BEGGARMAN by Susan Shwartz

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(Reprinted from the 1994 anthology 2041, edited by Jane Yolen)

“And see the wounded world healed in my dreams…”

One more line, and Jommy would have the poem finished. Earth bobbed in the viewport—or maybe he bobbed in zero G. It was hard to tell—fragile and bright like the enormous soap bubbles you could blow in zero G if you weren’t worrying about a downcheck about antisocial behavior.

Oh, this was going to be one good poem—maybe the best he’d ever written. He could just hear it…

“The wounded world, he says. The wooouuunnded wor-ulld! Jommy, you’re such a throwback! And pen on paper too!”

Jolted from his thoughts, Jommy started, bouncing at least a meter in the Rim’s zero G as Andrew and Mira snatched at his poems, gracefully, careful to conserve motion. Just his luck. The most popular kids on the Habitats just would have had to be the ones who’d nicknamed him “Throwback.”

“The wounded world!” Others of the Spaceborn surrounded him, chanting the line he had thought was so wonderful mockingly through their noses.

The new poem was ruined now, and Mira was snatching at the others.

“Waste paper, everyone! Throwback doesn’t even recycle.”

Jommy tried to protect his poems, but low and zero G were the Spaceborns’ particular habitats, not his. He got dizzy if he moved too fast. Besides, born on the station, they were taller than he, sinewy and lithe as if freedom from constant one G let their spines stretch. Earth, and his shattered vision of it, watched as they danced about him.

Mira gave him a shove that sent him flying so fast his head spun and lunch threatened to heave itself back up.

He swallowed and tried to aim himself, use the inertia of his weightless body to crash into at least one of them and bump him into the frosty Rim bulkhead. The Spaceborn laughed and evaded him, kicking effortlessly out at the last moment to send him flying in another direction.

“Listen to what else old Throwback says,” Andrew shouted, beginning to read the poem—his private Earth dreams!—in an affectedly dramatic voice.

“That’s so sick!” cried Mira. “He wants to live on a dirtball!”

The Spaceborn kids laughed and gasped at Mira’s last word. It was about the worst thing anyone could say. If her parents heard her, they’d… they’d talk at her, and they were all psychs.

Then someone’s knee caught the side of his head, and he bounced out of the sphere of jeering Spaceborn.

Three Spaceborn leapt, meeting midway between deck and bulkhead to snicker and trade dirt stories.

“I heard there’s an Earther here now. Came up here because he caught some sort of dirtball disease…”

“How ’bout it, Jommy, wanna meet the Beggarman?”

Could you die of shame? Jommy thought he was about to find out.

SERVICE ACCESS. He saw the words stenciled in black across a hatch twice before they made sense. Next to them was a button and, best of all, a handle, welded onto the bulkhead beside the hatch.

There it was, coming up!

The metal burned his hand as inertia tested his grip, but he hung on, then levered himself into the crawl space and watched the square of light vanish as the hatch slid shut.

Jommy shut his eyes, squeezing them till ugly lights exploded behind his eyelids. Once the colors made him good and sick, he let his eyes open, and blinked once.

Now, where was he? Up or down? He remembered his mother’s words. “Up and down are misnomers in zero G.” You didn’t have altitude. Just attitude.

He wanted to go “Down” toward heavier G, maybe toward the Habitat’s core where he’d be his Earthside weight.

He’d gotten into another fight, and that would affect his application to school.

It wasn’t my fault! Jommy wanted to howl. It was all so useless. The psychs and teachers, as well as his parents, would believe the Spaceborn. It was useless. They were certain to make McAuliffe, the institute on the oldest Habitat where all the brightest, luckiest kids got to go. Throwback Jommy’d better say his prayers that he wasn’t left behind, to miss out on advanced training and friends from all the Habitats and get stuck on makework all his life.

Careful. Where there was gravity, there was direction. He could fall and really hurt himself now.

Heavier and heavier he grew, and his breath now came in gasps. His hands, hot from grasping the rungs of the ladder, began to blister.

Now the rungs curved round the central bulkhead, forming a little perch beside a bigger-than-normal red emergency light, shining over a hatch marked EXIT.

What was it his father had told him? “We named you Jommy for a boy in a story. He was very special and very brave.” Just last year, he had come across that story in his father’s collection of old texts. Jommy wasn’t a name for someone special and brave. It was the name of a freak people chased. He’d certainly lived up to that, hadn’t he?”

He cried for a while, till he thought of Security chasing him through the shaft.

Fear brought him fully alert. Below the EXIT marks were codes that indicated what deck and subdivision level he had reached. Just as he thought, he was near the one-G core. He pressed the red button and, when the hatch hummed aside, thrust himself out into the too-bright corridor.

His timing was like everything else in his life—rotten! Wouldn’t you just know he’d hear footsteps? Heavy footsteps, the steps of an adult confident of his right to go where he pleased without feedback.

“What’s this?” asked a voice he had never heard before. It was deeper, more richly accented than the Habitants’. Jommy looked down at the intruder’s boots. Now, he understood why his steps had sounded so strange. Attached to the boots were small metal plates that he knew could be magnetized in low-G areas. Only one type of person would wear such boots: someone who wasn’t used to low G. Someone from Earth.

Jommy had just met the Beggarman.

“Why do I get the feeling I’m supposed to say ‘Fee, fie, fo, fum’?” he asked. He backed up a step or two. “Get up and run, lad, if that’s what you want.”

The laugh and friendly words stopped Jommy in mid-scramble. The Earthman didn’t look like the Beggarman. The Beggarman should be skeleton-thin, dressed in rags he hadn’t changed since Breakaway when he’d sneaked on board the last ship to flee Earth. He should have hungry, vacant eyes. And above all, the Beggarman would never step back to let anybody run.

What Jommy saw instead was a man in late middle age, wearing the same sort of worksuits that everyone wore. But the scars of sun and gravity were upon him. Like Jommy, he was shorter than the usual Habitant. His hair was streaked with gray. His skin was wrinkled and darker—tanned, the word was—and his eyes, under thick, thick eyebrows, were very bright.

“You were expecting… what? Some sort of monster? Instead, you met me. Sorry to disappoint you. Dr. George I. Stewart, at your service,” said the Earthman. “The I’s for Isherwood; my father had a strange sense of humor. Want a hand?”

Jommy shook his head and braced himself against the wall, his free hand patting the dust from his sides and backside.

“Care to tell me your name?”

The Privacy Codes said you didn’t have to give your name. You didn’t even have to be nice if you thought you were in trouble. Just step out into the corridor and call the nearest Security Monitor for help. But would the real Beggarman give his name, even make a little joke out of it, then spread out his hands to show he meant no harm?

Tentatively, Jommy smiled back. The man didn’t look as if he were going to—what was the bad Earther word?—mug Jommy.

“I’m Jommy,” he told the Earther at last, feeling awful even as he said it. He’d had the same feeling the first time he’d taken free-fall drill. Only that time, he’d thrown up.

“Maybe you’ll tell me your last name later. It couldn’t be ‘Cross’ by any chance, could it?”

Jommy grinned. That was the name of his namesake in the book Slan. The Earther grinned back, an I-didn’t-think-so sort of smile. Oh, Jommy hoped the Spaceborn were lying about Earthers.

“Well, we’re both named for loners. And I’d say, young Jommy, that we’re both pretty far from where we’re supposed to be. If this were my home, I’d guess you’d been in quite a fight. Who won?”

Jommy let his wad of papers fall. By now, Mira had probably cried all over her parents and told them some sort of awful story. He’d never get into the McAuliffe now. He’d be stuck here forever, a disappointment to his parents and a bad example for the little kids.

This George Stewart man stooped and picked up the paper, then began to read. Flick… flick… his eyes went, like a scanner trained on computers just like they had in the Habitat. He raised an eyebrow.

“No-oo!” Jommy darted at him. It was the Spaceborn all over again, stealing and jeering at his poems.

“Steady there!” Stewart said. He smoothed out the papers and returned them. “Some of these lines are really good. I especially liked the one about the ‘wounded world.’ That’s precisely what we’re doing on Earth you know. Healing it. Making it a garden again.”

Jommy slid to a stop. “They are? I mean, you are healing Earth? I mean, you like my poems?” The questions tumbled out as untidy as his room until breathlessness made him stop. He gasped for air and indignation, finishing with “Why are you reading my stuff?”

“Were you fighting to protect them?” asked the Earthman.

“They’re private!” Jommy said.

“And someone grabbed them. Probably started reading them to someone else. And you only wanted to crawl into a hole and pull it in after you, right?”

“That’s just what I did!” Jommy admitted. “Climbed down from the Rim in a maintenance shaft.”

“Did you ever come that way before?” Dr. Stewart looked genuinely impressed. “I wouldn’t want to take that climb in the near dark. Not to mention the low G. It still makes me sick. Nice going.”

Somehow, Jommy found himself walking alongside the Earthman, describing his escape routes. “Most of them lead to full G,” he finished up. “The Spaceborn don’t come down here much, but I do.”

They passed a washroom. At that moment, Jommy would have traded any hope he’d ever had of the McAuliffe for a chance to go in and wash. What if this stranger followed him inside? It wouldn’t be Jommy’s fault, but who’d believe him?

The Earthman leaned against the bulkhead. “You look like you found every speck of dust in the whole crawlway. Go wash. I’ll wait outside.”

* * *

A squirt of recycled water and a chemical towel could do wonders, Jommy thought as he marched outside. He felt better now. He could be brave and well-adjusted now. And then Dr. Stewart cocked his head at him and looked at him, really looked, the way the psychs did before things got more uncomfortable than usual.

“I wonder,” he began, and Jommy chilled. As if Dr. Stewart could actually read him like his own poems, he smiled slightly, reassuringly. “No, I’m not going to break Privacy. Believe it or not, we do learn manners on Earth. Even respect for other people’s rules. About these Spaceborn—sounds like they’ve been on your back…”

Jommy looked blank.

“I mean, teasing you for quite some time. Now, I’d be the last person to say I understand Habitant customs, but don’t you have rules against bullying? Seems to me that what they’re doing violates those rules.”

Jommy’s face flushed, and he felt himself scrunching up as if someone had tried to hit him.

“You think I’d tell?” he demanded in a rush of anger that left him feeling deflated, yet lighter than he’d felt in months. “You know what happens when you tell? They talk at you for hours: talk, talk, talk. You really think they’d believe me? The Spaceborn are the most popular kids in class. I’d just be Jommy the throwback. Jommy the freak, trying to get attention. Jommy, the squealing freak.”

“Jommy Cross wasn’t a freak.”

“Yeah? Then why’d he have those antennae? And what would you call a slan?”

“I’d call him the sort of man who helps heal his society.”

Ignoring the Earther’s answer, Jommy spat the words out with loathing. “Now I’ll never get into the McAuliffe Institute, never get off this… this…” To his horror, his eyes were filling and his voice was shaking so he made sure to say the worst thing he could. “This filthy dirtball!”

And now he was going to cry, and this Dr. Stewart would report him for maladjustment. A hand touched his arm, and Jommy tensed. “I’m not Beg… I mean crazy!” he protested. Every Habitant knew that outburst of temper led to Beggarman behavior.

“Of course you’re not,” said Dr. Stewart. He looked as if he wanted to hug Jommy, but then he glanced up, saw the red light of the Security Monitor, and let his hand drop. “You’ve got a right to feel bad, and you let it out. There’s nothing wrong with you but your choice of cursewords. ‘Filthy dirtball’ indeed—as if dirt were something bad. Come with me, Jommy. I’ll show you dirt. I’ll show you real dirt!”

He started down the corridor so rapidly that Jommy broke into a scamper to keep up. He dashed tears from his cheeks with both hands just in time to see Dr. Stewart set his palm against a lock above which was stenciled HYDROPONICS (backup). The door slid aside with a whoosh and a rush of warm, fragrant air, and the Earthman led the way in.

Jommy paused at the entrance. Already sticky, he’d have paid hard money—assuming he owned any—to escape this visit to hydro. He hated hydro and the time that every kid had to put in on it. Hydro was hot; hydro was sticky; and, rather than ruin clothing that had to be recycled, you had to work bare. The Spaceborn always teased him. “What’s that pouch round Jommy’s waist?” “What waist?” “Oh, that’s just his stomach.” “When’s the baby due?”

Still, he supposed he’d better be polite.

Now, Dr. Stewart was standing by what had to be the strangest-looking hydro tank Jommy had ever seen, and he was grinning as if he dared Jommy to follow.

If he tells me it’s for my own good, I’m out of here, Jommy promised himself. Instead, Dr. Stewart stuck his hand in the tank and brought it up. Jommy winced. Contaminating hydro was about as low as you could get.

But no nutrient solutions dripped from the Earthman’s hand. Instead, he held out clumps of crumbling brownish-black stuff, which he allowed to rain back into the tank.

“What’s that?” Jommy asked.

“That, my boy, is earth. Honest-to-goodness, brought-from-the-homeworld dirt. If you want to be polite, you can call it soil. It works like the hydroponics solutions. Like it?”

Jommy shook his head no, yet found himself drawn to the tub of earth. The lattices of the carrot greens were oddly dark and squat. The tomato plants huddled close to the surface of the… the soil. There were rows and rows of curiously vivid plants, all smaller than they should be, and all a bright green.

“They’re so short!” Jommy muttered. “Not like hydro on H-deck at all.”

“Those spindly mutants?” Dr. Stewart challenged him. “You let a plant grow in microgravity, and spindly is what you get. I’ve got a tank up there as a control group. Plants weren’t made to shoot up like that.”

Jommy knew what was right to say. Plants weren’t meant to be dosed with pesticide till they poisoned the very folk who ate them either.

“Come on, boy,” said Dr. Stewart. Jommy noted that the door had not yet closed and felt reassured.

He crept toward the tank and, at Dr. Stewart’s nod, touched the black soil. It was moist and warm from the lights overhead. He picked it up, sniffed at it.

“That’s one sort of soil. We’ve got loam, chalky soil, peaty soil—different soils for different parts of the world. They all smell different. They taste different, I’ve been told, though I can’t bring myself to try it. And, we’re bringing them all back.”

“Healing the ecosystem?” In his earliest lessons, Jommy had learned to revere the ecosystem and learned also how Earth had destroyed its own balance of nature.

“Don’t call it an ecosystem, boy. Call Earth a world. A home!” Stewart’s voice was so rich that Jommy realized that the man was homesick for that glowing blue world, however damaged it was, that hung in the black sky.

“This is home,” Jommy said.

“This is a habitat,” said Stewart. “One asteroid, though, and all it would be is wreckage. One longer-than-normal solar flare, and you’d all be cowering in shelters, doing genetic testing, and worrying how many eyes your grandchildren might have. Earth, now, Earth is a home, a home world that can recover if an asteroid hits it or a solar flare strikes. As it’s doing right now. And we’re helping.”

“You like Earth?” Jommy had wanted things without hope for so long not to recognize longing when he heard it.

“God, do I miss it.”

“I wouldn’t miss here,” Jommy admitted.

The Earthman smiled. “I could tell you about Earth, if you liked. If your parents agreed.”

Jommy put his hands firmly behind his back. “Why?”

“A bargain. Maybe I need help.”

Jommy raised his eyebrows as he’d once seen a teacher do at a particularly obvious excuse.

“Look at that!” The Earthman pulled up a carrot and held it out to Jommy.

“You’ll waste it!” Jommy yelped. Wasting food got you downchecks.

Stewart shook his head, wiped off the carrot, more brightly orange than any Jommy had ever seen, and grinning at his shock, bit into it. Surely, no vegetable ever made such a satisfying crunch.

“Want one?” Stewart asked, eating with his mouth full—another downcheck. His bad manners were reassuring, but Jommy shook his head. The idea of eating something that had grown up in actual dirt made his mouth water the way it did in zero G or just before he got sick.

“Next time,” Stewart muttered. “Or go on up to hydro and try one of the carrots like you’re used to. Then come back and eat one of these. Test thing. In fact…” He eyed Jommy with such obvious speculation that the boy laughed.

“Much as I like doing this, I’m only a part-time gardener.”

So what do you do? It was a breach of Privacy to ask, so Jommy didn’t.

“Here’s the bargain. I tell you about Earth. In return, I could use someone to help me with my plants. Measure the growth of plants at Earth G against those raised in low G. “Test vitamin content, taste, that sort of thing. Keep good records; write them up. What do you think?”

I hate hydroponics, Jommy almost blurted it out.

The Earthman was watching him with a not-quite-grin. “Not a gardener, are you?”

Jommy shrugged. What if he did tend some plants and make some notes. He knew he could write up a good report—and after the day’s episode with the Spaceborn, he knew he’d never have the nerve to read “Earth Dreams” to anyone, much less submit his poems to the McAuliffe. Besides, he could keep his coverall on, and there wouldn’t be any girls around to giggle at him. And besides that, being enthusiastic about vegetables and nutrition was considered very well adjusted. It beat growing crystals or writing music that made your eyeballs ache to listen to. And it would look great on his McAuliffe application.

* * *

The next day, Jommy had begun carefully to weed plants when Dr. Stewart came in with a package.

“Do you like music?” he asked, waving an iridescent, old-fashioned disk at the boy.

“Not that e-stuff Andrew writes. It hurts my eyes.”

“Try this,” the Earthman said. He fitted the disk into the player he had brought. Waterfalls of sound poured over Jommy, triumphant horns lifting above a steady current of strings and a bedrock of drums.

“That’s not synthesized,” Stewart told him. “Every note comes from human breath, wood, gut”—Jommy grimaced—“and human talent, not chance or programming. This is old-style music. Earth music.”

The music slowed, rang out over the drumbeats. Abruptly, it stopped. “Here,” said Dr. Stewart, “see for yourself.” He lifted the disk, pretended to toss it to Jommy, who protested with an upheld hand. A dirty hand. The disk label read To the New World.

“Why’d I bring it?” asked the Earthman. “They say plants like music. You can test it. Dvorak on one group and computer-synthesized squawks on another.”

Then, he was gone. The disk shone temptingly, its light shimmering as the door slid shut. Hastily, Jommy scrubbed his hands, fitted disk into player, and let the triumphant horns surge over him. It was a wonder, he thought, that the plants did not rustle in time with it.

* * *

Weeks later into what Dr. Stewart called the growing season, Jommy hurried into hydro. Quickly he turned on the music, then began his work. Counting, weighing, and measuring went rapidly, now that he was used to it. Quickly and meticulously, he entered his results in the database.

* * *

“Elegant code, Jommy,” Jommy’s Comp Sci teacher told the class. He looked as surprised at what he was saying as the Spaceborn. “I imagine that your database must be easy to use.”

Jommy ducked his head. He used to struggle just to make his teachers focus on him, not get that glazed-overlook in their eyes before they called on someone prestigious.

Two or three of the Spaceborn glared at him. “He thinks he’s so great,” Andrew grumbled.

“Now, Andrew, you’re much too well-adjusted to sink to jealousy. Don’t you know how it can poison your thoughts?”

Jommy tuned out what sounded like the sort of helpful feedback on consideration that had always made him writhe with humiliation.

Andrew only grimaced.

With Jommy’s mind on his plants and his music, he was surprised at how little pleasure Andrew’s downcheck gave him. It would probably be his first and last one.

I’ll get you, dirtball, Andrew mouthed. So Jommy too was in trouble, or going to be. Again. When class ended, he scuttled out, making himself small, so small he overheard his teacher talking to a colleague.

“Jommy’s work was first-rate,” the Comp Sci teacher said. “Tell you frankly, I didn’t think he had it in him. He’s always been sort of an underachieving lump. Now, it turns out he’s simply a late bloomer.”

The friend murmured something antisocial about psychs and tin gods. Both teachers looked around, then laughed.

“He doesn’t let it go to his head,” Jommy heard his teacher add.

That couldn’t be the old Throwback they were talking about, could it?

* * *

“You programmed this?” his father asked that evening. For once, Jommy hadn’t had to compete with research for his father’s attention. Both of them bent over the screen, testing Jommy’s work.

“This is excellent,” he approved, just as Jommy’s mother walked into the main room.

“What is?” she asked.

“Comp Sci project our Jommy did.”

Our Jommy. His eyes filled with tears. His mother bent over, kissed his hair, then turned her eyes to the screen.

“He’s already better at it than I am,” she said. “That’s not hard, I suppose. But I can still tell fine work from a kludge. Anyone mind if we order from Central Kitchen? I know it’s my night to cook, but I need to get back to the observatory. We’ll need the extra credits to equip you for McAuliffe, Jommy. I won’t have you in class with my old teachers looking like something that even the Beggarman would recycle.”

* * *

Getting the approval he’d always wanted was great, but what Jommy mostly lived for was the music of horns and strings and Dr. Stewart’s voice, telling him of Earth. His stories made what had always been dry data on geology or ecology come alive—and his teachers’ smiles widened like sunrise.

The music of Earth had fully caught him now. The sound was a river, sweeping him along, occasionally tossing him into side eddies as he caromed off a bulkhead in low G.

“Slow down!” Dr. Stewart cried. The Earthman was still unsteady in low G, squeamish about weightlessness, which he still remembered with loathing from the trip to the Habitat from Earth. Jommy was surprised how easy it was to help him. The practice he was getting in switching grav levels made him very sure-footed, just as his time in the one-G hydro lab was making him stronger. He wouldn’t have dreamed of laughing at the Earthman. Instead, throughout the trip to the Habitat’s Rim, whenever Dr. Stewart asked him to slow, Jommy bounded back to help him.

“I feel like a crippled old man,” grumbled the Earthman. He swallowed, his face turning slightly green.

Jommy knew those signs. If Dr. Stewart was sick here, there would be a terrible mess to clean.

“Look around you,” he urged. “Listen. Even now, there are people up here playing zero-G pickleball. There’s a whir—someone must be in the minimills. You know, we manufacture equipment here and send it back to Earth.”

“Ball bearings, medical supplies, and semiconductors,” agreed Dr. Stewart. He looked around, more curious now than sick.

Jommy sighed with relief and continued. “We always have to keep a lookout. You know, you tell me that Earth is safe, Earth heals, there’s room for mistakes there. That sounds good to me because here we don’t dare make any mistakes. Not with vacuum outside.”

“Sounds risky,” said Dr. Stewart in the tone that meant “just teasing.”

“Earth sounds risky too,” Jommy retorted. “Still, we’re all still here, aren’t we?”

He knew he sounded obnoxious, lecturing an adult. Like the Spaceborn lectured him. But Dr. Stewart just grinned.

“Streetwise,” he said, and Jommy looked puzzled. “That’s a survival mechanism. Somehow, just as you said, we muddle through. And Earth abides.” He paused, then repeated it. “Earth abides.”

Jommy looked away. Stewart’s words sounded like Privacy subjects, but if Jommy didn’t ask, he might burst.

“Earth abides?” he ventured.

“It’s the truth,” said Stewart. “But it’s also the name of a book. Perhaps you’d like to read it someday.”

Jommy could just see his parents’ faces. “Where did you get this, Jommy?” “The Beggarman gave it to me.”

Time to change the subject. “We’re almost at the Rim,” Jommy assured the Earthman. “You’re doing fine. Really.”

Jommy floated through the last pressure hatch, unsealing it and making certain that Stewart bobbed past before it could reseal. The Earthman muttered something about role reversal, but chuckled as he said it.

“What I do for my work,” he said.

Now that was just too good a chance to pass up.

“What do you do back… home?” Jommy asked. Maybe they were good enough friends now that asking wouldn’t violate Privacy.

“I touch the future.”

“That’s the McAuliffe Institute’s motto,” the boy said. “Are you a teacher too?”

Dr. Stewart looked thoughtful. “On Earth, we’re all teachers,” he said. “Let me tell you a story about a wise man. He once said that all you need for a school… wait a second, slow down already!… was a log and two people sitting on each end.”

Jommy thought of his Habitat’s learning skills center, the labs and the computers and the fiber optics workshops, not to mention the psychs. It would be nice to sit on a log—whatever that was—with someone like Dr. Stewart, and just listen.

“And you know what, Jommy? The good thing about that sort of school is that if you’re really poor, you can do without the log!”

Jommy looked back to make sure Dr. Stewart had finished his story and that he was coping with the trip to zero G. “We’re almost here,” he reassured the Earthman. “Just one more lock.” They bobbed in the no-G as he palmed the viewport lock. He heard a deep intake of breath and reached around for the hand-held suction pump mounted next to the oxygen on the bulkhead, just in case.

Dr. Stewart didn’t look as if he was going to be sick. He was very still. He held out his palm as if to cover the gleaming, distant world with it. The wounded world.

“Dear Earth, I do salute thee with my hand,” the man murmured.

Jommy wondered at his words. They sounded like music, or like one of the recordings of classic literature that only teachers ever bothered to listen to. The Earthman blinked fast, but not before a tear floated away from his face.

Then, Jommy thought he heard a rustle, the snick of a lock being released. He spun around. Too fast. Inertia flung him against the bulkhead, and Dr. Stewart laughed. Jommy was surprised that it didn’t hurt when Dr. Stewart laughed at a zero G tumble.

“What did you say about being careful?” the man asked. They both laughed this time. A minute later, Dr. Stewart was pointing out Earth’s continents on the tiny, brilliant globe.

No one mentioned the sounds Jommy thought he’d heard.

* * *

Jommy swung down the corridor in one-G territory toward hydro. It would take him ten more steps to go from the lift to the door. It used to take twenty. He was getting fit. Now, he walked fast, not noticing the bleakness of the corridors. Because few of the Spaceborn cared to venture down to full-G, no one decorated bulkheads here with murals people could admire and award points to. The soundproofing was good here, but even now, Jommy ought to be able to hear the music that he kept on for his plants.

They actually reacted well to old Earth music like Dvorak and Bach, whose patterns were more intricate than a computer program. Plants, however, that had to listen to Andrew’s e-music that Jommy borrowed from school tended to shrivel and wilt. Still, he couldn’t write “thrived to Bach” and “shriveled and wilted due to e-music” in his report without backing up his claims. The McAuliffe applications and references were due in a few days. He needed to check and recheck.

Then, the music boomed out. Something else within the lab boomed too. Jommy flattened himself against the corridor, trying to walk soundlessly even in one G and very glad he could. Then, he heard a crash, muffled by the drums.

Jommy darted for the nearest service access, flung himself through the hatch, and grunted when it proved to be a tight fit. His shoulders were growing.

Time too got tight. The hydro door wooshed open, spilling music and whispers into the corridor. Then the music died and someone giggled. Now, Jommy could smell the green earth scenes he had come to love.

To his shock, three of the Spaceborn—Andrew, Mira, and Chris—ran out of hydroponics, a place they never visited unless required. Actually, they would have run, if the heavy gravity hadn’t made them stop every few steps and moan about their aching backs and legs. All three left brown footprints, as if they had been stepping in mud.

“Oh, no,” Jommy whispered. He slid out of his hiding place and ran for hydro as fast as if this were shelter drill.

He stopped at the door. The place looked like a meteor had struck. Tubs were overturned. Dirt and clear hydro solution had blended on the deck into a horrible muck. His plants lay plucked and scattered on the filthy surface. Computers’ lights were on—no one would ever deliberately crash a system—but a glance told Jommy that his database had been wiped. And the disks that held so much music lay scratched and bent.

His experiments. His plants. His reports. His music, and his future.

“Those dirtballs,” Jommy said quietly.

Then, the tears of rage came. He scrubbed at them with one muddy hand.

“Dirtballs!” he shouted.

Sense would be to call Security. Sense would be to find his teachers or his parents or Dr. Stewart. Abandoning sense, Jommy tracked the Spaceborn by their dirty footprints down the corridor to the lift.

Seeing his face, Mira backed off. Andrew tried to run, but he was slow and awkward in the heavy G. Chris, who had always been a sneak, stuck out a grimy boot. It caught between Jommy’s feet, and he went over. In the last second before he sprawled, he wrenched his body around so he toppled into Andrew. Andrew, Chris, and Jommy all crashed onto the floor, grunting, punching, and kicking, while Mira shrieked at the Security Monitor.

“Jommy’s gone Beggarman,” she reported, tears in the sweet, earnest voice that fooled parents. “Oh, Andrew’s nose is bleeding. Jommy hit him!”

And hit him again and again. They had destroyed his lab. They had destroyed his work. They’d made him disappoint his friend. Things were worse than they had been months ago before he’d met Dr. Stewart, because now, he had hoped, he had so hoped…

Tears blinded his eyes, and Andrew got in a lucky punch. Jommy yelled with pain and outrage, and punched back harder.

* * *

Trankspray filled the air. Even as Jommy felt himself going limp, he borrowed a description of the mist from one of Dr. Stewart’s stories: cool and sweet as a summer’s evening. Everyone went suddenly quiet.

Under the influence of the spray, Jommy found himself thinking clearly. Maybe things weren’t so bad. Tubs could be turned upright, plants replanted, floors scrubbed—and his data were backed up. “There are only two kinds of users,” his father had always said. “Happy users, and fools who don’t download.”

“We just wanted to see his plants,” Mira was saying in a terrified whine, “but he threw over the tubs and chased us down the corridor. We tried to get away, but he tackled Andrew and Chris.”

“What a lie,” Jommy said, disgusted, through rubbery lips. “They couldn’t run in full G. I watched them wreck my lab… “ To his shame, his voice broke.

“Throwback,” crooned Andrew, and then Jommy knew the worst of it. No one would believe him. They would all think he’d gone Beggarman.

Beggarman, Jommy thought as boots clattered own the corridor, the long unsteady footsteps of Habitants unused to one G, and the shorter, firmer strides of …

“Dr. Stewart!” he tried to shout. It came out as a drugged croak.

The Earthman reached Jommy about the same time as his parents.

“What happened?” three voices demanded at once.

“They wrecked the lab,” Jommy muttered. “I bet the one at one-quarter G is smashed too.”

“Why would Andrew, Chris, and Mira wreck your lab experiments,” asked a teacher who had never much liked Jommy broke in. “You’ve never been especially good neighbors with them, but they’re well-adjusted children. They wouldn’t do something like that.”

A security woman spoke into her wristcom in an undertone. “Kid’s right,” she confirmed. “The lab in one-quarter-G hydro has been vandalized too.”

Jommy moaned. He’d never get into McAuliffe. Worse than that, even, would probably be sent to the psychs to be talked at until he was as old as Earth.

To his astonishment, bloody as he was, his mother put her arms around him.

“Why didn’t you tell us you weren’t happy?” she asked. Her face twisted like Mira’s as if she were going to cry—only her tears were real. “Whatever it is, Jommy. It doesn’t matter. Just get well!”

I didn’t do it! Jommy thought, furious, fighting the trank. He wanted to break away from the wrangle of adults, but the trank still made him feel as if he were running through two G. Maybe three.

“Wait a moment,” said Dr. Stewart. No one but Jommy heard him.

“Listen to me!” boomed the Earthman, and everyone started. Only badly adjusted people ever shouted in the Habitat. Probably Dr. Stewart didn’t know that rule. Or care.

“There’s truth in dirt,” he told the silent crowd, shocked at the word. “Look at the children’s boots. Now, if Jommy had overturned his own plant tubs, he’d have gotten his boots dirty. But look at his feet. Granted, he’s picked up some of the dirt on the deck. But it isn’t ground into his boot soles. Now, look at the other three. Go on, look at them!” he ordered.

To Jommy’s surprise, Security obeyed like preschoolers.

“Rubbed in, right?” asked Stewart.

Security nodded.

“Give me your comm,” Stewart ordered. “Hartley?”

Could even Dr. Stewart possibly mean Chief Counselor Hartley? Could he call her just like that? Other people had to get through voice after voice to make an appointment to see her and call her by formal titles, but Dr. Stewart spoke to her just like he spoke to Jommy.

Hartley’s voice, known throughout the network of Habitats, replied. “How can I help, Mr. Minister?”

“Can you come down to one G? We’ve had some sabotage,” said Dr. Stewart. “Involving the people I told you about. I’d say it’s mission-critical.”

“On my way,” said the Chief Counselor.

* * *

Chief Counselor Hartley arrived in full G with one hand pressed to the small of her back. She was tall, thin, and almost eight months pregnant.

“Counselor,” Dr. Stewart said, ducking his head in what Jommy realized had to be an old-fashioned bow. “My sincere regrets at dragging you down here in your condition. Someone bring Counselor Hartley a chair. Now.”

Jommy’s father was the first to comply. Dr. Stewart made a little ceremony of seating the Counselor. She tried to protest but sank down with a sigh of relief.

Seeing her had taken the words out of Jommy’s mouth, but not for long. Just as he opened his mouth, his mother pressed his shoulder to silence him.

“Mr. Minister?” she asked in the special tone she kept for faulty data.

“Earth’s Minister of Education,” said Counselor Hartley.

So his Dr. Stewart had been a teacher once, after all. Jommy sagged more with relief than from the trankspray. He hadn’t been lied to.

Questions erupted from three sets of parents—Andrew’s, Mira’s, and Chris’s—from Security, and, very feebly, from Jommy himself.

Dr. Stewart held up a hand. “We’ve got a case of sabotage,” he said. “This young man did a pretty professional job on some lab work for me—Jommy, do you have your data backed up?”

Jommy nodded.

“Good. Now, apparently, some of his classmates decided to break up the place a little. And Jommy—well, he caught them at it and lost his temper.”

“Lost his temper!” one of Mira’s fathers shouted though Jommy noted that he never moved from where he stood. “Went Beggarman and hit people.”

That caused more mutters. Violence, or the threat of Earth-style violence, was a thing the Habitat was built to break away from.

You can kiss McAuliffe good-bye, he told himself. No surprises there. Not anymore.

“Counselor,” said Dr. Stewart, Mr. Minister Stewart, the old trickster, the important man, “if you look at the children’s shoes, you can see who was in the lab and who wasn’t.”

The woman nodded. “Highly antisocial,” she confirmed.

The Spaceborns’ parents shrank. Antisocial tendencies meant downchecks on their records and psych sessions all around.

Jommy almost grinned, but “Quiet, you!” growled Dr. Stewart. Jommy’s mother’s hand tightened on his shoulder.

“And what of our son?” she asked.

“I know you had plans for him. The McAuliffe, I believe?”

What else was there? You went to McAuliffe or you went nowhere all your life. McAuliffe would never take a boy who’d gone Beggarman.

His mother nodded. “But this violence!” Her hand shook for a moment, then steadied. “I don’t know where he learned it, but he’s our son, and we’ll see him through this.”

That meant the psychs and therapy. Medicines, probably, and re-education. Jommy shut his eyes and stifled a groan.

“Not precisely,” said Dr. Stewart. “You may have guessed that I take an interest in the boy.”

Jommy’s father started forward, his face red as Jommy had never seen it.

Counselor Hartley held up a hand. “I was aware of this. When the Minister arrived here, he told me he would be visiting each habitat, looking for your people who were failing to thrive…”

“‘A bad fit’ was my exact phrase,” Dr. Stewart corrected.

“You make him sound like he’s some sort of freak!” Jommy’s father clenched his fists.

“I see where he gets his urge to violence,” remarked Dr. Stewart. “I don’t think Jommy is a freak at all. On the contrary. He’s stood up very well under abuse, and he’s worked hard. And he was very kind, despite a highly prejudiced upbringing—“ he grinned at the sensation his words caused—“to a stranger, even to the point of mastering his dislike for zero G. My ministry is looking for boys and girls like Jommy who don’t fit on their habitats, who show signs that they might adapt to Earth.”

“I’m not letting my son go live on a dirtball,” Jommy’s mother burst out.

“What do you want him to do? Squeeze into McAuliffe and hate every minute of it? Or not go, and wind up—with his talents—doing maintenance?” Stewart snapped. “I’m offering Jommy a full ride to Earth, training there, a chance to be one of the first generation of people who can live on a planet or in space. Oh, he’ll go to the McAuliffe, all right. Later on, as an instructor, to teach less flexible kids. To help heal the anger and misunderstandings that have grown up since Breakaway between planet and habitat, Earthborn and Spaceborn.

“And if we ever manage to escape this solar system, it’ll be people like Jommy we’ll need on the ships. I had a reason for setting him the experiment I did. You’ve been growing hothouse plants up here. I think we need something hardier.”

Jommy sighed. It was all he could manage.

“Well, Jommy, what do you think?” Stewart spoke to him, not the adults. “Ready to leave the greenhouse?”

“For the greenhouse effect?” The words leapt out before he could stop them, but Dr. Stewart was too important for people to scold Jommy in his presence. Suddenly he yawned. Stupid trank. He’d have to sleep it off.

“We’ve got the greenhouse effect under control. But don’t worry. We’ve got other problems you can sink your teeth into.” Stewart grinned again, and Jommy grinned back, then yawned.

* * *

Jommy’s arm still ached from immunizations, but he couldn’t scratch. His pressure suit was too thick, and besides, he was strapped into his couch, waiting for the faint bump that meant that the Earth shuttle had left the Habitat. Had left home. Though zero G no longer troubled him, he swallowed hard.

The others, after therapy, were going to McAuliffe. No surprises there. But he was actually going to Earth!

“You’ll have to work hard and justify the Minister’s confidence in trust,” people had been lecturing him since his future had suddenly met him in a mud-tracked corridor. They urged the practice of gratitude and thankfulness. Jommy had nodded gravely and fought off grins of pure excitement. He remembered Dr. Stewart’s last comments. “First, I was the Beggarman. Now, I’m Mr. Minister. You shouldn’t even talk to the Beggarman, but it’s fine, of course, if Mr. Minister gives you a going-away gift. So, here.”

It wasn’t a disk or a tape, but a real ancient book with Earth Abides stamped in worn gold on the fraying cover. Jommy’s father itched to take it. Jommy held it away.

Never mind his baggage allowance. He left out one pair of boots that would probably not be heavy enough for Earth and packed Dr. Stewart’s gift instead.

There came the bump! For a minute, panic gripped him. Then the shuttle turned, and an image of Earth appeared on its screens. The music of Earth, strings, horns, and drums, calling him to the new world, rose in his imagination. He was going home.

==========

AUTHOR BIO:

Susan Shwartz returned from a long sabbatical on Wall Street to her first love, writing fantasy and science fiction. She is a five-time nominee for the Nebula, a two-time nominee for the Hugo, with nominations for the World Fantasy Award, the Philip K. Dick, and the Edgar. In 1993, San Francisco chronicle cited her work for best novelette, and in 1996, best Novella with the late Mike Resnick for “Bibi,” a 1995 winner of the HOMer award.

Susan has published around thirty books, including anthologies, science fiction, historical fantasy, and Star Trek. She has also published more than 100 short stories, novelettes and novellas and published nonfiction in The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, Amazing, Asimov’s, and Analog. She is currently working on an article on The Butler Institute for American Art for a prize-winning magazine. Stories are scheduled for release in the next year or so on subjects as diverse as the Soviet Space Program, Eleanor of Aquitaine, climbing, and the Battle of the Bulge. She recently sold a story “Achilles in the Underworld” to FlameTree Press. She maintains a SubStack column in which she writes about polemics, semantics, and pop psychology just because.

Susan holds a PhD in English from Harvard and a BA from Mount Holyoke. She has also studied at Dartmouth College and Oxford University. She collects SF art and loves the opera, the theatre, and travel.

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WHY WE CHOSE TO PUBLISH “Beggarman”:

We’re suckers for strong, character-driven fiction, and when such a story from the hand of a master of the craft crosses our desk, well…

In the first two paragraphs we’re introduced to the character and setting, and we know immediately we’re not on Earth. The next few paragraphs anchor us in Jommy’s character and introduce the conflict and two of the story’s themes: bullying and societal misfit.

Author Susan Shwartz builds from there as she expertly crafts Jommy as a sympathetic character and slowly unwraps his story and the much larger one of the Habitat in space. And we’re barely over a thousand words into the story when we meet the title character.

Whether you’re a sci-fi aficionado or not, this is a story anyone can appreciate. It’s a rich and remarkable story not only because of the universal themes wrapped in the sci-fi setting, but the author further uses the setting to bring out aspects of a possible unpleasant future for Earth.

All of this is done through the eyes of one boy, one dreamer, one misfit, who had no idea he could become an instrument of hope and change.

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EDITOR’S NOTES:

This story, originally published in a print anthology over 30 years ago, is even more relevant today.

Our thanks to Elliott Morreau for the perfect AI-generated picture that accompanies this story.