Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  Ms. Patterson said in a funny voice, “And that’s a reasonable analogy. Meteor does bear a definable relationship to orbital: one natural and inhuman, one constructed and human.”

  Miri wasn’t sure what all Ms. Patterson’s words meant. This wasn’t going right. Ms. Patterson looked a little scary, and Joan looked lost. She plunged ahead anyway. “Th-then f-f-for ‘b-b-baby,’ the f-f-first str-string l-l-leads to ‘sm-small.’ Th-that leads t-t-to ‘p-protect,’ l-l-like I d-do T-T-Tony, b-b-b-because he’s sm-smaller than m-m-m-m-me and m-might g-get h-h-hurt if he c-climbs t-t-too h-h-h-high. Then the l-l-little str-string g-goes to ‘c-c-community’ b-b-because the c-community pr-protects p-p-p-p-people, and the f-fourth little str-str-string h-has to g-g-go t-to ‘p-people’ b-because a c-c-community is p-people, and b-b-b-because it w-was that w-way upside d-d-down under ‘pl-plastic,’ and a l-l-l-lot of our orbital is m-m-m-made of p-plastic.”

  Ms. Patterson still had her funny voice. “So at the end of three sets of four strings—Joan, don’t change the terminal screen just yet—at the end of these strings of yours, the problem reads ‘meteor is to orbital as people is to blank.’ And you typed in ‘God.’”

  “Y-y-yes,” Miri said, more happily now—Ms. Patterson did understand!—“b-b-because an orbital is an in-invented c-c-community, wh-while a m-m-meteor is j-just b-bare r-rock, and G-G-God is a pl-planned c-c-community of m-m-m-m-minds, while p-p-people alone are j-j-just one by one b-bare.”

  Ms. Patterson took her to Grandma. Miri had to explain the whole thing all over again, but this time it was easier because Grandma drew the design while Miri talked. Miri wondered why she hadn’t thought of this herself. The drawing let her put in all the cross-connections and it was much clearer that way, even if some of the lines she drew were wobbly because the light pen in her fist wouldn’t go as straight as the picture in her mind.

  When she was done, the drawing looked very simple to her. But, then, it was simple, just a little set of strings to practice reading:

  doll: plastic baby: ?

  ↓ ↓

  toy: invented small:

  ↓ ↓

  pretend: people protect:

  ↓ ↓

  shooting star: community community:

  ↓ ↓

  meteor: orbital people: God

  AFTERWARD, GRANDMA WAS QUIET A LONG TIME.

  “Miri, do you always think this way? In strings that make designs?”

  “Y-y-yes,” Miri said, astonished. “D-d-don’t y-you?”

  Grandma didn’t answer that. “Why did you want to type in the analogy that exists four little strings down on the terminal?”

  “Y-you m-m-mean instead of ei-eight or t-t-ten str-strings d-d-down?” Miri said, and Grandma’s eyes got very wide.

  “Instead of…of no strings down. The one the terminal wanted. Didn’t you know that was what it wanted?”

  “Y-yes. B-but…” Miri squirmed in her chair “…I g-g-g-get b-bored with the t-t-top str-strings. S-s-sometimes.”

  “Ah,” Grandma said. After another long silence she said, “Where did you hear that God is a planned community of minds?”

  “On a n-n-newsgrid. M-M-Mommy w-was pl-playing it whwh-when I w-was h-h-h-home for a v-v-visit.”

  “I see.” Grandma stood. “You are very special, Miri.”

  “T-T-Tony is t-t-too. And N-N-Nikos and Ch-Christina and Al-Al-Allen and S-Sara. G-G-Grandma, w-will the n-n-new b-baby M-M-Mommy w-wants to h-h-have be sp-special wh-when it’s b-b-b-born?”

  “Yes.”

  “W-will it t-t-twitch l-like we d-d-d-do? And st-st-stutter? And eat s-s-so m-m-m-much?”

  “Yes.”

  “And th-think in str-str-strings?”

  “Yes,” Grandma said, and Miri always remembered the expression on her face.

  THERE WERE NO MORE NEWSGRID BROADCASTS FROM EARTH. They had never come into the nursery, only into Mommy and Daddy’s dome, but now Miri never saw them there either. “When you are older,” Grandma said. “There are beggar ideas you’ll have to encounter soon enough, but not just yet. Learn first what’s right.”

  It was Grandma, or sometimes Grandpa Will, who decided what was right. Daddy was gone a lot on business. Mommy was often there, but sometimes it seemed to Miri she didn’t want to be. She would turn her head away from Miri and Tony when they entered a room.

  “It’s b-b-because w-we t-tw-twitch and st-stutter,” she said to Tony. “M-M-M-Mommy d-d-doesn’t-like us.”

  Tony started to cry. Miri put her arms around him and cried too, but she wouldn’t take the words back. They were true; Mommy was too beautiful to like anyone who twitched and stuttered and drooled, and truth was paramount to a community. “I’m y-your c-c-c-community,” she told Tony, and that was an interesting sentence because it was both true and of limited truth, with substrings and cross-connections that went down sixteen strings and formed a pattern that drew on what she had been learning in mathematics and astronomy and biology, a glorious pattern intricate and balanced as the molecular structure of a crystal. The pattern was almost worth Tony’s tears. Almost.

  As she grew older, however, Miri began to feel there was something missing in her patterns. She couldn’t tell what. She had drawn a number of them for Grandma and Dr. Toliveri, until they got so complicated she knew she was leaving things out. Besides, every time she drew a string pattern, thinking and drawing it made new patterns, each with multilevel strings and crosshatching of their own, and there was no way to draw those, too, because if she did, drawing them would just generate more. Drawing and explaining could never keep up with thinking, and Miri grew impatient with the attempts to try.

  She understood, by the time she was eight, the biology of what had been done to her and the others like her. SuperSleepless, they were called. She understood, too, that it must never be allowed to interfere with the twin truths Sanctuary was built on: productivity and community. To be productive was to be fully human. To share your productivity with the community in strict fairness was to create strength and protection for all. Anyone who would try to violate either truth—to reap the benefits of community without in turn contributing productively to it—was obscene, an inhuman beggar. Miri recoiled from the thought. No one could be that morally repulsive. On Earth, yes, which was full of what Grandma called beggars in Spain, some of whom were even Sleepless. But never in Sanctuary.

  The alterations to her nervous system—to Tony’s, Christina’s, Allen’s, Mark’s, Joanna’s—were to make her more productive, more use to the community and herself, more intelligent than humans had been before. They were all taught that, even the non-Supers, and eventually they all accepted it. Joan and Miri played together, now, every day. Miri was filled with gratitude.

  But much as she liked Joan, much as she admired Joan’s long brown curls and ability to play the guitar and high sweet laugh, Miri knew that it was with her own kind, the other Supers, that she felt the most community. She tried to hide this; it was wrong. Except for Tony, of course, who was her brother, and who one day would, with her and baby Ali—who had turned out to not be a Super after all, despite what Grandma said—join the Sharifi voting block that controlled 51 percent of Sanctuary stock, plus the family economic holdings. These were the things that guaranteed they were not beggars.

  The economic structure of Sanctuary interested her. Everything interested her. She learned to play chess, and for a month refused to do anything else—the game let you make dozens of generations of strings, all intricately knotted to your opponent’s string! But after a month, chess palled. There were, after, all, only two sets of strings involved, even though they got very long.

  Neurology interested her more. The brain had a hundred billion neurons, each with multiple receptor sites for neurotransmitters, of which there were so many variants that the strings you could construct were nearly infinite. By the time Miri was ten she was conducting experiments in neurotransmitter dosage, using herself and the willing Tony as primary subjects, Christ
ina and Nikos as controls. Dr. Toliveri encouraged her. “Soon you will be contributing yourself, Miranda, to the next generation of Supers!”

  But it was all not enough. There was still something missing in her strings, something Miri felt so obscurely she could not discuss it with anyone but Tony, who, it turned out, didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “Y-y-you m-mean, M-Miri, s-some str-str-strings h-have weak p-p-p-places d-due to insufficient d-d-databases t-to draw c-concepts fr-fr-from?”

  She heard the spoken words, but she also heard more: the strings that came with them, the Tony-strings in his own head, which she could guess at because she knew him so well. He sat supporting his big head in his hands, as they all frequently did, his mouth and eyelids and temples twitching, the thick dark hair jerking rhythmically over his forehead with the convulsions of his body. His strings were lovely, strong and sharp, but Miri knew that they were not as long as hers, or as complex in their crosshatching. He was nine years old.

  “N-n-no,” she said slowly, “n-not insufficient d-d-databases. M-more l-l-l-like—a s-space where another d-d-d-dimension of st-strings should g-g-go.”

  “A th-third d-d-dimension of thought,” he said, with pleasure. “G-g-great. B-but—wh-wh-why? It all f-fits in t-t-two d-dimensions. S-s-s-simplicity of d-design is s-s-s-superiority of design.”

  She heard the strings on that one: Occam’s razor, minimalism, program elegance, geometric theorems. She waved her hand, clumsily. None of them were physically very deft; they tended to avoid research that required handling many materials, and to spend time programming robowaldos when such handling couldn’t be avoided. “I d-d-ddon’t kn-know.”

  Tony hugged her. No words were necessary between them, and that was a third language, an addition to the simplicity of words and the complexity of strings, and better than either.

  JENNIFER FOR ONCE LOOKED SHAKEN.

  “How could it happen?” Councilor Perrilleon said. He looked as white as Jennifer.

  The doctor, a young woman still in recyclable steriles, shook her head. Blood stained the front of her smock. She had come right from the hospital delivery room to Jennifer, who had called an emergency Council session. The doctor looked close to tears. She had returned to Sanctuary only two months ago from the Earth medical training that was still mandatory, much thinner than when she had left.

  Perrilleon said, “Have you filed the birth certificate yet?”

  “No,” the doctor said. She was intelligent, Jennifer thought, as well as capable. The horror around the table did not lessen, but over it crept an almost imperceptible relaxation. There was no official transmission yet to Washington.

  “Then we have a little time,” Jennifer said.

  “If we weren’t still tied to the New York State and United States governments, we’d have more time,” Perrilleon said. “Filing birth certificates, receiving a security Dole number—” he snorted “—being entered in the tax rolls—”

  “None of that counts just now,” Ricky said, a little impatiently.

  “Yes, it does,” Perrilleon insisted. Jennifer saw his long face set into stubborn lines. He was seventy-two, just a few years younger than she, and had come from the United States in the first wave of settlement. He knew, had seen, how it was there—unlike the Sleepless born in Sanctuary—and he remembered. His votes had been useful to Jennifer’s goals for Sanctuary. She would miss him when his term ended.

  “The question we have to face,” Najla said, “is what to do about this…baby. And we don’t have much time. If there’s an anomaly in the birth-certificate filing, some damned agency or other might get a search warrant.”

  It was what they all dreaded—a legal reason for Sleepers to come to Sanctuary. For twenty-six years they had made sure no such legal reason existed, by scrupulously meeting every single bureaucratic requirement of both the United States and the New York State governments; Sanctuary, as the property of a corporation registered in New York State, fell under its legal jurisdiction. Sanctuary filed its legal motions there, licensed its lawyers and doctors, paid its taxes, and each year sent more of its lawyers to Harvard to learn how to keep “there” and “here” legally separate.

  This new baby could shatter that separation.

  Jennifer had regained her composure. She was still very pale, but her head with its crown of black hair was held high. “Let’s start by stating the facts. If this baby should die, its body would be shipped to New York for autopsy, as they all are.”

  Perrilleon nodded. He already knew where she was going. His nod was support.

  She went steadily on. “If that happens, the Sleepers might have a legal reason to enter Sanctuary. Charges of murder.”

  No one mentioned that other travesty of a murder trial, thirty-five years ago. This one would be different. Sanctuary would be guilty.

  “On the other hand,” Jennifer said in her clear voice, “it might be medically possible that the baby would appear to die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or some other clearly unassailable cause. Or, if the baby lives, then we will have to raise it. Here, with our own. In its…condition, with all that implies.” She paused. “I think our choice is clear.”

  “But how could it happen!” Councilor Kivenen burst out. She was very young, and inclined to be weepy. Jennifer wouldn’t miss her when her term ended.

  Dr. Toliveri said, “We don’t know as much as we would like about genetic information transmission over time. There have only been two naturally-born generations of Sleepless…” His voice trailed off. It was obvious that in some way he blamed himself, Sanctuary’s Chief Geneticist. This was so clearly unfair that Jennifer felt anger. Raymond Toliveri was a superb geneticist, responsible for creating her precious Miranda… Already this baby was causing disruption and strife in the community.

  But didn’t they always?

  Councilor Kivenen said to the young doctor, “Tell us once more what happened.”

  Her voice had steadied. “The delivery was normal. A nine-pound boy. He cried right away. The nurse wiped him off and took him to the McKelvey-Waller scanner for the neonatal brain scan. It takes about ten minutes. While he was lying there in the padded basket under the scanners, the baby, he…went to sleep.” There was a moment of silence. Finally Dr. Toliveri said, “RNA regression to the mean…we know so little in the area of redundant coding…”

  Jennifer said crisply, “It’s not your fault, Doctor.” She let that sink in, so they could all see the guilt a Sleeper—even an infant Sleeper—could bring to blameless people. Then she started the debate.

  The Council explored all possible legal scenarios: What if they filed a birth certificate but falsified it, checking the box for “Sleepless” rather than “Sleeper”? It might be eighty years before the child died of a premature old age and the government demanded an autopsy. But the child would have to take the mandatory New York State Board of Education tests at age seven. How much norm data did the beggars really have for those tests—enough to differentiate Sleepers from Sleepless? And there was the retina scan, virtually proof positive of sleep identity, although not for very small children… What if…

  Over and over again Jennifer, with the help of Will and Perrilleon, dragged the argument back to the real issue: The good of the community versus the good of one who would be forever an outsider. Not only an outsider but also a point of disruption, a potential point of legal entry for foreign governments, a person who could never produce on the level of the rest of them, who would forever take more than he gave.

  A beggar.

  The vote was eight to six.

  “I won’t be the one to do it,” the young doctor said suddenly. “I won’t.”

  “You don’t have to be,” Jennifer said. “I am Chief Executive Officer; mine is the signature that would have been on a falsified birth certificate; I will do it. Are you sure, Dr. Toliveri, that the injection will create conditions indistinguishable from SIDS?”

  Toliveri nodded. He looked very pale. Rick
y looked down at the surface of the table. Councilor Kivenen stuck her fist in her mouth. The young doctor looked in pain.

  But none of them protested aloud after the vote was taken. They were a community.

  LATER, AFTERWARD, JENNIFER CRIED. Her tears humiliated her, hot scant tears like boiling salt. Will held her and she could feel his stiffness even as he patted her back. This wasn’t what he expected from her. It wasn’t what she expected, either.

  But he tried. “Dearest one—there was no pain. The heart stopped immediately.”

  “I know,” she said coldly.

  “Then…”

  “Forgive me. I don’t mean to do this.”

  Later, when she had come back to herself, she didn’t apologize again. But she said to Will, as they walked together under the curved arc of agricultural and technical panels that was the sky, “The fault is with the government regulations that force us into deceit no matter what we do. It’s just one more example of what we’ve said before. If we were not part of the United States…”

  Will nodded.

  They walked first to visit Miranda in the children’s dome, and then to Sharifi Labs, Special Enterprises Division, as important as Miranda and under the tightest private-property security anywhere under Sanctuary’s solid, productive sky.

  SPRING HAD COME TO THE DESERT. Prickly pear bloomed with yellow flowers. Along the washes, cottonwoods glowed greenly. Sparrow hawks, solitary most of the winter, perched in twos. Leisha watched this flowering, so much more austere and rocky than along Lake Michigan, and wondered sardonically if the desert’s modesty was as much a draw for her as was its isolation. Here, nothing was genetically modified.