Beggars and Choosers (2 page)

I held out a cookie, which was from the Proust’s Madelines franchise
and were wonderful: crunchy, fragrant with anise, rich with butter.
Katous took it with toothless pink gums. “Thank you, lady!”

I looked at Stephanie. “He can’t defend himself. And he’s a mental
cripple, smart enough to talk but not smart enough to understand his
world. What’s the point?”

“What’s the point of your spermatic flowers? God, they’re salacious.
Did David give them to you? They’re wonderful.”

“David didn’t give them to me.”

“You bought them yourself? After he left, I would guess. A
replacement?”

“A reminder of male fallibility.”

Stephanie laughed. She knew I was lying, of course. David was never
fallible in that department. Or any other. His leaving was my fault. I
am not an easy person to live with. I needle, pry, argue, search
compulsively for weaknesses to match my own. Worse, I only admit this
well after the fact. I looked away from Stephanie and gazed through a
gap in the flowers at San Francisco Bay, my drink frosty in my hand.

It is, I suppose, a serious flaw in my character that I can’t stand
to be in the same room for ten minutes with people like Stephanie.
She’s intelligent, successful, funny, daring. Men fall all over her,
and not just for her genemod looks, red hair and violet eyes and legs a
yard and a half long. Not even for her enhanced intelligence. No, she
has the ultimate attraction for jaded males: no heart. She’s a
perpetual challenge, an infinite variety that custom doesn’t stale
because the tariff is always about to be revoked. She can’t really be
loved, and can’t really be hurt, because she doesn’t care.
Indifference, coupled with those legs, is irresistible. Every man
chinks he’ll be different for her, but he never is. Her face launched a
thousand ships? Big deal. There’s always another fleet. If pheromone
genemods weren’t illegal, I’d swear Stephanie had them.

Jealousy, David always said, corrodes the soul.

I’d always answered that Stephanie was soulless. She was
twenty-eight, seven years my junior, which meant seven years more
advancement in the allowable technological evolution of
Homo
sapiens
. They had been a fertile seven years. Her father was Harve
Brunell, of Brunell Power. For his only daughter he had bought every
genemod on the market, and some of that hadn’t quite arrived there,
legally. Stephanie Brunell represented the penultimate achievement of
American science, power, and values.

Right behind Katous.

She plucked a penile blue flower and turned it idly in her hands.
She was making me choke on my curiosity about Katous. “So it’s really
over with you and David. Incidentally, I glimpsed him last night at
Anna’s water fete. From a great distance. He was out on the lily pads.”

I asked casually, “Oh? With whom?”

“Quite alone. And looking very handsome. I think he had his hair
replaced again. It’s curly and blond now.”

I stretched and yawned. The muscles in my neck felt hard as duragem
chains. “Stephanie, if you want David, go after him. I don’t care.”

“Don’t you? Do you mind if I send your rather primitive house ‘bot
for another pitcher? You seem to have drunk this whole one without me.
At least your ’bot works—the breakdown rate on the cop ‘bots has
accelerated yet
again
. I’d think the parts franchises were
all owned by crooks, if they weren’t owned by some of my best friends.
What’s your ’bot’s name?”

“Hudson,” I said, “another pitcher.”

It floated off. Katous watched it fearfully, backing into a corner
of the terrace. The dog’s absurd tail brushed a hanging flower.

Immediately the flower wrapped itself around the tail, and Katous
yelped and jumped forward, quivering.

I said, “A genemod dog with some self-awareness but afraid of a
flower? Isn’t that a little cruel?”

“It’s supposed to be an ultra-pampered beastie. Actually, Katous is
a beta-test prototype for the foreign market. Allowable under the
Special Exemption Act for Economic Recovery, Section 14-c.
Non-Agricultural Domestic Animals for Export.”

“I thought the President hasn’t signed the Special Exemption Act.”
Congress had been wrangling over it for weeks. Economic crisis,
unfavorable balance of trade, strict GSEA controls, threat to life as
we know it. All the usual.

“He’ll sign it next week,” Stephanie said. I wondered which of her
lovers had influence on the Hill. “We can’t afford not to. The genemod
lobby gets more powerful every month. Think of all those Chinese and EC
and South American rich old ladies who will just love a nauseatingly
cute, helpless, unthreateningly sentient, short-lived, very expensive
lapdog with no teeth.”

“Short-lived? No teeth? GSEA breed specifications—”

“Will be waived for export animals. Meanwhile I’m just beta-testing
for a friend. Ah, here’s Hudson.”

The ‘bot floated through the French doors with a fresh pitcher of
vodka scorpions. Katous scrambled away, his four ears quivering. His
scramble brought him sideways against a bank of flowers, all of which
tried to wrap themselves around him. One long flaccid petal settled
softly over his eyes. Katous yelped and pulled loose, his eyes wild. He
shot across the terrace.

“Help!” he cried. “Help Katous!”

On that side of the terrace I had planted moondust in shallow boxes
between the palings, to make a low border that wouldn’t obstruct the
view of the Bay. Katous’s frightened flight barreled him into the
moondust’s sensor field. It released a cloud of sweet-smelling blue
fibers, fine as milkweed. The dog breathed them in, and yelped again.
The moondust cloud was momentarily translucent, a fragrant fog around
those enormous terrified eyes. Katous ran in a ragged circle, then
leaped blindly. He hurled between the wide-set palings and over the
edge of the terrace.

The sound of his body hitting the pavement below made Hudson turn
its sensors.

Stephanie and I ran to the railing. At our feet the moondust
released another cloud of fibers. Katous lay smashed on the sidewalk
six stories down.

“Damn!” Stephanie cried. “That prototype cost a quarter million
in R&D!”

Hudson said, “There was an unregistered sound from the lower
entranceway. Shall I alert security?”

“What am I going to tell Norman? I promised to baby-sit the thing
and keep it safe!”

“Repeat. There was an unregistered sound from the lower entranceway.
Shall I alert security?”

“No, Hudson,” I said. “No action.” I looked at the mass of bloody
pink fur. Sorrow and disgust swept through me: sorrow for Katous’s
fear, disgust for Stephanie and myself.

“Ah, well,” Stephanie said. Her perfect lips twitched. “Maybe the IQ
did
need enhancing. Can’t you just see the Liver tabloid
headlines? DUMB DOG DIVES TO DEATH. PANICKED BY PENILE POSY.” She threw
back her head and laughed, the red hair swinging in the breeze.

Mercurial
, David had once said of Stephanie.
She has
intriguingly mercurial moods
.

Personally, I’ve never found Liver tabloid headlines as funny as
everyone else seems to. And I’d bet that neither “penile” nor “posy”
was in the Liver vocabulary.

Stephanie shrugged and turned away from the railing. “I guess Norman
will just have to make another one. With the R&D already done, it
probably won’t bankrupt them. Maybe they can even take a tax write-off.
Did you hear that Jean-Claude rammed his write off through the IRS, for
the embryos he and Lisa decided not to implant in a surrogate after
all? He discarded them and wrote off the embryo storage for seven years
as a business depreciation on the grounds that an heir was part of
long-term strategic planning, and the IRS auditor actually allowed it.
Nine fertilized embryos, all with expensive genemods. And then he and
Lisa decide they don’t want kids after all.”

I gazed at the throwaway pile of pink fur on the sidewalk, and then
out at the wide blue Bay, and I made my decision. In that moment. As
quickly and irrationally as that.

Like most of the rest of my life.

“Do you know Colin Kowalski?” I asked Stephanie.

She thought briefly. She had eidetic recall. “Yes, I think so.

Sarah Goldman introduced us at some theater a few years ago. Tall,
with wavy brown hair? Minimal genemod, right? I don’t remember him as
handsome. Why? Is he your replacement for David?“

“No.”

“Wait a minute—isn’t he with the GSEA?”

“Yes.”

“I think I already mentioned,” Stephanie said stiffly, “that
Norman’s company had a special beta-test permit for Katous?”

“No. You didn’t.”

Stephanie chewed on her flawless lower lip. Actually, the permit is
pending. Diana—“

“Don’t worry, Stephanie. I’m not going to report your dead
violation. I just thought you might know Colin. He’s giving an
extravagant Fourth of July party. I could get you an invitation.” I was
enjoying her discomfort.

“I don’t think I’d be interested in a party hosted by a Purity Squad
agent. They’re always so stuffy. Guys who wrap up genetic rigidity in
the old red-white-and-blue and never see that the result looks like a
national prick. Or a nightstick, beating down innovation in the name of
fake patriotism. No thanks.”

“You think the idealism is fake?”

“Most patriotism is. Either that or Liver sentimentality. God, the
only thing bearable about this country comes from genemod technology.
Most Livers look like shit and behave worse—you yourself said you can’t
stand to be around them.”

I had said that, yes. There were a lot of people I couldn’t stand to
be around.

Stephanie was on a political roll, the kind that never made it to
campaign holovids. “Without the genemod brains in the security
enclaves, this would be a country of marching morons, incapable of even
basic survival. Personally, I think the best act of’patriotism‘ would
be a lethal genemod virus that wiped out everybody but donkeys. Livers
contribute nothing and drain off everything.”

I said carefully, “Did I ever tell you that my mother was a Liver?
Who was killed fighting for the United States in the China Conflict?
She was a master sergeant.”

Actually, my mother had died when I was two; I barely remembered
her. But Stephanie had the grace to look embarrassed. “No. And you
should have, before you let me give that tirade.

But it doesn’t change anything.
You’re
a donkey. You’re
genemod. You do useful work.“

This last was either generous or bitchy. I have done a variety of
work, none of it persistently useful. I have a theory about people who
end up with strings of short-term careers. It is, incidentally, the
same theory I have about people who end up with strings of short-term
lovers. With each one you inevitably hit a low point, not only within
the purported “love” affair or fresh occupation, but also within
yourself. This is because each new lover/job reveals fresh internal
inadequacy. With one you discover your capacity to be lazy; with
another, to be shrewish; with a third, to engage in frenzied hungry
ambition that appalls you with its pathetic neediness. The sum of too
many careers or too many lovers, then, is the same: a composite of
personal low points, a performance scattergram sinking inevitably to
the bottom right quadrant. All your weaknesses stand revealed. What one
lover or occupation missed, the next one will draw forth.

In the last ten years, I have worked in security, in entertainment
holovids, in county politics, in furniture manufacture franchises (more
than one), in ‘bot law, in catering, in education, in applied
syncography, in sanitation. Nothing ventured, nothing lost. And yet
David, who was after Russell who was after Anthony who was after Paul
who was after Rex who was after Eugene who was after Claude, never
called
me
“mercurial.” Which is certainly indicative of
something.

I hadn’t reacted to Stephanie’s jibe, so she repeated it, smiling
solicitously. “
You’re
a donkey, Diana. You do useful work.”

“I’m about to,” I said.

She poured herself another drink. “Will David be at this Colin
Kowalski’s party?”

“No. I’m sure not. But he’ll be at Sarah’s campaign fund-raiser on
Saturday. We both accepted weeks ago.”

“And are you going?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I understand. But if David and you are really finished with each
other—”

“Go after him, Stephanie.” I didn’t look at her face. Since David
moved out, I’d lost seven pounds and three friends.

So—say I joined the GSEA because I was jilted. Say I was jealous.
Say I was disgusted with Stephanie and everything she represented. Say
I was bored with my life at that extremely boring moment. Say I was
just looking for a new thrill. Say I was impulsive.

“I’m going to be out of town for a while,” I said.

“Oh? Where are you going?”

“I’m not sure yet. It depends.” I gave a last look over the railing
at the smashed, semi-sentient, pathetic and expensive dog. The ultimate
in American technology and values.

Say I was a patriot.

==========

The next morning I flew down to Colin Kowalski’s office in a
government complex west of the city. From the air, buildings and
generous landing lots formed a geometric design, surrounded by
free-form swaths of bright trees bearing yellow flowers. I guessed the
trees were genemod to bloom all year. Trees and lawn stopped abruptly
at the perimeter of the Y-field security bubble. Outside that charmed
circle the land reverted to scrub, dotted by some Livers holding a
scooter race.

From my aircar I could see the entire track, a glowing yellow line
of Y-energy about a meter wide and five twisting miles long. A platform
scooter shot out of the starting pod, straddled by a figure in red
jacks that, at its speed and my height, was no more than a blur. I had
been to scooter races. The scooter’s gravs were programmed to stay
exactly six inches above the track. Y-cones on the bottom of the
platform determined the speed; the sharper the tilt away from the
energy track, the faster the thing could go, and the harder it became
to control. The driver was allowed only a single handhold, plus a
pommel around which he could wrap one knee. It must be like riding
sidesaddle at sixty miles per hour— not that any Liver would ever have
heard of a sidesaddle. Livers don’t read history. Or anything else.