She wasn’t Theresa, she was a beggar. A beggar with a gift. The gift of needing—
The walk to the camp nearly finished her. The camp looked deserted, but the beggar knew better. She squatted outside, in full view of a window, and began to cry. “I’m so hungry, I’m so hungry…” And she was. Theresa was hungry, the beggar was hungry, Theresa was the beggar, with her gift.
Eventually the door opened, and an old woman peered fearfully around its corner, hugging the door.
“Please, ma’am, I’m not Changed, I haven’t eaten, I’m sick, I’m so hungry, don’t leave me here…”
The woman’s fear was heavy on the air; the beggar could smell it. But her old face creased with compassion. The beggar saw that the old woman, in her long life, knew well what it meant to be hungry, and sick, and alone.
Slowly the old woman crept around the door. And with her, the two people to whom she must be bonded, another elderly woman and a young girl whose heavy features resembled the second woman. One carried a bowl, another a blanket, a third a plastic cup. Ten feet from the beggar they stopped, breathing hard, taut with fear.
“Please, please, I can’t move anymore…”
Fear warred with memory. The old women, who remembered the unChanged days of hunger and sickness, briefly became the people they’d been then. And moved toward Theresa, the stranger in need.
“Here, now, how come you’re not Changed, you? Eat this, go on… Look at her arms, Paula, they’re like sticks, them…”
Plastic bowl and spoon. A mess of gluey food, looking like oatmeal but tasting of wild nuts, slightly bitter, incompletely masked by too sweet maple sugar. The beggar wolfed it all.
“She’s starving, her… Paula, she can’t hardly move, we can’t leave her here, us…”
From around the edge of the heavy door crept Josh and Mike and Patty, clinging to each other’s hands. Jomp. Feebly, the beggar raised her bald, scarred head. They didn’t recognize her. “Not Changed’ her? Jesus Christ—”
“It’s starting to rain, she can’t stay, her, out here like that…”
Mike picked her up. The beggar winced as her tender skin was hoisted into his arms. He carried her inside, the others trailing behind.
A dim, strange room, unfamiliar faces peering at her in fear… Her throat started to close and her heart to race. But she wasn’t Theresa. She was the beggar. The beggar with a gift. They needed her to need them.
The unChanged child, the same child she’d seen before, in another life, watched her from behind her mother’s legs. So it was still alive. And older; the beggar could see now that it was a little boy. His nose streamed snot. His crippled left arm, shorter than the right, dangled from his shoulder.
“Thank you,” she said to the circle of faces. A few shrank back, but the rest nodded and smiled. “Now will you let me give you something, because you helped me?”
Immediate alarm. Something different, something new. The beggar wondered, deep in a part of the brain that was someone else, how all their brain scans changed with her words.
“You can do this, accept this,” she said. “It’s just a ’bot. You’ve all seen ’bots, lots of times.”
The door to the building had been left open. The nursing ’bot, following its instructions, followed the beggar. The unChanged child, who had not seen ’bots lots of times, began to cry.
“It’s a medunit,” the beggar said desperately. Maybe if she spoke like them… “A medunit, it. Like we used to have, us. It can’t Change that baby, but it can give him medicine for his nose. It can fix his arm, it.” And, again, “You can do this.”
“Do what, us?” Josh said. He was still the most intelligent, and the least afraid. The beggar spoke directly to him.
“Do something new, Josh. You can do it, you, if it’s a good thing, and you really want to. I can teach you how, me.”
She was going too fast. Josh paled and took a step backward. But she also saw the quick gleam of interest in his eyes, before it was lost in fear. He could do it. He could learn to make different brain chemistry by pretending to be a person who was different. Maybe not all of them could, but some could. Like Josh. And maybe that would be enough.
A man was backing away from the nursing ’bot, dragging his two partners with him. “No, no, we’re fine, us. Take it away, you!”
But the mother of the crippled child stood her shaky ground. Theresa reached out and, with a corner of her torn and muddied shirt, wiped the baby’s nose. The mother let her, although her hand tightened on the little boy’s good shoulder. Still, she let the beggar, who ended up with snot all over her hand, touch her child. She had a reason to fight the fear.
Take a neuropharm, Tessie. It’s a medical problem.
With that thought, she was Theresa again. Theresa weak, Theresa frightened, Theresa in a strange place with strange people. She felt her breathing grow uneven. But she had been the beggar, she had come here, she had made a difference… and next time she would be the beggar longer. Would teach others to do it, only not now, she was so weak, she was afraid but these others understood fear, they would take care of her…
She had time for just one more thought before blackness took her. Theresa’s thought, not the beggar’s: Only partway a medical problem, Jackson. Only partway.
When she came to herself again, Theresa lay on a strange bed in the dark. No, not a bed: a pile of blankets on the floor, spread over pine branches. She could smell them, and they rustled underneath her. Irregular walls loomed on either side of her.
The Liver camp. They had put her to bed in one of their own sleeping places. Theresa remembered everything. Immediately she closed her eyes and tried to become Cazie. Only Cazie could get her out of here without panicking. She was Cazie, she was fierce and small and fearless, she was Cazie… the now-familiar click happened in her brain.
She rose quietly in the dark and groped along the closest wall. It ended in a heavy blanket hung as a curtain. After she pushed it aside, there was more light, glowing from a Y-cone in the center of the cavernous floor. The room smelled of unwashed, sleeping people. Cazie crossed it as swiftly as her battered body permitted. Halfway to the door, the nursing ’bot floated up to her. “Ms. Aranow, you’ve missed two sessions of physical re—”
“Quiet!” Cazie whispered. “Don’t talk! You stay right here.”
The ’bot whispered, “I am not programmed for override reassignment, Ms. Aranow. I must stay with you.”
The stupid thing was bonded to her. Like Jomp. Cazie scowled. “Then follow me in half an hour. Like before.”
She hobbled to the door and opened it quietly. The moon was full and high. Cazie started along the path beside the river, to the aircar. It took every bit of Theresa’s strength, borrowed and made and natural and a final strength that could only have been a gift, to make it.
“Oh, God,” a voice said. “Oh, Theresa!”
Vicki Turner. Vicki’s voice. But what was Vicki doing on the roof of her apartment building, in the cold night? Theresa, heavily asleep before the aircar landed, blinked and shrank back against the seat.
“Look at you, Theresa. Where did you go? Those rags… don’t you have a hat? Come on, let me help you…”
“I was Cazie,” Theresa said. “And the beggar.”
“What? Come on inside, you’re shivering. I’ve been waiting here for you to come home because I had no idea where to look, I didn’t even dare tell Jackson you were missing. No, Tessie, let me hold you up, here’s the elevator…”
She was asleep again. She was dreaming, she must be, strange shapes with huge teeth were chasing her across a genemod garden where all the trees hated her, she could feel their hatred coming to her in waves and she couldn’t understand what she’d done to make them want to destroy her—