Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

“He wanted excitement, him.”

A man in the sixth or seventh row wasn’t watching me. He glanced around at everybody else’s rapt face. He was first puzzled, then uneasy. A natural immune to hypnosis — there were always a few. Huevos Verdes had isolated the brain chemical necessary to respond to lucid dreaming, only it wasn’t a single brain chemical but a combination of what Sara Cerelli called “necessary prerequisite conditions,” some of which depended on enzymes triggered by other conditions … I didn’t really understand. But I didn’t need to. I was the Lucid Dreamer.

The unaffected man shuffled restlessly. Then settled down to listen anyway. Afterwards, I knew, he wouldn’t say much to his friends. It was too uncomfortable, being left out.

I knew all about that. My concerts counted on it.

“He wanted every day to be filled with challenges only he could meet.”

Miri loved me in a way I could never love her back. It burned, that love, as hard as her intelligence. It was the love, not the intelligence, that had made me never say to her directly, “Should we go ahead with the project? What proof do we have that this is the right thing to do?” She would tell me, of course, that proof was impossible, and her explanation of why not would contain so many things — equations and precedents and conditions — that I wouldn’t understand it.

But that wasn’t the real reason I’d never pushed my doubts. The real reason was that she loved me in a way I could never love her, and I had wanted Sanctuary since I was six years old and discovered that my grandfather died building it, a grunt worker before Livers were taken care of by a vote-hungry government. That was why I had turned my mind, so much weaker than hers, over to Huevos Verdes.

But now there was the pale grass, growing over the lattices in my mind, growing over the world.

“He wanted—”

He wanted to belong to himself again.

The shapes slid around my chair; the subliminals flickered in and out of my audience’s consciousness. Their faces were completely unguarded now, oblivious to each other and even to me, as the private doors of their minds swung briefly open. To the desires and fearlessness and confidence that had been buried there for decades, under the world that needed order and conformity and predictability to function. This was my best concert of “The Warrior” yet. I could feel it.

At the end, almost an hour later, I raised my hands. I felt the usual outpouring of holy affection for all of them. “Like a pope or a lama?” Miri had asked, but it wasn’t like that. “Like a brother,” I’d answered, and watched her dark eyes deepen with pain. Her own brother had been killed on Sanctuary. I’d known my answer would hurt her. That was a kind of power, too, and now I felt ashamed of it.

But it was also the turth. In a moment, when the concert ended, these Livers would go back to being the same whining, complaining, ineffectual, ignorant people they’d been before. But for this instant before the concert ended, I did feel a brotherhood that had nothing to do with likeness.

And they wouldn’t go completely back to what they had been. Not completely. Huevos Verdes’s computer programs had verified that.

“…back to his kingdom.”

The music ended. The shapes stopped. The lights came up. Slowly the faces around me dissolved into themselves, first blinking wide-eyed, then laughing and crying and hugging. The applause started.

I looked for the man with the voice magnifier. He wasn’t standing in his same place in the crowd. But I didn’t have to wait long to find him.

“Let’s go, us, to that gravtrain crash — it’s only a half-mile away. There’s still folks hurt there, them, more than there are med-units — I saw, me! And not enough blankets! We can help, us, to bring the injured here… Us!” Us. Us. Us.

There was confusion in the crowd. But a surprising number of Livers followed the new leader, burning to do something. To be heroes, which is the true hidden driver of the human mind. Some people started organizing a hospital corner. Others left, but from behind the now-opaqued shield that let me watch them without being seen, I observed even the departing Livers donating spare jackets and shirts and blankets for the aid of the wounded. Congresswoman Sallie Edith Gardiner bustled over the catwalk toward me.

“Well, Mr. Arlen, that was just marvelous—” Mahvelous .

“You didn’t watch it.”

She wasn’t listening. She stared at the activity in the King-Dome. “What’s all this now?”

I said, “They’re getting ready to help the survivors of the gravrail crash.”

“Them? Help how?”

I didn’t answer. All of a sudden I was very tired. I’d had only a few hours’ sleep, and I’d spent the previous night viewing man-made horrors.

Like this woman.

“Well, they can all just stop this nonsense right now!” Raht now .

She bustled away. I watched a little longer, then went to find my driver — who had, of course, vowed to never drive an aircar again. But that was before the gravrail crash showed that nothing else was any better. Still, I’d find some way back to Seattle. And to the airport. And to Huevos Verdes. And from there to East Oleanta. There were things I had to ask Miranda, critical things, things I should have asked a long time ago. And I was going to say them. I, Drew Arlen. Who had been the Lucid Dreamer long before I met Miranda Sharifi.

The floor of the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel was covered in leaves. It was late August — no leaves falling yet, them. That meant these leaves were left over from last year, blowing into the hotel last October and November and lying around ever since, without no ’bot to clean them out. I hadn’t been nowhere near the hotel, me, all those months. But I was now.

The funny thing was that for a few days I didn’t even notice the leaves, me. I didn’t notice nothing. My head was a fog, it, and I stumbled toward the hotel HT on its red counter and didn’t see nothing else. Lizzie was too sick.

The HT turned on when I come near, like it’d been doing for the past four days. “May I help you?”

I put both hands, me, on the counter. Like that would help. “I need the medunit, me. An emergency.”

“I’m sorry, sir, the County Legislator Thomas Scott Drinkwater Medical Unit is temporarily out of service. Albany has been notified, and a technician will shortly—”

“I don’t want Albany, me! I want a medunit! My little girl’s sick bad!”

“I’m sorry, sir, the County Legislator Thomas Scott Drinkwater Medical Unit is temporarily out of service. Albany has been—”

“Then get me another medunit, you! It’s an emergency! Lizzie’s coughing her guts up, her!”

“I’m sorry, sir, there’s no medunit immediately available, due to the temporary inoperability of the Senator Walker Vance Morehouse Magnetic Railway. As soon as the railway is repaired, another medical unit can be rushed in from—”

“The gravrail ain’t inaccessible, it’s busted!” I screamed at the HT. I would of busted it with my bare hands if it’d helped. “Let me talk to a human being!”

“I’m sorry, your elected officials are temporarily unavailable. If you wish to leave a message, please specify whether it’s intended for United States Senator Mard Todd Ingalls, United States Senator Walker Vance—”

“Off! Turn the hell off!”

Lizzie’d been sick, her, for three days. The gravrail had been down for five. The medunit had been out for who knows how long — nobody’d got sick, them, since Doug Kane’s heart attack. The politicians had been assholes as long as anybody could remember.