Beggars in Spain (31 page)

“N-N-N-Nikos…”

“H-h-h-hello, M-M-M-M-Miri.”

“W-w-will you have s-s-s-s-sex with m-me?”

Nikos regarded her steadily. Mottled color swept from his neck to his forehead. Miri saw that, like David Aronson, Nikos was embarrassed, but unlike David he didn’t seem embarrassed by the directness of the question. She could only think of one other reason he could be embarrassed. She turned and stumbled from the office.

Nikos called, “W-w-w-wait! M-Miri!” His voice sounded genuinely distressed; they had been playmates their entire lives. He couldn’t coordinate his movements even as well as she could. She easily outdistanced him.

Back in her lab, door locked and
STERILE ENVIRONMENT
seal activated, Miri sat, fiercely willing herself not to cry. Her grandmother had been right: There were hard necessities to face. One did not cry.

After that she was courteous and distant with Nikos, who didn’t seem to know what to do about that. Eventually she saw him with
a Norm, a pretty fourteen-year-old named Patricia who seemed fascinated by Nikos’s skill with money. Miri had never talked much with Christina; now she talked less. David she never saw. With Tony she was the same as always: he was her workmate, friend, beloved confidant. Her brother. Now there was just this one area where the confiding didn’t extend, was all. It was unimportant. She wouldn’t let it be important. Hard necessity.

Two weeks later, Miri resumed watching the newsgrids from Earth, but only the sex channels. There were a lot of them. She found one she liked, removed all retina prints except her own from her lab-door programming, and learned to masturbate efficiently. She did it twice a day, her neurochemical responses being as hyped in this area as every other. She never permitted herself to think about Tony while she did it, and Tony never asked her why he could no longer enter her lab unannounced. There was no need. He knew. He was her brother.

Seating herself in the chair Drew indicated, Leisha had a funny thought:
I wish I smoked.
She remembered her father smoking, reaching for his monogrammed gold cigarette case, making a ritual out of lighting a cigarette. His eyes would half-close and his cheeks would hollow with the first long inward drag. Roger always said it relaxed him. Even then Leisha had known he was lying: It revitalized him.

Which did she want now, tranquility or revitalization? It seemed she was in need of both, and that what Drew would offer her would provide neither.

He had insisted on her being the first one, and alone. “A new art form, Leisha,” he’d said, with that peculiar intensity that had marked him since Eric’s illegal experimentation. Drew had always been intense, but this was different. He looked at Leisha from under those thick dark lashes, and she was afraid for him. This, then, was what it felt like to be a parent, this fear that your child was not going to be able to obtain what he’d set his heart on. That he would fail, and you would hurt for him more than you ever did for your own failures. How had Alice stood it? How had Stella?

But not Roger. He had been sure, from the beginning, that his child would not fail.
Surprise, Daddy. Look at me now,
sulking idly in the desert for twenty years, an Achilles whose Agamemnon was fighting her own stupid war while Leisha raised a son whose major talent was petty crime and who was not, in fact, even hers.

She said to Drew, not gently, “You should know that I’ve never been particularly sensitive to art, in any form. Maybe somebody else—”

“I know you’re not. That’s why I want it to be you.”

She settled herself into the chair. “All right. Let’s start.” It sounded more resigned than she’d intended.

“Lights off,” Drew said. The room in the New Mexico compound, fitted over the past seven months with a half-million dollars of theatrical equipment, darkened. Leisha heard Drew’s chair move across the floor. When the holograph projector on the ceiling came on, he was seated directly beneath it, the console on his lap. Around him was nothing: not floor or walls or ceiling, just Drew suspended in the velvety blackness of a fairly standard null-projection.

He started to talk in a low voice. For a moment, all Leisha heard was the voice itself, calm and musical: She had never realized that Drew had such a beautiful voice. In normal surroundings, you didn’t notice it. Then the words penetrated. Poetry. Drew—
Drew
—was reciting an old poem, something about golden groves unleaving…Leisha knew she had heard it before but couldn’t think of the author. She was a little embarrassed for Drew. His voice was beautiful and soothing, but reciting poetry to holographic illustrations was about as juvenile artsy as you could get. Her heart tightened. Another false step, another failure…

Shapes swam toward her out of the darkness.

They weren’t quite identifiable, and yet she recognized them. They passed above Drew, behind him, in front of him, even through him, while he finished the poem and started it again. The same poem. At least she thought it was the same poem. Leisha wasn’t sure because it was hard to concentrate on the words; she had never much liked poetry anyway but even if she had it would be hard to concentrate. She
couldn’t take her eyes off the shapes. They slipped behind Drew and she tried to follow them with her eyes, see through him to see them, but she couldn’t. The effort was tiring. When the wavering shapes emerged again from behind Drew, they were different. She strained forward to make out exactly what they were…she recognized them…

Drew started the poem a third time. “‘What, Margaret, are you grieving over golden groves unleaving…’”

She was grieving, but not over leaves. The shapes slid in and out of her mind and suddenly Drew had vanished….He must be good to have programmed that…and the grief welled and filled her. She recognized a shape, finally: It was her father.
Roger.
He stood in the old conservatory in the house on Lake Michigan, the house that had been torn down twenty-six years ago. He was holding an exotic in his hands, thick-petaled and creamy white, with a flushed pink center. She cried out and he said clearly, “You haven’t failed, Leisha. Not with Sanctuary, not with trying to make Alice special too, not with Richard, not with the law. The only failure is to not use your individual capacities, and you have done that. All your life. You tried.”

Leisha gave a little scream and rose from her chair. She walked toward her father and he didn’t vanish, not even when she stood with him directly under the holographic projection equipment. But the flower in his arms vanished and he took both her hands, saying gently, “You were the whole point of my individual striving,” and Leisha shook her head violently. There was a blue ribbon on her head: She was a child again. Mamselle came in with Alice, and Alice said, “You never wronged me, Leisha. Never. There’s nothing to forgive.” Then Alice and Roger both vanished and Leisha was running through a forest filled with sunshine, green and golden slanting bars of light pouring through the trees. She was laughing, and in the light was the warmth of living plants and the scent of spring and the taste of forgiveness. Never had Leisha felt so free and joyous, as if she were doing exactly what she had always been meant to do. She laughed again and ran harder, because at the end of the sunlit, flowered path was her mother, holding out her arms and laughing too, her face alight with love.

There were tears on her cheeks. She sat in her chair in the adobe room. The lights were on. Immediately nausea hit her.

Drew said eagerly, “What did you see?”

Leisha doubled over, fighting her stomach. Finally she gasped, “What…did you do?”

“Tell me what you saw.” He was inexorable: the young artist.

“No!”

“It was powerful, then.” He leaned back in his wheelchair, smiling.

Leisha straightened slowly, hanging onto the back of her chair. Drew’s face was triumphant. She said, more calmly now, “What did you do?”

He said, “I made you dream.”

Dream. Sleep. Six teenagers in the woods, and a vial of interleukin-1…but this had been nothing like that. Nothing.

What this had been like was the night Alice had come to her in the Conewango hotel room, during Jennifer Sharifi’s trial. The night Leisha had lost her belief in the power of the law to create a common community, and had stood trembling at the edge—

Darkness—

The void—

But this dream of Drew’s had been
light,
not darkness. Yet it was the same. Leisha was sure of it. The edge of something vast and lawless, something that could swallow the tiny careful light of her reason…And then Alice had come. Across that vast unknown, Alice had somehow heard Leisha, in some way that had nothing to do with the careful light.
I knew,
Alice had whispered. And she had gone straight to Leisha, against all reason.

And now Drew, against all reason, had somehow manipulated an unknown part of her mind….

Drew said eagerly, “It starts with a kind of hypnosis, but one that reaches around the cortex to call on universal…shapes I call them. They’re more than that. But I don’t have the words, Leisha, you know I never did. I just know they’re in me and everybody else. I bring them out,
call
them out, so that they can take their own shapes in the person’s
dream. It’s a kind of lucid dreaming, semidirected, but more than that. It’s new.” He sucked in a deep breath. “It’s mine.”

Logical questions calmed her. “Semidirected? You mean you determined what I would…dream?” But she couldn’t maintain the detached tone. She was feeling too many things, not all of them good. “Drew—that’s what dreaming is like? That’s what Sleepers
do
?”

He shook his head. “No. Not often. I guess—I don’t really know yet what happened. You’re the first, Leisha!”

“I…
dreamed
about my father. And my mother.”

His eyes gleamed. “Good, good. I was working with shapes from my parents.” His young face suddenly darkened, lost in some private memory Leisha suddenly didn’t want to share. Dreaming…this was too public. Too irrational. Too much a letting go, a surrender. But if it were a surrender to sunlight, to sweetness…No. It wasn’t reality. Dreams were escape, she had always known that, she who had never dreamed. Dreams were as much an evasion of the real world as Alice’s Twin Group pseudoscience. But what she’d just experienced from Drew…

“I’m too old to have my world turned inside out like a sock!”

Drew suddenly grinned, a smile of such pure triumph unmixed with frustration or arrogance that Leisha was dazzled. But she held onto her reason, hard. She said, “Drew, the other four patients who had the same operation as you in that Mexican clinic—they didn’t come out of it with anything like this, any sort of change, any…” She couldn’t find the word.

“But they weren’t artists,” he said, with the absolute conviction of the reborn young. “I am.”

“But—” Leisha began, and got no farther because Drew, still smiling—still triumphant—leaned far over from his chair and kissed her hard on the mouth.

Leisha sat very still. She could feel her body respond, for the first time in…how long? Years. Her nipples hardened, her belly tightened…he smelled male, of male skin and hair. Her mouth opened of its own volition. Leisha drew sharply back.

“No, Drew.”

“Yes!”

She hated to spoil his triumph, his terrifying achievement—she had been
dreaming.
But about this she was sure. “No.”

“Why not?” He was pale now, but steady. His pupils were huge.

“Because I’m seventy-eight years old and you’re twenty. I know it doesn’t look that way to you, but to my mind—my
mind,
Drew—you’re a child. And you always will be to me.”

“Because I’m a Sleeper!”

“No. Because I’ve lived fifty-eight years you haven’t.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Drew said fiercely.

“No. I don’t. You have no idea what it means.” She covered his hand with her own. “I think of you as a son, Drew. A son. Not a lover.”

He looked her straight in the eyes. “And what did your dream tell you about mothers and fathers and children that was so terrifying?”

For a moment she felt the dream again, and she glimpsed something behind the dream, some obverse side of the sunlit path, the smiling Roger with his hands full of exotics, the loving Elizabeth as Elizabeth had never really been, not to her. Leisha couldn’t quite see that obverse side but it was there, deep in her mind, a way of ordering the world that had nothing to do with the law or economics or political integration or all the other things she had given her life to, not necessarily a worse way, or a better one, but different,
alien
…the glimpse slipped away.

She said, with all the compassion she could, “I’m sorry, Drew.”

As she left the room he said quietly after her, “I’ll get better at my art, Leisha. I’ll draw out more from your preconscious, I’ll show you things you never even…Leisha!”

She couldn’t answer him. It would only make it worse. She went out and softly closed the door.

By evening, when she had figured out how to discuss it with him, what to say to put the whole dizzying episode into rational perspective, Stella told her Drew had packed and was gone.

Miri took her seat in the Council dome. It was a new seat, added to the room at her sixteenth birthday, the fifteenth chair bolted to the floor
around the polished metal table. From now on, the 51 percent of Sanctuary stock owned by the Sharifi family would be voted in seven equal blocks. Next year, when Tony took his seat, there would be eight. The chair squeaked slightly as Miri sat in it.

“The Sanctuary Council is proud to welcome Miranda Serena Sharifi as a voting member,” Jennifer said formally. The councilors applauded. Miri smiled. Her grandmother had for a moment eased the tension in the room, so thick its currents could have been graphed on a Heller matrix. Miri glanced around the table from under lowered eyes; she habitually ducked her head now, since in her mirror that seemed to minimize her twitching and jerking. Her mother applauded without looking directly at Miri. Her father smiled with that resigned melancholy that was always in his eyes now. Beautiful Aunt Najla, pregnant with another Super, stared at Miri with unblinking determination.