Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  She stood in front of her work terminal, munching an apple and listening to the program recite the fourth chapter of her book on Thomas Paine. The room glowed with sunlight. Alice’s bed had been dragged to the window so she could see the flowers. Leisha hastily swallowed a bite of apple and addressed the terminal.

  “Text change: ‘Paine rushing to Philadelphia’ to ‘Paine’s rushing to Philadelphia.’”

  “Changed,” the terminal said.

  Alice said, “Do you really think anyone still cares about those old rules for verbals?”

  “I care,” Leisha said. “Alice, you haven’t touched your lunch.”

  “I’m not hungry. And you don’t care about verbals; you’re just filling time. Listen, there’s a whole lot of commotion in the front of the house.”

  “Hungry or not, you have to eat. You have to.” Alice was seventy-five but looked much older. Gone was the stocky figure that had plagued her all her life; now her skin stretched thin over bones revealed as delicate wirework. She had had another stroke, and after that she’d put away her terminal. Leisha, in desperation, had even suggested that Alice resume her work on twin parapsychology. Alice had smiled sadly—the twin work was the only thing they had never been able to really discuss—and had shaken her head. “No, dear. It’s too late. To convince you.”

  But the stroke hadn’t impaired Alice’s love for her family. She grinned as the commotion from the front of the house exploded into the room.

  “Drew!”

  “I’m home, Grandma Alice! Hey, Leisha!”

  Alice held out her arms hungrily, and Drew powered his chair to go into them. Unlike Alice’s grandchildren, with their own perfect health, Drew was never repulsed by the frozen left side of Alice’s face, the spittle at the left corner of her mouth, the slightly slurred speech. Alice hugged him tightly.

  Leisha put down her apple—it lacked flavor anyway; whatever the agrogene combines had done this time was a step backward—and tensed on her toes, waiting. When Drew finally turned to her she said, “You’ve been kicked out of another school.”

  Drew started his ingratiating grin, got a closer look at Leisha’s face, and stopped smiling. “Yes.”

  “What for this time?”

  “Not grades, Leisha. This time I studied.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Fighting.”

  “Who’s hurt?”

  He said sullenly, “A son of a bitch named Lou Bergin.”

  “And I presume I’ll be hearing from Mr. Bergin’s lawyer.”

  “He started it, Leisha. I just finished it.”

  Leisha studied Drew. He was sixteen, and despite the powerchair—or because of it—he exercised fanatically, keeping his upper body superbly conditioned. She could well believe he was a lethal fighter. His adolescent features didn’t yet fit together: nose too big, chin too small, skin spotted by acne where it wasn’t still rounded by baby fat. Only his eyes were handsome, vivid green fringed by thick black lashes, with a concentrated gaze that could still make almost anyone think that Drew found him completely fascinating. Leisha was an exception. For the past two years there had been antagonism between them, periodically mitigated by clumsy attempts on his part to remember how much he owed her, and on hers to remember the engaging child he had been.

  This was the fourth school that had expelled him. The first time, Leisha had been indulgent: He was a small crippled Liver, and the intellectual demands of a school full of donkey children, most genetically modified for intelligence and physical health, must have been over-whelming for him. The second time she had been less indulgent. Drew had failed every single subject, simply ceasing to go to class at all, spending solitary hours with his semiautomatic guitar or games terminal. No one had disturbed him. The school expected its students, most of whom would run the country someday, to be self-motivated.

  Leisha sent him next to the most structured school she could find. Drew loved it immediately; he discovered the drama program. He was the star of his acting class. “I’ve found my destiny!” he said on a comlink call home. Leisha winced; Alice laughed. But four months later Drew was home, bitter and silent. He had failed to get a part in either Death of a Salesman or Morning Light. Alice asked gently, “Was it because they didn’t want a Willy Loman or Kelland Vie in a powerchair?” “It was donkey politics,” Drew spat. “And it always will be.”

  Leisha then searched hard for a school with an untaxing academic program, a strong artistic one, a structured school day, and as high a percentage as possible of students from families without much political clout, impressive financial connections, or illustrious histories. She found one that seemed to qualify in Springfield, Massachusetts. Drew had seemed to like the school and Leisha had thought things were going well. Yet here he was again.

  “Look at your face,” Drew said sullenly. “Why don’t you say it aloud? ‘Here’s Drew back again, fucked-up Drew who thinks he’s going to be somebody but can’t finish anything. What the shit should we do about poor little Liver Drew?’”

  “What are we going to do?” Leisha said cruelly.

  “Why don’t you just give up on me?”

  Alice said, “Oh, no, Drew.”

  “Not you, Grandma Alice. Her. Her that insists that people be wonderful or they don’t exist.”

  Leisha said, “As opposed to thinking they’re wonderful just because they exist, but do nothing to fulfill their own existence?”

  Alice rapped out, “That’s enough, you two!”

  It wasn’t enough for Leisha. Drew’s goading had hurt parts of her she hadn’t known still existed. She said, “Now that you’re home, Drew, you’ll want to see Eric. He’s straightened himself out wonderfully and is making genuine progress with global atmospheric curves. Jordan is immensely proud of him.”

  Drew’s green eyes blazed. Leisha turned her back. She was suddenly, sickeningly, ashamed of herself. She was seventy-five years old—an incredible fact in itself; she never felt seventy-five—and this boy was sixteen. Unmodified, a Sleeper, not even drawn from the donkey class…As she got older, she lost compassion. Why else was she shut away from the world in this New Mexico fortress, in retreat from a country she had once hoped to help improve for everyone? Youthful dreams.

  Dreams which Drew didn’t even have.

  Alice said wearily, “All right, Leisha. Drew, Eric asked me to give you a message.”

  “What?” she heard Drew snarl. But it was a softened snarl; he could never stay angry at Alice. Not at Alice.

  Alice said, “Eric said to tell you that as part of his studies he walked into the Pacific and got his ass wiped. What does that mean?”

  Drew laughed. “Really? Eric said that? I guess he has changed.” The brooding bitterness returned to his voice.

  Stella ran into the room, looking distracted. She had put on weight and now looked like a painting by Titian, with plump, healthy flesh under youthfully red hair. “Leisha, there’s a—Drew! What are you doing home?”

  “He’s visiting,” Alice said. “There’s a what, dear?”

  “There’s a visitor to see Leisha. Actually, three visitors.” Stella smiled, and her chins wobbled with excitement. “Here they are!”

  “Richard!”

  Leisha catapulted across the room into his arms. Richard caught her, laughing, then let her go. Leisha turned immediately to his wife, Ada, a slim Polynesian girl who smiled shyly. Ada still had trouble with English.

  When Richard had first brought Ada to the New Mexico compound, after twenty years of solitary, aimless wandering around the globe, Leisha had been wary. She and Richard had never again been lovers; Leisha had recoiled from the thought of sleeping with Jennifer’s husband. And Richard had never asked. He had grieved for years for his lost children, Najla and Ricky, a silent bitter grieving so unlike a Sleepless that Leisha had not known how to respond. She had been relieved when he traveled for years at a time, disappearing with only his credit ring and the clothes on his back into India, Tibet, the Antarct
ic colonies, the central South American desert—always somewhere technologically backward, as close to primitive as a world fueled by Kenzo Yagai still possessed. Leisha never asked him about his journeys; he never volunteered information. She suspected he passed as a Sleeper.

  Then four years ago he had returned for one of his infrequent stays bringing Ada. His wife. She came from one of the South Pacific voluntary cultural preserves. Ada was slim and brown, with long lustrous black hair and a habit of ducking her head when anyone addressed her. She spoke no English. She was 15 years old.

  Leisha had welcomed her, set about learning Samoan, and tried to hide the fact that she was hurt to the heart. It wasn’t that Richard had rejected her; it was that he had rejected all the choices of being Sleepless. Choosing accomplishment. Choosing ambition. Choosing the mind.

  But gradually Leisha had come to understand. The point for Richard was not only that Ada, with her shy smiles and halting speech and youthful adoration of Richard, was so different from Leisha. It was that Ada was so different from Jennifer Sharifi.

  And Richard seemed happy. He had done what Leisha had not, and had made his own kind of peace with their Sleepless past. And if that peace looked like a surrender, could Leisha say that her own solution—the moribund Susan Melling Foundation, which had had all of ten applicants last year—was really any better?

  “I see you, Leisha,” Ada said in English. “I see you gladly.”

  “And I see you gladly,” Leisha said warmly. For Ada, this was a long speech of great intellectual power.

  “I see you gladly, Mirami Alice.” Mirami, Richard had once said, was a term of great respect for the honored old. Ada had flatly—shyly and sweetly, but flatly nonetheless—refused to believe that Alice and Leisha were twins.

  “And I see you gladly, dear,” Alice said. “You remember Drew?”

  “Hey,” Drew said, smiling. Ada smiled slightly and looked away, as was proper for a married woman to an unrelated man. Richard said genially, “Hey, Drew,” which was such a change from the usual shadowed pain in his eyes when he spoke to Drew that Leisha blinked. She had never really understood that pain: Drew was a generation younger than Richard’s lost son. And, of course, he was a Sleeper.

  Alice’s voice quavered, which meant she was tiring. “Stella said three visitors…”

  Stella entered then, carrying a baby.

  “Oh, Richard,” Leisha said. “Oh, Richard…”

  “This is Sean. After my father.”

  The baby looked absurdly like Richard: low brow, thick dark hair, dark eyes. Only his coffee-colored skin proclaimed Ada’s genes. They had evidently not had him modified at all. Leisha took the infant in her arms, not sure what she felt. Sean gazed at her solemnly. Leisha’s heart turned over.

  “He’s beautiful…”

  “Let me hold him,” Alice said hungrily, and Leisha surrendered the baby. She was glad for Richard, who had always wanted a family, an anchor, an intimate community…Two years ago Leisha had medical tests to confirm that her own eggs were inert. Gametes, Susan had warned her decades ago, did not regenerate.

  Kevin Baker, the only prominent Sleepless left in the United States, had four children by his young Sleepless wife.

  Jennifer Sharifi, she knew from consulting United States birth records, had two children and four grandchildren.

  Alice may have lost Moira, emigrant to Mars colony, but she had Jordan and his three children.

  Stop it, she told herself, and did.

  The baby was passed around. Stella bustled in with cookies and coffee. Alice, tired, was wheeled to her room to sleep. Jordan came in from a field he was cultivating with experimental genemod sunflowers. Richard talked, seemingly freely and yet with something odd in his manner, about his and Ada’s wanderings through the Artificial Islands Game Sanctuary off the African coast.

  “Hey,” Drew said, and at the sound in his voice everybody looked up. “Hey—this baby’s sleeping.”

  Leisha sat still. Then she stood, walked to Drew’s chair, and stared down at the infant carryall parked at Drew’s feet. Sean lay with his tiny fists flung above his head, asleep. His closed eyelids fluttered. Leisha’s stomach clenched. Richard had felt such hatred of his own kind, his own people, that he had had in vitro genemod to reverse sleeplessness.

  He was gazing at her. “No, Leisha,” he said quietly. “I didn’t. It’s natural.”

  “Natural…”

  “Yes. That’s where we’ve been the last month, after the Artificial Islands—Chicago Medical Institute. Looking for answers to a spontaneous regression. But there’s nobody there who’s doing more than cookbook carrying out of old discoveries—hell, there’s no geneticists left anywhere who can do more than that, except in agribusiness.” He fell silent; Leisha and he both knew this was not true. There was Sanctuary.

  Leisha said thickly, “Do they know at least if it’s widespread, or on the increase…statistical parameters…”

  “It seems to be pretty rare. Of course, there’s so few Sleepless now they can’t construct any statistical profiles.”

  Again that silence, heavy with the unnamed.

  It was Ada who broke the silence. She couldn’t have followed much of the conversation between Leisha and her husband, but she rose gracefully to move beside Leisha. Ada stooped and picked up her baby. Gazing tenderly down at him, she said, “I see you gladly, Sean. I see you sleep,” and then her gaze rose to meet Leisha’s directly, for the first time that Leisha could ever remember.

  Even when everything in the country had changed, nothing had changed.

  19

  JENNIFER, WILL, THE TWO GENETICISTS, Doctors Toliveri and Blure, and their technicians stood watching the creation of a miniature world.

  Five hundred miles away in space, a plastic bubble floated. As the Sanctuary team watched via screen in Sharifi Labs, Special Enterprises Division, the bubble reached maximum inflation. Inside it, thousands of plastic membranes pulled taut. The interior was a honeycomb of thin-walled tunnels, chambers, and diaphragms, some with pinhole pricks, some as porous as standard Earth building materials, some open. None was more than four inches high. When the bubble was fully inflated with standard atmospheric mix, the hologrid in the lab’s ceiling projected downward a transparent, three-dimensional model of the bubble and its internal partitions.

  From each of four chambers on the outside of the bubble, five mice were released. The mice squeezed through the tunnels, whose low height prevented free fall, squeaking hysterically. On the hologrid model twenty black dots traced their path. A screen on another wall displayed twenty sets of readings from the biometers implanted in each mouse.

  The mice ran free for ten minutes. Then from a single source inside the bubble was released the genemod organism, distantly related to a virus, that Toliveri and Blure had spent seven years creating.

  One by one, the biometer readings faltered and the squeaking, amplified on audio, disappeared. The first three ceased transmitting within three minutes; the next six a few minutes later; five more within ten minutes. The last six transmitted for nearly thirty-one minutes.

  Dr. Blure fed the data into an extrapolation program. He frowned. He was very young, no more than twenty-five, and since he was very blond the beard he seemed trying hard to grow was a soft stubble, like down. “No good. At that rate, the configurations of the smallest orbital project at over an hour. And of a beggar city, on a still day, over five hours for saturation.”

  “Too slow,” Will Sandaleros said. “It won’t convince.”

  “No,” Blure said. “But we’re closer.” He glanced again at the flat bioreadings. “Imagine people who would actually use such a thing.”

  “The beggars would,” Jennifer Sharifi said.

  No one contradicted her.

  MIRI AND TONY SAT IN THEIR SHARED LAB in Science Dome Four. Ordinarily children used school laboratories, not professional ones, for their learning projects; space on an orbital was too precious to dole out indiscriminately.
But Miri and Tony Sharifi were not ordinary children and their projects were not just learning experiences. The Sanctuary Council, Sharifi Labs, and the Board of Education had held a meeting to explore the issues: Should Miri’s neurological experiments and Tony’s datasystems improvements be considered class projects, patentable private enterprises, or work for hire for Sanctuary Corporation? Should any potential profits belong to the family business, to the corporation, or to a trust fund arranged for Miri and Tony until they were no longer minors under New York State law? Everyone at the meeting had smiled, and the discussion had been happy; they were all too proud of the Supers to fight over them. The decision had been that their work belonged to Sanctuary with a 60 percent royalty share to the children themselves of any commercial applications, plus college credit. Miri was twelve, Tony eleven.

  “L-l-look at th-this,” Tony said. Miri didn’t answer for forty-five seconds, which meant she was at a crucial point in thought-string construction and the string Tony’s words had started was knotted in only at the periphery. Tony waited cheerfully. He was usually cheerful, and Miri could seldom detect any black strings among the thought edifices he mapped for her on his hologrid. That was his current project: mapping how the Supers thought. He had started with one sentence: “No adult has an automatic claim on the production of another; weakness does not constitute a moral claim on strength.” Tony had spent weeks eliciting from twelve Supers every string and cross-string this sentence evoked, entering each into a program he had written himself.

  It had been slow work. Jonathan Markowitz and Ludie Calvin, the youngest Supers in the experiment, had lost patience with the opaque, stammering slowness of spoken words and had twice flounced out of Tony’s dogged sessions. Mark Meyer’s strings had been so bizarre that the program refused to recognize them as valid until Tony rewrote sections of the code. Nikos Demetrios had clear strings and cooperated eagerly, but in the middle of his interrogation he caught cold, was quarantined for three days, and came back with such different strings for the same phrases that Tony threw out all his data for contamination by artistic rearrangement.