Beggars in Spain (27 page)

Kevin Baker, the only prominent Sleepless left in the United States, had four children by his young Sleepless wife.

Jennifer Sharifi, she knew from consulting United States birth records, had two children and four grandchildren.

Alice may have lost Moira, emigrant to Mars colony, but she had Jordan and his three children.

Stop it,
she told herself, and did.

The baby was passed around. Stella bustled in with cookies and
coffee. Alice, tired, was wheeled to her room to sleep. Jordan came in from a field he was cultivating with experimental genemod sunflowers. Richard talked, seemingly freely and yet with something odd in his manner, about his and Ada’s wanderings through the Artificial Islands Game Sanctuary off the African coast.

“Hey,” Drew said, and at the sound in his voice everybody looked up. “Hey—this baby’s
sleeping
.”

Leisha sat still. Then she stood, walked to Drew’s chair, and stared down at the infant carryall parked at Drew’s feet. Sean lay with his tiny fists flung above his head, asleep. His closed eyelids fluttered. Leisha’s stomach clenched. Richard had felt such hatred of his own kind, his own people, that he had had
in vitro
genemod to
reverse
sleeplessness.

He was gazing at her. “No, Leisha,” he said quietly. “I didn’t. It’s natural.”

“Natural…”

“Yes. That’s where we’ve been the last month, after the Artificial Islands—Chicago Medical Institute. Looking for answers to a spontaneous regression. But there’s nobody there who’s doing more than cookbook carrying out of old discoveries—hell, there’s no geneticists left anywhere who can do more than that, except in agribusiness.” He fell silent; Leisha and he both knew this was not true. There was Sanctuary.

Leisha said thickly, “Do they know at least if it’s widespread, or on the increase…statistical parameters…”

“It seems to be pretty rare. Of course, there’s so few Sleepless now they can’t construct any statistical profiles.”

Again that silence, heavy with the unnamed.

It was Ada who broke the silence. She couldn’t have followed much of the conversation between Leisha and her husband, but she rose gracefully to move beside Leisha. Ada stooped and picked up her baby. Gazing tenderly down at him, she said, “I see you gladly, Sean. I see you sleep,” and then her gaze rose to meet Leisha’s directly, for the first time that Leisha could ever remember.

Even when everything in the country had changed, nothing had changed.

J
ennifer, Will, the two geneticists, Doctors Toliveri and Blure, and their technicians stood watching the creation of a miniature world.

Five hundred miles away in space, a plastic bubble floated. As the Sanctuary team watched via screen in Sharifi Labs, Special Enterprises Division, the bubble reached maximum inflation. Inside it, thousands of plastic membranes pulled taut. The interior was a honeycomb of thin-walled tunnels, chambers, and diaphragms, some with pinhole pricks, some as porous as standard Earth building materials, some open. None was more than four inches high. When the bubble was fully inflated with standard atmospheric mix, the hologrid in the lab’s ceiling projected downward a transparent, three-dimensional model of the bubble and its internal partitions.

From each of four chambers on the outside of the bubble, five mice were released. The mice squeezed through the tunnels, whose low height prevented free fall, squeaking hysterically. On the hologrid model twenty black dots traced their path. A screen on another wall displayed twenty sets of readings from the biometers implanted in each mouse.

The mice ran free for ten minutes. Then from a single source inside the bubble was released the genemod organism, distantly related to a virus, that Toliveri and Blure had spent seven years creating.

One by one, the biometer readings faltered and the squeaking, amplified on audio, disappeared. The first three ceased transmitting within
three minutes; the next six a few minutes later; five more within ten minutes. The last six transmitted for nearly thirty-one minutes.

Dr. Blure fed the data into an extrapolation program. He frowned. He was very young, no more than twenty-five, and since he was very blond the beard he seemed trying hard to grow was a soft stubble, like down. “No good. At that rate, the configurations of the smallest orbital project at over an hour. And of a beggar city, on a still day, over five hours for saturation.”

“Too slow,” Will Sandaleros said. “It won’t convince.”

“No,” Blure said. “But we’re closer.” He glanced again at the flat bioreadings. “Imagine people who would actually use such a thing.”

“The beggars would,” Jennifer Sharifi said.

No one contradicted her.

Miri and Tony sat in their shared lab in Science Dome Four. Ordinarily children used school laboratories, not professional ones, for their learning projects; space on an orbital was too precious to dole out indiscriminately. But Miri and Tony Sharifi were not ordinary children and their projects were not just learning experiences. The Sanctuary Council, Sharifi Labs, and the Board of Education had held a meeting to explore the issues: Should Miri’s neurological experiments and Tony’s datasystems improvements be considered class projects, patentable private enterprises, or work for hire for Sanctuary Corporation? Should any potential profits belong to the family business, to the corporation, or to a trust fund arranged for Miri and Tony until they were no longer minors under New York State law? Everyone at the meeting had smiled, and the discussion had been happy; they were all too proud of the Supers to fight over them. The decision had been that their work belonged to Sanctuary with a 60 percent royalty share to the children themselves of any commercial applications, plus college credit. Miri was twelve, Tony eleven.

“L-l-look at th-this,” Tony said. Miri didn’t answer for forty-five seconds, which meant she was at a crucial point in thought-string construction and the string Tony’s words had started was knotted in only at
the periphery. Tony waited cheerfully. He was usually cheerful, and Miri could seldom detect any black strings among the thought edifices he mapped for her on his hologrid. That was his current project: mapping how the Supers thought. He had started with one sentence: “No adult has an automatic claim on the production of another; weakness does not constitute a moral claim on strength.” Tony had spent weeks eliciting from twelve Supers every string and cross-string this sentence evoked, entering each into a program he had written himself.

It had been slow work. Jonathan Markowitz and Ludie Calvin, the youngest Supers in the experiment, had lost patience with the opaque, stammering slowness of spoken words and had twice flounced out of Tony’s dogged sessions. Mark Meyer’s strings had been so bizarre that the program refused to recognize them as valid until Tony rewrote sections of the code. Nikos Demetrios had clear strings and cooperated eagerly, but in the middle of his interrogation he caught cold, was quarantined for three days, and came back with such different strings for the same phrases that Tony threw out all his data for contamination by artistic rearrangement.

But he had persisted, sitting at the holoterminal across from Miri’s even longer hours than she did, twitching and muttering. Now he smiled at her. “C-c-come s-s-see!”

Miri walked around their double desk to Tony’s side. The holoterminal’s three-dimensional display had been opaqued on the side facing her. When she finally got to see his preliminary results, Miri gasped in delight.

It was a model of
her
strings for Tony’s research sentence, each concept represented by a small graphic for concretes, by words for abstracts. Glowing lines in various colors mapped first-, second-, and third-level cross-references. She had never seen such a complete representation of what went on in her mind. “It’s b-b-beautiful!”

“Y-y-yours are,” Tony said. “C-c-c-compact. El-elegant.”

“I kn-know that sh-shape!” Miri turned to the library screen.
T-T-Terminal on. Open L-Library. Earth b-b-bank. Ch-Chartres C-C-C-Cathedral, F-F-France, R-R-R-Rose W-W-Window. G-GG-Graphic d-d-d-display.”

The screen glowed with the intricate stained-glass design from the thirteenth century. Tony studied it with the critical eye of a mathematician. “N-n-noo…n-not r-really the s-s-s-s-same.”

“In
f-f-feel
it is,” Miri said, and the old frustration teased her, making limp spiraling strings in her mind: There was some essential connection between the Rose Window and Tony’s computer model that wasn’t obvious but was
there,
somehow, and of tremendous unseen importance. But her thinking couldn’t express it. Something was missing in her thought strings, had always been missing.

Tony said, “L-l-look at J-J-Jonathan.” Miri’s thought model vanished and Jonathan’s appeared. Miri gasped again. “H-h-how c-can he think l-like th-that!”

Unlike Miri’s, Jonathan’s model wasn’t a symmetrical shape but an untidy amoeba, with strings shooting off in all directions, petering out, suddenly shooting back for weird connections Miri didn’t immediately understand. How did the Battle of Gettysburg connect to the Hubble constant? Presumably Jonathan knew.

Tony said, “Th-those are the only t-t-two I’ve d-d-done s-s-so far. M-m-mine is n-next. Then the p-program will s-s-superimpose them and l-look for c-c-communication p-principles. S-s-someday, M-M-Miri, b-b-besides f-furthering c-c-communications science, we c-c-could use t-terminals to t-t-talk to each other w-without this f-f-f-fucking one-d-d-dimensional sp-sp-speech!”

Miri looked at him with love. His was work with a genuine contribution to the community. Well, maybe some day hers would be, too. She was working on synthetic neurotransmitters for the speech centers of the brain. Someday she hoped to create one that, unlike any the scientists had tried so far, would produce no side effects while it inhibited stuttering. She reached out and caressed the side of Tony’s big head, lolling and jerking on his thick neck.

Joan Lucas burst into their lab without knocking. “Miri! Tony! The playground’s open!”

Instantly Miri dismissed neurotransmitters and communications science. The playground was open! All the children, Norms and Supers alike, had waited for this for weeks. She grabbed Tony’s hand and scampered after Joan. Outside, Joan, long-legged and fleet, easily outdistanced her, but no child in Sanctuary needed directions to the new playground. They just looked up.

In the core of the cylindrical world, anchored by tough thin cables, the inflated plastic bubble floated at the orbital’s axis. Gravity here was so thin it approximated free fall, at least enough for the children. Miri and Tony crowded into the elevator that took them up, slipped on velcro mittens and slippers, and screamed in delight as they were dumped inside the huge bubble. The inside was crossed by translucent pink plastic struts, all with elastic give, with opaque boxes for hiding in, with pockets and tunnels that ended in midair. Everything was dotted with soft inflated hand-holds and velcro strips. Miri launched herself headlong into the air, flew across a plastic room, and launched herself back, crashing into Joan. Both girls giggled, and drifted slowly downward, clutching at each other and squealing when Tony and a boy they didn’t know tore by overhead.

Miri’s strings rippled in her mind with chaos theory, with mythic images, with angels and flyers and Icarus and acceleration ratios and Orville Wright and Mercury astronauts and membraned mammals and escape velocities and muscle-strength-weight ratios. With delight.

“Come inside here,” Joan shouted over the shrieking. “I have a secret to tell you!” She grabbed Miri, stuffed her into a translucent suspended box, and crowded in after her. Inside it was marginally less noisy.

Joan said, “Miri, guess what—my mom’s pregnant!”

“W-w-wonderful!” Miri said. Joan’s mother’s eggs were Type r-14, difficult to penetrate even
in vitro.
Joan was thirteen; Miri knew she had wanted a baby sister or brother with the same tenacity that Tony wanted a Litov-Hall auto-am. “I’m s-s-s-so g-g-g-glad!”

Joan hugged her. “You’re my best friend, Miri!” Abruptly she launched herself out of the box. “Catch me!”

Miri never would, of course. She was too clumsy, compared to Joan’s Norm agility. But that didn’t matter. She hurtled herself after Joan, shrieking with the others just for the pleasure of making noise, while below her the world tumbled over and over in patterns of hydrofields and domes and parks as beautiful as strings.

The Tuesday after the playground opened was Remembrance Day. Miri dressed carefully in black shorts and tunic. She could feel the somber shape of her strings, shifting with her thoughts in compact, flattened ovals as dark as everyone’s clothes. Religious holidays in Sanctuary varied from family to family; some kept Christmas, Ramadan, Easter, Yom Kippur, or Divali; many kept nothing at all. The two holidays held in common were the Fourth of July and Remembrance Day, April 15.

The crowd gathered in the central panel. The park had been expanded by covering surrounding fields of super-high-yield plants with a temporary spray-plastic latticework strong enough to stand on and large enough to accommodate every person in Sanctuary. Those few who could not leave their work or had temporary illnesses watched on their comlinks. A temporary platform for the speaker loomed above the crowd. High above the platform floated the deserted playground.

Most people stood with their families. Miri and Tony, however, clustered with the other Supers who were older than eight or nine, half hidden in the shadows of a power dome. The Supers were happier apart from crowds of Norms, whom they couldn’t keep up with physically, and happier together. Miri didn’t think her mother had even looked for her or Tony or Ali. Hermione had a new baby to whom she was devoted. No one had explained to Miri why this one, like little Rebecca, was a Norm. Miri hadn’t asked.

Where was Joan? Miri twisted and turned, but she couldn’t see the Lucas family anywhere.

Jennifer Sharifi, wearing a black
abbaya,
mounted the platform.
Miri’s heart swelled with pride. Grandma was beautiful, more beautiful even than Mother or Aunt Najla. She was as beautiful as Joan. And on Grandma’s face was the composed, set look that always evoked in Miri strings and cross-references of human intelligence and will. There was no one like Grandmother.

“Citizens of Sanctuary,” Jennifer began. Her voice, amplified, carried to every corner of the orbital without once being raised. “I call you that because although the United States government calls us citizens of that country, we know better. We know that no government founded without the consent of the governed has the right to claim us. We know that no government without the ability to recognize the reality of men having been created unequal has the vision to claim us. We know that no government operating on the principle that beggars have a right to the productive labor of others has the morality to claim us.

“On this Remembrance Day, April 15, we recognize that Sanctuary has the right to its own consenting government, its own clear-eyed reality, the fruits of its own productive labor. We have the right to these things, but we do not yet possess the actualities. We are not free. We are not yet allowed the ‘separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle’ us. We have Sanctuary, thanks to the Sleepless vision of our founder Anthony Indivino, but we do not have freedom.”

“Y-y-yet,” Tony whispered grimly to Miri. She squeezed his hand and stood on tiptoe to search the crowd for Joan.

“And yet we have created for ourselves as much of the measure of freedom as we can,” Jennifer continued. “Assigned without our consent to a New York State court jurisdiction, we have never in thirty-two years either filed or incurred a lawsuit. Instead, we have set up our own judicial system, unknown to the beggars below, and administered it ourselves. Assigned without our consent to licensing regulations for our brokers, doctors, lawyers, even teachers of our own children, we have complied with all the regulations. We have done this even when it means living for awhile among the beggars. Assigned to comply with meaningless statistical regulations that number us equal with beggars,
we have counted and measured and tested ourselves as required and then dismissed the result as the irrelevant pap it surely is.”

Miri spotted Joan. She was pushing through the crowd, heedlessly elbowing people, and Miri was shocked to see that Joan hadn’t changed into Remembrance Day black. She wore a forest-green halter and shorts. Miri raised her arm as far as she could beyond the shadow of the power dome and waved frantically.