Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

She pressed her lips together, a suspicious little Annie. “Dangerous how?”

“They could trace you, come here, and arrest you. And send you to jail.”

Her black eyes widened. She had some respect for authority, or at least for power. A cowardly little Annie.

“Promise,” I said, relentless.

“I promise, me!”

“And I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow I’ll go to Albany on the gravrail” — it was working again, briefly — “and buy you a handheld computer and crystal library. It has far more on it than you can access here. You won’t believe what you’ll learn to do.” And a free-held unit couldn’t be traced. I could use the “Dark Jones” account, which the high cost of a crystal library and compatible unit would just about empty. Maybe I’d better go farther than Albany to buy it. Maybe New York.

Lizzie stared at me, for once speechless. Her pink mouth made a little “O.” Then she was hugging me, smelling of warehouse distrib soap, her voice muffled against my neck.

“Vicki… a crystal library… oh, Vicki. . .”

For you. I didn’t say more. I couldn’t.

Anthony, who came before Russell and after Paul, once told me that there was no such thing as a maternal instinct, nor a paternal one either. It was all intellectual propaganda designed to urge humans toward a responsibility they didn’t really want, but couldn’t admit not wanting. It was a PR tour de force without genuine biological force.

I used to love some very stupid men.

Three days after I brought Lizzie her crystal library, I was up by 4:00 A.M., ready to follow Billy yet again into the deep woods.

This was my third trip in six weeks. Lizzie kept me informed, per our bargain, of Billy’s plans. She told me he used to go every few months, but now he went far more often. Maybe he had even made a few short trips Lizzie and I missed. Something was stepping up his scouting schedule, and I hoped it would lead me to “Eden,” careful hints about which were increasing on the local Liver channels. Broadcast from where? By whom? I’d bet anything they weren’t part of the regularly organized broadcasting from Albany.

This morning it was snowing in a desultory, nonserious way, even though it was only mid-October. In San Francisco, I hadn’t paid much attention to the “coming mini-ice age” stuff. In the Adirondacks, however, there wasn’t much choice. Everyone went around bundled in winter jacks, which were surprisingly warm, although no more tastefully dyed than summer jacks. Marigold, crimson, electric blue, poison green. And for the conservative, a dun the color of cow piles.

Which was what Billy wore when he emerged from his apartment building at 4:45 A.M. He carried a plasticloth sack. It was still dark out. He walked toward the river, which flowed by the edge of the village, only five or six blocks from what passed as downtown. I followed him unseen while there were buildings for cover. When there weren’t, I let him get out of sight and then followed his footprints in the light snow. After a mile the footsteps stopped.

I stood under a pine whose branches started ten feet up the trunk, pondering my choices. From behind me Billy said quietly, “You ain’t gotten any better, you, in the woods. Not since your first time.”

I turned. “How did you do that?”

“Don’t matter how / did it, me. The question is what you think you’re doing here.”

“Following you. Again.”

“Why?”

He had never asked before. The other times I’d followed him, he’d refused to talk to me at all. He looked unusually impressive, standing there in the bleak landscape with his wrinkled face stern and judgmental: a Liver Moses. I said, “Billy, where is Eden?”

“That what you after, you? I don’t know where it is, me, and if I did I wouldn’t take you there.”

This was promising; when someone has reasons not to do something, he has at least conceived that it’s possible to do it. From possibility to agreement isn’t nearly as large a leap as from denial to possibility. “Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why wouldn’t you take me to Eden if you knew where it was?”

“Because it ain’t no donkey place, it.”

“Is it a Liver place?”

But he seemed to realize he’d said too much. Deliberately he put down his sack, brushed the snow off a fallen tree, and sat down with the air of a man who wasn’t going to move until I left. I would have to prod him by offering more.

“It’s not a Liver place, either, is it, Billy? It’s a Sleepless place. You’ve seen a SuperSleepless from Huevos Verdes, or more than one, in these woods. They have larger heads than normal, and they talk like they’re slowing down their speech, because they are. They think so much faster and more complexly than we do — you or me — that it’s an effort for them to choose a few simple-enough words for us to understand. You saw one, didn’t you, Billy? A man or a woman?”

He stared at me, a wrinkled somber face against the gray and white woods.

“When was this, Billy? In the summer? Or longer ago than that?”

He said, with transparent effort and equally transparent mendacity, “I never saw nobody, me.”

I walked toward him and put my hand firmly on his shoulder. “Yes, you did, you. When was it?”

He stared at the snowy ground, angry but unwilling, or unable, to show it.

“Okay, Billy,” I sighed. “If you won’t tell me, you won’t. And you’re right — I can’t follow you unseen through the woods because I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m already cold.”

Still he said nothing. I trudged back to town. Lizzie’s computer and crystal library wasn’t all that Dark Jones had bought in New York. The homing device I’d stuck on the back of his plastisynth jacket, behind the shoulder and below the neck where he wouldn’t see it until he removed the jacket, registered as a motionless dot on my handheld monitor. It stayed a motionless dot for over an hour. Wasn’t he cold?

Russell, who came before David and after Anthony, had a theory about body temperature. He said that we donkeys, who are used to having instant adjustments in anything that happens to distress us, have lost the ability to ignore slight fluctuations in body temperatures. Constant environmental pampering had softened us. Russell saw this as a positive, because it made very easy identification of the successful and the genetically highly tuned (who naturally were one and the same). Watch a person pull on a sweater for a one-degree temperature drop and you know you’re looking at a superior person. I lacked the strength of will to avoid responding to this. Sort of a Princess and the Centigrade Pea, I said, but whimsey was wasted on Russell. We parted shortly afterwards when I accused him of inventing even more artificial social gradations than the ridiculous number that already existed, and he accused me of being jealous of his superior genemod left-brain logic. The last I heard, he was running for congressional representative from San Diego, which has possibly the most monotonous climate in the country.

Maybe Billy Washington made a fire; the monitor wouldn’t show that. After an hour, as I sat in warmth in my East Oleanta hotel room, the Billy-dot moved. He walked several more miles over the course of the day, in easy stages, in various directions.

A man looking for something. At no point did the dot disappear, which would have meant he’d disappeared behind a Y-energy security shield. The same thing happened for three more days and nights. Then he came home.

Incredibly, he didn’t confront me about the homer. Either he never found it, even after he took his jacket off (hard to believe), or he did but had no idea what it was and decided not to wonder. Or — and this only occurred to me later — he saw it but thought someone else had put it there, maybe while he was sleeping, and wanted it left alone. Someone out in the woods. Someone he wanted to please.