Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  Shapes slid quietly in and out of his conscious mind.

  For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

  It was Eric who read the words—Alice’s grandson, Drew’s old enemy. Drew looked at the handsome, solemn man Eric had become, and the shapes in his mind deepened, slithered faster. No, not shapes, this time he wanted the word. He was determined to find the word for Eric, who might be dust but if so only a high-quality real-leather solid-platinum dust that would never be passed over and known no more because Eric was a Sleepless, born to ability and power, no matter how much youthful rebellion he had acted out once. Drew wanted the word for Richard, eyes downcast beside his Sleeper wife and little boy, pretending he was like them. The word for Jordan, Alice’s son, torn in two all his life between his Sleeper mother and brilliant Sleepless aunt, defended only by his own decency. The word for Leisha, who had loved—if what Kevin Baker had told Drew was true—Sleepers far more than she had ever loved any of her own kind. Her father. Alice. Drew himself.

  He couldn’t find the right word.

  Jordan was reading now, from some different old book, they all knew so many old books: “Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war, death after life…”

  Leisha looked up from the coffin. Her face was set, unyielding. Light from the desert sky washed over the planes of her cheeks, the pale firm lips. She didn’t look at Drew. She glanced at the wind-smoothed stones on either side of Alice’s in the little plot, BECKER EDWARD WATROUS and SUSAN CATHERINE MELLING, and then straight forward, at nothing. At air. But even though no glance passed between them, Drew suddenly knew, from the fluid shapes inside his mind and the rigid shape of Leisha outside it, that he would never bed her. She would never love him as anything but a son, because a son was how she had seen him first, and she didn’t change her major shapes. She couldn’t. She was what she was. So were most people, but for Leisha it was even more true. She didn’t bend, didn’t flex. It was something in her, something from the sleeplessness—no, it was something not in her. Something the very fact of sleeplessness left out. Drew couldn’t define what. But the Sleepless all had it, this inflexibility, this inability to change categories, and because of it Leisha would never love him the way he loved her. Never.

  Pain clutched him, so strong that for a moment he couldn’t see Alice’s coffin below him on the ground. Alice, whose love had let Drew grow up in a way Leisha’s never could. His vision cleared and he let the pain flow freely, until it became another shape in his mind, jagged with lacerations but more than itself, more than himself. And so, bearable.

  He could never have Leisha.

  Then all that was left was Sanctuary.

  Drew looked again around the circle. Stella had her face hidden against her husband’s shoulder. Their daughter Alicia rested both hands on the shoulders of her small daughters. Richard had not raised his head; Drew couldn’t see his eyes. Leisha stood alone, the clear desert light revealing her young skin, unlined eyes, rigidly compressed lips.

  The word came to Drew, the word he had been hunting for, the word that fit them all, Sleepless mourning their best beloved who had not been one of them and for that very reason was their best beloved:

  The word was “pity.”

  MIRI BENT FURIOUSLY OVER HER TERMINAL. Both the display and the readout said the same thing: This synthetic neurochemical model performed worse than the last one. Or the last two. Or the last ten. Her lab rats, their brains confused by what was supposed to be the answer to Miri’s experiment, stood irresolutely in their brain-scan stalls. The smallest of the three gave up: He lay down and went to sleep.

  “T-t-t-terrific,” Miri muttered. What ever made her think she was a biochemical researcher? “Super”—yeah. Sure. Super-incompetent.

  Strings of genetic code, phenotypes, enzymes, receptor sites formed and reformed in her head. None of it was any good. Waste, waste. She threw a calibration instrument clear across the lab, guaranteeing it would have to be recalibrated.

  “Miri!”

  Joan Lucas stood in the doorway, her pretty face twisted as rope. She and Miri had not talked in years. “Miri…”

  “Wh-wh-what is it? J-J-J-Joan?”

  “It’s Tony. Come right now. He…” Her face twisted even more. Miri felt the blood leave her heart.

  “Wh-wh-what?”

  “He fell. From the playground. Oh, Miri, come—”

  From the playground. From the axis of the orbital…no, that wasn’t possible, the playground was sealed, and after a fall from that height there would be nothing left—

  “From the elevator, I mean. The outside. You know how the boys dare each other to ride the outside of the elevator, on the construction ribs, and then duck in the repair hatch—”

  Miri hadn’t known. Tony hadn’t told her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. She could only stare at Joan, who was crying. Behind Miri, one of the genemod rats gave a soft squeak.

  “Come on!” Joan cried. “He’s still alive!”

  Barely. The medical team had already reached him. They worked grimly on the smashed legs and broken shoulder before they moved him to the hospital. Tony’s eyes were closed; one side of his skull was covered with blood.

  Miri rode in the emergency skimmer the short distance to the hospital. Doctors whisked Tony away. Miri sat unmoving, unseeing, looking up only when her mother arrived.

  “Where is he!” Hermione cried, and a small, cruel part of Miri’s mind wondered if Hermione would finally look directly at her oldest son, now when everything that made looking worthwhile was gone. Tony’s smile. The expression in his eyes. His voice, stammering out his words. Tony’s words.

  The brain scan showed massive damage. But, miraculously, consciousness survived. The drugs that dulled his pain also dulled what made him Tony, but Miri knew he was still there, somewhere. She sat by his side, holding his limp hand, hour after hour. People came and went around her but she spoke to none of them, looked at none of them.

  Finally the doctor pulled a chair close to hers and put a hand on her shoulder. “Miranda.”

  Tony’s eyelids fluttered more that time; she watched carefully—

  “Miranda. Listen to me.” He took her chin gently in his hand and pulled her face toward his. “There’s nervous system damage beyond what can regenerate. There might be—we can’t be sure what we’re looking at. We’ve never seen this pattern of damage.”

  “N-n-not even on T-T-T-Tabitha S-Selenski?” she said bitterly.

  “No. That was different. Tony’s Mallory scans are showing highly aberrant brain activity. Your brother is alive, but he’s suffered major, nonreparable damage to the brain stem, including the raphe nuclei and related structures. Miranda, you know what that means, you research in this area, I have the readouts here for you—”

  “I d-d-d-don’t w-w-want to s-s-s-see th-them!”

  “Yes,” the doctor said, “You do. Sharifi, talk to her.”

  Miri’s father bent over her. She hadn’t realized he was there. “Miri—”

  “D-d-d-don’t d-d-do it! N-n-no, D-D-Daddy! N-not to T-T-T-Tony!”

  Ricky Keller didn’t pretend to not understand her. Nor did he pretend to a strength Miri knew, under the chaotic horrible strings in her mind, he didn’t possess. Ricky looked at his broken son, then at Miri, and slowly, shoulders stooped, he left the room.

  “G-g-get out!” Miri screamed at the doctor, at the nurses, at her mother, who stood closest to the door. Hermione made a small gesture with her hand and they all left her. With Tony.

  “N-n-n-no,” she whispered to Tony. Her hand tightened convulsively in his. “I w-w-w-won’t—” The words would not come. Only thoughts, and not in complex strings: in the straight linear narrowness of fear.

  I won’t let them. I’ll fight them every way I can. I’m as strong as they are,
smarter, we’re Supers, for you I’ll fight; I won’t let them; they can’t stop me from protecting you; no one can stop me—

  Jennifer Sharifi stood in the doorway.

  “Miranda.”

  Miri moved around the foot of the bed, between her grandmother and Tony. She moved slowly, deliberately, never taking her eyes off Jennifer.

  “Miranda. He’s in pain.”

  “L-l-l-life is p-p-pain,” Miri said, and didn’t recognize her own voice. “H-h-hard n-n-n-n-necessity. Y-y-you t-t-t-t-t-taught mme that.”

  “He won’t recover.”

  “Y-y-you d-d-don’t kn-know that! N-n-not y-y-y-yet!”

  “We can be sure enough.” Jennifer moved swiftly forward. Miri had never seen her grandmother move so fast. “Don’t you think I feel it as passionately as you do? He’s my grandson! And a Super, one of the precious few we have, who in a few decades are going to make all the difference to us, when we need it most, when we have fewer and fewer resources from Earth to draw on and will have to invent our own from sources not even dreamed of yet. Our resources and genemod adaptions and technology to leave this solar system and colonize somewhere finally safe for us. We needed Tony for that, for the stars—we need every one of you! Don’t you think I feel his loss as passionately as you do?”

  “If y-y-y-you k-k-k-k-kill T-T-T-T-T-” she couldn’t get the words out. The most important words she had ever said, and she couldn’t get them out—

  Jennifer said, with pain, “No one has a right to make claims on the strong and productive because he is weak and useless. To set a higher value on weakness than on ability is morally obscene.”

  Miri flew at her grandmother. She aimed for the eyes, curving her nails like claws, bringing up her knee to drive as hard as she could into Jennifer’s body. Jennifer cried out and went down. Miri dropped on top of her and tried to get her trembling, jerking hands around Jennifer’s throat. Other hands grabbed her, pulled her off her grandmother, tried to pin Miri’s arms to her sides. Miri fought, screaming—she had to scream loud enough for Tony to hear, to know what was happening, to make Tony wake up—

  Everything went black.

  MIRI WAS DRUGGED FOR THREE DAYS. When she finally awoke, her father sat beside her pallet, his shoulders hunched forward and his hands dangling between his knees. He told her Tony had died of his injuries. Miri stared at him, saying nothing, then turned her face away to the wall. The foamstone wall was old, speckled with motes of black that might have been dirt, or mold, or the negatives of tiny stars in a galaxy flat and two-dimensional and dead.

  MIRI WOULD NOT LEAVE HER LAB, not even to eat. She locked herself in and for two days ate nothing. The adults couldn’t override the locking security, which Tony had designed, but neither did they try. At least Miri didn’t think they tried; she didn’t really care.

  Her mother initiated contact once over the comlink. Miri blanked the screen, and her mother didn’t try again. Her father tried several times. Miri listened, stone, to what he had to say, in one-way mode so he could neither see nor hear her. There was nothing to hear anyway. She didn’t answer. Her grandmother did not try to call Miri.

  She sat in a corner of the lab, on the floor, her knees drawn up to her chest and her thin, twitching arms clasped around her knees. Anger raged through her, storms of anger that periodically swept away all strings, all thought, swept away everything ordered and complex in torrents of primitive rage that did not frighten her. There was no room for being frightened. The anger left no room for anything else except a single thought, at the edge of what had been her previous self: The hypermods apply to emotions as much as to cortical processes. The thought didn’t seem interesting. Nothing seemed interesting except her fury at Tony’s death.

  Tony’s murder.

  On the third day an emergency override brought every screen in her lab alive, even those that couldn’t receive local transmissions. Miri looked up and clenched her fists. The adults were better than she had thought if they could get the computer system to do that, if they could override Tony’s programming…But they couldn’t, nobody had been as good with systems as Tony, nobody…Tony…

  “M-M-M-Miri,” said Christina Demetrios’s face, “l-l-l-let us in. P-p-p-please.” And when Miri didn’t answer, “I l-l-l-l-l-l-loved h-him t-t-too!”

  Miri crawled to the door, where Tony had installed a complex lock combining manual and Y-fields. Crawling nearly made her faint; she hadn’t realized her body was quite so weak. A hyped metabolism ordinarily consumed huge amounts of food.

  She opened the door. Christina came in, carrying a large bowl of soypease. Behind her were Nikos Demetrios and Allen Sheffield, Sara Cerelli and Jonathan Markowitz, Mark Meyer and Diane Clarke, and twenty more. Every Super over the age of ten in Sanctuary. They crowded the lab, jerking and twitching, the broad faces on their large, slightly misshapen heads streaked with tears, or set with fury, or blinking frantically with hyped thought.

  Nikos said, “Th-they d-d-d-d-did it b-b-b-b-because he w-ww-was one of us.”

  Miri turned her head slowly to look at him.

  “T-T-T-T-T-Tony w-w-w-w-w-w-” The word wouldn’t come. Nikos jerked over to Miri’s terminal and called up the program Tony had designed to construct strings according to Nikos’s thought patterns, and the conversion program to Miri’s patterns. He typed in the key words, studied the result, altered key points, studied and altered again. Christy wordlessly held out a bowl of soypease to Miri. Miri pushed it away, looked at Christy’s face, and ate a spoonful. Nikos pressed the key to convert his string edifice to Miri’s. She studied it.

  It was all there: The Supers’ documented conviction that Tony’s death had been different from Tabitha Selenski’s. The medical differences were there: Tabitha had been proven cortically destroyed, but Tony’s brain scans and autopsy records showed only an uncertain degree of disablement, the readouts inconclusive about the amount of personality left. They were completely clear, however, about the destruction of certain brain-stem structures which regulated the production of genemod enzymes. Tony might or might not have still been Tony; he might or might not have still had his mental abilities intact; there had not been enough time allowed to find out. But either way he would, without doubt, have spent some unknown part of each day asleep.

  The medical evidence, obtained from the Sanctuary hospital records without even a trace that they had been entered, didn’t stand alone on Miri’s hologrid. It was knotted into strings and cross-strings of concepts about community, about the social dynamics of prolonged organizational isolation, of xenophobia, of incidents that Miri recognized between the Supers and the Norms in school, in the labs, in the playground. Mathematical equations on social dynamics and on psychological defenses against feelings of inferiority were tied to Earthside historical patterns: Assimilation. Religious zeal against heretics. Class warfare. Serfdom and slavery. Karl Marx, John Knox, Lord Acton.

  It was the most complex string Miri had ever seen. She knew without being told that it had taken Nikos the entire day since Tony’s autopsy to think through, that it represented the thoughts and contributions of the other Supers, and that it was the most important string she had ever studied—thought or felt—in her life.

  And that something—still, always—was missing from it.

  Nikos said, “T-T-T-Tony t-t-t-t-t-t-taught m-m-m-m-me h-h-h-how.” Miri didn’t answer. She saw that Nikos said that sentence, which was already self-evident, to keep from saying the other one that every element in the complex molecule of his string implied: The Norms think we Supers are so different from them that we are a separate community, created by them to serve the needs of their own. They don’t know they think this way, they would deny it—but they do it nonetheless.

  She looked around at the faces of the other children. They all understood. They were not children, not even the eleven-year-olds, not even in the sense Miri had been a child at eleven. Each new genemod had opened the potential to more pathways in the brain. Each new genetic mod
ification had expanded use of those cortical structures once only available in times of intense stress or intense insight. Each new modification had created more differences from the adult Norms who fashioned them. These Supers—especially the youngest—were children of the Normals only in the grossest biological sense.

  And she, Miri herself, how much was she the child of Hermione Wells Keller, who could not bear to even look at her? The daughter of Richard Anthony Keller, whose intelligence was in defeated thrall to his mother? The granddaughter of Jennifer Fatima Sharifi, who had killed Tony for a community that was defined only as she chose to define it?

  Christina said softly, “M-M-M-M-Miri, eat.”

  Nikos said, “W-w-w-w-we m-m-m-m-m-m-must n-not l-l-llet them d-d-d-d-do it ag-g-gain.”

  Allen said, “W-we c-c-c-c-c-c-” He jerked his shoulders in frustration. Speech had always been harder for Allen than even for the rest of them; sometimes he didn’t talk for days. He pushed Miri from the console, called up his own string program, keyed rapidly, and converted the result to Miri’s program. When he was done she saw, in beautifully ordered and composed strings, that if the Supers made blanket assumptions about Norms, they would be as ethically wrong as the Sanctuary Council. That each person, Super and Normal, would have to be judged as an individual, and that this might have to be carefully balanced with the need for security. They could already ensure complete, covert control of the Sanctuary systems, if necessary for their own defense, but they could not ensure complete control of the Norms they included in their defenses against never letting another Super be killed by the Council. It was a risk, to be balanced by the moral dilemma of becoming that which they were condemning in the Council. The moral factors glinted and dragged throughout Allen’s strings; they were unquestioned assumptions in Nikos’s.

  Miri studied the projection, the strings in her own mind knotting and forming faster than they had ever done in her life. She didn’t feel moral; she felt hatred for everyone who had killed Tony. And yet she saw Allen was right. They could never just turn on their own parents, grandparents, other Sleepless—their community. They just couldn’t. Allen was right.