Beggars and Choosers (39 page)

Maybe I should have expected it. I had not. I laid my hands, palms
flat, on his desk.

“Tell her… tell her just that I… tell her…”

“Drew,” Carmela said softly.

I pulled myself together. I hated that the smirking bastard had seen
me stammer. Supercilious donkey prick… In that moment I hated him as
much as I had hated Jimmy Hubbley, as much as I had hated Peg, that
poor ignorant hopeless slob pathetically trying to measure up to Jimmy
Hubbley… I
can’t help it that I know more and think better than
you do, Drew! I can’t help what I am
!

I turned the powerchair abruptly and moved toward the door.

After a moment I felt Carmela follow me. Warden Castner’s voice
stopped us both.

“Ms. Sharifi did leave a package for you, Mr. Arlen.”

A package. A letter. A chance to write back, to explain to her what
I’d done and why I’d done it.

I didn’t want to open the package in front of Castner. But I might
need to make arrangements to answer her letter, now, here, and the
letter might have some clue to that… It had taken Carmela three weeks
to get us this far. A direct favor from the Attorney General. Besides,
Castner had undoubtedly already read whatever Miranda had to say. Hell,
entire computer-expert security teams had undoubtedly analyzed her
words for code, for hidden nanotech, for symbolic meaning. I turned my
back to Castner and ripped open the slightly padded envelope.

What if she’d written words too hard for me to read—

But there were no words. Only the ring I’d given her twelve years
ago, a slim gold band set with rubies. I stared at it until the ring
blurred and only its image filled my empty mind.

“Is there an answer?” Castner said, his voice smooth. He’d scented
blood.

“No,” I said. “No answer.” I went on looking at the ring.

You said you loved me!

Not any more.

Carmela had her back to me, giving me the illusion of privacy.
Castner stared, smiling faintly.

I put the ring in my pocket. We left the federal prison. Now there
were no shapes in my mind, nothing. The dark lattice, that had
dissolved in Jimmy Hubbley’s underground bunker to show me my own
hemmed-in isolation, had never reappeared. I was no longer sealed in by
Huevos Verdes. But Miranda was gone. Leisha was gone. Carmela was
there, but I didn’t feel her in my mind, didn’t even really see her.

I was alone.

We went back through the security system and out of the prison, into
the cold bright Washington sunlight.

DIANA COVINGTON: ALBANY

I blinked and shut my eyes against the glare of a wall that seemed
excessively white. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was, or who
I was. This information returned. I sat up, too quickly. Blood rushed
from my head and the room swirled.

“Are you all right?”

A pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman, with a thick body and deep
lines from nose to mouth. Minimally genemod, if at all, but not a
Liver. She wore a security uniform. She was armed.

I said, “What day is it?”

“December tenth. You’ve been here thirty-four days.” She spoke to
the wall. “Dr. Hewitt, Ms. Covington is back.”

Back
. Where had I been? Never mind, I knew. I sat on a
white hospital bed in a white hospital room thick with medical and
surveillance equipment. Under the disposable white gown my arms and
legs and abdomen were covered with small clear globs of blood-clotter.
Somebody had been taking many many samples.

“
Lizzie
? Billy? The Livers who came in with me, there were
three of them…”

“Dr. Hewitt will be here in a minute.”

“
Lizzie
, the little girl, was sick, is she—”

“Dr. Hewitt will be here in a minute.”

He was, with Kenneth Emile Koehler. Immediately my head cleared.

“All right, Dr. Hewitt. What did Huevos Verdes do to me?”

My directness seemed expected. Why not? We’d spent thirty-four days
in intimate communion, none of which I could remember. He said, “They
injected you with several different kinds of nanotechnology. Some are
built from bioengineered organisms, primarily viruses. Some apparently
are completely machines, created one atom at a time, that have lodged
in your cells. Most seem self-replicating. Some, we guess, are clocked
for replication. We have everything under study, trying to determine
the exact nature of— ”

“What do the machines
do
? What’s been changed in
my
body
?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“You don’t
know
?” I heard my own shrillness. I didn’t care.

“Not completely.”

“Lizzie Francy? Billy Washington?
Lizzie
was sick—”

“A part of the injection you received is the Cell Cleaner mechanism,
as you already know. But the rest…” A strange look passed over Hewitt’s
face, resentful and yearning. I didn’t want to pursue this look. I was
in a sudden frenzy, the kind that makes you think you can’t live
through the next five minutes without hearing information that you know
you will reject in the five minutes after that.

“Doctor—what do you
think
this fucking injection will
do
?”

His face closed. “We don’t know.”

“But you must know
something
—”

A ‘bot rolled through the door. It was table-shaped, with an
unnecessary grille suggesting a smiling face. On its surface was a
covered tray. “Lunch for Room 612,” the ’bot said pleasantly. I smelled
chicken, rice—the real thing, not soysynth, foods I hadn’t tasted for
months. Suddenly I was ravenous.

Everybody watched me eat. They watched with peculiar intensity. I
didn’t care. Chicken juices trickled down my chin; rice grains fell
from my lips. My teeth tingled with the thick sweetness of ripping
meat. Fresh sweet peas, spiced applesauce. I was greedy for food,
consumed by what I was consuming. No amount could be enough.

When I had finished, I lay back on the pillows, curiously exhausted.
Hewitt and Koehler wore identical expressions, and I couldn’t read
either of them. There was a long, pregnant silence— pointlessly so, it
seemed to me.

I said, “So now what? When am I going to be arraigned?”

“Not necessary,” Koehler said. His face was still inscrutable.
“You’re free to leave.”

My sudden exhaustion just as suddenly departed. This was not how the
system worked.

“I’m under arrest for obstructing justice, conspiring to overthrow—”

“Charges have been dropped.” Hewitt this time. It was as if they’d
switched roles. Or as if roles no longer mattered. I lay there,
thinking about this.

I said slowly, “Let me have a newsholo.”

Koehler repeated Hewitt’s line, tonelessly, “You’re free to go.”

I swung my feet over the sides of the bed. The hospital gown tented
shapelessly around me. In big moments, small things matter: the world’s
way of keeping us petty. I demanded, “Where are my clothes?” Just as if
I
wanted
the muddy cheap jacks and parka I’d worn to the
hospital.

There would be body monitors, of course. Subepidermal homers,
radioactive blood markers, who knew what else. I’d never find them.

A ‘bot brought me my clothes. I put them on, not caring that the men
watched. The usual rules did not apply.

“Lizzie? Billy?”

“They left two days ago. The child is recovered.”

“Where did they go?”

Koehler said, “We do not have that information.” He was lying. His
information was closed to me. I was off the government net.

I walked out of the room, expecting to be stopped in the corridor,
at the elevator, in the lobby. I walked out the front door. There was
absolutely nobody around: nobody crossing from the parking lot, nobody
hurrying in to visit a brother or wife or business partner. A ‘bot
groomed the spring grass, which to my East Oleanta eyes looked
aggressively genemod green. The air was soft and warm. Spring sunlight
slanted over it, making long late-afternoon shadows. A cherry tree
bloomed with fragrant pink flowers. My parka was far too heavy; I took
it off and dropped it on the sidewalk.

I walked the length of the building, wondering what I was going to
do next. I was genuinely curious, in a detached way that should have
alerted me to how quietly and numbly crazed I actually was. Reality
could only interest me, not surprise me. Even the interest was
precarious. The next step would have been catatonia.

I reached the corner of the building and turned it. A shuttle bus
sat there, compact, green as the engineered grass. The door was open. I
climbed in.

The bus said, “Credit, please.”

My hands fumbled in the pocket of my jacks. There was a credit chip
there: not a Liver meal chip, but donkey credit. I pushed it into the
slot. The shuttle said, “Thank you.”

“What name is on that chip?”

“You have exceeded this unit’s language capacity. Destination,
please? Civic Plaza, Hotel Scheherazade, loto Hotel, Central Gravrail
Station, or Excelsior Square?”

“Central Gravrail Station.”

The shuttle doors closed.

There were people in the station, Livers dressed in bright jacks and
a few government donkeys; this was Albany, the state capital. Everybody
seemed in a hurry. I walked into the Governor John Thomas Lividini
Central Gravrail Cafe. Three men huddled at a corner table, talking
intently. The foodbelt had stopped. The holo-grid showed a scooter
race, and none of the men looked up when I changed it to a donkey news
channel.

“—continues to spread in the midwestern and southern states. Because
the engineered virus can be carried by so many different species of
animals and birds, the Centers for Disease Control recommend avoidance
of all contact with wildlife. Since the plague is also highly
contagious among humans—”

I switched channels.

“—strict embargo on all physical trade, travelers, mail, or other
entrance of any object whatsoever into France from North America. As
with other nations, French fear of contamination has led to an hysteria
that—”

I switched channels.

“—apparently ended. Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology have issued a statement that the duragem dissembler’s
clocked nanomachanisms have
not
run their programmed course,
but rather have failed over time because of faulty understanding of the
complex scope of their construction. Department of Engineering Chairman
Myron Aaron White spoke with us at his office in the—”

I switched channels.

“—chronic food shortages. The situation, however, is expected to
ease now that the so-called duragem dissembler crisis has slowed,
apparently due to—”

I watched for an hour. Famine was easing; famine was increasing. The
engineered plague was spreading; the engineered plague had been
checked. The rest of the world had been infected by American goods and
travelers; the rest of the world showed only minor signs of either
duragem contamination or the “wildlife plague.” There was less
breakdown from the duragem dissemblers; there was more breakdown in
some areas, but scientists were close to a solution to the problem,
which was actually difficult to understand because of the advanced
nature of the science, for which experts were on the verge of a major
breakthrough. Albany was Albany.

But not once was an underground organization of nanotech saboteurs
mentioned. Not once was the overground organization of Huevos Verdes
mentioned. The SuperSleepless might not have existed. Nor Miranda
Sharifi.

I walked over to the table of men in the corner. They looked up, not
smiling. I wore purple jacks and genemod eyes. I didn’t even feel to
see if there was a personal shield on my belt. There would be. Koehler
wanted me alive; I was an expensive walking laboratory.

“You men know, you, where I can get to Eden?”

Two faces remained hostile. On the third, the youngest, the eyes
nickered and the mouth softened at the corners. I spoke to him.

“I’m sick, me. I think I got it.”

“Harry—she’s genemod, her,” the oldest man said. Nothing in his
voice showed fear of infection.

“She’s sick,” Harry said. His voice was older than his face.

“You don’t know who—”

“You go to the sunshine machine by track twelve, you. A woman’s
there with a necklace pounded like stars. She’ll take you to the Eden,
her.”

“The” Eden. One of many. Prepared for in advance by Huevos Verdes:
technology, distribution, information dissemination, all of it. And the
Liver security, if you could call it that, consisted only of Harry’s
companions’ mild discouragement, which meant the government wasn’t
interfering. I felt dizzy.

On the long walk to track 12,1 saw only fourteen people. Two of them
were donkey techs. I saw no trains leave the station. A cleaning ‘hot
sat immobile where it had broken down, but there were no soda cans,
half-eaten sandwiches, genemod apple cores, soysynth candy wrappers on
the ground. Without them, the station looked donkey, not Liver.

A middle-aged woman sat patiently on the ground by the sunshine
machine. She wore blue jacks and a soda-can necklace, each soft metal
lid bent and pounded into a crude star. I planted myself in front of
her. “I’m sick.”

She inspected me carefully. “No, you’re not.”

“I want to go to Eden.”

“Tell Police Chief Randall if he wants, him, to shut us down, to
just do it. He don’t need no donkeys pretending to be sick, them, when
you ain’t.” The woman said this mildly, without rancor.

“Down the rabbit hole,” I said. “ ‘Eat Me,” ’Drink Me.“ ” To which
she naturally did not respond at all.

I walked to a gravrail monitor and asked it for information about
train departures. It was broken. I tried another. On the fourth try, a
working monitor answered me.

Track 25 was in another section of the station. There was more
activity here, although not more garbage on the ground. Three techs
worked on a small train. I sat cross-legged on the ground, not speaking
to them, until they’d finished. They repaired only this one train, then
left, looking tired. Colin Kowalski and Kenneth Koehler had known where
I would go.