Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  Hawke’s smile was stiff. There was a long silence. Finally he said mockingly, “Very pretty, Ms. Camden. You could easily find a job writing greeting cards.”

  Leisha’s expression didn’t change. She turned to go, and in that single contemptuous movement Jordan suddenly saw how little she had expected from this meeting. She had not confronted Hawke expecting to change him, or to learn anything from him, or even to discharge her rage. Those were not the reasons she had come, or the reason she had needed Jordan to come with her.

  No one stopped them as they left the factory. No one spoke until the plane skimmed over the dark fields sliced by the darker river. Jordan looked at his aunt. She didn’t know about Joey, didn’t know that Jordan had already left Hawke. “You came here for me. So I would see what Hawke is.”

  Leisha took his hand. Her fingers were cold. “Yes, I came for you. That’s all there is, Jordan. You. And you and you and you and you and you. I thought there was something more, something larger, but I was wrong. One by one. That’s all there is.”

  “COMMUNITY,” JENNIFER SHARIFI SAID CALMLY to Najla and Ricky, “must always come first. That’s why Daddy won’t be coming home again. Daddy broke his solidarity with his community.”

  The children looked at their shoes. They were afraid of her, Jennifer saw. That was not bad; fear was only the ancient word for respect.

  Najla finally said in a small voice, “Why do we have to leave Sanctuary?”

  “We aren’t leaving Sanctuary, Najla. Sanctuary goes with us. Wherever the community is, that’s Sanctuary. You’ll like the new place we’re taking Sanctuary. It’s safer for our people.”

  Ricky raised his eyes to his mother. Richard’s eyes, in Richard’s face. “When will the orbital be ready for us?”

  “Five years. We must plan it, construct it, pay for it.” Five years would be faster than an orbital had ever been constructed before, even given that they had purchased an existing shell from a Far East government that now would have to build itself another one.

  Ricky said, “And we’ll never come back to Earth again?”

  “Certainly you’ll come back to Earth,” Jennifer said. “On business, when you’re grown. Much of our business will still be here, among those few Sleepers who are not beggars or parasites. But we’ll conduct business from the orbital, and we’ll find ways to use genemods to build the strongest society ever known.”

  Najla said doubtfully, “Is that legal?”

  Jennifer rose, the folds of her abbaya falling around her sandals. The two children rose as well, Najla still looking doubtful, Ricky troubled. “It will be legal,” Jennifer said. “We’ll make it legal for you, and for all the children to come. Legal, and solid, and safe.”

  “Mother—” Ricky said, and stopped.

  “Yes, Ricky?”

  He looked at her, and a shade passed over his small face. Whatever he had been going to say, he decided to keep it to himself. Jennifer bent and kissed him, kissed Najla, and turned to start toward the house. She would talk again to the children later, explaining to them in small doses they could absorb, making it all clear. Later. Right now there was so much else to do. To plan. To keep in control.

  16

  SUSAN MELLING AND LEISHA CAMDEN SAT IN LAWN CHAIRS on the roof of Susan’s house in the New Mexico desert and watched Jordan and Stella stroll toward a huge cottonwood beside the creek. Overhead the summer triangle, Vega and Altair and Deneb, shone faint beside a brilliant full moon. On the western horizon the last red faded from low clouds. Long darknesses moved over the desert toward the mountains, whose peaks still glowed with unseen sun. Susan shivered.

  “I’ll get your sweater,” Leisha said.

  “No, I’m fine,” Susan said.

  “Shut up.”

  Leisha climbed down the ladder from the roof, found the sweater in Susan’s cluttered study, and stopped a moment in the living room. All the polished skulls were gone. She climbed the ladder and put the sweater around Susan’s shoulders.

  “Look at them,” Susan said, with pleasure. Just before the deeper darkness of the cottonwood, the silhouette that was Jordan blended with the shadow that was Stella. Leisha smiled; Susan’s eyes, at least, were still sharp.

  The two women sat in silence. Finally Susan said, “Kevin called again.”

  “No,” Leisha said simply.

  The old woman shifted her slight, painful weight in her chair. “Don’t you believe in forgiveness, Leisha?”

  “Yes. I do. But Kevin doesn’t know he’s done anything that requires it.”

  “I take it he doesn’t know either that Richard is here with you.”

  “I don’t know what he knows,” Leisha said indifferently. “Who can tell anymore?”

  “Like you, for instance, couldn’t tell that Jennifer Sharifi was innocent of murder. And you won’t forgive yourself any more than you forgive Kevin.”

  Leisha turned her head away. Moonlight ran up her cheek like a scalpel. From the cottonwood came low laughter. Leisha said suddenly, “I wish Alice were here.”

  Susan smiled. The smile was strained; her painkillers needed to be increased again. “Maybe she’ll just show up again if you need her hard enough.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “You don’t believe it happened, do you, Leisha? You don’t believe Alice had a paranormal perception about you.”

  “I believe she believes it,” Leisha said carefully. Everything was different now between her and Alice, and the difference was too precious to risk. Alice was the only thing she’d gotten back from this year of cataclysmic loss. Alice and Susan, and Susan was dying.

  Still, she had always been able to be honest with Susan. “You know I don’t believe in the paranormal. The normal is difficult enough to understand.”

  “And the paranormal disturbs your world view a lot, doesn’t it?” After a minute Susan added in a softer tone, “Are you afraid Alice will disapprove of Jordan and Stella? A Sleepless and a Sleeper?”

  “God, no. I know she’d approve.” She gave a sudden bark of harsh laughter. “Alice may be one of the twelve people in the world who would.”

  Susan said, as if it were relevant, “You also got calls from Stewart Sutter, Kate Addams, Miyuki Yagai, and your secretary, what’s-his-name. I told them all you’d call back.”

  “I won’t,” Leisha said.

  “There are more than twelve,” Susan said. Leisha didn’t answer.

  Below them, Richard emerged from the front door and walked toward the distant mesa. He moved slowly, limply, as if the direction didn’t matter to him. Leisha thought it probably didn’t. Very little did. That he was here at all was due only to Jordan, who had not hesitated but simply put Richard in the car and brought him. Jordan seldom hesitated any more. He acted. A moment later the huge figure of Joey, who loved walking anywhere, shambled happily after Richard.

  Susan said, “You think the Sharifi trial ended all chance of real integration—Sleepers and Sleepless, We-Sleep and mainstream economy, have and have-nots.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s never a last chance for anything, Leisha.”

  “Really? Then how come you’re dying?” After a moment Leisha added, “I’m sorry.”

  “You can’t hide here forever, Leisha, just because you’re disillusioned with law.”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  “What do you call it?”

  “I’m living,” Leisha said. “Just living.”

  “The hell you are. Not like this, not you. Don’t argue with me—I have the insight of the almost-eternal.”

  Despite herself, Leisha laughed. The laugh hurt.

  Susan said, “Damn right it’s funny. So call Stewart and Kate and Miyuki and that secretary.”

  “No.”

  Richard disappeared into the darkness, followed by Joey. Jordan and Stella, holding hands, started back toward the house. Susan said, with apparent guilelessness, “I wish Alice were here.”

  Leisha nodded.
<
br />   “Yes,” Susan said artlessly, “it would be good to collect your entire community.”

  Leisha looked at her, but Susan was absorbed in studying the moonlight on the desert, while below them some small animal scurried by unseen and overhead the stars came out one by one by one by one.

  BOOK III: DREAMERS

  2075

  “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Message to Congress, December 1, 1862

  17

  ON THE MORNING OF HER SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, Leisha Camden sat on the edge of a chair in her New Mexico compound and contemplated her feet.

  They were narrow and high-arched, the skin healthy and fresh right up to the toes, which were strong and straight. The toenails, cut straight across, glowed faintly pink. Susan Melling would have approved. Susan had set great store by feet: their strength, the condition of their veins and bones, their general usefulness as a barometer of aging. Or not aging.

  It made her laugh. Feet—to be remembering Susan, dead for 23 years, in terms of feet. And not even Susan’s feet, which might be logical, but Leisha’s own feet, which was ridiculous. In memoriam bipedalis.

  When had she begun to find funny such things as feet? Not, certainly, when she was young, in her twenties or thirties or fifties. Everything had been so serious then, of such world-shaking consequence. Not just the things that actually might have shaken the world, but everything. She must have been very tiresome. Perhaps there was no way for the young to be serious without being tiresome. They lacked that all-important dimension of physics: torque. Too much time ahead, too little behind, like a man trying to carry a horizontal ladder with a grip at one end. Not even an honorable passion could balance very well. And while jiggling hard to just keep your balance, how could anything ever be funny?

  “What are you laughing at?” Stella said, coming into Leisha’s office after only the most peremptory knock. “That reporter is waiting for you in the board room.”

  “Already?”

  “He’s early.” Stella sniffed; she hadn’t wanted Leisha to talk to any reporters. “Let them have their tricentennial without us,” she had said. “What does it have to do with us? Now?” Leisha hadn’t had an answer, but she’d agreed to see the reporter anyway. Stella could be so incurious. But, then, Stella was only fifty-two and found hardly anything funny.

  “Tell him I’m coming,” Leisha said, “but not until I check on Alice. Give him some coffee or something. Let the kids play him their flute solo; that ought to keep him enthralled.” Seth and Eric had just learned to make flutes from animal bones they scavenged in the desert. Stella sniffed again and went out.

  Alice had just awoken. She sat on the edge of her bed while her nurse eased the nightgown over her head. Leisha ducked back into the hall; Alice hated to have Leisha see her naked body. Not until Leisha heard the nurse say, “There, Ms. Watrous,” did she come back into the room.

  Alice wore loose, cotton pants and a white top cut wide enough for her to put on herself with just her right arm; the left was useless since her stroke. Her white curls had been combed. The nurse knelt on the floor, easing her charge’s feet into soft slippers.

  “Leisha,” Alice said, with pleasure. “Happy birthday.”

  “I wanted to say it to you first!”

  “Too bad,” Alice said. “Sixty-seven years.”

  “Yes,” Leisha said, and the two women held each other’s gaze, Leisha straight-backed in her white shorts and halter, Alice steadying herself with one veined hand on the footboard of the bed.

  “Happy birthday, Alice.”

  “Leisha!” Stella again, in top managerial mode. “You have a comlink conference at nine, so if you’re going to see that reporter…”

  From the right side of her mouth, so softly that Stella couldn’t hear, Alice murmured, “My poor Jordan…”

  Leisha murmured back, “You know he loves it,” and went to the board room to meet the reporter.

  He surprised her by looking about sixteen, a lanky boy with too-sharp elbows and bad skin, dressed in what must be the latest adolescent fashion: balloon-shaped shorts and plastic blouse trimmed with tiny dangling plastic scooters in red, white, and blue. He perched nervously in a chair while Eric and Seth danced around him playing flutes, badly. Leisha sent her grandnephews from the room. Seth went cheerfully; Eric scowled and slammed the door. In the sudden quiet Leisha sat down across from the boy.

  “What newsgrid did you say you represent, Mr… Cavanaugh?”

  “My high school net,” he blurted. “Only I didn’t tell the lady that when I made the appointment.”

  “Of course not,” Leisha said. Forget her feet—this was funny. The first interview she had granted in ten years, and it turned out to be to a kid for his high-school grid. Susan would have loved it.

  “Well, then, let’s begin,” she said. She knew the boy had never spoken to a Sleepless before. It was written all over him: the curiosity, the uneasiness, the furtive assessment. But no envy, in any of its virulent forms. That was the remarkable thing: its absence in this unremarkable boy.

  He was better organized than he looked. “My mom says it used to be different than it was now. She says donkeys and even Livers hated Sleepless. How come?”

  “How come you don’t?”

  The question seemed to genuinely surprise him. He frowned, then looked at her with a sideways embarrassment that told Leisha, more clearly than words, how decent he was. “Well, I don’t mean to offend you or anything, but…why would I hate you? I mean, donkeys are the ones—Sleepless are really just sort of super-donkeys, aren’t they?—who have to do all the work. We Livers just get to enjoy the results. To live. You know,” he said, in a burst of ingenuous confiding, “I can never figure out why donkeys don’t see that and hate us.”

  “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing, Mr. Cavanaugh. Are there any donkeys in your school?”

  “Nah. They have their own schools.” He looked at Leisha as if she was supposed to know that, which of course she did. The United States was a three-tiered society now: the have-nots, who by the mysterious hedonistic opiate of the Philosophy of Genuine Living had become the recipients of the gift of leisure. Livers, eighty percent of the population, had shed the work ethic for a gaudy populous version of the older aristocratic ethic: the fortunate do not have to work. Above them—or below—were the donkeys, genetically-enhanced Sleepers who ran the economy and the political machinery, as dictated by, and in exchange for, the lordly votes of the new leisure class. Donkeys managed; their robots labored. Finally, the Sleepless, nearly all of whom were invisible in Sanctuary anyway, were disregarded by Livers, if not by donkeys. All of it, the entire trefoil organization—id, ego, and superego, some wit had labeled it sardonically—was underwritten by cheap, ubiquitous Y-energy, powering automated factories making possible a lavish Dole that traded bread and circuses for votes. The whole thing, Leisha thought, was peculiarly American, managing to combine democracy with materialism, mediocrity with enthusiasm, power with the illusion of control from below.

  “Tell me, Mr. Cavanaugh, what do you and your friends do with all your free time?”

  “Do?” He seemed startled.

  “Yes. Do. Today, for instance. When you’re done recording this interview, what will you do?”

  “Well…drop off the recording at school. The teacher will put it on the school newsgrid, I guess. If he wants to.”

  “Is he a Liver or a donkey?”

  “A Liver, of course,” he said, a little scornfully. Her stock, Leisha saw, was dropping rapidly. “Then I might work on reading till school’s out at noon—I can almost read, but not quite. It’s pretty useless, but my mom wants me to learn. Then there’s the scooter races at n
oon, I’m going with some friends—”

  “Who pays for and organizes those?”

  “Our local assemblyman, of course. Cathy Miller. She’s a donkey.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then some friends are having a brainie party, our congressman passed out some new stuff from Colorado or someplace, then there’s this virtual-reality holovid I want to do—”

  “What’s that called?”

  “Tamarra of the Martian Seas. Aren’t you going to see it? It’s agro.”

  “Maybe I’ll catch it,” Leisha said. Feet, reporters, Tamarra of the Martian Seas. Moira, Alice’s daughter, had emigrated to a Martian colony. “You know there aren’t really any seas on Mars, don’t you?”

  “That so?” he said, without interest. “Then some friends and I are going to play ball, then my girl and I are going to fuck. After that, if there’s time, I might join my parents at my mom’s lodge, because they’re having a dance. If there’s not time—Ms. Camden? Is something funny?”

  “No,” Leisha gasped. “I’m sorry. No eighteenth-century aristo could have had a fuller social schedule.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m an agro Liver,” the boy said modestly. “But I’m supposed to ask you questions. Now, is…no, wait…what’s this—foundation you run? What does it do?”