Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

I dropped on my belly into four inches of water covering mucky ground. Leisha splashed down beside me, falling to her knees. Without my powerchair I felt myself flailing, a desperate fish, holding myself above water on my elbows. I crawled forward, pulling myself with my upper arms through the muck and away from the plane dragging my useless legs behind.

Leisha staggered to her feet and tried to lift me. “No, run!” I screamed, as if the smoke billowing out from the plane blocked sound and not sight. “Not without you,” she said. I could feel the plane behind me, a bomb. I screamed, “I can go faster on my own!” Maybe it was true.

She kept on tugging at my body, though I was far too heavy for her. The smoke thickened. I didn’t hear the pilot climb out — was he hurt? My left palm slipped in the mud and I fell face first into it. Frantically I tried to get back up on my hands and drag myself forward. “Run!” I screamed again at Leisha, who wouldn’t leave. Hopeless, hopeless. She wasn’t strong enough to carry me, and the plane was going to blow.

The thread snapped. The lattice in my mind, as in Seattle, disappeared.

Someone ran toward Leisha from the other side of the plane. The pilot? But it wasn’t. The man tackled Leisha and she fell on top of me. Once more my face was pushed into the mud. Then I heard a faint pop. When I fought my eyes free of the mud, I saw the air around the three of us shimmering. A force shield. Y-energy. How strong was it? Could it withstand—

The plane exploded in light and heat and blinding color.

I fell back into the muck, pinned under Leisha. The world rocked and I saw a tiny black water snake, terrified at the intrusions into its swamp, dart forward and bite me on the cheek. The snake started as a thin thread, then became a blur of close motion, and then the world went black as its shiny scales and I didn’t know if the thread held or not.

He was a GSEA agent. When I came to, three of them stood around me in a circle, like the ring of doctors around my bed decades ago, when I was crippled. I lay on my back on a patch of relatively dry, spongy ground at the edge of the shallow lake. Leisha sat a little way off, her back against a custard-apple tree, her head bent forward on her knees. Across the swamp, Kevin Baker’s plane burned, its smoke rising in billowy clouds.

“Leisha?” I heard myself croak. My voice sounded as alien as everything else. Only it wasn’t alien at all. I recognized the heaviness of the muggy air, the whine of insects, the scummy pools and waxy-white ghost orchids. And over everything, the gray dripping beards of Spanish moss. I had been raised in upcountry Louisiana. This was — had to be — Georgia, but much of the swampy country is the same. It was I who had become the alien.

“Ms. Camden will be all right in a moment,” an agent answered. “Probably just a concussion. There’s help on the way. We’re GSEA, Mr. Arlen. Lie still — your leg is broken.”

Again. But this time I felt no pain. There were no nerves left to feel pain. I raised my chin slightly, feeling the pull in my stomach muscles. My left leg lay bent at a sharp, unnatural angle. I lowered my chin.

The shapes slithering through my mind were gray and indistinct on the outside, spiked within. They had a voice. Can’t do anything right, can you, boy? Who d’you think you are — some goddamn donkey ?

I said aloud, like a little boy, “A snake bit my cheek.”

A second man bent to squint at my face. It was covered with mud. He said, not harshly, “There’s a doctor on the way. We’re not going to move you until she gets here. Just lie still and don’t think.”

Don’t think. Don’t dream. But I was the Lucid Dreamer. I was. I had to be.

Leisha’s voice said thickly behind me, “Are we under arrest? On what charges?”

“No, of course not, Ms. Camden. We’re happy to be able to assist you,” said the man who had squinted at my cheek. The other two agents stood blank-faced, although I saw one of them blink. You can convey contempt with a blink. Leisha and I consorted ” with, assisted, Huevos Verdes. Gene manipulators. Destroyers of the human genome.

I saw Carmela Clemente-Rice standing beside the lattice in my mind, a clean cool shape, vibrating softly.

“You are Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency,” Leisha said. It wasn’t a question. But she was a lawyer: she waited for an answer.

“Yes, ma’am. Agent Thackeray.”

“Mr. Arlen and I are grateful for your assistance. But by what right—”

I never found out what legal point Leisha had been going to make.

Men dressed in rags burst from behind trees, through tangled vines, from the mucky ground itself. One moment they weren’t there, the next they were — that’s how it felt. They hollered and shrieked and whooped. Agent Thackeray and his two comtemp-tuous deputies didn’t even have time to draw their guns. Lying flat on my back, I saw the ragged men foreshortened as they raised pistols and fired at what seemed like, but couldn’t have been, point-blank range. Thackeray and the two agents went down, the bodies twitching. I heard somebody say, “Hail, yes , she’s an abomination, that there’s Leisha Camden,” and a gun fired again: once, twice. The first time, Leisha screamed.

I jerked my head toward her. She still sat with her back against the custard-apple tree, but now her upper body leaned forward, gracefully, as if she had fallen asleep. There were two red spots on her forehead, one below the other, the higher spot matting a strand of bright blonde hair that had somehow escaped the mud. I heard a long low moan and I thought “She’s alive!” — the thought a desperate bright bubble — until I realized the moan was mine.

The man who had said “Hail, yes” leaned over me. His breath blew in my face; it smelled of mint and tobacco. “Don’t you worry none, Mr. Arlen. We know you ain’t no abomination against nature. You’re safe as houses.”

“Jimmy,” a woman’s voice said sharply, “Here they come!”

“Well, Abigail, y’all are ready for ’em, ain’t you?” Jimmy said in a reasonable voice. I tried to crawl toward Leisha. She was dead.

Leisha was dead.

A plane droned overhead. The medical team. They could help Leisha. But Leisha was dead. But Leisha was a Sleepless. Sleepless didn’t die. They lived, on and on, Kevin Baker was 110. Leisha couldn’t be dead —

The woman called Abigail stepped off the high ground into the swamp. She wore hip-high waders and tattered pants and shirt, and she carried a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, ancient in design but gleaming with spit and polish. The medical plane folded its wings for a grav-powered landing. Abigail aimed, fired, and blew it into a second torch in the swamp.

“Okay,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “That’s it. Come on y’all, make tracks, they’ll be all over here in no time. Mr. Arlen, I’m sorry this is going to be a rough ride for y’all, sir.”

“No! I can’t leave Leisha!” I didn’t know what I was saying. I didn’t know—

“Sure you can,” Jimmy said. “She ain’t going to get no deader. And you ain’t none of her kind anyways. You’re with James Francis Marion Hubbley now. Campbell? Where you at? Carry him.”

“No! Leisha! Leisha!”

“Have a little dignity, son. You ain’t no child bawlin’ after its mama.”

A huge man, fully seven feet high, picked me up and swung me over his shoulder. There was no pain in my leg but as soon as my body struck his, red fire darted up my spine to my neck and I screamed. The fire filled my mind, and the last view I ever had of Leisha Camden was of her slumped gracefully against the custard-apple tree, enveloped in the red fire of my mind, looking as if she had just fallen quietly asleep.