Beggars Ride Read online

  Also by Nancy Kress

  NOVELS

  The Prince of Morning Bells

  The White Pipes

  The Golden Grove

  An Alien Light

  Brain Rose

  Beggars in Spain

  Beggars and Choosers

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  Trinity and Other Stories

  The Aliens of Earth

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  BEGGARS RIDE

  Copyright © 1996 by Nancy Kress

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Cover art by Tom Canty

  Edited by David G. Hartwell

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  Tor Books on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  ISBN: 0-812-54474-9

  Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 96-19956

  First edition: November 1996

  First mass market edition: December 1997

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sleeping Dogs copyright © 1999 by Nancy Kress, First Published in Far Horizons: All New Tales from the Greatest Worlds of Science Fiction ed. Robert Silverberg, May 1999.

  For Jill Beves, R.N., CCRN,

  who could never be replaced by a nursing ’bot

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I: NOVEMBER 2120-JANUARY 2121

  PART II: MARCH-APRIL 2121

  PART III: MAY 2121

  EPILOGUE: NOVEMBER 2128

  BONUS SHORT STORY:

  SLEEPING DOGS

  Prologue

  The prison door swung open and she stepped through.

  The aircar waited in the parking lot a hundred feet away. She had asked her husband this: Don’t come for me. Let me come to you. Will Sandaleros had understood. He waited in the car, alone.

  Jennifer Sharifi stood still, surveying the outside. Grass. Trees. Flowers, genemod marililies and silver roses, sweet william and moonweed. It was full summer. The warden, beside her, said something. She didn’t hear him.

  Twenty-seven years.

  Everything had changed. Nothing had changed.

  Twenty-seven years since she had been tried, convicted, and imprisoned for a crime she most certainly had committed, treason against the United States of America. Except that it had not been a crime. It had been a revolution, a fight for freedom from the Sleepers that had tried to plunder and destroy Jennifer’s people. The government had used that modem weapon of destruction, ruinous taxes that eviscerated productive life, and Jennifer in turn had used one even more modem: genetic terrorism. Jennifer Sharifi and her eleven Sleepless allies had held five American cities hostage to genemod retroviruses, until the Sleepers let her people go.

  Only they had not done so. But not because the Sleeper government could outwit Sleepless. Jennifer’s defeat had come from another quarter. And Jennifer and the others had gone to prison with varying sentences, Jennifer’s the longest. Twenty-seven years.

  A second groundcar pulled up beside Will’s. Reporters? Maybe not, in this changed world. An old woman got out of the car, walked in the opposite direction. Jennifer watched dispassionately. The old woman—in her eighties, from her face—moved with the smooth-jointed walk and fluid arm swings they all had now. Since the Change. But the woman was still old: used up, nearly finished.

  Jennifer Sharifi was 114. She looked thirty-five, and would continue to look thirty-five. But twenty-seven years had been lost. And her world.

  The warden was still talking. Jennifer ignored him. She concentrated on her rage: massive, molten, welling up like slow thick lava from the planetary core. Coldly she walled it off, contained it, directed it. Undirected rage was a danger; directed rage was an inexhaustible force. It was an engineering problem.

  Not a muscle of her beautiful face moved.

  When she was ready, Jennifer walked away from the gabbling warden, away from Allendale Maximum Security Federal Prison, where she had spent twenty-seven years for treason against a government that, by now, barely existed.

  Will didn’t kiss or embrace her. But he reached for her hand, and he sat motionless a moment before he started the car.

  “Hello, Will.”

  “Hello, Jenny.”

  No more was needed.

  The car rose. Below her, the warden dwindled, and then the prison. Jennifer said to the comlink, “Messages?”

  “No messages,” it answered, which wasn’t surprising. The link wasn’t shielded. Her messages would be waiting on Will’s link, wherever he was living temporarily. There would be a lot of messages, and more in the days to come, as Jennifer gathered up once more the strands of her enormous, tangled corporate and financial web. But not in the United States. Never again in the United States. There was one call to make on an unshielded link.

  “Connect to Sanctuary, public frequency.”

  “Signaling Sanctuary, public frequency,” the comlink said. Will glanced at her, returned his gaze to the car.

  Jennifer’s screen flashed the access codes, immediately replaced by her granddaughter’s face. So Miranda had been waiting, had known the hour, the minute, of Jennifer’s release. Of course.

  “Hello, Grandmother,” Miranda Sharifi said, from 200,000 miles above Earth. She and the other third-generation Sleepless had been in possession of Sanctuary orbital for years now. Of Sanctuary, which Jennifer had built to keep the Sleepless safe. Jennifer didn’t enjoy irony.

  Miranda did not say Welcome home. Her plain face, with its oversize head and unruly black hair, did not smile. Jennifer looked at her granddaughter, and remembered, and held back the walls around her rage. It was Miranda who had sent Jennifer Sharifi to prison.

  Jennifer said in her clear cold voice, “I am resuming possession of Sanctuary. It is legally mine. Your father’s authority of guardian-in-law is void by my release. Both of you will vacate the orbital, along with the twenty-six other SuperSleepless and all those who have any formalized business arrangement with you, within twenty-four hours. If you do not, I will bring against you all the corrupt legal force of government that you brought against me.”

  Miranda said expressionlessly, “We will vacate Sanctuary.” The screen blanked.

  Will took Jennifer’s hand.

  The car approached a Y-energy security dome in the middle of an Appalachian upland. Old, worn hills, rounded on the top, gentled to leafy dark green, ungenemod. Will signaled the shield and it let the aircar through. He landed on the roof of a stone house, nanobuilt, on a low hill. They got out.

  Below Jennifer stretched a meadow of clover and daisies and bees, bounded by a shining stream that broke at the north end into a waterfall. Beyond, mountains rose in blue mist like smoky cathedrals. The sky arched milky white, faint gold at the western edge.

  Will said softly, “You’re home.”

  Jennifer looked at it, all of it—house, meadow, mountains, sky, country. Her face didn’t change, except that she closed her eyes, the better to see the meticulously engineered rage.

  “This, home? Never. This is only a battleground.”

  Will nodded slowly, and smiled, and they went inside.

  I

  NOVEMBER 2120-JANUARY 2121

  If wishes were horses, then beggars might ride.

  —John Ray, English Proverbs, 1670

  One

  There it was. Lying on a side
walk on Madison Avenue in the Manhattan East Enclave. Almost it could have been a fallen twig overlooked by a defective maintenance ’bot. But it wasn’t a preternaturally straight twig, or a dropped laser knife, or a truncated black line drawn on the nanocoated concrete, going nowhere. It was a Change syringe.

  Dr. Jackson Aranow picked it up.

  Empty, and no way to tell how long ago it had been used. The black alloy didn’t rust or dent or decay. Jackson couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen one lying around outside. Three or four years, maybe. He twirled it between his fingers like a baton, sighted along it like a telescope, pointed it at the building and said “Bang.”

  “Welcome,” the building said back. Jackson’s extended arm had brought him within sensor range. He put the syringe in his pocket and stepped into the security portico.

  “Dr. Jackson Aranow, to see Ellie Lester.”

  “’Alf a minute, sir. There you go, all cleared, sir. ’Appy to be of service, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Jackson said, a little stiffly. He disliked affected accents on buildings.

  The lobby was expensive and grotesque. A floor programmed with a yellow brick road whose bricks shifted every thirty seconds to a different path, all ending up at blank walls. A neon-green Venus with a digital clock in her belly, sitting on a beautiful antique Sheraton table beside the elevator. The elevator spoke in a high, singsong voice.

  “Please to be welcome, sahib. I am being very happy you visit Memsahib Lester. Please to look this way, allow me humble retina scan…thank you, sahib. Wishing you every gracious thing.”

  Jackson didn’t think he was going to like Ellie Lester.

  Outside the apartment door, a holo of a black man materialized, wearing a faded calico shirt, barefoot. “Sho is glad you here, sir. Sho is. Miz Ellie, she waiting on y’all inside, sir.” The holo shuffled, grinned, and put a translucent hand on the opening door.

  The apartment echoed the lobby: a carefully arranged mix of expensive antiques and ugly, outrageous kitsch. A papier-mâché rat eating her young atop an exquisite eighteenth-century sideboard. An antique television polished to a high gleam under a diamond-filament sculpture covered densely with dust. Faux, chairs, all dangerous angles and weird protuberances, impossible to sit on. “In an age of nanotech, even primitive nanotech,” said the latest issue of Design magazine, “the material presence of objects becomes vulgar, even irrelevant, and only the wit of their arrangement matters.” The two goldfish in the atrium were artfully dead, floating beside a small holo of a sinking Pequod.

  Ellie Lester strode out of a side door. She was genemod for size, which gave Jackson her age: female children engineered to top six feet had been briefly fashionable in the late eighties, when material presence hadn’t yet been irrelevant. Now that Design had decided it was, Ellie compensated for her height with wit. Over her bare breasts she wore a necklace alternating glowing laser beads with nanocoated animal turds; her draped skirt was red, white, and blue. Jackson remembered that tonight was election night.

  “Doctor, where the hell have you been? I called you ten minutes ago!”

  “It took me four minutes to get a go-’bot,” Jackson said mildly. “And you did tell me that your grandfather was already dead.”

  “Great-grandfather,” she said, scowling. “This way.”

  She walked five paces ahead, which gave Jackson a good view of her long, long legs, perfect ass, asymmetrically cut red hair. He thought of pointing the Change syringe at her and whispering “Bang.” But he left the syringe in his pocket. Parody displays weren’t actually as witty or intriguing as Design thought.

  Coward, jeered the Cazie in his mind.

  They passed through room after grotesque room. The apartment was even larger than Jackson’s on Fifth Avenue. On the walls hung elaborately framed, programmed burlesques: the Mona Lisa laughing like a hyena, A Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte in frantic, dot-dissolving motion.

  The dead man’s bedroom was much different, painted white and undecorated except for some small, predigital photographs grouped on one wall. A nursing ’bot stood silent beside the bed. The old man’s lips and cheek muscles had gone slack with death. Not genemod, but he might have been handsome once. His skin was deeply lined but nonetheless had the healthy look of all those who’d received the Change syringe, without spots or lumps or rough patches or anything else caused by either abnormal cells or toxins in the body. Neither existed anymore.

  Neither did illness. The Cell Cleaner, half of the Change magic, saw to that. Nanomachinery, made of genetically modified self-replicating protein, occupied one percent of everyone’s cells. Like white blood cells, the tiny biocomputers had the ability to leave the bloodstream and travel freely through body tissues. Unlike white blood cells, the Cell Cleaners had the ability to compare indigenous DNA with nonstandard variations and destroy not only foreign substances but aberrant DNA variations. Viruses. Toxins. Cancers. Irregular bone cells. Furthermore, the Cell Cleaner spared a long list of preprogrammed substances that belonged in the body, such as essential minerals and symbiotic bacteria. Since the Change, no doctors carried antibiotics or antivirals. No doctor carefully monitored patients for infectious complications. No doctor needed diagnostic judgment. Jackson, who had graduated from Harvard Medical School the same year that Miranda Sharifi had supplied the world with Change syringes, wasn’t a specialist. He was a mechanic.

  Jackson’s “practice” consisted of trauma, Change syringe injections of newborns, and death certifications. As a doctor, he was as obsolete as a neon-green Venus. A parody display.

  But not at this moment.

  Jackson unpacked his equipment from his medical bag and turned on the official medical comlink. Ellie Lester settled herself in the room’s only chair.

  “Name of the deceased?”

  “Harold Winthrop Wayland.”

  Jackson circled the dead man’s skull with the cerebral monitor. No electrical activity, no blood circulation in the brain. “Citizen number and birth date?”

  “AKM-92-4681-374. August 3, 2026. He was ninety-four.” She almost spat the age.

  Jackson placed the dermalyzer on Wayland’s neck. It immediately uncoiled and spread itself in a dense net of fine synthetic neurons over his face, disappearing under the collar of his silk pajamas and reappearing over his feet. A crawling, probing cocoon. Ellie Lester looked away. The monitor showed ho break or other indication of intrusion anywhere on the skin, not even the smallest puncture wound. All feeding tubules were fully functional.

  “When did you discover Mr. Wayland’s body?”

  “Just before I called you. I went in to check on him.”

  “And you found him as he looks now?”

  “Yes. I didn’t touch him, or anything in the room.”

  The dermalyzer web retracted. Jackson snaked the lung hose into Wayland’s left nostril. As soon as it touched the mucous membrane, the hose took over and disappeared down the bronchial tree into the lungs.

  “Last lung expansion at 6:42 Eastern Standard Time,” Jackson said. “No evidence of drowning. Sample tissues secured. Now, Ms. Lester, tell me and for the record everything you can remember about the deceased’s behavior in the last few days.”

  “Nothing unusual,” she said flatly. “He didn’t leave this room much, except to be led to the feeding room. You can access the nursing ’bot’s records, or take away the whole ’bot. I tried to check on him every few days. When I came in tonight, he was dead and the ’bot was on standby.”

  “Without having signaled distress signs to the house system? That’s not usual.”

  “It did signal. You can access all the house records and see for yourself. But I wasn’t home, and the connection to the comlink was malfunctioning. It still is—I didn’t touch it, so you could see.”

  Jackson said, “Then how did you call me?”

  “On my mobile link. I also called the repair franchise. You can access—”

  “I don’t want any of your records,”
Jackson said. He heard his own contemptuous tone, tried to modify it. The official link was still open. “But the police might. I only certify death, Ms. Lester, not investigate it.”

  “But…does that mean you’re going to notify the authorities? I don’t understand. My great-grandfather clearly died of old age! He was ninety-four!”

  “Many people are ninety-four now.” Jackson looked away from her eyes. Rich genemod brown, but flat and shiny as a bird’s. “Ms. Lester, what did you mean when you said that Mr. Wayland left this room only when the nurse ‘led him to the feeding area’?”

  Her shiny eyes widened, and then she shot a look of sly triumph at the comlink. “Why, Dr. Aranow—didn’t you access your patient’s records on the way over here? I told you I’d authorized your access.”

  “The go-’bot ride was short. I only live three blocks away.”

  “But you had four minutes of idle waiting for a go-’bot!” From her chair she gazed at him with brow-raised triumph. He’d bet anything she wasn’t genemod for IQ.

  He said calmly, “I did not access Mr. Wayland’s medical records. Why did the nurse have to lead him to your feeding room?”

  “Because he had Alzheimer’s, Dr. Aranow. He’d had it for fifteen years, long before the Change. Because your much-vaunted Cell Cleaner can’t repair damage to brain cells, can it, Doctor—only destroy abnormal ones. Which left him with fewer every year. Because he couldn’t find the feeding room, much less take off his own clothes and feed. Because his mind was gone and he was a drooling, vacuous, empty shell. Whose damaged brain finally just gave up and killed his body, even if it had been senselessly Changed!”

  She breathed hard. Jackson knew she was goading him, daring him to say it: You killed him. Then she’d probably sue.

  He didn’t let himself be provoked. After marriage to—and divorce from—Cazie Sanders, Ellie Lester was a stupid amateur. He said formally, “The cause of death will, of course, have to be made by the medical examiner for the City of New York, after autopsy. This preliminary report is concluded. Comlink, off.”