Beggars and Choosers by Nancy Kress Read Free Book Online Page A

screamed. The stomp with the biggest wooden
club had grabbed her food, him, and was eating it. Jack and Paulie and
Norm Frazier charged over, them, and jumped the kid. His buddies jumped
back. Tables crashed over and people started running. Somebody had just
changed HT channels, and a scooter race in Alabama roared by,
life-size. I grabbed Annie and Lizzie and shoved them to the door. “Get
out! Get out!”
    Outside, the Y-lights made Main Street bright as day. I could feel
my heart banging but I didn’t slow up, me. Angry people got no sense.
Anything could happen. I panted, me, alongside Annie, she running with
those big breasts bouncing, Lizzie running quick and quiet as a deer.
    In Annie’s apartment on Jay Street I collapsed, me, on a sofa. It
wasn’t none too comfortable, not like sofas I remembered from when I
was young, the soft ones you kept around long enough to take the shape
of a person’s body.
    But on the other hand, plastisynth don’t never get vermin.
    Lizzie
said, her eyes bright, “Do you think a donkey will
come, them, to fix the foodbelt in an hour?”
    I gasped, “Lizzie… hush, you.”
    “But what if in an hour no donkey don’t come to—”
    Annie said, “You be quiet, Lizzie, or you’ll wish them donkeys will
come to fix
you
! Billy, you better stay here, you, for
tonight. No telling what them fools at the cafe might do.”
    She brought me a blanket, one of those she’d embroidered, her, with
bright yarns from the warehouse. More embroideries hung on the wall,
woven with bits of pop can the young girls make jewelry out of, with
torn-up jacks, with any other bright thing Annie could find. All the
Jay Street apartments look alike. They was all built at the same time
about ten years ago, when some senator came up from way behind and
needed a big campaign boost. Small rooms, foamcast walls, plastisynth
furniture from a warehouse distrib, but Annie’s is one of the few that
looks to me like a home.
    Annie made
Lizzie
go to bed. Then she came, her, and sat
on a chair close by my sofa.
    “Billy—did you see, you, that woman in the cafe?”
    “What woman?” It was nice, her sitting so close.
    “The one standing, her, off by the back wall. Wearing green jacks.
She don’t live, her, in East Oleanta.”
    “So?” I snuggled under Annie’s pretty blanket. We get travelers
sometimes, us, though not as many as we used to, now that the gravrail
don’t work so regular. Meal chips are good anyplace in the state, they
come from United States senators, and it didn’t used to be hard to get
an interstate exchange chip. Maybe it still ain’t. I don’t travel much.
    “She looked different,” Annie said.
    “Different how?”
    Annie pressed her lips tight together, thinking. Her lips were dark
and shiny as blackberries, them, the lower one so full that pressing
them together only made it look juicier. I had to look away, me.
    She said slowly, “Different like a donkey.”
    I sat up on the sofa. The blanket slid off. “You mean genemod? I
didn’t see, me, nobody like that.”
    “Well, she wasn’t genemod pretty. Short, with squinchy features and
low eyebrows and a head a little too big. But she was a donkey, her. I
know
it. Billy—you think she’s a FBI spy?”
    “In East Oleanta? We ain’t got no underground organizations, us. All
we got is rotten stomps that want to spoil life for the rest of us.”
    Annie kept on pressing her lips together. County Legislator Thomas
Scott Drinkwater runs our police franchise. He contracts, him, with an
outfit that has both ‘bots and donkey officers. We don’t see them much.
They don’t keep the peace on the streets, and they don’t bother, them,
about thefts because there’s always more in the warehouse. But when we
have an assault, us, or a murder, or a rape, they’re there. Just last
year Ed Jensen was gene-fingered for killing the oldest Flagg girl when
a lodge dance got too rough. Jensen got took, him, up to Albany, for
twenty-five-to-life. On