Beggars in Spain (22 page)

Jennifer Sharifi, permanent Council leader, always faced north, toward the sun.

She said, pleasure sparkling in her dark eyes, “All the brain scans, fluid analyses, spinal cartography results, and of course DNA analyses indicate nothing but success. Doctors Toliveri and Clement are to be warmly congratulated. And so, of course, are Ricky and Hermione.” She smiled warmly at her son and daughter-in-law. Ricky smiled back; Hermione ducked her head and a spasm crossed her extravagantly
beautiful face. About half of Sanctuary’s families no longer altered genes, content with the intellectual and psychological benefits of Sleeplessness and wanting to preserve family resemblances. Hermione, violet-eyed and sleek-limbed, belonged to the other half.

Councilor Victor Lin said eagerly, “Can’t we see the baby? Certainly the environment has to be sterile enough.” Several people laughed.

“Yes, please,” Councilor Lucy Ames said, and blushed. She was only twenty-one, born on the orbital, and still a little overwhelmed that her name had come up for a Council term in the citizen lottery. Jennifer smiled at her.

“Yes, of course. We can all see the baby. But I want to repeat what you have been told before: This round of genetic alteration has gone far beyond anything that any of us are privileged to enjoy. If we wish to keep our advantage over the Sleepers on Earth, we must explore every avenue of superiority open to us. But there are sometimes minor, unavoidable prices to pay as we move forward.”

This speech sobered everyone. The eight councilors with lottery terms, those not of the Sharifi family that controlled 51 percent of Sanctuary financially and hence 51 percent of Council votes, glanced at each other. The six permanent councilors—Jennifer, Ricky, Hermione, Najla, Najla’s husband Lars Johnson and Jennifer’s husband Will Sandaleros—went on smiling determinedly. Except for Hermione.

“Bring in the baby,” Jennifer said to her. Hermione left. Ricky reached out a tentative hand as his wife passed, but didn’t touch her. He drew his hand back and stared out the dome window. Nobody spoke until Hermione returned with a wrapped bundle.

“This,” Jennifer said, “is Miranda Serena Sharifi. Our future.”

Hermione put the baby on the conference table and unwrapped its yellow blanket. Miranda was ten weeks old. Her skin was pale, without rosiness, and her hair was a thick mat of black. She gazed around the conference table from bright, very dark eyes. The eyes bulged in their sockets and darted constantly, unable to remain still. The strong, tiny body twitched ceaselessly. The minute fists opened and closed so fast it
was hard to count her fingers. The baby radiated a manic vitality, an overwrought tension so intense it seemed her gaze would bore a zigzag hole in the dome wall.

Young Councilor Ames put her fist to her mouth.

“At first glance,” Jennifer said in her composed voice, “you might think that our Miranda’s symptoms look like certain nervous-system disorders the unaltered beggars are prey to. Or perhaps symptoms of para-amphetamines. But this is something
very
different. Miri’s brain is operating at three or four times the speed of ours, with superbly enhanced mnemonic capacities and equally enhanced concentration. There is no loss of nerve-tissue control, although there is some minor loss of motor control as a side effect. Miri’s genemods include high intelligence, but what the changes to her nervous system will do is give her ways to
use
that intelligence that we cannot now predict. This genemod is the best way around the well-known phenomenon of intellectual regression to the mean, in which superior parents have children of only normal intelligence, providing a lesser platform from which new genemods can launch.”

A few people around the table nodded at this lecture; a few more, familiar with the lesser accomplishments of Najla and Ricky compared to Jennifer herself, looked down at the table. Councilor Ames continued to stare at the twitching infant, her eyes wide and her hand to her mouth.

“Miranda is the first,” Jennifer said. “But not the last. We in Sanctuary represent the best minds of the United States. It is our obligation to keep that advantage. For all our sakes.”

Councilor Lin said quietly, “Our usual Sleepless, genemod babies are already doing that.”

“Yes,” Jennifer said, smiling brilliantly, “but at any time the beggars on Earth could decide to reverse their shortsighted policy and begin to do that again themselves. We need more. We need everything we can create for ourselves from the genetic technology we dare to use to its fullest and they do not—mind, technology, defense—”

Will Sandaleros put his hand lightly on her arm.

For a second fury blazed in Jennifer’s eyes. Then it was gone, and she smiled at Will, who gazed at her tenderly. Jennifer laughed. “Was I orating again? I’m sorry. I know you all understand the Sanctuary philosophy as well as I do.”

A few people smiled; a few shifted uneasily around the polished table. Councilor Ames went on staring, wide-eyed, at the convulsing baby. Hermione caught the young woman’s horrified gaze; immediately she wrapped Miranda in her blanket. The thin yellow material jerked and twitched. Along the hem were embroidered white butterflies and dark blue stars.

Drew Arlen stood before Leisha Camden with his legs braced firmly apart. Leisha thought that she had never seen such a contrast as this child with the teen-age reporter who had just left, and whose name she had already forgotten.

Drew was the filthiest ten-year-old she had ever seen. Mud caked his brown hair and smeared the remains of his plastic shirt, pants, and torn Dole-issue shoes. So much dirt clung to a deep scratch on his exposed left arm that Leisha thought it must surely be infected; the skin had a red, angry look around elbow bones like chisels. One tooth had been knocked out of a face that was remarkable only for eyes as green as Leisha’s own and a sort of stubborn eagerness, as if Drew were prepared to fight for something with every fiber of his dirty, skinny, clearly non-donkey self.

“I’m Drew Arlen, me,” he said. It might have been a fanfare.

“Leisha Camden,” Leisha said gravely. “You insisted on seeing me.”

“I want to be in your Fountain.”

“Foundation. Where did you hear about my Foundation?”

Drew waved this away as of no consequence. “From somebody. After he told me, I done come a long way to get here, me. From Louisiana.”

“On foot? By yourself?”

“I stole rides when I could,” the boy said, again as if this were not worth mentioning. “It took a long time. But now I’m here, me, and I’m ready for you to start.”

Leisha said to the household robot, “Bring sandwiches from the refrigerator. And milk.” The robot glided soundlessly away. Drew watched it with total absorption until it left the room. He turned to Leisha. “Is that the kind that can wrestle with you? For muscle training. I see them on the newsgrids, me.”

“No. It’s just a basic retrieve-and-record ’bot. Now what is it you’re ready for, Drew?”

He said impatiently, “To get started. Your Fountain. Making me into somebody.”

“And just what does that mean to you?”

“
You
know—You’re the Fountain lady! Get cleaned up, me, and educated, and be somebody!”

“You want to become a donkey?”

The boy frowned. “No, but thass where I got to start, me, don’t I? Then go on from there.”

The robot returned. Drew looked longingly at the food; Leisha gestured and he fell on it like a filthy little dog, tearing at the sandwiches with teeth on the left side of his face and wincing with pain whenever the sore, empty hole on the right came in contact with bread or meat. Leisha watched.

“When did you eat last?”

“Yesterday morning. Thass good.”

“Do your parents know where you are?”

Drew picked up a crumb from the floor and ate it. “My mom don’t care. She’s at brainie parties, her, all the time now. My daddy’s dead.” He said this last harshly, looking straight at Leisha from his green eyes, as if she should know already about his father’s death. Leisha pulled the terminal from the wall.

“Won’t do no good to call them,” Drew said. “We got no terminal, us.”

“I’m not going to call them, Drew. I’m going to find out something about you. Where in Louisiana did you live?”

“Montronce Point.”

“Personal bio search, all primary databanks,” Leisha said. “Drew, what’s your Dole security number?”

“842-06-3421-889.”

Montronce was a tiny Delta town, no donkey economy to speak of. One thousand nine hundred twenty-two people, school with 16 percent attendance for students, 62 percent for volunteer teachers, who kept the building open fifty-eight days a year. Drew was one of the 16 percent, off and on. His medical history was nonexistent, but those of his parents and two younger sisters were recorded. Leisha listened to it all, and grew very still.

When the terminal was done, she said, “Your grades, even in what passes for a school in Montronce, weren’t terrific.”

“No,” the boy agreed. His eyes never left her face.

“You don’t seem to have unusual abilities in athletics, music, or anything else.”

“No, I don’t, me.”

“And you don’t really want to be educated for a donkey job.”

“Thass all right,” he said aggressively. “I can do that.”

“But you don’t really want to. The Susan Melling Foundation exists to help people become what they want to become. What is it you want your future to hold?” It seemed an absurd question to ask a ten-year-old, especially this ten-year-old. Poorer than even most Livers. Not particularly talented. Scrawny. Smelly. A Sleeper.

And yet not ordinary, either—the bright green eyes looked at Leisha with a directness most adult Sleepers never managed, not even in the relaxed, hedonistic tolerance of the tricentennial social climate. In fact, Leisha thought, there was more than directness in Drew’s eyes: There was a confidence in her help that Foundation applicants almost never had. Most of them looked at her with uncertainty (“Why should you help me?”) or suspicion (“Why should you help me?”) or a nervous obsequiousness that inevitably reminded her of groveling dogs. Drew looked as if he and Leisha were business partners in a sure thing.

“You heard the terminal say how my Grampy died, him.”

Leisha said, “He was a workman building Sanctuary. A metal strut tore loose in space and ripped his suit.”

Drew nodded. His voice held the same buoyant confidence, without
grief. “My Daddy was a little boy then. The Dole didn’t hardly provide nothin’ then.”

“I remember,” Leisha said wryly; what the Dole had provided, courtesy of basic cheap Y-energy and social conscience, was nothing compared to what donkeys and government now provided, courtesy of the need for votes. Bread and circuses, saved from Roman barbarism only by that same cheap affluence. Comfortable and courted, Livers lacked the pent-up rage for the arena.

She had expected Drew to pass over her reference to remembering his father’s era; most children regarded the past as irrelevant. But he surprised her. “You remember, you? How it was? How old you be, Leisha?”

He doesn’t know any better than to use my first name,
Leisha thought indulgently—and immediately saw, for the first time, Drew’s gift. His interest in her was so intense, so fresh and real shining from the green eyes, that she was willing to indulge him. He carried blamelessness on him like a scent. She began to see how he could have made the trip from Louisiana to New Mexico still healthy: people would help him. In fact, the blood on his arm was fresh and so was the knocked-out tooth; it was possible he had met with nothing but help until he encountered Eric Bevington-Watrous outside Leisha’s walls.

And he was only ten years old.

She said, “I’m sixty-seven.”

His eyes widened. “Oh! You don’t look like an old lady, you!”

You should see my feet
. She laughed, and the child smiled. “Thank you, Drew. But you still haven’t answered my question. What is it you want from the Foundation?”

“My daddy grew up without his daddy and so he grew up rough, him, drinking too much,” Drew said, as if it were an answer. “He hit my mom. He hit my sisters. He hit me. But my mom told me he wouldn’t a been like that, him, if his daddy had lived. He’d a been a different man, him, kind and nice, and it warn’t his fault.”

Leisha could see it: The abused mother, not yet thirty herself, exonerating the man to his abused children, and eventually coming to
believe the excuse herself because she too needed an excuse, to keep from leaving.
It wasn’t his fault
becomes
It isn’t my fault. She spends all her time at brainie parties,
Drew had said. There were brainies and there were brainies: Not all met the FDA’s guidelines for either mildness or non-accumulation of side effects.

“It warn’t my Daddy’s fault,” Drew repeated. “But I figure, it warn’t mine, neither, me. So I had to get out of Montronce.”

“Yes, but…what do you
want
?”

The green eyes changed. Leisha wouldn’t have thought a child could look like that. Hatred, yes—she had seen children’s eyes full of hate. But this wasn’t hate, or anger, or even childish aggrievement. This was a completely adult look, such as not even adults wore much anymore, an old-fashioned look: icy determination.

Drew said, “I want Sanctuary.”

“Want it? What do you mean, you want it? To get even? To destroy it? To hurt people?”

The green eyes softened; they looked amused, an even more adult look, even more disconcerting. Leisha stood up, then sat down again.

“’Course not, silly,” Drew said. “I wouldn’t hurt nobody, me. I don’t want to destroy Sanctuary.”

“Then—”

“Someday, me, I’m gonna
own
it.”

The alarm sounded all over the orbital, loud and unmistakable. Technicians grabbed suits. Mothers picked up the babies shrieking at the noise, and instructed terminals in voices that trembled almost enough to obscure identification. The Sanctuary Exchange immediately froze all transactions; no one would profit from any dimension of the disaster, whatever it was.

“Get a flyer,” Jennifer said to Will Sandaleros, already in his contamination suit. She pulled on hers and ran out of their dome. This one could be it. Any one of them could be it.