Beggars and Choosers (44 page)

“Free Miranda…”

At the end of an hour, it was over. It took another hour for the
huge crowd to quietly disperse, which it started to do the moment the
holo vanished.

Back in my tent, I borrowed Lizzie’s terminal, with its library
crystal. “Don’t tread on me” was first used on flags in the Colonial
South, as relations with Great Britain deteriorated, and later adopted
as Revolutionary slogan in much of New England. “Liberty or Death”
appeared on flags in Virginia, following Patrick Henry’s exhortation to
turn on the British masters. “Hope” was the legend on the flag of the
Colonial armed schooner
Lee
, the first flag to also feature
thirteen stars. I couldn’t find a record anywhere of “Will and Idea.”

These maniacs considered themselves colonists in their own country,
fighting to overthrow a donkey establishment that was largely in
passive hiding and, maybe, a syringed Liver population that was
essentially defenseless. Unless you count chanting as a weapon.

The government existed, in part, to defend its citizens against this
sort of demented civil insurrection. Did we have a government left? Did
we have a country left?

The only official representative of that country in sight, Oak
Mountain Maximum Security Federal Prison, sat silent and dark. Maybe it
was even empty.

I walked back toward the prison walls. This time I went right up to
them, borrowing a torch from some obliging camper who asked mildly,
without insistence, that I return it when I was done. I walked along
the prison walls, inspecting.

A few graffiti, not very many. Few Livers could write. What graffiti
there was hadn’t been written on the walls themselves, which of course
shimmered with a faint Y-energy shield. Instead river boulders had been
rolled laboriously against the shield, the earth scraped raw from their
passage. On the rocks was painted FREEE MARANDA. WE R PEEPLUL TO. TAK
DOWN THEEZ WALLZ.

A pathetic scratching in one rock, a half-inch deep, where some
group had begun, symbolically at least, to tak down theez wallz.

The prison door, facing the river, blank and impenetrable. Thirty
feet up the security screens, which may or may not have been recording,
were dark blank patches.

Above the walls the shimmer, hard to see unless you used your
peripheral vision, extended outward a few feet, like eaves. I couldn’t
imagine why.

Towers loomed at each of the four corners. They had no windows, or
else windows holoed to look like they didn’t exist.

I walked back to my tent, returning the torch on the way. Annie,
Billy,
Lizzie
, and Brad had already disappeared into their
tents, two by two. Clouds were rolling in from the west. I sat outside
for a long time, wrapped in a plasticloth tarp, cold even though it was
at least seventy degrees out. The prison, too, sat massive and silent,
not even flying a holographic flag. Dead.

==========

“Lizzie, I need you to do something for me. Something tremendously
important.”

She looked up at me. I’d found her deep in the woods, after hours of
patiently asking total strangers if they’d seen a thin black girl with
pink ribbons tying up her two braids.
Lizzie
sat on a fallen
log, which the backs of her thighs were probably eating. She’d been
crying. Brad, of course. I’d kill him. No, I wouldn’t. There was no
other way for her to learn.
Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David.

The timing was good for me. I could make use of these tears.

I said, “There’s a message I have to get to Charleston. I can’t go
myself because the GSEA is monitoring me remotely; I told you that.
They’d know. And there’s nobody else I can trust. Annie wouldn’t do it,
and Billy won’t leave Annie…”

She went on looking at me, not changing expression, her eyes swollen
and her nose red.

“It’s about Miranda Sharifi,” I said. “
Lizzie
, it’s
unbelievably important. I need you to walk to Charleston, and I’ll
time-encode in your terminal what you need to do after you arrive. In
fact, I’ve already done that. I know this sounds mysterious, but it’s
essential.” I put everything I had—or once had—into that last sentence.
The donkey authority. The adult tone of command. The confidence that
this girl loved me.

Lizzie went on gazing at me, expressionless.

I handed her the terminal. “You walk along the gravrail track until
it branches at Ash Falls. Then you—”

“There’s no message about Miranda Sharifi,”
Lizzie
said.

“I just told you there was.” Donkey authority. Adult command.

“No. There’s nothing anybody can do about Miranda. You just want me
out of here because you’re afraid that underground will attack tonight.”

“No. It’s not that. Why would you think—”
you, who owe me so
much
, my tone said “—that I don’t have resources
you
don’t understand? If I say there is a crucial message about Miranda,
there
is
a crucial message about Miranda.”

Lizzie stared at me emptily, hopelessly.

“Lizzie—”

“He left me. Brad. For Maura Casey!”

It’s wrong to laugh at puppy love. For one thing, it’s not that
different from what most adults do. I sat on the log next to her.

“He says… he says, him… that I’m too smart for my own good.”

“Livers always say that,” I said gently. “Brad just hasn’t caught on
yet.”

“But I am smarter than he is, me.” She sounded like the child she
still was. “
Lots
smarter. He’s so stupid about so many things!”

I didn’t say,
Then why do you want him;
I recognized a
hopeless arena for logic when I saw one. Instead I said, “Most people
are going to look stupid to you,
Lizzie
. Starting with your
mother. That’s just the way you are, and the way the world is going to
be now. For you.”

She blew her nose on a leaf. “I hate it, me! I want people to
understand me!”

“Well. Better get used to it.”

“He says, him, I try to control him! I don’t, me!”

Who should control the technology
? Paul’s voice said to me,
lying in bed, pleased to be instructing the person he had just fucked.

Pleased to be on top.
Lizzie
probably did try to control
Brad.
Whoever can
, Billy said.

“Lizzie… in Charleston…”

She jumped up. “I said I’m not going, me, and I’m not! I hope there
is
an attack tonight! I hope I die in it!” She ran off, crashing through
the woods, crying.

I took after Lizzie at a dead run. At ten yards, I started gaining.
She was fast, but I was more muscled, with longer legs. She was within
a yard of my grasp. It was six hours before dark. I could tie her up
and physically carry her as far from Oak Mountain, from danger, as I
could get in six hours. If I had to, I’d knock her out to let me carry
her.

My fingers brushed her back. She spurted forward and leaped over a
pile of brush. I leaped, too, and my ankle twisted under me as I fell.

Pain lanced through my leg. I cried out.
Lizzie
didn’t
even falter. Maybe she thought I was faking. I tried to call out to
her, but a sudden wave of nausea—biological shock—took me. I turned my
head just in time to vomit.
Lizzie
kept running, and
disappeared among the trees. I heard her even after I couldn’t see her
anymore. Then I couldn’t hear her either.

Slowly I sat up. My ankle throbbed, already swollen. I couldn’t tell
if it was sprained or even fractured. If it was, Miranda’s nanotech
would fix it. But not instantly.

I felt cold, then sweaty.
Don’t pass out
, I told myself
sternly. Not now, not here. Lizzie…

Even if I could find her again, I couldn’t carry her anywhere.

When the biologic shock passed, I limped back to camp. Every step
was painful, and not just to my ankle. When I reached the outskirts of
the camp, some Livers helped me get to my tent. By the time I got
there, the pain was already muted. It was also dark.
Lizzie
wasn’t there, and neither was Annie nor Billy. Lizzie’s terminal and
library crystal were gone from her tent.

I sat huddled in front of my tent, watching the sky. Tonight was
cloudy, without stars or moon. The air smelled of rain. I shivered, and
hoped I was wrong. Completely, spectacularly, omnisciently wrong. About
the underground nobody admitted actually existed, about their targets,
about everything.

After all, what did I know?

==========

“Free Miranda.
Free
Miranda.
Free
Miranda…”

The red-and-blue helix pulsed, overlaid by the red, white, and blue
flag. WILL AND IDEA, no other legend. Whose will? What idea? Oak
Mountain Prison sat dark and still under the rhythmical light.

“
Free
Miranda.
Free
Miranda.
Free
Miranda…”

I still sat in front of my tent, nursing my ankle. Annie had wrapped
it tightly in a strip of woven cloth, which my skin was probably
consuming. I sat perhaps a quarter mile from the ten thousand chanters.
Their chant carried to me clearly.

The sky’was dark, overcast. The summer air smelled of rain, of pine,
of wildflowers. I realized for the first time that these scents were as
strong as ever, whereas the stink of human bodies was muted in my
altered olfactory nerves. Miranda & Company knew their business.

The torches held by the chanters mixed with Y-energy cones: wavering
primitive light and steady high tech. And above it, the red-and-blue
glare. Broad stripes and bright stars.

The first plane came from Brad’s nameless mountain, flying without
lights, a metallic glint visible only if you were looking for it. They
didn’t need planes; they could have used long-distance artillery.
Somebody wanted to record the action close up. I staggered to my feet,
already crying. The plane came in over the top of the prison and swept
low, buzzing the chanters. People screamed. It dropped a single impact
bomb, which went off in the middle of the crowd. Barely enough to cause
fifty deaths, even in that mass of bodies. They were playing.

People started to shove and push, screaming. Those fortunates on the
edge of the crowd ran free, toward the distant wooded slopes. I could
see figures behind them, distant but separate, stumble over each other.
Miranda had left me with 20/20 vision.

A second plane, that I hadn’t seen in advance, flew over me from the
opposite direction and disappeared over the prison walls. I didn’t hear
the second bomb, which must have fallen on the other side of the walls.
The explosion was drowned out by the screaming.

People started to trample each other.

Billy. Annie.
Lizzie .
. .

The first plane had wheeled and was returning from behind me. This
time, I knew, it wouldn’t be to play. Too many people from the edges of
the crowd were scrambling to safety. Would the bomb take out Oak
Mountain itself? Of course. That’s where the chief abomination was. I
didn’t know what kinds of shields the prison had, but if the attack was
nuclear…

The holo above the prison changed for the last time:

THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE THE IDEA OF HUMAN PURITY

I thought I saw
Lizzie
. Insane—it wasn’t possible to
distinguish individuals at this distance. My mind merely wanted me to
die in as much dramatic anguish as possible. And so I thought I saw
Lizzie
run forward, and be trampled by people panicked to escape what had been
inevitable since the creation of the first genemod.

I squeezed my eyes shut to die. And then opened them again.

In time to see the nanosecond in which it happened.

The shield around Oak Mountain glowed brighter than the holo in the
sky. One moment the prison was wrapped in silvery light. The next the
same silvery light shot out from the prison walls over the crowd below,
in grotesquely elongated eaves of pure energy. The bomb, or whatever it
was, hit the top of the energy shield and detonated, or ricocheted, or
was thrown back. The plane exploded in a light that blinded me, but
wasn’t quite nuclear. An instant later a second explosion: the other
plane. Then dead silence.

People had stopped running, most of them. They looked up at the
opaque silver roof protecting them, the roof of manmade high-tech
radiation.

I cried out and staggered forward. Immediately my ankle gave way and
I fell. I raised myself chest-high off the ground and stared up. The
“roof extended all the way to the lowest slopes of the mountain. I
couldn’t see through it. But I heard the subsequent explosions,
artillery or radiation or something that must have been directed from
the top of the distant mountain.

People were screaming
again
. But the shoving and trampling
had stopped. Huddled under this high-energy umbrella was the safest
place to be.

I thought:
Huevos Verdes protects their own
.

I lay back down on the ground, my cheek pressed against the
hard-packed dirt. It felt as if I had no bones; I literally couldn’t
move. Small children could have trampled on me. Huevos Verdes had
protected their own, incidentally saving the lives of nine or ten
thousand Livers while wiping out some other unknown number of Livers.
That was who made the laws now: Huevos Verdes. Twenty-seven Sleepless
plus their eventual offspring, who did not consider themselves part of
my country. Or any other. Not donkeys, not Livers, not the
Constitution, which even to donkeys had always been silent in the
background but fundamental, like bedrock. No longer.

Who was the statesman whose last, dying words concerned the fate of
the United States? Adams? Webster? I’d always thought it was a stupid
story. Shouldn’t his last words have concerned his wife or his will or
the height of his pillow—something concrete and personal? How grandiose
to think oneself large enough to match the fate of a whole country—and
at such a moment! Pretentious, inflated. Also silly—the man wasn’t
going to pass any more laws or influence any more policy, he was
dying
.
Silly.