Beggars and Choosers (7 page)

Does that sound like anybody you know? Does that sound like Miri?“

“Yes,” I said. Where do they get all these words, Leisha and Miri
and the rest of them? But these particular words fit. “It sounds like
Miranda.”

“And another thing about my father,” Leisha said, looking directly
at me. “He wore people out. He wore out two wives, one daughter, four
business partners, and, finally, his own heart. Just wore them out. He
was capable of destroying what he passionately loved just by applying
his own impossible standards toward improving it.”

I put down my coffee cup. Leisha put her palms flat on the table and
leaned toward me.

“Drew—I’m asking for the last time. What is Miri doing at Huevos
Verdes? You have to understand—I’m scared for her. Miri’s not like my
father in one important way. She’s not a loner. She’s desperate for a
community, growing up the way she did on Sanctuary, with Jennifer
Sharifi for a grandmother… but that’s not the point. Or maybe it is.
She yearns to belong the way only an outsider can. And she doesn’t. She
knows that. She put her grandmother and that gang in jail, and so the
Sleepless have rejected her. She’s so superior to the donkeys they
can’t accept her on principle; she’s too much of a threat. And the idea
of her trying to find common ground communicating with Livers is
ludicrous. There’s no common language.”

I looked carefully away, out the window, at the desert. You never
see that clear crystalline light anywhere else. Like the air itself,
the light is both solid and yet completely transparent.

Leisha says, “All Miri has, outside of you, is twenty-six other
SuperSleepless. That’s it. Do you know what makes a revolutionary,
Drew? Being an outsider looking in, coupled with the idealistic desire
to
create the one true, just community, coupled with the belief that you
can
.
Idealists on the inside don’t become revolutionaries. They just become
reformers. Like me. Reformers think that things need a little
improvement, but the basic structure is sound. Revolutionaries think
about wiping everything out and starting all over. Miri’s a
revolutionary. A revolutionary with Superintelligent followers,
unimaginable technology, huge amounts of money, and passionate ideals.
Do you wonder that I’m scared?

“What are they doing in Huevos Verdes?”

I couldn’t meet Leisha’s eyes. So many words pouring out of her, so
much argument, so many complicated definitions. The shapes in my mind
were dark, confused, angry, with dangerous trailing cables hard as
steel. But they weren’t Leisha’s shapes. They were mine.

“Drew,” Leisha said, softly now, the outsider pleading with me.
“Please tell me what she’s doing?”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

==========

Two days later I sat in a skimmer speeding over the open sea toward
Huevos Verdes. The sun on the Gulf of Mexico was blinding. My driver, a
freckled kid of about fourteen whom I’d never seen before, was young
enough to enjoy skimming water. He edged the gravboat’s nose downward
to just touch the ocean, and blue-white spray flew. The kid grinned.
The second time he did it, he suddenly turned his head to make sure I
wasn’t getting wet, sitting in my powerchair in the back of the
skimmer. Clearly he’d forgotten I was there. Sudden guilt and the new
angle changed his face, and I recognized him. One of Kevin Baker’s
greatgrandchildren.

“Not wet at all,” I said, and the kid grinned again. A Sleepless, of
course. I could see that now in the shape of him in my mind: compact
and bright-colored and brisk-moving. Born owning the world. And, of
course, no security risk for Huevos Verdes.

But with their defenses, Huevos Verdes wouldn’t be risking security
even if passengers were being ferried by the director of the Genetic
Standards Enforcement Agency.

I had worked hard to understand the triple-shield security around
Huevos Verdes.

The first shield, a translucent shimmer, rose from the sea a quarter
mile out from the island. Spherical, the shield extended underwater,
cutting through the rock of the island itself, an all-enveloping egg.
Terry Mwakambe, the Supers’ strangest genius, had invented the field.
Nothing else like it existed anywhere in the world. It scanned DNA, and
nothing not recorded in the data banks got through. Not dolphins, not
navy frogmen, not seagulls, not drifting algae. Nada.

The second shield, a hundred yards beyond, stopped all nonliving
matter not accompanied by DNA that
was
stored in the data
banks. No unmanned ‘bot vessel carrying anything—sensors, bombs,
spores—passed this field. No matter how small. If there wasn’t a
registered DNA code accompanying it, it didn’t get through. We skimmed
through the shield’s faint blue shimmer as if through a soap bubble.

The third shield, at the docks, was manually controlled and visually
monitored. The registered DNA had to be alive and talking. I don’t know
how they checked for a drugged state. Nothing touched us, at least
nothing I felt. The design was Terry Mwakambe’s. The monitoring was
shared by everybody, in shifts. The paranoia was Miri’s. Unlike her
grandmother, she didn’t want the Supers to secede permanently from the
United States. But like her grandmother, she’d nonetheless constructed
a defended refuge that government officials couldn’t touch. A
sanctuary. She’d just done it better than Jennifer Sharifi had.

“Permission to dock,” the freckled kid said seriously. He gave a
little half-mocking salute and grinned. This was still an adventure for
him.

“Hi, Jason,” Christy Demetrios said. “Hello, Drew. Come on in.”

Jason Reynolds. That was the kid’s name. I remembered now. Kevin’s
granddaughter Alexandra’s son. Something about him tugged at my memory,
a nervous quick shape like a string of beads. I couldn’t remember.

Jason docked the boat expertly—they all did everything expertly—and
we went ashore, Jason with quick bounds and me in my powerchair.

A hundred feet of genemod greenery, flowers and bushes and trees,
all of it part of the project. Plants grew right to the water’s edge.
When the sea threatened, a Y-shield switched on, capable of protecting
even the most fragile genemod rose from a hurricane. Beyond the garden,
the compound walls rose abruptly, thin as paper, stronger than
diamonds. Miri told me they were only a dozen molecules thick,
constructed by second-generation nano-machines that had themselves been
made from nanomachines. In my mind I saw the walls’ glossy whiteness,
to which no dirt could adhere, as hot dark red motion, thick and
unstoppable as lava.

Nothing here was stoppable.

“Drew!” Miri ran to meet me, wearing white shorts and a loose shirt,
her masses of dark hair tied back with a red ribbon. She had put on red
lipstick. She still looked more like sixteen than twenty-nine. She
threw her arms around me in my chair, and I felt the quick beating of
her heart against my cheek. Super metabolism is revved up a lot higher
than ours. I kissed her.

She murmured into my hair, “This time was too long. Four months!”

“It was a good tour, Miri.”

“I know. I watched sixteen performances on the grid, and the
performance stats look good.”

She nestled into my lap. Jason and Christy had discreetly vanished.
We were alone in the bright, newly created garden. I stroked Miri’s
hair, not wanting to hear just yet about performance stats.

Miri said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I kissed her again, this time to keep from looking at her face. It
would be blinding, white hot with love. It always was, when she saw me.
Always. For thirteen years.
He was capable of complete
obsessiveness
, Leisha had said about her father.
He just wore
people out
.

“I miss you so much when you’re away, Drew.”

“I miss you, too.” This was true.

“I wish you could stay longer than a week.”

“Me, too.” This was not true. But there were no words.

She looked at me, then, a long moment. Something shifted behind her
eyes. Carefully, so as not to hurt my crippled legs, she climbed off my
lap, held out her hands, and smiled. “Come see the lab work.”

I recognized this for what it was: Miri offering me the best she
had. The most valuable present in the world. The thing I desperately
wanted to be part of, even though I wouldn’t understand it, because not
to be part of it was to be unimportant. Insignificant. She was offering
me what I needed most.

I couldn’t do less.

I pulled her back onto my lap, forced my hands to move over her
breasts. “Later. Can we be alone first…”

Her face was the curving shape of joy, too bright to be any color at
all.

Miri’s bedroom, like every other bedroom at La Isla, was spartan.
Bed, dresser, terminal, an oval green rug made of some soft material
Sara Cerelli had invented. On the dresser was a green pottery vase of
fragrant genemod flowers I didn’t recognize. These people, who could
command all luxury, rarely indulged in any. The only jewelry Miri ever
wore was the ring I had given her, a slim gold band set with rubies. I
had never seen the other Sleepless wear any jewelry at all. All their
extravagances, Miri had told me once, were mental. Even the light was
ordinary: flat, without shadows.

I thought of the library in Leisha’s New Mexico house.

Miri unbuttoned her shirt. Her breasts looked the same as they had
at sixteen: full, milky, tipped with pale brown aureoles. She pulled
down her shorts. Her hips were full, her waist chunky. Her pubic hair
was bushy and wiry and the same black as the hair on her head, where it
was confined by a red ribbon. I reached up and pulled the ribbon free.

“Oh, Drew, I’ve missed you so much…”

I hoisted myself from my powerchair to her narrow bed, and then
pulled her on top of me. Her breasts spread over my chest: soft on
hard. On tour or not, I exercised my upper body fanatically, to make up
for my crippled legs. Miri loved that. She liked to feel my arms crush
her against me. She liked my thrusts to be hard, definite, even
ramming. I tried to give her that, but this time I stayed soft.

She looked at me questioningly, brushing the wild black hair back
from her face. I didn’t meet her eyes. She reached down and took me in
her hand, massaging gently.

This had happened only a few times, all of them recent. Miri
massaged harder.

“Drew…”

“Give me a minute, love.”

She smiled uncertainly. I tried to concentrate, and then not to
concentrate.

“Drew…”

“Shhhh… just a minute.”

The gray shapes of failure snapped their teeth in my mind.

I closed my eyes, pulled Miri closer, and thought of Leisha. Leisha
in the New Mexico twilight, a dim golden shape against the sunset.
Leisha singing me to sleep when I was ten years old. Leisha running
across the desert, slim and swift, tripping in a kangaroo-rat hole and
twisting her ankle. I had carried her back to the compound, her body
light and sweet in my eighteen-year-old arms. Leisha at her sister’s
funeral, tears making her eyes reflect all light, naked to sorrow.
Leisha naked, as I had never seen her…

“AAhhhhhh,” Miri crooned triumphantly.

I rolled us both over, so that I was on top. Miri preferred it that
way. I thrust hard, then harder. She liked it really rough. Eventually
I felt her shudder under me, and I let myself go.

Afterward, I lay still, my eyes closed, Miri curled against me with
her head on my shoulder. For a brief piercing moment I remembered how
love was between us a decade ago, in the beginning, when just the touch
of her hand could turn me shivery and hot. I tried not to think, not to
feel any shapes at all.

But making a void in the mind is impossible. I suddenly remembered
the thing that had tugged at my mind about Jason Reynolds, Kevin
Baker’s great-grandson. Last year, the kid had nearly drowned. He had
taken a skimmer out on the Gulf straight into Hurricane Julio. Huevos
Verdes had found him only because Terry Mwakambe had developed some
esoteric homing devices, and Jason had been brought back from death
only by using on him some part of the project that hadn’t even been
tested yet.

When he revived, Jason admitted knowing the hurricane was coming. He
wasn’t trying to commit suicide, he said earnestly. Everyone believed
him; Sleepless don’t commit suicide. They’re too much in love with
their own minds to end them. With all of them hanging over his bed, his
parents and Kevin and Leisha and Miri and Christy and Terry, Jason had
said in a small voice that he hadn’t known the sea would get quite that
rough quite that fast. He just wanted to feel the boat get pitched
around a lot. He just wanted to watch the huge, angry sky, and feel the
rain lash him. He, a Sleepless, just wanted to feel vulnerable.

Miranda whispered, “Nobody ever makes me feel like you do, Drew.
Nobody.”

I kept my eyes closed, pretending to sleep.

==========

In the late afternoon we went to the labs. Sara Cerelli and Jonathan
Markowitz were there, dressed in shorts, barefoot. One of the
requirements of the project was that at no stage did anything need to
be sterile.

“Hello, Drew,” Jon said. Sara nodded. Their concentration on their
work made closed, muddy shapes in my mind.

A blob of living tissue sat in a shallow open tray on a lab bench,
connected to machines by slender tubes and even more slender cables.
Dozens of display screens ringed the rooms. Nothing on any of them was
comprehensible to me. The tissue in the tray was flesh-colored, a light
dun, but no particular form. It looked as if it could change shape,
oozing into something else. On my last visit, Miri had told me it
couldn’t do that. No Sleepless are squeamish. I’m not either, but the
shapes that crawled in and out of my mind as I looked at the thing were
pale and speckled and smelled of dampness, although diamond-precise on
their edges. Like the nanobuilt walls of Huevos Verdes.