Beggars and Choosers (38 page)

“I don’t believe you. You could have found me. You Supers can do
anything, can’t you?”

“You think I’m lying to you—”

“Yes,” Drew said. “I think you’re lying.”

“But I’m
not
. Drew—” It was a cry of pure anguish. I
couldn’t look at her face.

“You could have stopped the duragem dissembler, too, couldn’t you?
You knew it came from the underground. But you let it encourage social
breakdown because that prepared the way better for the project. For
your
plans. Isn’t that true, Miranda?”

“Yes. We could have stopped the dissembler.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“We were afraid—” She stopped.

“Afraid of what? That I’d tell Leisha? The newsgrids? The GSEA?”

She said, more quietly, “Which is just what you did. The first
chance you got. We did look for you, Drew, but we’re not omnipotent.
There was no way of knowing which bunker, where… And meanwhile you did
exactly what Jon and Nick and Christy said you would—betray the project
to the GSEA.”

“Because I started to think for myself. Again. Finally. And that’s
not what Supers want, is it? You want to think for all of us, and us to
obey you, without question. Because you always know best, don’t you?
God, Miranda, aren’t you ever
wrong
?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was wrong about you.”

“That won’t be a problem for you any longer.”

She cried, “You said you loved me!”

“Not any more.”

They went on looking at each other. Drew’s face I couldn’t read.
Miranda’s had turned stony, her tears gone. Her eyes were lasers.

She said, “I loved
you
. And you couldn’t stand being
inferior. That’s what your betrayal to the GSEA is really about. Jon
was right. You can’t ever really understand. Anything.”

Drew didn’t answer. The wind picked up, smelling of cold water. More
leaves blew off the oak. The birch tree shuddered. There was more noise
behind me. I didn’t turn around.

A GSEA agent said, “I arrest you, Miranda Sharifi, for violations of
the—”

She cried out, just as if the agent hadn’t spoken, “I can’t help it
that I know more and think better than you, Drew! I can’t help what I
am!”

He said, his voice unsteady but angry, the way men are when they
know they look weak, “Who should control the technology—”

“Shit!” someone called. I turned. Billy sat dazed on the ground,
holding his chest. The noise had been him and Annie, pulling the
unconscious
Lizzie
up from the underground bunker, which they
didn’t understand and must have feared. Or maybe Annie had pulled
Lizzie
up the steps, and the agent with the burned hand had helped Billy. The
agent stood there beside the old man, looking dazed. But there was
nothing dazed about Billy. He sat in the frozen mud, an old man with a
body about to be the most biologically efficient machine on the planet,
and I saw that he, too, knew what he was looking at. Billy Washington,
the Liver. His wrinkled old-man’s gaze moved from Drew to Miranda—the
latter, I saw, with adoration—then back to Drew again, then to Miranda.
“Shit,” he said again, and there were layers and layers in his tone,
unsortable.

“You’re fighting, you, about who should control this technology—but
don’t you see, it don’t matter who
should
control it, them?
It only matters who
can
?” And he put his gnarled, grateful,
hand on the crumpled sleeping form of
Lizzie
, lying in the
mud, her small face peaceful and cool and damp as her lethal fever
broke.

DIANA COVINGTON: ALBANY

There was nothing to confiscate for evidence. More planes came, and
Drew used the codes that made the door appear in the far wall of the
bunker. I contrived to be present for this. Security was chaotic,
except for Miranda Sharifi, electro-cuffed to the birch tree, whom
agents watched as if they expected an anti-grav heavenly ascension,
tree and all. Maybe they did. But Miranda allowed herself to be
captured. And everybody understood that’s what happened: she allowed it.

But nobody, including me, understood why.

Behind the bunker door lay nothing. Even the sterile, fortifying
walls that had probably been there were self-consuming by the same
nanotechnology that had built them. There were only a series of
earth-packed tunnels and caves extending back into the mountain,
dangerous to explore without proper equipment because the dirt walls
crumbled and threatened to cave in. It was impossible to tell how
extensive the caves/tunnels were. It was impossible to tell what had
been nano-destroyed in them, or removed from them before their
collapse.
Miri, they’re on the way
—
Miri, you can’t
—

I looked for the slim black syringes that had injected the four of
us, but all I saw was smudges of melted black, like metallic candle
wax, on the floor at the bottom of the steps where Lizzie and Billy had
lain.

==========

There was more. And it happened, incredibly, almost as an
afterthought.

But first one of the agents arrested me. “Diana Arlene Covington,
you are under arrest for violations of the United States Code, Title
18, Sections 1510, 2381, and 2383.”

Obstruction of criminal investigations. Assisting rebellion or
insurrection. Treason. I was, after all, supposed to be a GSEA agent.

Miranda watched me intently from her birch tree. Too intently. Drew
had gone into the plane. We awaited a second plane, either for more
space or more security. With a sudden feint that surprised the agent, I
ducked around him and sprinted toward Miranda.

“Hey!”

She had time to say to me only, “More in the syringe—” before the
outraged agent had me again and dragged me grimly into the plane. His
grip bruised my arms.

I barely noticed.
More in the syringe
—

The whole extent of the project
, she had said to Drew Arlen.

So not just the Cell Cleaner, which was staggering enough. Not just
that. Something else.

Some other biological technology: radical, unexpected. Unimaginable.

Something more.

Huevos Verdes had not needed to set up this elaborate underground
lab to perfect or test the Cell Cleaner. They had already done that,
openly, before the Science Court hearing last fall.

Huevos Verdes had expected to lose their case in front of the
Science Court. That had been clear at the time, to nearly everybody.
What had not been clear was why they were presenting the case at all,
given the foregone conclusion. It was because Miranda wanted the moral
reassurance that all legitimate paths for this larger project were
closed, before she completed her stroll down illegitimate paths at East
Oleanta.

How much did the agent know? The GSEA top brass, of course, would
know everything. Arlen would have told them.

This intellectual speculation lasted only a moment. It was replaced
almost instantly with a freezing fear, the kind that doesn’t melt your
bones but stiffens them, so it seems you won’t ever move, or breathe,
again.

Whatever bioengineering project Huevos Verdes had been built for,
the charade of the Science Court had been staged for, Drew Arlen had
performed concerts for, the duragem dissembler had not been stopped
for—whatever bioengineering project had occupied all of the
SuperSleepless’s unfathomable energies— whatever that bioengineering
project was, I had been injected with it. It was in my body. In me.
Becoming me.

You don’t have the right to choose for 175 million people. Not
in a democracy. Not without any checks and balances
—

Kenzo Yagai did.

I swayed against the metal bulkhead, then caught myself. My fingers
were faintly blue with cold. The nail on the middle finger had broken.
The flesh was smooth except for one tiny cut on the index finger. Mud,
now dried, made a long arc from wrist to nails. My hand. Alien.

I said aloud to Miranda, “
What was it
?”

In my mind she turned her misshapen head to look at me. Tears, which
still didn’t fall, brightened her eyes. She said, “Only for your good.”

“By whose definition!”

Her expression didn’t change. “Mine.”

I went on staring at her. Then she dissolved, because of course she
was an illusion, born of shock. She wasn’t really inside my head. She
couldn’t ever be inside my head. It was way too small.

The plane lifted, and I was transported to Albany to be arraigned in
a court of law.

==========

Billy, Annie,
Lizzie
, and I were taken to the Jonas Salk
United States Research Hospital in Albany, a heavily shielded edifice
conspicuous for security ‘bots. I was led down a different corridor. I
craned my neck to keep Lizzie’s gurney in sight as long as I could.

In a windowless room Colin Kowalski waited for me, with a man I
recognized instantly. Kenneth Emile Koehler, director, Genetic
Standards Enforcement Agency. Colin said nothing. I saw that he never
would; he was too outranked, included only because he had had the bad
judgment to hire me, the wildcat agent who could have led the GSEA to
Miranda Sharifi before Drew Aden did, and hence just as much an
official quisling. But, of course, for the other side. Colin was in
disgrace. Aden was probably a hero who had belatedly but righteously
seen the light. I was under arrest for treason. One loser, one winner,
one who doesn’t know how to play the game.

“All right, Diana,” Kenneth Emile Koehler said: a bad beginning. I’d
been reduced to a first name. Like a ‘bot. “Tell us what happened.”

“Everything?”

“From the beginning.”

The recorders were on. Drew Arlen had undoubtedly spilled his brain
cells already. And I myself could think of no reason not to tell the
truth:
Something bioengineered had been injected into my veins.
More in the syringe
—

But I didn’t want to start there. I felt instead an overwhelming
desire to begin at the beginning, with Stephanie Brunell and her
illegal genemod pink poodle hurtling itself over my terrace railing. I
needed to tell it all, every last action and decision and intellectual
argument that had brought me from disgust at illegal bioengineering to
championing it. I wanted to explain clearly to myself as well as to
these men exactly what I had done, and why, and what it meant, because
that was the only way I would fully understand it myself.

That was the moment I realized the GSEA had already gotten a truth
drug into me. Which was, of course, a completely illegal violation of
the Fifth Amendment, a fact too insignificant to even comment on. I
didn’t comment on it. Instead I gazed at Koehler and Kowalski and the
others who had suddenly appeared and then, wrapped in the glow of
absolute truth and in the tender and selfless desire to share it, I
talked on and on and on.

DREW ARLEN: WASHINGTON

There were human guards, robot guards, guard shields. But it was the
human guards I noticed. Techs, mostly, although at least one was
donkey. I noticed them because there were so many. Miranda had more
human guards than the entire population of Huevos Verdes, even
including the Sleepless hangers-on like Kevin Baker’s grandchildren.
She awaited her trial in a different prison from her grandmother, whose
treason conviction was ancient history now. Jennifer probably had fewer
guards.

“Put your eye directly up to the ‘scope, sir,” one of them said. He
wore the drab blue prison uniform, cut like jacks but not jacks. I let
my retina be scanned. Huevos Verdes had passed this level of
identification ten years ago.

“You, too, ma’am.”

Carmela Clemente-Rice stepped closer to the scope. When she stepped
back, I felt her hand on my shoulder, cool and reassuring. I felt her
in my mind as a series of perfectly balanced interlocking ovals.

I felt the prison as hot blue confusion. Mine.

“This way, please. Watch the steps, sir.”

They evidently didn’t see too many powerchairs here. Inanely, I
wondered why. My chair skimmed down the steps.

The warden’s office showed no signs of security or surveillance,
which meant there was plenty of both. It was a large room, furnished in
the currently popular donkey style, simple straight-lined tables of
teak or rosewood combined with some fancy antique chairs with cloth
seats and carved arms. I didn’t know what period they were from.

Miranda would have known.

The warden didn’t rise as Carmela and I were shown in. He was donkey
to his blond hair roots. Tall, blue-eyed, heavily muscled, a genemod
re-creation of a Viking chief by parents with more money than
imagination. He spoke directly to Carmela, ignoring me.

“I’m afraid, Dr. Clemente-Rice, that you are unable to see the
prisoner after all.”

Carmela’s voice remained serene, with steel. “You’re mistaken, Mr.
Castner. Mr. Arlen and I have clearance from the Attorney General
herself to see Ms. Sharifi. You’ve received both terminal and hard copy
notification. And I have copies of the paperwork with me.”

“I already received this notification from Justice, doctor.”

Carmela’s expression didn’t change. She waited. The warden leaned
back in his antique chair, hands laced behind his head, eyes hostile
and amused. He waited, too.

Carmela was better at it.

Finally he repeated, “Neither of you can see the prisoner, despite
what Justice says.”

Carmela said nothing.

Slowly his amused look vanished. She wasn’t going to either ask or
beg. “You can’t see the prisoner because the prisoner doesn’t choose to
see
you
.”

I blurted, despite myself, “At all?”

“At all, Mr. Arlen. She refuses to see either of you.” He leaned
back in his chair even farther, unlacing his hands, his blue eyes small
in his handsome face.