Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

He ignored this. “It could be a trap, despite what Maleck says. They could be using him. You should know that!”

Impatience had crept into his voice, despite himself: the stupid Sleeper had overlooked the obvious once again. I saw him as a dark shape with a thousand shades of gray, undulating in subtle patterns I would never understand.

“Nick, suppose — just suppose — that I wanted, me, to talk to somebody private, somebody who I don’t want you listening to, somebody who isn’t, them, no part of Huevos Verdes? Somebody else ?”

Nick stared. I heard then, me, how I was talking. Liver talk. My glass was empty again. The hotel system said politely, “Excuse me, sir. There are two men requesting access to your suite. Would you like visuals?”

“Nah,” I said. “Send the men in, them.”

“ Drew —” Nick began. I blanked him. It didn’t work. Some sort of SuperSleepless override. Wasn’t there anything they couldn’t do, them?

“Drew! Listen, you can’t just—” I disconnected the terminal from the Y-energy power unit.

The GSEA agents didn’t look like GSEA agents. I guess they never do, them. Mid-forties. Donkey handsome. Donkey polite. Probably donkey smart. But if they thought, them, in donkey words, at least the words would come one at a time, not in bunches and clusters and libraries of strings.

Snow fell on the purple lattice, cool and blank.

“You guys like a drink, you?”

“Yes,” one said, a little too fast. Going along with me. But he felt, him, almost as solid, almost as clean, as Maleck. That confused me. They were GSEA, them. How could they feel unhidden?

“Changed my mind,” I said. “Let’s go now, us, wherever you’re taking me.” I powered my chair toward the door. It hit the jamb, it, and hurt my legs.

But on the hotel roof, the cold sobered me. Some, anyway. Cars landed, bringing home early party-goers; it was just a little after midnight. Seattle was built on hills and the hotel was on top of a big one. I could see way beyond the enclave: the dark waters of Puget Sound to the west, Mount Rainier white in the moonlight. Cold stars above, cold lights below. Liver neighborhoods at the bases of the hills, except along the Sound, which was waterfront land too good for Livers.

The GSEA aircar, armored and shielded, took off to the east. Pretty soon there were no more lights. Nobody spoke. I might have slept, me. I hope not.

Don’t bother your Daddy, Drew. He’s asleep.

He’s drunk, him.

Drew!

Drew! Nick said on the comlink. Huevos Verdes said. Miranda Sharifi said. Drew, do this. Give this concert. Spread this subconscious idea. Drew—

The lattice curled in my mind, floating like swamp gas in the bayou where my Daddy finally drowned, him, dead drunk. Some kids found him, long after. They thought the thing in the water was a rotten log.

“We’re here, Mr. Arlen. Please wake up.”

We had landed on a pad somewhere in wild, dark country, dense and wooded, with huge outcroppings of rock that I slowly realized were parts of mountains. My head pounded. One of the agents turned on a portable Y-lamp and cut the car’s lights. We got out. I realized for the first time I didn’t know their names.

“Where are we?”

“Cascade Range.”

“But where are we?”

“Just another few minutes, Mr. Arlen.”

They looked away while I pulled myself into my chair. It floated on its gravunit six inches above a narrow dirt track that led from the landing pad into thick woods. I followed the agents, who carried the lamp. The blackness on either side of the track, under the trees, was like a solid wall, except for rustlings and distant, deep hoots. I smelled pine needles and leaf mold.

The track ended at a low foamcast building hidden by trees, a building too small to be important. No windows. An agent had his retina scanned and spoke a code to the door and it opened. The inside lit up. An elevator filled the interior, and that too had retinal scanner and a code. We went underground.

The elevator opened on a large laboratory crowded with equipment, none of it running. The lights were low. A woman in a white lab coat hurried through one of many side doors. “Is that him?”

“Yes,” an agent said, and I caught his quick involuntary glance to see if the Lucid Dreamer minded not being recognized. I smiled.

“Welcome, Mr. Arlen,” the woman said gravely. “I’m Dr. Car-mela Clemente-Rice. Thank you for coming.”

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, even lovelier than Leisha. Hair so black it looked blue, enormous eyes of a clear navy, flawless skin. She looked about thirty but, of course, might have been much older. Donkey genemods. She was wreathed with the wispy shapes of sorrow.

She held her hands lightly clasped in front of her. “You’re wondering why we brought you here. This isn’t a GSEA installation, Mr. Arlen. It’s an outlaw gene facility we discovered and captured. Setting up the law-enforcement operation took an entire year. The trial of the scientists and technicians working here took another year. They’re all in prison now. Ordinarily the GSEA would dismantle an outlaw lab completely, but there are reasons we couldn’t dismantle this one. As you’ll see in a minute.”

She unclasped her hands and made a curious gesture, as if she were pulling me toward her. Or pulling my mind toward her. The navy-blue donkey eyes never left my face.

“The… beasts working here were creating illegal genemods for the underground market. One of the underground markets. These facilities exist across the United States, Mr. Arlen, although fortunately most of them aren’t as successful as this one. The GSEA expends a lot of money, time, manpower, and legal talent putting them out of business. Follow me, please.”

Carmela Clemente-Rice led the way back through the same side door. We followed. A long white corridor — how big was this underground place? — was lined with doors. She led me through the first one and stepped aside.

There were two of them, male and female, both naked. They had the dreamy, unfocused expressions of heavy users, but somehow I knew they didn’t exist on drugs. They just existed. Both of them were masturbating with a dreamy nonurgency that matched their expressions. The woman had one hand in the vagina between her legs, the other in the one between her breasts. But her other vaginas, between her eyes and on each palm, had also gone labile, their tissues swollen and flushed. The man fondled both his gigantic erect penis and his vagina, and I saw that he had pushed what looked like a food utensil of some kind up one asshole.

“For the sex trade,” Carmela Clemente-Rice said quietly behind me. “Underground genetic embryonic engineering. There’s no way we can undo it, no way we can raise their IQs, which are about 60. All we can do is keep them comfortable, and out of the market they were designed for.”

I powered my chair out of the room. “You’re not showing me anything I don’t already know about, lady,” I said, more harshly than I intended. The sex slaves made bruised, painful shapes in my mind. “This stuff has been around for years, long before Hue-vos Verdes existed. Huevos Verdes doesn’t quarrel with the GSEA outlawing it and shutting it down. Nobody sane argues in favor of this kind of genetic engineering.”

She didn’t answer, just led me down the corridor to another door.

Four of them this time, in a much larger room, with the same dreamy expressions. These weren’t naked, although their clothes were odd: jacks clumsily hand-sewn to fit around the extra limbs and the deformities. One had eight arms, one four legs, another three pairs of breasts. Judging from its body shape, the extra organs on the fourth must have been internal. Pancreases, or livers, or hearts? Could the genes be programmed to grow extra hearts?