Beggars in Spain (21 page)

S
usan Melling and Leisha Camden sat in lawn chairs on the roof of Susan’s house in the New Mexico desert and watched Jordan and Stella stroll toward a huge cottonwood beside the creek. Overhead the summer triangle, Vega and Altair and Deneb, shone faint beside a brilliant full moon. On the western horizon the last red faded from low clouds. Long darknesses moved over the desert toward the mountains, whose peaks still glowed with unseen sun. Susan shivered.

“I’ll get your sweater,” Leisha said.

“No, I’m fine,” Susan said.

“Shut up.”

Leisha climbed down the ladder from the roof, found the sweater in Susan’s cluttered study, and stopped a moment in the living room. All the polished skulls were gone. She climbed the ladder and put the sweater around Susan’s shoulders.

“Look at them,” Susan said, with pleasure. Just before the deeper darkness of the cottonwood, the silhouette that was Jordan blended with the shadow that was Stella. Leisha smiled; Susan’s eyes, at least, were still sharp.

The two women sat in silence. Finally Susan said, “Kevin called again.”

“No,” Leisha said simply.

The old woman shifted her slight, painful weight in her chair. “Don’t you believe in forgiveness, Leisha?”

“Yes. I do. But Kevin doesn’t know he’s done anything that requires it.”

“I take it he doesn’t know either that Richard is here with you.”

“I don’t know what he knows,” Leisha said indifferently. “Who can tell anymore?”

“Like you, for instance, couldn’t tell that Jennifer Sharifi was innocent of murder. And you won’t forgive yourself any more than you forgive Kevin.”

Leisha turned her head away. Moonlight ran up her cheek like a scalpel. From the cottonwood came low laughter. Leisha said suddenly, “I wish Alice were here.”

Susan smiled. The smile was strained; her painkillers needed to be increased again. “Maybe she’ll just show up again if you need her hard enough.”

“That’s not funny.”

“You don’t believe it happened, do you, Leisha? You don’t believe Alice had a paranormal perception about you.”

“I believe she believes it,” Leisha said carefully. Everything was different now between her and Alice, and the difference was too precious to risk. Alice was the only thing she’d gotten back from this year of cataclysmic loss. Alice and Susan, and Susan was dying.

Still, she had always been able to be honest with Susan. “You know I don’t believe in the paranormal. The normal is difficult enough to understand.”

“And the paranormal disturbs your world view a lot, doesn’t it?” After a minute Susan added in a softer tone, “Are you afraid Alice will disapprove of Jordan and Stella? A Sleepless and a Sleeper?”

“God, no. I know she’d approve.” She gave a sudden bark of harsh laughter. “Alice may be one of the twelve people in the world who would.”

Susan said, as if it were relevant, “You also got calls from Stewart Sutter, Kate Addams, Miyuki Yagai, and your secretary, what’s-his-name. I told them all you’d call back.”

“I won’t,” Leisha said.

“There are more than twelve,” Susan said. Leisha didn’t answer.

Below them, Richard emerged from the front door and walked toward the distant mesa. He moved slowly, limply, as if the direction didn’t matter to him. Leisha thought it probably didn’t. Very little did. That he was here at all was due only to Jordan, who had not hesitated but simply put Richard in the car and brought him. Jordan seldom hesitated any more. He acted. A moment later the huge figure of Joey, who loved walking anywhere, shambled happily after Richard.

Susan said, “You think the Sharifi trial ended all chance of real integration—Sleepers and Sleepless, We-Sleep and mainstream economy, have and have-nots.”

“Yes.”

“There’s never a last chance for anything, Leisha.”

“Really? Then how come you’re dying?” After a moment Leisha added, “I’m sorry.”

“You can’t hide here forever, Leisha, just because you’re disillusioned with law.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“What do you call it?”

“I’m living,” Leisha said. “Just living.”

“The hell you are. Not like this, not you. Don’t argue with me—I have the insight of the almost-eternal.”

Despite herself, Leisha laughed. The laugh hurt.

Susan said, “Damn right it’s funny. So call Stewart and Kate and Miyuki and that secretary.”

“No.”

Richard disappeared into the darkness, followed by Joey. Jordan and Stella, holding hands, started back toward the house. Susan said, with apparent guilelessness, “
I
wish Alice were here.”

Leisha nodded.

“Yes,” Susan said artlessly, “it would be good to collect your entire community.”

Leisha looked at her, but Susan was absorbed in studying the moonlight on the desert, while below them some small animal scurried by unseen and overhead the stars came out one by one by one by one.

2075

O
n the morning of her sixty-seventh birthday, Leisha Camden sat on the edge of a chair in her New Mexico compound and contemplated her feet.

They were narrow and high-arched, the skin healthy and fresh right up to the toes, which were strong and straight. The toenails, cut straight across, glowed faintly pink. Susan Melling would have approved. Susan had set great store by feet: their strength, the condition of their veins and bones, their general usefulness as a barometer of aging. Or not aging.

It made her laugh.
Feet
—to be remembering Susan, dead for 23 years, in terms of feet. And not even Susan’s feet, which might be logical, but Leisha’s own feet, which was ridiculous.
In memoriam bipedalis
.

When had she begun to find funny such things as feet? Not, certainly, when she was young, in her twenties or thirties or fifties. Everything had been so serious then, of such world-shaking consequence. Not just the things that actually might have shaken the world, but everything. She must have been very tiresome. Perhaps there was no way for the young to be serious without being tiresome. They lacked that all-important dimension of physics: torque. Too much time ahead, too little behind, like a man trying to carry a horizontal ladder with a grip at one end. Not even an honorable passion could balance very well. And
while jiggling hard to just keep your balance, how could anything ever be funny?

“What are you laughing at?” Stella said, coming into Leisha’s office after only the most peremptory knock. “That reporter is waiting for you in the board room.”

“Already?”

“He’s early.” Stella sniffed; she hadn’t wanted Leisha to talk to any reporters.
“Let them have their tricentennial without us,”
she had said.
“What does it have to do with us? Now?”
Leisha hadn’t had an answer, but she’d agreed to see the reporter anyway. Stella could be so incurious. But, then, Stella was only fifty-two and found hardly anything funny.

“Tell him I’m coming,” Leisha said, “but not until I check on Alice. Give him some coffee or something. Let the kids play him their flute solo; that ought to keep him enthralled.” Seth and Eric had just learned to make flutes from animal bones they scavenged in the desert. Stella sniffed again and went out.

Alice had just awoken. She sat on the edge of her bed while her nurse eased the nightgown over her head. Leisha ducked back into the hall; Alice hated to have Leisha see her naked body. Not until Leisha heard the nurse say, “There, Ms. Watrous,” did she come back into the room.

Alice wore loose, cotton pants and a white top cut wide enough for her to put on herself with just her right arm; the left was useless since her stroke. Her white curls had been combed. The nurse knelt on the floor, easing her charge’s feet into soft slippers.

“Leisha,” Alice said, with pleasure. “Happy birthday.”

“I wanted to say it to you first!”

“Too bad,” Alice said. “Sixty-seven years.”

“Yes,” Leisha said, and the two women held each other’s gaze, Leisha straight-backed in her white shorts and halter, Alice steadying herself with one veined hand on the footboard of the bed.

“Happy birthday, Alice.”

“Leisha!” Stella again, in top managerial mode. “You have a comlink conference at nine, so if you’re going to see that reporter…”

From the right side of her mouth, so softly that Stella couldn’t hear, Alice murmured, “My poor Jordan…”

Leisha murmured back, “You know he loves it,” and went to the board room to meet the reporter.

He surprised her by looking about sixteen, a lanky boy with too-sharp elbows and bad skin, dressed in what must be the latest adolescent fashion: balloon-shaped shorts and plastic blouse trimmed with tiny dangling plastic scooters in red, white, and blue. He perched nervously in a chair while Eric and Seth danced around him playing flutes, badly. Leisha sent her grandnephews from the room. Seth went cheerfully; Eric scowled and slammed the door. In the sudden quiet Leisha sat down across from the boy.

“What newsgrid did you say you represent, Mr…. Cavanaugh?”

“My high school net,” he blurted. “Only I didn’t tell the lady that when I made the appointment.”

“Of course not,” Leisha said. Forget her feet—
this
was funny. The first interview she had granted in ten years, and it turned out to be to a kid for his high-school grid. Susan would have loved it.

“Well, then, let’s begin,” she said. She knew the boy had never spoken to a Sleepless before. It was written all over him: the curiosity, the uneasiness, the furtive assessment. But no envy, in any of its virulent forms. That was the remarkable thing: its absence in this unremarkable boy.

He was better organized than he looked. “My mom says it used to be different than it was now. She says donkeys and even Livers hated Sleepless. How come?”

“How come you don’t?”

The question seemed to genuinely surprise him. He frowned, then looked at her with a sideways embarrassment that told Leisha, more clearly than words, how decent he was. “Well, I don’t mean to offend you or anything, but…why would I hate you? I mean, donkeys are the ones—Sleepless are really just sort of super-donkeys, aren’t they?—who have to do all the work. We Livers just get to enjoy the results. To live. You know,” he said, in a burst of ingenuous confiding, “I can never figure out why donkeys don’t see that and hate
us
.”

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing, Mr. Cavanaugh. Are there any donkeys in your school?”

“Nah. They have their own schools.” He looked at Leisha as if she was supposed to know that, which of course she did. The United States was a three-tiered society now: the have-nots, who by the mysterious hedonistic opiate of the Philosophy of Genuine Living had become the recipients of the gift of leisure. Livers, eighty percent of the population, had shed the work ethic for a gaudy populous version of the older aristocratic ethic: the fortunate do not have to work. Above them—or below—were the donkeys, genetically-enhanced Sleepers who ran the economy and the political machinery, as dictated by, and in exchange for, the lordly votes of the new leisure class. Donkeys managed; their robots labored. Finally, the Sleepless, nearly all of whom were invisible in Sanctuary anyway, were disregarded by Livers, if not by donkeys. All of it, the entire trefoil organization—id, ego, and superego, some wit had labeled it sardonically—was underwritten by cheap, ubiquitous Y-energy, powering automated factories making possible a lavish Dole that traded bread and circuses for votes. The whole thing, Leisha thought, was peculiarly American, managing to combine democracy with materialism, mediocrity with enthusiasm, power with the illusion of control from below.

“Tell me, Mr. Cavanaugh, what do you and your friends do with all your free time?”

“Do?” He seemed startled.

“Yes. Do. Today, for instance. When you’re done recording this interview, what will you do?”

“Well…drop off the recording at school. The teacher will put it on the school newsgrid, I guess. If he wants to.”

“Is he a Liver or a donkey?”

“A Liver, of course,” he said, a little scornfully. Her stock, Leisha saw, was dropping rapidly. “Then I might work on reading till school’s out at noon—I can almost read, but not quite. It’s pretty useless, but my mom wants me to learn. Then there’s the scooter races at noon, I’m going with some friends—”

“Who pays for and organizes those?”

“Our local assemblyman, of course. Cathy Miller.
She’s
a donkey.”

“Of course.”

“Then some friends are having a brainie party, our congressman passed out some new stuff from Colorado or someplace, then there’s this virtual-reality holovid I want to do—”

“What’s that called?”

“
Tamarra of the Martian Seas
. Aren’t you going to see it? It’s agro.”

“Maybe I’ll catch it,” Leisha said. Feet, reporters, Tamarra of the Martian Seas. Moira, Alice’s daughter, had emigrated to a Martian colony. “You know there aren’t really any seas on Mars, don’t you?”

“That so?” he said, without interest. “Then some friends and I are going to play ball, then my girl and I are going to fuck. After that, if there’s time, I might join my parents at my mom’s lodge, because they’re having a dance. If there’s not time—Ms. Camden? Is something funny?”

“No,” Leisha gasped. “I’m sorry. No eighteenth-century aristo could have had a fuller social schedule.”

“Yeah, well, I’m an agro Liver,” the boy said modestly. “But I’m supposed to ask you questions. Now, is…no, wait…what’s this—foundation you run? What does it do?”

“It asks beggars why they’re beggars and provides funding for those who want to be something else.”

The boy looked bewildered.

“If, for instance,” Leisha said, “you wanted to become a donkey, the Susan Melling Foundation might help send you to school, finance augments for you, whatever was necessary.”

“Why would I ever want to do that?”

“Why indeed?” Leisha said. “But some people do.”

“Nobody
I
know,” the boy said decidedly. “Sounds a little wormy to me. One more question: Why do
you
do it? Run this foundation thing?”

“Because,” Leisha said with precision, “what the strong owe beggars is to ask each one why he is a beggar and act accordingly. Because community is the assumption, not the result, and only by giving
nonproductiveness the same individuality as excellence, and acting accordingly, does one fulfill the obligation to the beggars in Spain.”

She saw that the boy had understood not one word of this. Nor did he ask. He stood, picked up his recording equipment with obvious relief—the day’s work over—and held out his hand. “Well, I guess that’s it. The teacher said four questions are enough. Thanks, Ms. Camden.”

She took his hand. Such a polite boy, so devoid of envy or hatred, so satisfied. So stupid. “Thank you, Mr. Cavanaugh. For answering my questions. Will you answer one more?”

“Sure.”

“If your teacher does put this interview on the student newsgrid, will anybody watch it?” He looked away; she saw he didn’t want to embarrass her with the answer. Such a polite boy. “Do you watch the newsgrids at all, Mr. Cavanaugh?”

Now he did meet her eyes, his young face shocked. “Of course! My whole family does! How else would my mom and dad know which donkeys would give us the most for our vote?”

“Ah,” Leisha said. “The American Constitution at work.”

“And next year’s the tricentennial year,” the boy said proudly; Livers were all patriots. “Well, thanks again.”

“Thank
you
,” Leisha said. Stella, stern at the doorway, ushered the boy out.

“Your comlink call is in two minutes, Leisha, and right now there’s a—”

“Stella—how many applications has the Foundation processed this quarter?”

“One hundred sixteen,” Stella said precisely. She kept all Foundation records, including financials.

“Down what percentage from last quarter?”

“Six percent.”

“And from last year-to-date?”

“Eight percent. You know that.” Leisha did; Stella would have more to occupy her if the Foundation were still running at the heady pace of its first years. She wouldn’t be trying to make secretarial and maternal
duties fill up a first-rate brain, leaning on everybody else in the process. Stella must have guessed what Leisha was thinking. She said suddenly, “You could go back to law. Or write another book. Or start another corporation, if you’d even consider competing with the donkeys at what you do even better.”

“Sanctuary competes,” Leisha said mildly. “And the new economic order isn’t based on competition anyway, it’s based on quality living. A young man just told me so. Don’t badger me, Stella, it’s my birthday. What’s all that noise out there?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to
tell
you. There’s a child out beyond the gate, screaming his head off to see you and nobody but you.”

“A Sleepless child?” Leisha asked, her blood quickening. It still happened, sometimes: an illegal genemod, a confused child learning slowly over years that he was different, that the scooter races and holovids and brainie parties somehow weren’t enough for him as they were for his friends. Then there would be the chance learning of the Susan Melling Foundation, usually from a kind donkey, and the scary, determined journey in search of his own kind even before he knew what it meant to belong to his own kind. Taking these Sleepless children or teenagers or sometimes even adults inside the compound, helping them to become what they were, had been Leisha’s sweetest pleasure during her two and a half decades in the isolated desert.

But Stella said, “No. Not a Sleepless. He’s about ten years old, a dirty kid yelling his head off that he has to see you and nobody else. I sent Eric out to tell him you had open reception tomorrow, but he socked Eric in the eye and said he couldn’t wait.”

“Did Eric flatten him?” Leisha said. Stella’s twelve-year-old son had strength mods. And karate lessons. And a disposition no Sleepless should have.

“No,” Stella said, with pride, “Eric’s growing up. He’s learned not to hit unless there’s a clear physical need for defense.”

Leisha doubted this. Eric Bevington-Watrous troubled her. But all she said was, “Let the boy in. I’ll see him now.”

“Leisha! Tokyo is on the comlink this very minute!”

“Tell them I’ll call back. Humor me, Stella—it’s my birthday. I’m old.”

“
Alice
is old,” Stella said, altering the mood instantly. After a moment she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Let the kid in. At least it will stop that yelling. What did you say his name was?”

“Drew Arlen,” Stella said.

In orbit over the Pacific Ocean, the Sanctuary Council broke into spontaneous applause.

Fourteen men and women sat around the polished metal table shaped like a stylized double helix in the Council dome. A plastiglass window three feet above the floor ran around the entire dome, occasionally crossed with thin metal support struts. The dome itself sat as close as possible to one end of the cylindrical orbital, so the view from the conference room, which neatly occupied half the Council dome, was appealingly varied. To the “north” stretched agricultural fields, dotted with domes, curving gently upward until lost in the hazy sky. To the “south” was space, uncompromising in the relatively thin layer of air that lay between the Council dome and the plastiglass end of the orbital cylinder. To the north, a warm and sunny “day” as sunlight streamed into the orbital through the long unopaqued window sections; to the south, endless night, filled variously with stars or an oppressively huge Earth. The uneven curvature of the conference table and the chairs bolted to the floor meant that six Council members faced stars, eight faced sun.