Beggars in Spain (36 page)

“‘But felt through all this fleshly dress/Bright shoots of everlastingness,’” the man said. Miri realized suddenly that his chair was technologically enhanced, and that he must be somehow damaged or deformed. Not normal.

The strings in her mind grew flatter, calmer. The shapes in the hologrid had changed. She heard the man’s words, and yet she didn’t; the words were not what was really important. And wasn’t that right? Words had never been important, only strings, and the strings had shapes like—but not like—the ones around the man. Only the man had disappeared, too, and that was all right because she, Miri, Miranda Serena Sharifi, was disappearing, was sliding down a steep long chute and each meter she traveled she became smaller and smaller until she had disappeared and was invisible, a weightless transparent ghost that neither twitched nor stammered, in the corner of a room she had never seen before.

Below it, she knew, were other rooms. It was a deep building—deep, not tall—and each room was like this one, filled with light so palpable it was almost alive. In fact, it
was
alive, forming suddenly into a beast with fifteen heads. Miri held a sword. “No,” she said aloud, “I’m transparent, I can’t use a sword,” but this apparently made no difference, because the beast started toward her, roaring, and she hacked at a head. It fell off, and only then did she see it was her grandmother’s.
Jennifer’s head lay on the floor, and as Miri watched in horror a hole opened in the floor and the head, smiling faintly, slid down it. Miri knew it was going to another, deeper room—this whole place was room after room, opening off each other—but the head wouldn’t vanish entirely. Nothing ever vanished entirely. The beast attacked again and she cut off another head, which dropped just as serenely through the floor. It had been her father’s.

Suddenly fury filled her. She hacked and hacked. Some of the heads she recognized as they burrowed deeper into the building, others she didn’t. The last one was Tony’s, and instead of vanishing it grew a body—not Tony’s but David Aronson’s genemod-perfect body, the body she had tried to seduce three years ago when he had rejected her. Tony/David started undressing her, and she immediately became excited. “I always wanted you,” she said. “I know,” he replied, “but I had to stop twitching first.” He entered her and the world above their heads exploded into strings of thought.

“No, wait a minute,” Miri said to Tony, “those aren’t the right strings.” She looked up, concentrated, and changed the strings at several points. Tony waited, smiling with his beautiful mouth on the motionless body. When Miri was done changing the strings, he reached out to hold her again and such tenderness, such peace flooded Miri that she said joyously, “It doesn’t matter about Mother!” “It never did,” Tony said, and she laughed and stroked him and—

—woke up.

Miri started in terror. The lab swam back into existence around her. It had been
gone,
been replaced by—

She had been asleep. She had been dreaming.

“N-n-n-no,” Miri moaned. How could she have been asleep?
She?
Dreams were what Sleepers had, dreams were thought-construct described in theoretical brain studies…The holoterminal was once more dark. Slowly the man faded back in.

The shapes. His equipment had projected shapes, and then there had been answering shapes in her mind. Like thought-string edifices—but not. From a different part of her brain, perhaps, not cortical? But
the feeling of peace, of joy, of tremendous oneness with Tony, that could only have come from her cortex. She had dreamed it. He had—she dredged up the Earth word—“hypnotized” her with his mind shapes, his poetry on aloneness, and then the shapes in the hologram had drawn forth her own dreaming shapes…

But there had been more. Miri had changed the dream. She had concentrated on the strings above her and Tony’s heads and
changed
them, deliberately. She could see both versions now, in memory.

Miri sat very still, as still as she had in the dream.

“Drew Arlen,” a too-hearty voice was saying over the holo of the man in the chair, “Lucid Dreamer. The new art form that has taken the country by flash! This is a nonreplicable program, Livers out there in Holo-Land, so to purchase your own copy of one of Drew’s six different Lucid Dreaming performances—”

Miri pressed Tony’s code to replicate. The man in the chair froze in time.

She put her head between her knees, still dazed. She had been dreaming. She, Miranda Sharifi, Sleepless and Superbright. She could see Tony still, feel his arms around her, feel the depth of the building below her, its endless rooms. She could still see the thought strings, solid as matter, that she had reached up and changed.

Miri raised her head from her knees and went to her work terminal. She fixed the program glitch. It was easy; all she had to do was follow the strings she had seen in the dream, the ones she had changed. She typed in the pinpoint DNA code she had been hunting for three years and had never really seen. The program ran it against her parameters, probability tables, and neurochemical interactions. The comparisons and modeling would take a while to complete, but Miri already knew—the genemods were the right ones. They were the ones she had been searching for, had been circling around, but had not seen until a part of her dreaming mind had looked in a different way at the facts in her thought strings, and added what was missing.

That was right; her mind had added what was missing, what had always been missing, all her life. The ideas—not linear, not knotted into
strings, not connected in perceptible ways—from the missing part of her mind. The dreaming part. No—the
lucid dreaming
part, which reached into a universe deeper than one story, to pull out things she had never guessed were there and yet were indubitably hers. Things she—the conscious Miri—could partially manipulate in the dream world.

Miri looked at the frozen holo of the artist in the chair. He was smiling faintly; unseen light glinted on his glossy hair. He had bright green eyes. She felt again the dream orgasm with Tony. Every fiber of her fierce, young, single-minded personality knotted itself around the figure of Drew Arlen, who had given her this gift, this redemption.

Lucid dreaming.

Miri rose. She wanted to synthesize her neuorological compound, test it, and take it. She knew it would work. It would inhibit the stuttering and stammering and twitching of the Supers without impairing their superabilities. It would let them be themselves, only with an added dimension.

Like lucid dreaming. Oneself, only more so.

But there was something else to do first. She called up the library program and set it for the widest possible preliminary search parameters: all data in Sanctuary records, in legal Earth databanks for which Sanctuary paid stiff fees, in illegal Earth ones for which they paid even stiffer fees. She added the search programs Tony had designed and taught her to use, the ones that accessed databanks their owners thought completely secure. Miri added anything else she could think of. She wanted wanted to know everything there was to know about Drew Arlen. Everything.

And then she would figure out how to get to him.

The Beggars crowded into Raoul’s lab, sitting on benches, the desk, the floor. They talked softly, as they usually did to each other, allowing a long time for the words to come out. Most of the time they didn’t look directly at each other. Nearly all wore masks now, some elaborately ornamented.

Miri’s mask was undecorated. She wasn’t going to wear it long.

“N-n-n-nucleid p-p-p-p-p-prot-teins—”

“—f-f-f-found a n-new r-r-ribbon fl-flow—”

“—t-t-t-two p-pounds h-h-h-heavier—”

“M-my n-n-n-new si-si-sister—”

“C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C—” A grunt of frustration. The first terminal came out to call up a string program.

“Wait a minute before you turn to string communication,” Miri said. “I have something to show you.”

The room fell into frozen silence. Miri took off her mask and brushed her long bangs from her eyes. She gazed at them serenely from a face that didn’t twitch, or jerk, or tremble.

“Uhn-n-n-n-n,” someone said, as if punched in the stomach.

“I found the pinpoint code,” Miri said. “The enzyme is easily synthesized, has no predicted side effects and none observed in myself—so far anyway—and can be delivered by slow-drip subcutaneous patch.” She rolled up her sleeve to show them the slight scar, rapidly regenerating, on her upper left arm.

“The f-f-f-f-f-
formula
!” Raoul, the other biological researcher, demanded hungrily.

Miri called up the string edifice on her work terminal. Raoul pasted himself in front of it.

Christy said, “Wh-Wh-When?”

“I put the patch in three days ago. Since then I haven’t left the lab. No one has seen it but you.”

Nikos said, “D-d-d-d-do m-m-m-m-me!”

Miri had prepared twenty-seven subcutaneous patches. The Beggars formed an assembly line, with Susan disinfecting the upper arm of each of them, Raoul making the incision, Miri inserting the patch, and Diana bandaging tightly. There was no need for stitches; the skin would regenerate.

“It takes a few hours for the effects to kick in,” Miri said. “The enzyme has to direct the manufacture of a sufficient amount of neuro-transmitter.”

The Supers looked at Miri with shining, twitching eyes. She leaned forward. “Listen—there’s something else we have to talk about.

“You know I’ve been searching for this genemod for nearly four years; well, in the first two I was still exploring the problem. But I don’t think I would have found the solution at all if I hadn’t learned to do something else. It’s called lucid dreaming.”

She had their complete, formidable attention.

“It sounds like something Sleepers do, and a Sleeper led me to it. Through Joan Lucas. But we can do lucid dreaming, too, and although I don’t have any brain-scan data yet, I think we might do it differently from Sleepers. Or even from Norms.” Miri explained about Joan’s call, about Drew Arlen, about seeing her own research string in the lucid dream and reaching up to change it.

“It’s as if strings are one kind of thinking, one that effectively unites associative and linear thought, and lucid dreaming is some other kind. It uses…
stories
. Pulling from the unconscious, maybe, the way Sleeper dreams are supposed to do. But Sleepers don’t have string edifices to put together with the stories. They can’t—I don’t know!—maybe they can’t shape the lucid dreaming as well because they don’t have such coherent shapes to work with in the first place. Or maybe they can shape the dream, but without the visualized complexity of strings, the shaping only operates on an emotional level.” Miri shrugged. Who could say how Sleepers’ minds worked?

“Anyway, lucid dreaming is like…being reborn. Into a world with more dimensions than this one. And I want you to all try it.”

From the pocket of her shorts Miri pulled the program cartridge of her favorite of Drew’s performances, the second. Recording the entire series of six had been no challenge for Tony’s programs, no matter what the newsgrids claimed.

Terry Mwakambe had thrown one of his impenetrable security fields around Raoul’s lab before the meeting began. Miri inserted her cartridge into Raoul’s holoterminal. She turned her back to the miniature stage; she didn’t want to fall asleep herself, not this time. She wanted to watch the others.

One by one their eyes glazed, although they didn’t close. Drew Arlen’s musical voice licked at their eyelids, reciting words, suggesting ideas. The Supers dreamed.

When it was over, they awoke almost simultaneously. They laughed, and cried, and talked excitedly about their dreams—all but Terry, the most genetically modified, the most different. He sat slumped in a corner, his head bent so that all Miri could see was hair.

Somewhere in the middle of the laughing and exclaiming, Miri’s synthetic enzyme stimulated sufficient production of three different, interdependent brain chemicals to change the subtle, genetically-coded composition of cerebrospinal fluids.

Terry stood. His thin body and large head were held very still. He looked at all of them from eyes that neither blinked nor twitched.

He said, “I know how to remove the last Sharifi Labs failsafes. And I know what’s behind them.”

O
n New Year’s Day Leisha walked along the creek, under the cottonwoods. A light snow glistened on the ground. She looked up to see Jordan, coatless, puffing toward her. The lines and wrinkles on his sun-battered face—he was sixty-seven—were pulled taut as wires.

“Leisha! Sanctuary has seceded from the United States!”

“Yes,” Leisha said, without surprise. She had decided shortly after Alice’s funeral that this must be Jennifer’s intent. It fit. It occurred to her that she and Kevin Baker were probably the only two people in the country who were not surprised. Or maybe Kevin was surprised. She had not talked to him since Alice’s funeral.

Leisha bent to pick up a stone: it was almost a perfect oval, polished by patient wind and ancient water. Under her fingers the stone felt icy. “Yes,” she said to Jordan. “I know.”

“Well, aren’t you coming in to watch the grids?”

“Don’t we always?” Leisha said, and at her tone, Jordan stared.

Sanctuary made its declaration at 8:00
A.M.
January 1, 2092. The statement, released simultaneously to the country’s five most important newsgrids, the president, and the Congress of the United States, none of whom were fully functional at that hour on New Year’s Day, was not negotiable:

The newsgrid facsimile bore fourteen signatures, led by a large, scrawled
Jennifer Fatima Sharifi.
Jennifer’s usual handwriting, Leisha remembered, was small and neat.

Stella said, “They did it. They really did it.”

Jordan said, “Leisha—what will happen now?”

“The IRS will wait for the nonpayment of the January 15 taxes. When it doesn’t come, they’ll attach a jeopardy assessment to Sanctuary. That means they’ll have the right to physically seize the material assets to hold as protection against getting their money.”

“Physically seize
Sanctuary
? Without even a hearing or something?”

“Jeopardy assessment puts the seizure first, the hearing second. That’s probably why Jennifer chose this course of action. Everybody will have to move very fast. Half of Congress is away for the holidays.” Leisha noted how detached she sounded, how calm. How amazing.

Stella said, “But seizing Sanctuary—how, Leisha? With the army? An assault?”

Jordan said, “They could blow it out of the sky with a single Truth missile.”

“But they won’t,” Stella argued, “because that would just destroy the property the IRS is trying to seize. It’ll have to be a…an invasion. But that would be just as hard on Sanctuary—orbital environments are
fragile
. Leisha, what the hell is Jennifer thinking of?”

“I don’t know,” Leisha said. “Look at the signatures. Richard Anthony Keller Sharifi, Najla Sharifi Johnson, Hermione Wells Keller—Richard’s children have married. I don’t think Richard knows that.”

Stella and Jordan looked at each other. “Leisha,” Stella said in her acerbic way, “doesn’t it seem to you this is more than a matter of
family news
? It’s a civil war! Jennifer has finally succeeded in separating virtually all the Sleepless from the rest of the country, from the mainstream of American society—”

“And are you going to tell me,” Leisha asked, smiling without amusement, “that the twelve of us sitting out here in this forgotten compound in the desert haven’t done exactly the same thing?”

Neither of the others answered her.

“Do you think,” Stella said finally, “that Sanctuary is a match for the
United States
?”

“I don’t know,” Leisha said, and Stella and Jordan stared at each other, aghast. “I’m not the right person to ask. I’ve never once, in my entire life, been right about Jennifer Sharifi.”

“But, Leisha—”

“I’m going down to the creek,” Leisha said. “Call me if we go to war.”

She left Stella and Jordan staring at each other, bewildered and angry at her, unable to see the distinction between criminal indifference and what, to Leisha, was even worse: criminal uselessness.

The United States Congress, from the first, took Sanctuary’s secession threat seriously. This was
Sleepless
. Senators and congressmen who had scattered to their constituencies for the winter holidays hastily reassembled in Washington. President Calvin John Meyerhoff, a big slow-moving man dubbed in the newsgrids “Silent Cal II,” nonetheless possessed a sharp brain, finely tuned to foreign policy. If it struck Meyerhoff as ironic that the major foreign crisis of his waning first term involved a section of the United States technically part of Cattaraugus County, New York, the irony was not present in any of the press releases from the Oval Office.

The Liver newsgrids, however, saw the Sanctuary threat as hysterically funny, raw material for the two-minute comedy sketches that were the favorite form of entertainment. Few Livers had ever dealt
with, heard of, or known any Sleepless, whose dealings were with the donkey class that ran the businesses that ran the country. A Liver newsgrid gleefully made the prediction: “Next to Secede—Oregon! Inside story!” The sketch was dramatized with holoactors with taped-up eyelids standing in downtown Portland and ranting that it was necessary for Oregon people “to dissolve the political bands that connect them with another people.”
FREE OREGON
banners suddenly appeared at scooter races, at brainie parties, at the free dance palaces. A racer named Kimberly Sands won the Belmont Winter Race in a scooter painted with the Oregon flag superimposed over the United States flag.

On January 3, the White House issued a statement that Sanctuary had in effect made a statement of both sedition and terrorism, declaring its “power to levy war” while conspiring to overthrow the United States government as it pertained to a section of New York State. Neither terrorism nor sedition could be tolerated in a free democracy. The National Guard was put on alert. Sanctuary was told, in a statement released to the press as well, that on January 10 a delegation consisting of members from both the State Department and the IRS—a coupling seldom seen before in American diplomacy—would dock at Sanctuary “for discussion of the situation.”

Sanctuary replied that if any shuttle or other space-going vessel approached the orbital, Sanctuary would open fire.

Congress met in emergency session. The IRS levied a jeopardy assessment against all assets held by Sanctuary, Inc., and its principal shareholders, the Sharifi family. The tabloid newsgrids, more interested in drama than in federal tax procedure, whooped that the IRS would sell Sanctuary at an auction to pay the taxes and penalty: “Anybody want to buy a used shuttle? A slightly dented orbital panel? Oregon?” WBRN, “the Brainie Channel,” held a mock auction in which Oregon was won by a couple in Monterey, California, who announced that Crater Lake National Park wished to secede from Oregon.

On January 8, two days before Sanctuary was to receive the federal delegation, the
New York Times,
Newsgrid Division, in conjunction with its venerable donkey newspaper, offered an editorial called “Why Keep
Oregon?” The newsgrid version was spoken on all six daily holobroadcasts by the leading anchorman; the hard-copy version was centered, alone, on the editorial page.