Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  But it was Kevin himself calling.

  “Leisha—listen, honey, I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier. I tried, but…” His voice trailed off, unlike Kevin. On the comscreen his jawline sagged slightly. He looked to her left. “Leisha, I’m not coming home. We’re in the middle of an important negotiation—the Stieglitz contract, you know about it—and I have to be available. I may have to fly on very short notice to Argentina to deal with some political ramifications in their Bahia Blanca subsidiary. If I have to fight my way in and out of the apartment building, or if those crazies keep blocking air lanes on the roof…I can’t risk it.” After a moment he added, “I’m sorry.”

  She said nothing.

  “I’ll stay here at the office. Maybe when this is over…hell, no ‘maybe’ about it, when the Stieglitz contract is signed and the trial is over, then I’ll come home.”

  “Sure, Kev,” Leisha said. “Sure.”

  “I knew you’d understand, honey.”

  “Yes,” Leisha said. “I do. I understand you.”

  “Leisha—”

  “Goodbye, Kevin.”

  She walked from the library to the kitchen and made herself a sandwich, wondering if he would call back. He didn’t. She threw the sandwich down the organic chute and went back to the library. The holo of Kenzo Yagai had shifted. Yagai bent over the Y-energy cone prototype, his dark eyes serious and intelligent, the sleeves of his white turn-of-the-century lab coat pushed above the elbows.

  Leisha sat down on a straight wooden chair and put her head between her knees. But that position made her think of Richard, slumped in his room, and the thought was unbearable. She walked to the window, cleared it, and watched the street from eighteen floors above, until sudden increased agitation in the mass of distant, tiny demonstrators made it probable that someone with a zoom lens had seen her. She opaqued the windows, returned to the chair, and sat straight-backed.

  Afterward, she could never remember how long she had sat there. Instead she remembered something decades old. Once, when she had been an undergraduate at Harvard, she and Stewart Sutter had gone for a walk along the Charles River. The wind had been cold and sharp, and they had run straight into it, laughing, Stewart’s cheeks red as apples. Despite the cold they sat on the banks of the river, kissing, until a Mutilation Reminder had staggered, nearly naked, over the withered grass. The MuRems were a bizarre, horrifying religious sect in the service of great ideals. They mutilated their bodies to remind the world of suffering in countries under tyranny, then begged money to alleviate that global suffering. This one had amputated three of his fingers and half of his left foot. The MuRem’s mangled hand was tatooed “Egypt,” his bare blue foot “Mongolia,” and his hideously scarred face “Chile.”

  He held out his begging bowl to Leisha and Stewart. Leisha, filled with the familiar shamed repugnance, had slipped in a hundred dollars. “Half for Chile, half for Mongolia. For the suffering,” he had croaked; his vocal cords, too, had been offered up as a reminder. The look he gave Leisha was so crystalline, so suffused with joy, that she was unable to gaze back. She laid her head on her knees and twined her hand hard in the icy grass. Stewart had put his arms around her and murmured against her cheek. “He’s happy, Leisha. He is. He’s begging for a purpose, he raises a great deal of money for world suffering. He’s doing what he chooses to do, and he’s doing it well. He doesn’t mind being mutilated. And anyway, he’s going away now. He’s leaving. Look—he’s already gone.”

  12

  THE PROFIT FAIRE ON THE LEVEE WAS IN FULL SWING by 8:00 P.M. Below the foamstone walls the Mississippi River slid past, dark and silent. A Y-field had been set up for security, invisible walls enclosing a bubble the diameter of a football field. The bubble covered an arc of river, a hundred yards of broad levee, and a semicircle of rough grass and dark bushes between the scooter factory and the river. From the farthest bushes came occasional giggles, accompanied by much thrashing.

  On the south end of the broad levee people flocked around the refreshment kiosks, the hologame booths, the terminals where We-Sleep partially subsidized chances at major newsgrid lotteries. At the north end a noisy band whose name Jordan had forgotten blasted the night with dance music. Every thirty seconds a remote-guided holo of the We-Sleep logo, three-dimensional and six feet high, flashed in a different cubic volume of air: ten feet above the ground, two inches over the water, in the midst of the whirling dancers. Across the river, slightly blurred by the edges of the Y-bubble, the Samsung-Chrysler lights shone chastely.

  “The basic flaw in your Aunt Leisha is that she belongs to the eighteenth century, not the twenty-first,” Hawke said. “Have some ice cream, Jordy.”

  “No,” Jordan said. He didn’t want ice cream; even less did he want to talk to Hawke about Leisha. Again. He tried to deflect their path toward the north end of the Faire, where the dance music would drown Hawke’s voice.

  Hawke neither deflected nor drowned. “The ice cream’s a new biopatent from GeneFresh Farms. Unbelievable in strawberry. Two cones, please.”

  “I don’t really—”

  “What do you think, Jordy? Could you ever guess they started with soybean genes? Profit margin of 17 percent last quarter.”

  “Amazing,” Jordan said, a little sourly. He hoped the ice cream would be mediocre, but it was the best he’d ever tasted.

  Hawke laughed, eyeing him keenly over his own strawberry cone. Jordan guessed that tomorrow GeneFresh Farms would be approached by a We-Sleep organizer, if they weren’t already under negotiation. The Profit Faire on the levee was to celebrate companies like GeneFresh, which were (or would be) new cells in the We-Sleep revolution. Average profits had risen an astounding 74 percent since the Sharifi murder case had hit the media. The connection between Timothy Herlinger’s death and We-Sleep buying, to Jordan as painful as it was hysterical, had brought millions of new consumers under Hawke’s rhetoric. “I knew it!” We-Sleepers cried in triumph, fear, anger, and greed. “The Sleepless are afraid of us! They’re spooked enough to try to control us through murder!”

  In the Mississippi scooter factory, where Hawke continued to maintain headquarters in an artificially rustic manner that irritated Jordan, production had doubled before leveling off. Hawke had posted production trend charts on the factory wall, smiled one of his lavish, secret smiles, and announced the Profit Faire on the levee, “where the local politicians of my great-great-grandfather’s day held their catfish fries.”

  Jordan, a Californian who had no idea who his great-great-grandfather was, hadn’t realized unmodified catfish was edible. He looked sideways at Hawke, who laughed. “Not my Cherokee great-great-grandfather, Jordan. A different one, in a much different position. Although he wasn’t one of your lords of the earth, either.”

  “Not ‘my’ lords of the earth. I don’t come from that class,” Jordan said, nettled. Hawke’s laugh disturbed him.

  “Of course not,” Hawke had said, and laughed again.

  Now Hawke said—just as if the discussion about GeneFresh Farms hadn’t happened, just as if Jordan hadn’t tried to change the subject—“The basic flaw in your Aunt Leisha is that she doesn’t belong to this century at all. She belongs to the eighteenth. It’s always fatal to be born out of your own time.”

  “Let’s not talk about Leisha tonight, Hawke. All right?”

  “The eighteenth-century values were social conscience, rational thought, and a basic belief in the goodness of order. With those attitudes, they were going to remake or stabilize the world, all the Lockes and Rousseaus and Franklins and even Jane Austens, who was also in the wrong century. Sound like Leisha Camden?”

  “I said—”

  “But of course the Romantics swept all that away, and we never worked back to it. Until the Sleepless came along. Don’t you think that’s interesting, Jordan? A biological innovation turning the social-value clock backwards?”

  Jordan stopped walking and faced Hawke. Somewhere to his left, over the river, the We-Sleep holo app
eared, shimmered, and disappeared in a burst of electronic light. “You really don’t care what I say, do you, Hawke? You just steamroll right over it. Only your words count.”

  Hawke was silent, watching him keenly.

  “Why did you even hire me? All you want is to snipe at me, delete my objections, have somebody to show up as stupid and—”

  “All I want,” Hawke said quietly, his ice cream dripping over his hands, “is for you to get angry.”

  “Get—”

  “Angry. Do you think you’re of any use to me when you let me show you up as stupid? When you don’t insist on whatever you say to me? I want you to feel your own fury when somebody is stepping on you, or you’ll never be any use to the Movement. What in hell do you suppose the We-Sleep idea is all about in the first place? Waking up to anger!”

  There was a flaw in that someplace, something not quite right, or maybe the not-quite-right was the sight of Hawke with strawberry ice cream dripping over his hands, his words to Jordan impassioned but his eyes focused on the levee, scanning the crowd—for what? To see if he was being overheard? Only one young couple, walking toward them from the StarHolo booth, could even possibly overh—

  The Mississippi exploded. Water geysered upwards, and beneath Jordan’s feet the levee rocked and split. A second explosion, and the StarHolo booth crumpled. The young couple were flung to the pavement like dolls. People screamed. A fissure opened at Jordan’s feet; the next moment Hawke tackled him, knocking him to safety. Even while Jordan was in the air he saw the remote-guided holo burst out above him, swollen to a monstrous ten feet visible throughout the entire Faire. But somehow it wasn’t the We-Sleep logo but letters, red and gold, silhouetted against the twinkling lights across the river: Samsung-Chrysler.

  NO ONE BELIEVED IT. Samsung-Chrysler, outraged, disclaimed responsibility for the attack. It was an old and honorable firm; not even the workers in the scooter factory believed S-C had set underwater explosives along the levee. The media didn’t believe it; the We-Sleep Council didn’t believe it; Jordan didn’t believe it.

  “You did it,” he said to Hawke.

  Hawke merely looked at him. Over his desk in the dusty factory office were spread the kiosk tabloids in hard-copy: “Sanctuary Behind Bombing of We-Sleep Faire! Sleepless Resort to Violence—Again!” The cheap paper had already curled around the tiny rips made by the kiosk printer, a flimsy We-Sleep unit built and marketed from Wichita. Two of Hawke’s huge fingers worked at the largest tear. From the factory floor came irregular staccato bursts of manual machinery and shatter-rock.

  “You’ll use anything,” Jordan said. “The media hysteria over the Herlinger murder—it’s not a question of truth for you. It’s just a question of taking any advantage that happens to turn up for your cause. You’re no better than Sanctuary!”

  Hawke said, “Nobody got hurt at the Faire.”

  “They might have!”

  “No,” Hawke said. “There was no chance of that.”

  It took a moment for Jordan to understand. “The ice cream melting over your hands. That was the detonator, wasn’t it? A temperature-sensitive microchip just under the skin. So you could pick a time when no one would be hurt.”

  Hawke said softly, “Are you angry yet, Jordan? Do you want to come with me to see more babies without medical care or running water because under Yagaiism nutrition and Y-energy are basic Dole rights but medicine and plumbing fixtures are free-market contractual enterprises? Do you want to see more adults who sit around all day and rot, knowing they can’t compete with automation for low-level jobs or with genemods for skilled ones? Do you want to see more toddlers with hookworm, more marauding teenagers who can have all the law they want but no real work? Are you angry yet?”

  “The ends don’t justify these means!” Jordan shouted.

  “The hell they don’t.”

  “You’re not helping the Sleeper underclass, you’re just—”

  “I’m not? Have you talked to Mayleen lately? Her oldest kid just got accepted to RoboTech training. And she can pay for it. Now.”

  “You’re helping, but you’re stirring up more hate to do it!”

  “Wake up, Jordan. No social movement has ever progressed without emphasizing division, and doing that means stirring up hate. The American revolution, abolitionism, unionization, civil rights—”

  “That wasn’t—”

  “At least we didn’t invent this particular division—the Sleepless did. Feminism, gay rights, Dole franchisement—”

  “Stop it! Stop throwing sterile intellectualizations at me!”

  To Jordan’s astonishment—even through his anger, he felt the astonishment—Hawke grinned. His black eyes were aquiline. “‘Sterile intellectualizations’—you’re one of us already. What would Aunt Leisha say, that high priestess of reason?”

  Jordan said, “I quit.”

  Hawke didn’t seem surprised. He nodded; the sharp dark gaze sliced the air like a lance. “All right. Quit. You’ll be back.”

  Jordan started for the door.

  “Do you know why you’ll be back, Jordy? Because if you were to get married—say, tomorrow—and have a child, you’d alter that child’s genes to be a Sleepless. Wouldn’t you? And you wouldn’t be able to stand yourself for doing it.”

  The door slid open.

  Behind him Hawke said softly, “When you do come back, you’ll be welcome, Jordan.”

  It was only outside the gates, the Mississippi sliding placidly toward the Delta, that Jordan realized there was no place else he wanted to go.

  Mayleen watched him from the guardhouse. At this distance, he couldn’t read her expression. He had met her oldest daughter once, a skittish girl with the same tow-headed, skinny looks as Mayleen. RoboTech school. Hookworm. Jobs.

  Jordan started back toward the scooter factory. Mayleen opened the gate for him, and he went inside.

  SUSAN MELLING’S WRINKLED FACE ON THE COMSCREEN was backed not by her adobe-walled study in the New Mexican desert but by a laboratory dense with terminals, plastiware, and robotic arms.

  “Susan, where are you?” Leisha said.

  “Chicago Med,” Susan said crisply. “Research. They’ve given me a guest lab.” The deep lines in her face pulled taut with excitement.

  Leisha said slowly, “You’ve been working on—”

  “Yes,” Susan interrupted, “that genetic problem we discussed in New Mexico. The one the med school has classified.”

  The comlink, Leisha realized, was not shielded. Or else not shielded enough. She almost laughed: in the current circumstances, what could possibly constitute “enough”?

  Susan said, “I just wanted you to know that we’ve begun, and that my distinguished Chinese colleague has arrived safely to join me.”

  Chinese? Susan was staring at her steadily, significantly; Leisha suddenly remembered that Claude Gaspard-Thiereux was genemod for intelligence, and that he had told Susan once, during a drunken party at an international symposium, that the genetic material woven into his had come originally from a Chinese donor. This fact had, for some reason, fascinated him. He began to collect imitation Ming vases and holopictures on the Forbidden City, which had in turn fascinated Susan. Leisha had thought the whole thing unimportant, but Susan obviously expected her to remember it now.

  Gaspard-Thiereux at Chicago Med. He would have flown in from Paris only if Susan had been able to offer him proof that Walcott’s findings were feasible.

  Susan said crisply, “We worked through the first part of the problem, replicating earlier work in the same area, and now we’ve hit a sort of snag. But we’re working on it, and we’ll keep you informed. We’re applying Mr. Wong’s work to the end of the problem, rather than the beginning, because the end has the most problematical gap.”

  Susan was enjoying this, Leisha saw: not just the research but the pseudosecrecy, the theatrical code words. Her voice danced; if Leisha closed her eyes she would see the Susan of forty years ago, braids bobbing with inexhaust
ible energy as she led two small girls in controlled-testing “games.” Sudden tenderness choked Leisha.

  To say something, she said, “Starting at the end? That sounds like applying the verdict instead of the evidence to a trial brief.”

  “Not a justified analogy,” Susan said gleefully. Her voice softened. “How are you doing, Leisha?”

  “The trial starts next week,” Leisha said, as if it were an answer. Which it was.

  “Is Richard still—”

  “No change,” Leisha said.

  “And Kevin—”

  “He’s not coming back.”

  “Damn him,” Susan said. But Leisha didn’t want to discuss Kevin. What hurt most about his defection, she’d realized, was that Kevin had betrayed the Sleepless as a group, not just her. Did that mean she no longer had personal loves, only political ones? The question was troubling.

  “Susan, do you know what occurred to me yesterday? That in the whole world, there are only three people who understand why I’m testifying against a Sleepless, against what the press call ‘my own kind.’ Only three. You, and Richard, and…Daddy.”

  “Yes,” Susan said. “Roger never felt class solidarity outweighed truth. In fact, he never felt class solidarity, period. He considered himself in a class of one. But there are undoubtedly more than three, Leisha. In the whole world.”

  Leisha looked across the room, at the pile of kiosk hard-copies heaped on the desk, the floor, the chair. From being unable to read them she had gone to being unable not to read them.

  “It doesn’t feel like more than three.”

  “Ah,” Susan said. It was a sound Alice made, too. Leisha had never before made the connection. “Did you know that in the United States year-to-date the officially recorded number of in vitro genemods to produce Sleepless babies was 142?”

  “That’s all?”

  “Down from thousands, ten years ago. Even fair and thoughtful people don’t want their own children to undergo the danger and the discrimination. But if your Dr. Walcott’s research…” She left the sentence unfinished.