Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  “My daddy grew up without his daddy and so he grew up rough, him, drinking too much,” Drew said, as if it were an answer. “He hit my mom. He hit my sisters. He hit me. But my mom told me he wouldn’t a been like that, him, if his daddy had lived. He’d a been a different man, him, kind and nice, and it warn’t his fault.”

  Leisha could see it: The abused mother, not yet thirty herself, exonerating the man to his abused children, and eventually coming to believe the excuse herself because she too needed an excuse, to keep from leaving. It wasn’t his fault becomes It isn’t my fault. She spends all her time at brainie parties, Drew had said. There were brainies and there were brainies: Not all met the FDA’s guidelines for either mildness or non-accumulation of side effects.

  “It warn’t my Daddy’s fault,” Drew repeated. “But I figure, it warn’t mine, neither, me. So I had to get out of Montronce.”

  “Yes, but…what do you want?”

  The green eyes changed. Leisha wouldn’t have thought a child could look like that. Hatred, yes—she had seen children’s eyes full of hate. But this wasn’t hate, or anger, or even childish aggrievement. This was a completely adult look, such as not even adults wore much anymore, an old-fashioned look: icy determination.

  Drew said, “I want Sanctuary.”

  “Want it? What do you mean, you want it? To get even? To destroy it? To hurt people?”

  The green eyes softened; they looked amused, an even more adult look, even more disconcerting. Leisha stood up, then sat down again.

  “’Course not, silly,” Drew said. “I wouldn’t hurt nobody, me. I don’t want to destroy Sanctuary.”

  “Then—”

  “Someday, me, I’m gonna own it.”

  THE ALARM SOUNDED ALL OVER THE ORBITAL, loud and unmistakable. Technicians grabbed suits. Mothers picked up the babies shrieking at the noise, and instructed terminals in voices that trembled almost enough to obscure identification. The Sanctuary Exchange immediately froze all transactions; no one would profit from any dimension of the disaster, whatever it was.

  “Get a flyer,” Jennifer said to Will Sandaleros, already in his contamination suit. She pulled on hers and ran out of their dome. This one could be it. Any one of them could be it.

  Will lifted the flyer. As they approached the free-fall zone along the orbital’s center axis, the comlink said, “Fourth panel. It’s a projectile, Will. ’Bots thirty-three seconds away; tech crew a minute and a half. Watch the vacuum pull—”

  “We won’t get there fast enough for that,” Will said crisply. Under the crispness Jennifer heard the satisfaction. Will didn’t like her to rush personally to damage sites. To keep her away, he’d have to tie her down.

  She could see the hole now, a ragged gash in an agricultural panel. The robots were already there, spraying the first coat of tough plastic over the breach, anchored against the outrush of Sanctuary’s precious air by Y-powered suction cups that could have held asteroids together. When a robot had to move, the suction simply cut off in alternate feet. The tech crew flyers spun in gracefully, and the crew in their sanitary suits were out in seconds, spraying the crops in a wide semicircle with a different sealant, one that would not harm anything organic until it could be analyzed at the DNA level, for whatever might be there.

  Weapons were only half the danger; the worse half was contamination. Not all the nations of Earth placed sanctions on genetic research.

  “Where’s the projectile?” Jennifer said over the comlink to the tech chief. His suit had audio only, but he didn’t have to ask who was speaking.

  “H section. They’ve got it sealed. It dented the panel on impact but didn’t puncture.” That was good; the projectile was available for analysis without retrieving it from space. “What does it look like?”

  “Meteor.”

  “Maybe,” Jennifer said and Will, beside her, nodded. She was glad it was Will. Sometimes it was Ricky when damage happened, and that was always tiresome.

  Will flew more slowly back across the orbital. He was a good pilot, and proud of his skill. Below them Sanctuary stretched—fields and domes, roads and power plants, window panels continuously cleaned by the tiny ’bots that did nothing else. Bright warm artificial sunshine suffused the air with golden haze. As they landed, the spicy smell of soyflowers, the newest decorative edible, wafted toward Jennifer.

  “I want the Council assembled to hear the lab reports,” she said.

  Will, out of his helmet, looked first startled, then comprehending. “I’ll call them.”

  You could never rest. The Quran and United States history agreed on at least that one point: “And they who fulfill their covenant and endure with fortitude misfortune, hardship, and peril—these are they who are true in their faith.” And then, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

  Not that Sanctuary had genuine liberty.

  Jennifer stood before her Council. Ricky looked at her face, and his own grew set. Najla stared out the window. Councilor Lin leaned forward; Councilor Ames held her hands tightly clasped together on the metal table.

  “The lab reports are all negative,” Jennifer said. “This time. The composition of the projectile is consistent with J-class meteors, although that of course does not rule out its capture and subsequent use as a weapon. It appeared to contain no active microbes, and such spores as were found are consistent with J-class. The soil does not contain any foreign microbes, genetically altered or otherwise, that we could identify, although of course that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, hidden through DNA mimicry with gene triggers for later activation.”

  “Mother,” Ricky said carefully, “nobody but us is capable of that level of genetic work. And even we’re not very good at it yet.”

  Jennifer smiled brilliantly at him. “No one we know about.”

  “We monitor every lab on Earth, practically, through data-tapping—”

  “Note the word ‘practically,’” Jennifer said. “We don’t actually know we have them all, do we?”

  Ricky shifted position in his chair. He was thirty-one, a stocky man with thick hair over a low brow and dark eyes. “Mother, this is the sixteenth damage alert in two years, and not one of them has been an attack. Eight meteor hits, with three punctures. Three temporary malfunctions, almost immediately corrected. Two spontaneous microbe mutations from the space radiation we can’t do a thing about. One—”

  “Sixteen we know about,” Jennifer said. “Can you guarantee that right now there are not DNA-mimetic microbes in the air you’re breathing? That your baby is breathing?”

  Councilor Ames said timidly, “But in the absence of proof—”

  “Political proof is a beggar concept,” Jennifer said. “You don’t know that, Lucy, because you’ve never been on Earth. The concept of scientific proof is perverted there, used selectively to advance whatever cause the government is espousing to make claims on its betters. They can ‘prove’ anything, in their courts of law, in their newsgrids, in their financial dealings. What were your taxes last year to the IRS, Lucy? To New York State? And what did you get back in return? Yet the president of the United States would offer you proof that you have an obligation to support the weak by paying them, and further proof that if you don’t, his military has the right to seize or destroy the very facilities you use to support your life and the life of your community.”

  “But,” Councilor Ames said, bewildered, “Sanctuary pays its taxes. They’re unfair, but we pay them.”

  Jennifer did not answer. After a moment Will Sandaleros said smoothly, “Yes. We do.”

  Ricky Keller said, “The point is, none of these damage incidents have been attacks. Yet our assumption always is that they are, and even evidence to the contrary is suspect. Have we carried this paranoia too far?”

  Jennifer looked at her son. Strong, loyal, productive, a member of the community to be proud of. She was proud of him. She loved him and Najla as much as when they had been children, but her love had done them a disservice. She kne
w that now. Through her protection, her fierce shielding of them from what the beggars could do, they had grown up too secure. They didn’t understand how it was, outside this enclave where community was strength, safety, survival, and where strength and safety and survival let a person use his talents for the fulfillment of his life. Her children did not understand the clawing, hot-eyed hatred the beggars felt toward that attitude, because beggars could never fulfill their own lives without looting the lives of their betters. Ricky and Najla had seen that only secondhand, in newsgrid broadcasts from Earth, and then usually contemporary broadcasts. Like wild animals who have eaten to satiety, the beggars were relatively quiet now under the Dole, under the absence of Sleepless before their very eyes. They dozed in the sun of cheap Y-energy, and it was easy to forget how dangerous they really were. Especially if, like her children, you had spent most of your life in safety.

  Jennifer would never forget. She would remember for all of them.

  She said, “Vigilance is not paranoia. And trust outside the community is not a survival skill. It could endanger us all.”

  Ricky said nothing more; he would never endanger the community. None of them, Jennifer knew, would ever do that.

  “I have a proposal to put in front of you,” Jennifer said. Will, the only one who knew what she was going to say, grew taut. Ready.

  “All our safety measures are defensive. Not even retaliatory defensive, merely damage-control defensive. But the core of our existence is the survival of the community and its rights, and among the rights of the community is self-defense. It’s time for Sanctuary to develop bargaining power through defensive weapons. We’ve been prevented from doing that by the careful international monitoring of every Sanctuary transaction with Earth, no matter how covert. The only way we’ve kept the beggars out of here for twenty-four years is by never giving the slightest legal excuse for the issuance of a search warrant.”

  Jennifer searched her audience’s faces, tallying: Will and Victor Lin solidly with her—that was good, Lin was influential; three more listening with receptive body language; three closed and frowning; eight with the faces of surprise or uncertainty, including young Lucy Ames. And both her children.

  She went on composedly, “The only way to both prevent penetration of Sanctuary by Sleepers and to create defensive weapons is through the use of our one undeniably superior technology: genetics. We’ve already done that with the new genemods for Miranda and the other children. Now we need to think about using our strength to create defensive weapons.”

  A storm of protest broke out. She and Will had expected this. Sanctuary, a refuge, had no military tradition. They listened carefully, not so much for the arguments as for the alliances. Who might be persuaded, who would never be, who was open to what moves along the decision tree. All the moves would be open and legitimate: community above all. But communities changed. The eight non-family councilors held their seats for only two years. And even family composition was open to change. Lars Johnson was Najla’s second husband; she might have a third, or Ricky might have a new wife. And at sixteen, the next generation would take voting seats on the Council. Sixteen, for a genemod Sleepless, was old enough to make intelligent choices; Miranda’s choices would be superintelligent.

  Jennifer and Will could wait. They would force no one. That was the way a community worked. Not among the beggars, but here, in Sanctuary, that was the way the community worked. It worked through the slow shaping of consensus among the members, the productive who were entitled to their individual viewpoints because they were productive. Jennifer could wait for her community to take action.

  But the Sharifi Labs research facilities did not belong to the community. They were hers, built and financed with her money, not the Sanctuary Corporation funds. And what was hers could begin work immediately. That way, the biological weapons would be ready when the community needed them.

  “I think,” Najla said, “that we should discuss this in terms of the next generation. What relationships will we have with the federal government twenty years down the line? If we feed all the variables into the Geary-Tollers social-dynamics equations…”

  Her daughter. Bright, productive, committed. Jennifer smiled across the table at Najla with love. She would protect her daughter.

  And start the research on genemod bioweapons.

  DREW HAD TWO PROBLEMS AT LEISHA’S PLACE IN THE DESERT: Eric Bevington-Watrous and food.

  The way he figured it, nobody but him even knew these were problems. On the other hand, they thought he had all kinds of problems that Drew himself didn’t see as bothersome at all. They thought he was worried by the strange manners, the confusing number of people to keep straight, the donkey talk he’d never heard before, the need to sleep that only a few others shared, and the time he had to wait, doing nothing until September when they shipped him off to the donkey school they were paying for.

  None of these were problems for Drew, especially the doing nothing. Nobody in his short life had ever done otherwise. But doing nothing, he saw on the first day, was not going to keep the scooter up in this place. Not here. These people were afraid of doing nothing.

  So he kept busy, and made sure everybody saw him keeping busy, at all the things they thought were his problems. He learned the names of everybody in the compound—that’s what they called it, a “compound,” which up till that very minute Drew had thought was a double fuck at a brainie party, something he had once observed with great interest. He learned how they were related: Leisha and her sister, the old lady with a stroke who was a Sleeper, and her Sleeper son Jordan and his Sleepless wife Stella, whom Drew saw pretty quick he had better call “Mr. Watrous” and “Mrs. Bevington-Watrous.” That’s just the way they were. They had three kids, Alicia and Eric and Seth. Alicia was grown-up—she might be as old as eighteen—but not married, which Drew thought strange. In Montronce, women of eighteen usually had their first baby. Maybe donkeys were different.

  There were other people, too, mostly Sleepless but not always, who lived there. Drew learned what all these people did—law and money and donkey things like that—and he tried to stay interested. When he couldn’t stay interested he tried to at least stay useful, running errands and asking people if they needed anything. “Obsequious little lackey,” he heard Alicia say once, but then the old lady cut her off pretty sharp by saying, “Don’t you dare misunderstand him, young lady. He’s doing the best he can with the genes he’s got, and I won’t have you trampling on his feelings!” Drew hadn’t felt trampled; he didn’t know what either “obsequious” or “lackey” meant. But he’d learned that the old lady liked him, and after that he spent a lot of time doing things for her, who after all needed it the most anyway since she was so old.

  “Are you by any chance a twin, Drew?” she asked him once. She was working, very slowly, at a terminal.

  “No, ma’am,” he answered promptly. The idea gave him crawlies. Nobody else was like him!

  “Ah,” the old lady said, smiling a little. “Determinedly discontinuous.”

  They used a lot of words he didn’t understand: words, ideas, manners. They talked about the shift of electoral power—what kind was that? Was it different from Y-energy? About genemod diatoms feeding Madagascar, about the advantages of circumlunar orbitals compared to the older circumterrestial ones. They told him to cut his meat with fork and knife, not talk with his mouth full, say thank you even for stuff he didn’t want. He did it all. They told him he had to learn to read, and he worked at the terminal every day, even though it was slow scooting and he didn’t see how he would ever use it. Terminals spoke you whatever you wanted to know, and when there were words on the screen there wasn’t as much room for graphics. Graphics made more sense to Drew than words anyway. They always had. He felt things in graphics, colors and shapes in the bottom of his brain that somehow floated up to the top and filled his head. The old lady was a spiral, brown and rust-colored; the desert at night filled him with soft sliding purple. Like that. Bu
t they said to learn to read, so he did.

  They said to get along with Eric Bevington-Watrous, too, but that was harder than the reading. And it was Eric who first noticed Drew’s problem with the food. He was smart; they were all so fucking smart.

  “Having trouble with real food, aren’t you,” Eric taunted him. “Used to that Liver soysynth stuff, and real food rips at your gut. Why don’t you shit it out right here, you mannerless little vermin?”

  “What’s your problem, you?” Drew said quietly. Eric had followed him to the enormous cottonwood by the creek, a place Drew liked to be alone. Now he stood, tensed, and started a slow turn to get the water at his back.

  “You’re my problem, vermin,” Eric said. “You’re a parasite here. You don’t contribute, you don’t belong, you can’t read, you can’t even eat. You aren’t even clean. Why don’t you just take a walk into the ocean and let the waves wipe your ass!”

  As Drew slowly turned, Eric did too. That was good: Eric might have twenty pounds and two years on him, but he didn’t know how to maneuver for fighting advantage. The sun appeared over Drew’s left shoulder. He kept turning.

  He said, “I don’t see you contributing so fucking much, you. Your grandmom says you’re the biggest worry she got, her.”

  Eric’s face turned purple. “You never talk about me with my own family!” he yelled, and charged forward.

  Drew dropped to one knee, ready to leverage Eric over one shoulder and throw him into the creek. But just before Eric reached Drew, he leapt into the air, a controlled leap that brought instant sickening waves through Drew’s chest: he had made a bad mistake. Eric was trained; it was just a kind of training Drew hadn’t recognized. The toe of Eric’s boot caught Drew under the chin. Pain exploded through his jaw. His head whipped backward and he felt something snap in his spine. The force of the kick hurtled him backward, over the shallow embankment into the creek.