Beggars Ride by Nancy Kress
But the mother of the crippled child stood her shaky ground. Theresa reached out and, with a corner of her torn and muddied shirt, wiped the baby’s nose. The mother let her, although her hand tightened on the little boy’s good shoulder. Still, she let the beggar, who ended up with snot all over her hand, touch her child. She had a reason to fight the fear.
Take a neuropharm, Tessie. It’s a medical problem.
With that thought, she was Theresa again. Theresa weak, Theresa frightened, Theresa in a strange place with strange people. She felt her breathing grow uneven. But she had been the beggar, she had come here, she had made a difference…and next time she would be the beggar longer. Would teach others to do it, only not now, she was so weak, she was afraid but these others understood fear, they would take care of her…
She had time for just one more thought before blackness took her. Theresa’s thought, not the beggar’s: Only partway a medical problem, Jackson. Only partway.
When she came to herself again, Theresa lay on a strange bed in the dark. No, not a bed: a pile of blankets on the floor, spread over pine branches. She could smell them, and they rustled underneath her. Irregular walls loomed on either side of her.
The Liver camp. They had put her to bed in one of their own sleeping places. Theresa remembered everything. Immediately she closed her eyes and tried to become Cazie. Only Cazie could get her out of here without panicking. She was Cazie, she was fierce and small and fearless, she was Cazie…the now-familiar click happened in her brain.
She rose quietly in the dark and groped along the closest wall. It ended in a heavy blanket hung as a curtain. After she pushed it aside, there was more light, glowing from a Y-cone in the center of the cavernous floor. The room smelled of unwashed, sleeping people. Cazie crossed it as swiftly as her battered body permitted. Halfway to the door, the nursing ’bot floated up to her. “Ms. Aranow, you’ve missed two sessions of physical re—”
“Quiet!” Cazie whispered. “Don’t talk! You stay right here.”
The ’bot whispered, “I am not programmed for override reassignment, Ms. Aranow. I must stay with you.”
The stupid thing was bonded to her. Like Jomp. Cazie scowled. “Then follow me in half an hour. Like before.”
She hobbled to the door and opened it quietly. The moon was full and high. Cazie started along the path beside the river, to the aircar. It took every bit of Theresa’s strength, borrowed and made and natural and a final strength that could only have been a gift, to make it.
“Oh, God,” a voice said. “Oh, Theresa!”
Vicki Turner. Vicki’s voice. But what was Vicki doing on the roof of her apartment building, in the cold night? Theresa, heavily asleep before the aircar landed, blinked and shrank back against the seat.
“Look at you, Theresa. Where did you go? Those rags…don’t you have a hat? Come on, let me help you…”
“I was Cazie,” Theresa said. “And the beggar.”
“What? Come on inside, you’re shivering. I’ve been waiting here for you to come home because I had no idea where to look, I didn’t even dare tell Jackson you were missing. No, Tessie, let me hold you up, here’s the elevator…”
She was asleep again. She was dreaming, she must be, strange shapes with huge teeth were chasing her across a genemod garden where all the trees hated her, she could feel their hatred coming to her in waves and she couldn’t understand what she’d done to make them want to destroy her—
“Theresa, wake up, it’s just a dream. You screamed, you’ve been asleep for hours…”
Her body was burning up. The shapes had set her on fire. Her head ached. “I don’t…don’t feel so good.”
Vicki, standing beside her bed with one hand on Theresa’s shoulder, went suddenly still. Theresa turned her head and vomited onto the pillow.
Vicki waited until she was finished. “Come on, Tessie, slide out the other way…no, you won’t fall, I’ve got you, we’re going into the bathroom…There. Theresa, listen, this is very important. Where’s the nursing ’bot?”
“I…left it.” She let Vicki wipe her face with a cool cloth. So cool. She was burning up, the sharp-toothed shapes had set her arms and legs on fire and now flames danced along them, dry and hot.
“Left it where? Where, Tess?”
“The…camp.”
“A camp? A Liver camp? You gave the nursing ’bot to a Liver camp?”
“I was…the beggar.” Her stomach heaved and she vomited again.
“At the camp. Theresa, was there any Liver there who was unChanged? Did you touch anyone who was sick?”
“The baby. His nose…”
“What about his nose? How sick was he?”
But she couldn’t answer. The bathroom jumped and swirled, and she vomited again, thin black bile in ropy gobs.
Then she was back in bed, but the bed was clean. Vicki held a pan under her mouth whenever the dry heaves came. Theresa’s head pounded from the inside, so hard she could only see in flashes, and the flashes sent hot lances through her eyes. She saw that the room was a mess. Holes in the walls, furniture knocked over…Had Vicki done that? Why had Vicki done that?
“Where is it, Tess? Think, darling. It’s important Where is it?”
“What?” Theresa said, because Vicki’s face looked so urgent and intense. Like Cazie’s face. No one could stand against Cazie. Not even Jackson. Only Theresa couldn’t be Cazie because she was too weak, too hot, she hurt too much—
“Where’s the safe, Tess? Your father’s private safe. I know he had one because I once heard Jackson say so—come on, Tessie, stay with me. Where’s the safe?”
Safe. She wanted to be safe. All her life she’d wanted to be safe, and she never had been…Take a neuropharm, Tess. But that wouldn’t make her safe, she’d always known that, she’d needed something more, something bigger—
“Where is your father’s private safe?”
“I think…master bathroom?…the wall behind the toilet…” Vicki ran off. Only then did Tess realize that the torn-apart room wasn’t hers but Jackson’s, she lay in Jackson’s bed and not her own. Jackson’s room that had once been her parents’.
From the bathroom came a tremendous crash. Jones immediately said, “Ms. Aranow, there’s a plumbing problem in the master bath. Would you like me to summon a building maintenance ’bot?”
“Yes…No…”
More crashes. Something heavy hit something else, hard. Theresa cowered in Jackson’s bed. Vicki came back in, covered with water.
“All right, it’s an old-fashioned mechanical lock. Completely undetectable by any electronics. You open it with numbers. What’s the code, Theresa?…Three numbers…Theresa! Stay with me!”
“Don’t know…call Jackson…”
“I can’t get through. Kelvin-Castner has cut him off electronically, and he probably doesn’t even know it. I can’t get through to Lizzie, I don’t know enough about systems…wait a minute. Systems.”
“I’m…am I…dying?”
“Not if I can help it,” Vicki said grimly. “And not if your brother is as sentimental and naive as I think. Jones, calendar information!”
Theresa winced. Vicki sounded exactly like Cazie. But how could that be, Theresa was Cazie…
Jones said, “What dates would you like, Ms. Turner?”
Vicki ran into the bathroom, yelling to Jones, “Jackson’s birthday. Theresa’s birthday…”
Theresa was dying. But she couldn’t die, she had to sing vespers with Sister Anne. Vespers and matins and…what came next? Something else. The unChanged Liver baby with the snotty nose was going to sing with her. She’d promised him…
“The date Jackson graduated from medical school,” Vicki yelled.
If Theresa died, the little boy with the runny nose would die, too. You can’t, Jackson, she argued with him, ghostly by her bedside. You can’t stop me. I can show them how…Don’t you see, it’s a gift? It’s always been my only gift. Need. You needed me, to take care of.
The thing in Vicki’s hand was a Change syringe.
“Listen, Tess. Jackson told me he had this put away in his safe for you. For when you someday reversed your decision about Changing. You’ve picked up some disease from that unChanged kid in the Liver camp; it must be a fast-mutating virus—there’s all sorts of microbes coming out of the woods now that the host population is without vaccines. Tess, I gave you antivirals from Jackson’s supply but it doesn’t look like any of them are working. I don’t know what I’m doing with medicine, the nursing ’bot is gone, I can’t reach Jackson. It has to be the Change syringe—”
Theresa shook her head. Tears burned her eyes.
“Tessie, you’d have had to have it sooner or later anyway, because of the radiation you took in New Mexico. The cancer curves…I’m going to inject you, Theresa. I have to.”
“G-g-g…” She couldn’t get the word out. Gift. Her gift. It would be gone if she Changed, you had to struggle to gain your soul…they said so…all the great historical people that Thomas had quoted for her…
“I’m sorry, Tess.” Vicki gripped Theresa’s arm and raised the syringe.
“Beggar,” Theresa gasped. “Gift…” She closed her eyes, and fever danced along her body and burned her soul. Gone.
She felt nothing. When she opened her eyes again, Vicki still held the syringe above Theresa’s arm.
“Tessie—” Vicki whispered. “Do you really want to die instead? I can’t make you do this…yes, I can make you. But I shouldn’t, it should be your choice…damn you to hell, Jackson! This should be your problem!”
Tess said, “My…problem.”
Vicki stared at her. “Yes. Your problem. Your choice, your life…God, Tess, how can I not…all right. Your choice. Should I inject you? If I don’t, you might die—but I don’t know that you’ll die. If I do inject you, you might or might not have your brain chemistry altered in some ways…I don’t know, I’m not a doctor!”
Her brain chemistry altered. But Theresa could already do that! She could be Cazie, could be the beggar, could make herself control her own brain…at least a little.
Enough to be Theresa.
Even if her body was Changed. She was more than her body. But hadn’t she always known that? Wasn’t that what she’d argued about so hard with Jackson?
“Tess? You’re smiling like…God, honey, your forehead is burning up…I don’t know what to do!”
“Inject me,” Theresa said, and thought, at the moment that the needle plunged in, and through the bright hot whirl of fever, that Vicki was different from Cazie after all: Cazie would never have said she didn’t know what to do.
The slim black syringe emptied into her wasted arm.
Twenty-four
When Vicki finally stopped speaking, Jackson lay silent a long time. Her body beside his on the narrow Kelvin-Castner guest bed no longer distracted him, and he certainly no longer felt sleepy.
He believed her. Even though some of the events she’d just whispered into his ear seemed incredible. Theresa—his Theresa—bailing Lizzie Francy out of jail? Going alone to a Liver camp to give them the nursing ’bot? Choosing to be Changed?
And yet he believed Vicki. But, then, he’d always believed Cazie, too, right up until he came to Kelvin-Castner…
“I have something to show you,” Vicki said, and now it was her voice that drowsed. “Proof, of a sort. But it can wait until morning. I am spectacularly sleepy. Worn out with Lizzie and Theresa, the children of the next age…”
“The what?” Jackson said, more harshly than he’d intended, because he felt so disoriented. Theresa, choosing to be Changed…Theresa, Changed. Would she still need him?
“Children of the new age,” Vicki repeated, almost mumbling. “Self-appointed…” She was asleep.
Jackson eased himself away from her limp body and off the bed. Sleep was impossible. The room, ten by ten at the most, had no room to pace. And if he used its terminal, he might wake Vicki. He didn’t want Vicki awake. She’d only hit him with additional emotional right hooks—that’s what she did—and he’d already been hit too many times today.
How many brain-rattling punches were too many? And why the hell was he the one receiving them?
Soundlessly Jackson opened the bedroom door, closed it behind him, and padded barefoot in his borrowed pajamas down the unfamiliar and institutional-looking hallway. At the end he found a small, empty lounge. Of course it was empty—this was the middle of the night. The lounge held a sofa, chairs, table, servebot—all as institutional as the hallway—and a flat-screen terminal.
“System on,” Jackson said.
“Yes, how can I help you?” An anonymous program, for waiting technicians or bored insomniac guests. Undoubtedly limited access. It was enough.
“Newsgrids, please. Channel 35.”
“Certainly. And if there’s anything else Kelvin-Castner can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
“—in eastern Kansas. The tornado brushed the Wichita Enclave, which immediately activated high-security shields. In Washington, Congress continued debating on the controversial airport-regulation package; the Senate vote is scheduled for tomorrow morning. In Paris, the Sorbonne Enclave saw the first performance of Claude Guillaume Arnault’s new concerto, Le Moindre. The venerable but irascible, much-feted composer did not—”
“Internal communications,” Jackson said. The newsgrids didn’t have anything fresh on the destruction of Sanctuary. And the inhibition-neuropharm wasn’t yet major news, merely an isolated phenomenon, a local curiosity among backward Livers.
Fools. The enclaves were all fools.
“Yes, how can I help you?” the program said. “With which internal department would you like to link?”
“Not a department, an individual. Lizzie Francy. She’s a guest user somewhere in this building. In the bio-unshielded portion.”
“Certainly. And if there’s anything else Kelvin-Castner can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
Lizzie’s face came on the screen. Her wiry black hair stuck out in twenty different directions, hirsute vectors. Her black eyes gleamed with excitement, despite the deep shadows underneath. “I just tried to link with your room.”
“I’m not there,” Jackson said inanely. “Only Vicki is. She came from my and Theresa’s—”
“I know,” Lizzie said hurriedly. She raised both hands to her hair and pulled, creating even more hair vectors. “I woke her up. Jackson, I need, me, to come in to you. To see you, me, in person. Now.”
“Lizzie, it’s bioshielded here. If you come in, you can’t leave for—”
“I know, I know! But I have to come in, me. Now.”
Jackson looked more closely. It wasn’t excitement shining in Lizzie’s eyes. It was fear. And her speech had reverted to Liver.
“Lizzie, what—”
“Nothing yet. I can’t dip this system, me. It’s too hard. But I don’t like it here, me, by myself. I want Vicki. I want to come in, me!”
Lizzie, Jackson saw, was trying hard to look pathetic. A teenage girl alone in the middle of the night in a strange place, who wanted her surrogate mother. Except that this was Lizzie Francy, who had walked to New York alone, had broken into a supposedly impenetrable enclave, had dipped more donkey corporations than Jackson could probably name. The pathos was faked.
The underlying fear was not.
He said, “Dirk—”
“I know that if I come in, me, I’ll be in quarantine a few weeks. But I want Vicki, me! And I can’t dip this fucking system!” Tears filled her black eyes.
Bewildered, Jackson said, “All right. I’ll tell a holo to lead you to Decon. Thurmond Rogers gav
“My diary is on here! And Dirk’s baby pictures!” And she started to cry.
“Lizzie, sweetheart—”
“I want Vicki!”
So, all at once, did Jackson. Vicki might know how to deal with unexpected hysteria. Lizzie, of all people, wailing and throwing a tantrum for her mother…But Vicki wasn’t even her mother. And Jackson didn’t believe that Lizzie hadn’t dipped the Kelvin-Castner system.
“Come on in, Lizzie,” Vicki said beside him. “Leave your terminal. Isn’t the information you’re concerned about backed up at Jackson’s?”
“No! If I try, it might be zapped!”
“Then carry your personal system—you’ve unlinked it from K-C already, haven’t you? Of course you have—carry it outside the building. Through the door behind you, turn left at the end of the corridor, continue to the fire exit. Right outside are seven people in a van. Give them your system, and they’ll safeguard it while you come in to me.”
Jackson blinked. A van?
Immediately the screen split, and Thurmond Rogers said from the other half, “No proprietary data can be physically removed from Kelvin-Castner. Ms. Francy has been analyzing K-C systems, and—”
Vicki interrupted him. “Two of the six people in the van are bonded shield-security agents. They have appropriate equipment for encasing Lizzie’s system in such a way that it cannot be opened without retina scans from her, Jackson, and two Kelvin-Castner officials present at the sealing. One official could easily be you, Thurmond.”
“Even so, you can’t—”
“One of the people in the van is a lawyer. He has a court order to safely remove any Kelvin-Castner records that may be pertinent to Dr. Aranow’s legal contract with Kelvin-Castner.”
“That’s only contractual if—”
“Another person in the van is a microbiologist. She is prepared to examine Lizzie’s data before sealing and declare, as legally valid expert opinion, that it is indeed relevant to Dr. Aranow’s contract. Unless, of course, you don’t wish her to examine the data.”