Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

Billy led me through the alley, behind a few buildings, on our hands and knees through what seemed to be a mini-junkyard of scrapped scooters, chunks of plastisynth, mattresses, and other large unlovely discards. At the back of the cafe he did something to the servoentrance used by delivery ’bots; it opened. We crawled into the automated kitchen, which was busily preparing soysynth to look like everything else.

“How—”

“Lizzie,” he gasped, “before she even… learned nothing… from you,” and even through his incipient heart attack I heard his pride. He slid down the wall and concentrated on breathing more slowly. His hectic color subsided.

I looked around. In one corner was a second, smaller stockpile of food, blankets, and necessities. My eyes prickled.

“Billy…”

He was still catching his breath. “Don’t nobody know… about this, so they won’t think, them … to look for you here.”

Whereas they might have in Annie’s apartment. People had seen me with Lizzie. He wasn’t protecting me; he was protecting Lizzie from being associated with me.

I said, “Will the whole town go Bastille now?”

“Huh?”

I said, “Will the whole town riot and smash things and look for somebody to blame and hurt?”

He seemed astounded by the idea. “Everybody? No, of course not, them. What you hear now is just the hotheads that don’t never know, them, how to act when something’s different. They’ll calm down, them. And the good people like Jack Sawicki, he’ll get them organized to seeing about getting useful things done.”

“Like what?”

“Oh,” he waved a hand vaguely. His breathing was almost normal again. “Putting by blankets for anybody who really needs one. Sharing stuff that ain’t going to be coming in. We had a shipment of soysynth, us, just last week — the kitchen won’t run out for a while, though there won’t be no extras. Jack will make sure, him, that people know that.”

Unless the kitchen broke, of course. Neither of us said it.

I said quietly, “Billy, will they look for me at Annie’s?”

He looked at the opposite wall. “Might.”

“They’ll see the stockpiled stuff.”

“Most of it’s here. What you saw is mostly empty buckets, them. Annie, she’s putting them in the recycler now.”

I digested this. “You didn’t trust me to know about this place. You were hoping I’d leave before I had to know.”

He went on staring at the wall. Conveyer belts carried bowls of soysynth “soup” toward the flash heater. I looked again at the stockpile; it was smaller than I’d thought at first. And if the kitchen did break, then of course it would be only a matter of time before the homegrown mob remembered the untreated soysynth that must be behind their foodbelt somewhere. Billy must have other piles. In the woods? Maybe.

“Will anybody bother you or Annie or Lizzie because I used to be with you, even if I’m not now?”

He shook his head. “Folks ain’t like that.”

I doubted this. “Wouldn’t it be better to bring Lizzie here?”

His furrowed face turned stubborn. “Only if I have to, me. Better I bring food and stuff out.”

“At least make her hide that terminal and crystal library I gave her.”

He nodded and stood. His knees weren’t trembling anymore. He picked up his baseball bat and I hugged him, a long hard hug that surprised him so much he actually staggered. Or maybe I pushed him slightly.

“Thank you, Billy.”

“You’re welcome, Doctor Turner.”

He gave me the code to the servoentrance door, then crawled cautiously out. I made a blanket nest on the floor and sat in it. From my jacks I pulled out the handheld monitor. The homer I’d fastened firmly inside his deepest pocket when he staggered off balance showed Billy walking back to Annie’s. He wouldn’t go anywhere else today, maybe for several days. When he did, I wanted to know about it.

Rex, who came before Paul and after Eugene, once told me something interesting about organizations. There are essentially only two types in the entire world, Rex had said. When people in the first type of organization either don’t follow the organization’s rules or otherwise become too great a pain in the ass, they can be kicked out. After that they cease to be part of the organization. These organizations include sports teams, corporations, private schools, country clubs, religions, cooperative enclaves, marriages, and the Stock Exchange.

But when people in the second type of organization don’t follow the rules, they can’t be kicked out because there isn’t any place to send them. No matter how useless or aggravating or dangerous are the unwanted members, the organization is stuck with them. These organizations include maximum-security prisons, families with impossible nine-year-olds, nursing homes for the terminally ill, and countries.

Had I just seen my country kick out an unwanted and aggravating town of voters who had been following the rules?

Most donkeys were not cruel. But desperate people — and most especially desperate politicians — had been known to act in ways they might not usually act.

I settled my back against the wall and watched the automated kitchen turn soysynth into chocolate chip cookies.

The day after East Oleanta wrecked the warehouse, them, food started coming in by air. Like I told Dr. Turner, it wasn’t all of us in East Oleanta. Only some stomps, plus the people like Celie Kane who was always angry anyway, plus a few good people who just couldn’t take it no more, them, and went temporary crazy. They all calmed down when the plane started coming every day, without no warehouse goods but with plenty of food. The tech who ran the delivery ’bots smiled wide, her, and said, “Compliments of Congresswoman Janet Carol Land.” But she had three security ’bots with her, and a bluish shimmer that Dr. Turner said was a military-strength personal shield.

Dr. Turner moved, her, out of the space behind the kitchen just an hour before the delivery ’bots started marching in. She just barely didn’t get caught, her. “All of Rome meets in the Forum,” she said, which didn’t make no sense. She moved back to the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel.

Then the women’s shower in the baths broke. A security ’bot broke. The streetlights broke, or something that controlled the streetlights. We got a cold stretch of Arctic air, and the snow wouldn’t stop, it.

“Damn snow,” Jack Sawicki grumbled every time I saw him. The same words, them, every time, like the snow was the problem. Jack had lost weight. I think he didn’t like being mayor no more.

“It’s the donkeys doing it to us,” Celie Kane shrilled. “They’re using the fucking weather, them, to kill us all!”

“Now, Celie,” her father said, reasonable, “can’t nobody control the weather.”

“How do you know what they can do, them? You’re just a dumb old man!” And Doug Kane went back to eating his soup, staring at the holoterminal show of a Lucid Dreamer concert.

At home, Lizzie said to me, “You know, Billy, Mr. Kane is right. Nobody can control the weather. It’s a chaotic system.”

I didn’t know what that meant. Lizzie said a lot of things I didn’t know, me, since she’d been doing software every day with Dr. Turner. She could even talk like a donkey now. But not around her mother. Lizzie was too smart, her, for that. I heard her say to Annie, “Nobody can’t control the weather, them.” And Annie, counting sticky buns and soyburgers rotting in a corner of the apartment, nodded without listening and said, “Bed time. Lizzie.”