Beggars Ride by Nancy Kress
“Jackson, you look like shit. Go to bed. Nothing is going to change before morning.”
But Theresa was already changing. Radiation bums across her pale skin, sores inside her mouth and on her tongue.
“Jackson—”
“I’ll stay.”
She pulled up a chair and sat beside him. Some minutes—hours?—later, he woke to find himself stumbling along the hallway to his bedroom, Vicki tugging him along. He didn’t remember falling asleep or waking up. She dumped him fully clothed, on his bed, and instantly he sank into restless dreams.
The next time he woke, Cazie was shaking his shoulder, looming over him like a Greek Fury.
“Jackson! I’ve left you a dozen top-priority messages from K-C—what’s the matter with you? Don’t you realize how important this deal is? And even if you don’t, can’t you at least do me the courtesy of answering once in thirty-six hours even if you’re sulking? God, I can’t believe that you—”
“I’d rather you didn’t disturb Jackson,” Vicki said sweetly from the doorway of Jackson’s bedroom.
Cazie turned slowly. Her honey-colored skin paled, making the flecks in her eyes more brilliantly green.
“Jackson needs his sleep.” Vicki continued in that same voice of sweet reason. “So it might be better if you left now.”
Cazie had recovered herself, always a dangerous mood. “I don’t think so…Diana, isn’t it? Or Victoria? True, Jack looks pretty well done in—you must have given him quite a workout. I’m sure he enjoyed it. But we have grown-up items to discuss now, so if you’ve already been paid, the building system can call you a go-’bot. Now, Jack, if you like, I’ll wait in your study while you shower.”
Vicki only smiled.
Suddenly Jackson was sick of them both. He heaved himself off the bed. “Don’t be so stupid, Cazie. Theresa is sick. I don’t have time to think about Kelvin-Castner until she’s out of danger.”
Cazie’s face changed. “Sick? Seriously? With what? Jackson, a Change syringe—”
“Not this time. It’s radiation sickness.” He pushed past her and strode to Theresa’s room. Cazie ran after him.
His sister lay quietly asleep; no change in her monitor readings. Cazie saw Theresa and gasped. “What…Jack!”
“She was in range of the nuclear explosion that took out La Solana.” By now it must be on all the newsgrids. Cazie always watched newsgrids.
“Tess? Went to New Mexico? That’s impossible!”
“I would have said so.”
“Oh, my God, Jack…I’ll stay here and help you nurse her.”
This was Cazie at her most genuine, Cazie at her most lovable. She gazed at Theresa with affection and pain. Jackson said, “Vicki’s nursing her just fine,” and was immediately too wretched to relish his own cruelty.
“All right,” Cazie said humbly. She laid one tentative hand on the very edge of Theresa’s bed.
Jackson closed his eyes. “Tell me what you want to do about Kelvin-Castner.”
“It can wait,” Cazie said in a low voice.
“No, it can’t. And there’s nothing I can do for Theresa this minute anyway. Tell me.”
“If you…all right. I want to commit five hundred million dollars initially, more on a rolling schedule with go/ no-go achievement targets. I sent you the proposed target schedule. We own fifteen percent of gross profits on this project only, with roughly standard liabilities and exposure. The ROI and long-term interlocks—”
“No, not those things. Don’t tell me those things. What is K-C going to do?”
“Race to get a patentable delivery molecule based on the Liver tissue samples and brain alterations. The first computer models are already running. There are hundreds of possibilities to check on, of course, maybe thousands. But if we get the patentable model, we can use it as the basis of an incredible number of Cleaner-resistant pharmaceuticals. The preliminary applications team has already started brainstorming.”
Cleaner-resistant. Jackson had never heard the term before. Maybe the “preliminary applications team” had just brainstormed it.
He took a last look at Theresa’s readings and then led Cazie out of Theresa’s room. The nursing ’bot floated closer to the bed.
In the hallway, Jackson said, “I’ll vote to invest the funding, and commit Theresa’s votes, too, on one condition. The first line of research—the first, Cazie, with majority allocation of talent and resources—goes to a counteragent for the original neuropharm that affected the Livers. A reverser that will restore their cerebral biochemistry to previous functioning. Without the stranger anxiety and the inhibition toward novelty and all the fucking fear. Is that agreed?”
Cazie hesitated only a moment. “Agreed.”
“You can get Alex Castner to agree?”
“Yes.” She sounded confident. Jackson wondered suddenly if she was sleeping with Castner. Or with Thurmond Rogers.
He said, “Get it in a contract and send it to me. And I’ll want constant recorded progress reports on the counteragent, plus lab records.”
“No problem.”
“And put in the contract that I’m officially informed the very minute there’s any breakthroughs, of any significant kind at all, on any aspect of the entire project.”
“You got it. The contract will be at your apartment tomorrow morning. We can record the voting commitment right now. Yours in person, Theresa’s by proxy. But, Jack—” Her voice trembled. “How bad is Tessie? Will she…will she…”
“She won’t die.” Jackson looked at Cazie. Her eyes, raised to his from her shorter height, filled with sudden tears. “Tess will recover. It’ll take a long time, but she’ll recover.”
“Long term…?”
“Long term, she’s going to have to take the Change syringe. It’s the only thing that’ll keep her from eventual cancers.”
“But there aren’t any more syringes. Unless you—”
“Of course I have one for Theresa. In my father’s private safe. I’ve always kept one for Theresa.”
Cazie’s face showed sudden understanding. Of what it had cost him as a doctor to do that, as the public health crisis grew—to watch babies dying and know he could save one more of them. She stepped forward and put her arms around him, and he let her. Her full breasts were soft against his chest. The top of her head fit familiarly under his chin. He was so tired.
In his peripheral vision, he saw Vicki disappear around the corner of the hallway.
Theresa developed oozing sores over her skull, face, and body. Her tissues swelled until, if she hadn’t been on heavy painkillers, the pressure of the soft bed would have been agony. Her firm small breasts turned into ulcerated bags with cracked and bleeding nipples.
She couldn’t talk. Her mouth, her tongue, her gums, became as much a mass of ulcers as her radiation-burned body. Sometimes, rising briefly to consciousness, she tried to mumble around the endotracheal tube. Her swollen eyes looked urgently into Jackson’s. “Ennh…de-de-” He always sedated her. He couldn’t stand it.
“Patient’s progress within normal limits,” the nursing ’bot said pleasantly several times a day. “Do you wish for detailed readings?”
“For God’s sake, Jackson, get some sleep,” Vicki said, equally often. “You look like something Miranda Sharifi’s lab team threw away.”
“M-M-M-M…de…de,” Theresa tried. He increased the sedative.
Twice a day, as per contract, lab records arrived from Kelvin-Castner, reams of raw data. Jackson read only the summaries, hastily spoken by Thurmond Rogers. “Jack, we’ve developed computer models of the most likely protein foldings for the initial molecule, based on most-probable receptor-site responses. Unfortunately, there are six hundred forty-three level-A possible foldings, so the testing is going to take some time and we thought of—”
“That’s enough, Caroline,” Jackson told his system. “File the reports by date, speaker, and…whatever else fits best-retrieval protocol.” And leave me alone.
&n
“Jack, how is Tess?” Cazie’s image said daily, more than daily, he didn’t know how often because he never linked with her calls. Once he heard Cazie’s voice in another room, talking with Vicki. With Vicki? Conflict, sparring, dueling? He didn’t go in.
Theresa lost flesh she couldn’t afford to lose. Her already thin body grew skeletal, arms and legs like wire clothes hangers, knees and elbows chisel-sharp. Her sores oozed and wept.
The progress reports from Kelvin-Castner, Thurmond Rogers told him daily, didn’t seem to progress. The computer models weren’t panning out. The algorithms didn’t, upon investigation, apply. There were possibilities only, tentative hypotheses later disproved, unsatisfactory animal-testing results. They needed a breakthrough, Thurmond Rogers explained in messages that Jackson watched only until he had their gist. The breakthrough would come, Rogers said. It hadn’t yet, however. “After all, we’re not Miranda Sharifi and Jonathan Markowitz,” Rogers added testily.
“Patient’s progress within normal limits,” the nursing ’bot said.
“Sleep. Your sanity is consumable, you know,” Vicki said.
“Possibly a decapeptide, triggering cell response in—”
“De…ded…mmmm…”
“How is she, Jack? How are you? Answer me, damn it—”
After a month, Theresa still had radiation bums on her face and body. Her muscles had atrophied. Her sores stopped oozing. Jackson wanted her to eat, even though she wouldn’t have any real appetite for weeks yet. To eat, she had to come off sedation.
He and Vicki propped Theresa up against her pillows. Beside the bed, Vicki placed a huge bouquet of genemod flowers, pink and yellow and a deep subtle orange. Then she discreetly left the room. The nursing ’bot prepared a liquid protein, with a straw, that smelled of raspberries. Theresa had always liked raspberries.
“Jack…son.”
“Don’t try to talk, Tessie, if it hurts. You’ve been sick, but you’re going to be fine. I’m right here.”
She stared at him fuzzily. Her head was completely hairless, scabbed, burned. But slowly her pale blue eyes cleared.
“M-M-Mir…”
“I said don’t talk, honey.”
“M-Mir…”
He gave in. “Let me help. ‘Miranda Sharifi.’ You went out to La Solana to research your book about Leisha Camden, right? To talk to Miranda’s father, because he once knew Leisha?”
Theresa hesitated. The hairless pathetic head nodded slightly. She winced as the back of her skull scraped the soft pillow.
“De…ed.”
“Richard Sharifi is dead. Somebody bombed La Solana, and he was vaporized.” Jackson saw the question in her eyes. “No, the government doesn’t know who set off the bomb. It was apparently a drone ground-launched from the New Mexico mountains. No group has claimed credit, nobody’s been arrested, and if the FBI has leads, they aren’t making them public. And Selene Base hasn’t retaliated, or even made any public comment.”
“Not…at…Selene.”
“What’s not at Selene? Tess, honey, don’t try to talk anymore, I can see how it’s hurting you. All this can wait until you—”
“De-ed. Miranda.”
Jackson gently held Theresa’s hand. “Miranda Sharifi is dead? You can’t know that, honey.”
“Talked…to her. Me. Saw…her.”
“You saw Miranda Sharifi?” He glanced at the monitor. Theresa’s temperature, skin conductance, and brain scan were normal; she wasn’t hallucinating. “Honey, you couldn’t have. Miranda’s at Selene. On the moon.”
“No!”
“She’s not? She was at La Solana? Tess—how could that be?”
Theresa glared at him, watery blue eyes in a hideously deformed head. Then tears started to fall. Jackson saw her wince where their salt touched her skin. “Dead! Dead!”
“Tess, oh, don’t—”
“If she says she saw Miranda and Miranda’s dead, then it’s probably true,” Vicki’s voice said behind him. “She knows what she saw. And it’s the only motive that makes sense for bombing La Solana without taking credit or making demands.”
Theresa looked past Jackson, at Vicki standing in the doorway. Theresa nodded, a tremendous effort. Then her eyes closed and she was asleep.
Jackson whirled on Vicki. “Do you know what you’re saying?”
“Better than you do, probably.” Vicki’s face contorted and she left the room.
Jackson didn’t follow her. He gazed down at Theresa, who lay propped up, her poor mouth fallen open. Gently Jackson settled her flat on the bed.
He walked the length of the apartment, through the Y-shield onto the terrace. It was apparently dusk; Jackson had lost track of the hours, the days. The trees and flowerbeds in the park below bloomed in full-summer genemod glory. He thought it must be sometime in May.
Theresa said that Miranda Sharifi was dead.
And the rest of the SuperSleepless, too? Maybe. They had usually stayed together, in a pack of their own kind. Maybe because that was the only way they could find anyone who understood them. Or maybe just for simple protection. They stayed together, and hid, and then used all their technology to make the world think they were hiding someplace else, as yet another added protection.
And if Theresa was right, none of it had helped. The haters had gotten them anyway.
The treetops below danced in a sudden breeze. Standing at the very edge of the terrace, Jackson could hear the leaves rustle, smell their cool moisture. In the southeast, just below the moon, a bright planet shone steadily. Probably Jupiter. Or a holo of Jupiter, voted in by the enclave weather committee. Let’s add a planet to the dome programming this month. The children can learn to use the sky-tracking software.
Jackson saw again the printouts of unChanged Liver children on Theresa’s study wall. Dying in bloat and putrefaction from lack of the sanitation nobody needed to practice anymore, or lack of Change syringes, or lack of medical attention.
And now there never would be any more Change syringes. People and groups and governments could send endless messages or even expeditions to Selene, and it wouldn’t matter. Unless the Supers had left a huge cache of syringes somewhere for posthumous discovery, there would be no more Changing for this next generation. Or the next. Or the next. Not even for donkey children with sky-scanning software. The biochemistry/nanotech was too far beyond normal humanity, even genemod humanity. You couldn’t get to the industrial revolution when you’d only just invented the wheel.
Jackson put both hands on the terrace railing and leaned over. From the street four stories below came the soft sound of a woman’s laughter, followed by a man’s, smooth and tenor. Jackson couldn’t glimpse either of them. The air smelled of mint and mown grass and roses.
Eden, Theresa had once said of Central Park, during her religious phase. She’d been twelve, and had wanted to become a nun.
Eden. For how long?
There were probably syringes hoarded, family by family, throughout the enclaves—one or two here, more there. Newborns would be injected, secretly, before outsiders knew the syringes existed and could steal them. When the hoarded syringes were all gone, the birth rate would drop even further than it had, as parents secure in the Change contemplated the disease and food needs of unChanged infants. Finally, people would have babies anyway, because people always did. Then medicine would revive from a coma feverish with research on pleasure drugs, and donkeys would get along about as well as they always had, behind their Y-shields, which would expand every year as the need grew to put more land under agriculture, under dairy farms, under soysynth factories, under tougher security shields. But the enclaves would adapt. They had all the technology to do so. No expulsion from Eden here.
And the Livers? No need to ask what would happen there. It was already happening. Famine, death, disease, war. And, eventually, they would relearn subsistence-survival skills. Or, if the neuropharm inhibiting tolerance for novelty continued
Genocide by universal inaction. The Lord doesn’t help those who are cerebrochemically incapable of helping themselves. Who are too terrified of change to let anyone else anywhere near them. And who just lost their last extraterrestrial champions.
Jackson breathed deeply of the sweet, artificial air, and closed his eyes.
“Jackson.” Vicki said behind him. “Theresa’s calling for you.”
“In a minute.”
To his surprise, he felt Vicki’s arms creep around him from behind. Her cheek rested against his back. His shirt grew wet. He remembered that while he’d been thinking of the dead SuperSleepless as mostly a source of Change syringes, Vicki had had some kind of unexplained personal history with them.
He said, not turning around, “You met Miranda Sharifi.”
“I met her, yes. Twice.”
“What lunatic killed them?”
“Too many candidates to enumerate. The world is full of the disgruntled and the disgusted.”
“Yeah. All kinds of losers who resent the winners.”
“I’m not sure Miranda was ever a winner,” Vicki said. “Not ever. But she and her kind were our one shot at forced radical evolution. Only Sanctuary could have created them, and Sanctuary will never do it again.”
And then Jackson saw it. His hands tightened on the railing. The air suddenly smelled noxious. “Jennifer Sharifi killed them. In retaliation for sending her and her co-conspirators to prison almost thirty years ago.”
“Yes,” Vicki said. “Probably. But the Justice Department will never be able to prove it.”
She let Jackson go and stepped away from him. “It’s up to you, Jackson.”
He turned to face her. “Up to me? What the hell are you talking about?”
“You don’t think Kelvin-Castner is really aiming their research at a cure for the neuropharm, do you? They don’t expect it to filter into the enclaves, because they know it’s some other donkey group that must have made it in the first place. In order to render the Livers no political or physical threat, without the nasty business of actually having to wipe them all out. Unless you hold K-C to your contract, they’ll just roar ahead with the commercial applications and drag their feet on the counterdrug you contracted for.”