Beggars Ride

Epilogue November 2128

Jackson waited beside the ugly bulk of a destroyed building, his equipment well back in the shadows. The usual procedure. The building had been foamcast, which meant it couldn’t bum, but everything else had been done to it. Smashing, ramming, looting, maybe even shelling. Old destruction, starting to be covered by the mutated form of kudzu covering the rest of St. Louis, possibly the ugliest place Jackson had ever been.

In the last seven years, he’d been a lot of ugly places.

Theresa and Dirk had finished their readying and started their walk forward. Dirk, eight years old and new to readying, clung tightly to his mother’s hand. Lizzie, of course, had not needed to ready; she’d never contracted the inhibition virus. But she was guiding Dirk, who over the past year had made tremendous progress in sustaining another persona—he called his “Treeboy.” Dirk had learned readying with the adaptability of the young, apparently still present under the panicky inhibition artificially hardwired into his amygdalae. “Treeboy,” created by imagination but neurochemically real, was braver and freer than Dirk was. Jackson had the brain scans to prove it.

Theresa led the way. Theresa, dressed in the most ragged of all three of their pathetic rags. Theresa, whose fair hair, grown out from baldness, was the most matted of the three. Theresa, with the emptiest hands, for whom this was harder than for anyone else.

Theresa, who was finally happy.

The three beggars approached the semi-whole building where the infected tribe camped. All the Livers, of course, had fled inside. Theresa, Lizzie, and Dirk squatted in front of the closed door and began to beg.

“Warm clothing, please. Oh, please give us some warm clothing if you can spare it, the nights are so cold…”

They would stay there, Jackson knew, for days, if days were necessary. This time, he didn’t think they would be. The beggars had a child with them. All the inhibited, in and out of the enclaves, were more likely to open to women and children. The Order of the Spiritual Brain—Jackson hated the name, but it had been Theresa’s choice—had three thousand members across the country, not counting affiliated doctors and corporate sponsors, but only twenty-eight percent were male. Still, the number was growing. The Order was growing.

Almost as fast as the inhibition was spreading.

Still, the major pharmaceutical companies—Kelvin-Castner, Lilly, Genentech Neuropharm, Silverstone Martin—were close to a reverser. They might have been closer still if the inhibition plague had been easier to transmit. But the human race had been lucky. If one person in a camp or enclave got it, usually everyone did, due to the poor sanitation and feeding habits of the Changed. But transmission between camps and enclaves was slow, because once infected, the inhibited neither became nor received visitors.

Theresa was changing that.

“Please, just a warm coat…” little Dirk begged.

Sometimes the camp would just open the door and throw out whatever was being begged: clothing, a jug of water, a spare Y-cone for warmth. The beggars didn’t go away. The one thing about religious orders, Jackson thought, awaiting his part in the shadows, was that they were persistent. Nuts, maybe, but persistent.

And, sometimes, effective.

The door of the Liver building opened a crack. A man squeezed through, followed by a child. Jackson switched his eyes to zoom augments. The child wasn’t Changed. Jackson studied the bare, inflamed patches on the side of her scalp: rounded lesions, crusty in the middle and scaly at the edges. Most likely ringworm. But otherwise the little girl looked healthy, if inhibited. Although not as inhibited as some others. The renegade neuropharm, like every other drug, affected different people differently. There were even a few cases of natural immunity, studied eagerly by the pharmaceuticals and the CDC.

The little girl ducked behind the man’s legs, but peeped out between them at Dirk.

Treeboy smiled.

Maybe Jackson wouldn’t have to wait too long to do his part, after all.

The equipment stood ready, loaded onto a floater. Medicines, nursing ’bot. And, most important, holo cartridges to play on the camp’s very own terminal, a terminal they were used to, that was a part of the usual routine. Theresa would start them with the holos on medical care for the unChanged children. Even the most inhibited would try something new when their children’s lives were at stake. The more unChanged children were born, the more desperate the inhibited came—and that need was the key to getting into their lives.

Once in, Theresa would gradually introduce the holos on readiness. She, herself constantly afraid, would teach them to overcome fear by imagining a different self. Then, later, they would learn the biofeedback techniques that could make that different self neurochemically real. Temporary—but real. And ready when you needed it.

Or until somebody found a medical solution to the same problem.

A medical solution would of course be simpler, easier, faster. Just take a neuropharm. With the right neuropharm, you could become less fearful, more fearful, more lusty, more hopeful, less angry, more lethargic… anything. But Theresa and her disciples weren’t using neuropharms. So the question wasn’t, as Jackson had always assumed, how neurochemically driven were humans? The question was, why were they ever driven by anything but neurochemicals? Why—and how—could men and women choose against their own fear, lust, hope, anger, inertia? Because clearly they could choose that. Theresa was doing so, right in front of his eyes. So not—isn’t man just a bunch of chemicals? Rather—how could man ever be anything else?

Jackson didn’t know the answers. He was, after seven years, still uneasy with the questions.

He blew on his hands; it was getting colder. Jackson turned on the Y-heat filaments woven fluidly into his clothes. Theresa, Dirk, and Lizzie vanished inside the building; a good thing, too, since beggars’ rags carried no Y-heat weaving. Nor personal shields. The beggars wore remotes monitored by the backup doctors and nurses—themselves backed up by carefully concealed, highly equipped security ’bots. In the seven years of Theresa’s Order of the Spiritual Brain, the security ’bots had only been needed three times. The inhibited were not notable fighters.

The sun began to set over the rubble of St. Louis. Another night vigil. Jackson sighed, activated the Y-shield tent, and moved the floater inside it. He called Vicki.

“Hello, Jackson. How is the assault going? Has Troy fallen yet?”

Jackson grinned. “We just wheeled in the wooden horse. Don’t let Lizzie hear you call it that.”

“People in the grip of temporary religious mania have no sense of humor. Even seven-year temporary mania. How are you, love?”

“Lonely.” Jackson looked more sharply at Vicki’s face on the small portable screen. “How are you? You look… something’s happened.”

“Yes,” Vicki said. Her violet eyes reflected light, like purple wine.

Jackson said, “Someone’s found the reverser.”

“No. Not that. Although K-C keeps saying how close they are. Something else—clearly you haven’t been watching the newsgrids. The Chicago School of Medicine has made an announcement.”

“An announcement? Of what?”

“Egg and sperm. Frozen for seven years, unknown until they arrived by time-activated ’bot last week.”

A slow pounding filled Jackson’s ears. In the distance, beyond the shadows, the door of the Liver building opened again. “Egg and sperm. Whose?”

“You can guess, Jackson. All of the SuperSleepless. Miranda Sharifi, Terry Mwakambe, Christina Demetrios, Jonathan Markowitz… all the dead geniuses that we normals didn’t know how to engineer for ourselves.”

Jackson said nothing. A small figure slipped out the camp door into the long twilight shadows.

Vicki said, “The Chicago School of Medicine is where the original Sleepless were engineered one hundred twenty-five years ago. Leisha Camden, Kevin Baker, Richard Keller… Miranda Sharifi must have had a sentimental streak after all.”

“So it will start all over.”

“If they fertilize, it will. The debate will be fierce. Do we need more dei from rediscovered machinae? Or are we better off blundering along alone?”

The small figure was Dirk. On zoom, Jackson could see that the little boy was terrified, exhilarated, proud of himself, longing to run back inside. Dirk waved frantically for Jackson to come to the building.

“Vicki, I have to go. They’re ready to let me inside.”

“Already?”

“Already. Theresa’s getting very good at this.”

“Saint Theresa. All right, Jackson, go convert. I love you.” The screen blanked.

Now Dirk waved both hands. Jackson put away his comlink, waved back, and summoned the floater. The equipment to teach people to take back their own lives was ready: medicine, teaching holos, nursing ’bot, seeds, crystal library. All following the chemically inhibited Dirk, who had turned himself into Treeboy, who had become a beggar because only with empty, open hands could any of them reach each others.

Dr. Jackson Aranow moved forward with his gifts.