Beggars and Choosers (34 page)

The lock glowed. The door opened. The second she was inside I
slammed her in the face with the wheelchair, swinging it upward with
every bit of strength in my augmented arm muscles. She fell back
against the door, closing it. She was only stunned a moment, but I only
needed a moment. I swung the chair again, this time aiming the arm
rest, which I had bent out at an angle, directly into her stomach. If
she had been a man I could have gone for her balls. Patiently I’d
removed the padding on the armrest and worked the metal back and forth,
sweat streaming down my face, until it broke off jagged, and then I
replaced the armrest. This had taken days, finding the odd moments when
I could plausibly bend over the armrest to hide my work from both the
monitors and Peg. It took only seconds for the sharp jagged metal to
pierce Peg’s abdomen and impale her.

She screamed, clutched the metal, and fell to her knees, stopped by
the bulk of the chair. But she was strong; in a moment she had the
jagged armrest out of her flesh. Blood streamed from her belly over the
twisted metal of the chair, but not as much as I’d hoped. She turned
toward me, and I knew that in all my concerts, all my work with
subconscious shapes in the mind, I’d never created anything as savage
as Peg’s face looked that moment.

But she was on her knees now, on my level. She was strong, and
trained, and bigger than I was, but I was augmented, as her
philosophy—Hubbley’s philosophy—could never let her be. And

I was trained, too. We grappled, and I got both my hands around her
neck and squeezed the fingers Leisha had paid to have strengthened. In
case I would ever, in my bodily weakness, need them.

Peg struck at me viciously. Pain exploded in my head, a hot geyser,
spraying the dark lattice. I hung on. Pain drowned us both, drowned
everything.

For the third time, the purple lattice disappeared. Then so did
everything else.

Slowly, slowly, I became aware that objects in the room had shapes
of their own, shapes outside my head. They were solid, and sharp-edged,
and real. My body had shapes: legs crumpled under me, my head lying on
top of the metal wheelchair, my balls screaming with hurt. My hands had
shape. They clenched, locked into shape, around Peg’s neck. Her face
was purple, the tongue poking out swollen between her lips. She was
dead.

It hurt to unclench my hands.

I looked at her. I had never killed anybody before. I looked at
every inch of her. The note scrawled on lace was locked in her rigid
fingers.

As quickly as I could I righted the wheelchair, stuck the padding
back on the jagged armrest, and hauled my hurting body into it. Peg had
a gun in her jacks; I took that. I didn’t know how sophisticated the
room’s surveillance program was. Peg was presumably allowed to enter at
will. Could the surveillance program interpret what it recorded, making
judgment calls about sounding an alarm? Or did someone have to be
actively watching?
Was
someone actively watching?

Francis Marion, Hubbley had told me, was meticulous about pickets
and sentries.

I opened the door and wheeled myself into the corridor. The wheels
left a thin line of blood on the perfect nanobuilt floor. There was
nothing I could do about it.

I had watched, through all the wheeled trips around the bunker, who
went in and out of which doors. I had listened, trying to figure out
who were the most trusted lieutenants, who seemed smart enough for
computer work. I had guessed which doors might have terminals behind
them.

Nobody had come for me. It had been five minutes since I left my
room. Eight. Ten. No alarms had sounded. Something was wrong.

I came to a door I hoped held a terminal; it was of course locked. I
spoke the override tricks Jonathan and Miranda had taught me, the
tricks I didn’t understand, and the lock glowed. I opened the door.

It was a storage room, full of more small metal canisters, stacked
to the ceiling. None of the canisters were labeled. There were no
terminals.

Footsteps ran down the hall. Quickly I closed the door from the
inside. The footsteps ceased; the room was sound shielded. I opened the
door again a few inches. Now people were shouting farther down the
corridor.

“Goddamn it, where is he, him? Goddamn it to hell!” Campbell, whom I
had never heard even speak. They were looking for me. But the
surveillance program should show clearly where I was…

Another voice, a woman’s, low and deadly, said, “Try Abby’s room.”

“Abby! Fuck, she’s in on it! Her and Joncey! They already got the
terminal room—”

The voices disappeared. I closed the door. The shapes in my mind
suddenly ballooned, crowding out thought. I pushed them down. This was
it, then. It had started. They weren’t looking for me, they were
looking for Hubbley. The revolution against the revolution had started.

I sat thinking as fast as I could. Leisha. If Leisha were here—

Leisha was no plotter. No killer. She’d believed in trusting the
eventual outcome of any clash between good and evil, in trusting the
basic similarities among human beings, in trusting their ability to
compromise and live together. Humans might need checks and balances,
but they didn’t need imposed force, nor defensive isolation, nor
crushing retribution. Leisha, unlike Miranda, believed in the rule of
law. That’s why she was dead.

I opened the door the rest of the way and wheeled my chair, bent as
it was, into the corridor. The padding fell off the armrest. I blocked
the corridor, gun drawn, and waited for someone to round the corner.
Eventually someone did. It was Joncey. I shot him in the groin.

He screamed and fell against the wall. There was a lot more blood
than there had been with Peg. I raced my chair up to him and pulled him
across my lap, holding his wrists with one of my augmented hands and
the gun with the other. Another man rounded the corner, Abigail
waddling after him. Abigail made a moaning sound, more like wind than
people.

“Oohhhhhhhh…”

“Don’t come close or I’ll kill him. He’ll live, Abby, with medical
attention, if I let him have it soon. But if you don’t do what I ask,
I’ll kill him. Even if you draw a gun and shoot me, I’ll kill him
first.”

The other man said, “Shoot the crippled bastard, you!”

“No,” Abby said. She’d regained control of herself immediately; her
eyes darted like trapped rabbits, but she was in control. She was a
better natural leader than most, maybe better than Hubbley. But I held
Joncey in my arms, and she wasn’t leader enough for that sacrifice.

“What do you want, Alien?” She licked her lips, watching the blood
pour out of Joncey’s groin. He’d fainted, and I shifted him to free my
other hand.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you? The ones of you left alive. Did you
kill Hubbley?”

She nodded. Her eyes never moved from Joncey. He was still on my
lap. The almost forgotten shapes of childhood prayer whipped through my
mind:
Please don’t let him die yet
. I saw the same shapes in
Abigail’s eyes.

“Leave me here,” I said. “Just that. Here, and alive. Somebody will
come eventually.”

“He’ll call, him, for help,” the other man said.

“Shut up,” Abby said. “You know nobody can’t use them terminals but
Hubbley and Carlos and O’Dealian, and they’re all dead, them.”

“But, Abby—”

“Shut up, you!” She was thinking hard. I couldn’t feel Joncey’s
heart.

A woman raced into the corridor. “Abby, what’s the matter, you? The
submarine’s off the coast—” She stopped dead.

The
submarine
. All of a sudden I saw how the underground
revolution had evaded the GSEA for so long. A sub meant military help.
There were agencies inside the government involved, or at least people
within agencies. PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT. CLASSIFIED. DANGER.

For a long moment I thought I was dead.

“All right!” Abby said. “Give him to me and lock yourself in that
there storage room, you!”

“Don’t come close,” I said. I backed into the room with the
canisters, still carrying Joncey. At the last minute I dumped him onto
the floor and slammed the door. It could be locked from the inside, but
I had no doubt she could override it. I held onto the urgency in the
second woman’s voice, the panic:
Abby, the submarine’s off the
coast
! Let the sub be ready to go. Let Abby want Joncey alive,
safely tucked inside a medunit, more than she wanted me dead. Let the
canisters all around me not contain deadly viruses, and let them not be
able to be released by remote…

I sat, heart pounding. The shapes in my mind were red and black and
spiky, painful as cactuses.

Nothing happened.

Minutes dragged by.

Finally a small section of the wall beside me brightened. It was a
holoscreen, and I hadn’t even realized it. A dumb terminal. Abby’s face
filled it. It was smeared with blood, twisted with hate.

“Listen, Arlen, you. You’re going to die there, underground. I done
sealed it off. And the terminals are frozen, them, all of them. In
another hour the life support will cut out automatically. I could kill
you now, me, but I want you to think about it first… You hear me?
You’re dead, you—dead dead DEAD.” With each word her voice rose, until
it was a shriek. She whipped her head from side to side, her hair
seething and foaming, caked with blood. I knew Joncey was dead.

Someone pulled her away from the screen, and it went blank.

I edged open the door of the storage room. My wheelchair was so bent
I could hardly wheel it along the corridors. My vision kept fading in
and out, until I wasn’t sure what shapes were in front of me and what
were in my head, except for the dark lattice. That was in my head. It
stirred, and for the first time began to open, and every inch of its
opening pushed against my mind like pain.

I found Jimmy Hubbley. They had killed him clean, as near as I could
tell. A bullet through the head. Francis Marion, I remembered, had died
quietly in bed, of an infection.

Campbell must have fought. His huge body blocked a corridor, bloody
and torn, as if by repeated blows. He lay sprawled across the captured
doctor. The doctor’s face looked both terrified and indignant; this was
not supposed to be his war. His blood slid down the nanosmooth walls,
which had been designed to shed stains.

Two bodies lay on the terminal room floor, when I had finally opened
enough doors to find it. A woman named Junie, and a man I’d never heard
called anything but “Alligator.” They, too, had died clean, of bullets
through the forehead. Abigail’s bid for power hadn’t been sadistic. She
just wanted to control things. To be in charge. To know what was best
for 175 million Americans, give or take a few million donkeys.

I sat in front of the main terminal and said, “Terminal on.” It
answered, “YES, SIR!”

Francis Marion had believed in military discipline.

It took me fifteen minutes to try everything Jonathan Markowitz had
taught me. I spoke each step, or coded it in manually, not
understanding what any of them meant. Even if Jonathan had explained, I
wouldn’t have understood. And he had not explained. The shapes in my
mind darted quickly, palpitating, sharp as talons.

“READY FOR OUTSIDE TRANSMISSION, SIR!”

I didn’t move.

If Abigail had been telling the truth, I had thirty-seven minutes of
life support left in the underground bunker.

Huevos Verdes, off the Mexican coast, could be here in fifteen. But
would they be? Miranda had not come for me before now.

“SIR? READY FOR OUTSIDE TRANSMISSION, SIR!”

The dark lattice in my mind was, finally, opening.

It started to unfurl like an umbrella, or a rosebud. They have
rosebuds now, genemod, that will unfurl completely in five minutes,
with the right stimuli, for use in various ceremonies. They’re pretty
to watch. The opaque diamond-shaped panes on the lattice lightened and
widened, both at the same time. The lattice itself expanded, larger and
larger, until it had opened completely.

Inside was a ten-year-old boy, dirty and confident, his eyes bright.

I hadn’t seen him, me, in decades. Not his sureness about what he
wanted, his straight-line going after it. That boy had been his own
man. He made his own decisions, undaunted by what the rest of the world
said he should do. I hadn’t seen him since the day he arrived at Leisha
Camden’s compound in New Mexico, and met his first Sleepless, and gave
his mind to their superior ones. Not since I’d become the Lucid
Dreamer, Not since I’d met

Miranda.

And here he was again, that solitary grinning boy, released from the
stone lattice that had encased him. A bright glowing shape in my mind,

“SIR? DO YOU WISH TO CANCEL TRANSMISSION, SIR?” There were
thirty-one minutes left.

“No,” I said, and spoke the emergency override code, the one I’d
been urged to memorize carefully and not forget, as Drew Arlen common
Liver might easily forget, in case of emergency. She herself answered.
“Drew? Where are you?” I gave her the exact longitude and latitude,
obtained from the terminal, and told her how to get the rescue force
through the mucky pool. My voice was completely steady. “It’s an
illegal underground lab. Part of the revolution that already released
the duragem dissemblers. But you know all about that, don’t you?” Her
eyes didn’t nicker. “Yes. I’m sorry we couldn’t tell you.”

“I understand.” And I did. I hadn’t understood before, but I did
now. Since Jimmy Hubbley. Since Abigail. Since Jontcey. I said,
“There’s a lot I have to tell
you”

She said, “We’ll be there in twenty minutes. There are people
already close by… just wait twenty minutes, Drew.”

I nodded, watching her face on the screen. She didn’t smile at me;
this was too important. I liked that. The shapes in my mind left no
room for smiles. The crying boy, the people—all the people in the
world—inside the dark lattice. Inside my mind, inside my unwilling
responsibility.