Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. What did I know about how a Liver thought? What, in fact, did I know about how anybody thought? Would somebody who had the ability to discern that knowledge on short acquaintance have actually spent eighteen months with Russell?

Two days after Billy’s return from the woods, Annie said, “The gravrail’s broke again, it.” She didn’t say it to me. I sat in her apartment, visiting Lizzie, but Annie had yet to acknowledge directly that I was there. She didn’t look at my face, she didn’t speak to me, she maneuvered her considerable bulk around the space I occupied as if it were an inexplicable and inconvenient black hole. Probably Billy had let me in only because I’d brought a double armful of food and warehouse goods, obtained on “Victoria Turner’s” chip, to contribute to the growing stockpiles along the walls. The place smelled vaguely like a landfill where the waste-eating microorganisms had fallen behind.

“Where’s it at?” Billy said. He meant the actual train, sitting somewhere along its magnetic track.

“Right here,” Annie said. “About a quarter mile outside town, that’s what Celie Kane said, her. Some of them are mad enough to burn it.”

Lizzie looked up with interest from the handheld terminal with her precious crystal library. I hadn’t witnessed Annie’s reaction to my gift, but Lizzie had told me about it. The only reason Lizzie still owned the thing was that she’d threatened to run away on a gravrail otherwise. She was twelve, she’d told her mother — a lot of kids left home at twelve. I suppose Liver kids did, coming and going with their portable meal chips. That was when Annie had stopped speaking to me.

Lizzie said, “Can trains burn, them?”

“No,” Billy said shortly. “And it’s against the law to do hurt to them anyway.”

Lizzie digested this. “But if nobody can’t come, them, from Albany on the train to punish people who break the law—”

“They can come, them, on a plane, can’t they?” Annie snapped. “Don’t you be thinking about breaking no laws, young lady!”

“I ain’t thinking about it, me. Celie Kane is,” Lizzie said reasonably. “Besides, ain’t nobody going to come, them, to East Oleanta on a plane anymore from Albany. All those donkeys got bigger problems than us, them.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” I said, but naturally no one answered.

Outside, in the hall, someone shouted. Feet ran past our door, came back, pounded once. Billy and Annie looked at each other. Then Billy opened the door a crack and stuck his head out. “What’s wrong?”

“The warehouse ain’t opened again, it! Second week in a row! We’re going smash that fucking building — I need another blanket and some boots, me!”

“Oh,” Billy said, and shut the door.

“Billy,” I said carefully, “who else knows you have food and warehouse goods hoarded here?”

“Nobody but us four,” he said, not meeting my eyes. He was ashamed.

“Don’t tell anyone. No matter how much they say they need this stuff.”

Billy looked helplessly at Annie. I knew he was on my side. East Oleanta, I had discovered, had a healthy barter economy existing side-by-side with the official donkey one. Skinned rabbits, good roasted over an open fire, were traded for spectacularly hideous handmade wall hangings or embroidered jacks. Nuts for toys, sunshine for food. Services, everything from babysitting to sex, for music decks or homemade wooden furniture from trees in the forest. I could see Billy trading some of our stockpiled stuff, but not risking it all by4etting anyone know we had it. Not when there was a chance Lizzie might need it.

Annie was another story. She would die for Lizzie , but she had in her the sharing and fairness and unthinking conformity that create a sense of community.

I stretched. “I think I’ll go witness the liberation of the District Supervisor Aaron Simon Samuelson Goods Distribution Center.”

Annie gave a sour look without actually looking at me. Billy, who knew that I was equipped with both a personal shield and stun weaponry, nonetheless said unhappily, “Be careful.” Lizzie jumped up. “I’m going too, me!”

“You shut up, child! You ain’t going no place, you, that dangerous!” Annie, of course. The broken gravrail temporarily invalidated Lizzie’s leverage: her threat to leave.

Lizzie pressed her lips together so tightly they all but disappeared. I had never seen her do that before. She was still Annie’s child. “I am too going, me.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll tell you what happens.” Lizzie subsided, grumbling.

Annie was not grateful.

A small crowd, twenty or so, battered on the foamcast door of the warehouse, using a sofa as battering ram. I knew this was hopeless; if the Bastille had been made of foamcast, Marie Antoinette would have gone on needing wigs. I lounged across the street, leaning against a turquoise apartment building, and watched.

The door gave way.

Twenty people gave a collective shout and rushed inside. Then twenty people gave another shout, this one furious. I examined the door hinges. They had been duragem, taken apart atom by atom by dissemblers.

“There’s nothing in here!”

“They cheated us, them!”

“Fucking bastards—”

I peered inside. The first small room held a counter and terminal. A second door led to the depository, which was lined with empty shelves, empty bins, empty overhead hooks where jacks and vases and music chips and chairs and cleaning ’bots and hand tools should go. I felt a chill prickle over me from neck to groin, an actual frisson complexly made of fear and fascination. It was true then. The economy, the political structure, the duragem crisis, were acutally this bad. For the first time in over a hundred years, since Kenzo Yagai invented cheap energy and remade the world, there really was not enough to go around. The politicians were conserving production for the cities, where larger numbers of voters resided, and writing off less populous or less easily reached areas with fewer votes. East Oleanta had been written off.

No one was going to come to fix the gravrail.

The crowd howled and cursed: “Fucking donkeys! Fuck them all, us!” I heard the sound of shelves ripping from the walls; maybe they’d had duragem bolts.

I walked rapidly but calmly back outside. Twenty people is enough to be a mob. A stun gun only fires in one direction at a time, and a personal shield, although unbreachable, does not prevent its wearer from being held in one place without food or water.

The hotel or Annie’s? Whichever I chose, I might be there semipermanently.

The hotel had a networked terminal I could use to call for help, if I chose my moment well. Annie’s apartment was on the edge of town, which suddenly seemed safer than dead center. It also had food, doors whose hinges were not duragem, and an owner already hostile to me. And Lizzie .

I walked quickly to Annie’s.

Halfway there, Billy rounded the corner of a building, carrying a baseball bat. “Quick, doctor! Come this way, you!”

I stopped cold. All my fear, which had been a kind of heightened excitement, vanished. “You came to protect me ?”

“This way!” He was breathing hard, and his old legs trembled. I put a hand on his elbow to steady him.

“Billy… lean against this wall. You came to protect me ?”

He grabbed my hand and pulled me down an alley, the same one the stomps used for creative loitering when the weather had been warm. I heard it, then — the shouts from the opposite end of the street from the warehouse. More angry people, screaming about donkey politicians.