Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

“But I’m in the middle of—”

“Bed time”

In the middle of the night somebody pounded on the apartment door.

“B-B-Billy! Annie! L-L-Let me in!”

I sat up on the sofa where I slept, me. For a minute I thought I was dreaming. The room was dark as death.

“L-Let m-m-me in!”

Dr. Turner. I stumbled, me, off the sofa. The bedroom door opened and Annie came out in her white nightdress, Lizzie stuck behind her like a tail wind.

“Don’t you open that door, Billy Washington,” Annie said. “Don’t you open it, you!”

“It’s Dr. Turner,” I said. I couldn’t stand up straight, me, so fuddled with dreaming. I staggered and grabbed the corner of the sofa. “She don’t mean no harm, her.”

“Nobody comes in here! We won’t understand none of it, us!”

Then I saw she was fuddled with dreaming, too. I opened the door.

Dr. Turner stumbled in, her, carrying a suitcase but wearing a nightdress, covered with snow. Her beautiful donkey face was white and her teeth chattered. “L-L-Lock the d-door!”

Annie demanded, “You got people hunting you, them?”

“No. N-N-No… j-just let me g-g-get warm…”

It hit me then. From the hotel to our apartment wasn’t all that far, even if it was freezing out. Dr. Turner shouldn’t be that cold, her. I grabbed her shoulders. “What happened at the hotel, doctor?”

“H-H-Heating unit qu-quit.”

“Heating unit can’t quit, it,” I said. I sounded like Doug Kane trying to talk to Celie. “It’s Y-energy.”

“N-N-Not the circulating equipment. It m-m-must have dura-gem p-parts.” She stood by our unit, rubbing her hands together, her face still the same white-gray as all the snow piled in the streets.

Lizzie said suddenly, “I hear screaming!”

“Th-they’re b-burning the hotel.”

“ Burning it?” Annie said. “Foamcast don’t burn!”

Dr. Turner smiled, her, one of those twisted donkey smiles that said Livers just now caught on to what donkeys already knew. “They’re trying anyway. I told them it won’t eradicate the duragem dissembler, and somebody will likely get hurt.”

“ You told ’em,” Annie said, one hand on her wide hip. “And then you come here, you, with a mob following you—”

“No one’s following me. They’re far too busy trying to contravene the laws of physics. And Annie, I’m freezing. Where else would I go? The tech reprogrammed the entrance codes for the kitchen, and anyway it’s still full of delivery ’bots whenever that unpredictable plane comes.”

Annie looked at her, and she looked at Annie, and I could see, me, that there was something wrong with Dr. Turner’s speech. It wasn’t no plea for help, even if the words said that. And it wasn’t trying to sound reasonable, either. Dr. Turner really was asking Where else would I go? Can you tell me some other place I ain’t mentioned ? Only it wasn’t Annie she was asking, her. It was me.

And I wasn’t about to tell her, me, that finally I knew. After all my looking, I knew where Eden was.

“You can stay here with us,” Lizzie said, and her big brown eyes looked at her mother. I felt my back muscles knot, them. This was it, the big Armaggedon between Annie and Dr. Turner. Only it wasn’t. Not yet. Maybe because Annie was afraid, her, of whose side Lizzie would take.

“All right,” Annie said, “but only because I can’t stand, me, to see nobody freeze to death, or get tore apart by them damn stomps. But I don’t like it, me.”

Like anybody ever thought she did. I was careful, me, not to meet nobody’s eyes.

Annie gave Dr. Turner a few blankets off the stockpile along the west wall. We had everything there, us, crowding out the space: blankets and jacks and chairs and ribbons and rotting food and I don’t know what else. I wondered, me, if I should give Dr. Turner the sofa, but she spread her blankets in a nest on the floor, her, and I figured that she might be company but she was also thirty years younger than me. Or twenty, or fiprty — with donkeys you can’t never really tell.

We all got back to sleep, us, somehow, but the shouts outside went on a long time. And in the morning the State Representative Anita Clara Taguchi Hotel was wrecked. Still standing, because Dr. Turner was right and foamcast don’t burn, but the doors and windows were tore off the hinges, and the furniture was all broke up, and even the terminal was a twisted pile of junk in the street. Jack Sawicki looked serious, him, about that. Now all he had to talk to Albany on was the cafe terminal. Besides, them things are expensive. State Representative Taguchi was going to be mad as hell, her.

Snow blew in the hotel windows and drifted on the floor, and you’d of thought the place had been deserted for years, the way it looked. It kind of twisted my chest to see it. We were losing more and more, us.

That afternoon the plane didn’t come, it, and by dinner the next day the cafe was out of food.

There’s a place upriver, about a half mile from town, where deer go, them. When we had a warden ’bot, it put out pellets for the deer in the winter. The pellets had some kind of drug inside, so the deer couldn’t never breed, them, more than the woods can feed. The warden wasn’t never replaced, it, since before them rabid raccoons in the summer. But the deer still come to the clearing. They just do what they always did, them, because they don’t know no better.

Or maybe they do, them. Here the river flowed fast enough that it didn’t freeze completely through unless the temperature got down in the single numbers. The snow blew across the clearing, it, and piled up against the wooded hill beyond, so plants were easy to uncover. You could usually spot two or three deer without waiting very long.

When I went there, me, with Doug Kane’s old rifle, somebody else had already got there first. The snow was bloody and a mangled carcass laid by the creek. Most of the meat was spoiled, it, by somebody too lazy or too stupid to butcher it right. Bastards didn’t even bother to drag the carcass away from the water.

I walked, me, a little ways more. It was snowing, but not hard. The ground crunched under my feet and my breath smoked. My back-hurt and my knees ached and I didn’t even try, me, to walk without any noise. “Don’t go alone, you,” Annie’d said, but I didn’t want Annie to leave Lizzie by herself. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to take Dr. Turner. She’d moved in with us, her, and that was probably good because donkeys got all kinds of things you don’t never suspect until you need them, like medicine for Lizzie last summer. But Dr. Turner was a city woman, her, and she scared away the game, crashing through the brush like an elephant or dragon or one of them other old-time monsters. I needed to kill something today. We needed the meat, us.

In a week, all out stockpiled food had gotten eaten up. One lousy week.

No more came, by rail or air or gravsled, from Albany. People tore into the cafe, them, to the kitchen where Annie used to cook apple pudding for the foodbelt, but there wasn’t nothing left there.

I walked farther upstream. When I was a young boy, me, I used to love being in the woods in winter. But then I wasn’t scared out of my skull. Then I wasn’t an old fool with a back that hurts and who can’t see nothing in his mind but Lizzie’s big dark eyes looking hungry. I can’t stand that, me. Never.

Lizzie . Hungry…

When I left town, the rifle under my coat, people were hurrying to the cafe. Something was going on, I didn’t know what. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted, me, to keep Lizzie from going hungry.

I could only think, me, of two ways to do that. One was to hunt for food in the woods. The other was to take Lizzie and Annie to Eden. I’d found it, me, just before the gravrail quit this last time. I found that big-headed girl in the woods, and I followed her, me, and she let me follow her. I watched a door in the mountain open up, where there couldn’t be no door, and her go inside, and the door close up again like it was never there in the first place. But just before it closed, the Sleepless girl turned, her, right toward me. “Don’t bring anyone else here, Mr. Washington, unless you absolutely must. We’re not quite ready for you yet.”