Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  Twenty years ago, for one moment, it had seemed as if it might be different between them. But now…

  Twenty-two thousand Sleepless on Earth, 95 percent of them in the United States. Eighty percent of those within Sanctuary. And since nearly all Sleepless babies were now born, not created in vitro, most Sleepless were now born inside Sanctuary. Parents across the country continued to purchase other genetic alterations: enhanced IQ, sharpened sight, a strong immune system, high cheekbones—anything at all, it sometimes seemed to Leisha, within the legal parameters, no matter how trivial. But not Sleeplessness. Genetic alterations were expensive; why purchase for your beloved baby a lifetime of bigotry, prejudice, and physical danger? Better to choose an assimilated genemod. Beautiful or brainy children might encounter natural envy, but usually not virulent hatred. They were not viewed as a different race, one endlessly conspiring at power, endlessly controlling behind the scenes, endlessly feared and scorned. The Sleepless, Leisha had written for a national magazine, were to the twenty-first century what Jews had been to the fourteenth.

  Twenty years of legal fighting to change that perception, and nothing had changed.

  “I am tired,” Leisha said experimentally, aloud. The pilot didn’t turn around; he wasn’t much for conversation. The foothills, unchanging, continued to slide away 20,000 feet below.

  Leisha unfolded her work station. It accomplished no good to be tired: not of the troubling gulf between her and Alice, not of Calvin Hawke in the fight behind her, not of Sanctuary in the fight ahead. They would all still be there. And meanwhile, she could at least get some work done. Three more hours to upstate New York, two back to Chicago, enough time to finish the brief for Calder v. Hansen Metallurgy. She had a client meeting in Chicago at 4:00 P.M., a deposition at 5:30 P.M., another client meeting at 8:00 P.M., and then the rest of the night to prepare for trial tomorrow. She might just fit everything in.

  The law was the one thing she never tired of. The one thing—despite twenty years of the inevitable crap that went with its practice—she still believed in. A society with a functioning, reasonably uncorrupted (say, 80 percent) judicial system was a society that still believed in itself.

  More cheerful now, Leisha settled into a knotty question of prima facie assumption. But the book still lay on the seat, distracting her, along with Alice’s question, and her unspoken answer.

  In April 1864 Lincoln had written to Kentuckian A. G. Hodges. The northern states were enraged over the racial massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow, the federal treasury was nearly empty, the war was costing the Union two million dollars a day. Daily Lincoln was reviled in the press; weekly he was locked in combat with Congress. In the next month Grant would lose 10,000 men at Cold Harbor, more at Spotsylvania Courthouse. Lincoln wrote to Hodges, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

  Leisha shoved her book under the seat of the plane and bent over her workstation, leaning into the law.

  JENNIFER SHARIFI RAISED HER FOREHEAD FROM THE GROUND, rose gracefully, and bent to roll up her prayer rug. The rough mountain grass was slightly wet; blades clung crookedly to the underside of the rug. Holding it away from the white folds of her abbaya, Jennifer walked across the small clearing in the woods to her aircar. Her long, unbound black hair stirred in the faint wind.

  Alight plane streaked overhead. Jennifer frowned: Leisha Camden, already. Jennifer was late.

  Let Leisha wait. Or let Richard deal with her. Jennifer had not wanted Leisha here in the first place. Why should Sanctuary welcome a woman who worked against it at every turn? Even the Quran, in its quaint pre-globalnet simplicity, was explicit about traitors: “Whosoever commits aggression against you, you commit/ him like as he has committed against you.”

  The small plane with the Baker Enterprises logo disappeared into the trees.

  Jennifer slipped into her car, her mind busy with the rest of the day ahead. Were it not for the solace and quiet of morning and afternoon prayer, she didn’t think she could face some of her days. “But you have no religious faith,” Richard had said, smiling, “you’re not even a believer.” Jennifer hadn’t tried to explain to him that religious belief was not the point. The will to believe created its own power, its own faith, and, ultimately, its own will. Through the practice of faith, whatever its specific rituals, one brought into existence the object of that faith. The believer became the Creator.

  I believe, Jennifer said each dawn and each noon, kneeling on the grass or the leaves or the snow, in Sanctuary.

  She shaded her eyes, trying to see exactly where Leisha’s plane had disappeared. It was being tracked, Jennifer assumed, by both the Langdon sensors and the antiaircraft lasers. She lifted her aircar, flying well under the Y-field dome.

  What would her paternal great-grandmother, Najla Fatima Noor el-Dahar, have said about a faith such as hers? On the other hand, her maternal great-grandmother, whose granddaughter became an American movie star, had herself survived as an Irish immigrant turned Brooklyn cleaning lady and thus probably understood something about power and will.

  Not that great-grandmothers, anybody’s great-grandmothers, mattered any longer. Nor grandfathers nor fathers. A new race had always been required to sacrifice its roots to its own survival. Zeus, Jennifer would guess, had mourned neither Cronus nor Rhea.

  Sanctuary spread below her in the morning sun. In twenty-two years it had grown to nearly 300 square miles, occupying a fifth of Cattaraugus County, New York. Jennifer had acquired the Allegany Indian Reservation, immediately after the repeal of Congressional trust restrictions. She had paid a sum that made the Seneca tribe that sold it comfortable in Manhattan, Paris, and Dallas. There hadn’t actually been very many Senecas left to sell; not all threatened groups, Jennifer well knew, had the adaptable skills of the Sleepless—skills such as buying land when the owners were initially reluctant to sell. Or acquiring antiaircraft lasers on the international arms market. Or, if those other groups did have these skills, they lacked the cause to make them focused and clean and holy. To call survival itself what it actually was: a holy war. Jihad.

  Allegany had been unique among Native American reservations in containing an entire non-Indian city, Salamanca, leased from the Senecas by city residents since 1892. Salamanca had been included in Jennifer’s purchase. The lessees all had received eviction notices, and after multiple court fights for which Salamanca residents had little money and Sanctuary had the donated services of the best Sleepless lawyers in the country, the city’s outdated buildings, gutted, had become the shells of Sanctuary’s high-tech city—research hospital, college, securities exchange, power and maintenance centers, and the most sophisticated telecommunications in existence, all surrounded by ecologically maintained woodland.

  In the distance, beyond Sanctuary’s gates, Jennifer could see the daily line of trucks toiling up the mountain road, bringing in food, building materials, low-tech supplies—everything Sanctuary would rather import than produce, which included everything nonchallenging, nonprofitable, or nonessential. Not that Sanctuary was dependent on the daily trucks. It had enough of everything to run self-sufficiently for a year, if necessary. It wouldn’t be necessary. Sleepless controlled too many factories, distribution channels, agricultural research projects, commodity exchanges, and law offices on the Outside. Sanctuary had not ever been planned as a survivalist retreat; it was a fortified command center.

  The airfield groundcar was already parked in front of the house Jennifer shared with her husband and two children at the edge of Argus City. The house was a geodesic dome, graceful and efficient, but not opulent. Build the security facilities first, Tony Indivino had argued twenty-two years ago. Then build the technical and educational facilities, then the storage warehouses, and the individual dwellings last. Only now was Sanctuary getting around to new individual dwellings.

  Jennifer adjusted the folds of her abbaya, took a deep breath, and entered her house.

  Leisha st
ood by the southern glass wall of the living room, staring at the gold-framed holo portrait of Tony, who stared back from smiling, youthful eyes. Sunlight caught in Leisha’s blonde hair and blazed. When she heard Jennifer and turned, Leisha was backlit by the windows and Jennifer couldn’t see her expression.

  The two women stared at each other.

  “Jennifer.”

  “Hello, Leisha.”

  “You’re looking well.”

  “As are you.”

  “And Richard? How are he and the kids?”

  “Fine, thank you,” Jennifer said.

  There was a silence, prickly as heat.

  Leisha said, “I think you know why I’m here.”

  “Why, no, I don’t,” Jennifer said, although of course she did. Sanctuary monitored the movements of all Sleepless who remained outside, but none more than Leisha Camden and Kevin Baker.

  Leisha made a brief, impatient noise. “Don’t be evasive with me, Jennifer. If we can’t agree on anything else, let’s at least agree to be honest.”

  She never changed, Jennifer thought. All that intelligence, all that experience, and yet she did not change. A triumph of naive idealism over both intelligence and experience.

  The deliberately blind deserved not to see.

  “All right, Leisha. We’ll be honest. You’re here to find out if yesterday’s attack on the We-Sleep textile factory in Atlanta originated in Sanctuary.”

  Leisha stared before she exploded. “Good God, Jennifer, of course I’m not! Don’t you think I know you don’t fight that way? Especially not against a low-tech operation grossing less than half a million annual?”

  Jennifer muffled a smile; the pairing of objections, moral and economic, was pure Leisha. And of course Sanctuary hadn’t directed the attack. The We-Sleep people were insignificant. She said, “I’m relieved to hear your opinion of us has improved.”

  Leisha waved her arm. Inadvertently, her hand brushed Tony’s holo; the image turned its head in her direction. “My opinion is irrelevant, as you’ve made clear enough. I’m here because Kevin gave me this.” She pulled hard-copy from her pocket and thrust it at Jennifer, who realized with a nasty jolt what it was.

  She made her face impassive, realizing too late that impassivity would tell Leisha just as much as emotion. How had Leisha and Kevin gotten the hard-copy? Her mind ran over the possibilities, but she wasn’t a datanet expert. She would have to pull Will Rinaldi and Cassie Blumenthal off their other projects immediately to go over the entire net for gates and bubbles and geysers…

  “Don’t bother,” Leisha said. “Kevin’s wizards didn’t get it off the Sanctuary net. This was mailed to me—to me directly—by one of your own.”

  That was even worse. Someone inside Sanctuary, someone who secretly sided with the Sleeper-lovers, someone who was without the ability to recognize a war of survival… Unless of course Leisha was lying. But Jennifer had never caught Leisha in a lie. It was part of Leisha’s pathetic, dangerous naivete to prefer unadjusted truth.

  Leisha crumpled the paper in her hand and threw it across the living room. “How could you divide us further like this, Jennifer? Set up a separate Sleepless Council in secret, with membership limited to those who take this so-called oath of solidarity; ‘I vow to hold the interests of Sanctuary above all other loyalties, personal, political, and economic, and to pledge, to its survival and so to my own, my life, fortune, and sacred honor.’ Good God—what an unholy alliance of religious fanaticism and the Declaration of Independence! But you always did have a tin ear!”

  Jennifer gazed at her impassively. “You are being stupid.” It was the worst epithet either of them had. “Only you and Kevin and your handful of soft-minded doves don’t see that this is a war of survival. War demands clearly drawn lines, especially for strategic information. We can’t afford voting privileges for the fifth column.”

  Leisha’s eyes narrowed. “This is not a war. A war is attack and response. If we don’t counterattack, if we go on being productive and law-abiding citizens, eventually we’ll win assimilation by sheer economic power—like every other newly-franchised group. But not if we split into factions like this! You used to know that, Jenny!”

  She said sharply, “Don’t call me that!” Just barely did she stop herself from glancing at Tony’s picture.

  Leisha didn’t apologize.

  More calmly, Jennifer added, “Assimilation doesn’t come with economic power alone. It’s won by political power, which we don’t have, and in a democracy never will have. There aren’t enough of us to form a significant voting bloc. You used to know that.”

  “You’ve already set up the strongest covert lobby in Washington. You buy the votes you need. Political power flows from money, it always has; the concept of society is about money. Any values we want to change or advocate, we have to change or advocate within the framework of money. And we are. But how can we advocate a single trade ecology for Sleeper and Sleepless if you split us into warring factions?”

  “We wouldn’t be split if you and yours could recognize a war when you saw one.”

  “I recognize hatred when I see it. It’s in your stupid oath.”

  They had reached an impasse, the same old impasse. Jennifer crossed the room to the bar. Her black hair floated behind her. “Would you like a drink, Leisha?”

  “Jennifer…” Leisha said, and stopped. After a moment, with a visible effort, she went on. “If your Sanctuary Council becomes a reality…you’ll shut us out. Me and Kevin and Jean-Claude and Stella and the others. We won’t have a voting voice in statements to the media, we won’t be included in governance decisions, we won’t even be able to help with the new Sleepless kids because nobody who takes the oath will be allowed to use Groupnet, only the Sanctuary net… What’s next? A boycott on doing business with any of us?”

  Jennifer didn’t answer, and Leisha said slowly, “Oh my God. You are. You are thinking of an economic boycott…”

  “That would not be my decision. It would take the whole Sanctuary Council. I doubt they would vote such a boycott.”

  “But you would.”

  “I was never a Yagaiist, Leisha. I don’t believe in the predominance of individual excellence over the welfare of the community. Both are important.”

  “This isn’t about Yagaiism and you know it. This is about control, Jennifer. You hate everything you can’t control—just like the worst of the Sleepers do. But you go farther than they do. You make control into something holy because you need holiness as well. This is all about what you, Jennifer Sharifi, need. Not what the community needs.”

  Jennifer walked from the room, gripping her hands together to keep them from shaking. It was her own fault, of course, that any other person had enough power over her to cause them to shake. A fault, a weakness, that she had failed to root out. Her failure. In the hall her children barreled into her from their playroom.

  “Mom! Come see what we built!”

  Jennifer put one hand on each of their heads. There was a knot somewhere in Najla’s coarse hair. Ricky’s, darker than his older sister’s but finer, felt like cool silk. Jennifer’s hands steadied.

  The children caught sight of the living room. “Aunt Leisha! Aunt Leisha’s here!” Their hair left Jennifer’s fingers. “Aunt Leisha, come see what we built on CAD!”

  “Of course,” Jennifer heard Leisha’s voice say. “I want to. But let me just ask your mother one more thing.”

  Jennifer didn’t turn around. If the traitor Inside had mailed Leisha notice of the oath of solidarity, what else had she been mailed?

  But all Leisha said was, “Did Richard receive the subpoena for Simpson v. Offshore Fishing?”

  “Yes. He did. He’s preparing his expert testimony now, in fact.”

  “Good,” Leisha said bleakly.

  Ricky looked from Leisha to his mother. His voice had lost some of its exuberance. “Mom…should I go get Dad? Aunt Leisha will want to see Dad…won’t she?”

  Jennifer smiled
at her son. She could feel the lavishness of her own smile, lush with relief. Offshore fishing rights: Almost she could pity Leisha. Her days were given to such triviality. “Yes, of course, Ricky,” she said, turning the lavish smile on Leisha, “go get your father. Your Aunt Leisha will want to visit with him. Of course she will.”

  9

  “LEISHA,” SAID THE RECEPTIONIST IN HER LAW OFFICE, “This gentleman has been waiting to see you for three hours. He doesn’t have an appointment. I told him you might not even be back today, but he stayed anyway.”

  The man stood, lurching a little with the stiffness of someone who has held muscles too long in one tense position. He was short and thin, oddly wispy, dressed in a rumpled brown suit that was neither cheap nor expensive. In one hand he held a folded kiosk tabloid. Sleeper, Leisha thought. She always knew.

  “Leisha Camden?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not seeing any new clients. If you need a lawyer, you’ll need to ask elsewhere.”

  “I think you’ll take this case,” the man said, surprising her. His voice was considerably less wispy than his appearance. “At any rate, you’ll want to know about it. Please give me ten minutes.” He opened the tabloid and held it out to her. On the front page was her picture with Calvin Hawke, over the headline, “Sleepless Worried Enough to Investigate We-Sleep Movement… Have We Got Them on the Run?”

  Now she knew why Hawke had permitted her to visit the scooter factory.

  “It says this picture was taken this morning,” the man said. “My, my, my,” and Leisha knew he did not work in telecommunications.

  “Come into my office, Mr…”

  “Adam Walcott. Dr. Adam Walcott.”

  “A medical doctor?”

  He looked directly at her. His eyes were a pale, milky blue, like frosted glass. “Genetic researcher.”

  The sun was setting over Lake Michigan. Leisha transluced the glass wall, sat down opposite Dr. Walcott, and waited.

  Walcott twisted his legs, which were remarkably spindly, into pretzels around the legs of his chair. “I work for a private research firm, Ms. Camden. Samplice Biotechnical. We develop refinements on genetic modeling and alteration and offer these products to the bigger houses that do in vitro gene altering. We developed the Pastan procedure for preternaturally sharp hearing.”