Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  The newsgrid facsimile bore fourteen signatures, led by a large, scrawled Jennifer Fatima Sharifi. Jennifer’s usual handwriting, Leisha remembered, was small and neat.

  Stella said, “They did it. They really did it.”

  Jordan said, “Leisha—what will happen now?”

  “The IRS will wait for the nonpayment of the January 15 taxes. When it doesn’t come, they’ll attach a jeopardy assessment to Sanctuary. That means they’ll have the right to physically seize the material assets to hold as protection against getting their money.”

  “Physically seize Sanctuary? Without even a hearing or something?”

  “Jeopardy assessment puts the seizure first, the hearing second. That’s probably why Jennifer chose this course of action. Everybody will have to move very fast. Half of Congress is away for the holidays.” Leisha noted how detached she sounded, how calm. How amazing.

  Stella said, “But seizing Sanctuary—how, Leisha? With the army? An assault?”

  Jordan said, “They could blow it out of the sky with a single Truth missile.”

  “But they won’t,” Stella argued, “because that would just destroy the property the IRS is trying to seize. It’ll have to be a…an invasion. But that would be just as hard on Sanctuary—orbital environments are fragile. Leisha, what the hell is Jennifer thinking of?”

  “I don’t know,” Leisha said. “Look at the signatures. Richard Anthony Keller Sharifi, Najla Sharifi Johnson, Hermione Wells Keller—Richard’s children have married. I don’t think Richard knows that.”

  Stella and Jordan looked at each other. “Leisha,” Stella said in her acerbic way, “doesn’t it seem to you this is more than a matter of family news? It’s a civil war! Jennifer has finally succeeded in separating virtually all the Sleepless from the rest of the country, from the mainstream of American society—”

  “And are you going to tell me,” Leisha asked, smiling without amusement, “that the twelve of us sitting out here in this forgotten compound in the desert haven’t done exactly the same thing?”

  Neither of the others answered her.

  “Do you think,” Stella said finally, “that Sanctuary is a match for the United States?”

  “I don’t know,” Leisha said, and Stella and Jordan stared at each other, aghast. “I’m not the right person to ask. I’ve never once, in my entire life, been right about Jennifer Sharifi.”

  “But, Leisha—”

  “I’m going down to the creek,” Leisha said. “Call me if we go to war.”

  She left Stella and Jordan staring at each other, bewildered and angry at her, unable to see the distinction between criminal indifference and what, to Leisha, was even worse: criminal uselessness.

  THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS, from the first, took Sanctuary’s secession threat seriously. This was Sleepless. Senators and congressmen who had scattered to their constituencies for the winter holidays hastily reassembled in Washington. President Calvin John Meyerhoff, a big slow-moving man dubbed in the newsgrids “Silent Cal II,” nonetheless possessed a sharp brain, finely tuned to foreign policy. If it struck Meyerhoff as ironic that the major foreign crisis of his waning first term involved a section of the United States technically part of Cattaraugus County, New York, the irony was not present in any of the press releases from the Oval Office.

  The Liver newsgrids, however, saw the Sanctuary threat as hysterically funny, raw material for the two-minute comedy sketches that were the favorite form of entertainment. Few Livers had ever dealt with, heard of, or known any Sleepless, whose dealings were with the donkey class that ran the businesses that ran the country. A Liver newsgrid gleefully made the prediction: “Next to Secede—Oregon! Inside story!” The sketch was dramatized with holoactors with taped-up eyelids standing in downtown Portland and ranting that it was necessary for Oregon people “to dissolve the political bands that connect them with another people.” FREE OREGON banners suddenly appeared at scooter races, at brainie parties, at the free dance palaces. A racer named Kimberly Sands won the Belmont Winter Race in a scooter painted with the Oregon flag superimposed over the United States flag.

  On January 3, the White House issued a statement that Sanctuary had in effect made a statement of both sedition and terrorism, declaring its “power to levy war” while conspiring to overthrow the United States government as it pertained to a section of New York State. Neither terrorism nor sedition could be tolerated in a free democracy. The National Guard was put on alert. Sanctuary was told, in a statement released to the press as well, that on January 10 a delegation consisting of members from both the State Department and the IRS—a coupling seldom seen before in American diplomacy—would dock at Sanctuary “for discussion of the situation.”

  Sanctuary replied that if any shuttle or other space-going vessel approached the orbital, Sanctuary would open fire.

  Congress met in emergency session. The IRS levied a jeopardy assessment against all assets held by Sanctuary, Inc., and its principal shareholders, the Sharifi family. The tabloid newsgrids, more interested in drama than in federal tax procedure, whooped that the IRS would sell Sanctuary at an auction to pay the taxes and penalty: “Anybody want to buy a used shuttle? A slightly dented orbital panel? Oregon?” WBRN, “the Brainie Channel,” held a mock auction in which Oregon was won by a couple in Monterey, California, who announced that Crater Lake National Park wished to secede from Oregon.

  On January 8, two days before Sanctuary was to receive the federal delegation, the New York Times, Newsgrid Division, in conjunction with its venerable donkey newspaper, offered an editorial called “Why Keep Oregon?” The newsgrid version was spoken on all six daily holobroadcasts by the leading anchorman; the hard-copy version was centered, alone, on the editorial page.

  WHY KEEP OREGON?

  In the past week the country has been offered both a serious secession threat by Sanctuary, stronghold of American Sleepless, and a sideshow by the so-called tabloid newsgrids. Sideshows can, depending on your taste, be amusing, vulgar, demeaning, or trivial. This one, however, centering as it does on the lighthearted “Free Oregon” movement, actually serves a useful purpose in aiding understanding of the nature of the threat from Sanctuary.

  Suppose it were Oregon that was trying to secede from the union? Suppose further that a thoughtful, objective person—assuming there are any left in the general Liver hoopla—wished to set forth genuine, thoughtful arguments against Oregon’s right to do so. What might those arguments be?

  The first point to note is that such arguments must start from a parallel with the American Revolution, not the Civil War, in which eleven Confederate States tried to depart the union. Indeed, in all the fun that irresponsible newsgrids are having with this issue, we don’t remember hearing one reference to Fort Sumter or Jeff Davis. The parallel with the Revolution is implied in the borrowed language of Sanctuary’s so-called Declaration of Independence. Clearly, Sanctuary considers itself as much an oppressed colony as did the original thirteen American colonies, and a thoughtful rebuttal to the Sanctuary document must start with an examination of that parallel.

  It is not very convincing. Our first argument against allowing Oregon—or Sanctuary—to secede is that of no contest. The case does not admit of enough evidence to warrant admission to serious decision, because the parallels between 1776 and 2092 are so weak. The American colonies had had foreign rule forced on them without representation, foreign soldiers quartered among them, second-class status with a first-class mother country. Sanctuary, on the other hand, has had no federal official so much as enter the place since its initial inspection 36 years ago. Sanctuary is represented in the New York State legislature, in the federal Congress, and in the person of the president—all through the absentee ballot, which Sanctuary residents receive as a matter of course for each election and which are, according to reliable sources, never returned.

  It is true that Sanctuary is taxed very heavily in the new tax package approved last October by Congress. But Sanctuary
is also the richest entity in not only the United States, but the world. A sliding tax scale is appropriate. Unlike the American colonies, Sanctuary does not hold second-class, exploited economic status in the world. If the entire economic truth could ever be pieced together from investment records around the world, we might very well find that Sanctuary enjoys more financial status in the global economy than the United States; certainly its international bond rating is higher. We might find that Sanctuary actually possesses more opportunity to exploit rather than be exploited. Certainly the Sanctuary annual deficit—if one exists at all—is less than the United States government’s. It is as if Oregon had decided that because its use of federal services and its payment of federal taxes are both less than, say, Texas’s, it may secede. Wrong.

  No, by the criteria of the original Declaration of Independence, Oregon and Sanctuary must both remain in the Union.

  Another argument to keep Oregon is negative precedent. If Oregon could secede, why not California? Why not Florida? Why not Harrisburg, Pennsylvania? The Balkanization of the Union was settled in that other conflict 225 years ago, that conflict Sanctuary is so careful not to mention in its secession document.

  Third, Oregon may not secede because of the argument of violated relationship. It is through United States resources, including the struggle of United States citizens, that Oregon was settled, was built to economic prosperity, was enabled to become the center of the fur trade in the nineteenth century and of Class E comlink production in the twenty-first. Oregon must honor that reciprocal relationship even if she is tired of it, just as a child who has been put through law school by her parents must, in keeping with the Civil Rights Act of 2048, support her elderly parents in the amount needed to maintain the same standard of living she enjoyed at law school. She cannot shuck them off just because she is now more successful than they. She cannot secede from the relationship that established her in her current enviable position. Nor could Oregon.

  Finally, Oregon must not be allowed to secede because it is, simply and finally, illegal. Defiance of United States sovereignty, refusal to pay taxes, threats of maintaining independence by aggression—all are outlawed by the United States Code. For Oregon to attempt secession is an illegal act; for her to be allowed to succeed would be a slap in the face to every law-abiding citizen, state, and organizational entity in the country.

  Why keep Oregon? For reasons of no contest, negative precedent, violated relationship, and legality.

  And as it is for Oregon, so it is for Sanctuary.

  No matter who lives there.

  DREW ARRIVED AT THE NEW MEXICO COMPOUND the evening of January 6. The day had been unusually cold; he had wrapped a red muffler around his throat and a matching blanket over his legs. Both, Leisha noted, were of fine Irish wool. He powered his chair across the large open living room, built to provide a gathering place for seventy-five and lately never holding more than ten or twelve. Alice’s daughter Alicia and her family had moved back to California, Eric was in South America, Seth and his wife in Chicago. Drew, Leisha saw, had once more changed.

  The strident flamboyance of the newly successful artist, a little too self-conscious, had softened. Success did that. Looking up at her face, greeting her, Drew’s gaze was open but in no way needy—not even of attention. He was sure, now, of what he was, without her confirmation. Nor did his gaze shut her out as automatically of less interest than himself, the way so many celebrities did. Drew still looked at the world as if willing to be interested, with the addition of a faint smiling challenge that said continued interest would have to be earned.

  It was the look Leisha remembered, always, as her father’s.

  “I thought I should come home,” Drew said, “in case this political situation becomes really tense.”

  “You think it won’t?” Leisha said dryly. “But, then, you never knew Jennifer Sharifi.”

  “No. But you did. Leisha—tell me. What’s going to happen to Sanctuary?”

  In Drew’s intonations—Sanctuary—she heard all the old obsession. What did he himself make of that childish obsession now, in his strange adult profession? Did Sanctuary, transformed into the shapes of desire, fuel his lucid dreaming?

  Leisha said, “The military won’t blow Sanctuary out of orbit, if that’s what you mean. They’re civilians up there, even if terrorist civilians, and about a fourth of them are children. Any weapons they have could be deadly, but Jennifer always had too much political acumen to cross the line where she could be hit back really hard.”

  “People change,” Drew said.

  “Maybe. But even if obsession has eroded Jennifer’s judgment, she has others up there to counteract it. A very smart lawyer named Will Sandaleros and Cassie Blumenthal and of course her children must be over forty by now—”

  Abruptly Leisha remembered Richard saying, forty years ago, “You become different, walled away with only other Sleepless for decades…”

  Drew said, watching her, “Richard’s here, too.”

  “Richard?”

  “With Ada and the kid. Stella was fussing over them when I came in. Apparently Sean has a flu or something. You seemed surprised that Richard’s here, Leisha.”

  “I am.” She suddenly grinned. “You’re right, Drew—people change. Don’t you think that’s kind of funny?”

  “I never thought you had much of a sense of humor, Leisha. With all your other wonderful qualities, I never suspected that one.”

  She said sharply, “Don’t try to bait me, Drew.”

  He said, “I wasn’t,” and she saw in his private smile that he meant it: He had never thought she had much of a sense of humor. Well, maybe their ideas of humor were very different. Along with so much else.

  Richard came in, alone. He was abrupt. “Hello, Leisha. Drew. Hope you don’t mind the unannounced visit. I thought…”

  She finished the thought for him. “That if Najla or Ricky had any communication to make to you, it would be through me? Richard, dear…I think Kevin would be a more likely choice. Sanctuary deals with him…”

  “No. They wouldn’t use Kevin,” Richard said, and Leisha didn’t ask how he knew. “Leisha, what’s going to happen with Sanctuary?”

  Everyone asked her that. Everyone assumed she was the political expert. She, who had sat—“sulked,” Susan Melling had called it—thirty years idle in the desert. What went on in people’s minds, even her own people? “I don’t know, Richard. What do you think Jennifer will do?”

  Richard didn’t look at her. “I think she’d detonate the world if she thought it would finally make her feel safe.”

  “You’re saying—do you know what you’re saying, Richard? That all of Sanctuary’s political philosophy still comes down to one person’s personal needs. Do you believe that?”

  “I believe it about all political philosophies,” Richard said.

  “No,” Leisha said, “Not all.”

  “Yes,” and it was not Richard who made the rebuttal, but Drew.

  “Not the Constitution,” Leisha said, surprising herself.

  “We’ll see,” Drew said, and smoothed the fine, expensive Irish wool over his withered legs.

  SANCTUARY, WITHOUT NIGHT OR DAY, without seasons, had always kept eastern standard time. This fact, as familiar to Jennifer as the feeling of her own blood flowing through her veins, suddenly struck her as grotesque. Sanctuary, the refuge and homeland of the Sleepless, the pioneer in the next stage of human evolution, had all these years been tied to the out-worn United States by the most basic of man-made shackles, time. Standing at the head of the Sanctuary Council table at 6:00 P.M. EST, Jennifer resolved that when this crisis was over, those shackles would be cut. Sanctuary would devise its own system of measuring time, free from the planet-based idea of day and night, free from the degrading circadian rhythms that bound Sleepers. Sanctuary would conquer time.

  “Now,” Will Sandaleros said. “Fire.”

  None of the Council was seated; they all stood, palms flat on th
e polished metal table or clenched at their sides, eyes turned to the screens at one end of the room. Jennifer scanned each face: excited or determined or pained. But the few that were pained were also resolute, with the pain that accepts the necessity for the surgery. She had had the lottery system replaced by elections—that alone had taken nearly a decade. Then, she had maneuvered a long time for this particular Council. She had talked people into delaying candidacy, sometimes for decades. She had lent subtle support here, subtle discouragement there. She had reasoned, traded, probed, waited, accepted delays and indecision. And now she had a Council—all but one—capable of supporting her at the decisive moment for Sleepless everywhere, for all time, as time was described by the worn-out country that had ceased to matter to human evolution.

  Robert Dey, seventy-five years old, the respected patriarch of a large and rich Sanctuary family, who had passed on to all of them, for decades, stories of Sleepless abused and hated in the United States of his childhood.

  Caroline Renleigh, twenty-eight, a brilliant communications expert with a fanatic belief in Sleepless Darwinian superiority.

  Cassie Blumenthal, with Jennifer since the earliest days of Sanctuary and instrumental in the events leading up to Jennifer’s trial—events considered ancient history on Sanctuary but still very real to Cassie’s tenacious mind.

  Paul Aleone, forty-one, a mathematician-economist who had not only foreseen the collapse of the Y-energy-based American economy when the international patents expired, but had created a program that predicted exactly the past ten years’ worth of legerdemain and folly, even as the United States tried to deny that its bluebird of illusionary prosperity had in fact flown. Aleone had worked out the economic future of Sanctuary as an independent state dealing with other independent states more prudent than the United States.

  John Wong, forty-five, a lawyer who was also Appeals Justice of Sanctuary’s seldom-used court system, proud of the fact that Sleepless, except for routine contract interpretations, seldom used it. There was little violence, little vandalism, less theft on Sanctuary. But Wong, a historian, understood the power of the judiciary among a law-abiding people in times of controversial change, and he believed in change.