Beggars and Choosers (21 page)

We plunged through the clouds. There was a shrieking high in the
air, almost sounding above us, as if it were coming from some entirely
different machinery. Then the plane hit flat on its belly on marshy
ground. I felt the hit in my teeth, in my bones. Leisha, thrown once
more against me, said something very low, a single word; it might have
been “Daddy.”

The second the plane smashed into the ground, the sides lifted. But
it couldn’t have been the same second, I thought later, because nobody
would design crash equipment that way. But it seemed only a second
until the sides lifted and the passenger restraints sprang free. Leisha
pushed me out of the plane, the same moment I caught the acrid smell of
smoke.

I dropped on my belly into four inches of water covering mucky
ground. Leisha splashed down beside me, falling to her knees. Without
my powerchair I felt myself flailing, a desperate fish, holding myself
above water on my elbows. I crawled forward, pulling myself with my
upper arms through the muck and away from the plane dragging my useless
legs behind.

Leisha staggered to her feet and tried to lift me. “No, run!” I
screamed, as if the smoke billowing out from the plane blocked sound
and not sight. “Not without you,” she said. I could feel the plane
behind me, a bomb. I screamed, “I can go faster on my own!” Maybe it
was true.

She kept on tugging at my body, though I was far too heavy for her.
The smoke thickened. I didn’t hear the pilot climb out— was he hurt? My
left palm slipped in the mud and I fell face first into it. Frantically
I tried to get back up on my hands and drag myself forward. “Run!” I
screamed again at Leisha, who wouldn’t leave. Hopeless, hopeless. She
wasn’t strong enough to carry me, and the plane was going to blow.

The thread snapped. The lattice in my mind, as in Seattle,
disappeared.

Someone ran toward Leisha from the other side of the plane. The
pilot? But it wasn’t. The man tackled Leisha and she fell on top of me.
Once more my face was pushed into the mud. Then I heard a faint pop.
When I fought my eyes free of the mud, I

saw the air around the three of us shimmering. A force shield.
Y-energy. How strong was it? Could it withstand—

The plane exploded in light and heat and blinding color.

I fell back into the muck, pinned under Leisha. The world rocked and
I saw a tiny black water snake, terrified at the intrusions into its
swamp, dart forward and bite me on the cheek. The snake started as a
thin thread, then became a blur of close motion, and then the world
went black as its shiny scales and I didn’t know if the thread held or
not.

==========

He was a GSEA agent. When I came to, three of them stood around me
in a circle, like the ring of doctors around my bed decades ago, when I
was crippled. I lay on my back on a patch of relatively dry, spongy
ground at the edge of the shallow lake. Leisha sat a little way off,
her back against a custard-apple tree, her head bent forward on her
knees. Across the swamp, Kevin Baker’s plane burned, its smoke rising
in billowy clouds.

“Leisha?” I heard myself croak. My voice sounded as alien as
everything else. Only it wasn’t alien at all. I recognized the
heaviness of the muggy air, the whine of insects, the scummy pools and
waxy-white ghost orchids. And over everything, the gray dripping beards
of Spanish moss. I had been raised in upcountry Louisiana. This was—had
to be—Georgia, but much of the swampy country is the same. It was I who
had become the alien.

“Ms. Camden will be all right in a moment,” an agent answered.
“Probably just a concussion. There’s help on the way. We’re GSEA, Mr.
Arlen. Lie still—your leg is broken.”

Again. But this time I felt no pain. There were no nerves left to
feel pain. I raised my chin slightly, feeling the pull in my stomach
muscles. My left leg lay bent at a sharp, unnatural angle. I lowered my
chin.

The shapes slithering through my mind were gray and indistinct on
the outside, spiked within. They had a voice.
Can’t do anything
right, can you, boy? Who d’you think you are
—
some goddamn
donkey
?

I said aloud, like a little boy, “A snake bit my cheek.”

A second man bent to squint at my face. It was covered with mud. He
said, not harshly, “There’s a doctor on the way. We’re not going to
move you until she gets here. Just lie still and don’t think.”

Don’t think. Don’t dream. But I was the Lucid Dreamer. I was. I had
to be.

Leisha’s voice said thickly behind me, “Are we under arrest? On what
charges?”

“No, of course not, Ms. Camden. We’re happy to be able to assist
you,” said the man who had squinted at my cheek. The other two agents
stood blank-faced, although I saw one of them blink. You can convey
contempt with a blink. Leisha and I consorted “ with, assisted, Huevos
Verdes. Gene manipulators. Destroyers of the human genome.

I saw Carmela Clemente-Rice standing beside the lattice in my mind,
a clean cool shape, vibrating softly.

“You
are
Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency,” Leisha
said. It wasn’t a question. But she was a lawyer: she waited for an
answer.

“Yes, ma’am. Agent Thackeray.”

“Mr. Arlen and I are grateful for your assistance. But by what
right—”

I never found out what legal point Leisha had been going to make.

Men dressed in rags burst from behind trees, through tangled vines,
from the mucky ground itself. One moment they weren’t there, the next
they were—that’s how it felt. They hollered and shrieked and whooped.
Agent Thackeray and his two contemptuous deputies didn’t even have time
to draw their guns. Lying flat on my back, I saw the ragged men
foreshortened as they raised pistols and fired at what seemed like, but
couldn’t have been, point-blank range. Thackeray and the two agents
went down, the bodies twitching. I heard somebody say, “Hail,
yes
,
she’s an abomination, that there’s Leisha Camden,” and a gun fired
again: once, twice. The first time, Leisha screamed.

I jerked my head toward her. She still sat with her back against the
custard-apple tree, but now her upper body leaned forward, gracefully,
as if she had fallen asleep. There were two red spots on her forehead,
one below the other, the higher spot matting a strand of bright blonde
hair that had somehow escaped the mud. I heard a long low moan and I
thought “She’s alive!”—the thought a desperate bright bubble—until I
realized the moan was mine.

The man who had said “Hail,
yes”
leaned over me. His
breath blew in my face; it smelled of mint and tobacco. “Don’t you
worry none, Mr. Arlen. We know
you
ain’t no abomination
against nature. You’re safe as houses.”

“Jimmy,” a woman’s voice said sharply, “Here they come!”

“Well, Abigail, y’all are ready for ‘em, ain’t you?” Jimmy said in a
reasonable voice. I tried to crawl toward Leisha. She was dead.

Leisha was dead.

A plane droned overhead. The medical team. They could help Leisha.
But Leisha was dead. But Leisha was a Sleepless. Sleepless didn’t die.
They lived, on and on, Kevin Baker was 110. Leisha couldn’t be
dead
—

The woman called Abigail stepped off the high ground into the swamp.
She wore hip-high waders and tattered pants and shirt, and she carried
a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, ancient in design but gleaming with
spit and polish. The medical plane folded its wings for a grav-powered
landing. Abigail aimed, fired, and blew it into a second torch in the
swamp.

“Okay,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “That’s it. Come on y’all, make
tracks, they’ll be all over here in no time. Mr. Arlen, I’m sorry this
is going to be a rough ride for y’all, sir.”

“No! I can’t leave Leisha!” I didn’t know what I was saying. I
didn’t know—

“Sure you can,” Jimmy said. “She ain’t going to get no deader. And
you ain’t none of her kind anyways. You’re with James Francis Marion
Hubbley now. Campbell? Where you at? Carry him.”

“No! Leisha! Leisha!”

“Have a little dignity, son. You ain’t no child bawlin‘ after its
mama.”

A huge man, fully seven feet high, picked me up and swung me over
his shoulder. There was no pain in my leg but as soon as my body struck
his, red fire darted up my spine to my neck and I screamed. The fire
filled my mind, and the last view I ever had of Leisha Camden was of
her slumped gracefully against the custard-apple tree, enveloped in the
red fire of my mind, looking as if she had just fallen quietly asleep.

==========

I woke in a small, windowless room with smooth walls. Too smooth—not
a nanodeviance from the smooth, the perpendicular, the unblemished. I
didn’t realize at the time that I noticed this.

My mind filled with grief, welling up in spurts, geysers, rivers of
hot lava the color of the two spots on Leisha’s forehead.

She really was dead. She really was.

I closed my eyes. The hot lava was still there. I beat on the ground
with my fists, and cursed my useless body. If I could have moved to
shield her, to put myself between her and the ragged gunmen…

Not even trained GSEA agents had been able to shield her. Or
themselves.

I couldn’t hold back my tears, which embarrassed me. The lava had
swamped the furled lattice in my mind, buried it, as it was burying me.
Leisha . .
.

“Now, y’all stop that, son. Keep a little dignity. Ain’t no woman
sired by man worth that kind of carry in‘ on.”

The voice was kind. I opened my eyes, and hatred replaced the hot
lava. I was glad. Hatred was a better shape: sharp, and cold, and very
compact. That shape would not bury me. I looked at the concerned face
of James Francis Marion Hubbley looming over me, and I let the cold
compact shapes slide through me, and I knew that I was going to stay
alive, and stay alert, and stay in control of myself, because otherwise
I might not be able to kill him. And I knew I was going to kill him.
Even if that meant his was the last face I ever saw.

“That’s better,” Hubbley said genially, and sat down on a tree
stump, hands on his knees, nodding encouragingly.

It really was a tree stump. The walls snapped into sharp focus,
then, and I knew what kind of place I was in. I had seen the same kind
of walls with Carmela Clemente-Rice, and at Huevos Verdes. This was an
underground bunker, dug out of the earth by the tiny precise machines
of nanotechnology, plastered over with alloy by other tiny precise
machines. Eating dirt and laying down a thin layer of alloy were not
hard, Miri had told me once. Any competent nanoscientist could create
nonorganic mechanisms to do that. Corporations did it all the time,
despite government regulations. It was only organic-based replicating
nanotechnology that was hard. Anyone could dig a hole, but only Huevos
Verdes could build an island.

But Hubbley didn’t look like a scientist. He leaned forward and
smiled at me. His teeth were rotten. Wisps of graying hair hung on
either side of a long, bony face with deeply sunburned skin and pale
blue eyes. An odd lump under the skin disfigured the right side of his
neck. He might have been forty, or sixty. He wore cloth rags, not
jacks, of a streaky dull brown, but his boots, whole and high, were
almost certainly from some goods warehouse someplace. I had never seen
him before, but I recognized him. He belonged to the backwater South.

In most of the country, the donkey-run District Supervisor This
Warehouse or Congressman That Cafe had forced out all independent
businesses. Livers could get everything they needed for free, so why
pay for it? But in the rural South, and sometimes in the West, you
still found hardscrabble businesses, weedy motels and chicken farms and
whorehouses, getting poorer and poorer over forty years but hanging on,
because damn it the gov’mint don’t have no business runnin‘ our lives,
them. Such people didn’t mind much being poor. They were used to being
poor. It was better than being owned by the donkeys. They took
handicrafts or chickens or beans or other services in trade. They
disdained jacks and medunits and school software. And wherever these
pathetic business held on, so did criminals like Hubbley. Stealing,
too, was outside the gov’mint, and so a mark of pride.

Hubbley and his band would rob warehouses, apartment blocks, even
gravrails, for what they absolutely needed. They would hunt in the deep
swamps, and fish, and maybe grow a little of this and that. There would
be a still someplace. Oh, I knew Jimmy Hubbley, all right. I’d known
him all my life, before Leisha took me in. My daddy was a Jimmy Hubbley
without the independence to break free from the system he cursed until
the day free government whiskey—not even home-distilled—killed him.

And this was the man that had killed Leisha Camden.

The shapes of hatred have great energy, like robotic knives.

I said, “This is an illegal genemod lab.”

Hubbley’s face creased into a huge grin. “That’s exactly right!
Y’all are sharp, boy. Only this is just a bitty little outstation,
where Abigail can see to her equipment and we can pick up supplies. And
this place ain’t used by the gene abominators no more. Y’all are
visitin‘ the Francis Marion Freedom Outpost, Mr. Arlen. And let me say
we’re honored to have y’all. We all seen all your concerts. You’re a
Liver, all right. Livin’ with the donkeys and the Sleepless ain’t
harmed you at all. But then that’s the way with the true blood, ain’t
At?”

There was something wrong with his speech. I fumbled, then got it.
He didn’t talk like a Liver—none of what Miri called “intensifying
reflexive pronouns”—but he didn’t talk like a donkey, either. There was
something artificial about his sentences. And I’d heard this kind of
speech before, but I couldn’t remember where.

I said, to keep him talking, “The Francis Marion Freedom Outpost?
Who was Francis Marion?”