Beggars in Spain (34 page)

“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 modification 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.

Miri nodded.

“D-d-d-d-defense. Ours,” Allen got out.

“Inc-c-c-cluding N-N-N-Norms who are…r-r-r-r-r-right,” Diane Clarke said, and the others intuited the strings she meant by the word “right.”

Jonathan Markowitz said, “S-S-S-S-Sam S-S-S-S-Smith.”

Sarah Cerelli said, “J-J-J-Joan L-Lucas. H-her unborn b-b-bb-b-baby b-b-b-b-b-brother.” Miri again saw herself and Joan crouched by the power dome on Remembrance Day, heard again her own narrow hardness about Joan’s grief over the abortion of her Sleeper brother. Miri winced. How could she have been so hard on Joan? How could she not have
seen
?

Because it hadn’t yet happened to her.

“W-w-w-we n-n-n-n-need a n-n-n-name,” Diane said. She took Allen’s place in front of the console and called up her own string program. When she made room for Miri to see the results, Miri saw a complex thought edifice about the power of names for self-identification, of self-identification for community, about the Supers’ position in the Sanctuary community if the need for their own defense never arose again. It might not. It might happen that no one of their number was ever again hurt or endangered by the Norms, and the two communities could exist for decades side by side, with only one of them actually knowing there were two. The power of a name.

Miri’s mouth twisted. She said, “A n-n-n-n-name.”

“Y-yes. A n-name,” Diane said.

She looked at them all. Diane’s strings flowed in holographic projection, detailing both their separateness and the complex limits of their physical and emotional dependency. A name.

“The B-B-B-B-Beggars,” Miri said.

“I had no choice,” Jennifer said. “I had no choice!”

“No, you didn’t,” Will Sandaleros said. “She’s just too young to hold a Council seat, Jenny. Miri hasn’t learned yet to control herself, or to direct her talents toward her own good. She will. In a few years you can restore her seat. It was just a misjudgment, dear heart. That’s all.”

“But she won’t talk to me!” Jennifer cried. In another moment she had regained control of herself. She smoothed the folds of her black
abbaya
and reached to pour herself and Will more tea. Her long slim fingers were steady on the antique pot; the fragrant stream of singleaf tea, a genemod developed on Sanctuary, fell unwaveringly into the pretty alloy cups Najla had molded for her mother’s sixtieth birthday. But sharp lines ran from Jennifer’s nose to her mouth. Looking at his wife, Will realized that pain could look like age.

“Jenny,” he said gently, “give her more time. She had a bad shock and she’s still a child. Don’t you remember yourself at sixteen?”

Jennifer gave him a penetrating look. “Miri is not like us.”

“No, but—”

“It’s not only Miri. Ricky refuses to talk to me either.”

Will put down his teacup. His words had the careful sound of a courtroom statement. “Ricky has always been a little unstable for a Sleepless. A little weak. Like his father.”

Jennifer said, as if it were an answer, “Ricky and Miri will both have to recognize what Richard never could: The first duty of a community is to protect its laws and its culture. Without the willingness to do that, without that patriotism, you have nothing but a collection of people who happen to live in the same place. Sanctuary must protect itself.” After a moment she added, “Especially now.”