Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers

“At first I hardly noticed them at all. Then I remembered the—”

“From where, damn it!”

Startled, he pointed. Horizontally, to the top of a not-very-near mountain I couldn’t name. I stared at the mountain, silhouetted in moonlight.

“I don’t see why you’re yelling at me, you,” Brad said, somewhere between a sulk and a sneer. I ignored him. I hoped Lizzie was losing interest in him. He wasn’t nearly as bright as she was.

0 same new world.

1 stared at the dark nameless mountain. That’s where they were, then. The Will-and-Idea underground, which Drew Arlen had hinted at, and of which Billy had met a member weeks ago. But that man had been syringed. Did that mean you could be syringed, with all its changes to basic biological machinery, and still be considered human by the underground? Or was the man being used as an informer, who would be dealt with for his turncoat treason once the war was over? Such things were not unknown in history.

This movement had loosed the duragem dissembler. They were killing donkeys. They had successfully hidden Drew Arlen for two months from Huevos Verdes. They armed their soldiers with United States military weapons.

It was dawn before I slept.

The next night, the holo was back, but changed.

The double helix, red and blue in white light, was still there. But this time the flashing letters read:

Don’t tread on me ? What pseudo-revolutionary group could possibly have the demented idea that a bunch of pastoral dirt-feeding chanters were treading on them? Or even interested in them?

I had a sudden insight. It wasn’t only that Livers, due to using the syringes, may or may not have become non-human. That alone hadn’t provoked the underground’s hatred. The Liver’s non-interest had. Syringed people not only didn’t pay the established government much attention, most of them were equally uninterested in its would-be replacements. They didn’t need any replace-ment, or thought they didn’t. And for some people, being hated is preferable to being irrelevant. Any action that provokes response, no matter how irrational, is better than being irrelevant. Even if the response is never enough.

Another thing: These holos were not trying to convert anyone. There were no broadcasts explaining why people should join the underground. There were no simply worded leaflets. There were no cell members furtively reaching out to the susceptible, persuading in hushed voices. The people projecting these holos were not interested in recruitment. They were interested in self-righteous violence.

The Livers gazing upward at the sky responded to this second holo exactly as they had the night before. Orderly, without confusion, without any signal given, they began to move toward the prison. There was no haste. Mothers took the time to wrap up babies against the night chill, to finish breast-feeding, to arrange who would stay with sleeping toddlers. Fires were banked. Knitters did whatever they do at the end of a row of stitches. But within ten minutes every adult in the camp had started to move, ten thousand strong, toward the walls. They moved courteously around the tents and temporary hearths of those camped hard by the prison, careful not to step on anything. As soon as they were shoulder-to-shoulder, they started to chant.

“ Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda …”

The holo pulsed for fifteen minutes, then changed:

The white light changed to an American flag, stars and bars su-perimposed over the double helix.

“ Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda …” Fifteen minutes later the holo words changed again:

“ Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda …” The American flag became a rattlesnake, poised to strike. It looked so real that a few children started to cry.

Another fifteen minutes and the snake was replaced by the original double helix and holy white light. This time we got three lines:

The double helix rotated slowly. I wondered how many of the chanters even knew what it was.

“Free Miranda…”

At the end of an hour, it was over. It took another hour for the huge crowd to quietly disperse, which it started to do the moment the holo vanished.

Back in my tent, I borrowed Lizzie’s terminal, with its library crystal. “Don’t tread on me” was first used on flags in the Colonial South, as relations with Great Britain deteriorated, and later adopted as Revolutionary slogan in much of New England. “Liberty or Death” appeared on flags in Virginia, following Patrick Henry’s exhortation to turn on the British masters. “Hope” was the legend on the flag of the Colonial armed schooner Lee , the first flag to also feature thirteen stars. I couldn’t find a record anywhere of “Will and Idea.”

These maniacs considered themselves colonists in their own country, fighting to overthrow a donkey establishment that was largely in passive hiding and, maybe, a syringed Liver population that was essentially defenseless. Unless you count chanting as a weapon.

The government existed, in part, to defend its citizens against this sort of demented civil insurrection. Did we have a government left? Did we have a country left?

The only official representative of that country in sight, Oak Mountain Maximum Security Federal Prison, sat silent and dark. Maybe it was even empty.

I walked back toward the prison walls. This time I went right up to them, borrowing a torch from some obliging camper who asked mildly, without insistence, that I return it when I was done. I walked along the prison walls, inspecting.

A few graffiti, not very many. Few Livers could write. What graffiti there was hadn’t been written on the walls themselves, which of course shimmered with a faint Y-energy shield. Instead river boulders had been rolled laboriously against the shield, the earth scraped raw from their passage. On the rocks was painted FREEE MARANDA. WE R PEEPLUL TO. TAK DOWN THEEZ WALLZ.

A pathetic scratching in one rock, a half-inch deep, where some group had begun, symbolically at least, to tak down theez wallz.

The prison door, facing the river, blank and impenetrable. Thirty feet up the security screens, which may or may not have been recording, were dark blank patches.

Above the walls the shimmer, hard to see unless you used your peripheral vision, extended outward a few feet, like eaves. I couldn’t imagine why.

Towers loomed at each of the four corners. They had no windows, or else windows holoed to look like they didn’t exist.

I walked back to my tent, returning the torch on the way. Annie, Billy, Lizzie , and Brad had already disappeared into their tents, two by two. Clouds were rolling in from the west. I sat outside for a long time, wrapped in a plasticloth tarp, cold even though it was at least seventy degrees out. The prison, too, sat massive and silent, not even flying a holographic flag. Dead.

“Lizzie, I need you to do something for me. Something tremendously important.”

She looked up at me. I’d found her deep in the woods, after hours of patiently asking total strangers if they’d seen a thin black girl with pink ribbons tying up her two braids. Lizzie sat on a fallen log, which the backs of her thighs were probably eating. She’d been crying. Brad, of course. I’d kill him. No, I wouldn’t. There was no other way for her to learn. Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David.