Beggars in Spain (37 page)

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 the 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.

Charles Stauffer, fifty-three, head of Sanctuary external security. Like all good soldiers, he was constantly prepared for attack, constantly ready to have his preparations justified. It was not such a long step, Jennifer thought, from preparation to actuality, from ready to eager.

Barbara Barcheski, sixty-three, the silent, thoughtful head of a firm dealing in corporate information modeling. For a long time Jennifer had been unsure about Barcheski. She was a student of political systems, coming over decades to believe that unlimited technological progress and community loyalty were basically incompatible, a premise she heavily supported by studies of societies in flux, from Renaissance Venice to the industrial revolution to the early orbital utopias. Study of a paradox, Jennifer knew, leads almost inevitably to evaluation—but not necessarily negative evaluation. She waited. Eventually Barbara Barcheski made up her methodical mind: When a society must choose, community loyalty carried the better long-term odds for survival than even technological progress. Barbara Barcheski loved Sanctuary. She supported Jennifer.

Dr. Raymond Toliveri, sixty-one, the brilliant chief researcher of Sharifi Labs. Jennifer had never questioned his support for this project;
he’d created it. What had been difficult was to get Toliveri, whose fanatical work schedule made him a virtual recluse, elected to the Council. That had taken Jennifer a long time.

Then there were Will Sandaleros, Najla and her husband Lars Johnson, and Hermione Sharifi. All stood taut and proud, knowing fully the consequences of what they were about to do, and accepting those consequences without evasion, without weakness, without excuses.

Only Ricky stood slumped against the far wall of the Council dome, his eyes on the floor, his arms folded across his chest. Hermione, Jennifer saw, would not look at her husband. They must have fought over this. And it was Hermione—only Jennifer’s daughter-in-law, not her genetic son—who supported the side of justice. A complex emotion kindled in Jennifer—anger and pain and aching maternal guilt—but she pushed it away. There was no more time for Ricky’s failures. It was Sanctuary’s time.

“Now,” Will said, “Fire,” and he activated the all-Sanctuary communications net, comlink screens and holostages inside, speakers outside. Jennifer smoothed the folds of her white
abbaya
and stepped forward.

“Citizens of Sanctuary. This is Jennifer Sharifi, speaking to you from the Council dome, where the Sanctuary Council is in full emergency session. The United States has answered our Declaration of Independence as we expected, with the announcement of a Sleeper invasion tomorrow morning. This
must not be allowed to happen.
To permit this delegation to dock at Sanctuary would say that we permit negotiation where no negotiation is possible, would signal irresolution where we are resolute, would allow for the possibility of economic and judicial punishment where we are morally and evolutionarily right. The delegation must not dock at Sanctuary.

“But to try to stop the beggars by force might endanger or harm them. This too would send to the United States a false statement. Sleepless do not attack where there has been no attack. We understand self-defense, and we accept its necessity, but we do not want
war. We want to be left alone, to pursue in our own way the lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness by our own labors that until now have been denied us.

“No, the most we can do to stop the beggars is give them a show of that force we will not use unless we are pressed to do so in defense. Accordingly, the following demonstration, created by the authority of all members of the Sanctuary Council, is being broadcast simultaneously to major United States newsgrids, overriding their own broadcasts.”

Caroline Renleigh keyed manual codes into her console. Will Sandaleros spoke on a closed link to Sanctuary internal security, a group so seldom used that most people had forgotten it existed—which had allowed Will free rein in building it up. On every comlink in Sanctuary, and every comlink on Earth turned to the five serious donkey newsgrids, there appeared an image of the decaying habitat Sanctuary had purchased from the Japanese, Kagura Orbital, whose name meant “god music.”

Jennifer’s voice spoke over the image. “This is the Sanctuary Council. The United States government has announced an invasion of Sanctuary tomorrow morning, in the form of a so-called peace-keeping delegation. But there can be no true peace where there is physical and economic coercion. We have not agreed to host this delegation. We are a peace-loving people who wish to be left alone. If the United States does not honor this wish, it in effect will be launching the first attack. We will not permit Sanctuary to be attacked.

“For the purpose of deterring this attack, and as a demonstration of the lengths to which we will go to protect our home, Sanctuary offers the following demonstration. The United States press has speculated on what weapons Sanctuary could possibly bring to bear to defend itself. We don’t want this to be a speculative question. We don’t want our secession from the United States to be tarred with any imputation of withholding vital information. We
do
want to avoid war by the illustration of how terrible such a war would be.

“This is Kagura Orbital, which Sanctuary now owns. There are no humans left on the orbital. Animal life does remain here: domestic
livestock, insects used for pollination, birds and reptiles used for ecological balance, and miscellaneous rodents.”

Each holostage or comlink screen showed the interior of Kagura, first in a long pan and then in close-ups of grazing goatows and bicattle. The Japanese had fewer restraints on genetic engineering than the United States; the meat stock was thick, slow, juicy, contented, and stupid. The robot cameras followed the flight of a bird, the scuttle of an insect on a leaf.

“In a single hidden packet on this orbital is an organism developed by Sanctuary genetic engineers. It is wind-borne. Its genetic code includes a built-in seventy-two-hour destruct from the time it is released. This packet will now be released by remote from Sanctuary.”

The view of the orbital showed no change in sound or light. A gentle breeze created by maintenance ruffled some leaves. The meat animal munching them, a bicow, rolled its eyes. It made a single anguished, painful sound and crumpled.

Birds fell from the skies. The drone of insects stopped. Within two minutes nothing moved except the leaves, rustling in the lethal breeze.