Free Beggars and Choosers by Nancy Kress Page B

that draws on subconscious
risk-taking imagery. He wants it by your broadcast a week from Sunday.”
    “Maybe Terry should just write it for me.”
    “You know none of us can do that.” Then her eyes sharpened and her
mouth softened. “
You’re
the Lucid Dreamer, Drew. None of us
can do what you do. If we seem to be… directing you too much, it’s only
because the project requires it. The whole thing would be impossible
without you.”
    I smiled at her. She looked so concerned, filled with so much
passion for her work. So resolute.
Implacable
, Leisha had
said of her father.
Willing to bend anything that stood in his way
.
    She said, “You do believe that we know how important you are, Drew?
Drew?”
    I said, “I know, Miri.”
    Her face broke into shards of light, like swords in my mind. “Then
you’ll compose the new piece?”
    “Risk taking,” I said. “Presented as desirable, attractive, urgent.
Right. By a week from Sunday.”
    “It’s really necessary, Drew. We’re still months away from a
prototype in the lab, but the country…” She picked up another set of
hard copy. “Look. Gravtrain breakdowns up eight percent over last
month. Reports to the FCC of communications interruptions—up another
three percent. Bankruptcies up five percent. Food movement—this is
crucial—performing sixteen percent less efficiently. Industrial
indicators falling at the same dismal rate. Voter confidence in the
basement. And the duragem situation—”
    For once her voice lost its quarter-beat-behind slowness. “Look at
these graphs, Drew! We can’t even locate the origin of the duragem
breakdowns—there’s no one epicenter. And when you run the data through
the Lawson conversion formulas—”
    “Yes,” I said, to escape the Lawson conversion formulas. “I believe
you. It’s bad out there and getting worse.”
    “Not just worse—apocalyptical.”
    My mind fills with crimson fire and navy thunder, surrounding a
crystal rose behind an impenetrable shield. Miri grew up on Sanctuary.
Necessities and comforts were a given. All the time, for everybody,
without question or thought. Unlike me, Miranda never saw a baby die of
neglect, a wife beaten by a despairing and drunk husband, a family
existing on unflavored soysynth, a toilet that didn’t work for days.
She didn’t know these things were survivable. How would she recognize
an apocalypse?
    I don’t say this aloud.
    Terry Mwakambe jumped down from the windowsill. He hadn’t said a
single word the whole time we’d been in the room. His thought strings,
Miri said, consisted almost entirely of equations. But now he said,
“Lunch?”
    I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Lunch! The one tie between Terry
Mwakambe and Drew Arlen: food. Surely even Terry and Miri must see the
joke, standing here in this room, this building, this project… Lunch!
    Neither of them laughed. I felt the shape of their bewilderment. It
was a rain of tiny, tear-shaped droplets, falling on everything,
falling on the apocalypse in my mind, falling on me, light and cold and
smothering as snow.
----

Four
    DIANA COVINGTON: KANSAS
    One night in another lifetime Eugene, who came before Rex and after
Claude, asked me what the United States reminded me of. That was the
sort of question to which Gene was given: inviting metaphorical
grandiosity, which in turn invited his scorn. I replied that the United
States had always seemed to me like some powerful innocent beast,
lushly beautiful, with the cranial capacity of a narrow-headed deer.
Look how it stretches its sleek muscles in the sunlight. Look how it
bounds high. Look how it runs gracefully straight into the path of the
oncoming train. This answer had the virtue of being so inflatedly
grandiose that to object to it on those grounds became superfluous. It
was beside the point that the answer was also true.
    Certainly from
my
gravrail I could see enough of the lush,
mangled carcass. We’d come over the Rockies at quarter speed so the
Liver