Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

She said, “I loved you . And you couldn’t stand being inferior. That’s what your betrayal to the GSEA is really about. Jon was right. You can’t ever really understand. Anything.”

Drew didn’t answer. The wind picked up, smelling of cold water. More leaves blew off the oak. The birch tree shuddered. There was more noise behind me. I didn’t turn around.

A GSEA agent said, “I arrest you, Miranda Sharifi, for violations of the—”

She cried out, just as if the agent hadn’t spoken, “I can’t help it that I know more and think better than you, Drew! I can’t help what I am!”

He said, his voice unsteady but angry, the way men are when they know they look weak, “Who should control the technology—”

“Shit!” someone called. I turned. Billy sat dazed on the ground, holding his chest. The noise had been him and Annie, pulling the unconscious Lizzie up from the underground bunker, which they didn’t understand and must have feared. Or maybe Annie had pulled Lizzie up the steps, and the agent with the burned hand had helped Billy. The agent stood there beside the old man, looking dazed. But there was nothing dazed about Billy. He sat in the frozen mud, an old man with a body about to be the most biologically efficient machine on the planet, and I saw that he, too, knew what he was looking at. Billy Washington, the Liver. His wrinkled old-man’s gaze moved from Drew to Miranda — the latter, I saw, with adoration — then back to Drew again, then to Miranda. “Shit,” he said again, and there were layers and layers in his tone, unsortable.

“You’re fighting, you, about who should control this technology — but don’t you see, it don’t matter who should control it, them? It only matters who can ?” And he put his gnarled, grateful, hand on the crumpled sleeping form of Lizzie , lying in the mud, her small face peaceful and cool and damp as her lethal fever broke.

There was nothing to confiscate for evidence. More planes came, and Drew used the codes that made the door appear in the far wall of the bunker. I contrived to be present for this. Security was chaotic, except for Miranda Sharifi, electro-cuffed to the birch tree, whom agents watched as if they expected an anti-grav heavenly ascension, tree and all. Maybe they did. But Miranda allowed herself to be captured. And everybody understood that’s what happened: she allowed it.

But nobody, including me, understood why.

Behind the bunker door lay nothing. Even the sterile, fortifying walls that had probably been there were self-consuming by the same nanotechnology that had built them. There were only a series of earth-packed tunnels and caves extending back into the mountain, dangerous to explore without proper equipment because the dirt walls crumbled and threatened to cave in. It was impossible to tell how extensive the caves/tunnels were. It was impossible to tell what had been nano-destroyed in them, or removed from them before their collapse. Miri, they’re on the way — Miri, you can’t —

I looked for the slim black syringes that had injected the four of us, but all I saw was smudges of melted black, like metallic candle wax, on the floor at the bottom of the steps where Lizzie and Billy had lain.

There was more. And it happened, incredibly, almost as an afterthought.

But first one of the agents arrested me. “Diana Arlene Cov-ington, you are under arrest for violations of the United States Code, Title 18, Sections 1510, 2381, and 2383.”

Obstruction of criminal investigations. Assisting rebellion or insurrection. Treason. I was, after all, supposed to be a GSEA agent.

Miranda watched me intently from her birch tree. Too intently. Drew had gone into the plane. We awaited a second plane, either for more space or more security. With a sudden feint that surprised the agent, I ducked around him and sprinted toward Miranda.

“Hey!”

She had time to say to me only, “More in the syringe—” before the outraged agent had me again and dragged me grimly into the plane. His grip bruised my arms.

I barely noticed. More in the syringe —

The whole extent of the project , she had said to Drew Arlen.

So not just the Cell Cleaner, which was staggering enough. Not just that. Something else.

Some other biological technology: radical, unexpected. Unimaginable.

Something more.

Huevos Verdes had not needed to set up this elaborate underground lab to perfect or test the Cell Cleaner. They had already done that, openly, before the Science Court hearing last fall.

Huevos Verdes had expected to lose their case in front of the Science Court. That had been clear at the time, to nearly everybody. What had not been clear was why they were presenting the case at all, given the foregone conclusion. It was because Miranda wanted the moral reassurance that all legitimate paths for this larger project were closed, before she completed her stroll down illegitimate paths at East Oleanta.

How much did the agent know? The GSEA top brass, of course, would know everything. Arlen would have told them.

This intellectual speculation lasted only a moment. It was replaced almost instantly with a freezing fear, the kind that doesn’t melt your bones but stiffens them, so it seems you won’t ever move, or breathe, again.

Whatever bioengineering project Huevos Verdes had been built for, the charade of the Science Court had been staged for, Drew Arlen had performed concerts for, the duragem dissembler had not been stopped for — whatever bioengineering project had occupied all of the SuperSleepless’s unfathomable energies — whatever that bioengineering project was, I had been injected with it. It was in my body. In me. Becoming me.

You don’t have the right to choose for 175 million people. Not in a democracy. Not without any checks and balances —

Kenzo Yagai did.

I swayed against the metal bulkhead, then caught myself. My fingers were faintly blue with cold. The nail on the middle finger had broken. The flesh was smooth except for one tiny cut on the index finger. Mud, now dried, made a long arc from wrist to nails. My hand. Alien.

I said aloud to Miranda, “ What was it ?”

In my mind she turned her misshapen head to look at me. Tears, which still didn’t fall, brightened her eyes. She said, “Only for your good.”

“By whose definition!”

Her expression didn’t change. “Mine.”

I went on staring at her. Then she dissolved, because of course she was an illusion, born of shock. She wasn’t really inside my head. She couldn’t ever be inside my head. It was way too small.

The plane lifted, and I was transported to Albany to be arraigned in a court of law.

Billy, Annie, Lizzie , and I were taken to the Jonas Salk United States Research Hospital in Albany, a heavily shielded edifice conspicuous for security ’bots. I was led down a different corridor. I craned my neck to keep Lizzie’s gurney in sight as long as I could.

In a windowless room Colin Kowalski waited for me, with a man I recognized instantly. Kenneth Emile Koehler, director, Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency. Colin said nothing. I saw that he never would; he was too outranked, included only because he had had the bad judgment to hire me, the wildcat agent who could have led the GSEA to Miranda Sharifi before Drew Aden did, and hence just as much an official quisling. But, of course, for the other side. Colin was in disgrace. Aden was probably a hero who had belatedly but righteously seen the light. I was under arrest for treason. One loser, one winner, one who doesn’t know how to play the game.