Beggars in Spain (26 page)

The Council explored all possible legal scenarios: What if they filed a birth certificate but falsified it, checking the box for “Sleepless” rather than “Sleeper”? It might be eighty years before the child died of a premature old age and the government demanded an autopsy. But the child would have to take the mandatory New York State Board of Education tests at age seven. How much norm data did the beggars really have for those tests—enough to differentiate Sleepers from Sleepless? And there was the retina scan, virtually proof positive of sleep identity, although not for very small children…. What if…

Over and over again Jennifer, with the help of Will and Perrilleon, dragged the argument back to the real issue: The good of the community versus the good of one who would be forever an outsider. Not only an outsider but also a point of disruption, a potential point of legal
entry for foreign governments, a person who could never produce on the level of the rest of them, who would forever take more than he gave.

A beggar.

The vote was eight to six.

“I won’t be the one to do it,” the young doctor said suddenly. “I won’t.”

“You don’t have to be,” Jennifer said. “I am Chief Executive Officer; mine is the signature that would have been on a falsified birth certificate; I will do it. Are you sure, Dr. Toliveri, that the injection will create conditions indistinguishable from SIDS?”

Toliveri nodded. He looked very pale. Ricky looked down at the surface of the table. Councilor Kivenen stuck her fist in her mouth. The young doctor looked in pain.

But none of them protested aloud after the vote was taken. They were a community.

Later, afterward, Jennifer cried. Her tears humiliated her, hot scant tears like boiling salt. Will held her and she could feel his stiffness even as he patted her back. This wasn’t what he expected from her. It wasn’t what she expected, either.

But he tried. “Dearest one—there was no pain. The heart stopped immediately.”

“I know,” she said coldly.

“Then…”

“Forgive me. I don’t mean to do this.”

Later, when she had come back to herself, she didn’t apologize again. But she said to Will, as they walked together under the curved arc of agricultural and technical panels that was the sky, “The fault is with the government regulations that force us into deceit no matter what we do. It’s just one more example of what we’ve said before. If we were not part of the United States…”

Will nodded.

They walked first to visit Miranda in the children’s dome, and then to Sharifi Labs, Special Enterprises Division, as important as Miranda
and under the tightest private-property security anywhere under Sanctuary’s solid, productive sky.

Spring had come to the desert. Prickly pear bloomed with yellow flowers. Along the washes, cottonwoods glowed greenly. Sparrow hawks, solitary most of the winter, perched in twos. Leisha watched this flowering, so much more austere and rocky than along Lake Michigan, and wondered sardonically if the desert’s modesty was as much a draw for her as was its isolation. Here, nothing was genetically modified.

She stood in front of her work terminal, munching an apple and listening to the program recite the fourth chapter of her book on Thomas Paine. The room glowed with sunlight. Alice’s bed had been dragged to the window so she could see the flowers. Leisha hastily swallowed a bite of apple and addressed the terminal.

“Text change: ‘Paine rushing to Philadelphia’ to ‘Paine’s rushing to Philadelphia.’”

“Changed,” the terminal said.

Alice said, “Do you really think anyone still cares about those old rules for verbals?”

“
I
care,” Leisha said. “Alice, you haven’t touched your lunch.”

“I’m not hungry. And you don’t care about verbals; you’re just filling time. Listen, there’s a whole lot of commotion in the front of the house.”

“Hungry or not, you have to eat. You
have
to.” Alice was seventy-five but looked much older. Gone was the stocky figure that had plagued her all her life; now her skin stretched thin over bones revealed as delicate wirework. She had had another stroke, and after that she’d put away her terminal. Leisha, in desperation, had even suggested that Alice resume her work on twin parapsychology. Alice had smiled sadly—the twin work was the only thing they had never been able to really discuss—and had shaken her head. “No, dear. It’s too late. To convince you.”

But the stroke hadn’t impaired Alice’s love for her family. She grinned as the commotion from the front of the house exploded into the room.

“Drew!”

“I’m home, Grandma Alice! Hey, Leisha!”

Alice held out her arms hungrily, and Drew powered his chair to go into them. Unlike Alice’s grandchildren, with their own perfect health, Drew was never repulsed by the frozen left side of Alice’s face, the spittle at the left corner of her mouth, the slightly slurred speech. Alice hugged him tightly.

Leisha put down her apple—it lacked flavor anyway; whatever the agrogene combines had done this time was a step backward—and tensed on her toes, waiting. When Drew finally turned to her she said, “You’ve been kicked out of another school.”

Drew started his ingratiating grin, got a closer look at Leisha’s face, and stopped smiling. “Yes.”

“What for this time?”

“Not grades, Leisha. This time I studied.”

“Well, then?”

“Fighting.”

“Who’s hurt?”

He said sullenly, “A son of a bitch named Lou Bergin.”

“And I presume I’ll be hearing from Mr. Bergin’s lawyer.”

“He started it, Leisha. I just finished it.”

Leisha studied Drew. He was sixteen, and despite the powerchair—or because of it—he exercised fanatically, keeping his upper body superbly conditioned. She could well believe he was a lethal fighter. His adolescent features didn’t yet fit together: nose too big, chin too small, skin spotted by acne where it wasn’t still rounded by baby fat. Only his eyes were handsome, vivid green fringed by thick black lashes, with a concentrated gaze that could still make almost anyone think that Drew found him completely fascinating. Leisha was an exception. For the past two years there had been antagonism between them, periodically mitigated by clumsy attempts on his part to remember how much he owed her, and on hers to remember the engaging child he had been.

This was the fourth school that had expelled him. The first time, Leisha had been indulgent: He was a small crippled Liver, and the intellectual demands of a school full of donkey children, most genetically modified for intelligence and physical health, must have been over-
whelming for him. The second time she had been less indulgent. Drew had failed every single subject, simply ceasing to go to class at all, spending solitary hours with his semiautomatic guitar or games terminal. No one had disturbed him. The school expected its students, most of whom would run the country someday, to be self-motivated.

Leisha sent him next to the most structured school she could find. Drew loved it immediately; he discovered the drama program. He was the star of his acting class. “I’ve found my destiny!” he said on a comlink call home. Leisha winced; Alice laughed. But four months later Drew was home, bitter and silent. He had failed to get a part in either
Death of a Salesman
or
Morning Light
. Alice asked gently, “Was it because they didn’t want a Willy Loman or Kelland Vie in a powerchair?” “It was donkey politics,” Drew spat. “And it always will be.”

Leisha then searched hard for a school with an untaxing academic program, a strong artistic one, a structured school day, and as high a percentage as possible of students from families without much political clout, impressive financial connections, or illustrious histories. She found one that seemed to qualify in Springfield, Massachusetts. Drew had seemed to like the school and Leisha had thought things were going well. Yet here he was again.

“Look at your face,” Drew said sullenly. “Why don’t you say it aloud? ‘Here’s Drew back again, fucked-up Drew who thinks he’s going to be somebody but can’t finish anything. What the shit should we do about poor little Liver Drew?’”

“What
are
we going to do?” Leisha said cruelly.

“Why don’t you just give up on me?”

Alice said, “Oh, no, Drew.”

“Not you, Grandma Alice.
Her
. Her that insists that people be wonderful or they don’t exist.”

Leisha said, “As opposed to thinking they’re wonderful just because they exist, but do nothing to fulfill their own existence?”

Alice rapped out, “That’s enough, you two!”

It wasn’t enough for Leisha. Drew’s goading had hurt parts of her she hadn’t known still existed. She said, “Now that you’re home, Drew,
you’ll want to see Eric. He’s straightened himself out wonderfully and is making genuine progress with global atmospheric curves. Jordan is immensely proud of him.”

Drew’s green eyes blazed. Leisha turned her back. She was suddenly, sickeningly, ashamed of herself. She was seventy-five years old—an incredible fact in itself; she never felt seventy-five—and this boy was sixteen. Unmodified, a Sleeper, not even drawn from the donkey class…As she got older, she lost compassion. Why else was she shut away from the world in this New Mexico fortress, in retreat from a country she had once hoped to help improve for everyone? Youthful dreams.

Dreams which Drew didn’t even have.

Alice said wearily, “All right, Leisha. Drew, Eric asked me to give you a message.”

“What?” she heard Drew snarl. But it was a softened snarl; he could never stay angry at Alice. Not at Alice.

Alice said, “Eric said to tell you that as part of his studies he walked into the Pacific and got his ass wiped. What does that mean?”

Drew laughed. “Really?
Eric
said that? I guess he has changed.” The brooding bitterness returned to his voice.

Stella ran into the room, looking distracted. She had put on weight and now looked like a painting by Titian, with plump, healthy flesh under youthfully red hair. “Leisha, there’s a—Drew! What are you doing home?”

“He’s visiting,” Alice said. “There’s a what, dear?”

“There’s a visitor to see Leisha. Actually, three visitors.” Stella smiled, and her chins wobbled with excitement. “Here they are!”

“Richard!”

Leisha catapulted across the room into his arms. Richard caught her, laughing, then let her go. Leisha turned immediately to his wife, Ada, a slim Polynesian girl who smiled shyly. Ada still had trouble with English.

When Richard had first brought Ada to the New Mexico compound, after twenty years of solitary, aimless wandering around the globe, Leisha had been wary. She and Richard had never again been
lovers; Leisha had recoiled from the thought of sleeping with Jennifer’s husband. And Richard had never asked. He had grieved for years for his lost children, Najla and Ricky, a silent bitter grieving so unlike a Sleepless that Leisha had not known how to respond. She had been relieved when he traveled for years at a time, disappearing with only his credit ring and the clothes on his back into India, Tibet, the Antarctic colonies, the central South American desert—always somewhere technologically backward, as close to primitive as a world fueled by Kenzo Yagai still possessed. Leisha never asked him about his journeys; he never volunteered information. She suspected he passed as a Sleeper.

Then four years ago he had returned for one of his infrequent stays bringing Ada. His wife. She came from one of the South Pacific voluntary cultural preserves. Ada was slim and brown, with long lustrous black hair and a habit of ducking her head when anyone addressed her. She spoke no English. She was 15 years old.

Leisha had welcomed her, set about learning Samoan, and tried to hide the fact that she was hurt to the heart. It wasn’t that Richard had rejected her; it was that he had rejected all the choices of being Sleepless. Choosing accomplishment. Choosing ambition. Choosing the mind.

But gradually Leisha had come to understand. The point for Richard was not only that Ada, with her shy smiles and halting speech and youthful adoration of Richard, was so different from Leisha. It was that Ada was so different from Jennifer Sharifi.

And Richard seemed happy. He had done what Leisha had not, and had made his own kind of peace with their Sleepless past. And if that peace looked like a surrender, could Leisha say that her own solution—the moribund Susan Melling Foundation, which had had all of ten applicants last year—was really any better?

“I see you, Leisha,” Ada said in English. “I see you gladly.”

“And I see you gladly,” Leisha said warmly. For Ada, this was a long speech of great intellectual power.

“I see you gladly,
Mirami
Alice.”
Mirami,
Richard had once said, was
a term of great respect for the honored old. Ada had flatly—shyly and sweetly, but flatly nonetheless—refused to believe that Alice and Leisha were twins.

“And I see you gladly, dear,” Alice said. “You remember Drew?”

“Hey,” Drew said, smiling. Ada smiled slightly and looked away, as was proper for a married woman to an unrelated man. Richard said genially, “Hey, Drew,” which was such a change from the usual shadowed pain in his eyes when he spoke to Drew that Leisha blinked. She had never really understood that pain: Drew was a generation younger than Richard’s lost son. And, of course, he was a Sleeper.

Alice’s voice quavered, which meant she was tiring. “Stella said three visitors…”

Stella entered then, carrying a baby.

“Oh, Richard,” Leisha said. “Oh, Richard…”

“This is Sean. After my father.”

The baby looked absurdly like Richard: low brow, thick dark hair, dark eyes. Only his coffee-colored skin proclaimed Ada’s genes. They had evidently not had him modified at all. Leisha took the infant in her arms, not sure what she felt. Sean gazed at her solemnly. Leisha’s heart turned over.

“He’s beautiful…”

“Let me hold him,” Alice said hungrily, and Leisha surrendered the baby. She was glad for Richard, who had always wanted a family, an anchor, an intimate community….Two years ago Leisha had medical tests to confirm that her own eggs were inert. Gametes, Susan had warned her decades ago, did not regenerate.