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Beggars Ride

(Sleepless-3)

by Nancy Kress

Acknowledgments

For Jill Beves, R. N. , CCRN,

who could never be replaced by a nursing ’bot

Prologue

The prison door swung open and she stepped through.

The aircar waited in the parking lot a hundred feet away. She had asked her husband this: Don’t come for me. Let me come to you. Will Sandaleros had understood. He waited in the car, alone.

Jennifer Sharifi stood still, surveying the outside. Grass. Trees. Flowers, genemod marililies and silver roses, sweet william and moonweed. It was full summer. The warden, beside her, said something. She didn’t hear him.

Twenty-seven years.

Everything had changed. Nothing had changed.

Twenty-seven years since she had been tried, convicted, and imprisoned for a crime she most certainly had committed, treason against the United States of America. Except that it had not been a crime. It had been a revolution, a fight for freedom from the Sleepers that had tried to plunder and destroy Jennifer’s people. The government had used that modem weapon of destruction, ruinous taxes that eviscerated productive life, and Jennifer in turn had used one even more modem: genetic terrorism. Jennifer Sharifi and her eleven Sleepless allies had held five American cities hostage to genemod retroviruses, until the Sleepers let her people go.

Only they had not done so. But not because the Sleeper government could outwit Sleepless. Jennifer’s defeat had come from another quarter. And Jennifer and the others had gone to prison with varying sentences, Jennifer’s the longest. Twenty-seven years.

A second groundcar pulled up beside Will’s. Reporters? Maybe not, in this changed world. An old woman got out of the car, walked in the opposite direction. Jennifer watched dispassionately.

The old woman—in her eighties, from her face—moved with the smooth-jointed walk and fluid arm swings they all had now. Since the Change. But the woman was still old: used up, nearly finished.

Jennifer Sharifi was 114. She looked thirty-five, and would continue to look thirty-five. But twenty-seven years had been lost. And her world.

The warden was still talking. Jennifer ignored him. She concentrated on her rage: massive, molten, welling up like slow thick lava from the planetary core. Coldly she walled it off, contained it, directed it. Undirected rage was a danger; directed rage was an inexhaustible force. It was an engineering problem.

Not a muscle of her beautiful face moved.

When she was ready, Jennifer walked away from the gabbling warden, away from Allendale Maximum Security Federal Prison, where she had spent twenty-seven years for treason against a government that, by now, barely existed.

Will didn’t kiss or embrace her. But he reached for her hand, and he sat motionless a moment before he started the car.

“Hello, Will. ”

“Hello, Jenny. ”

No more was needed.

The car rose. Below her, the warden dwindled, and then the prison. Jennifer said to the comlink, “Messages?”

“No messages,” it answered, which wasn’t surprising. The link wasn’t shielded. Her messages would be waiting on Will’s link, wherever he was living temporarily. There would be a lot of messages, and more in the days to come, as Jennifer gathered up once more the strands of her enormous, tangled corporate and financial web. But not in the United States. Never again in the United States. There was one call to make on an unshielded link.