Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

Then we came, us, to some town with a HT in the cafe. Vicki insisted, her, on watching one whole afternoon of donkey news-grids. Lizzie sat with her. So did me and Ben and Carl, just to be safe.

That night, around our campfire, Vicki sat slumped over, her, more depressed than before.

There was her, me, Annie, Lizzie , and Brad. Brad was a kid, him, who joined us a week ago. He spent a lot of time, him, bent over a terminal close to Lizzie . Annie didn’t like it, her. I didn’t like it neither. Lizzie’s body was feeding on her dress faster than mine or Annie’s, the way the young bodies did, them. Her little breasts were half hanging out, all rosy in the soft firelight. I could see she didn’t care, her. I could see Brad did. There wasn’t a damn thing Annie or I could do.

Lizzie said, “The Carnegie-Mellon Enclave hasn’t lowered its shield once. Not once, in nine months. They have to be out of food completely, which means they have to have used the syringes.”

She didn’t even talk, her, like us anymore. She talks like her terminal.

Annie said sharply, “So? Donkeys can use syringes. Miranda said so, her. Just so long as they stay, them behind their shields, and leave us alone.”

Vicki said sharply, “You didn’t want them to leave you alone when they were providing everything you needed. You were the one, in fact, who had the most reverence for authority. ‘Give us this day our daily bread…’ ”

“Don’t blaspheme, you!”

“Now, Annie,” I said, “Vicki don’t mean nothing, her. She just wants—”

“She just wants you to stop apologizing for her, Billy,” Vicki said coldly. “I can apologize myself for my outworn caste.” She got up, her, and walked off into the darkness.

“Can’t you stop bothering her?” Lizzie said furiously to her mother. “After all she’s done for us!” She jumped up and followed Vicki.

Brad looked helplessly after her, him. He stood up, sat down, half got up again. I took pity, me. “Don’t do it, son. They’re better off, them, alone for a while.”

The boy looked at me gratefully, him, and went back to his everlasting terminal.

“Annie…” I said, as gently as I could.

“Something’s wrong with that woman, her. She’s jumpy as a cat.”

So was Annie. I didn’t say so, me. Their jumpiness wasn’t the same kind. Annie was thinking, her, about Lizzie , just like she’d always been. But Vicki was thinking, her, about a whole country. Just like donkeys always did.

And if they didn’t, them, who would?

I thought, me, about Livers not needing donkeys no more, and donkeys hiding behind their shields from Livers. I thought about all the fighting and killing we’d watched, us, that afternoon on the newsgrids. I thought about the man who’d called donkeys “abominations” and said the syringes was from God. The man who said he’d got the Will and the Idea.

I got up, me, to go look for Vicki and make sure she was all right.

They don’t understand. None of them. Livers are still Livers, despite the staggering everything that’s happened, and there’s a limit to what you can expect.

I walked toward West Virginia wearing my new legal name and my rapidly decaying dress, full of health and doom. Where was Heuvos Verdes in all this? Miranda Sharifi had been tried under the most spectacular security known to man, and the press from thirty-four countries had waited breathlessly for the Lance-lotian high-tech rescue, the snatching from the legal fire, that had never materialized. Miranda herself had said not one word throughout the trial. Not one, not even on the stand, under oath. She had, of course, been found in contempt, and the crowds of Livers outside — syringed, all — had raised enough un-Liver-like howls to compensate for the silence of ten sacrificial lambs. But not for Huevos Verdes’s silence. No rescue. No defense, to speak of. Nada, unless you count syringes raining from the sky, pushing up from the earth, appearing like alchemy out of the very stones and fields and pavements of the country the Supers were utterly, silently, invisibly transforming.

Drew Arlen had testified. He’d described the illegal Huevos Verdes genemod experiments in East Oleanta, in Colorado, in Florida. The last two labs were apparently only backup locations to East Oleanta and Huevos Verdes, but Jesus Christ, there were only twenty-seven Supers. How in hell had they staffed four locations?

They weren’t like us.

That became clearer and clearer, as the trial progressed. It became clear, too, that Arlen was like us: stumbling around in the same swamp of good intentions, moral uncertainties, limited understanding, personal passions, and government restrictions about what he could or could not say on the stand.

“That information is classified,” became his monotonous response to Miranda Sharifi’s defense attorney, who was surely the most frustrated man on the planet. Arlen sat in his powerchair, his aging Liver face expressionless. “Where were you, Mr. Arlen, between August 28 and November 3?”

“That information is classified.”

“With whom did you discuss the alleged activities of Ms. Sharifi in Upstate New York?”

“That information is classified.”

“Please describe the events that led to your decision to notify the GSEA about Huevos Verdes.”

“That information is classified.”

Just like wartime.

But not my war. I had been declared a noncombatant, removed lock and stock and retina print from any but the most public databases, in perpetuity. Three times over the last year I had been picked up, transported to Albany, and knocked out, while bio-monitors gave up their secrets to scientists who, most probably, had by now syringed themselves with the same thing. The results of the biomonitoring were not shared with me. I was a government outcast.

So why did I even care that the United States, qua United States, was on the verge of nonexistence, the first nationalistic snuff job brought about by making government itself obsolete? Why should / care?

I don’t know. But I did. Call me a fool. Call me a romantic. Call me stubborn. Call me a deliberate, self-created anachronism.

Call me a patriot.

“Billy,” I said as we trudged along the endless gravrail track in the high rolling hills of Pennsylvania, “are you still an American?”

He gave me a Billy-look, which is to say intelligent without the remotest glimmer of vocabular understanding. “Me? Yes.”

“Will you be an American if you are killed by some fanatic last-ditch legalistic donkey defense at Oak Mountain?”

He took a minute to sort this out. “Yes.”

“Will you still be an American if you’re killed by some attack by a purist Liver-government underground that thinks you’ve sold out to the genetic enemy?”

“I ain’t going, me, to be killed by no other Livers.”

“But if you were , would you die an American?” He was losing patience. His old eyes with the young energy roamed over our fellow walkers, looking for Annie. “Yes.”

“Would you still be an American if there is no America, no central government left and nobody to administer it if there were, the Constitution forgotten, the donkeys wiped out by some fanatic revolutionary underground, and Miranda Sharifi rotting in a prison run exclusively by ’bots?”

“Vicki, you think too much, you,” Billy said. He turned his concern on me, that agape concern off which I’d been living, out of caste, for so long. It didn’t help. “Think about whether we’re going to stay alive, us — that makes sense. But you can’t take on the whole damn country, you.”