Beggars and Choosers (6 page)

But on the other hand, plastisynth don’t never get vermin.

Lizzie
said, her eyes bright, “Do you think a donkey will
come, them, to fix the foodbelt in an hour?”

I gasped, “Lizzie… hush, you.”

“But what if in an hour no donkey don’t come to—”

Annie said, “You be quiet, Lizzie, or you’ll wish them donkeys will
come to fix
you
! Billy, you better stay here, you, for
tonight. No telling what them fools at the cafe might do.”

She brought me a blanket, one of those she’d embroidered, her, with
bright yarns from the warehouse. More embroideries hung on the wall,
woven with bits of pop can the young girls make jewelry out of, with
torn-up jacks, with any other bright thing Annie could find. All the
Jay Street apartments look alike. They was all built at the same time
about ten years ago, when some senator came up from way behind and
needed a big campaign boost. Small rooms, foamcast walls, plastisynth
furniture from a warehouse distrib, but Annie’s is one of the few that
looks to me like a home.

Annie made
Lizzie
go to bed. Then she came, her, and sat
on a chair close by my sofa.

“Billy—did you see, you, that woman in the cafe?”

“What woman?” It was nice, her sitting so close.

“The one standing, her, off by the back wall. Wearing green jacks.
She don’t live, her, in East Oleanta.”

“So?” I snuggled under Annie’s pretty blanket. We get travelers
sometimes, us, though not as many as we used to, now that the gravrail
don’t work so regular. Meal chips are good anyplace in the state, they
come from United States senators, and it didn’t used to be hard to get
an interstate exchange chip. Maybe it still ain’t. I don’t travel much.

“She looked different,” Annie said.

“Different how?”

Annie pressed her lips tight together, thinking. Her lips were dark
and shiny as blackberries, them, the lower one so full that pressing
them together only made it look juicier. I had to look away, me.

She said slowly, “Different like a donkey.”

I sat up on the sofa. The blanket slid off. “You mean genemod? I
didn’t see, me, nobody like that.”

“Well, she wasn’t genemod pretty. Short, with squinchy features and
low eyebrows and a head a little too big. But she was a donkey, her. I
know
it. Billy—you think she’s a FBI spy?”

“In East Oleanta? We ain’t got no underground organizations, us. All
we got is rotten stomps that want to spoil life for the rest of us.”

Annie kept on pressing her lips together. County Legislator Thomas
Scott Drinkwater runs our police franchise. He contracts, him, with an
outfit that has both ‘bots and donkey officers. We don’t see them much.
They don’t keep the peace on the streets, and they don’t bother, them,
about thefts because there’s always more in the warehouse. But when we
have an assault, us, or a murder, or a rape, they’re there. Just last
year Ed Jensen was gene-fingered for killing the oldest Flagg girl when
a lodge dance got too rough. Jensen got took, him, up to Albany, for
twenty-five-to-life. On the other hand, nobody never stood trial for
the bow-shooting of Sam Taggart out in the woods two years ago. But I
think we had a different franchise, us, back then.

FBI is a whole other thing. All them federal outfits are. They don’t
come to Livers unless something donkey is threatened, and once they
come, them, they don’t let go.

“Well,” Annie said stubbornly, “all I know, me, is that she was a
donkey. I can smell them.”

I didn’t want to argue, me. But I didn’t want her to worry, neither.
“Annie—ain’t no reason for FBI to be in East Oleanta. And donkeys don’t
have big heads and squinchy features, them— they don’t let their kids
get born that way.”

“Well, I hope you’re right, you. We don’t need no visiting donkeys
in East Oleanta. Let them stay, them, in their places, and us in ours.”

I couldn’t help it. I said, real soft, “Annie—you ever hear of Eden?”

She knew, her, that I didn’t mean the Bible. Not in that voice. She
snapped, “No. I never heard of it, me.”

“Yes, you did. I can tell, me, by your voice. You heard of Eden.”

“And what if 1 did? It’s garbage.”

I couldn’t let it go, me. “Why’s it garbage?”

“
Why
? Billy—think, you. How could there be a place, even in
the mountains, that donkeys don’t know about? Donkeys serve everything,
them, including mountains. They got aircars and planes to see
everything. Anyway, why would a place without donkeys ever come to be?
Who would do the work?”

“ ‘Bots,” I said.

“Who would make the ‘bots?”

“Maybe us?”

“Livers work? But
why
, in God’s name? We don’t got to
work, us—we got donkeys to do all that for us. We got a right to be
served by donkeys and their ‘bots—we elect them! Why would we want to
go, us, to some place without public servants?”

She was too young, her. Annie don’t remember a time before the
voting came on HT and the franchises made cheap ‘bots and the Mission
for Holy Living was all over the place, them, contributing lots of
money to all the churches and explaining about the lilies of the field
and the sacredness of joy and the favor of God to Mary over Martha.
Annie don’t remember, her, all the groups for all the kinds of
democracy, each showing us how in a democracy the common man was the
real aristo and master of his public servants. Schools for democracy.
Irish-Americans for Democracy. Hoosiers for Democracy. Blacks for
Democracy. I don’t know, me. The ’bots took over the hard work, and we
were happy, us, to give it to them. The politicians started talking,
them, about bread and circuses, and calling voters “sir” and “ma’am”
and building the cafes and warehouses and scooter tracks and lodge
buildings. Annie don’t remember, her. She likes to cook and sew and she
don’t spend all her time at races and brainie parties and lodge dances
and lovers, like some, but she still ain’t never held an ax in her hand
and swung it, or a hoe or a hatchet or a hammer. She don’t remember.

And then suddenly I knew, me, what an old fool I really was, and how
wrong. Because I
did
swing heavy tools, me, on road crews in
Georgia, when I was just a few years older than Lizzie. And when I
wasn’t being an ass I could remember, me, how my back ached like it was
going to break, and my skin blistered under the sun, and the blackflies
bit, them, on the open sores where they’d bit before, and at night I
was so tired and hurting, me, I’d cry for my mother into my pillow,
where the older men couldn’t hear me. That’s the work we did, us, not
some quiet clean assembling of donkey ‘bots. I remembered the fear of
losing that lousy job when there wasn’t no Congresswoman Janet Carol
Land Cafe, no Senator Mark Todd Ingalls meal chip, no Senator Calvin
Guy Winthop Jay Street Apartment Block. The fear was like a knife
behind your eyes when the foreman come over, him, on a Friday to say,
“That’s it, Washington. You through,” and all you wanted
to
do was take that knife out from behind your eyes and drive it hard
through his heart because now how you going to eat, pay the rent, stay
alive. I remembered, me, how it was, all in a second after I opened my
big mouth to Annie.

“You’re right,” I said, not looking at her. “There ain’t no Eden for
us. I should go home now, me.”

“Stay,” Annie said kindly. “Please, Billy. In case there’s trouble
at the cafe.”

Like anybody could break into a foamcast apartment. Or like a
broke-down old man could be any real help to her or Lizzie. But I
stayed.

In the darkness I could hear, me, how Annie and Lizzie moved in
their bedrooms. Walking around, laying down, turning and settling into
sleep. Sometime in the night the temperature must of dropped because I
heard the Y-energy heater come on. I listened, me, to their breathing,
a woman and a child, and pretty soon I slept.

But I dreamed about dangerous raccoons, sick and full of death.

DREW ARLEN: HUEVOS VERDES

I never get used to the way other people don’t see colors and
shapes. No. That’s not right. They see them. They just don’t
see
them, in the mind, where it matters. Other people can’t feel colors and
shapes. Can’t become colors and shapes. Can’t see through the colors
and shapes to the trueness of the world, as I do, in the shapes it
makes in my mind.

That’s not it either.

Words are hard for me.

I think words were hard even before the operation that made me the
Lucid Dreamer.

But the pictures are clear.

I can see myself as a dirty, dumb, hungry ten-year-old, traveling
alone halfway across the country to Leisha Camden, the most famous
Sleepless in the world. I can see her face as I ask her to make me “be
somebody, me.” I can see her eyes when I boasted, “Someday, me, I’m
gonna
own
Sanctuary.”

Sanctuary, the orbital where all the Sleepless except Leisha Camden
and Kevin Baker had exiled themselves. My grandfather, a dumb laborer,
had died building Sanctuary. And I thought, in my pathetic ten-year-old
arrogance, that I could own it. I thought that if I learned to talk
like donkeys and Sleepless, learned to behave like them, learned to
think like them, I could have what they had. Money. Power. Choices.

When I picture that child now, the shapes in my mind are sharp and
small, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The shapes are
the pale lost gold of remembered summer twilight.

Miranda Sharifi will inherit a controlling interest in Sanctuary
stock. When her parents, Sleepless, eventually die. If they ever do.
“What belongs to me belongs to you, Drew,” Miranda said. She has said
it several times. Miranda, a SuperSleepless, often explains things to
me several times. She is very patient.

But even with her explanations, I don’t understand what Miri and the
Supers are doing at Huevos Verdes. I thought I did eight years ago,
when the island was created. But since then there have been a lot more
words. I can repeat the words, but I can’t feel their shapes. They’re
words without solid form: Auxotrophes. Allosteric interactions.
Nanotechnology. Photophosphorylation. Law-son conversion formulas.
Neo-Marxist assisted evolution. Most of the time I just nod and smile.

But I am the Lucid Dreamer. When I float onstage and put a raucous
Liver crowd into the Lucid Dreaming trance, and the music and words and
combination of shapes flow from my subconscious through my
Super-designed hardware, I touch their minds in places they didn’t know
they had. They feel more deeply, exist more blissfully, become more
whole.

For at least the length of the concert.

And when the concert’s over, my audience is subtly changed. They
might not realize it. The donkeys who pay for my performances,
considering them bread-and-circus occult trash for the masses, don’t
realize it. Leisha doesn’t realize it. But I know I’ve controlled my
audience, and changed them, and that I am the only one in the world
with that power. The only one.

I try to remember that, when I am with Miranda.

==========

Leisha Camden sat across the table from me and said, “Drew— what are
they doing at Huevos Verdes?”

I sipped my coffee. On a plate were fresh genemod grapes and
berries, with small buttery cookies smelling of lemon and ginger. There
was fresh cream for the coffee. The library in Leisha’s New Mexico
compound was airy and high-ceilinged, its light, earthy colors echoing
the New Mexico desert beyond the big windows. Here and there among the
monitors and bookshelves stood stark, graceful sculptures by artists I
didn’t know. Some sort of delicate, old-fashioned music played.

I said, “What’s that music?”

“Claude de Courcy.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Her. A sixteenth-century composer for the lute.” Leisha said this
impatiently, which only showed how tense she was. Usually the shapes
she made in my mind were all clean and hard-edged, rigid, glowing with
iridescence.

“Drew, you’re not answering me. What are Miri and the Supers doing
at Huevos Verdes?”

“I’ve been answering you for eight years—I don’t know.”

“I still don’t believe you.”

I looked at her. Sometime in the last year she had cut her hair;
maybe a woman got tired of caring for her hair after 106 years. She
still looked thirty-five. Sleepless didn’t age, and so far they didn’t
die, except through accidents or murder. Their bodies regenerated, an
unexpected side effect of their bizarre genetic engineering. And the
first generation of Sleepless, unlike Miranda’s, hadn’t been so
complexly altered that physical appearance couldn’t be controlled.
Leisha would be beautiful until she died.

She had raised me. She had educated me, to the limits of my
intelligence, which might once have been normal but could never compare
to the genemod-boosted IQ of donkeys, let alone Sleepless. When I
became crippled in a freak accident, at the age of ten, Leisha had
bought me my first powerchair. Leisha had loved me when I was a child,
and had declined to love me when I became a man, and had given me to
Miranda. Or Miranda to me.

She put both palms flat on the table and leaned forward. I
recognized what was coming. Leisha was a lawyer. “Drew—you never knew
my father. He died when I was in law school. I adored him. He was the
most stubborn human being I ever met. Until I met Miri, anyway.”

The spiky pain-shapes again. When Miri came down from Sanctuary
thirteen years ago, she came to Leisha Camden, the only Sleepless not
financially or ethically bound to Miri’s horror of a grandmother. Miri
came to Leisha for help in starting a new life. Just as I once had.

Leisha said, “My father was stubborn, generous, convinced he was
always right. He had boundless energy. He was capable of incredible
discipline, manic reliance on will, complete obsessive-ness when he
wanted something. He was willing to bend any rules that stood in his
way, but he wasn’t a tyrant. He was just implacable.