Nancy Kress: Beggars and Choosers

To Miriam Grace Monfredo and Mary Stanton without whose friendship in a bad time this book would not have been finished.

The clanging of the priority-one override alarm ripped through the cavernous backstage dressing room. Drew Arlen, the only occupant, jerked his head toward the holo-terminal beside his dressing table. The screen registered his retina scan and Leisha Camden’s face appeared.

“Drew! Have you heard?”

The man in the powerchair, upper body fanatically muscled above his crippled legs, turned back to putting on his eye makeup. He leaned into the dressing table mirror. “Heard what?”

“Did you see the six o’clock Times ?”

“Leisha, I go on stage in fifteen minutes. I haven’t listened to anything.” He heard the thickening in his own voice, and hoped she didn’t. Even after all this time. Even at just the sight of her holo.

“Miranda and the Supers… Miranda… Drew, they’ve built an entire island . Off the coast of Mexico. Using nanotech and the atoms in seawater, and almost overnight!”

“An island,” Drew repeated. He frowned into the mirror, rubbed at his makeup, applied more.

“Not a floating construct. An actual island, that goes all the way down to the continental shelf. Did you know about this?”

“Leisha, I have a concert in fifteen minutes…”

“You did, didn’t you. You knew what Miranda was doing. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Drew turned his powerchair to face Leisha’s golden hair, green eyes, genemod perfect skin. She looked thirty-five. She was ninety-eight years old.

He said, “Why didn’t Miranda tell you?”

Leisha’s expression quieted. “You’re right. It was Miranda’s place to tell me. And she didn’t. There’s a lot she doesn’t tell me, isn’t there, Drew?”

A long moment passed before Drew said softly, “It isn’t easy being on the outside for a change, is it, Leisha?”

She said, equally softly, “You’ve waited a long time to be able to say that to me, haven’t you, Drew?”

He looked away. In the corner of the huge silent room something rustled: a mouse, or a defective ’bot.

Leisha said, “Are they moving to this new island? All twenty-seven Supers?”

“Yes.”

“No one in the scientific community even knew nanotech had reached that capability.”

“Nobody else’s nanotech has.”

Leisha said, “They’re not going to let me on that island, are they? At all?”

He listened to the complex undertones in her voice. Leisha’s generation of Sleepless, the first generation, could never hide their feelings. Unlike Miranda’s generation, who could hide anything.

“No,” Drew said. “They’re not.”

“They’ll shield the island with something that Terry Mwa-kambe invents, and you’ll be the only non-Super ever allowed to know what they’re doing there.”

He didn’t answer. A technician stuck his head diffidently in the door. “Ten minutes, Mr. Arlen, sir.”

“Yes. I’m coming.”

“Huge crowd tonight, sir. All pumped up.”

“Yes. Thank you.” The tech’s head disappeared.

“Drew,” Leisha said, her voice splintering. “She’s as much a daughter to me as you were a son… what is Miranda planning out on that island?”

“I don’t know,” Drew said, and it was both a lie and not a lie, in ways that Leisha could never understand. “Leisha, I have to be on stage in nine minutes.”

“Yes,” Leisha said wearily. “I know. You’re the Lucid Dreamer.”

Drew stared again at her holo-image: the lovely curve of cheek, the unaging Sleepless skin, the suspicion of water in the green eyes. She had been the most important person in his world, and in the larger public world. And now, although she didn’t know it yet, she was obsolete.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s right. I’m the Lucid Dreamer.”

The holostage blanked, and he went back to his makeup for the stage.

For some of us, of course, nothing would be enough. That sentence can be taken two ways, can’t it? But I don’t mean that having nothing would ever be satisfactory to us. It isn’t even satisfactory to Livers, no matter what pathetic claims they lay to an “aristo life of leisure.” Yes. Right. There isn’t a single one of us that doesn’t know better. We donkeys could always recognize seething dissatisfaction. We saw it daily in the mirror.

My IQ wasn’t boosted as high as Paul’s.

My parents couldn’t afford all the genemods Aaron got.

My company hasn’t made it as big as Karen’s.

My skin isn’t as small-pored as Gina’s.

My constituency is more demanding than Luke’s. Do the bloodsucking voters think I’m made of money?

My dog is less cutting-edge genemod than Stephanie’s dog.

It was, in fact, Stephanie’s dog that made me decide to change my life. I know how that sounds. There’s nothing about the start of my service with the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency that doesn’t sound ridiculous. Why not start with Stephanie’s dog? It brings a certain satiric panache to the story. I could dine out on it for months.

If, of course, anyone were ever going to dine out again.

Panache is such a perishable quality.

Stephanie brought her dog to my apartment in the Bayview Security Enclave on a Sunday morning in July. The day before, I’d bought pots of new flowers from BioForms in Oakland and they cascaded over the terrace railing, a riot of blues much more varied than the colors of San Francisco Bay , six stories below.

Cobalt, robin’s egg, aquamarine, azure, cyan, turquoise, cerulean. I lay on my terrace chaise, eating anise cookies and studying my flowers. The gene geniuses had shaped each blossom into a soft fluttery tube with a domed end. The blossoms were quite long. Essentially, my terrace frothed with flaccid, blue, vegetable pe-nises. David had moved out a week ago.

“Diana,” Stephanie said, through the Y-energy shield spanning the space between my open French doors. “Knock knock.”

“How’d you get into the apartment?” I said, mildly annoyed. I hadn’t given Stephanie my security code. I didn’t like her enough.

“Your code’s broken. It’s on the police net. Thought you’d like to know.” Stephanie was a cop. Not with the district police, which was rough and dirty work down among the Livers. Not our Stephanie. She owned a company that furnished patrol ’bots for enclave security. She designed the ’bots herself. Her firm, which was spectacularly successful, held contracts with a sizable number of San Francisco enclaves, although not with mine. Telling me my code was on the ’bot net was her ungraceful way of needling me because my enclave used a different police force.

I lounged back on my chaise and reached for my drink. The closest blue flowers yearned toward my hand.

“You’re giving them an erection,” Stephanie said, walking through the French doors. “Oh, anise cookies! Mind if I give one to Katous?”

The dog followed her from the cool dimness of my apartment and stood blinking and sniffing in the bright sunshine. It was clearly, aggressively, illegally genemod. The Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency may allow fanciful tinkering with flowers, but not with animal phyla higher than fish. The rules are very clear, backed up by court cases whose harsh financial penalties make them even clearer. No genemods that cause pain. No genemods that create weaponry, in its broadest definition. No genemods that “alter external appearance or basic internal functioning such that a creature deviates significantly from other members of not only its species but also its breed.” A collie may pace and single-foot, but it better still look like Lassie.