Beggars in Spain (32 page)

The term councilors smiled, but she didn’t know them well enough to know what the smiles meant. She wondered if they were jealous of her sudden power. The Sanctuary charter, she knew from the library, was far more generous within the family than any family corporation on Earth would be. And on the newsgrid “dramas,” usual community procedure on Earth seemed to be for young males to kill the fathers who ran business empires or ranches or orbital corporations, in order to gain power. Then they apparently married their dead fathers’ young third wives. This was such a barbaric and appalling social system that Miri concluded it couldn’t be the way the beggars really ran things; they must like their “dramas” to explore situations that bore no relation to reality. This was such a silly idea that for the second time she had given up the dramas in disgust and returned to the sex channels.

“We have a full agenda,” Jennifer said in her graceful voice. “Councilor Drexler, will you start with the treasurer’s report?”

The treasurer’s report, routine and positive, did nothing to reduce the tension. Miri, unobserved now, studied one face after another from under her lowered brow. Something was very wrong. What?

The agricultural, legal, judicial, and medical committee heads made their reports. Hermione twisted a strand of her honey-colored
hair (when was the last time Miri had touched her mother’s hair? Years) around one finger, transferred the curl to a second finger, around and around. Twist, twist. Najla rubbed her swollen belly. Councilor Devore, a thin young man with large soft eyes, looked as if he were sitting on hot coals.

Finally Jennifer said, “One more addendum to the medical report, which I asked Councilor Devore to leave to general discussion. As most of you know, we have had an accident.” Abruptly Jennifer lowered her head, and Miri saw with astonishment that Jennifer needed a moment before she could go on. Miri was used to thinking of her grandmother as invulnerable.

“Tabitha Selenski, of Kenyon International, was repairing a power-conversion input in Business Building Three and received a power charge that…Her gross tissues are regenerating, very slowly. But parts of her nervous system are so destroyed there’s nothing to regenerate. She won’t ever be fully conscious again, although there’s partial consciousness, at about the level an animal might have…She will need constant care, including such basic tasks as diaper changes, feeding, restraint. Moreover, she will never again be a productive member of the community.”

Jennifer looked at each Council member in turn. Miri’s strings knotted themselves into horrible nets. To be helpless, dependent on others for everything, a drain on someone else’s time and resources without giving anything back…

A beggar.

She saw what the issue was, and her stomach lurched.

“I once knew a woman on Earth,” Jennifer said, “when I was a child. A friend’s mother. After my friend, the woman had another child, one with a profound neural disorder. As part of its so-called treatment, the mother was required to move its arms and legs in the rhythmic patterns of crawling, trying to impress those patterns on the brain and so stimulate brain development. She had to do this for an hour, six times every day. Between sessions, she fed the child, washed it, suctioned wastes from its colon, played prescribed tapes to stimulate its senses,
bathed it, and talked to it nonstop for three half-hour sessions equally spaced around the clock. This woman had once played the piano professionally, but now she never touched it. When the child was four, its doctors added more to the treatments. Four times a day the mother was required to wheel the child around the yard for exactly fifteen minutes, encountering the same objects in the same order but under different weather conditions, again to build certain response patterns into the brain. My friend helped with all this, but after years of it, she hated to even go home. So did the woman’s husband, who eventually didn’t go home at all. Neither of them was there the day the mother shot both herself and her child.”

Jennifer paused. She picked up a paper. “The Council has a petition from Tabitha Selenski’s husband, to end her suffering. We must decide now.”

Councilor Letty Rubin, a young woman with angular features that could have been turned on a lathe, said passionately, “Tabitha can still smile, still respond a little. I visited her and she tried to smile at the sound of my voice! She has a right to her life, whatever it is now!”

Jennifer said, “My friend’s mother’s child could smile, too. The real question is, do we have the right to sacrifice someone else’s life to the care of hers?”

“It wouldn’t have to be a sacrifice of one life! If we divide up the caretaking, in for instance two-hour shifts, the burden would be spread among so many that nobody would really be sacrificed.”

Will Sandaleros said, “The principle would still be there. A claim on the strong by the weak
because
of weakness. A beggar’s claim, that says the fruits of a person’s labor belong to whoever can’t labor for himself. Or won’t. We don’t recognize that weakness has a moral claim on competency.”

Councilor Jamison, an engineer nearly as old as her grandmother whose only genemod was Sleeplessness, shook his head. He had a long, plain face with a sharp knobby chin. “This is a human life, Councilor Sandaleros. A member of our community. Doesn’t the community owe its members full support?”

Will said, “But what constitutes a member of a community? Is it automatic—once you have joined, you are included for good? That leads to institutional morbidity. Or does being a member of a community mean that you continue to actively support the community, and actively contribute to it? Would, for instance, your insurance company, Councilor Jamison, continue to include a subscriber in the client list if he stopped paying his premiums?”

Jamison was silent.

Letty Rubin cried, “But a community is not congruent with a business arrangement! It must mean more!”

Jennifer’s voice cut sharply across her last words. “What it
should
mean is that Tabitha Selenski shouldn’t want to be a burden on her community. She should have the principles and dignity to not want to continue so-called life as a beggar, which means she should have included the standard life-termination clause in her will. I have, Will has,
you
have, Letty. Since Tabitha didn’t, she’s abandoned the principles of this community and declared herself no longer a member.”

Ricky Sharifi said, “Self-preservation is an innate drive, Mother.”

Jennifer said, “Innate drives can be modified for the good of civilization. This happens all the time. Sexual fidelity, formal laws to settle disputes, incest taboos—what are they but modifications imposed by will for the good of all? The innate drives would be to kill for revenge or to fuck our brains out whenever the urge struck.”

Miri stared at her grandmother—never, never had she heard Jennifer use language like that. Her grandmother’s speech was always formal, almost pedantic. The next moment she saw that it had been deliberate, theatrical, and she felt a slight distaste, followed by renewed stomach churning. Her grandmother did not trust her arguments alone to convince the Council to kill Tabitha Selenski.

To kill.

Strings whirled in her head.

Jean-Michel Devore said nervously, “What are the Sleepless except modifications of innate drives?”

Jennifer smiled at him.

Najla Sharifi said, “The definition of a community is key here. I think we all agree on that. Our definition seems to involve certain traits—like Sleeplessness—certain abilities, and certain principles. Which of these are crucial? Which are optional?”

“A good place to start,” Will Sandaleros approved.

Jennifer said, “A member of the community must possess all three. The trait of Sleeplessness, the ability to contribute to the community rather than drain it, the principles to value the community’s profound good above his own immediate preferences. Anyone who does not possess these things is not only too different from us but an active danger.” She leaned forward, palms flat on the table. “Believe me,
I know.
”

There was a little silence.

Into the silence Hermione said quietly, “Anyone who thinks too differently from us is not really a member of our community.”

Miri’s head jerked up. She stared at her mother, who didn’t look back. All the strings in Miri’s head turned over once, slowly, inside out. For a moment she couldn’t breathe.

But her mother had meant anyone who thought differently about
principles
…

Words from two dozen languages weaved themselves into her strings:
Harijan. Proscrit. Bui doi. Inquisición. Kristalnacht. Gulag.

“Ac-c-c-community d-d-d-d-” she couldn’t, in her emotion, get the damn words out, “
d-divided
on f-f-f-fundamentals w-w-will d-destroy itself.”

“Which is why we must not divide into the able and the parasitic,” Jennifer said swiftly.

“Th-th-that’s not whh-wh-wh-what I m-m-meant!”

They argued for five hours. Only Najla, her back aching from pregnancy, left, making over her proxy to her husband. In the end, the vote was nine to six: Tabitha Selenski must leave the community. She could, if her husband wished, be sent to Earth, among the beggars.

Miri had voted with the minority. So, to her surprise, had her father. The majority decision upset her, although of course she would abide by it. Sanctuary was owed her allegiance. But she felt confused
and she wanted to discuss it all with Tony, as only they could, in the full depth and breadth of all the cross-references, tertiary associations, strings of meaning. Tony’s computer program was a success. The Supers now used it routinely for communication among themselves, exchanging massive programmed edifices of meaning without the everlasting barricades of speech. She hurried to Tony.

Outside the Council dome, her father stopped her. Ricky Keller had hollows under his eyes. It occurred to Miri that seeing him sit in Council beside his mother, most people would conclude that Jennifer was the younger. Each year Ricky’s manner became gentler. He said now, one hand on Miri’s shoulder, “I wish you had met my father, Miri.”

“Y-y-y-your f-father?” No one ever spoke of Richard Keller. Miri had been told about the trial; what he had done to Jennifer, his wife, was monstrous.

“I think in many ways you’re like him, despite being a Super. Genetic inheritance is trickier than we know, despite our smugness. It’s not all in quantifiable chromosomes.”

He walked away. Miri didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted. Richard Keller, the traitor to Sanctuary. People usually said she was like her grandmother, “a strong-minded woman.” But her father’s eyes had been soft under their melancholy. Miri stared after his retreating, stooped figure.

The next day, Tabitha Selenski died by fatal injection. A persistent rumor circulated that Tabitha had injected the dose herself, but Miri didn’t believe that. If Tabitha had been capable of doing that, the Council wouldn’t have voted as it did. Tabitha had been nearly a vegetable. That was the truth. Miri’s grandmother had said so.

2091

T
he 152nd Congress of the United States faced an annual trade deficit that over the past ten years had increased six-hundred percent, a federal debt that had more than tripled, and a fiscal debt of twenty-six percent. For nearly a century, Y-energy patents had been licensed by Kenzo Yagai’s heirs exclusively to American firms, as specified in Yagai’s eccentric will. This had fueled the longest economic climb in history. Through Y-technology, the United States had pulled out of a dangerous turn-of-the-century international slump and an even more dangerous internal depression. Americans invented and built every known application of Y-energy, and everyone wanted Y-energy. American-designed and fueled orbitals circled the Earth; American-built aircraft spanned the skies; American-built weapons traded on the illegal arms market of every major nation in the world. The colonies on Mars and Luna survived on Y-generators. On Earth, a thousand engineering applications cleaned the air, recycled the wastes, warmed the cities, fueled the automated factories, grew the genetically-efficient food, powered the institutionalized Dole, and kept the expensive information flowing to the corporations that each year became richer, more shortsighted, and more driven, like an earlier age’s bloated aristocrats popping buttons off their waistcoats as they wagered fortunes at faro or E.O.

In 2080, the patents ran out.

The International Trade Commission opened international access to Y-energy patents. The nations that had nibbled at the crumbs of American prosperity—building the machine housings, sublicensing the less profitable franchises, surviving as middlemen and brokers—were ready. They had been ready for years, the factories in place, the engineers trained at the great American donkey universities, the designs prepared. Ten years later the United States had lost sixty percent of the global Y-energy market. The deficit climbed like a Sherpa.

Livers didn’t worry. That was what they elected their congressmen and women to do: to worry. To scramble in their donkey working fashion and find solutions, to take care of the problem, if there was a problem. The citizenry, those that were listening at all, didn’t see any problem. The public scooter races and Dole allotments and newsgrid entertainment and politically-funded mass rallies, with plenty of food and beer, and district building and energy grants continued to grow. And in districts where they didn’t grow, of course, the politicians just didn’t get returned. Votes, after all, had to be earned. Americans had always believed that.

The domestic deficit became critical.

Congress raised corporate taxes. Again in 2087, and then again in 2090. The donkey firms that sent daughters and fathers and cousins to Congress protested. By 2091 the issue could no longer be ignored. The House debate, which lasted six days and nights and revived the art of filibuster, was carried on the newsgrids. Hardly anyone outside of donkeys watched it. One of the few who did was Leisha Camden. Another was Will Sandaleros.

At the end of the sixth day, Congress passed a major tax package. Corporate taxes were recalibrated to the steepest sliding scale the world had ever seen. At the top of the scale, corporate entities that qualified were taxed at ninety-two percent of gross profit, with strict limitations on expense claims, as their share of governing America. At the next bracket, corporations were taxed at seventy-eight percent. After that, the brackets descended rapidly.

Of corporations taxed at seventy-eight percent, fifty-four percent
were based on Sanctuary Orbital. Only one corporation met the ninety-two percent tax criteria: Sanctuary itself.

Congress passed the tax package in October. Leisha, watching a newsgrid in New Mexico, glanced involuntarily out the window, at the sky. It was blue and empty, without a single cloud.

Will Sandaleros made a full report to Jennifer Sharifi, who had been away from Sanctuary on Kagura Orbital, concluding a vital arrangement there. Jennifer listened calmly, the folds of her white
abbaya
falling gracefully around her feet. Her dark eyes glistened.

“Now, Jenny,” Will said. “Starting January 1.”

Jennifer nodded. Her eyes went to the holoportrait of Tony Indivino, hanging on the dome wall. After a moment they returned to Will, but he was bent over the hard-copy of projected Sanctuary tax figures, and had not noticed.

Miri couldn’t get Tabitha Selenski’s death to move from the front of her mind. No matter what she was thinking about—her neurochemical research, joking with Tony, washing her hair, anything—Tabitha Selenski, whom Miri had never met, tangled, knotted, tied herself into Miri’s strings and choked there.

Choked. She had researched the injection from which Tabitha had died; it would have stopped the heart instantly. Without the heart to pump, the lungs could not draw in air. Tabitha would have choked on her own already-breathed air, except of course she wouldn’t have known it because the injection had also immediately paralyzed what was left of her brain.

Miri sat alone in the suspended bubble playground at Sanctuary’s core and thought about Tabitha Selenski. Miri was too old for the playground. Still, she liked to go there when it was empty, sailing slowly from one handhold to another, her clumsiness canceled by the absence of both gravity and observers. Today her thought strings seemed as solitary as the playground.

No, not solitary—five other people, including her father, had voted with her to let Tabitha live in Sanctuary even as a beggar. But there was
a difference in their votes, their reasons, their arguments for compassion. Miri felt the difference but she couldn’t name it, neither in words nor strings, and that was intensely frustrating. It was the old problem; something was missing from her thoughts, some unknown kind of association or connection. Why couldn’t she spin out an exploratory string about the difference between her vote and the others’, and so learn what that difference was? Explain it, examine it, integrate it into the ethical system that Tabitha Selenski’s accident had charred just as surely as it had charred her mind. There was something missing here, something important to Miri. A hole where an explanation should be.

She looked at the fields and domes and pathways below. Sanctuary was beautiful in the soft, UV-filtered sunlight. Clouds drifted at the far end; the maintenance team must be planning rain. She would have to check the weather calendar.

Sanctuary. (Refuge> churches> law> the protection of person and property> the balance of the rights of the individual with those of society> Locke> Paine> rebellion> Gandhi> the lone crusader on a higher moral plain…) Sanctuary was all of that for the Sleepless. Her community. Why, then, did she feel as if Tabitha’s death had pushed her to a place where the refuge was violated (Becket in the cathedral, blood on the stone floor…)? To a place where nothing was safe after all?

Slowly Miri climbed down from the playground bubble to look for Tony, who would not have the answers either but would understand the questions. He would understand as far as she did herself, anyway, which suddenly didn’t seem very far. Something vital was missing.

What?

In late October Alice had a heart attack. She was eighty-three years old. Afterward she lay quietly in bed, pain masked by drugs. Leisha sat by her bedside night and day, knowing it couldn’t be long. Much of the time Alice slept. Awake, she drifted in drugged dreams, and often there was a small smile on her wizened face. Leisha, holding her hand, had no idea where her sister’s mind wandered until the night Alice’s eyes cleared and focused and she gave Leisha a smile of such warm
sweetness that Leisha caught her breath and leaned forward. “Yes, Alice? Yes?”

Alice whispered, “Daddy is w-watering the plants!”

Leisha’s eyes prickled. “Yes, Alice. Yes, he is.”

“He gave me one.”

Leisha nodded. Alice relapsed into sleep, smiling, in that place where a small girl had her father’s love.

She woke a second time a few hours later to clutch Leisha’s hand with unexpected strength. Her eyes were wild. She tried to sit up, gasping. “I made it! I made it, I’m still here, I didn’t die!” She fell back on the pillows.

Jordan, standing by Leisha at his mother’s bedside, turned his face away.

The last time Alice woke, she was lucid. She looked at Jordan with love, and Leisha saw that she would say nothing to him, because nothing was necessary. Alice had given her son everything she had, everything he needed, and he was safe. To Leisha she whispered, “Take…care of Drew.”

Of Drew, not Jordan or Eric or the other grandchildren. Alice knew, somehow, where need was greatest. Hadn’t she always known?

“Yes, I will. Alice—”

But Alice had already closed her eyes, and the smile was back on lips that twitched in private dreams.

Afterward, while Stella and her daughter pinned up the sparse gray hair and called the state government for the special permit for private burial, Leisha went to her own room. She took off all her clothes and stood in front of the mirror. Her skin was clear and rosy, her breasts sagged slightly from decades of gravity but were still full and smooth, the muscles in her long legs flexed when she pointed her toe. Her hair, still the bright blond Roger Camden had ordered, fell around her face in soft waves. She thought of seizing a scissors and hacking the hair into ragged chunks, but she felt too old, too tired, for theatrical gestures. Her twin sister was dead of old age. Asleep for good.

Leisha pulled on her clothes, not looking again at the mirror, and went to help Stella and Alicia with Alice’s body.

Richard and Ada and their son came to New Mexico for the funeral. Sean was nine now, an only child—was Richard afraid that a second baby might be Sleepless? Richard looked content, looked as settled as his and Ada’s wandering life could be, looked no older. He was mapping ocean currents in a highly-farmed section of the Indian Ocean, just off the continental shelf. The work was going well. He put his arms around Leisha and said how sorry he was about Alice. Leisha knew that Richard meant it, and through her grief a part of her mind reflected that this had been the most important man in her adult life and that as he held her she felt nothing. He was a stranger, linked to her only by the biology of parental choice and the past of finite dreams.

Drew, too, came home for the funeral.

Leisha had not seen him in four years, although she had followed his spectacular career on the newsgrids. She met him in the stone-floored courtyard, bright with cactuses kept in forced bloom and exotics under humidified, transparent Y-bubbles. He drove his chair up to her without hesitation. “Hello, Leisha.”

“Hello, Drew.” He still had the same intense green gaze, although in every other way he had changed yet again. Leisha thought of the dirty, skinny ten-year-old, the gawky teen trying hard to be a donkey in coat and tie and borrowed manners, the drama major with clipped hair and retro lace-cuffed clothing, the bearded drifter with sullen eyes and weak, dangerous resentments. Now Drew wore quiet, expensive clothes, except for a single, flashy, giveaway diamond arm cuff. His body had filled out, his face had matured. He was, Leisha saw without desire, a handsome man. Whatever else he was he had learned to keep hidden.

“I’m so sorry about Alice. She had the most generous soul I’ve ever known.”

“You knew that about her? Yes, she did. And she created it for herself, with very little help from those who should have helped her.”

He didn’t ask what she meant by that; words had never been Drew’s medium.

He said, “I’ll miss her tremendously. I know I haven’t been here in years.” He spoke without a tremor of embarrassment. Drew had apparently made his peace with the final awkward scene between him and Leisha. But if so, why stay away for four years? Leisha had sent enough messages inviting him home. “But even though I wasn’t here, Alice and I talked on comlink every Sunday. Sometimes for hours.”

Leisha hadn’t known that. She felt a flash of jealousy. But was she jealous of Drew, or of Alice?

She said, “She loved you, Drew. You were important to her. And you’re in her will, but that can all wait until after the funeral.”

“Yes,” Drew said, without apparent interest in his inheritance. Leisha warmed to that. The child Drew was still there, under the flashy arm cuff and the strange career neither of them mentioned. And yet she should mention it, shouldn’t she? This was Drew’s work, his achievement, his individual excellence.

“I’ve followed your career on the grids. You’ve been very successful, and we’re proud of you.”

A light kindled in his eyes. “You watched a grid performance?”

“No, not a performance. Just the reviews, the praise…”

The light went out. But his smile was still warm. “That’s all right, Leisha. I knew you couldn’t watch it.”

“Wouldn’t,” she said, before she could stop herself.

He smiled. “No—couldn’t. It’s all right. Even if you never let me put you into lucid dreaming again, you’re still the single most important influence on my work that I’ll ever have.”

Leisha opened her mouth to reply to this—to the sentiment, to the sting below the sentiment, to the stubborn ambivalence below both—but before she could speak Drew added, “I’ve brought someone with me for Alice’s funeral.”

“Who?”

“Kevin Baker.”

Leisha’s awkwardness vanished. Drew might confuse her still, this
son she had not birthed who had become something she could neither envision nor understand, but Kevin was a known quantity. She had known him for sixty years—since before Drew’s father had been born.

“Why is he here?”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself,” Drew said shortly, and Leisha knew that Drew had learned, from Kevin or the datanets or somewhere, everything that had happened between her and Kevin. Sixty years’ worth of everything. Time just piled up, Leisha thought. Like dust.

“Where is Kevin now?”

“On the north patio.” Drew added to her back as she left the courtyard, “Leisha—one more thing. I haven’t changed. About what I want, I mean.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, although she did, and berated herself for petty cowardice.