Beggars and Choosers (17 page)

“A gravrail crashed comin‘ from Portland. There are… a number of
Livers dead. The crowd heard about it, and they’re upset. Naturally.”
Natchally
.
Her voice sounded upset, but her eyes were resentful. The first big
event she’d sponsored since her election, and a lot of inconsiderate
Livers had to go die and ruin it.
An unpleasant complication
.
I would have bet a quarter million credits against her reelection.

“We’re goin‘ to go ahead with the concert anyway, unless you object.
I’m goin’ to introduce you in about five minutes.”

“Try drawing out your vowels slightly less,” I said. “It would be at
least a little more authentic.”

I had underestimated her. Her smile didn’t waver. “Then five minutes
is all right with you?”

“Whatever you say.” The lattice in my head was shaking now, as if in
a high wind.

They had built a floating gravplatform at one end of the arena, with
a wide catwalk to the upper room where I waited. The grav-train had
crashed; the aircar had faltered. I knew that gravdevices didn’t really
manipulate gravity, but magnetism; I didn’t understand how. What were
the odds of three magnetic devices failing me in an evening? Jonathan
Markowitz would know, to the twentieth decimal.

“—one of the premier artists of our times—” Congresswoman Gardiner
broadcast from the stage.
Tahms
,

Of course, it might not have been the gravunit itself that failed in
the train. A gravrail might have hundreds of different moving parts,
thousands, for all I knew. What were they all made of?

“—with deep gratitude for the opportunity to bring y’all the Lucid
Dreamer, I—”

/. /. 7. The donkeys’ favorite word. In Huevos Verdes, at least they
said
we
. And meant more than just the SuperSleepless.

Pale green grass rippled in front of the purple lattice. Grew over
it, through it, around it. Took it over. Took over the world.

I clasped my hands hard in front of me. I had to perform in two
minutes. I had to control the images in my mind. I was the Lucid
Dreamer.

“—understandably grieved about the tragedy, but grief is one of the
emotions the Lucid Dreamer—”

“What the fuck do you know about grief, you?” someone unseen
screamed, so loud I jumped. Somebody in the audience had a voice
magnifier as powerful as my own sound system. From where I sat I
couldn’t see the audience, only Congresswoman Gardiner. But I heard a
low rumble, almost like the Delta in flood.

“—pleased to introduce—”

“Get off, you bitch!” The same magnified voice.

I powered my chair forward. Halfway across the catwalk the
congresswoman passed me, her head high, her lips smiling, her eyes
burning with anger. There was no applause.

I powered my chair to the center of the floating platform and put my
lenses on zoom. The KingDome was only half full. People stared at me,
some sullen, some uncertain, some wide-eyed, but nobody smiling. I
hadn’t ever faced anything like this. They were balanced on an edge,
right between an audience and a mob.

“That a donkey chair you sit in, Arlen, you?” the magnified voice
shrieked, and I identified its owner when several people turned to him.
A man pushed him, hard; another glared; a third moved protectively in
front of the heckler and stared hard-eyed at the platform. Somebody
down front called faintly, unmagnified, “The Lucid Dreamer ain’t no
donkey, him. You shut up!”

I said, so softly that everyone had to quiet to hear, “I’m no
donkey, me.”

Another rumble went up from the audience, and in my mind I saw water
flooding the Delta where I was born, the water not fast but relentless,
unstoppable, rising as steeply as any Huevos Verdes curve of social
breakdown.

“People are dead, them, in the lousy donkey trains nobody bothers to
keep up!” the magnified voice cried. “Dead!”

“I know,” I said, still softly, and the lattice stopped shaking as
my mind filled with slow, large shapes, moving with stately grace, the
color of wet earth. I pressed the button on my chair and the concert
machinery began to dim the stage lights.

I was supposed to give “The Warrior,” designed and redesigned and
redesigned again to encourage independent risk taking, action,
self-reliance. Stored in the concert machinery were also the tapes and
holos and subliminals for “Heaven,” the most popular of my concerts. It
led people to a calm place inside their own minds, the place all of us
could reach as children, where the world is in perfect balance and we
with it, and the warm sunlight not only falls on our skin but goes all
the way through to the soul and draws us in to blessed peace. It was a
concert of reconciliation, of repose, of acceptance. I could give that.
In ten minutes the mob would be a yielding pillow.

I began “The Warrior.”

“Once there was a man of great hope and no power. When he was young
he wanted everything…”

The words quieted them. But the words were the least of it, were
unimportant, really. The shapes were what counted, and the way the
shapes moved, and the corridors the shapes opened to the hidden places
in the mind, different for each person. And I was the only one in the
world who could program those shapes, working off my own mind, whose
neural pathways to the unconscious had been opened by a freak illegal
operation. I was the Lucid Dreamer.

“He wanted strength, him, that would make all other men respect him.”

No one at Huevos Verdes could do this: seize the minds and souls of
eighty percent of the people. Lead them, if only deeper into
themselves. Shape them. No—give them their own shapes.

“Do you understand what it is you do to other people’s minds?” Miri
had asked me in her slightly-too-slow speech, shortly after we met. I
had braced myself—even then—for equations and Law-son conversion
formulas and convoluted diagrams. But she had surprised me. “You take
people into the otherness.”

“The—”

“Otherness. The reality under the reality. You pierce the world of
relativities, so that the mind glimpses that a truer absolute lies
behind the fragile structures of everyday life. Only glimpses it, of
course. That’s all even science can really give us: a glimpse. But you
take people there who couldn’t ever be scientists.”

I had stared at her, strangely frightened. This wasn’t the Miri I
usually saw. She brushed her unruly hair away from her face, and I saw
that her dark eyes looked soft and far away. “You really do that, Drew.
For us Supers, as well as the Livers. You hold aside the veil for just
a glimpse into what else we are.”

My fright deepened. She wasn’t like this.

“Of course,” she added, “unlike science, lucid dreaming isn’t under
anybody’s control. Not even yours. It lacks the cardinal quality of
replicability.”

Miri saw my face, then, and realized her last words were a mistake.
She had ranked what I do second… again. But her stubborn truthfulness
wouldn’t let her back down from what she did in fact actually believe.
Lucid dreaming lacked cardinal quality. She looked away.

We had never spoken of the otherness again.

Now the Liver faces turned up to me, open. Old men with deep lines
and bent shoulders. Young men with jaws clenched even as their eyes
widened like the children they had so recently been. Women with babies
in their arms, the tiredness fading from their faces when their lips
curved faintly, dreaming. Ugly faces and natural beauties and angry
faces and grieving faces and the bewildered faces of people who thought
they’d been running their lives and were just now discovering they
weren’t even on the Board of Directors.

“He wanted sex, him, that would make his bones melt with
satisfaction. He wanted love.”

Miri was probably already in the underground facility at East
Oleanta, and I was too cowardly to admit that I was glad. Well, I’d
admit it now. She was safer there than at Huevos Verdes, and I didn’t
have to see her. Eden. The carefully programmed subliminals on the cafe
HTs throughout New York’s Adirondack Mountains called it “Eden.” Not
that the Livers knew what this new Eden meant. I didn’t either, not
really. I knew what the project was supposed to
do
—but not
what it would ultimately mean. I’d been too cowardly to admit my
questions. Or admit that even SuperSleepless confidence might not add
up to automatic Tightness.

Pale, deadly grass waved in my mind.

“Aaaaaaahhh,” a man sighed, somewhere close enough that I could hear
him over the low music.

“He wanted excitement, him.”

A man in the sixth or seventh row wasn’t watching me. He glanced
around at everybody else’s rapt face. He was first puzzled, then
uneasy. A natural immune to hypnosis—there were always a few. Huevos
Verdes had isolated the brain chemical necessary to respond to lucid
dreaming, only it wasn’t a single brain chemical but a combination of
what Sara Cerelli called “necessary prerequisite conditions,” some of
which depended on enzymes triggered by other conditions… I didn’t
really understand. But I didn’t need to. I was the Lucid Dreamer.

The unaffected man shuffled restlessly. Then settled down to listen
anyway. Afterwards, I knew, he wouldn’t say much to his friends. It was
too uncomfortable, being left out.

I knew all about that. My concerts counted on it.

“He wanted every day to be filled with challenges only he could
meet.”

Miri loved me in a way I could never love her back. It burned, that
love, as hard as her intelligence. It was the love, not the
intelligence, that had made me never say to her directly, “Should we go
ahead with the project? What proof do we have that this is the right
thing to do?” She would tell me, of course, that proof was impossible,
and her explanation of why not would contain so many things—equations
and precedents and conditions—that I wouldn’t understand it.

But that wasn’t the real reason I’d never pushed my doubts. The real
reason was that she loved me in a way I could never love her, and I had
wanted Sanctuary since I was six years old and discovered that my
grandfather died building it, a grunt worker before Livers were taken
care of by a vote-hungry government. That was why I had turned my mind,
so much weaker than hers, over to Huevos Verdes.

But now there was the pale grass, growing over the lattices in my
mind, growing over the world.

“He wanted—”

He wanted to belong to himself again.

The shapes slid around my chair; the subliminals flickered in and
out of my audience’s consciousness. Their faces were completely
unguarded now, oblivious to each other and even to me, as the private
doors of their minds swung briefly open. To the desires and
fearlessness and confidence that had been buried there for decades,
under the world that needed order and conformity and predictability to
function. This was my best concert of “The Warrior” yet. I could feel
it.

At the end, almost an hour later, I raised my hands. I felt the
usual outpouring of holy affection for all of them. “Like a pope or a
lama?” Miri had asked, but it wasn’t like that. “Like a brother,” I’d
answered, and watched her dark eyes deepen with pain. Her own brother
had been killed on Sanctuary. I’d known my answer would hurt her. That
was a kind of power, too, and now I felt ashamed of it.

But it was also the truth. In a moment, when the concert ended,
these Livers would go back to being the same whining, complaining,
ineffectual, ignorant people they’d been before. But for this instant
before the concert ended, I did feel a brotherhood that had nothing to
do with likeness.

And they wouldn’t go completely back to what they had been. Not
completely. Huevos Verdes’s computer programs had verified that.

“… back to his kingdom.”

The music ended. The shapes stopped. The lights came up. Slowly the
faces around me dissolved into themselves, first blinking wide-eyed,
then laughing and crying and hugging. The applause started.

I looked for the man with the voice magnifier. He wasn’t standing in
his same place in the crowd. But I didn’t have to wait long to find him.

“Let’s go, us, to that gravtrain crash—it’s only a half-mile away.
There’s still folks hurt there, them, more than there are med-units—I
saw, me! And not enough blankets! We can help, us, to bring the injured
here… Us!” Us. Us. Us.

There was confusion in the crowd. But a surprising number of Livers
followed the new leader, burning to do something. To be heroes, which
is the true hidden driver of the human mind. Some people started
organizing a hospital corner. Others left, but from behind the
now-opaqued shield that let me watch them without being seen, I
observed even the departing Livers donating spare jackets and shirts
and blankets for the aid of the wounded. Congresswoman Sallie Edith
Gardiner bustled over the catwalk toward me.

“Well, Mr. Arlen, that was just marvelous—”
Marvelous.

“You didn’t watch it.”

She wasn’t listening. She stared at the activity in the King-Dome.
“What’s all
this
now?”

I said, “They’re getting ready to help the survivors of the gravrail
crash.”

“Them? Help how?”

I didn’t answer. All of a sudden I was very tired. I’d had only a
few hours’ sleep, and I’d spent the previous night viewing man-made
horrors.

Like this woman.

“Well, they can all just stop this nonsense right now!”
Raht now
.

She bustled away. I watched a little longer, then went to find my
driver—who had, of course, vowed to never drive an aircar again. But
that was before the gravrail crash showed that nothing else was any
better. Still, I’d find some way back to Seattle. And to the airport.
And to Huevos Verdes. And from there to East Oleanta. There were things
I had to ask Miranda, critical things, things I should have asked a
long time ago. And I was going to say them. I, Drew Arlen. Who had been
the Lucid Dreamer long before I met Miranda Sharifi.