Beggars and Choosers

Russell, who came before David and after Anthony, had a theory about body temperature. He said that we donkeys, who are used to having instant adjustments in anything that happens to distress us, have lost the ability to ignore slight fluctuations in body temperatures. Constant environmental pampering had softened us. Russell saw this as a positive, because it made very easy identification of the successful and the genetically highly tuned (who naturally were one and the same). Watch a person pull on a sweater for a one-degree temperature drop and you know you’re looking at a superior person. I lacked the strength of will to avoid responding to this. Sort of a Princess and the Centigrade Pea, I said, but whimsey was wasted on Russell. We parted shortly afterwards when I accused him of inventing even more artificial social gradations than the ridiculous number that already existed, and he accused me of being jealous of his superior genemod left-brain logic. The last I heard, he was ru

Maybe Billy Washington made a fire; the monitor wouldn’t show that. After an hour, as I sat in warmth in my East Oleanta hotel room, the Billy-dot moved. He walked several more miles over the course of the day, in easy stages, in various directions.

A man looking for something. At no point did the dot disappear, which would have meant he’d disappeared behind a Y-energy security shield. The same thing happened for three more days and nights. Then he came home.

Incredibly, he didn’t confront me about the homer. Either he never found it, even after he took his jacket off (hard to believe), or he did but had no idea what it was and decided not to wonder. Or — and this only occurred to me later — he saw it but thought someone else had put it there, maybe while he was sleeping, and wanted it left alone. Someone out in the woods. Someone he wanted to please.

Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. What did I know about how a Liver thought? What, in fact, did I know about how anybody thought? Would somebody who had the ability to discern that knowledge on short acquaintance have actually spent eighteen months with Russell?

Two days after Billy’s return from the woods, A

“Where’s it at?” Billy said. He meant the actual train, sitting somewhere along its magnetic track.

“Right here,” A

Lizzie looked up with interest from the handheld terminal with her precious crystal library. I hadn’t witnessed A

Lizzie said, “Can trains burn, them?”

“No,” Billy said shortly. “And it’s against the law to do hurt to them anyway.”

Lizzie digested this. “But if nobody can’t come, them, from Albany on the train to punish people who break the law—”

“They can come, them, on a plane, can’t they?” A

“I ain’t thinking about it, me. Celie Kane is,” Lizzie said reasonably. “Besides, ain’t nobody going to come, them, to East Oleanta on a plane anymore from Albany. All those donkeys got bigger problems than us, them.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” I said, but naturally no one answered.

Outside, in the hall, someone shouted. Feet ran past our door, came back, pounded once. Billy and A

“The warehouse ain’t opened again, it! Second week in a row! We’re going smash that fucking building — I need another blanket and some boots, me!”

“Oh,” Billy said, and shut the door.

“Billy,” I said carefully, “who else knows you have food and warehouse goods hoarded here?”

“Nobody but us four,” he said, not meeting my eyes. He was ashamed.

“Don’t tell anyone. No matter how much they say they need this stuff.”

Billy looked helplessly at A

A

I stretched. “I think I’ll go witness the liberation of the District Supervisor Aaron Simon Samuelson Goods Distribution Center.”

A

“You shut up, child! You ain’t going no place, you, that dangerous!” A

Lizzie pressed her lips together so tightly they all but disappeared. I had never seen her do that before. She was still A

“No, you’re not,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll tell you what happens.” Lizzie subsided, grumbling.

A

A small crowd, twenty or so, battered on the foamcast door of the warehouse, using a sofa as battering ram. I knew this was hopeless; if the Bastille had been made of foamcast, Marie Antoinette would have gone on needing wigs. I lounged across the street, leaning against a turquoise apartment building, and watched.

The door gave way.

Twenty people gave a collective shout and rushed inside. Then twenty people gave another shout, this one furious. I examined the door hinges. They had been duragem, taken apart atom by atom by dissemblers.

“There’s nothing in here!”

“They cheated us, them!”

“Fucking bastards—”

I peered inside. The first small room held a counter and terminal. A second door led to the depository, which was lined with empty shelves, empty bins, empty overhead hooks where jacks and vases and music chips and chairs and cleaning ’bots and hand tools should go. I felt a chill prickle over me from neck to groin, an actual frisson complexly made of fear and fascination. It was true then. The economy, the political structure, the duragem crisis, were acutally this bad. For the first time in over a hundred years, since Kenzo Yagai invented cheap energy and remade the world, there really was not enough to go around. The politicians were conserving production for the cities, where larger numbers of voters resided, and writing off less populous or less easily reached areas with fewer votes. East Oleanta had been written off.