Beggars and Choosers Read Online Free PDF Page A

too unreliable.
That I
had
left my training before its completion was de
facto unreliability, disloyalty, unacceptability for anything
important. That’s the way government types think. Maybe they’re right.
    Whatever surveillance Colin gave me would be strictly backup, triple
redundancy. There was a theory for this in surveillance work: cheap,
limited, and out of control. It started as a robot-engineering theory
but pretty soon carried over into police work. If there are a lot of
investigators with limited tasks, they won’t cohere into a single
premature viewpoint about what they’re looking for. That way, they
might turn up something totally unexpected. Colin wanted me for the
equivalent of a wild card.
    I didn’t mind. At least it would get me out of San Francisco.
    Colin said, “For the last two years the Supers have been entering
the United States, in ones and twos, heavily disguised both
cosmetically and electronically. They travel around to various Liver
towns or donkey enclaves, and then go home, to La Isla. We want to know
why.”
    I murmured, “Maybe they have Gravison’s disease.”
    “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
    “I said, have you made any progress penetrating Huevos Verdes?”
    “No,” he said, but then he wouldn’t have told me if they have. The
sexual innuendo he missed completely.
    “And who will I be keeping under surveillance?” The excitement was a
little bubble in my throat now, still surprising. It had been a long
time since anything had excited me. Except David, of course, who had
taken his sexy shoulders and verbal charm and sense of superiority to
hold in readiness for plunking down temporarily in the middle of some
other woman’s life.
    He said, “You’ll be following Miranda Sharifi.”
    “Ah.”
    “I have full ID information and kit for you in a locker at the
gravrail station. You’ll pass as a Liver.”
    This was a slight insult; Colin was implying my looks weren’t
spectacular enough to absolutely mark them as genemod. I let it pass.
    Colin said, “She’s only made one trip off the island herself. We
think. When the next one happens, you go with her.”
    “How will you be sure it’s her? If they’re using both cosmetic and
electronic disguises, she could have different features, hair, even
brain-scan projection all masking her own.”
    “True. But their heads are slightly misshapen, slightly too big.
That’s hard to disguise.”
    I knew that, of course. Everybody did. Thirteen years ago, when the
Supers had first come down from Sanctuary, their big heads had given
rise to a lot of bad jokes. The actuality was that their revved-up
metabolism and altered brain chemistry had caused other abnormalities,
the human genemod being a very complex thing. Supers are not, I
remembered, an especially handsome people.
    I said, “Their heads aren’t
that
big, Colin. In some
lights it’s even hard to tell at all.”
    “Also, their infrared body scans are on file. From the trial. You
can’t move the position of your liver, or mask the digestive rate in
your duodenum.”
    Which are both pretty generic anyway. Infrared scans aren’t even
admissible in court as identity markers. They’re too unreliable. Still,
it was better than nothing.
    All of this was better than the nothing with David. The nothing of
Stephanie. The something of Katous.
Thank you, lady
.
    Colin said, “The trips off Huevos Verdes are increasing. They’re
planning something. We need to find out what.”
    “Si, senor,” I said. He wasn’t amused.
    We’d walked nearly to the perimeter of the security bubble.
    Beyond its faint shimmer, a body pod had arrived for the dead
scooter racer. I could just see some Livers loading him into the pod,
at the very edge of my range of genemod-enhanced vision. The Livers
were crying. They got the body into the pod, and the pod started down
the track. After fifteen feet there was a sudden grinding sound and the
pod stopped. Livers pushed. The pod didn’t move. The