Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

“Ms. Covington? I’m Charlotte Prescott. I’m in temporary command here, until the arrival of Colin Kowalski from the West Coast. Come with me, please.”

She was tall, flame-haired, absolutely beautiful. Expensive genes. She had the accent that goes with the monied Northeast, and eyes like the Petrified Forest. I went with her, but not without a patented little Diana-protest: spirited but essentially ineffectual.

“I don’t want to talk until I’m sure that two people are getting fed. Three actually. An old man and a little girl and the girl’s mother… they might not be able to handle being part of that mob outside…” What was I saying? Annie Francy could handle being part of Custer’s Last Stand, protesting all the while that the Indians weren’t behaving properly.

Charlotte Prescott said, “Lizzie Francy and Billy Washington are being seen to. The guard at the apartment will procure them food.”

And she had only been in East Oleanta ten minutes.

Charlotte Prescott and I sat opposite each other in two plas-tisynth cafe chairs and I told her everything I knew. That I had followed Miranda Sharifi from Washington to East Oleanta, after which she had disappeared. That I’d been searching the woods for her. That some of the locals half believed there was a place in the mountains they called Eden, probably a shielded underground illegal genemod lab, and that I believed that was where Huevos Verdes was releasing the duragem dissembler. That I’d followed various locals into the woods in the hopes of discovering Eden, but had never seen anything, and was now convinced nobody knew where, or if, this mythical place existed.

This last wasn’t strictly true. I still suspected Billy Washington knew something. But I wanted to tell that directly to Colin Ko-walski, whom I halfway trusted, rather than to Charlotte Prescott, whom I trusted not at all. She reminded me of Stephanie Brunell. Billy was an ignorant and exasperating old man, but he was not a pink dog with four ears and overly big eyes, and I was not going to watch him go over any metaphorical terrace railing.

Prescott said, “Why didn’t you report your whereabouts, and Miranda Sharifi’s suspected whereabouts, as soon as you reached East Oleanta? Or even en route?”

“I was fairly sure that the SuperSleepless outpost would be able to monitor any technology I used.”

This was a fair hit; not even the GSEA flattered itself that it could outinvent Supers. Prescott showed no reaction.

“You were in violation of every Agency procedure.”

“I’m not a regular agent. I run wild-card for Colin Kowalski, under informant status. You wouldn’t even know about me now if he hadn’t told you.”

Still no reaction. She had the ability, like some reptiles, to just draw a nicitating membrane between herself and any blowing insinuating sand. I saw this about her: her limitations, her rigidity born of the automatic assumption of superiority. Yet I still couldn’t help feeling unworthy beside her, in a way I hadn’t felt unworthy in months. Me in my rumpled turquoise jacks and untrimmed hair, she looking like something off a holovid ad for the Central Park East Enclave. Even her fingernails were perfect, genemod rose so they never had to be painted.

The questions went on. I was as honest as I could be, except for Billy. It didn’t help my mood, which was middling lousy. I was doing what I should, what I needed to do, what was right and patriotic for my country three cheers and “Hail to the Chief.” No, I don’t mean that cynicism — it was right. So why did I feel so terrible?

Colin Kowalski arrived about 9:00 P.M. I was still under house arrest, or whatever, but Charlotte Prescott had apparently run out of questions. The foodbelt was working, serving an insatiable line of the hungry, who peered curiously at the Y-shield cramping them into half their cafe but could see nothing because the outer layer had been one-way opaqued.

“Colin. I’m glad you’re here.”

He was angry, not hiding it, but keeping it under control. I gave him points for all three.

“You should have contacted me in August, Diana. Maybe we could have stopped release of the duragem dissembler sooner.”

“Can you stop it now ?” I said, but he didn’t answer. I wasn’t having any of that. I grabbed both his lapels — or what passes for lapels in the new fall fashions — and said, slowly and with great distinctness, “You’ve found something. Already. Colin, you have to tell me what you’ve found so far. You have to. I got you all this far, and besides there’s no earthly reason not to tell me. You know damn well you’ve got reporters all over every place out there by now.”

He stepped back a pace and pulled his lapels free. Billy and Doug Kane and Jack Sawicki and Annie and Krystal Mandor had been all over each other constantly. I was a little shocked at how quickly I’d forgotten the donkey intolerance for being touched.

But I was not going to give up. Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to involve Billy more than he already was by having taken me into Annie’s apartment for the last month. “What have your agents found, Colin?”

“Diana—”

“What?”

He told me, not because of my persistence but because there really wasn’t any reason not to. He even gave me the lattitude and longitude, to the minutes and seconds. Proud of himself. And yet, somehow, not. I listened harder.

“Just what you suspected, Diana, an underground lab. Shielded. We broke the shield half an hour ago, once we knew the general area to look. The Supers had fled, but the duragem dissembler originated there, all right. Bastards didn’t even bother to destroy the evidence. The dangerous recombinant and nanotech stuff in that lab…”

I had never seen words fail Colin Kowalski before. He didn’t sputter, or twitch. Instead his mouth just clamped shut on the last word with a small audible pop! as if naming these words had hurt his lip and he was protecting it. I felt sick inside. The dangerous recombinant and nanotech stuff. . . “What else have they got cooked up for us?”

“Nothing that’s going to get out,” he said, and looked straight at me. Too straight. I couldn’t tell what the look meant.

And then I could.

“Colin, no, if you don’t examine it all minutely—”

The explosion rocked the cafe, even though we were probably miles away and undoubtedly the GSEA had thrown a blast shield around the area first. But a blast shield only contains flying debris, and anyway nothing really muffles a nuclear blast. People at the foodbelt screamed and clutched their bowls of soysynth soup and soysnth steak. The holoterminal, which was in the food-line half of the cafe and which someone had turned to the National Scooter Championships, flickered momentarily.

Colin said stiffly, “It was too dangerous to examine minutely. Anything could have escaped from there. Anything they were working on.”

I stood up unsteadily. There was no reason for the unsteadiness. I kept my voice level. “Colin — was the lab really empty? Did Miranda Sharifi and the other Supers really get out before you got there? Before you blew it up , I wanted to say.

“Yes, they were gone,” Colin said, and met my eyes so steadily, so guilessly, that I immediately knew he was lying.

“Colin—”

“Your service with the GSEA is terminated, Diana. We appreciate your help. Six months’ pay will be deposited to your credit account, and a discreet and nonspecific letter of commendation provided if you ever want one. You are, of course, constrained from selling your story to the media in any form whatsoever. Should you break this prohibition, you could be subject to severe penalties up to and including imprisonment. Please accept the Department’s warmest thanks for your assistance.”