Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

Hubbley nodded. “Genuine sacrifice. A genuine patriot, Mrs.

Rebecca Motte. You hear that, son?”

The tech didn’t appear to hear anything. Was he drugged? Leisha had always warned me against believing history’s more colorful stories.

“We cain’t never stop resistin’ all you enemies of America. And you watchers are the worst, just like traitors and spies is always the worst in any revolution. They pretend to be on one side while plottin’ and workin’ for the other. GSEA agents are all traitors, pretendin’ to safeguard the purity of human beings while actually permittin’ all kinds of abominations. And then handin’ over this great country to those same abominations, the donkeys, just like we Livers didn’t realize y’all would let us starve if you could. And in fact y’all are . Joncey, what did General Marion say in his speech to the men before they attacked Doyle at Lynche’s Creek?”

Joncey’s voice, so much stronger and at ease than Earl’s, recited, “ ‘But, my friends, if we shall be ruined for bravely resisting our tyrants, what will be done to us if we tamely lie down and submit to them?’ ›:

I turned around. The room was full of people, all the “revolutionaries” from other “companies.” Staring at the young tech, I hadn’t even heard them come in. Neither, I was convinced, had he.

Hubbley said, “This here boy is a traitor. Workin’ in agenemod clinic. He’s goin’ to die like a traitor, and y’all out there remember that he ain’t the only one today, or tomorrow, or the day after that. Abby?”

Abigail came out of the crowd. She carried a featureless gray canister, no bigger than her closed fist.

“Abby,” Hubbley said, “what did General Marion do with goods confiscated from the enemy?”

She turned to speak directly to the robocam. “Every metal saw the brigade could find, them, they hammered into a sword.”

“That’s exactly right. And this here—” he hoisted the canister high above his head ” — is a saw. It ain’t even been concocted in some illegal gene lab. This here comes straight from the biggest traitor of all: the so-called United States government.” He turned the canister around. I saw stamped on it PROPERTY OF U. S. ARMY. CLASSIFIED. DANGER.

I didn’t believe it. Hubbley had painted the words on. I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t even know as yet what the canister held. This ragtag bag of so-called revolutionaries had delusions, dreams, pathetic wishes … I didn’t believe it.

The lattice in my mind sighed, as if wind soughed through. “Okay, Abby,” Hubbley said, “do it.”

Abby, her back to me, did something I couldn’t see. The shimmer of a heavy-duty Y-energy shield appeared around the naked tech, a domed and floored hemisphere six feet in diameter. The canister was inside the shimmer.

The boy wasn’t drugged after all. Immediately he started screaming. The sound couldn’t carry through the shield, which was the kind nothing got through, not even air. The boy beat his fists against the inside and screamed, his open mouth a pink cave, his eyes round with terror. There was faint down on his upper lip, like a fledgling bird, and scarcely more on his groin.

Jimmy Hubbley looked disgusted. “He lives causin’ death and then cain’t even die like a man … do it, Abby.”

Whatever Abby did, I couldn’t see. The canister glowed briefly, then dissolved into a gray puddle.

“This here is your metal saw you made to cut us up with,” Hubbley said, “but we made it a sword. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Matthew 26:52. Y’all already know what this stuff does.

But for them that don’t—” he looked directly at me ” — I’ll repeat it. This here’s one of your own genemod abominations. It takes apart cell walls, cells of livin’ human beings. Like this.”

The boy had stopped beating against the shield. He was still screaming, but his mouth was changing shape. He was dissolving. It wasn’t the same as when someone had acid poured on him — I had seen that once, in the days before Leisha took me in. Acid burns away the flesh. The boy’s flesh wasn’t burning, it was breaking up, like ice in springtime. Bits of skin fell to the dome floor, exposing red flesh, and then bits of that fell. He went on screaming, screaming, screaming. I felt my stomach heave, and the shapes in my mind heaved, too, around the ever-closed lattice.

It took the boy almost three minutes to die.

Hubbley said, very softly, “General Marion ended his Lynche’s Creek speech this way: ‘As God is my judge this day, that I would die a thousand deaths, most gladly would I die them all, rather than see my dear country in such a state of degradation and wretchedness.’ As God is my judge, watchers.” His pale eyes in their bony, sunburned face looked directly outward, filled with light.

Then everyone moved. The robocam must have been turned off. The shapes in my mind were tarry, foul. I had done nothing to save the boy. I hadn’t even tried to speak up. I had not tried to get myself on the uneditable tape, to provide the watchers some clue about where this abomination was taking place … I had done nothing.

“That’s a wrap,” Jimmy Hubbley said, clearly pleased with himself. “That’s old-time movie talk, it means the filmin’ is done. Y’all are dismissed. And Mr. Aden, sir, I think Peg better take y’all to your room. Y’all look a little peaked. If it ain’t too great an impertinence in me to tell you so.”

It went on like that for weeks.

Physical training, holos about the state of society (where were they made?), political drill. It was the worst of being in school, all over again. I kept finding small lace oblongs from Abigail’s wedding gown, and Peg never pushed my chair anywhere in spitting distance of a terminal.

There were no more executions.

I badly wanted a drink. Hubbley said no. He allowed sunshine, because it didn’t dull reaction time. I wanted a drink, because it dulled reaction time.

Hubbley had allowed me a handheld dumb terminal, the kind kids use for schoolwork, and a standard encyclopedia library. I said to him once, because I couldn’t bite back the words, “Francis Marion discouraged the killing of prisoners. He even spirited a Tory, Jeff Butler, out of his own camp when it looked like Marion’s men might butcher him.”

Hubbley laughed with delight and rubbed the lump on his neck. “Damn, you been studyin’, son, hail if you haven’t! I’m damn proud of you!”

My teeth hurt from clenching them. “Hubbley—”

“But it don’t make no never mind, Mr. Arlen, sir. No, it really don’t. General Marion showed compassion to Tories because they were his own kind, his neighbors, living off the land same as he did. He didn’t show that same compassion to British soldiers, now, did he? Donkeys ain’t our kind. They ain’t our neighbors in their snooty enclaves. And they sure don’t live like we do, deprived of education and personal property and real power. No, donkeys are the British, Mr. Arlen. Not Jeff Butler — but Captain James Lewis of His Majesty’s Forces, who was killed by a fourteen-year-old patriot named Gwynn. That’s natural law, son. Protect your own.”

“Marion didn’t—”

“You say ‘General Marion,’ you!” Peg yelled. She glanced at Hubbley, like a dog hoping for a pat on the head. Hubbley smiled, showing his broken teeth.

These were the people who had loosened the duragem dissembler on the country, wrecking civilization. These.

And it was wrecked. The HT in commons received donkey newsgrids. There was scarcely agravrail running a steady schedule, especially outside the cities. Most technicians had been diverted to major population areas, where the votes were. And the danger of rioting. Security had been tripled at most enclaves. Few planes flew, which meant the country was being run mostly by teleconferencing, at a distance. Medunits malfunctioned regularly. They didn’t dispense wrong diagnoses; they just stopped diagnosing.