys can be human, too.”

Can be
. On sufferance. If we join the Livers and give up
the institutions by which we controlled the world.

Lizzie’s lip quivered. “If anything happened to you…”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I said, not believing it for half
a minute. Too much already had. But I hugged her, this daughter
slipping rapidly away from both Annie and me, who nonetheless fought
over her just as if she weren’t already a different species. Lizzie was
almost completely naked now, her “dress” reduced to a few courtesy
rags. Unselfconsciously naked. There were thirteen-year-olds in this
camp who were just as unselfconsciously pregnant. No problem. Their
bodies would take care of it. They anticipated no danger in childbirth,
had no fears about supporting a baby, counted on plenty of people
around all the time to help care for these casual offspring. It was no
big deal. The pregnant children were serene.

“Just be careful,”
Lizzie
said.

“You be careful,” I retorted, but of course she only smiled at this.

That night the first holo appeared in the sky.

==========

It appeared to be centered above the prison itself. Eighty feet up
and at least fifty feet tall—it was hard to judge from the ground— it
was clearly visible for miles. The laser lighting was intricate and
brilliant. It was around ten o’clock, dark enough even in summer for
the holo to dominate even a nearly full moon. It consisted of a
red-and-blue double helix bathed in a holy white light, like some
biological Caravaggio. Below it letters pulsed and flashed:

DEATH TO NON-HUMANS WILL AND IDEA

People screamed. In a year, they had apparently forgotten how
ubiquitous political holes used to be.

Death to non-humans
. Cold seeped along my spine, starting
in the small of my back and traveling upwards.

“Who’s making that holo them?” a nearby man called indignantly.
There was a frenzied babble of answers: the government, the food
franchises nobody needed anymore, the military. The donkeys, the
donkeys, the donkeys…

I didn’t hear anyone say, “The underground, them.” Did that mean
there were no members of it present, not even informers? There must be
informers; every war had them.

Informers would have to fit in, which meant they’d have to be
syringed. Did that mean they, too, were non-humans? Who exactly
qualified as “non-human”?

I saw Lizzie fighting through the crowd, felt her hands drawing me
back into our tent. If she was saying anything, it was lost in the
noise. I shrugged off her small insistent hands and stayed where I was.

The holo continued to flash. Then there was a general surge forward,
toward the prison. It didn’t happen all at once; nobody was in danger
of being trampled. But people began to move around tents and campfires
toward the prison walls. By the garish pulsing light I could see
similar movements down the sides of the distant wooded slopes. The
Livers were moving to protect Miranda, their chosen icon.

“Anybody tries, them, to give death to
her
. . .”

“She’s as human, her, as anybody with fancy holos!”

“Just let them
try
to get at her…”

What on earth did they think they could actually
do
to
help her?

Then the chanting started, first closest to the prison walls and
quickly spreading outward, drowning out the more random babble of
discussion and protest. By the time I reached the edge of the
shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, it was strong, rising from thousands of
throats: “Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”

Torches appeared. Within a half hour every human being in miles
stood packed by the prison walls, faces grim and yet exalted in that
way people get when they’re intent on something outside themselves.
Firelight turned some of their homely Liver faces rosy; others were
striped red and blue from the flashing holo above us.
Free
Miranda, Free Miranda, Free Miranda . .
.

There was no response at all from the silent gray walls.

They kept it up for an hour, which was the same length of time the
holo flashed its message of death to those like Miranda.

And me.

And the syringed Livers?

When the holo finally disappeared, the chanting did, too, almost as
if cut off from above. People blinked and looked at each other, a
little dazed. They might have been coming off a Drew Arlen lucid
dreaming.

Slowly, without haste, ten thousand people moved away from the
prison, back to their tents, spreading out over miles. It took a long
time. People moved slowly, subdued, talking softly or not at all. As
far as I knew, nobody got pushed or hurt. Once, I would not have
believed this possible.

People sat up very late, huddled around common fires, talking.

Brad said, “That holo didn’t come from the prison.”

I’d never thought it did. But I wanted to hear his reasoning. “How
do you know?”

He smiled patiently, the newly fledged techie addressing his
illiterate elder. The little prick. I had forgotten more tech than he
had yet learned in his belated post-syringe love affair with actual
knowledge. He was sixteen. Still, I had no real right to contempt. I
hadn’t noticed where the holo originated.

“Laser holos have feeds,” he said. “You know, those skinny little
lines of radiation you can only see kind of sidewise, and only if
you’re looking—”

“Peripheral vision. Yes, I know, Brad. Where were they coming from,
if not the prison?”

“Lizzie and me only studied about them last week.” He put a
proprietary hand on Lizzie’s knee. Annie scowled.

“Where were the feeds coming from, Brad?”

“At first I hardly noticed them at all. Then I remembered the—”

“From where, damn it!”

Startled, he pointed. Horizontally, to the top of a not-very-near
mountain I couldn’t name. I stared at the mountain, silhouetted in
moonlight.

“I don’t see why you’re yelling at me, you,” Brad said, somewhere
between a sulk and a sneer. I ignored him. I hoped Lizzie was losing
interest in him. He wasn’t nearly as bright as she was.

0 same new world.

1 stared at the dark nameless mountain. That’s where they were,
then. The Will-and-Idea underground, which Drew Arlen had hinted at,
and of which Billy had met a member weeks ago. But that man had been
syringed. Did that mean you could be syringed, with all its changes to
basic biological machinery, and still be considered human by the
underground? Or was the man being used as an informer, who would be
dealt with for his turncoat treason once the war was over? Such things
were not unknown in history.

This movement had loosed the duragem dissembler. They were killing
donkeys. They had successfully hidden Drew Arlen for two months from
Huevos Verdes. They armed their soldiers with United States military
weapons.

It was dawn before I slept.

==========

The next night, the holo was back, but changed.

The double helix, red and blue in white light, was still there. But
this time the flashing letters read:

DON’T TREAD ON ME WILL AND IDEA

Don’t tread on me
? What pseudo-revolutionary group could
possibly have the demented idea that a bunch of pastoral dirt-feeding
chanters were treading on them? Or even interested in them?

I had a sudden insight. It wasn’t only that Livers, due to using the
syringes, may or may not have become non-human. That alone hadn’t
provoked the underground’s hatred. The Liver’s non-interest had.
Syringed people not only didn’t pay the established government much
attention, most of them were equally uninterested in its would-be
replacements. They didn’t need any replacement, or thought they didn’t.
And for some people, being hated is preferable to being irrelevant. Any
action that provokes response, no matter how irrational, is better than
being irrelevant. Even if the response is never enough.

Another thing: These holos were not trying to convert anyone. There
were no broadcasts explaining why people should join the underground.
There were no simply worded leaflets. There were no cell members
furtively reaching out to the susceptible, persuading in hushed voices.
The people projecting these holos were not interested in recruitment.
They were interested in self-righteous violence.

The Livers
gazing
upward at the sky responded to this
second holo exactly as they had the night before. Orderly, without
confusion, without any signal given, they began to move toward the
prison. There was no haste. Mothers took the time to wrap up babies
against the night chill, to finish breast-feeding, to arrange who would
stay with sleeping toddlers. Fires were banked. Knitters did whatever
they do at the end of a row of stitches. But within ten minutes every
adult in the camp had started to move, ten thousand strong, toward the
walls. They moved courteously around the tents and temporary hearths of
those camped hard by the prison, careful not to step on anything. As
soon as they were shoulder-to-shoulder, they started to chant.

“
Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda
…”

The holo pulsed for fifteen minutes, then changed:

LIBERTY OR DEATH WILL AND IDEA

The white light changed to an American flag, stars and bars
superimposed over the double helix.

“
Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda
…” Fifteen minutes
later the holo words changed again:

HOPE WILL AND IDEA

“
Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda
…” The American
flag became a rattlesnake, poised to strike. It looked so real that a
few children started to cry.

Another fifteen minutes and the snake was replaced by the original
double helix and holy white light. This time we got three lines:

DEATH TO ABOMINATIONS

POWER TO TRUE LIVERS

WILL AND IDEA

The double helix rotated slowly. I wondered how many of the chanters
even knew what it was.