Beggars and Choosers (20 page)

This was it, then. Annie was ready, her, to send me away. I followed
her into Lizzie’s bedroom. She shut the door.

“Billy, what we did, us, last night…” She didn’t look at me. I
couldn’t help her, me, even if I’d of wanted to. My throat was too
closed up. And I didn’t want to.

“Billy, I’m sorry. I behaved, me, like a fool. It just been too
long. I didn’t mean to make you… I can’t… Can we just go back, us, to
the way we was before? Friends? Partners, sort of, but not…” She raised
her beautiful chocolate eyes to me.

I felt light, me, filled with light, like I might float off the
floor. She wasn’t going to send me away. I could stay, me, with her and
Lizzie
. Just like we were before.

“Sure, Annie. I understand, me. We won’t never talk about it again.”

She let out a long sigh, her, like she’d been holding it in since
last night. Maybe she was. “Thank you, Billy. You’re a good friend,
you.”

We went back out to
Lizzie
, who was listening hard to Dr.
Turner talk donkey talk. Here was more trouble.

“… isn’t like that,
Lizzie
. The basic principle of the
computer is binary, which just means ‘two.” Tiny switches, too small to
see, with two positions: on and off. They make a code.“

“Like base two in math,” Lizzie said eagerly, but underneath her
eagerness she was tired so deep, her, she could hardly keep her eyes
open.

Annie said sharply, “She has to sleep now, her. Is the examination
done, Doctor?”

“Yes,” Dr. Turner said, standing up. She looked bewildered, her; I
didn’t see no reason why. “But I’ll come back this afternoon.”

“Medunit don’t see people twice a day,” Annie said.

“No,” Dr. Turner said, still looking bewildered. She stared at
Lizzie
,
who was already asleep, her. “That’s a remarkable child.”

“Bye, doctor,” Annie said.

Dr. Turner ignored her. She stood quiet, her, but tensed up inside,
like she was making some kind of important decision. “Billy—listen to
what I’m going to tell you. Stockpile whatever you can from the food
line here in this apartment. And if the warehouse reopens, stockpile
blankets and jacks and—oh—toilet paper and soap and whatever else
occurs to you. And buckets for water—lots of buckets. Do it.” She said
it like nobody else but her could of thought of all that. Like /
couldn’t of thought of it.

Annie said, “Folks start stockpiling, them, there ain’t going to be
enough for everybody else.”

Dr. Turner stared at Annie bleakly. “I know, Annie.”

“Ain’t right.”

The doctor said softly, “A lot of things ain’t right.”

“So you telling us, you, to make it more not right?”

Dr. Turner didn’t answer. I had the weird feeling, me, that she
didn’t
have
an answer. A donkey without an answer.

With a last look at Lizzie, Dr. Turner left. Annie said, “I don’t
want
her
around here no more! She can just leave
Lizzie
alone!”

I could of told Annie, me, that wasn’t going to happen. Not from the
look in Lizzie’s tired, sick eyes when the donkey doctor was telling
her about that computer code. This was what Lizzie’d been looking for,
her, all her life. Looking in the school software that Dr. Turner
talked down, and in the East Oleanta library when we still had one, and
in taking apart the apple peeler ‘bot in the Congresswoman Janet Carol
Land Cafe kitchen. This. Somebody who could tell her, them, what that
smart little throwback mind wanted to know. And Annie wasn’t going to
be able to stop it. Annie didn’t know that, her, but I did. Lizzie was
already nearly twelve years old, her, and ain’t nobody been able to
really stop her from anything since she was eight.

But I didn’t say nothing, me, to Annie. Not then. Annie watched
Lizzie
sleep with her whole heart in her eyes, and I couldn’t say nothing,
because I was too busy, me, watching them both.

==========

That afternoon, though, I did hunt up Jack Sawicki, me, and ask him
for a terminal password. He gave it to me, him, without asking too many
questions. We go back a long way, Jack and me, and besides he had his
hands full. A technician actually arrived, her, from Albany to fix the
medunit. And there was supposed to be a big all-lodge dance that night
in the cafe. Three lodges combined, them, to give the party. There was
a dance jam, and betting games, and some kind of bare-breasted beauty
contest, and most of the young people in town were going, which meant
testing all the security ‘bots. Especially since the gravrail was
running again, it, and word of the dance might of traveled to other
towns. Jack didn’t even ask, him, why I wanted the password.

I walked, me, to the hotel. Dr. Turner wasn’t around. It had turned
cool for August; maybe she went for another walk in the woods, looking
for Eden. She wasn’t going to find it. I had looked, me, and there
wasn’t nothing nowhere near where Doug Kane had keeled over beside that
rabid raccoon. No place that big-headed girl could of come from.

I said to the hotel HT, “Newsgrid mode. Password Thomas Alva
Edison.” Jack don’t want the whole town knowing the hotel HT can go
newsgrid; you’d have every Tom, Dick, and Harry in here, them, who want
to watch a different channel than the HT at the cafe or the lodge
houses.

“Newsgrid mode,” the HT said cheerfully. It’s always cheerful, it.
“What channel, please?”

“Some donkey channel.”

“What channel, please?”

I tried different numbers, me, until I found a donkey newsgrid. Then
I sat and watched, me, for an hour, trying to remember the words Dr.
Turner explained. Molecular bonds. Dissemblers. Alloy. Duragem. Only
the newsgrid didn’t use those words, it, except for “duragem.” Instead
it used words like “proposed epicenter” and “replication rate
equations” and “Stoddard equations for field failure curves” and
“manual replacement efforts falling behind incident rate.” I watched
anyway, me. After an hour I got up and said, “Information mode.”

I went home, me, and got Lizzie’s and Annie’s meal chips. When
nobody in the cafe was near the foodbelt, I took everything the chips
would give me and put it all in a clean covered bucket and carried it
home.
Lizzie
was still asleep, her, holding her doll. I went
to the warehouse, which was opened again after a new shipment came on
the gravrail, and got two more buckets, three blankets, and three sets
of jacks on all our chips. Plus a new door lock, flowerpots, and a
suitcase. The tech there looked at me funny, him, but didn’t say
nothing. I filled all the buckets with clean water, one at a time, and
lugged them, me up the stairs to Annie’s apartment. At the end my back
ached and I was panting like the old fool I was.

But I didn’t stop, me. I rested for ten minutes and then borrowed
Annie’s broom. I took it down to the hotel. People were carrying
plasticloth banners into the cafe to decorate for the dance. They
laughed and joked, them; a young girl flashed her breasts. Getting
ready for tonight’s contest. A few strangers checked themselves into
the hotel on their New York State chips. They chattered on about the
dance. Dr. Turner was still gone, her.

I took Annie’s broom, me, and swept all the dead leaves out of the
hotel lobby, all the leaves left by the broken cleaning ‘bot that
wasn’t never going to get fixed now because it wasn’t all that
important compared to other breakdowns, all the leaves that had died,
them, since last year, before all the breakdowns started and the rabid
coons first come to East Oleanta.

DREW ARLEN: FLORIDA

When I left Seattle for Huevos Verdes, it was on a plane from Kevin
Baker’s corporate fleet. Kevin’s reasons for not following the rest of
the Sleepless to Sanctuary, unlike Leisha’s, were not idealistic. He
was Sanctuary’s financial liaison with the rest of the planet. I
figured that a Sleepless plane was the least likely in the world to
crash from duragem dissembler damage. The plane would have been checked
and rechecked compulsively; the Sleepless do safety very well. “Because
we’ve had so little of it,” Kevin said somberly when I phoned him and
begged the use of plane and pilot. I was not interested at that moment
in the social problems of the Sleepless. Kevin had never liked me, and
I’d never asked him for any favors before. But I did now. I was going
to force a showdown at Huevos Verdes, learn some important answers.
Maybe Kevin knew that. You never know how much they know.

The unceasing lattice, closed tight, swayed in my mind.

“There’s just one thing, Drew,” Kevin said, and I thought I saw the
shades and shapes of apology flit across his face on the vidscreen.
Like all his generation of Sleepless, he looks a handsome thirty-five.
“Leisha insists on going with you.”

“How did Leisha even know I was going to Huevos Verdes? As far as
she knows, I’m on a concert tour!”

“I don’t know,” Kevin said, which may or may not have been true.
Maybe Leisha had her own electronic spies in my hotel room, or at the
Seattle concert. Although it was hard to imagine she and Kevin could do
that without Huevos Verdes knowing. Maybe the Supers did know, and
tolerated Leisha’s information system.

Maybe Leisha just knew me so well that she guessed what I was
feeling. Maybe she had some kind of probability program predicting what
I would do, what any Norm would do. You never know what they know.

“And if I say no to Leisha?” I said.

“Then no plane,” Kevin said. He didn’t meet my eyes. I saw that he
felt he owed her this, for old debts, things that had happened before I
was born. I saw, too, that there was just the slightest sign of
puffiness along his jaw, the very beginning of a sag to his
handsomeness. He was 110 years old. Flat, low shapes slid through my
mind, the color of tarnished silver. Kevin was not going to change his
mind.

Before Huevos Verdes, the plane went to Atlanta, to drop off
something very secret and very industrial, in which I was not
interested at all. Before that, it landed in Chicago to pick up Leisha.
There were no reporters. The GSEA agents must have been there, of
course, somewhere, but I didn’t see them. Leisha climbed on board with
a lawyerly briefcase and a small green overnight case, her golden hair
blowing in the brisk wind off Lake Michigan. She wore white pants,
sandals, and a thin yellow shirt. I stared straight ahead.

“I have to go with you, Drew,” Leisha said with no hint of apology.
This was her straight-forward, reasonable voice. It made me feel like a
kid again, being chided for flunking out of the expensive donkey
schools she’d sent me to. Schools no Liver could have succeeded in—or
so I’d told myself at the time. “I love Miranda, too, you know. And I
have to know what you and she and the other Supers are up to. Because
if it’s what I think it is…”

A hint of anger had crept into her voice. Leisha would feel entitled
to anger, just for being excluded from knowledge. I didn’t answer her.

Miri once told me that there were only four important questions you
could ask about any human being: How does he fill up his time? How does
he feel about how he fills up his time? What does he love? How does he
react to those he perceives as either inferior or superior to him?

“If you make people feel inferior, even unintentionally,” she had
said, her dark eyes intense, “they will be uncomfortable around you. In
that situation, some people will attack. Some will ridicule, to ‘cut
you down to size.” But some will admire, and learn from you. If you
make people feel superior, some will react by dismissing you. Some by
wielding power—just because they can— in greater or lesser ways. But
some will be moved to protect and help. All this is just as true of a
junior lodge clique as of a group of governments.“

I had wondered how she could possibly know anything about junior
lodge cliques. But, admiring her and wanting to learn, I hadn’t said
anything.

“I only want to protect you and Miranda, Drew,” Leisha said, “and to
help any way I can.”

I looked out the plane window, at the sunlight reflected blindingly
on the metal wings, until the shapes behind my eyelids blotted out the
ones in my mind.

==========

The plane, which had been so carefully checked for
duragem-dissembler contamination in Seattle, must have become
contaminated in Atlanta. It went down over upcountry Georgia.

It was the KingDome all over again, except that this pilot didn’t
pray or curse or moan, and we were flying at twenty thousand feet. The
sky was a hazy blue, with clouds below that blocked any view of the
ground. The plane listed to the left, just slightly, and I saw the
flesh on the back of the pilot’s neck change from light brown to a
mottled maroon. Leisha looked up from her briefcase. Then the plane
righted and I could feel my mind, which had clenched into a tight hard
shape like constipation, open again.

But the next moment the plane lurched again, and began to shudder.
The pilot spoke to his console in low, urgent orders, simultaneously
punching in manual commands. The plane nosedived.

The pilot pulled it up so hard I was thrown against Leisha. Her
bright hair filled my mouth. Her briefcase hurled forward, against the
back of the front seat. The briefcase said, “For maximum utility,
please hold this unit steady.” A long, thin, thread spun itself in my
mind.

Leisha grabbed the back of the front seat and pulled herself off me.
“Drew! Are you all right?”

The plane dropped. The pilot stayed with it, issuing orders in a
monotonous voice controlled as machinery, manipulating the manual.
Leisha’s briefcase said, “This unit is deactivating,” in a clear high
voice like a trained soprano. Leisha’s hand groped to check my
restraints. “Drew!”

“I’m all right,” I said, thinking,
This is not all right
.
The thread spun itself out, stretching tauter and tauter.