Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  At the end of the sixth day, Congress passed a major tax package. Corporate taxes were recalibrated to the steepest sliding scale the world had ever seen. At the top of the scale, corporate entities that qualified were taxed at ninety-two percent of gross profit, with strict limitations on expense claims, as their share of governing America. At the next bracket, corporations were taxed at seventy-eight percent. After that, the brackets descended rapidly.

  Of corporations taxed at seventy-eight percent, fifty-four percent were based on Sanctuary Orbital. Only one corporation met the ninety-two percent tax criteria: Sanctuary itself.

  Congress passed the tax package in October. Leisha, watching a newsgrid in New Mexico, glanced involuntarily out the window, at the sky. It was blue and empty, without a single cloud.

  Will Sandaleros made a full report to Jennifer Sharifi, who had been away from Sanctuary on Kagura Orbital, concluding a vital arrangement there. Jennifer listened calmly, the folds of her white abbaya falling gracefully around her feet. Her dark eyes glistened.

  “Now, Jenny,” Will said. “Starting January 1.”

  Jennifer nodded. Her eyes went to the holoportrait of Tony Indivino, hanging on the dome wall. After a moment they returned to Will, but he was bent over the hard-copy of projected Sanctuary tax figures, and had not noticed.

  MIRI COULDN’T GET TABITHA SELENSKI’S DEATH to move from the front of her mind. No matter what she was thinking about—her neurochemical research, joking with Tony, washing her hair, anything—Tabitha Selenski, whom Miri had never met, tangled, knotted, tied herself into Miri’s strings and choked there.

  Choked. She had researched the injection from which Tabitha had died; it would have stopped the heart instantly. Without the heart to pump, the lungs could not draw in air. Tabitha would have choked on her own already-breathed air, except of course she wouldn’t have known it because the injection had also immediately paralyzed what was left of her brain.

  Miri sat alone in the suspended bubble playground at Sanctuary’s core and thought about Tabitha Selenski. Miri was too old for the playground. Still, she liked to go there when it was empty, sailing slowly from one handhold to another, her clumsiness canceled by the absence of both gravity and observers. Today her thought strings seemed as solitary as the playground.

  No, not solitary—five other people, including her father, had voted with her to let Tabitha live in Sanctuary even as a beggar. But there was a difference in their votes, their reasons, their arguments for compassion. Miri felt the difference but she couldn’t name it, neither in words nor strings, and that was intensely frustrating. It was the old problem; something was missing from her thoughts, some unknown kind of association or connection. Why couldn’t she spin out an exploratory string about the difference between her vote and the others’, and so learn what that difference was? Explain it, examine it, integrate it into the ethical system that Tabitha Selenski’s accident had charred just as surely as it had charred her mind. There was something missing here, something important to Miri. A hole where an explanation should be.

  She looked at the fields and domes and pathways below. Sanctuary was beautiful in the soft, UV-filtered sunlight. Clouds drifted at the far end; the maintenance team must be planning rain. She would have to check the weather calendar.

  Sanctuary. (Refuge> churches> law> the protection of person and property> the balance of the rights of the individual with those of society> Locke> Paine> rebellion> Gandhi> the lone crusader on a higher moral plain…) Sanctuary was all of that for the Sleepless. Her community. Why, then, did she feel as if Tabitha’s death had pushed her to a place where the refuge was violated (Becket in the cathedral, blood on the stone floor…)? To a place where nothing was safe after all?

  Slowly Miri climbed down from the playground bubble to look for Tony, who would not have the answers either but would understand the questions. He would understand as far as she did herself, anyway, which suddenly didn’t seem very far. Something vital was missing.

  What?

  IN LATE OCTOBER ALICE HAD A HEART ATTACK. She was eighty-three years old. Afterward she lay quietly in bed, pain masked by drugs. Leisha sat by her bedside night and day, knowing it couldn’t be long. Much of the time Alice slept. Awake, she drifted in drugged dreams, and often there was a small smile on her wizened face. Leisha, holding her hand, had no idea where her sister’s mind wandered until the night Alice’s eyes cleared and focused and she gave Leisha a smile of such warm sweetness that Leisha caught her breath and leaned forward. “Yes, Alice? Yes?”

  Alice whispered, “Daddy is w-watering the plants!”

  Leisha’s eyes prickled. “Yes, Alice. Yes, he is.”

  “He gave me one.”

  Leisha nodded. Alice relapsed into sleep, smiling, in that place where a small girl had her father’s love.

  She woke a second time a few hours later to clutch Leisha’s hand with unexpected strength. Her eyes were wild. She tried to sit up, gasping. “I made it! I made it, I’m still here, I didn’t die!” She fell back on the pillows.

  Jordan, standing by Leisha at his mother’s bedside, turned his face away.

  The last time Alice woke, she was lucid. She looked at Jordan with love, and Leisha saw that she would say nothing to him, because nothing was necessary. Alice had given her son everything she had, everything he needed, and he was safe. To Leisha she whispered, “Take…care of Drew.”

  Of Drew, not Jordan or Eric or the other grandchildren. Alice knew, somehow, where need was greatest. Hadn’t she always known?

  “Yes, I will. Alice—”

  But Alice had already closed her eyes, and the smile was back on lips that twitched in private dreams.

  Afterward, while Stella and her daughter pinned up the sparse gray hair and called the state government for the special permit for private burial, Leisha went to her own room. She took off all her clothes and stood in front of the mirror. Her skin was clear and rosy, her breasts sagged slightly from decades of gravity but were still full and smooth, the muscles in her long legs flexed when she pointed her toe. Her hair, still the bright blond Roger Camden had ordered, fell around her face in soft waves. She thought of seizing a scissors and hacking the hair into ragged chunks, but she felt too old, too tired, for theatrical gestures. Her twin sister was dead of old age. Asleep for good.

  Leisha pulled on her clothes, not looking again at the mirror, and went to help Stella and Alicia with Alice’s body.

  RICHARD AND ADA AND THEIR SON CAME to New Mexico for the funeral. Sean was nine now, an only child—was Richard afraid that a second baby might be Sleepless? Richard looked content, looked as settled as his and Ada’s wandering life could be, looked no older. He was mapping ocean currents in a highly-farmed section of the Indian Ocean, just off the continental shelf. The work was going well. He put his arms around Leisha and said how sorry he was about Alice. Leisha knew that Richard meant it, and through her grief a part of her mind reflected that this had been the most important man in her adult life and that as he held her she felt nothing. He was a stranger, linked to her only by the biology of parental choice and the past of finite dreams.

  Drew, too, came home for the funeral.

  Leisha had not seen him in four years, although she had followed his spectacular career on the newsgrids. She met him in the stone-floored courtyard, bright with cactuses kept in forced bloom and exotics under humidified, transparent Y-bubbles. He drove his chair up to her without hesitation. “Hello, Leisha.”

  “Hello, Drew.” He still had the same intense green gaze, although in every other way he had changed yet again. Leisha thought of the dirty, skinny ten-year-old, the gawky teen trying hard to be a donkey in coat and tie and borrowed manners, the drama major with clipped hair and retro lace-cuffed clothing, the bearded drifter with sullen eyes and weak, dangerous resentments. Now Drew wore quiet, expensive clothes, except for a single, flashy, giveaway diamond arm cuff. His body had filled out, his face had matured. He was, Leisha saw without desire
, a handsome man. Whatever else he was he had learned to keep hidden.

  “I’m so sorry about Alice. She had the most generous soul I’ve ever known.”

  “You knew that about her? Yes, she did. And she created it for herself, with very little help from those who should have helped her.”

  He didn’t ask what she meant by that; words had never been Drew’s medium.

  He said, “I’ll miss her tremendously. I know I haven’t been here in years.” He spoke without a tremor of embarrassment. Drew had apparently made his peace with the final awkward scene between him and Leisha. But if so, why stay away for four years? Leisha had sent enough messages inviting him home. “But even though I wasn’t here, Alice and I talked on comlink every Sunday. Sometimes for hours.”

  Leisha hadn’t known that. She felt a flash of jealousy. But was she jealous of Drew, or of Alice?

  She said, “She loved you, Drew. You were important to her. And you’re in her will, but that can all wait until after the funeral.”

  “Yes,” Drew said, without apparent interest in his inheritance. Leisha warmed to that. The child Drew was still there, under the flashy arm cuff and the strange career neither of them mentioned. And yet she should mention it, shouldn’t she? This was Drew’s work, his achievement, his individual excellence.

  “I’ve followed your career on the grids. You’ve been very successful, and we’re proud of you.”

  A light kindled in his eyes. “You watched a grid performance?”

  “No, not a performance. Just the reviews, the praise…”

  The light went out. But his smile was still warm. “That’s all right, Leisha. I knew you couldn’t watch it.”

  “Wouldn’t,” she said, before she could stop herself.

  He smiled. “No—couldn’t. It’s all right. Even if you never let me put you into lucid dreaming again, you’re still the single most important influence on my work that I’ll ever have.”

  Leisha opened her mouth to reply to this—to the sentiment, to the sting below the sentiment, to the stubborn ambivalence below both—but before she could speak Drew added, “I’ve brought someone with me for Alice’s funeral.”

  “Who?”

  “Kevin Baker.”

  Leisha’s awkwardness vanished. Drew might confuse her still, this son she had not birthed who had become something she could neither envision nor understand, but Kevin was a known quantity. She had known him for sixty years—since before Drew’s father had been born.

  “Why is he here?”

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself,” Drew said shortly, and Leisha knew that Drew had learned, from Kevin or the datanets or somewhere, everything that had happened between her and Kevin. Sixty years’ worth of everything. Time just piled up, Leisha thought. Like dust.

  “Where is Kevin now?”

  “On the north patio.” Drew added to her back as she left the courtyard, “Leisha—one more thing. I haven’t changed. About what I want, I mean.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, although she did, and berated herself for petty cowardice.

  He made an impatient gesture—exactly how old was he now? Twenty-five. “I don’t believe you, Leisha. I want what I’ve always wanted. You and Sanctuary.”

  That did catch her by surprise—half of it, anyway. Sanctuary. It had been a decade since Drew had so much as mentioned it to her. Leisha thought the childish dream of revenge or justice or conquest, or whatever it was, had faded long ago. Drew sat in his chair, a powerfully-built man despite the crippled legs, and his eyes didn’t falter when they met hers. Sanctuary.

  He was a child still, in spite of everything.

  She went to the north patio. Kevin stood there alone, examining a stone shaped by desert wind into a long, tapered shape like a sandstone tear. At the sight of him Leisha realized that she felt no more than she had at the sight of Richard. Age had killed Alice’s body; it seemed to have worked instead on Leisha’s heart.

  “Hello, Kevin.”

  He turned quickly. “Leisha. Thank you for inviting me.”

  So Drew had lied to him. It didn’t seem to matter. “You’re welcome.”

  “I wanted to pay my last respects to Alice.” He stood awkwardly, and finally smiled ruefully. “Sleepless aren’t very good at this, are we? At death, I mean. We never think about it.”

  “I do,” Leisha said. “Would you like to see Alice now?”

  “Later. First there’s something I want to say to you, and I don’t know if I’ll get another chance. The funeral’s in an hour, isn’t it?”

  “Kevin—listen. I don’t want to listen to any apologies or explanations or reconstructions of events forty years old. Not now. I just don’t.”

  “I wasn’t going to apologize,” he said, a little stiffly, and Leisha suddenly remembered herself saying to Susan Melling, on the roof of this same house, Kevin doesn’t see there’s anything to forgive. “What I wanted to say to you was on a different topic altogether. I’m sorry to bring it up just before the funeral but as I said, there might not be another time. Has Drew told you what business I handle for him?”

  “I didn’t know you handled any business for him.”

  “Actually, I handle it all. Not his tour bookings—there’s an agency that does that—but his investments and security needs and so forth. He—”

  “I should think the amount Drew makes would be pretty small compared to your usual corporate clients.”

  “It is,” Kevin said, without self-consciousness, “but I do it for you. Indirectly. But what I wanted to say was that he insists I secure his investments exclusively in funds or speculations traded through Sanctuary.”

  “So?”

  “Most of my business is with Sanctuary anyway, but on their terms. Dealing Earth-side when they don’t want their own people to come down, and especially doing the security on their Earth-side transactions. There are still a lot of people out there who hate Sleepless, despite the benevolent social climate on the grids. You’d be surprised how many.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Leisha said. “What is it you want to tell me?”

  “This: There’s something starting to happen on Sanctuary. I don’t know what it is, but I’m in a unique position to see the outer fringes of their planning for whatever it is. Especially through Drew’s tiny investments because he wants them as close into the heart of Sanctuary dealings as they’ll permit. Which, incidentally, was never very close, and now it’s getting even more distant. They’re liquidating whenever they can, converting investments not to credit but to equipment and to tangibles like gold, software, even art. That’s what my watchdog program flagged in the first place: There’s never been a Sleepless who collected art seriously. We’re just not interested.”

  This was true. Leisha frowned.

  Kevin continued, “So I went on digging, even in areas I don’t handle. The security is harder to crack than it used to be; they must have some very good younger wizards up there, although there’s no formal record of it anywhere. Sanctuary’s spent the last year moving all investment it doesn’t liquidate into holdings outside the United States. Will Sandaleros bought a Japanese orbital, Kagura, a very old one with a lot of internal damage, used mostly for genetic breeding experiments on altered meat animals for the luxury orbital trade. Sandaleros bought it in the name of Sharifi Enterprises, not of Sanctuary. They’ve acted strange with it—they evicted all the tenants but there’s no record of moving out any of the livestock. Not so much as a single disease-resistant goatow. Presumably they brought their own people in to care for the animals, but I can’t crack any of those records. And now they’ve started to move all their people on Earth back up to Sanctuary. The kids at grad school, the doctors doing residencies, the business liaisons, even the occasional kook who’s down here slumming. They’re all going back to Sanctuary, by ones and twos, inconspicuously. But they’re all going back.”

  Leisha frowned. “What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know.�
�� Kevin put down the wind-sculpted stone. “I thought you might be able to guess. You knew Jennifer better than any of us left here.”

  “Kev, I don’t think I ever really knew anybody in my life.” It just slipped out; she hadn’t planned to say anything so personal. Kevin smiled thinly.

  Drew drove his chair onto the patio. His eyes were red. “Leisha, Stella wants you.”

  She went, her mind full of Sanctuary’s movements, of Alice’s death, of the exploitive congressional tax package, of Drew’s investing in Sanctuary, of Kevin’s concern, of her irrational fear of Drew’s art—it was irrational, she knew that. She didn’t seem to have the energy to stay rational that she’d had when she was younger. There was no way to think about so many things at once. They were too different. The human mind could not encompass them. A different way of thinking was needed. Daddy, you failed—you should have provided that in the genemod, too. A better way of integrating thought, not just better thoughts.

  Leisha smiled, without mirth. Poor Roger. Blamed for everything Alice wasn’t, everything Leisha was, everything Leisha wasn’t. It was funny, in a way. But only in the unhumorous way anything recent was funny. In another eighty years, maybe she would find it hilarious. All it took was enough time, piling up like dust.

  “ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST…”

  It was Jordan who had chosen the beautiful, painful, sentimental words, Drew knew. Drew had never heard the funeral service before and he wasn’t sure what all the archaic phrases meant, but looking at the faces gathered around Alice Camden Watrous’s grave, he was sure that Jordan had chosen the words, Leisha disliked them, and Stella was impatient with them. And Alice? She would have liked them, Drew knew, because her son had chosen them. That would be enough for Alice. And so for Drew, too.