Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

I took a step, me, right toward her. She stood up. She didn’t seem afraid, her — just went on looking at me with those eyes with no smile. After seeing the coon, it came to me that she had a shell, too. Not hard like the coon’s, and maybe not away from her body neither. Maybe close on it like a clear glove. But that was why she was out in the woods in shorts and flimsy sandals, and why she wasn’t bit up, her, by no blackflies, and why she wasn’t afraid of me.

I said, “You… you’re from Eden, ain’t you? It’s really here someplace, in these woods, it’s really here…”

She got a funny expression on her face. I didn’t know, me, what it meant, and it came to me that I could better guess what a rabid coon was thinking than what this girl was.

“Go get help, Mr. Washington. Your friend needs it.” She stopped, her. “And please tell the townspeople … as little as you feel you can.”

“But, ma’am—”

“Uuuhhhmmmm,” Doug moaned, not like he was in pain, him, but like he was dreaming.

I stumbled back to East Oleanta as fast as I could, me, puffing until I thought we’d have two heart attacks for the medunit. Just beyond the scooter track I met Jack Sawicki and Krystal Mandor, hot and sweaty, them, straggling back to town. I told them, me, about old man Kane’s collapse. They had to make me start over twice. Jack set off, him, by the sun — he’s maybe the only other good woodsman East Oleanta’s got. Krystal ran, her, for the med-unit and more help. I sat down, me, to catch my breath. The sun was hot and blinding on the open field, the lake sparkled down past town, and I couldn’t find no balance no place in my mind.

Maybe I never did. Nothing ever looked the same to me after that day.

The medunit found Doug Kane easy enough, skimming above the brush on its gravsensors, smelling me and Doug’s trail in the air. Four men followed, them, and they carried Kane home. He breathed easy. That night near everybody else in town gathered, us, in the cafe. There was dancing and accusing and yelling and a party. Nobody had shot no raccoons, but Eddie Rollins shot a deer and Ben Radisson shot Paulie Cenverno. Paulie wasn’t hurt bad, him, just a graze on the arm, and the medunit fixed him right up. I went to see Doug Kane, me.

He didn’t remember no girl in the woods. I asked him, me, while he lay on his plastisynth sleeping platform, propped up on extra pillows and covered with an embroidered blanket like the one Annie made for her sofa. Doug loved the attention, him. I asked him, me, real careful, not exactly saying there was a girl in the woods, just hinting around the edges of what happened. But he didn’t remember nothing, him, after he collapsed, and nobody who went to bring him home mentioned finding any raccoon in a hard shell.

She must of just picked up the whole shell, her, safe as houses, and just walked off with it.

The only person I told, me, was Annie, and I made sure Lizzie was nowhere near. Annie didn’t believe me, her. Not at first. Then she did, but only because she remembered the big-headed girl in green jacks in the cafe two nights before. This girl had a big head too, her, and somehow to Annie that meant all the rest of my story was true. I told Annie not to say nothing to nobody. And she never did, not even to me. Said it gave her the willies, her, to think of some weird outcast donkeys living in the woods with genemod machinery and calling it Eden. Blasphemous, almost. Eden was in the Bible and no place else. Annie didn’t want to think about it, her.

But I thought about it, me. A lot. It got so for a while I couldn’t hardly think about nothing else. Then I got a grip on myself, me, and went back to normal living. But the big-headed girl was still in my thoughts.

We didn’t have no more trouble that whole summer and fall with rabid raccoons. They all just disappeared, them, for good.

But machines kept breaking.

The first person I saw at Science Court, walking up the broad shallow white stone steps that were supposed to evoke Socrates and Aristotle, was Leisha Camden.

Paul, who came before Anthony and after Rex, and I used to enjoy intellectual arguments. He enjoyed them because he won; I enjoyed them because he won. This was, of course, before I understood how deeply rooted, like a cancer, was my desire to lose. At the time the arguments seemed amusing, even daring. The people Paul and I knew considered it rather bad form to debate abstract questions. We donkeys, with our genemod intelligence, were all so good at it — like showing off the fact that you could walk. No one wished to appear ridiculous. Much better to publicly enjoy body surfing. Or gardening. Or even, God help us, sensory deprivation tanks. Much better.

But one night Paul and I, daring nonconformists right up to our banal end, debated who should have the right to control radical new technology. The government? The technocrats, mostly scientists and engineers, who were the only ones who ever really understood it? The free market? The people? It was not a good night. Paul wanted to win more than usual. I, for reasons connected to a gold-eyed slut at a party the night before, was not quite as eager as usual to lose. Things got said, the kinds of embarrassing things that don’t go away. Tempers ran high. My paternal grandfather’s teak desk required a new panel, which never quite matched the others. Intellectual debate can be very hard on furniture.

In a subtle way, I blame the Sleepless for Paul’s and my breakup. Not directly, but a desastre inoffensif , like the final small program that crashes an overloaded system. But, then, for the last hundred years, what haven’t we blamed on the Sleepless?

They even caused the creation of the science courts: another desastre inoffensif . A hundred years ago, nobody ever made a decision that is was acceptable to engineer human embryos to be Sleepless. Genemod companies just did it, the way they did all those other embryonic genemods in the unregulated days before the GSEA. You want a kid who’s seven feet tall, has purple hair, and is encoded with a predisposition for musical ability? Here — you got yourself a basketball-playing punk cellist. Mazel tov.

Then came the Sleepless. Rational, awake, smart. Too smart. And long-lived, a bonus surprise — nobody knew at first that sleep interfered with cell regeneration. Nobody liked it when they found out. Too many Darwinian advantages piling up in one corner.

So, this being the United States and not some sixteenth-century monarchy or twentieth-century totalitarian state, the government just didn’t outlaw radical genetic modifications outright. Instead, they talked them to death.

The Federal Forum for Science and Technology follows due process. A jury composed of a panel of scientists, arguments and rebuttals, cross-examination, final written opinion with provision for dissenting opinions, the whole ROM. Science Court has no power. It can ony recommend, not make policy. Nobody on it can tell anybody to do or not do anything about any thing.

But no Congress, president, or GSEA board has ever acted contrary to a Science Court recommendation. Not once. Not ever.

So I had all the force majeure of the status quo on my side that furniture-wrecking night when I declared that the government should control human genetic modification. Paul wanted absolute control by scientists (he was one). We both were right, as far as actual practice. But of course practice didn’t matter; neither did theory, really. What we’d really wanted was the fight.