Beggars and Choosers (32 page)

There was a little stir in the room.

“If they had all the knowledge we do, Bobby, then it sure would mean
that,” Hubbley said earnestly. Light shone in his pale eyes. “But they
don’t know all the things we do. They ain’t had the privilege of
fightin‘ for freedom on the front lines. Specifically, they ain’t seen
the holo of the captured lab. They don’t know what weapons we got on
our side now. They might think this here revolution is hopeless, not
knowing that. But we know better. So we got the obligation to decide
for them, and to act in the best will of all our fellow Americans.”

Heads nodded. I could see how special they felt, Ida and Bobby and
Peg, deciding so selflessly in the best interests of all Americans.
Just as Francis Marion had done.

I heard Miranda’s voice in my head:
They can’t possibly
understand the biological and societal consequences of the project,
Drew, any more than people of Kenzo Yagai’s time could foresee the
social consequences of cheap ubiquitous energy. He had to go forward
and develop it on the basis of his best informed projections. And so do
we. They can’t really understand until it happens
.

Because they were norms. Like Drew Arlen.

There was a long silence. People shifted from ham to ham or sat
preternaturally still. Eyes darted at each other, then away. I could
feel my own back straighten. All this tension was not over some holo
they had seen “pretty near every damn day.”

Hubbley said, “I said they don’t know what we got, and I
meant
they don’t know what we got. But they’re sure the hail going to find
out. Campbell, bring him in.”

Campbell entered from one of the many corridors, half dragging a
naked, handcuffed Liver. The man was a sorry sight, barely five and a
half feet to Campbell’s seven and looking even shorter as he futiley
resisted being dragged. He was hunched over, his bare heels scraping
the floor. He didn’t make a sound.

Hubbley said, “Is the robocam ready?”

Someone behind him said, “I just turned it on, Jimmy.”

“Good. Now, y’all know this film is the kind that cain’t be edited
without self-destructin‘. And you watchers out there, y’all know it
too. Son, look at me when I’m talkin’.”

The captive raised his head. He made no effort to cover his
genitals. I saw with a shock that his lack of height wasn’t due to bad
Liver genes; he was a boy. Thirteen, maybe fourteen, and genemod. It
was there in the bright green eyes, the sharp handsome line of his jaw.
But he wasn’t donkey. He was a tech, those offspring of borderline
families who can’t afford full genetic modification, including the
expensive IQ boosters, but who aspire to be more than Livers. They buy
their children the appearance mods only, and the kids grow up—early—to
provide those services halfway between robots and donkey brains. My
roadies were techs. At Huevos Verdes, you could argue, Kevin Baker’s
grandson Jason, a Sleepless, was nonetheless a tech.

The boy looked terrified.

Hubbley said, not to the boy, “What did General Francis Marion’s
young lieutenant call him?”

Peg answered fervently, “ ‘An ugly, cross, knock-kneed, hook nosed
son of a bitch’!”

“Y’all see, son,” Hubbley explained kindly to the boy, “General
Marion warn’t genemod. He was just the way his Lord made him. And he
became the greatest hero this country ever had. Curtis, what did
General Marion say was his policy when he was too outnumbered to attack
the enemy directly?”

A man to my left said promptly, “ ‘Yet I pushed them so hard as in a
great measure to break them up.”’

“Absolutely right. ”Pushed them so hard as to break them up.“ And
that’s just what we’re doin‘, you watchers out there. Pushin’ y’all.
This here man is a captured enemy, a worker in a genemod clinic.
Parents take their innocent unborn babies to this place and
turn
them into something that ain’t human
. Their own children. To some
of us this is damn near inconceivable.”

I wanted to say that
in vitro
genetic modification
happened before there was a ‘babe,“ that it was done to the fertilized
egg in artificial biostasis. But my tongue was stuck to the roof of my
mouth. The tech boy stared straight ahead, seeing nothing, like a
rabbit caught in bright lights.

“Now, y’all might think that this boy is too young to be held
accountable for his actions. But he’s fifteen years old. Junie, how old
was Francis Marion’s nephew Gabriel Marion when he was killed fightin‘
the enemy at Mount Pleasant Plantation?”

“Fourteen,” a female voice answered. From my chair, I couldn’t see
her face.

Hubbley’s voice grew confidential. He leaned forward slightly,
“Y’all out there see, don’t y’all? This is war. We mean it. We got the
Idea what kind of country we want to live in, and we got the Will to
get there. No matter what the personal cost. Earl, tell all our
watchers out there at the GSEA about Mrs. Rebecca Motte.”

A man dressed in purple jacks stood awkwardly, his arms dangling
loose at his side. “On May 11—”

“May 10,” Hubbley said, with a brief frown. He didn’t want any
inaccuracies in his uneditable tape. Earl, rattled, took a deep breath.

“On May
10
General Marion and his men attacked Mount
Pleasant Plantation, them, ”cause the British had took it for a
headquarters. They made the lady and her kids move, her, into a log
cabin. Her name was Mrs. Rebecca Motte. The house was too well
fortified for direct attack, it, and so the general decided, him, to
shoot flaming arrows and set it on fire. But they didn’t have no good
bow and arrows. Lighthorse Harry Lee, who was working with General
Marion, he went, him, to tell Mrs. Motte they had to burn her house
down. And she went into the cabin and come out with beautiful bow and
arrows, real donkey stuff. And she said, her, about her house, “If it
were a palace, it should go.” “ Earl sat down.

Hubbley nodded. “Genuine sacrifice. A genuine patriot, Mrs.

Rebecca Motte. You hear that, son?“

The tech didn’t appear to hear anything. Was he drugged? Leisha had
always warned me against believing history’s more colorful stories.

“We cain’t never stop resistin‘ all you enemies of America. And you
watchers are the worst, just like traitors and spies is always the
worst in any revolution. They pretend to be on one side while plottin’
and workin‘ for the other. GSEA agents are all traitors, pretendin’ to
safeguard the purity of human beings while actually permittin‘ all
kinds of abominations. And then handin’ over this great country to
those same abominations, the donkeys, just like we Livers didn’t
realize y’all would let us starve if you could. And in fact y’all
are
.
Joncey, what did General Marion say in his speech to the men before
they attacked Doyle at Lynche’s Creek?“

Joncey’s voice, so much stronger and at ease than Earl’s, recited, “
‘But, my friends, if we shall be ruined for bravely resisting our
tyrants, what will be done to us if we tamely lie down and submit to
them?”

I turned around. The room was full of people, all the
“revolutionaries” from other “companies.” Staring at the young tech, I
hadn’t even heard them come in. Neither, I was convinced, had he.

Hubbley said, “This here boy is a traitor. Workin‘ in a genemod
clinic. He’s goin’ to die like a traitor, and y’all out there remember
that he ain’t the only one today, or tomorrow, or the day after that.
Abby?”

Abigail came out of the crowd. She carried a featureless gray
canister, no bigger than her closed fist.

“Abby,” Hubbley said, “what did General Marion do with goods
confiscated from the enemy?”

She turned to speak directly to the robocam. “Every metal saw the
brigade could find, them, they hammered into a sword.”

“That’s exactly right. And this here—” he hoisted the canister high
above his head “—is a saw. It ain’t even been concocted in some illegal
gene lab. This here comes straight from the biggest traitor of all: the
so-called United States government.” He turned the canister around. I
saw stamped on it PROPERTY OF U. S. ARMY. CLASSIFIED. DANGER.

I didn’t believe it. Hubbley had painted the words on. I didn’t
believe it, and I didn’t even know as yet what the canister held. This
ragtag bag of so-called revolutionaries had delusions, dreams, pathetic
wishes… I didn’t believe it.

The lattice in my mind sighed, as if wind soughed through. “Okay,
Abby,” Hubbley said, “do it.”

Abby, her back to me, did something I couldn’t see. The shimmer of a
heavy-duty Y-energy shield appeared around the naked tech, a domed and
floored hemisphere six feet in diameter. The canister was inside the
shimmer.

The boy wasn’t drugged after all. Immediately he started screaming.
The sound couldn’t carry through the shield, which was the kind nothing
got through, not even air. The boy beat his fists against the inside
and screamed, his open mouth a pink cave, his eyes round with terror.
There was faint down on his upper lip, like a fledgling bird, and
scarcely more on his groin.

Jimmy Hubbley looked disgusted. “He lives causin‘ death and then
cain’t even die like a man… do it, Abby.”

Whatever Abby did, I couldn’t see. The canister glowed briefly, then
dissolved into a gray puddle.

“This here is your metal saw you made to cut us up with,” Hubbley
said, “but we made it a sword. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Matthew 26:52. Y’all already know what this stuff does.

But for them that don’t—“ he looked directly at me ”—I’ll repeat it.
This here’s one of your own genemod abominations. It takes apart cell
walls, cells of livin‘ human beings. Like this.“

The boy had stopped beating against the shield. He was still
screaming, but his mouth was changing shape. He was dissolving. It
wasn’t the same as when someone had acid poured on him—I had seen that
once, in the days before Leisha took me in. Acid burns away the flesh.
The boy’s flesh wasn’t burning, it was breaking up, like ice in
springtime. Bits of skin fell to the dome floor, exposing red flesh,
and then bits of that fell. He went on screaming, screaming, screaming.
I felt my stomach heave, and the shapes in my mind heaved, too, around
the ever-closed lattice.

It took the boy almost three minutes to die.

Hubbley said, very softly, “General Marion ended his Lynche’s Creek
speech this way: ‘As God is my judge this day, that I would die a
thousand deaths, most gladly would I die them all, rather than see my
dear country in such a state of degradation and wretchedness.” As God
is my judge, watchers.“ His pale eyes in their bony, sunburned face
looked directly outward, filled with light.

Then everyone moved. The robocam must have been turned off. The
shapes in my mind were tarry, foul. I had done nothing to save the boy.
I hadn’t even tried to speak up. I had not tried to get myself on the
uneditable tape, to provide the watchers some clue about where this
abomination was taking place… I had done nothing.

“That’s a wrap,” Jimmy Hubbley said, clearly pleased with himself.
“That’s old-time movie talk, it means the filmin‘ is done. Y’all are
dismissed. And Mr. Aden, sir, I think Peg better take y’all to your
room. Y’all look a little peaked. If it ain’t too great an impertinence
in me to tell you so.”

==========

It went on like that for weeks.

Physical training, holos about the state of society (where were they
made?), political drill. It was the worst of being in school, all over
again. I kept finding small lace oblongs from Abigail’s wedding gown,
and Peg never pushed my chair anywhere in spitting distance of a
terminal.

There were no more executions.

I badly wanted a drink. Hubbley said no. He allowed sunshine,
because it didn’t dull reaction time. I wanted a drink, because it
dulled reaction time.

Hubbley had allowed me a handheld dumb terminal, the kind kids use
for schoolwork, and a standard encyclopedia library. I said to him
once, because I couldn’t bite back the words, “Francis Marion
discouraged the killing of prisoners. He even spirited a Tory, Jeff
Butler, out of his own camp when it looked like Marion’s men might
butcher him.”

Hubbley laughed with delight and rubbed the lump on his neck. “Damn,
you been studyin‘, son, hail if you haven’t! I’m damn proud of you!”

My teeth hurt from clenching them. “Hubbley—”

“But it don’t make no never mind, Mr. Arlen, sir. No, it really
don’t. General Marion showed compassion to Tories because they were his
own kind, his neighbors, living off the land same as he did. He didn’t
show that same compassion to British soldiers, now, did he? Donkeys
ain’t our kind. They ain’t our neighbors in their snooty enclaves. And
they sure don’t live like we do, deprived of education and personal
property and real power. No, donkeys are the British, Mr. Arlen. Not
Jeff Butler—but Captain James Lewis of His Majesty’s Forces, who was
killed by a fourteen-year-old patriot named Gwynn. That’s natural law,
son. Protect your own.”

“Marion didn’t—”

“You say ‘General Marion,” you!“ Peg yelled. She glanced at Hubbley,
like a dog hoping for a pat on the head. Hubbley smiled, showing his
broken teeth.

These were the people who had loosened the duragem dissembler on the
country, wrecking civilization. These.

And it
was
wrecked. The HT in commons received donkey
newsgrids. There was scarcely agravrail running a steady schedule,
especially outside the cities. Most technicians had been diverted to
major population areas, where the votes were. And the danger of
rioting. Security had been tripled at most enclaves. Few planes flew,
which meant the country was being run mostly by teleconferencing, at a
distance. Medunits malfunctioned regularly. They didn’t dispense wrong
diagnoses; they just stopped diagnosing.

A viral plague was spreading in southern California. Nobody knew if
it was a natural mutation, or bioengineered.