Beggars and Choosers (26 page)

“Okay, Billy,” I sighed. “If you won’t tell me, you won’t. And
you’re right—I can’t follow you unseen through the woods because I
don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m already cold.”

Still he said nothing. I trudged back to town. Lizzie’s computer and
crystal library wasn’t all that Dark Jones had bought in New York. The
homing device I’d stuck on the back of his plastisynth jacket, behind
the shoulder and below the neck where he wouldn’t see it until he
removed the jacket, registered as a motionless dot on my handheld
monitor. It stayed a motionless dot for over an hour. Wasn’t he cold?

Russell, who came before David and after Anthony, had a theory about
body temperature. He said that we donkeys, who are used to having
instant adjustments in anything that happens to distress us, have lost
the ability to ignore slight fluctuations in body temperatures.
Constant environmental pampering had softened us. Russell saw this as a
positive, because it made very easy identification of the successful
and the genetically highly tuned (who naturally were one and the same).
Watch a person pull on a sweater for a one-degree temperature drop and
you know you’re looking at a superior person. I lacked the strength of
will to avoid responding to this. Sort of a Princess and the Centigrade
Pea, I said, but whimsey was wasted on Russell. We parted shortly
afterwards when I accused him of inventing even more artificial social
gradations than the ridiculous number that already existed, and he
accused me of being jealous of his superior genemod left-brain logic.
The last I heard, he was running for congressional representative from
San Diego, which has possibly the most monotonous climate in the
country.

Maybe Billy Washington made a fire; the monitor wouldn’t show that.
After an hour, as I sat in warmth in my East Oleanta hotel room, the
Billy-dot moved. He walked several more miles over the course of the
day, in easy stages, in various directions.

A man looking for something. At no point did the dot disappear,
which would have meant he’d disappeared behind a Y-energy security
shield. The same thing happened for three more days and nights. Then he
came home.

Incredibly, he didn’t confront me about the homer. Either he never
found it, even after he took his jacket off (hard to believe), or he
did but had no idea what it was and decided not to wonder. Or—and this
only occurred to me later—he saw it but thought someone else had put it
there, maybe while he was sleeping, and wanted it left alone. Someone
out in the woods. Someone he wanted to please.

Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. What did I know about how a Liver
thought? What, in fact, did I know about how anybody thought? Would
somebody who had the ability to discern that knowledge on short
acquaintance have actually spent eighteen months with Russell?

==========

Two days after Billy’s return from the woods, Annie said, “The
gravrail’s broke again, it.” She didn’t say it to me. I sat in her
apartment, visiting Lizzie, but Annie had yet to acknowledge directly
that I was there. She didn’t look at my face, she didn’t speak to me,
she maneuvered her considerable bulk around the space I occupied as if
it were an inexplicable and inconvenient black hole. Probably Billy had
let me in only because I’d brought a double armful of food and
warehouse goods, obtained on “Victoria Turner’s” chip, to contribute to
the growing stockpiles along the walls. The place smelled vaguely like
a landfill where the waste-eating microorganisms had fallen behind.

“Where’s it at?” Billy said. He meant the actual train, sitting
somewhere along its magnetic track.

“Right here,” Annie said. “About a quarter mile outside town, that’s
what Celie Kane said, her. Some of them are mad enough to burn it.”

Lizzie looked up with interest from the handheld terminal with her
precious crystal library. I hadn’t witnessed Annie’s reaction to my
gift, but
Lizzie
had told me about it. The only reason
Lizzie
still owned the thing was that she’d threatened to run away on a
gravrail otherwise. She was twelve, she’d told her mother—a lot of kids
left home at twelve. I suppose Liver kids did, coming and going with
their portable meal chips. That was when Annie had stopped speaking to
me.

Lizzie said, “Can trains burn, them?”

“No,” Billy said shortly. “And it’s against the law to do hurt to
them anyway.”

Lizzie digested this. “But if nobody can’t come, them, from Albany
on the train to punish people who break the law—”

“They can come, them, on a plane, can’t they?” Annie snapped. “Don’t
you be thinking about breaking no laws, young lady!”

“I ain’t thinking about it, me. Celie Kane is,” Lizzie said
reasonably. “Besides, ain’t nobody going to come, them, to East Oleanta
on a plane anymore from Albany. All those donkeys got bigger problems
than us, them.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” I said, but naturally no one answered.

Outside, in the hall, someone shouted. Feet ran past our door, came
back, pounded once. Billy and Annie looked at each other. Then Billy
opened the door a crack and stuck his head out. “What’s wrong?”

“The warehouse ain’t opened again, it! Second week in a row! We’re
going smash that fucking building—I need another blanket and some
boots, me!”

“Oh,” Billy said, and shut the door.

“Billy,” I said carefully, “who else knows you have food and
warehouse goods hoarded here?”

“Nobody but us four,” he said, not meeting my eyes. He was ashamed.

“Don’t tell anyone. No matter how much they say they need this
stuff.”

Billy looked helplessly at Annie. I knew he was on my side. East
Oleanta, I had discovered, had a healthy barter economy existing
side-by-side with the official donkey one. Skinned rabbits, good
roasted over an open fire, were traded for spectacularly hideous
handmade wall hangings or embroidered jacks. Nuts for toys, sunshine
for food. Services, everything from babysitting to sex, for music decks
or homemade wooden furniture from trees in the forest. I could see
Billy trading some of our stockpiled stuff, but not risking it all by
letting anyone know we had it. Not when there was a chance Lizzie might
need it.

Annie was another story. She would die for
Lizzie
, but she
had in her the sharing and fairness and unthinking conformity that
create a sense of community.

I stretched. “I think I’ll go witness the liberation of the District
Supervisor Aaron Simon Samuelson Goods Distribution Center.”

Annie gave a sour look without actually looking at me. Billy, who
knew that I was equipped with both a personal shield and stun weaponry,
nonetheless said unhappily, “Be careful.” Lizzie jumped up. “I’m going
too, me!”

“You shut up, child! You ain’t going no place, you, that dangerous!”
Annie, of course. The broken gravrail temporarily invalidated Lizzie’s
leverage: her threat to leave.

Lizzie pressed her lips together so tightly they all but
disappeared. I had never seen her do that before. She was still Annie’s
child. “I am too going, me.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll tell you what
happens.”
Lizzie
subsided, grumbling.

Annie was not grateful.

A small crowd, twenty or so, battered on the foamcast door of the
warehouse, using a sofa as battering ram. I knew this was hopeless; if
the Bastille had been made of foamcast, Marie Antoinette would have
gone on needing wigs. I lounged across the street, leaning against a
turquoise apartment building, and watched.

The door gave way.

Twenty people gave a collective shout and rushed inside. Then twenty
people gave another shout, this one furious. I examined the door
hinges. They had been duragem, taken apart atom by atom by dissemblers.

“There’s nothing in here!”

“They cheated us, them!”

“Fucking bastards—”

I peered inside. The first small room held a counter and terminal. A
second door led to the depository, which was lined with empty shelves,
empty bins, empty overhead hooks where jacks and vases and music chips
and chairs and cleaning ‘bots and hand tools should go. I felt a chill
prickle over me from neck to groin, an actual frisson complexly made of
fear and fascination. It was true then. The economy, the political
structure, the duragem crisis, were acutally this bad. For the first
time in over a hundred years, since Kenzo Yagai invented cheap energy
and remade the world, there really was not enough to go around. The
politicians were conserving production for the cities, where larger
numbers of voters resided, and writing off less populous or less easily
reached areas with fewer votes. East Oleanta had been written off.

No one was going to come to fix the gravrail.

The crowd howled and cursed: “Fucking donkeys! Fuck them all, us!” I
heard the sound of shelves ripping from the walls; maybe they’d had
duragem bolts.

I walked rapidly but calmly back outside. Twenty people is enough to
be a mob. A stun gun only fires in one direction at a time, and a
personal shield, although unbreachable, does not prevent its wearer
from being held in one place without food or water.

The hotel or Annie’s? Whichever I chose, I might be there
semipermanently.

The hotel had a networked terminal I could use to call for help, if
I chose my moment well. Annie’s apartment was on the edge of town,
which suddenly seemed safer than dead center. It also had food, doors
whose hinges were not duragem, and an owner already hostile to me. And
Lizzie
.

I
walked quickly to Annie’s.

Halfway there, Billy rounded the corner of a building, carrying a
baseball bat. “Quick, doctor! Come this way, you!”

I stopped cold. All my fear, which had been a kind of heightened
excitement, vanished. “You came to protect
me
?”

“This way!” He was breathing hard, and his old legs trembled. I put
a hand on his elbow to steady him.

“Billy… lean against this wall. You came to protect
me
?”

He grabbed my hand and pulled me down an alley, the same one the
stomps used for creative loitering when the weather had been warm. I
heard it, then—the shouts from the opposite end of the street from the
warehouse. More angry people, screaming about donkey politicians.

Billy led me through the alley, behind a few buildings, on our hands
and knees through what seemed to be a mini-junkyard of scrapped
scooters, chunks of plastisynth, mattresses, and other large unlovely
discards. At the back of the cafe he did something to the servoentrance
used by delivery ‘bots; it opened. We crawled into the automated
kitchen, which was busily preparing soysynth to look like everything
else.

“How—”

“Lizzie,” he gasped, “before she even… learned nothing… from you,”
and even through his incipient heart attack I heard his pride. He slid
down the wall and concentrated on breathing more slowly. His hectic
color subsided.

I looked around. In one corner was a second, smaller stockpile of
food, blankets, and necessities. My eyes prickled.

“Billy…”

He was still catching his breath. “Don’t nobody know… about this, so
they won’t think, them… to look for you here.”

Whereas they might have in Annie’s apartment. People had seen me
with Lizzie. He wasn’t protecting me; he was protecting Lizzie from
being associated with me.

I said, “Will the whole town go Bastille now?”

“Huh?”

I said, “Will the whole town riot and smash things and look for
somebody to blame and hurt?”

He seemed astounded by the idea. “Everybody? No, of course not,
them. What you hear now is just the hotheads that don’t never know,
them, how to act when something’s different. They’ll calm down, them.
And the good people like Jack Sawicki, he’ll get them organized to
seeing about getting useful things done.”

“Like what?”

“Oh,” he waved a hand vaguely. His breathing was almost normal
again. “Putting by blankets for anybody who really needs one. Sharing
stuff that ain’t going to be coming in. We had a shipment of soysynth,
us, just last week—the kitchen won’t run out for a while, though there
won’t be no extras. Jack will make sure, him, that people know that.”

Unless the kitchen broke, of course. Neither of us said it.

I said quietly, “Billy, will they look for me at Annie’s?”

He looked at the opposite wall. “Might.”

“They’ll see the stockpiled stuff.”

“Most of it’s here. What you saw is mostly empty buckets, them.
Annie, she’s putting them in the recycler now.”

I digested this. “You didn’t trust me to know about this place. You
were hoping I’d leave before I had to know.”

He went on staring at the wall. Conveyer belts carried bowls of
soysynth “soup” toward the flash heater. I looked again at the
stockpile; it was smaller than I’d thought at first. And if the kitchen
did break, then of course it would be only a matter of time before the
homegrown mob remembered the untreated soysynth that must be behind
their foodbelt somewhere. Billy must have other piles. In the woods?
Maybe.

“Will anybody bother you or Annie or
Lizzie
because I used
to be with you, even if I’m not now?”

He shook his head. “Folks ain’t like that.”

I doubted this. “Wouldn’t it be better to bring Lizzie here?”

His furrowed face turned stubborn. “Only if I have to, me. Better I
bring food and stuff out.”

“At least make her hide that terminal and crystal library I gave
her.”

He nodded and stood. His knees weren’t trembling anymore. He picked
up his baseball bat and I hugged him, a long hard hug that surprised
him so much he actually staggered. Or maybe I pushed him slightly.

“Thank you, Billy.”

“You’re welcome, Doctor Turner.”

He gave me the code to the servoentrance door, then crawled
cautiously out. I made a blanket nest on the floor and sat in it. From
my jacks I pulled out the handheld monitor. The homer I’d fastened
firmly inside his deepest pocket when he staggered off balance showed
Billy walking back to Annie’s. He wouldn’t go anywhere else today,
maybe for several days. When he did, I wanted to know about it.