Nancy Kress: Beggars and Choosers

I squeezed my eyes shut to die. And then opened them again.

In time to see the nanosecond in which it happened.

The shield around Oak Mountain glowed brighter than the holo in the sky. One moment the prison was wrapped in silvery light. The next the same silvery light shot out from the prison walls over the crowd below, in grotesquely elongated eaves of pure energy. The bomb, or whatever it was, hit the top of the energy shield and detonated, or ricocheted, or was thrown back. The plane exploded in a light that blinded me, but wasn’t quite nuclear. An instant later a second explosion: the other plane. Then dead silence.

People had stopped running, most of them. They looked up at the opaque silver roof protecting them, the roof of manmade high-tech radiation.

I cried out and staggered forward. Immediately my ankle gave way and I fell. I raised myself chest-high off the ground and stared up. The “roof extended all the way to the lowest slopes of the mountain. I couldn’t see through it. But I heard the subsequent explosions, artillery or radiation or something that must have been directed from the top of the distant mountain.

People were screaming again . But the shoving and trampling had stopped. Huddled under this high-energy umbrella was the safest place to be.

I thought: Huevos Verdes protects their own .

I lay back down on the ground, my cheek pressed against the hard-packed dirt. It felt as if I had no bones; I literally couldn’t move. Small children could have trampled on me. Huevos Verdes had protected their own, incidentally saving the lives of nine or ten thousand Livers while wiping out some other unknown number of Livers. That was who made the laws now: Huevos Verdes. Twenty-seven Sleepless plus their eventual offspring, who did not consider themselves part of my country. Or any other. Not donkeys, not Livers, not the Constitution, which even to donkeys had always been silent in the background but fundamental, like bedrock. No longer.

Who was the statesman whose last, dying words concerned the fate of the United States? Adams? Webster? I’d always thought it was a stupid story. Shouldn’t his last words have concerned his wife or his will or the height of his pillow — something concrete and personal? How grandiose to think oneself large enough to match the fate of a whole country — and at such a moment! Pretentious, inflated. Also silly — the man wasn’t going to pass any more laws or influence any more policy, he was dying . Silly.

Now I understood. And it was still silly. But I understood.

I think I have never felt such desolation.

There was a final explosion that left my ear, the one not pressed to the ground, completely deaf. I struggled to turn my head and look up. The shield had disappeared, and so had the holo and the entire top of the distant mountain. I had never even learned its name.

More screaming. Now, when it was all over. The Livers probably didn’t realize that, might never even realize what had been lost. Small bands of roaming, self-sufficient tribes, not needing that quaint entity, “the United States,” any more than Huevos Verdes did. Livers.

The first fleeing people ran past me, toward the dark hills. I stumbled to my feet, or rather foot. If I didn’t put my full weight on the self-healing ankle, I could hop forward. After a few yards I actually found a dropped torch. I extinguished it and leaned on it like a cane. It wasn’t quite long enough, but it would do.

It was slow work being the only person moving toward the prison. People had stopped shoving, and some kind or guilty souls started to carry away the trampled dead. But a crowd that size takes a long time to disperse. The noise from the crying and the shouting was overwhelming, especially after I started pressing my way through the narrow capillaries between people. My ankle throbbed.

It was at least an hour before I reached the prison itself.

I hobbled the length of the wall and turned the corner toward the river. It was somehow astonishing to me that the water continued to flow and murmur, the rocks to sit in their usual dumb fashion. For a second I saw not this river but another, with a dead snowshoe rabbit beside it — which river did I hear murmur in the darkness? There were no people left on this side of the walls, but I thought I saw dead bodies on the ground. They were actually shadows. Even after I realized this, they went on looking like corpses. They went on looking like Lizzie , all of them, at different moments. The pain had spread from my ankle to my whole leg. I wasn’t quite sane.

When I reached the prison doors, I looked up at the blank security screens, angled out from the wall much as the silvery shield has been. I said to them, “I want to come in.”

Nothing happened.

I said, louder — and even I heard the edge of hysteria in my voice — “I’m coming in now. I am. Now. Coming in.”

The river murmured. The screens brightened slightly — or maybe not. After a moment the door swung open.

Just like Eden.

I limped into a small antechamber. The door swung closed behind me. A door opened on the far wall.

I have been in prisons before, as part of my long-ago intelligence training. I knew how they worked. First the computer-run automated doors and biodetectors, all of which passed me through. Then the second set of doors, which are not Y-energy but carbon-alloy barred doors, run only manually because there are always people who can crack any electronic system, including retina prints. It’s been done. The second set of doors are controlled by human beings behind Y-energy screens, and if there are no human beings, nobody gets in. Or out. Not without explosives as large as the ones the Will and Idea people had already tried.

I stood in front of the first barred door and peered through the cloudy window to the guard station, a window constructed of plasticlear and not Y-energy, because Y-energy, too, is vulnerable to enough sophisticated electronics. There was a figure there.

Somehow Huevos Verdes must have brought in their own people — when? How ? And what had they done with the donkey prison officials?

The barred door opened.

Then the next one.

And the next.

There was no one in the prison yard. Recreation and dining halls on the right, administrative and gym on the left. I hobbled toward the cellblocks, at the far end. A solitary small building sat behind them. Solitary. The door opened when I pushed it.

I half expected, when I reached her cell, to find it empty, a rock rolled away from the tomb door. Playing with cultural icons…

But the SuperSleepless don’t play. She was there, sitting on a sleeping bunk she would never use, in a space ten by five, with a lidless toilet and a single chair. Stacked on the chair were books, actual bound hard copy printouts. They looked old. There was no terminal. She looked up at me, not smiling.

What do you say?

“Miranda? Sharifi?”

She nodded, just once, her slightly too large head. She wore prison jacks, dull gray. There was no red ribbon in her dark hair.

“They… your… the doors are open.”

She nodded again. “I know.”

“Are you … do you want to come out?” Even to myself I sounded inane. There were no precedents.

“In a minute. Sit down, Diana.”

“Vicki,” I said. More inanity. “I go by Vicki now.”

“Yes.” She still didn’t smile. She spoke in the slightly hesitant manner I remembered, as if speech were not her natural manner of communication. Or maybe as if she were choosing her words carefully, not from too few but from an unimaginable too many. I moved the books off the chair and sat.

She said the last thing I could have anticipated. “You’re troubled.”