Beggars in Spain (30 page)

“Leisha…” His voice surprised him: it came out weak and faint. Yet he didn’t feel weak. He tried again. “Leisha, I need…”

“Yes? What? Anything, Drew, anything.”

That other day came back to him, the day he had been crippled. Lying on the bed just like this, Eric’s father bending above him saying, “We’ll do everything we can…everything,” and himself thinking,
now I’ve got them.
The same shapes. Always, throughout a man’s life—and more than his own life—testified deep shapes stirring far down in his mind, flicking tails and fluttering gills, more than his own life.

“
What,
Drew? What do you need?”

“A Staunton-Carey programmable hologram projector.”

“A—”

“Yes,” Drew whispered with the last of his strength. “Now. I need it now.”

M
iri was thirteen. For a year she had been watching the Sleeper broadcasts, on both the Liver and the donkey newsgrids. The first few months the grids were absorbing because they raised so many questions: Why were scooter races so important? Why did the beautiful young men and women on
Bedtime Stories
change sex partners so often when they seemed so ecstatic with the ones they already had? Why did the women have such huge breasts, the men such big penises? Why should a congresswoman from Iowa make a resentful speech about the spending of a congressman from Texas when, it seemed, the congresswoman was spending just as much herself, and they weren’t members of the same community anyway? At least, they didn’t seem to define themselves that way. Why did all the newsgrids praise the Livers for doing nothing—“creative leisure”—and hardly mention the people who worked to run things, when it turned out the people who ran things also ran the newsgrids?

Eventually Miri discovered answers to these questions, either by databank research or by talking with her father or grandmother. The trouble was, the answers weren’t very interesting. Scooter races were important because Livers thought they were important—was that all? Was there no standard except what pleased at the moment?

Her mind created long strings out of this question, pulling in the
Heisenberg Principle, Epicurus, a defunct philosophy called existentialism, the Rahvoli constants for neural reinforcement, mysticism, epileptic storms in the so-called “visionary” centers of the brain, social democracy, the utility of the social organism, and Aesop’s fables. The string was a good one, but the part supplied by the Earth newsgrid was still essentially uninteresting.

The same was true for the answers to the rest of Miri’s questions. Political organization and resource allocation depended on a precarious balance between Liver votes and donkey power, and that balance seemed to be the results of a haphazard social evolution, not of planning or principles. Things in the United States were the way they were because they were the way they were. If there was more depth than that, the newsgrids didn’t reveal it.

She decided it was just the United States, coddled by cheap Y-energy, rich from licensing those same patents abroad, as decadent as her grandmother had always said. She learned Russian, French, and Japanese and spent a few months watching newsgrids in those languages. The answers were different but no more interesting. Things happened because they happened; they were the way they were because that was the point they’d come to. Minor border wars were fought, or they weren’t. Trade agreements were signed, or they weren’t. Important Sleepers died, or they had operations and recovered. A French broadcaster, one of the most prominent, always closed his broadcast the same way:
Ça va toujours.

Nowhere on the popular newsgrids could Miri find any mention of scientific research or breakthroughs that were not clear sensationalism, of political excitement, of complex musical sounds like the Bach or Mozart or O’Neill in the library banks, of ideas as complex as those she discussed with Tony every day.

After six months, she stopped watching the newsgrids.

One thing had changed, however. Often her grandmother was busy, spending more and more time in the Sharifi Labs, and it was her father whom Miri took questions to. He didn’t have all the answers,
and the ones he did have made short, lopsided strings in her mind. He had left Earth, he told her, when he was ten, and although he sometimes went there on business, he seldom spent much time with Sleepers. Usually he did business through a middleman, a Sleepless who nonetheless lived on Earth, a man named Kevin Baker.

Miri knew about Baker; he was extensively documented in the databanks. She wasn’t much interested in him. He seemed faintly contemptible to her: A man who lived alone with the beggars, profited from them, and preferred those profits—which were apparently huge—to the connections of community. But she listened while her father talked, because through the newsgrids she had become interested in her father. Unlike her mother, he could look directly at Miri’s twitching face and oversized head, her jerking body, without looking away. He could listen to her stutter. He sat, a dark low-browed man with his hands resting quietly on his knees, and listened to her patiently, and in his dark eyes was something she couldn’t name, no matter how many strings she wrapped around it. All the strings started with pain.

“D-D-Daddy, wh-wh-wh-where were y-y-you?”

“Sharifi Labs. With Jennifer.” Her father, unlike Aunt Najla, often referred to his mother by her name. Miri wasn’t sure when that had started.

She looked at him. There was a light sweat on his forehead, although Miri thought her lab was cool. His face looked shaken. Miri’s strings included seismic tremors, adrenalin effects, the compression of gases that form the ignition of stars. She said, “Wh-wh-wh-what are the L-L-L-L-L-Labs d-doing?”

Ricky Keller shook his head. He said abruptly, “When do you join the Council?”

“S-sixteen. T-two years and t-t-two m-months.”

Her father smiled, and the smile started a string that spun itself, surprisingly, to a Sleeper newsgrid she had seen months ago and had not thought of since: a story, evidently fiction, from a mystic book central to several Sleeper religions. A man called Job had been looted of one possession after another without either fighting in his own defense
or devising ways to regain or replace them. Miri had thought Job spineless, or stupid, or both, and had lost interest in the broadcast before it was over. But her father’s smile reminded her now of the actor’s resigned face. All her father would say, however, was, “Good. We need you on the Council.”

“Wh-wh-wh-why?” Miri said sharply, hating that it took so long to get the word out, even while she was warmed by his need.

He didn’t answer.

Will Sandaleros said, “Now.”

Jennifer leaned forward, staring at the three-dimensional holographic bubble. A thousand miles away in space, the original inflated, pressurized with standard air, and released the mice from their semi-hypothermic state. Tiny drip-patches on their collars brought their biological systems back to full functioning in minimum time. Within minutes the biometers on their collars showed them dispersed throughout the interior of the bubble, which was a complex internal topography mathematically congruent to Washington, D.C.

“Ready,” Dr. Toliveri said, “Stand by. Six, five, four, three, two, one, go.”

The genemod viruses were released. Air currents matched to winds five miles per hour from the southwest wafted through the temperature-controlled bubble. Jennifer shifted her attention to the biometer read-out screen on the far wall. Within three minutes, it showed no activity.

“Yes,” Will said. He wasn’t smiling, but he took her hand. “Yes.”

Jennifer nodded. To Toliveri, Blure, and the three technicians she said, “A superb job.” She turned to Will. Her beautiful, composed voice was very low. “We’re ready for the next stage.”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Start the purchase negotiations for Kagura orbital. Don’t go through Kevin Baker. Keep it blind.”

Will Sandaleros looked as if he didn’t mind being told what had actually been decided between them years earlier. He looked as if he
understood his wife’s need to issue orders. Then he looked again at the biometer, his eyes gleaming.

Miri opened the door to Tony’s lab. He had moved to his own work quarters in Science Building Two six months ago, when there was no longer room in one lab for both their projects. Every time Miri looked at his half of the partners’ desk she felt sad, although she thought perhaps part of the sadness came from her own work’s going so badly. In two years she had modeled every genetic modification she could think of, without coming closer to any that would correct the stutters and twitches of all the Supers’ hyped-up electrochemical processes. The work had begun to feel sterile to her, to remind her of the missing component, whatever it was, of the strings themselves. Elusive, sterile, and nonproductive. Today had been another failure. She was in a terrible mood, a terrible, fast-moving, chaotic-string, sterile mood. She wanted Tony’s comfort and encouragement. She wanted Tony.

His lab door was locked, but Miri’s retina print was in the authorized file and the
STERILE ENVIRONMENT
light was off. She placed her right eye to the scanner and pushed open the door.

Tony lay on the floor, twitching and jerking, on top of Christina Demetrios. Over his thrusting body Miri saw Christy’s eyes widen, then darken. “Oh!” Christy said. Tony said nothing; possibly he hadn’t heard Miri, or even Christina. His naked buttocks contracted powerfully and his whole body shuddered with orgasm. Miri backed out of the lab, closed the door, and ran to her own lab.

She sat with her hands clasped, twitching, on her desk, her head bowed. Tony hadn’t told her—well, why should he tell her? It was his business, not hers; she was only his sister. Not his lover—his sister. Strings formed and reformed in her head: For the first time, various ancient and obscure stories, which she had remembered only because she remembered everything, made sense to her. Hera and Io. Othello and Desdemona. She knew the entire physiology of sex—hormone-influenced secretions, vascular engorgement, pheromone triggers. She knew everything. She knew nothing.

Jealousy. One of the most community-destroying emotions there was. A
beggar
emotion.

Miri stood up and paced distractedly. No. She would not give in to the degradation of jealousy. She was better than that. Tony deserved better than that of his sister. Idealism. (Stoicism, Epicureanism “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love,” Tony’s butt pumping away in Christina…) She would solve this problem her own way (darkness, fullness, the throbbing ache, gravitational pressure to ignite gases into thermonuclear reactions, cepheid variables…).

Miri washed her face and hands. She put on a clean pair of white shorts and tied a red ribbon in her dark hair. Her lips, despite their constant twitching, set together hard. She didn’t have to think whom to approach; she already knew, and knew that she knew, and knew all the implications of already knowing (darkness, fullness, lying on her belly on her lab floor or under the genemod soy plants that met in a concealing arc, her hands between her legs).

His name was David Aronson. He was three years older than she, a Norm but fairly intelligent, an intense believer in the Sanctuary Oath and in her grandmother’s leadership. He had dark curling hair, as dark as Miri’s own, but very light eyes of clear, black-lashed gray. His legs were long, his shoulders at eighteen were as broad and powerful as a grown man’s. His mouth was generous, wide mobile lips of an almost molded firmness. Miri had spent the past six months looking at David’s mouth.

She found him where she expected to: at the orbital’s shuttle port, poring over CAD displays of machinery. In two months he would leave for a doctoral program in engineering at Stanford, his first trip to Earth.

“Hello, Miri.” He had a deep voice, a little rough. Miri liked the roughness. She could find no reason why.

“D-D-David. I w-w-w-want t-to ask you s-s-something.”

He looked slightly to one side of her, at the CAD holo. “What?”

She had no trouble being direct; all her life, the trouble in communication had come from the difficulty and simplicity of speech compared to
the enormous complexity of her thoughts. She was used to simplifying things for Norms as much as possible. This was already a simple thing; it seemed to her to fit admirably, as almost nothing else did, to the limitations of language.

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

David straightened. Color mounted in his cheeks. He continued to look past her. “I’m sorry. Miri, but that’s not possible.”

“Wh-wh-why n-not?”

“I already have a lover.”

“Wh-wh-who?”

“Don’t you think that’s my business?”

He sounded cold; Miri couldn’t see why. Noncommercial information, surely, was for community use, and what information could be more public? She was used to having questions answered. If they were not, she was used to exploring why not. “Wh-wh-why w-w-won’t you t-t-tell me who?”

David bent ostentatiously closer to his screen. His beautiful mouth set. “I think this conversation is over, Miri.”

“Wh-wh-why?”

He didn’t answer her. The strings of her thoughts suddenly tangled, tightened around her like a noose. “B-b-bec-c-cause I’m ugly? I t-tt-t-twitch?”

“I said I didn’t have anything else to say!” Frustration, or embarrassment, or anger, overcame courtesy, and he finally looked directly at her before stalking off. Miri recognized the look: She had often seen it on her mother’s face before Hermione turned to fiddling with a screen, or a cup of coffee, or anything handy. Miri recognized, too, that she was the reason for the frustration or embarrassment or anger, and that she had somehow contributed enough of it to justify the discourtesy. He didn’t want her, and she had had no right to press him—but all she’d wanted was answers. By pressing him, she’d only humiliated herself. He didn’t want her. She twitched, her head was too big, she stuttered, she wasn’t pretty like Joan was. No Norm would want her.

She walked carefully, as if she were a chemical compound that
shouldn’t be jarred, back to her laboratory. Sitting at her desk, she again clasped her hands—jerking, twitching—and tried to calm herself. To think. To construct orderly, balanced nets of thought that would hold everything useful to the problem, everything relevant—intellectually, emotionally, biochemically—everything productive. After twenty minutes, she got up again and left the lab.

Nikos Demetrios, Christina’s twin, was fascinated by money. Its international flow, fluctuations, uses, changes, symbolism were, he had once told Miri, more complex than any natural Gaea patterns on Earth, just as useful to biological survival, and more interesting. At fourteen, he’d already made suggestions about international trading to the adult Norms with seats on the Sanctuary Exchange. They purchased his suggestions on investment opportunities around the globe: new wind-shear-detection technology under development in Seoul, a catalytic antibody application marketed in Paris, the embryonic Moroccan aerospace industry. Miri found him in the central communications building, in his tiny office ringed with datascreens.