Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

Peg struck at me viciously. Pain exploded in my head, a hot geyser, spraying the dark lattice. I hung on. Pain drowned us both, drowned everything.

For the third time, the purple lattice disappeared. Then so did everything else.

Slowly, slowly, I became aware that objects in the room had shapes of their own, shapes outside my head. They were solid, and sharp-edged, and real. My body had shapes: legs crumpled under me, my head lying on top of the metal wheelchair, my balls screaming with hurt. My hands had shape. They clenched, locked into shape, around Peg’s neck. Her face was purple, the tongue poking out swollen between her lips. She was dead.

It hurt to unclench my hands.

I looked at her. I had never killed anybody before. I looked at every inch of her. The note scrawled on lace was locked in her rigid fingers.

As quickly as I could I righted the wheelchair, stuck the padding back on the jagged armrest, and hauled my hurting body into it. Peg had a gun in her jacks; I took that. I didn’t know how sophisticated the room’s surveillance program was. Peg was presumably allowed to enter at will. Could the surveillance program interpret what it recorded, making judgment calls about sounding an alarm? Or did someone have to be actively watching? Was someone actively watching?

Francis Marion, Hubbley had told me, was meticulous about pickets and sentries.

I opened the door and wheeled myself into the corridor. The wheels left a thin line of blood on the perfect nanobuilt floor. There was nothing I could do about it.

I had watched, through all the wheeled trips around the bunker, who went in and out of which doors. I had listened, trying to figure out who were the most trusted lieutenants, who seemed smart enough for computer work. I had guessed which doors might have terminals behind them.

Nobody had come for me. It had been five minutes since I left my room. Eight. Ten. No alarms had sounded. Something was wrong.

I came to a door I hoped held a terminal; it was of course locked. I spoke the override tricks Jonathan and Miranda had taught me, the tricks I didn’t understand, and the lock glowed. I opened the door.

It was a storage room, full of more small metal canisters, stacked to the ceiling. None of the canisters were labeled. There were no terminals.

Footsteps ran down the hall. Quickly I closed the door from the inside. The footsteps ceased; the room was sound shielded. I opened the door again a few inches. Now people were shouting farther down the corridor.

“Goddamn it, where is he, him? Goddamn it to hell!” Campbell, whom I had never heard even speak. They were looking for me. But the surveillance program should show clearly where I was…

Another voice, a woman’s, low and deadly, said, “Try Abby’s room.”

“Abby! Fuck, she’s in on it! Her and Joncey! They already got the terminal room—”

The voices disappeared. I closed the door. The shapes in my mind suddenly ballooned, crowding out thought. I pushed them down. This was it, then. It had started. They weren’t looking for me, they were looking for Hubbley. The revolution against the revolution had started.

I sat thinking as fast as I could. Leisha. If Leisha were here—

Leisha was no plotter. No killer. She’d believed in trusting the eventual outcome of any clash between good and evil, in trusting the basic similarities among human beings, in trusting their ability to compromise and live together. Humans might need checks and balances, but they didn’t need imposed force, nor defensive isolation, nor crushing retribution. Leisha, unlike Miranda, believed in the rule of law. That’s why she was dead.

I opened the door the rest of the way and wheeled my chair, bent as it was, into the corridor. The padding fell off the armrest. I blocked the corridor, gun drawn, and waited for someone to round the corner. Eventually someone did. It was Joncey. I shot him in the groin.

He screamed and fell against the wall. There was a lot more blood than there had been with Peg. I raced my chair up to him and pulled him across my lap, holding his wrists with one of my augmented hands and the gun with the other. Another man rounded the corner, Abigail waddling after him. Abigail made a moaning sound, more like wind than people.

“Oohhhhhhhh…”

“Don’t come close or I’ll kill him. He’ll live, Abby, with medical attention, if I let him have it soon. But if you don’t do what I ask, I’ll kill him. Even if you draw a gun and shoot me, I’ll kill him first.”

The other man said, “Shoot the crippled bastard, you!”

“No,” Abby said. She’d regained control of herself immediately; her eyes darted like trapped rabbits, but she was in control. She was a better natural leader than most, maybe better than Hubbley. But I held Joncey in my arms, and she wasn’t leader enough for that sacrifice.

“What do you want, Alien?” She licked her lips, watching the blood pour out of Joncey’s groin. He’d fainted, and I shifted him to free my other hand.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you? The ones of you left alive. Did you kill Hubbley?”

She nodded. Her eyes never moved from Joncey. He was still on my lap. The almost forgotten shapes of childhood prayer whipped through my mind: Please don’t let him die yet . I saw the same shapes in Abigail’s eyes.

“Leave me here,” I said. “Just that. Here, and alive. Somebody will come eventually.”

“He’ll call, him, for help,” the other man said.

“Shut up,” Abby said. “You know nobody can’t use them terminals but Hubbley and Carlos and O’Dealian, and they’re all dead, them.”

“But, Abby—”

“Shut up, you!” She was thinking hard. I couldn’t feel Joncey’s heart.

A woman raced into the corridor. “Abby, what’s the matter, you? The submarine’s off the coast—” She stopped dead.

The submarine . All of a sudden I saw how the underground revolution had evaded the GSEA for so long. A sub meant military help. There were agencies inside the government involved, or at least people within agencies. PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT. CLASSIFIED. DANGER.

For a long moment I thought I was dead.

“All right!” Abby said. “Give him to me and lock yourself in that there storage room, you!”

“Don’t come close,” I said. I backed into the room with the canisters, still carrying Joncey. At the last minute I dumped him onto the floor and slammed the door. It could be locked from the inside, but I had no doubt she could override it. I held onto the urgency in the second woman’s voice, the panic: Abby, the submarine’s off the coast ! Let the sub be ready to go. Let Abby want Joncey alive, safely tucked inside a medunit, more than she wanted me dead. Let the canisters all around me not contain deadly viruses, and let them not be able to be released by remote…

I sat, heart pounding. The shapes in my mind were red and black and spiky, painful as cactuses.

Nothing happened.

Minutes dragged by.

Finally a small section of the wall beside me brightened. It was a holoscreen, and I hadn’t even realized it. A dumb terminal. Abby’s face filled it. It was smeared with blood, twisted with hate.

“Listen, Arlen, you. You’re going to die there, underground. I done sealed it off. And the terminals are frozen, them, all of them. In another hour the life support will cut out automatically. I could kill you now, me, but I want you to think about it first. . . You hear me? You’re dead, you — dead dead DEAD.” With each word her voice rose, until it was a shriek. She whipped her head from side to side, her hair seething and foaming, caked with blood. I knew Joncey was dead.

Someone pulled her away from the screen, and it went blank.