Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  “I’m too old to have my world turned inside out like a sock!”

  Drew suddenly grinned, a smile of such pure triumph unmixed with frustration or arrogance that Leisha was dazzled. But she held onto her reason, hard. She said, “Drew, the other four patients who had the same operation as you in that Mexican clinic—they didn’t come out of it with anything like this, any sort of change, any…” She couldn’t find the word.

  “But they weren’t artists,” he said, with the absolute conviction of the reborn young. “I am.”

  “But—” Leisha began, and got no farther because Drew, still smiling—still triumphant—leaned far over from his chair and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  Leisha sat very still. She could feel her body respond, for the first time in…how long? Years. Her nipples hardened, her belly tightened…he smelled male, of male skin and hair. Her mouth opened of its own volition. Leisha drew sharply back.

  “No, Drew.”

  “Yes!”

  She hated to spoil his triumph, his terrifying achievement—she had been dreaming. But about this she was sure. “No.”

  “Why not?” He was pale now, but steady. His pupils were huge.

  “Because I’m seventy-eight years old and you’re twenty. I know it doesn’t look that way to you, but to my mind—my mind, Drew—you’re a child. And you always will be to me.”

  “Because I’m a Sleeper!”

  “No. Because I’ve lived fifty-eight years you haven’t.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Drew said fiercely.

  “No. I don’t. You have no idea what it means.” She covered his hand with her own. “I think of you as a son, Drew. A son. Not a lover.”

  He looked her straight in the eyes. “And what did your dream tell you about mothers and fathers and children that was so terrifying?”

  For a moment she felt the dream again, and she glimpsed something behind the dream, some obverse side of the sunlit path, the smiling Roger with his hands full of exotics, the loving Elizabeth as Elizabeth had never really been, not to her. Leisha couldn’t quite see that obverse side but it was there, deep in her mind, a way of ordering the world that had nothing to do with the law or economics or political integration or all the other things she had given her life to, not necessarily a worse way, or a better one, but different, alien…the glimpse slipped away.

  She said, with all the compassion she could, “I’m sorry, Drew.”

  As she left the room he said quietly after her, “I’ll get better at my art, Leisha. I’ll draw out more from your preconscious, I’ll show you things you never even…Leisha!”

  She couldn’t answer him. It would only make it worse. She went out and softly closed the door.

  By evening, when she had figured out how to discuss it with him, what to say to put the whole dizzying episode into rational perspective, Stella told her Drew had packed and was gone.

  MIRI TOOK HER SEAT IN THE COUNCIL DOME. It was a new seat, added to the room at her sixteenth birthday, the fifteenth chair bolted to the floor around the polished metal table. From now on, the 51 percent of Sanctuary stock owned by the Sharifi family would be voted in seven equal blocks. Next year, when Tony took his seat, there would be eight. The chair squeaked slightly as Miri sat in it.

  “The Sanctuary Council is proud to welcome Miranda Serena Sharifi as a voting member,” Jennifer said formally. The councilors applauded. Miri smiled. Her grandmother had for a moment eased the tension in the room, so thick its currents could have been graphed on a Heller matrix. Miri glanced around the table from under lowered eyes; she habitually ducked her head now, since in her mirror that seemed to minimize her twitching and jerking. Her mother applauded without looking directly at Miri. Her father smiled with that resigned melancholy that was always in his eyes now. Beautiful Aunt Najla, pregnant with another Super, stared at Miri with unblinking determination.

  The term councilors smiled, but she didn’t know them well enough to know what the smiles meant. She wondered if they were jealous of her sudden power. The Sanctuary charter, she knew from the library, was far more generous within the family than any family corporation on Earth would be. And on the newsgrid “dramas,” usual community procedure on Earth seemed to be for young males to kill the fathers who ran business empires or ranches or orbital corporations, in order to gain power. Then they apparently married their dead fathers’ young third wives. This was such a barbaric and appalling social system that Miri concluded it couldn’t be the way the beggars really ran things; they must like their “dramas” to explore situations that bore no relation to reality. This was such a silly idea that for the second time she had given up the dramas in disgust and returned to the sex channels.

  “We have a full agenda,” Jennifer said in her graceful voice. “Councilor Drexler, will you start with the treasurer’s report?”

  The treasurer’s report, routine and positive, did nothing to reduce the tension. Miri, unobserved now, studied one face after another from under her lowered brow. Something was very wrong. What?

  The agricultural, legal, judicial, and medical committee heads made their reports. Hermione twisted a strand of her honey-colored hair (when was the last time Miri had touched her mother’s hair? Years) around one finger, transferred the curl to a second finger, around and around. Twist, twist. Najla rubbed her swollen belly. Councilor Devore, a thin young man with large soft eyes, looked as if he were sitting on hot coals.

  Finally Jennifer said, “One more addendum to the medical report, which I asked Councilor Devore to leave to general discussion. As most of you know, we have had an accident.” Abruptly Jennifer lowered her head, and Miri saw with astonishment that Jennifer needed a moment before she could go on. Miri was used to thinking of her grandmother as invulnerable.

  “Tabitha Selenski, of Kenyon International, was repairing a power-conversion input in Business Building Three and received a power charge that…Her gross tissues are regenerating, very slowly. But parts of her nervous system are so destroyed there’s nothing to regenerate. She won’t ever be fully conscious again, although there’s partial consciousness, at about the level an animal might have…She will need constant care, including such basic tasks as diaper changes, feeding, restraint. Moreover, she will never again be a productive member of the community.”

  Jennifer looked at each Council member in turn. Miri’s strings knotted themselves into horrible nets. To be helpless, dependent on others for everything, a drain on someone else’s time and resources without giving anything back…

  A beggar.

  She saw what the issue was, and her stomach lurched.

  “I once knew a woman on Earth,” Jennifer said, “when I was a child. A friend’s mother. After my friend, the woman had another child, one with a profound neural disorder. As part of its so-called treatment, the mother was required to move its arms and legs in the rhythmic patterns of crawling, trying to impress those patterns on the brain and so stimulate brain development. She had to do this for an hour, six times every day. Between sessions, she fed the child, washed it, suctioned wastes from its colon, played prescribed tapes to stimulate its senses, bathed it, and talked to it nonstop for three half-hour sessions equally spaced around the clock. This woman had once played the piano professionally, but now she never touched it. When the child was four, its doctors added more to the treatments. Four times a day the mother was required to wheel the child around the yard for exactly fifteen minutes, encountering the same objects in the same order but under different weather conditions, again to build certain response patterns into the brain. My friend helped with all this, but after years of it, she hated to even go home. So did the woman’s husband, who eventually didn’t go home at all. Neither of them was there the day the mother shot both herself and her child.”

  Jennifer paused. She picked up a paper. “The Council has a petition from Tabitha Selenski’s husband, to end her suffering. We must decide now.”

  Councilor Letty Rubin, a young woman
with angular features that could have been turned on a lathe, said passionately, “Tabitha can still smile, still respond a little. I visited her and she tried to smile at the sound of my voice! She has a right to her life, whatever it is now!”

  Jennifer said, “My friend’s mother’s child could smile, too. The real question is, do we have the right to sacrifice someone else’s life to the care of hers?”

  “It wouldn’t have to be a sacrifice of one life! If we divide up the caretaking, in for instance two-hour shifts, the burden would be spread among so many that nobody would really be sacrificed.”

  Will Sandaleros said, “The principle would still be there. A claim on the strong by the weak because of weakness. A beggar’s claim, that says the fruits of a person’s labor belong to whoever can’t labor for himself. Or won’t. We don’t recognize that weakness has a moral claim on competency.”

  Councilor Jamison, an engineer nearly as old as her grandmother whose only genemod was Sleeplessness, shook his head. He had a long, plain face with a sharp knobby chin. “This is a human life, Councilor Sandaleros. A member of our community. Doesn’t the community owe its members full support?”

  Will said, “But what constitutes a member of a community? Is it automatic—once you have joined, you are included for good? That leads to institutional morbidity. Or does being a member of a community mean that you continue to actively support the community, and actively contribute to it? Would, for instance, your insurance company, Councilor Jamison, continue to include a subscriber in the client list if he stopped paying his premiums?”

  Jamison was silent.

  Letty Rubin cried, “But a community is not congruent with a business arrangement! It must mean more!”

  Jennifer’s voice cut sharply across her last words. “What it should mean is that Tabitha Selenski shouldn’t want to be a burden on her community. She should have the principles and dignity to not want to continue so-called life as a beggar, which means she should have included the standard life-termination clause in her will. I have, Will has, you have, Letty. Since Tabitha didn’t, she’s abandoned the principles of this community and declared herself no longer a member.”

  Ricky Sharifi said, “Self-preservation is an innate drive, Mother.”

  Jennifer said, “Innate drives can be modified for the good of civilization. This happens all the time. Sexual fidelity, formal laws to settle disputes, incest taboos—what are they but modifications imposed by will for the good of all? The innate drives would be to kill for revenge or to fuck our brains out whenever the urge struck.”

  Miri stared at her grandmother—never, never had she heard Jennifer use language like that. Her grandmother’s speech was always formal, almost pedantic. The next moment she saw that it had been deliberate, theatrical, and she felt a slight distaste, followed by renewed stomach churning. Her grandmother did not trust her arguments alone to convince the Council to kill Tabitha Selenski.

  To kill.

  Strings whirled in her head.

  Jean-Michel Devore said nervously, “What are the Sleepless except modifications of innate drives?”

  Jennifer smiled at him.

  Najla Sharifi said, “The definition of a community is key here. I think we all agree on that. Our definition seems to involve certain traits—like Sleeplessness—certain abilities, and certain principles. Which of these are crucial? Which are optional?”

  “A good place to start,” Will Sandaleros approved.

  Jennifer said, “A member of the community must possess all three. The trait of Sleeplessness, the ability to contribute to the community rather than drain it, the principles to value the community’s profound good above his own immediate preferences. Anyone who does not possess these things is not only too different from us but an active danger.” She leaned forward, palms flat on the table. “Believe me, I know.”

  There was a little silence.

  Into the silence Hermione said quietly, “Anyone who thinks too differently from us is not really a member of our community.”

  Miri’s head jerked up. She stared at her mother, who didn’t look back. All the strings in Miri’s head turned over once, slowly, inside out. For a moment she couldn’t breathe.

  But her mother had meant anyone who thought differently about principles…

  Words from two dozen languages weaved themselves into her strings: Harijan. Proscrit. Bui doi. Inquisición. Kristalnacht. Gulag.

  “Ac-c-c-community d-d-d-d-” she couldn’t, in her emotion, get the damn words out, “d-divided on f-f-f-fundamentals w-w-will d-destroy itself.”

  “Which is why we must not divide into the able and the parasitic,” Jennifer said swiftly.

  “Th-th-that’s not whh-wh-wh-what I m-m-meant!”

  They argued for five hours. Only Najla, her back aching from pregnancy, left, making over her proxy to her husband. In the end, the vote was nine to six: Tabitha Selenski must leave the community. She could, if her husband wished, be sent to Earth, among the beggars.

  Miri had voted with the minority. So, to her surprise, had her father. The majority decision upset her, although of course she would abide by it. Sanctuary was owed her allegiance. But she felt confused and she wanted to discuss it all with Tony, as only they could, in the full depth and breadth of all the cross-references, tertiary associations, strings of meaning. Tony’s computer program was a success. The Supers now used it routinely for communication among themselves, exchanging massive programmed edifices of meaning without the everlasting barricades of speech. She hurried to Tony.

  Outside the Council dome, her father stopped her. Ricky Keller had hollows under his eyes. It occurred to Miri that seeing him sit in Council beside his mother, most people would conclude that Jennifer was the younger. Each year Ricky’s manner became gentler. He said now, one hand on Miri’s shoulder, “I wish you had met my father, Miri.”

  “Y-y-y-your f-father?” No one ever spoke of Richard Keller. Miri had been told about the trial; what he had done to Jennifer, his wife, was monstrous.

  “I think in many ways you’re like him, despite being a Super. Genetic inheritance is trickier than we know, despite our smugness. It’s not all in quantifiable chromosomes.”

  He walked away. Miri didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted. Richard Keller, the traitor to Sanctuary. People usually said she was like her grandmother, “a strong-minded woman.” But her father’s eyes had been soft under their melancholy. Miri stared after his retreating, stooped figure.

  The next day, Tabitha Selenski died by fatal injection. A persistent rumor circulated that Tabitha had injected the dose herself, but Miri didn’t believe that. If Tabitha had been capable of doing that, the Council wouldn’t have voted as it did. Tabitha had been nearly a vegetable. That was the truth. Miri’s grandmother had said so.

  BOOK IV: BEGGARS

  2091

  “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Peoria, October 16, 1854

  22

  THE 152ND CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES faced an annual trade deficit that over the past ten years had increased six-hundred percent, a federal debt that had more than tripled, and a fiscal debt of twenty-six percent. For nearly a century, Y-energy patents had been licensed by Kenzo Yagai’s heirs exclusively to American firms, as specified in Yagai’s eccentric will. This had fueled the longest economic climb in history. Through Y-technology, the United States had pulled out of a dangerous turn-of-the-century international slump and an even more dangerous internal depression. Americans invented and built every known application of Y-energy, and everyone wanted Y-energy. American-designed and fueled orbitals circled the Earth; American-built aircraft spanned the skies; American-built weapons traded on the illegal arms market of every major nation in the world. The colonies on Mars and Luna survived on Y-generators. On Earth, a thousand engineering applications cleaned the air, recycled the wastes, warmed the cities, fueled the automated factories, grew
the genetically-efficient food, powered the institutionalized Dole, and kept the expensive information flowing to the corporations that each year became richer, more shortsighted, and more driven, like an earlier age’s bloated aristocrats popping buttons off their waistcoats as they wagered fortunes at faro or E.O.

  In 2080, the patents ran out.

  The International Trade Commission opened international access to Y-energy patents. The nations that had nibbled at the crumbs of American prosperity—building the machine housings, sublicensing the less profitable franchises, surviving as middlemen and brokers—were ready. They had been ready for years, the factories in place, the engineers trained at the great American donkey universities, the designs prepared. Ten years later the United States had lost sixty percent of the global Y-energy market. The deficit climbed like a Sherpa.

  Livers didn’t worry. That was what they elected their congressmen and women to do: to worry. To scramble in their donkey working fashion and find solutions, to take care of the problem, if there was a problem. The citizenry, those that were listening at all, didn’t see any problem. The public scooter races and Dole allotments and newsgrid entertainment and politically-funded mass rallies, with plenty of food and beer, and district building and energy grants continued to grow. And in districts where they didn’t grow, of course, the politicians just didn’t get returned. Votes, after all, had to be earned. Americans had always believed that.

  The domestic deficit became critical.

  Congress raised corporate taxes. Again in 2087, and then again in 2090. The donkey firms that sent daughters and fathers and cousins to Congress protested. By 2091 the issue could no longer be ignored. The House debate, which lasted six days and nights and revived the art of filibuster, was carried on the newsgrids. Hardly anyone outside of donkeys watched it. One of the few who did was Leisha Camden. Another was Will Sandaleros.