Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

After that I stayed awake. I watched Miranda Sharifi as the grav train, miraculously not malfunctioning, slid through the mountains of Pennsylvania and into New York State.

There was a latticework in my head. I couldn’t make it go away. Its shape floated there all the time now, looking a little like the lattices that roses grow on. It was the dark purple color that objects take on in late twilight when it’s hard to see what color anything really is. Miri once told me that nothing “really” is any color — it was all a matter of “circumstantial reflected wave-lengths.” I didn’t understand what she meant. To me, colors are too important to be circumstantial.

The lattice bent around and met itself to form a circle. I couldn’t see what was inside the circle, even though the lattice had diamond-shaped holes. Whatever was inside remained completely hidden.

I didn’t know what this graphic was. It suggested nothing to me. I couldn’t will it to suggest anything, or to change form, or to go away. This hadn’t ever happened to me before. I was the Lucid Dreamer. The shapes that came from my deep unconscious were always meaningful, always universal, always malleable. I shaped them. I brought them outward, to the conscious world. They didn’t shape me. I was the Lucid Dreamer.

I watched Miri’s final day in Science Court on hologrid in a hotel room in Seattle, where I was scheduled to give the revised “The Warrior” concert tomorrow afternoon. The robocams zoomed in close on Leisha and Sara as they climbed into their aircar on the Forum roof. Sara looked exactly like Miri. The holomask over her face, the wig, the red ribbon. She even walked like Miri. Leisha’s eyes had the pinched look that meant she was furious. Had she already discovered the switch? Or maybe that would come in the car. Leisha wouldn’t take it well. Nothing frustrated her more than being lied to, maybe because she was so truthful herself. I was glad I wasn’t there.

Spiky red shapes, taut with anxiety, sped around the purple latticework that never went away.

Sara/Miri closed the car door. The windows, of course, were opaqued. I turned off the newsgrid. It might be months before I saw Miri again. She could slip in and out of East Oleanta — she had, in fact, come to Washington from there — but Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer in his state-of-the-art powerchair, followed everywhere by the GSEA, could not. And even if I went to Huevos Verdes, Nikos Demetrios or Toshio Ohmura or Terry Mwakambe might decide a shielded link with East Oleanta was too great a risk for just personal communication. I might not even talk with Miri for months.

The spiky red shapes eased a little.

I poured myself another scotch. That slowed down the anxiety-shapes sometimes. But I tried to be careful with the stuff. I did try. I could remember my old man, in the stinking Delta town where I grew up:

Don’t you lip me, boy! You ain’t nothing, you, but a shit-bottomed baby!

I ain’t no baby, me! I’m seven years old!

You’re a shit-bottomed teatsucker, you, who ain’t never gonna own nothing, so shut up and hand me that beer.

I’m gonna own Sanctuary, me, someday.

You! A stupid bayou rat ! Laughter. Then, after thinking it over, the smack. Whap . Then more laughter.

I downed the scotch in a single gulp. Leisha would have hated that. The comlink shrilled in two short bursts. Twice meant the caller wasn’t on the approved list but Kevin Baker’s comlink program had nonetheless decided it was somebody I might want to see. I didn’t know how it decided that. “Fuzzy logic,” Kevin said, which made no shapes in my mind.

I think I would have talked to anybody just then. But I left off the visual.

“Mr. Arlen? Are you there? This is Dr. Elias Maleck. I know it’s very late, but I’d like a few minutes of your time, please. It’s extremely urgent. I’d rather not leave a message.”

He looked tired; it was three in the morning in Washington. I poured myself another scotch. “Visual on. I’m here, Dr. Maleck.”

“Thank you. I want to say right away this is a shielded call, and it’s not being recorded. Nobody can hear it but us two.”

I doubted that. Maleck didn’t understand what Terry Mwa-kambe or Toshio Ohmura could do. Even if Maleck’s Nobel had been in physics and not medicine, he wouldn’t have understood. Maleck was a big man, maybe sixty-five, not genemod for appearance. Thinning gray hair and tired brown eyes. His skin fell in jowls on either side of his face but his shoulders were square. I felt him as a series of solid navy cubes, unbreakable and clean. The cubes hovered in front of the unmoving lattice.

“I’m not sure exactly where to begin, Mr. Aden.” He ran his hand through his hair and the navy cubes took on a reddish tinge. Maleck was very tense. I sipped my drink.

“As you undoubtedly know by now, I voted against allowing further development of the Huevos Verdes patent claim in the Federal Forum for Science and Technology. The reasons for my vote are stated clearly in the majority opinion. But there are things that a public document can’t contain, things I want permission to inform you about.”

“Why?”

Maleck was blunt. “Because I — we — have no way to talk to Huevos Verdes. They accept messages but not two-way com-munication. You represent the only path by which I can convey information directly to Ms. Sharifi about genetic research.” The shapes in my mind rippled and twisted. I said, “How did you leave any messages for Huevos Verdes? How’d you get the access code to leave any messages?”

“That’s part of what I want to tell you, Mr. Arlen. In five minutes two men will request access to your suite. They want to show you something approximately half an hour from Seattle by plane. The purpose of my call is to urge you to go with them.” He hesitated. “They’re from the government. GSEA.”

“No.”

“I understand, Mr. Arlen. That’s the purpose of my call — to tell you this isn’t a trap, or a kidnapping, or any of the other atrocities you and I both know the government is capable of. The GSEA agents will take you outside the city, keep you about an hour, and return you safely, without implants or truth drugs or anything else. I know these men personally — personally — and I’m willing to stake my entire professional reputation on this. I’m sure you’re recording my call on your end. Send copies to anyone you like before you so much as open your hotel door. You have my word you will return safe and unaltered. Please consider what that’s worth to me.”

I considered. The man filled me with shapes I hadn’t felt in a long time: light, clean shapes, without any hidden agenda. Nothing like the shapes at Huevos Verdes.

Of course, Maleck might be completely sincere and still be used.

Somehow the glass of scotch, my fourth, was empty.

Maleck said, “If you want to take extra time to call Huevos Verdes for instructions—”

“ No .” I lowered my voice. “No. I’ll go.”

Maleck’s face changed, opened, growing years younger and hours less tired. (A light cleansing rain falling on the navy cubes.)

“ Thank you ,” he said. “You won’t regret it. You have my word, Mr. Aden.”

I would bet anything that he, an eminent donkey, had never seen any of my concerts.

I cut off the link, sent off copies of the call to Leisha, to Kevin Baker, to a donkey friend I trusted in Wichita. The link shrilled. Once. Even before I answered it Nikos Demetrios appeared on visual. He wasted no words, him.

“Don’t go with them, Drew.”

There was another glass of scotch in my hand. It was half empty. “That was a shielded call, Nick. Private.”