Beggars in Spain (41 page)

Miri said, “I’ll bring it up with the others.” Leisha had already observed her with the other Superbrights, trading glances for which, Leisha knew, she was missing most of the meaning. Volumes worth of meaning she would never see. And how much more meaning she would never see was there in the string-globes they constructed for each other, or in the string-globes in their alien minds?

The string-globes that reminded her so uncomfortably of the shapes in Drew’s lucid dreaming.

“But even if we use Kevin Baker,” Miri continued, “we’ll still need a lawyer. Will you represent us?”

“Thank you, but I can’t,” Leisha said. She didn’t tell Miri why not. Not just yet. “But I can recommend some good lawyers. Justine Sutter, for instance. She’s the daughter of a very old friend of mine.”

“A
Sleeper
?” Miri said.

“She’s very good,” Leisha said. “And that’s what counts, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Miri said. And then, “A Sleeper.”

Ricky Sharifi said, “That might actually be best. Your lawyers are going to have to deal with United States property laws, after all. A beggar might know them best.”

Leisha said, “If you’re going to live here, Ricky, you’re going to have to stop using that word. Like that, anyway.”

After a moment Ricky said, “Yes. You’re right.”

Just like that. Jennifer Sharifi’s son, brought up in Sanctuary. And human beings thought they understood genetic manipulation!

Drew said abruptly to Miri, “Are you going to inherit Sanctuary someday?”

Miranda looked at him for a long time. Leisha couldn’t tell—nothing, not a clue—what was in the girl’s mind. “Yes,” Miri said finally, thoughtfully. “Although not for a very long time. Maybe a century. Or more. But someday, yes. I am.”

Drew didn’t answer.
A century or more,
Leisha thought. A look passed between Drew and Miri, a look Leisha couldn’t interpret. She had no idea at all what it meant when Drew finally smiled.

“Good enough,” he said.

Miri smiled, too.

L
eisha sat on her favorite flat rock under the shade of a cottonwood tree. The creek at her feet was completely dry. A quarter mile downstream a Super moved slowly, face bent forward over the ground. It must be Joanna; she had become fascinated with fossils and was constructing a three-dimensional thought string which Leisha didn’t understand about the relation of coprolites to orbitals. It was poetry, Miri said, adding that none of them built poetry before they began lucid dreaming. That was the phrase she used: “built poetry.”

A kangaroo rat burrowed into a mound of dry earth a few feet away. Leisha watched it whir its short forelegs like a mechanical auger, then kick away the excavated dirt with long hind legs. The rat turned suddenly and looked at her: round ears and rounder, bulging, lustrous-black eyes. It had an odd bump on the top of its head: an incipient tumor, Leisha thought. The little animal returned to its work, incidentally aerating the soil and enriching it with nitrates from its droppings. Beyond, away from the cottonwood shade, the desert shimmered under heat already fierce in early June.

If she turned around, Leisha knew, she would see a different kind of shimmer. Forty feet above the compound, air molecules were distorted with a new kind of energy field Terry was experimenting with. It would, he said, be the next breakthrough in applied physics. Kevin
Baker was in negotiation with Samsung, IBM, and Konig-Rottsler for selective licensing of Terry’s patents.

Leisha wriggled out of her boots and socks. This was mildly dangerous; she was beyond the area swept electronically clear of scorpions. But the rock, warm here even in the shade, felt pleasantly gritty under her bare feet. Suddenly she remembered studying her feet the morning of her sixty-seventh birthday. How odd—what a strange thing to remember. The memory actually pleased her; she had only just begun to realize how much, in eighty-three years, even a Sleepless forgot.

The Supers remembered everything. Always.

Leisha was waiting for Miri to explode out of the compound to accuse her. The explosion was already overdue; Miri must have been locked longer than usual in her lab. Or perhaps she was with Drew, home only a few days after his spring tour. If so they would be in his room; Miri’s didn’t have a bed.

The kangaroo rat disappeared into his mound.

“Leisha!”

Leisha turned. A figure in green shorts was running furiously toward her from the compound, arms and legs pumping. Eight, seven, six, five, four, three—

“Leisha!
Why?
”

The Supers always finished things before you expected them to.

“Because I choose to do it, Miri. Because I want to.”

“
Want
to? Defend my grandmother against charges of treason?
You,
Leisha, who wrote the definitive book on Abraham Lincoln?”

Leisha knew this wasn’t a non sequitur. She had begun, in the past three months, to learn a little about how the Supers thought. Not to the extent of following an entire complex string shape, woven from associations and reasoning and connections, glinting with shocks from lucid dreaming. And never to the extent of constructing one herself. Nor did Leisha want to construct one. That was not who she was. But she had become able to fill in the skipped links when this girl, more important to her than anyone had been since Alice, spoke to her. At least, Leisha
could fill them in if Miri hadn’t skipped too many links. This time she hadn’t.

“Sit down, Miri. I want to explain to you why I’m Jennifer’s counsel. I’ve been waiting out here for you to ask.”

“I’ll stand!”

“Sit,” Leisha said, and after a moment Miri sat. She pushed the dark hair off her forehead, sweaty after even such a short run, and dropped angrily onto Leisha’s rock without even a glance for scorpions.

There were so many earthly things that Miri still didn’t know to look for.

Leisha had rehearsed her words carefully. “Miri, your grandmother and I are both part of a specific American generation, the first generation of Sleepless. That generation had certain things in common with the one before, the one that created us. Both generations saw that it’s not possible to have both equality, which is just another name for what you call community solidarity, and individual excellence. When individuals are free to become anything at all, some will become geniuses and some will become resentful beggars. Some will benefit themselves and their communities, and others will benefit no one and just loot whatever they can. Equality disappears. You can’t have both equality and the freedom to pursue individual excellence.

“So two generations chose inequality. My father chose it for me. Kenzo Yagai chose it for the American economy. A man called Calvin Hawke, whom you don’t know about—”

“Yes, I do,” Miri said.

Leisha smiled quietly. “Of course you do. Stupid comment. Well, Hawke picked the side of the born-unequal and tried to even up the equation a little, and excellence be damned. Of all of us, only Tony Indivino and your grandmother tried to create a community that put just as much value on its own solidarity—the ‘equality’ of those who were included as members—as on those members’ individual diverse achievements. Jennifer failed, because it can’t be done. The more Jennifer failed, the more fanatic she became about trying to do this thing,
pushing the blame for all failures onto people who weren’t members of the community. Narrowing the definition more and more. Getting farther and farther away from any kind of balance at all. But I suspect you know even more about that than I do.”

Leisha waited, but Miri said nothing.

“But even while Jennifer got farther and farther away from her dream of community, that dream itself”—
Tony’s dream
—“was admirable. If impossible. It was an idealistic dream of uniting two great human needs, two great human longings. Can’t you forgive your grandmother on the basis of that initial dream?”

“No,” Miri said, her face rigid, and Leisha remembered again how young she was. The young don’t forgive. Had Leisha ever forgiven her own mother?

Miri said, “So that’s why you’re defending her? Because of what you see as her initial dream?”

“Yes.”

Miri stood. The rock had made tiny ridges on the backs of her legs, below her shorts. Her dark eyes bored into Leisha. “In narrowing her definitions of community, my grandmother killed my brother Tony.” She walked away.

Leisha, after a moment of shock, scrambled to her feet and ran barefoot after her. “Miri! Wait!”

Miri stopped, obedient, and turned. There were no tears on her face. Leisha sprinted forward, came down on a sharp rock, and hopped painfully. Miri helped her back to the rock where Leisha’s boots and socks lay limp in the heat.

“Check them for scorpions before you put them on,” Miri ordered, “or they might—why are you smiling?”

“Never mind. I never know what you do or don’t know. Miri—would you exclude me from your categories of defensible behavior? Or Drew? Or your father?”

“No!”

“But all of us have changed our minds over the decades about what
is acceptable, or right, or even desirable. That’s the key, honey. That’s why I’m defending your grandmother.”

“
What’s
the key?” Miri snapped.

“Change. The unpredictable ways events can change people. And Miri, Sleepless live a long time. There’s a lot of time for a lot of events”—
time piling up like dust
—“and that means a lot of change. Even Sleepers can change. When Drew came to me, he was a beggar. Now he’s made a major contribution to the course of the world by the way he changed you Superbrights’ thinking. That’s the answer, Miri. You can’t call anyone indefensible, ever, because things change. Even your grandmother could change. Maybe
especially
your grandmother. Miri? Do you see what I mean?”

“I’ll think about it,” Miri growled.

Leisha sighed. Miri’s thinking about it would be so complex Leisha might not, if she saw the results in string-edifice hologram, even recognize her own argument.

But when Miri had gone back to the house and Leisha had put her boots and socks back on, she sat on the flat rock looking out over the desert, her arms clasped around her knees.

People change. Beggars can become artists. Productive lawyers can become despairing idlers, sulking like Achilles in his tent, sulking for decades, a world-class sulk—and then repass the bar and become lawyers again. Marine experts can become drifters. Sleep researchers can become failed wives, and then transform themselves back into brilliant researchers. Sleepers may not be able to become Sleepless—or could they? Just because Adam Walcott had failed 40 years ago, just because Susan Melling had said the thing was impossible, did that mean it would always be impossible? Susan had never known about the Superbrights.

Tony,
Leisha said silently,
there are no permanent beggars in Spain. Or anywhere else. The beggar you give a dollar to today might change the world tomorrow. Or become father to the man who will. Or grandfather, or great-grandfather. There is no stable ecology of trade, as I thought once, when I was
very young. There is no stable anything, much less stagnant anything, given enough time. And no nonproductive anything, either. Beggars are only gene lines temporarily between communities
.

The kangaroo rat came back out of its burrow and sniffed at a primrose. Leisha had a clear view of the growth on its head. It wasn’t natural. The fur was a different color, and grew in longer tufts; the growth was too perfectly round; the kangaroo rat tilted it forward to touch the tufts to the primrose and paused. The growth was a sensor of some kind. The animal was genemod—here in this distant place, against all rules and expectations.

Leisha tied her boot laces and stood. She suddenly felt wonderful, like the young girl her body still looked. Full of energy. Full of light.

There was so much to do.

She turned toward the compound and started to run.