Beggars and Choosers

She was too young, her. A

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 A

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

“Stay,” A

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 A

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

Three

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 go

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. Al-losteric 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.