Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

A viral plague was spreading in southern California. Nobody knew if it was a natural mutation, or bioengineered.

A Liver messiah in East Texas had proclaimed this the Time of the End. He was quoting Revelations on the four horsemen, with a twist: The horseman of war must be loosed by the Livers. Now. When the state security squad tried to arrest him, he and his followers blew away thirty-three people with illegal Mexican weapons. The governor, said the newsgrid with concern, was virtually certain to fail reelection.

In Kansas, a soysynth factory owned by the D’Angelo franchise was ripped apart by hoarders, who carried off the treated and untreated soy. They also wrecked three million dollars of robotic machinery.

The lieutenant-governor of South Dakota was somehow knifed to death in his sleep, within a protected enclave.

Livers in San Diego broke into the world-famous zoo there, killed a lion and two elehippos, and ate them, following a report that animals could not get the new plague.

The northeast had been hit by early winter. Small towns were isolated without gravrails, starving without food. People starved. Small towns like East Oleanta.

Where was Miranda? And what was she waiting for? Unless something had gone wrong in the last steps of the project. Unless the GSEA had discovered Eden, traced it back from the carefully disseminated rumors in the little isolated Liver towns.

Unless there was even more that she, and Huevos Verdes, hadn’t told me.

For the first time, I wondered if she wasn’t coming for me at all.

“The greatness of the Constitution is in its Will to the common people,” Jimmy Hubbley said, his pale eyes bright.

“The greatness of the Constitution is in its checks and balances,” Leisha had always said. Leisha. Who. Was. Dead.

The dark lattice in my mind was furled tight as an umbrella, impenetrable, a thin sharp line that cut me inside.

Where were the checks and balances on Huevos Verdes?

“Take me around the compound again,” I said to Peg.

She was slumped in a chair in commons, watching a scooter race someplace in California. A part of California without plague. “I don’t want, me, to take you again. You seen everything you’re gonna see.”

“Fine. I’ll go alone.” I wheeled the chair away from her. I didn’t dare exercise my upper body, not even after she’d locked me in at night. I couldn’t see the surveillance monitors but I knew they had to be there. I settled for furtively hoisting myself a few inches above the arms of my chair several times a day, lifting my useless legs, careful to choose different locations each day.

“Wait, you.” Peg sighed and heaved herself up. Roughly she shoved the chair forward.

A white corridor with the featureless doors locked.

Another white corridor with the featureless doors locked.

And another white corridor with the featureless doors locked.

The landing stage, guarded by Campbell, who was asleep but not very. Another white corridor with…

A piece of Abby’s wedding dress lay snagged on a rough spot in the wall.

“Damn!” Peg said, with more energy than I’d ever heard her say anything. “That bitch can’t keep nothing tidy, her! This stupid stuffs everywhere!” She snatched it up savagely and tore the small oblong into even smaller pieces. Her face was a mottled, angry red. There were tears in her eyes.

Why was there a rough place on a nanosmooth wall to snag a piece of dropped lace?

“Stupid bitch!” Peg said. Her voice caught.

“Why, Peg,” I said. “You’re jealous.”

“You shut up, you!”

Through the zoom portion of my corneas, the rough place on the wall had an added-on look. Not a mistake in the nanopro-gramming, but a bump built later, with another clocked nanoas-sembler, manually. Why?

To snag an oblong of lace?

Every oblong was different. The lace had been programmed that way. To make a unique pattern on an old-fashioned wedding gown.

To make a code.

Peg had recovered herself. Blank-faced once more, but with red eyes, she shoved the torn bit of lace in the pocket of her hideously unbecoming turquoise jacks. Her mouth twitched in pain. No sympathetic shapes slid through my mind. Peg didn’t know what pain was. Peg hadn’t seen Leisha die, mud caked on her thin yellow shirt, two small red dots on her forehead.

“Let’s go, you,” she said impatiently, as if I were the one who’d delayed her.

A code. The bits of lace were a code, in a place where every word, every action, every chance encounter was monitored. And everyone was encouraged to be “tidy” and pick up litter, because Brigadier General Francis Marion had been the tidiest son-of-a-bitch to ever attack the British army.

How many people were involved? Abigail and Joncey, most certainly. Who did they have with them against Hubbley? Did they have anyone on the outside?

I saw again the gray canister. PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY. CLASSIFIED. DANGER.

“See,” Peg snarled when we got back to commons, “you seen everything, you! Now can we stay put?”

“I get bored staying put,” I said. “Let’s do it again.” And I wheeled away my primitive chair, hearing her curse behind me.

Three days later, three days of ceaseless wheeling, the door to Jimmy Hubbley’s private quarters opened and he and Abigail came out. When Abigail saw Peg, she lowered her eyes, smiled, and pretended to finish zipping the pants to her jacks.

Peg was behind me, where I couldn’t see her face, but I could see her hands, large and rough on the handles of my chair. In the stiffening of her hands — controlled, habitual — I saw that she already knew about Abigail and Hubbley. Of course. Everyone would know; you couldn’t hide it in a place like this. Joncey must accept it. Maybe it advanced his and Abby’s plans for the counterrevolution. Maybe he thought Hubbley was just spreading his genes in the allowable natural way to strengthen the human genome. Maybe Hubbley even thought he was spreading Francis Marion’s, to every pretty soldier with a duty to Will and Idea.

“Evenin’, Peg,” Hubbley said. She choked out some reply. Abigail smiled demurely. She made a shape in my mind: flowers with tiny, deadly teeth in their sunny yellow centers.

“Evenin’, Major Hubbley,” Peg choked out. I didn’t even know he’d been promoted.

But now I had him.

At dinner the commons was full. Abigail sat with her friends, laughing, sewing on her white lace wedding dress. Her face was flushed and giddy. Above, in the world I now knew only from the HT, it turned November. Sixty-seven days underground, and Miranda had not come.

Joncey stood with a group watching a pair of gamblers play Devil. The twelve-sided dice, made of some shiny metal, flashed as they were thrown overhead. Everyone shrieked and laughed. Peg sat slumped, blank-faced, in her chair, her rough hands slack on her knees. I’d asked her for paper and pen, which made her first suspicious and then disgusted.

“What for? You got your library terminal, you.”

“I want to write something.”

“You can speak, you, to the terminal anything you want saved.”

“I want to write it. On paper.”

Her suspicion deepened. “You can write?”

“Yes.”

“I thought Major Hubbley said, him, that you wasn’t no donkey, you.”

“I’ve been to donkey schools. I can write. Can’t you read?”

“Course I can read, me!”

She probably could, at least a little. Liver children usually learned to read basic words, if not to write them. You needed to read names on packages at the warehouse, on street signs, on scooter bet sheets. I hoped to hell she could read.

An unseen monitor watched me, of course. I bent over the paper Peg brought me, coarse pale sheets probably meant to wrap something in. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d written anything. I was never very good at it. The pen felt heavy in my hand.