Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  “Ready,” Dr. Toliveri said, “Stand by. Six, five, four, three, two, one, go.”

  The genemod viruses were released. Air currents matched to winds five miles per hour from the southwest wafted through the temperature-controlled bubble. Jennifer shifted her attention to the biometer read-out screen on the far wall. Within three minutes, it showed no activity.

  “Yes,” Will said. He wasn’t smiling, but he took her hand. “Yes.”

  Jennifer nodded. To Toliveri, Blure, and the three technicians she said, “A superb job.” She turned to Will. Her beautiful, composed voice was very low. “We’re ready for the next stage.”

  “Yes,” he said again.

  “Start the purchase negotiations for Kagura orbital. Don’t go through Kevin Baker. Keep it blind.”

  Will Sandaleros looked as if he didn’t mind being told what had actually been decided between them years earlier. He looked as if he understood his wife’s need to issue orders. Then he looked again at the biometer, his eyes gleaming.

  MIRI OPENED THE DOOR TO TONY’S LAB. He had moved to his own work quarters in Science Building Two six months ago, when there was no longer room in one lab for both their projects. Every time Miri looked at his half of the partners’ desk she felt sad, although she thought perhaps part of the sadness came from her own work’s going so badly. In two years she had modeled every genetic modification she could think of, without coming closer to any that would correct the stutters and twitches of all the Supers’ hyped-up electrochemical processes. The work had begun to feel sterile to her, to remind her of the missing component, whatever it was, of the strings themselves. Elusive, sterile, and nonproductive. Today had been another failure. She was in a terrible mood, a terrible, fast-moving, chaotic-string, sterile mood. She wanted Tony’s comfort and encouragement. She wanted Tony.

  His lab door was locked, but Miri’s retina print was in the authorized file and the STERILE ENVIRONMENT light was off. She placed her right eye to the scanner and pushed open the door.

  Tony lay on the floor, twitching and jerking, on top of Christina Demetrios. Over his thrusting body Miri saw Christy’s eyes widen, then darken. “Oh!” Christy said. Tony said nothing; possibly he hadn’t heard Miri, or even Christina. His naked buttocks contracted powerfully and his whole body shuddered with orgasm. Miri backed out of the lab, closed the door, and ran to her own lab.

  She sat with her hands clasped, twitching, on her desk, her head bowed. Tony hadn’t told her—well, why should he tell her? It was his business, not hers; she was only his sister. Not his lover—his sister. Strings formed and reformed in her head: For the first time, various ancient and obscure stories, which she had remembered only because she remembered everything, made sense to her. Hera and Io. Othello and Desdemona. She knew the entire physiology of sex—hormone-influenced secretions, vascular engorgement, pheromone triggers. She knew everything. She knew nothing.

  Jealousy. One of the most community-destroying emotions there was. A beggar emotion.

  Miri stood up and paced distractedly. No. She would not give in to the degradation of jealousy. She was better than that. Tony deserved better than that of his sister. Idealism. (Stoicism, Epicureanism “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love,” Tony’s butt pumping away in Christina…) She would solve this problem her own way (darkness, fullness, the throbbing ache, gravitational pressure to ignite gases into thermonuclear reactions, cepheid variables…).

  Miri washed her face and hands. She put on a clean pair of white shorts and tied a red ribbon in her dark hair. Her lips, despite their constant twitching, set together hard. She didn’t have to think whom to approach; she already knew, and knew that she knew, and knew all the implications of already knowing (darkness, fullness, lying on her belly on her lab floor or under the genemod soy plants that met in a concealing arc, her hands between her legs).

  His name was David Aronson. He was three years older than she, a Norm but fairly intelligent, an intense believer in the Sanctuary Oath and in her grandmother’s leadership. He had dark curling hair, as dark as Miri’s own, but very light eyes of clear, black-lashed gray. His legs were long, his shoulders at eighteen were as broad and powerful as a grown man’s. His mouth was generous, wide mobile lips of an almost molded firmness. Miri had spent the past six months looking at David’s mouth.

  She found him where she expected to: at the orbital’s shuttle port, poring over CAD displays of machinery. In two months he would leave for a doctoral program in engineering at Stanford, his first trip to Earth.

  “Hello, Miri.” He had a deep voice, a little rough. Miri liked the roughness. She could find no reason why.

  “D-D-David. I w-w-w-want t-to ask you s-s-something.”

  He looked slightly to one side of her, at the CAD holo. “What?”

  She had no trouble being direct; all her life, the trouble in communication had come from the difficulty and simplicity of speech compared to the enormous complexity of her thoughts. She was used to simplifying things for Norms as much as possible. This was already a simple thing; it seemed to her to fit admirably, as almost nothing else did, to the limitations of language.

  “W-w-will y-you have s-s-s-sex with m-m-m-me?”

  David straightened. Color mounted in his cheeks. He continued to look past her. “I’m sorry. Miri, but that’s not possible.”

  “Wh-wh-why n-not?”

  “I already have a lover.”

  “Wh-wh-who?”

  “Don’t you think that’s my business?”

  He sounded cold; Miri couldn’t see why. Noncommercial information, surely, was for community use, and what information could be more public? She was used to having questions answered. If they were not, she was used to exploring why not. “Wh-wh-why w-w-won’t you t-t-tell me who?”

  David bent ostentatiously closer to his screen. His beautiful mouth set. “I think this conversation is over, Miri.”

  “Wh-wh-why?”

  He didn’t answer her. The strings of her thoughts suddenly tangled, tightened around her like a noose. “B-b-bec-c-cause I’m ugly? I t-tt-t-twitch?”

  “I said I didn’t have anything else to say!” Frustration, or embarrassment, or anger, overcame courtesy, and he finally looked directly at her before stalking off. Miri recognized the look: She had often seen it on her mother’s face before Hermione turned to fiddling with a screen, or a cup of coffee, or anything handy. Miri recognized, too, that she was the reason for the frustration or embarrassment or anger, and that she had somehow contributed enough of it to justify the discourtesy. He didn’t want her, and she had had no right to press him—but all she’d wanted was answers. By pressing him, she’d only humiliated herself. He didn’t want her. She twitched, her head was too big, she stuttered, she wasn’t pretty like Joan was. No Norm would want her.

  She walked carefully, as if she were a chemical compound that shouldn’t be jarred, back to her laboratory. Sitting at her desk, she again clasped her hands—jerking, twitching—and tried to calm herself. To think. To construct orderly, balanced nets of thought that would hold everything useful to the problem, everything relevant—intellectually, emotionally, biochemically—everything productive. After twenty minutes, she got up again and left the lab.

  Nikos Demetrios, Christina’s twin, was fascinated by money. Its international flow, fluctuations, uses, changes, symbolism were, he had once told Miri, more complex than any natural Gaea patterns on Earth, just as useful to biological survival, and more interesting. At fourteen, he’d already made suggestions about international trading to the adult Norms with seats on the Sanctuary Exchange. They purchased his suggestions on investment opportunities around the globe: new wind-shear-detection technology under development in Seoul, a catalytic antibody application marketed in Paris, the embryonic Moroccan aerospace industry. Miri found him in the central communications building, in his tiny office ringed with datascreens.

  “N-N-N-Nikos…”

  “H-h-h-hello, M-M-M-M-Miri.”


  “W-w-will you have s-s-s-s-sex with m-me?”

  Nikos regarded her steadily. Mottled color swept from his neck to his forehead. Miri saw that, like David Aronson, Nikos was embarrassed, but unlike David he didn’t seem embarrassed by the directness of the question. She could only think of one other reason he could be embarrassed. She turned and stumbled from the office.

  Nikos called, “W-w-w-wait! M-Miri!” His voice sounded genuinely distressed; they had been playmates their entire lives. He couldn’t coordinate his movements even as well as she could. She easily outdistanced him.

  Back in her lab, door locked and STERILE ENVIRONMENT seal activated, Miri sat, fiercely willing herself not to cry. Her grandmother had been right: There were hard necessities to face. One did not cry.

  After that she was courteous and distant with Nikos, who didn’t seem to know what to do about that. Eventually she saw him with a Norm, a pretty fourteen-year-old named Patricia who seemed fascinated by Nikos’s skill with money. Miri had never talked much with Christina; now she talked less. David she never saw. With Tony she was the same as always: he was her workmate, friend, beloved confidant. Her brother. Now there was just this one area where the confiding didn’t extend, was all. It was unimportant. She wouldn’t let it be important. Hard necessity.

  Two weeks later, Miri resumed watching the newsgrids from Earth, but only the sex channels. There were a lot of them. She found one she liked, removed all retina prints except her own from her lab-door programming, and learned to masturbate efficiently. She did it twice a day, her neurochemical responses being as hyped in this area as every other. She never permitted herself to think about Tony while she did it, and Tony never asked her why he could no longer enter her lab unannounced. There was no need. He knew. He was her brother.

  SEATING HERSELF IN THE CHAIR DREW INDICATED, Leisha had a funny thought: I wish I smoked. She remembered her father smoking, reaching for his monogrammed gold cigarette case, making a ritual out of lighting a cigarette. His eyes would half-close and his cheeks would hollow with the first long inward drag. Roger always said it relaxed him. Even then Leisha had known he was lying: It revitalized him.

  Which did she want now, tranquility or revitalization? It seemed she was in need of both, and that what Drew would offer her would provide neither.

  He had insisted on her being the first one, and alone. “A new art form, Leisha,” he’d said, with that peculiar intensity that had marked him since Eric’s illegal experimentation. Drew had always been intense, but this was different. He looked at Leisha from under those thick dark lashes, and she was afraid for him. This, then, was what it felt like to be a parent, this fear that your child was not going to be able to obtain what he’d set his heart on. That he would fail, and you would hurt for him more than you ever did for your own failures. How had Alice stood it? How had Stella?

  But not Roger. He had been sure, from the beginning, that his child would not fail. Surprise, Daddy. Look at me now, sulking idly in the desert for twenty years, an Achilles whose Agamemnon was fighting her own stupid war while Leisha raised a son whose major talent was petty crime and who was not, in fact, even hers.

  She said to Drew, not gently, “You should know that I’ve never been particularly sensitive to art, in any form. Maybe somebody else—”

  “I know you’re not. That’s why I want it to be you.”

  She settled herself into the chair. “All right. Let’s start.” It sounded more resigned than she’d intended.

  “Lights off,” Drew said. The room in the New Mexico compound, fitted over the past seven months with a half-million dollars of theatrical equipment, darkened. Leisha heard Drew’s chair move across the floor. When the holograph projector on the ceiling came on, he was seated directly beneath it, the console on his lap. Around him was nothing: not floor or walls or ceiling, just Drew suspended in the velvety blackness of a fairly standard null-projection.

  He started to talk in a low voice. For a moment, all Leisha heard was the voice itself, calm and musical: She had never realized that Drew had such a beautiful voice. In normal surroundings, you didn’t notice it. Then the words penetrated. Poetry. Drew—Drew—was reciting an old poem, something about golden groves unleaving…Leisha knew she had heard it before but couldn’t think of the author. She was a little embarrassed for Drew. His voice was beautiful and soothing, but reciting poetry to holographic illustrations was about as juvenile artsy as you could get. Her heart tightened. Another false step, another failure…

  Shapes swam toward her out of the darkness.

  They weren’t quite identifiable, and yet she recognized them. They passed above Drew, behind him, in front of him, even through him, while he finished the poem and started it again. The same poem. At least she thought it was the same poem. Leisha wasn’t sure because it was hard to concentrate on the words; she had never much liked poetry anyway but even if she had it would be hard to concentrate. She couldn’t take her eyes off the shapes. They slipped behind Drew and she tried to follow them with her eyes, see through him to see them, but she couldn’t. The effort was tiring. When the wavering shapes emerged again from behind Drew, they were different. She strained forward to make out exactly what they were…she recognized them…

  Drew started the poem a third time. “‘What, Margaret, are you grieving over golden groves unleaving…’”

  She was grieving, but not over leaves. The shapes slid in and out of her mind and suddenly Drew had vanished…He must be good to have programmed that…and the grief welled and filled her. She recognized a shape, finally: It was her father. Roger. He stood in the old conservatory in the house on Lake Michigan, the house that had been torn down twenty-six years ago. He was holding an exotic in his hands, thick-petaled and creamy white, with a flushed pink center. She cried out and he said clearly, “You haven’t failed, Leisha. Not with Sanctuary, not with trying to make Alice special too, not with Richard, not with the law. The only failure is to not use your individual capacities, and you have done that. All your life. You tried.”

  Leisha gave a little scream and rose from her chair. She walked toward her father and he didn’t vanish, not even when she stood with him directly under the holographic projection equipment. But the flower in his arms vanished and he took both her hands, saying gently, “You were the whole point of my individual striving,” and Leisha shook her head violently. There was a blue ribbon on her head: She was a child again. Mamselle came in with Alice, and Alice said, “You never wronged me, Leisha. Never. There’s nothing to forgive.” Then Alice and Roger both vanished and Leisha was running through a forest filled with sunshine, green and golden slanting bars of light pouring through the trees. She was laughing, and in the light was the warmth of living plants and the scent of spring and the taste of forgiveness. Never had Leisha felt so free and joyous, as if she were doing exactly what she had always been meant to do. She laughed again and ran harder, because at the end of the sunlit, flowered path was her mother, holding out her arms and laughing too, her face alight with love.

  There were tears on her cheeks. She sat in her chair in the adobe room. The lights were on. Immediately nausea hit her.

  Drew said eagerly, “What did you see?”

  Leisha doubled over, fighting her stomach. Finally she gasped, “What…did you do?”

  “Tell me what you saw.” He was inexorable: the young artist.

  “No!”

  “It was powerful, then.” He leaned back in his wheelchair, smiling.

  Leisha straightened slowly, hanging onto the back of her chair. Drew’s face was triumphant. She said, more calmly now, “What did you do?”

  He said, “I made you dream.”

  Dream. Sleep. Six teenagers in the woods, and a vial of interleukin-1…but this had been nothing like that. Nothing.

  What this had been like was the night Alice had come to her in the Conewango hotel room, during Jennifer Sharifi’s trial. The night Leisha had lost her belief in the power of the law to create a common
community, and had stood trembling at the edge—

  Darkness—

  The void—

  But this dream of Drew’s had been light, not darkness. Yet it was the same. Leisha was sure of it. The edge of something vast and lawless, something that could swallow the tiny careful light of her reason…And then Alice had come. Across that vast unknown, Alice had somehow heard Leisha, in some way that had nothing to do with the careful light. I knew, Alice had whispered. And she had gone straight to Leisha, against all reason.

  And now Drew, against all reason, had somehow manipulated an unknown part of her mind…

  Drew said eagerly, “It starts with a kind of hypnosis, but one that reaches around the cortex to call on universal…shapes I call them. They’re more than that. But I don’t have the words, Leisha, you know I never did. I just know they’re in me and everybody else. I bring them out, call them out, so that they can take their own shapes in the person’s dream. It’s a kind of lucid dreaming, semidirected, but more than that. It’s new.” He sucked in a deep breath. “It’s mine.”

  Logical questions calmed her. “Semidirected? You mean you determined what I would…dream?” But she couldn’t maintain the detached tone. She was feeling too many things, not all of them good. “Drew—that’s what dreaming is like? That’s what Sleepers do?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not often. I guess—I don’t really know yet what happened. You’re the first, Leisha!”

  “I…dreamed about my father. And my mother.”

  His eyes gleamed. “Good, good. I was working with shapes from my parents.” His young face suddenly darkened, lost in some private memory Leisha suddenly didn’t want to share. Dreaming…this was too public. Too irrational. Too much a letting go, a surrender. But if it were a surrender to sunlight, to sweetness…No. It wasn’t reality. Dreams were escape, she had always known that, she who had never dreamed. Dreams were as much an evasion of the real world as Alice’s Twin Group pseudoscience. But what she’d just experienced from Drew…