Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

“Why don’t we have much time? What’s going to happen? I’m not sick yet, you’re going to alter my entire biochemistry, let me at least think a moment—”

A screen suddenly appeared on the wall. Even though this — unlike the door — was certainly a normal technology, I nonetheless jumped as if an angel had appeared with flaming sword. But the angel was in front of me, staring at the screen as if in pain, and the sword trembled in her hand, and I was going to die not because I’d eaten of this particular genetically-engineered apple, but because I didn’t.

She didn’t give me a choice. The screen showed a plane landing where no plane should have been able to land, a folded thing setting straight down like a rotorless coptor but far more precisely than any coptor, on the same small flat patch of ground between stream and mountain where I had screamed for Eden to open. The same naked birch tree, shivering white. The same tattered oak. I raised my head to stare at the four men climbing out of the unfolded cylinder of the government plane, and Miranda pushed the syringe into my neck. With her other hand on my shoulder, she held me still while the fluid drained.

She was very strong.

Somehow, that one fact cleared my head, which just shows how crazed was the whole situation. I said, almost as if we were coconspirators, “They can’t get in, can they? They couldn’t even find it before, they blew up the wrong installation. They must have followed us here, Billy and Annie and Lizzie and me — oh, I’m sorry, Miranda—”

She wasn’t listening. To my complete shock — it was the weirdest thing that had happened yet, because after all, I’d known about the Cell Cleaner, I’d seen her explain it in Washington — to my utter shock, tears glittered in her eyes. She circled the fingers of her right hand around her left. Covering the ring.

A fifth man was helped out of the plane, and into a powerchair someone else swiftly unfolded. I saw with yet another shock that it was Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer.

He put his hand on the birch tree. I didn’t know — and never found out — if it was to steady himself, or if it was part of the entry procedure, an activator or a skin-recognition system or just a failsafe of some unimaginable kind. Then he spoke a series of words, very clear, in that famous voice. The door above our heads opened.

Miranda made no effort to stop him, if she could have. Of course she could have. There must have been shields, counter-shields, something . They were SuperSleepless.

The four GSEA agents came down the stairs as if this were a root cellar in Kansas. They had drawn their guns, which filled me with sudden contempt. Drew Arlen stayed outside.

“Miranda Sharifi, you are under arrest for violations of the Genetic Standards Act, Sections 12 through 34, which state—”

She completely ignored them. She pushed past the four men as if they weren’t there, a sudden fire glowing around her that had to be some sort of electrified personal shield. One of the agents reached for her, cried out, and cradled his burned hand, his face distorted by pain. The agent blocking the steps hesitated. I saw him think for half a second about firing, and then change his mind. I could almost see the report later: “Civilians were present, making it inadvisable to—” Or maybe they realized that whoever officially killed Miranda Sharifi was dead himself careerwise, forever, a scapegoat. The agent moved off the steps.

Miranda ascended them slowly, heavily, the tears sparkling in her dark eyes. Three of the agents followed. After a stunned moment I bolted after them.

Drew Arlen sat in the cold November woods in a powerchair. Miranda faced him. A slight wind shook the oak tree, and the dead leaves rattled. A few fell.

“Why, Drew?”

“Miri — you don’t have the right to choose for 175 million people. Not in a democracy. Not without any checks and balances. Leisha said—”

“Kenzo Yagai did. He chose. He created cheap energy, and changed the world for the better.”

“You could have stopped the duragem dissembler. And didn’t. People died, Miranda!”

“Not as many as if we had stopped it. Not in the long run.”

“That wasn’t your reason! You just wanted control of the situation! You Supers, who don’t ever have to die!”

There was a noise behind me. I didn’t turn around. What I was looking at was more important than any noise. The questions Drew and Miranda hurled at each other were the same public question I had struggled with ever since I’d seen the Cell Cleaner in Washington: Who should control radical technology? Only they were making of it a private weapon, as lovers can make private weapons of anything. Who should control technology…

And — make no mistake — technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.

The GSEA had hoped to keep radical tech from falling into the wrong hands. But Huevos Verdes was the right hands: the hands that used nanotech to strengthen human beings, not destroy them. That was what the GSEA could not admit. It wasn’t their place to judge, they claimed; they only carried out the law. Maybe they were right.

But somebody, somewhere, sometime, had to judge, or we’d end up with pure Darwinian jungle, red in byte and assembler.

Huevos Verdes had judged. And I, by not summoning the GSEA a second time, along with them. And there was no clear way to know whether either of us was right.

All this I realized, with that peculiar clarity that comes in bodily crisis, as I watched Drew Arlen and Miranda Sharifi tear each other apart in the cold woods.

He said, “You don’t have the right to carry out this project. You never did. No more than Jimmy Hubbley—”

She said, “It was supposed to be ‘we,’ not ‘you.’ You were part of this.”

“Not any more.”

“Because you fell into the hands of some scientific crazies. God, Drew, to equate Jimmy Hubbley with us —”

“So you did know about him. And left me there all these months.”

“No! We knew about the counterrevolution, but not specifically where you were—”

“I don’t believe you. You could have found me. You Supers can do anything, can’t you?”

“You think I’m lying to you—”

“Yes,” Drew said. “I think you’re lying.”

“But I’m not . Drew—” It was a cry of pure anguish. I couldn’t look at her face.

“You could have stopped the duragem dissembler, too, couldn’t you? You knew it came from the underground. But you let it encourage social breakdown because that prepared the way better for the project. For your plans. Isn’t that true, Miranda?”

“Yes. We could have stopped the dissembler.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“We were afraid—” She stopped.

“Afraid of what? That I’d tell Leisha? The newsgrids? The GSEA?”

She said, more quietly, “Which is just what you did. The first chance you got. We did look for you, Drew, but we’re not omnipotent. There was no way of knowing which bunker, where… And meanwhile you did exactly what Jon and Nick and Christy said you would — betray the project to the GSEA.”

“Because I started to think for myself. Again. Finally. And that’s not what Supers want, is it? You want to think for all of us, and us to obey you, without question. Because you always know best, don’t you? God, Miranda, aren’t you ever wrong ?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was wrong about you.”

“That won’t be a problem for you any longer.”

She cried, “You said you loved me!”

“Not any more.”

They went on looking at each other. Drew’s face I couldn’t read. Miranda’s had turned stony, her tears gone. Her eyes were lasers.