Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

“The human mind, Charles Lamb once remarked, can fall in love with anything. Call me a patriot, Billy. Don’t you still believe in patriotism, Billy?”

“Besides, I once saw a genemod dog fall to its death off a balcony.” But Billy suddenly spotted Annie. He smiled at me and moved off to walk by his beloved, whose dress, despite her best efforts, was being consumed by her big-breasted body. She looked like a pastoral goddess, utterly unaware that the industrial revolution has begun and the looms are clacking like gunfire.

We reached Oak Mountain July 14, which only I found funny, or even notable. There were already ten thousand people there, by generous estimate. They ringed the flat land around the prison and spread up the sides of the surrounding mountains. Brush had been cleared for feeding for miles around, although the trees remained for shade. No one was on solid food; there was little shit. Tents in the wild colors of Before jacks dotted the grounds: turquoise, marigold, crimson, kelly green. At night, there were the usual campfires or Y-energy cones.

World War I lost more soldiers to disease, the result of being messed together in unsanitary conditions, than to guns. At the siege of Dunmar, they had eaten the rats, and then each other. During the Brazilian Action, the damage to the rain forest was greater than the damage to the combatants as high tech destroyed everything it touched. Never again, none of it.

Did history still apply? Human history?

Billy was right. I thought too much. Concentrate on staying alive.

“Put more dirt on your face,” Lizzie said, peering at me critically. This seemed superfluous; everyone was constantly covered in dirt, which had become acceptable. Dirt was clean. Dirt was mother’s milk. I suspected that Miranda and Company had altered our olfactory sense with her magic brew. People did not seem to smell bad to each other.

“Put more leaves in your hair,” Lizzie said, tipping her head critically to study me. Her pretty face was creased with worry. “There are some weird people here, Vicki. They don’t understand that donkeys can be human, too.”

Can be . On sufferance. If we join the Livers and give up the institutions by which we controlled the world.

Lizzie’s lip quivered. “If anything happened to you…”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I said, not believing it for half a minute. Too much already had. But I hugged her, this daughter slipping rapidly away from both Annie and me, who nonetheless fought over her just as if she weren’t already a different species. Lizzie was almost completely naked now, her “dress” reduced to a few courtesy rags. Unself-consciously naked. There were thirteen-year-olds in this camp who were just as unselfconsciously pregnant. No problem. Their bodies would take care of it. They anticipated no danger in childbirth, had no fears about supporting a baby, counted on plenty of people around all the time to help care for these casual offspring. It was no big deal. The pregnant children were serene.

“Just be careful,” Lizzie said.

“You be careful,” I retorted, but of course she only smiled at this.

That night the first holo appeared in the sky.

It appeared to be centered above the prison itself. Eighty feet up and at least fifty feet tall — it was hard to judge from the ground — it was clearly visible for miles. The laser lighting was intricate and brilliant. It was around ten o’clock, dark enough even in summer for the holo to dominate even a nearly full moon. It consisted of a red-and-blue double helix bathed in a holy white light, like some biological Caravaggio. Below it letters pulsed and flashed:

People screamed. In a year, they had apparently forgotten how ubiquitous political holes used to be.

Death to non-humans . Cold seeped along my spine, starting in the small of my back and traveling upwards.

“Who’s making that holo^ them?” a nearby man called indignantly. There was a frenzied babble of answers: the government, the food franchises nobody needed anymore, the military. The donkeys, the donkeys, the donkeys…

I didn’t hear anyone say, “The underground, them.” Did that mean there were no members of it present, not even informers? There must be informers; every war had them.

Informers would have to fit in, which meant they’d have to be syringed. Did that mean they, too, were non-humans? Who exactly qualified as “non-human”?

I saw Lizzie fighting through the crowd, felt her hands drawing me back into our tent. If she was saying anything, it was lost in the noise. I shrugged off her small insistent hands and stayed where I was.

The holo continued to flash. Then there was a general surge forward, toward the prison. It didn’t happen all at once; nobody was in danger of being trampled. But people began to move around tents and campfires toward the prison walls. By the garish pulsing light I could see similar movements down the sides of the distant wooded slopes. The Livers were moving to protect Miranda, their chosen icon.

“Anybody tries, them, to give death to her. . .”

“She’s as human, her, as anybody with fancy holos!”

“Just let them try to get at her…”

What on earth did they think they could actually do to help her?

Then the chanting started, first closest to the prison walls and quickly spreading outward, drowning out the more random babble of discussion and protest. By the time I reached the edge of the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, it was strong, rising from thousands of throats: “Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”

Torches appeared. Within a half hour every human being in miles stood packed by the prison walls, faces grim and yet exalted in that way people get when they’re intent on something outside themselves. Firelight turned some of their homely Liver faces rosy; others were striped red and blue from the flashing holo above us. Free Miranda, Free Miranda, Free Miranda…

There was no response at all from the silent gray walls.

They kept it up for an hour, which was the same length of time the holo flashed its message of death to those like Miranda.

And me.

And the syringed Livers?

When the holo finally disappeared, the chanting did, too, almost as if cut off from above. People blinked and looked at each other, a little da2ed. They might have been coming off a Drew Arlen lucid dreaming.

Slowly, without haste, ten thousand people moved away from the prison, back to their tents, spreading out over miles. It took a long time. People moved slowly, subdued, talking softly or not at all. As far as I knew, nobody got pushed or hurt. Once, I would not have believed this possible.

People sat up very late, huddled around common fires, talking.

Brad said, “That holo didn’t come from the prison.”

I’d never thought it did. But I wanted to hear his reasoning. “How do you know?”

He smiled patiently, the newly fledged techie addressing his illiterate elder. The little prick. I had forgotten more tech than he had yet learned in his belated post-syringe love affair with actual knowledge. He was sixteen. Still, I had no real right to contempt. I hadn’t noticed where the holo originated.

“Laser holos have feeds,” he said. “You know, those skinny little lines of radiation you can only see kind of sidewise, and only if you’re looking—”

“Peripheral vision. Yes, I know, Brad. Where were they coming from, if not the prison?”

“Lizzie and me only studied about them last week.” He put a proprietary hand on Lizzie’s knee. Annie scowled.

“Where were the feeds coming from, Brad?”