Beggars in Spain (40 page)

Miri pulled her shirt over her head. “You’ve given your life to your community. But we Supers aren’t in that community now, are we? And you killed the one of us who might have made a bridge between your community and ours, the best and most generous of us all. You killed him because he didn’t fit your definition of a community any more. And now we don’t, either. For one thing, we dream. Did you know that,
Jennifer
? Lucid dreaming. Taught to us by a Sleeper.” Miri kicked off her sandals.

Cassie Blumenthal said, panic in her voice, “I can’t regain control of the communications system.”

“Stop this,” Charles Stauffer said. “Children, put your clothes back on!”

“No,” Miri said. “Because then we’d look like members of your community, wouldn’t we, Jennifer? And we’re not. We never can be again.”

Someone said over a comlink, “We have Terry Mwakambe. He’s not resisting.”

Miri said, “And not even your own community really matters to you. Otherwise you would have taken us up on the choice we offered you. That way only you would have faced trial for treason. The beggars below would have granted the rest of the Council immunity. Now they’ll all be indicted for conspiracy to treason. You could have saved them and you didn’t, because that would have meant giving up your own control over who is in your community and who is out, wouldn’t it? Well, you lost it anyway. The day you killed Tony.” Miri yanked down her shorts. She stood naked, the other Supers behind her. Some of the girls covered their budding breasts with crossed arms; a few of the boys held hands in front of their genitals. But none of them cried. They stared at Jennifer with cold, unchildlike eyes, as if she had confirmed something for them, as if they were thinking…thinking unknowable things…Miri stood uncovered, the nipples on her small breasts erect, her dark
pubic hair as thick as Jennifer’s own. Her large misshappen head was held high. She smiled.

Ricky came forward, holding his own shirt. He put it around Miri’s shoulders and drew it closed across her breasts, and for the first time the girl looked at someone else besides Jennifer. She glanced at her father, blushed painfully, and whispered, “Thank you, Daddy.”

Cassie Blumenthal said tiredly, “A delayed-timing broadcast just left for the White House. There’s a duplicate here. It contains all the locations and neutralizing procedures for every virus packet we planted in the United States.”

Charles Stauffer said, “None of the Sanctuary external defenses are operative.”

Caroline Renleigh said, “Emergency security on the detention dome is down. Overrides don’t regain control…”

Cassie Blumenthal said, “Second delayed-timing broadcast beamed at…at
New Mexico
…”

Only Miranda said nothing. She was sobbing, an overwrought sixteen-year-old girl, on her father’s shoulder.

L
eisha watched the hologrids of the rioting in Atlanta over dead pigeons, the rioting in New York over clogged ground traffic leaving the city, the rioting in Washington over rioting. All the old banners had come out—
NUKE THE SLEEPLESS
!—did they just keep the placards and banners in some dusty basement between crises thirty or forty years apart? All the old rhetoric was out, all the old attitudes, even—on the worst of the Liver grids—all the old jokes. “What do you get if you cross a Sleepless with a pit bull? A set of jaws that
really
never let go.” Leisha had heard that one when she was at Harvard. Sixty-seven years ago.

She said out loud, “And I looked and saw that there was nothing new under the sun, and the race was not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor favor to men of skill…” Jordan and Stella watched her worriedly. It wasn’t fair to worry them with melodramatic tag lines. Especially not after hours of silence. She should talk to them, explain to them what she was feeling…

She was so tired.

For more than seventy years she had seen the same things, over and over, starting with Tony Indivino. “If you walked down a street in Spain and a hundred beggars each asked for a dollar and you wouldn’t give it to them so they jumped on you in fury…” Sanctuary. The law, that illusory creator of common community. Calvin Hawke. Sanctuary,
again. And throughout it all, the United States: rich, prosperous, myopic, magnificent in aggregate and petty in specifics, unwilling—always, always—to accord mass respect to the mind. To good fortune, to luck, to rugged individualism, to faith in God, to patriotism, to beauty, to spunk or pluck or grit or git, but never to complex intelligence and complex thought. It wasn’t sleeplessness that had caused all the rioting; it was thought and its twin consequences, change and challenge.

Was it different in other countries, other cultures? Leisha didn’t know. In eighty-three years she’d never once traveled outside the United States for longer than a weekend. Nor particularly wanted to. Surely that was singular, in such a global economy?

“I always loved this country,” Leisha said, also aloud, and realized instantly how this disconnected sentiment must sound.

“Leisha, dear, would you like a brandy? Or a cup of tea?” Stella said.

Despite herself, Leisha smiled. “You sounded just like Alice when you said that.”

“Well…” Stella said.

“Leisha,” Drew said, “I think it might be a good idea if you—”

“Leisha Camden!” said the holostage. Stella gasped.

The newsgrid coverage of the White House, the rioting in New York, the satellite shots of Sanctuary, had all disappeared. A young girl with a large, slightly bulging head and great dark eyes stood stiffly on the holostage, in a scientific lab filled with unfamiliar equipment. She wore a thin synthetic shirt, shorts, and simple slippers, and her unruly dark hair was tied back with a red ribbon. Richard, whom Leisha had forgotten was in the room, made a strangled sound.

The girl said, “This is Miranda Serena Sharifi, in Sanctuary. I’m the granddaughter of Jennifer Sharifi and Richard Keller. I’m beaming this broadcast directly to your New Mexico equipment. It’s an override on all other Sanctuary communication nets. It’s also unauthorized by the Sanctuary Council.”

The girl paused, and a slight falter came into the serious young face. So serious—this child looked as if she never smiled. How old was she?
Fourteen? Sixteen? Her voice had a slight accent, as if English were being spoken differently in Sanctuary. More precisely and more formally, both contrary to the way language usually evolved. The differences, too, lent seriousness to her words. Leisha took an involuntary step toward the holostage.

“There are a group of us here, Sleepless but also something more. Genemod construction. We’re called Superbrights, and I’m the oldest. There are 28 of us over the age of ten. We’re…different from the adults, and they have treated us differently. We’ve taken over Sanctuary, sent the location of all the biological weapons to your president, deactivated the Sanctuary defenses, and stopped the war for independence.”

“Oh dear God,” Jordan said.
“Children
.”

“If you receive this, it means we Superbrights are being held prisoner by my grandmother and the Sanctuary Council, but we don’t think that can last long. However, we won’t be able to stay here on Sanctuary. We have no real other place to go. I’ve researched you, Leisha Camden, and I’ve researched your ward Drew Arlen. The Lucid Dreamer. We Supers are all lucid dreamers. It’s become an important component of how we think.”

Leisha glanced at Drew. He stared intently at Miranda Sharifi, and at the look in his green eyes, Leisha glanced away.

“I don’t know what will happen next, or when,” Miranda continued. “Maybe Sanctuary will allow us a shuttle. Maybe your government will send for us, or a corporation you control can do that. Maybe some Superbrights, the younger ones, will stay here. But some of us, soon, will need a place to go away from Sanctuary, since we will have caused the arrest for conspiracy to treason of the entire Sanctuary Council. We need a place with security, a place with reasonable equipment we can modify further, and someone to help us with your legal and economic system. You were a lawyer, Ms. Camden. Can we come to you?”

Miranda paused. Leisha felt her eyes prickle.

“There will be with us, I think although I’m not sure, a few Normals. One will probably be my father, Richard Sharifi. I don’t think you
can contact me directly to answer this broadcast, although I don’t know for sure what your capabilities are.”

“Not what
theirs
are,” Stella said, sounding dazed. Drew shot her an amused look.

“Thank you,” Miranda finished awkwardly. She shifted weight, one foot on top of the other, and suddenly looked even younger. “If…if Drew Arlen is with you when you receive this, and if you’re willing to let us Superbrights come to you, please ask him to stay. I’d like…I’d like to meet him.”

Suddenly Miranda smiled, a smile of such cynicism that Leisha was startled. This was no child after all. “You see,” Miranda said, “we come to you as beggars. Nothing to offer, nothing to trade. Just need.” She disappeared and a sudden three-dimensional graphic appeared on the screen, a complex globe made of strings of words looped and crossed and balanced, each word or phrase an idea that connected to the next, the whole thing color-coded in ways that emphasized the stresses and balances and trade-offs in meaning from concepts that opposed or reinforced or modified each other. The globe lingered, rotating slowly.

“What on earth is
that
?” Stella said.

Leisha got up and walked around the globe slightly faster than it rotated, studying it. Her knees felt shaky. “I think…I think it’s a philosophical argument.”

“Ahhhhhhhhh,” Drew said.

Leisha looked at the globe. Her eye snagged on a phrase in green in an outer layer:
a house divided: Lincoln
. Abruptly she sat down on the floor.

Stella took refuge in a flurry of domestic activity. “If there’s twenty-eight of them, and if they double up, we can open the west wing and move Richard and Ada to—”

“I won’t be here,” Richard said quietly.

“But Richard! Your son—” Stella broke off, looking embarrassed.

“That was another life.”

“But
Richard
—” Stella’s face began to redden. Richard slipped quietly from the room. The only one he looked at directly was Drew, who gazed steadily back.

Leisha saw none of this. She sat on the floor, studying Miranda’s string-globe until the broadcast ended and the hologram vanished. Then she looked up at the three left, Stella and Jordan and Drew. Stella took in a sharp breath.

“Leisha…your
face
…”

“Things change,” Leisha said, cross-legged and radiant on the floor. “There are second and third chances. And fourth and fifth.”

“Well, of course,” Stella said, puzzled. “Leisha, please get up!”

“Things
do
change,” Leisha repeated, like a little girl. “Not just changes in degree. Changes in kind. Even for us. After all. After all. After all.”

There were thirty-six of them, flown by government plane from Washington; the whole thing had taken much longer than anyone but Leisha, the ex-lawyer, had expected. Twenty-seven “Superbrights”: Miri, Nikos, Allen, Terry, Diane, Christy, Jonathan, Mark, Ludie, Joanna, Toshio, Peter, Sara, James, Raoul, Victoria, Anne, Marty, Bill, Audrey, Alex, Miguel, Brian, Rebecca, Cathy, Victor, and Jane. Such familiar names for such unfamiliar people. And with them there were four “Normal” Sleepless children: Joan, Sam, Hako, and Androula. There were five parents, looking for the most part tenser than their children. Among the parents was Ricky Sharifi.

His dark eyes were patient with pain and he moved hesitantly, as if unsure he had a right to walk on the Earth. When Leisha realized why this looked normal to her, she grimaced. Richard, who now looked younger than his son, had looked like that in the months after Jennifer’s trial.

Jennifer’s first trial. The Sanctuary Council members were all in prison in Washington.

“Is my father here?” Ricky asked Leisha quietly, the first afternoon.

“No. He…he left, Ricky.”

Ricky nodded, unsurprised. He looked as if he had expected this answer. Perhaps he had.

Miranda Sharifi—“Miri”—took the lead from the first. After the bustle of arrival, the equipment and suitcases and security nets and
Stella’s elaborate rooming arrangements, Miri came with her father to Leisha’s study. “Thank you for letting us come here, Ms. Camden. We want to work out some form of rent as soon as our assets are unfrozen by your government.”

“Call me Leisha. And it’s your government, too. But no rent is necessary, Miri. We’re glad to have you here.”

Miri’s dark eyes studied her. They were strange eyes, Leisha thought, not for any physical attributes but because they seemed to see things no one else did. She was a little shocked to realize, despite the admiration she already had for Miri, that the girl’s eyes made her uncomfortable. How much did that unswerving gaze see about her? How much did that brain—enhanced, different,
better
—understand of Leisha’s private soul?

This must have been how Alice had once felt about Leisha. And Leisha had never known, never realized.

Miri smiled. The smile changed her whole face, opened and lighted it. “Thank you, Leisha. That’s very generous. More than that—I think you think of us as your community, and for that we really thank you. Community is an important concept to us. But we’d all prefer to pay you. We’re Yagaiists, you know.”

“I know,” Leisha said, wondering if among the things Miri’s better brain could better understand was irony. She was still sixteen years old.

“Is…is Drew Arlen still here? Or did he go back on tour?”

“He’s still here. He waited for you.”

Miri flushed.
Oh,
Leisha thought.
Oh
…

Leisha sent for Drew. He looked up at Miri from his powerchair, his handsome face openly interested, and held out his hand.

“Hello, Miranda.”

“I’d like to talk to you later about lucid dreaming,” Miranda said gracelessly, reddening more. “About the neurochemical effects on the brain. I’ve done some studies, you might be interested in the results, a chance to look at your art from the scientific side…” Leisha recognized the girl’s babbling for what it was: a gift. She was offering Drew what she conceived to be the best part of herself, her work.

“Thank you,” Drew said gravely. His eyes sparkled. “I’d like that.”

Leisha was amazed at herself. She had wondered if she would feel a brief, mild stab of jealousy at Drew’s defection from her to Miri—it had been all too obvious how ready he was to defect—but what she did feel was not brief or mild. Nor was it jealousy. Protectiveness flared in her like brush fire. If Drew was just using this extraordinary child to get to Sanctuary, she would flatten him. Completely. Miri deserved better, needed better,
was
better than that—

Astonished at herself, Leisha fell silent.

Miri smiled a second time. Her hand was still in Drew’s. “You changed our lives, Mr. Arlen. I’ll tell you later.”

“Please. And call me Drew.”

Leisha saw a dirty ten-year-old with reckless green eyes and appalling manners:
I’m gonna own Sanctuary, me
. She looked again at Miranda, the girl’s dark hair falling forward to hide her red face, the misshappen head. The brush fire raged. Miranda withdrew her hand from Drew’s.

“I think,” Ricky Sharifi said, “that Miri needs to eat again soon. Her metabolism differs from ours. Leisha, we’re going to be a great drain on your resources. Let us pay for it. You haven’t even seen what Terry and Nikos and Diane will do to your communications equipment.”

Ricky also had been watching Miranda and Drew. He looked at Leisha and smiled ruefully. Leisha saw that Ricky, too, was as afraid of his daughter’s powers as Leisha had been of Drew’s lucid dreaming, and as secretly proud.

“I wish,” Leisha said directly to Ricky, “that you had known my sister Alice. She died last year.”

He seemed to see as much in this simple statement as she intended. “I wish I had, too.”

Miri returned to the question of payment. “And once your—our—government satisfies itself enough to release our assets, we’ll all be rich by your standards. In fact, I was going to ask you if you would be interested in doing the legal work to help a number of us set up corporations registered in New Mexico. Most of us have run businesses or done
commercial research, you know, but here we’re underage. We’re going to need legal structures to let us continue our businesses as part-time employees of corporate entities with adults named as CEO’s.”

“That wasn’t ever my field,” Leisha said carefully. “But I can suggest someone who could do it. Kevin Baker.”

“No. He was the liaison for Sanctuary.”

“Was he always honest?” Leisha said.

“Yes, but—”

“He would be for you, too.” And willing—Kevin was always willing to go where the business was.