Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  But he had persisted, sitting at the holoterminal across from Miri’s even longer hours than she did, twitching and muttering. Now he smiled at her. “C-c-come s-s-see!”

  Miri walked around their double desk to Tony’s side. The holoterminal’s three-dimensional display had been opaqued on the side facing her. When she finally got to see his preliminary results, Miri gasped in delight.

  It was a model of her strings for Tony’s research sentence, each concept represented by a small graphic for concretes, by words for abstracts. Glowing lines in various colors mapped first-, second-, and third-level cross-references. She had never seen such a complete representation of what went on in her mind. “It’s b-b-beautiful!”

  “Y-y-yours are,” Tony said. “C-c-c-compact. El-elegant.”

  “I kn-know that sh-shape!” Miri turned to the library screen. “T-T-Terminal on. Open L-Library. Earth b-b-bank. Ch-Chartres C-C-C-Cathedral, F-F-France, R-R-R-Rose W-W-Window. G-GG-Graphic d-d-d-display.”

  The screen glowed with the intricate stained-glass design from the thirteenth century. Tony studied it with the critical eye of a mathematician. “N-n-noo…n-not r-really the s-s-s-s-same.”

  “In f-f-feel it is,” Miri said, and the old frustration teased her, making limp spiraling strings in her mind: There was some essential connection between the Rose Window and Tony’s computer model that wasn’t obvious but was there, somehow, and of tremendous unseen importance. But her thinking couldn’t express it. Something was missing in her thought strings, had always been missing.

  Tony said, “L-l-look at J-J-Jonathan.” Miri’s thought model vanished and Jonathan’s appeared. Miri gasped again. “H-h-how c-can he think l-like th-that!”

  Unlike Miri’s, Jonathan’s model wasn’t a symmetrical shape but an untidy amoeba, with strings shooting off in all directions, petering out, suddenly shooting back for weird connections Miri didn’t immediately understand. How did the Battle of Gettysburg connect to the Hubble constant? Presumably Jonathan knew.

  Tony said, “Th-those are the only t-t-two I’ve d-d-done s-s-so far. M-m-mine is n-next. Then the p-program will s-s-superimpose them and l-look for c-c-communication p-principles. S-s-someday, M-M-Miri, b-b-besides f-furthering c-c-communications science, we c-c-could use t-terminals to t-t-talk to each other w-without this f-f-f-fucking one-d-d-dimensional sp-sp-speech!”

  Miri looked at him with love. His was work with a genuine contribution to the community. Well, maybe some day hers would be, too. She was working on synthetic neurotransmitters for the speech centers of the brain. Someday she hoped to create one that, unlike any the scientists had tried so far, would produce no side effects while it inhibited stuttering. She reached out and caressed the side of Tony’s big head, lolling and jerking on his thick neck.

  Joan Lucas burst into their lab without knocking. “Miri! Tony! The playground’s open!”

  Instantly Miri dismissed neurotransmitters and communications science. The playground was open! All the children, Norms and Supers alike, had waited for this for weeks. She grabbed Tony’s hand and scampered after Joan. Outside, Joan, long-legged and fleet, easily outdistanced her, but no child in Sanctuary needed directions to the new playground. They just looked up.

  In the core of the cylindrical world, anchored by tough thin cables, the inflated plastic bubble floated at the orbital’s axis. Gravity here was so thin it approximated free fall, at least enough for the children. Miri and Tony crowded into the elevator that took them up, slipped on velcro mittens and slippers, and screamed in delight as they were dumped inside the huge bubble. The inside was crossed by translucent pink plastic struts, all with elastic give, with opaque boxes for hiding in, with pockets and tunnels that ended in midair. Everything was dotted with soft inflated hand-holds and velcro strips. Miri launched herself headlong into the air, flew across a plastic room, and launched herself back, crashing into Joan. Both girls giggled, and drifted slowly downward, clutching at each other and squealing when Tony and a boy they didn’t know tore by overhead.

  Miri’s strings rippled in her mind with chaos theory, with mythic images, with angels and flyers and Icarus and acceleration ratios and Orville Wright and Mercury astronauts and membraned mammals and escape velocities and muscle-strength-weight ratios. With delight.

  “Come inside here,” Joan shouted over the shrieking. “I have a secret to tell you!” She grabbed Miri, stuffed her into a translucent suspended box, and crowded in after her. Inside it was marginally less noisy.

  Joan said, “Miri, guess what—my mom’s pregnant!”

  “W-w-wonderful!” Miri said. Joan’s mother’s eggs were Type r-14, difficult to penetrate even in vitro. Joan was thirteen; Miri knew she had wanted a baby sister or brother with the same tenacity that Tony wanted a Litov-Hall auto-am. “I’m s-s-s-so g-g-g-glad!”

  Joan hugged her. “You’re my best friend, Miri!” Abruptly she launched herself out of the box. “Catch me!”

  Miri never would, of course. She was too clumsy, compared to Joan’s Norm agility. But that didn’t matter. She hurtled herself after Joan, shrieking with the others just for the pleasure of making noise, while below her the world tumbled over and over in patterns of hydrofields and domes and parks as beautiful as strings.

  THE TUESDAY AFTER THE PLAYGROUND OPENED was Remembrance Day. Miri dressed carefully in black shorts and tunic. She could feel the somber shape of her strings, shifting with her thoughts in compact, flattened ovals as dark as everyone’s clothes. Religious holidays in Sanctuary varied from family to family; some kept Christmas, Ramadan, Easter, Yom Kippur, or Divali; many kept nothing at all. The two holidays held in common were the Fourth of July and Remembrance Day, April 15.

  The crowd gathered in the central panel. The park had been expanded by covering surrounding fields of super-high-yield plants with a temporary spray-plastic latticework strong enough to stand on and large enough to accommodate every person in Sanctuary. Those few who could not leave their work or had temporary illnesses watched on their comlinks. A temporary platform for the speaker loomed above the crowd. High above the platform floated the deserted playground.

  Most people stood with their families. Miri and Tony, however, clustered with the other Supers who were older than eight or nine, half hidden in the shadows of a power dome. The Supers were happier apart from crowds of Norms, whom they couldn’t keep up with physically, and happier together. Miri didn’t think her mother had even looked for her or Tony or Ali. Hermione had a new baby to whom she was devoted. No one had explained to Miri why this one, like little Rebecca, was a Norm. Miri hadn’t asked.

  Where was Joan? Miri twisted and turned, but she couldn’t see the Lucas family anywhere.

  Jennifer Sharifi, wearing a black abbaya, mounted the platform. Miri’s heart swelled with pride. Grandma was beautiful, more beautiful even than Mother or Aunt Najla. She was as beautiful as Joan. And on Grandma’s face was the composed, set look that always evoked in Miri strings and cross-references of human intelligence and will. There was no one like Grandmother.

  “Citizens of Sanctuary,” Jennifer began. Her voice, amplified, carried to every corner of the orbital without once being raised. “I call you that because although the United States government calls us citizens of that country, we know better. We know that no government founded without the consent of the governed has the right to claim us. We know that no government without the ability to recognize the reality of men having been created unequal has the vision to claim us. We know that no government operating on the principle that beggars have a right to the productive labor of others has the morality to claim us.

  “On this Remembrance Day, April 15, we recognize that Sanctuary has the right to its own consenting government, its own clear-eyed reality, the fruits of its own productive labor. We have the right to these things, but we do not yet possess the actualities. We are not free. We are not yet allowed the ‘separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle’ us.
We have Sanctuary, thanks to the Sleepless vision of our founder Anthony Indivino, but we do not have freedom.”

  “Y-y-yet,” Tony whispered grimly to Miri. She squeezed his hand and stood on tiptoe to search the crowd for Joan.

  “And yet we have created for ourselves as much of the measure of freedom as we can,” Jennifer continued. “Assigned without our consent to a New York State court jurisdiction, we have never in thirty-two years either filed or incurred a lawsuit. Instead, we have set up our own judicial system, unknown to the beggars below, and administered it ourselves. Assigned without our consent to licensing regulations for our brokers, doctors, lawyers, even teachers of our own children, we have complied with all the regulations. We have done this even when it means living for awhile among the beggars. Assigned to comply with meaningless statistical regulations that number us equal with beggars, we have counted and measured and tested ourselves as required and then dismissed the result as the irrelevant pap it surely is.”

  Miri spotted Joan. She was pushing through the crowd, heedlessly elbowing people, and Miri was shocked to see that Joan hadn’t changed into Remembrance Day black. She wore a forest-green halter and shorts. Miri raised her arm as far as she could beyond the shadow of the power dome and waved frantically.

  “But there is one requirement of the beggars we cannot dismiss,” Jennifer said. “Beggars do not work to support their own lives; they depend, snarling, on their betters to do that. To support the millions of nonproductive ‘Livers’ in the United States, Sanctuary—as an entity and as individuals—is forcibly robbed of a total of 64.8 percent of its annual productivity through the legal thievery of state and federal taxes. We cannot fight this, not without risk to Sanctuary itself. We cannot resist. All we can do is remember what this means—morally, practically, politically, and historically. And on April 15 of every year, as our resources are taken from us with nothing given in return, we do remember.”

  Joan’s pretty face was puffy and streaked—she had been crying. Miri tried to remember the last time she had seen someone as old as Joan cry. Little children cried, when they fell down or couldn’t do a terminal problem or fought with each other over toys. But Joan was thirteen. Adults, catching sight of her face as Joan elbowed through the crowd, tried kindly to question her. Joan ignored them, pushing toward Miri.

  “We remember the hatred toward Sleepless on Earth. We remember—”

  “Come with me,” Joan said fiercely to Miri. She grabbed her friend and half-dragged her around the power dome, until the curved black surface completely hid Jennifer from view. Jennifer’s voice, however, floated toward them, as clear as if she stood beside Joan’s trembling body. Strings exploded in Miri’s mind. She had never seen a Norm twitch.

  “Do you know what they’ve done? Do you, Miri?”

  “Wh-who? Wh-wh-wh-what?”

  “They’ve killed the baby!”

  Blackness swept through Miri. Her knees gave way and she sank to the ground. “The b-b-b-beggars? H-h-h-how?” Joan’s mother had been only a few weeks pregnant and she hadn’t left Sanctuary; did that mean there were beggars here…

  “Not the beggars! The Council! Led by your precious grandmother!”

  Strings unraveled, and ripped. Miri gripped the ends firmly. Her nervous system, always revved up to the edge of biochemical hysteria, began to slide over that edge. Miri closed her eyes and breathed deeply until she was in control.

  “Wh-what h-happened, J-J-J-Joan?”

  Miri’s calm, fragile as it was, seemed to calm Joan. She slid to the grass beside Miri and wrapped her arms around her knees. There was a scratch, not yet fully regenerated, on her left calf.

  “My mother called me in to her study just before I was going to change for Remembrance Day. She’d been crying. And she was lying on the pallet she and Daddy use for sex.”

  Miri nodded; her mind made strings of why a Sleepless would be in bed if she were not having sex or injured.

  Joan said, “She told me that the Council had made the decision to abort the baby. I thought that was strange—if the prefetal tests show DNA failure in a major area the parents naturally abort. What does the Council have to do with it?”

  “Wh-wh-what d-d-do they?”

  “I asked where the DNA failure was. She said there wasn’t one.”

  Around them floated Jennifer’s voice: “—the assumption that, because they are weak, they are automatically owed the labor of the strong—”

  “I asked my mother why the Council ordered an abortion if the baby was normal. She said it wasn’t an order but a strong recommendation, and she and Daddy were going to comply. She started crying again. She told me the gene analysis showed that the baby is…was…”

  She couldn’t say it. Miri put her arm around her friend.

  “…was a Sleeper.”

  Miri took her arm away. The next minute she regretted it, bitterly, but it was too late. Joan scrambled to her feet. “You think Mom should abort too!”

  Did she? Miri wasn’t sure. Strings whirled in her head: genetic regression, DNA information redundancy, spiraling children in the playground, the nursery, the lab, productivity…beggars. A baby, soft in Joan’s mother’s arms. She remembered Tony in her own mother’s arms, her grandmother holding Miri up to see the stars…

  Jennifer’s voice came louder: “Above all, to remember that morality is defined by what contributes to life, not what leeches from it…”

  Joan cried, “I’ll never be friends with you again, Miranda Sharifi!” She ran away, her long legs flashing under the green shorts she should not have been wearing on Remembrance Day.

  “W-w-wait!” Miri cried. “W-wait! I think the C-C-Council is wr-wr-wrong!” But Joan didn’t wait.

  Miri would never catch her.

  Slowly, awkwardly, she got up from the ground and went to the lab in Science Dome Four. Her and Tony’s work terminals were both on, running programs. Miri turned them off, then swept all the hard-copy off her desk with one lash of her arm.

  “D-d-damn!” The word was not enough; there must be more such words, must be…something to do with this pain. Her strings were not enough. Their incompleteness taunted her yet again, like a missing piece of an equation you knew was missing even though you had never seen it before, because otherwise there was a hole in the center of the idea. There was a hole in Miri, and a Sleeper baby spiraled through it—Joan’s Sleeper brother, who by this time tomorrow wouldn’t exist any more than the missing piece of the thought equation existed, had ever existed, was ever out there somewhere. And now Joan hated her.

  Miri curled herself under Tony’s desk and sobbed.

  Jennifer found her there two hours later, after the Remembrance Day speeches were over and the huge chunk of credit, the equation for productive labor, had been transmitted to the government which gave nothing back in return. Miri heard her grandmother pause in the doorway, then unhesitatingly cross the room, as if she already knew where Miri was.

  “Miranda. Come out from there.”

  “N-n-no.”

  “Joan told you that her mother is carrying a Sleeper fetus that must be aborted.”

  “N-n-not ‘m-must.’ The b-b-baby c-could l-l-l-live. It’s n-normal in every other w-w-way. And th-th-they w-want it!”

  “The parents are the ones who made the decision, Miri. No one else could make it for them.”

  “Then wh-wh-wh-wh-why are J-Joan and her m-mother c-c-c-crying?”

  “Because sometimes necessary things are hard things. And because neither of them has yet learned to accept hard necessity without making it worse by regret. That’s a vital lesson, Miri. Regret is not productive. Nor is guilt, nor grief, although I have felt both over the five Sleeper fetuses we’ve had in Sanctuary.”

  “F-f-five?”

  “So far. Five in thirty-one years. And every set of parents has made the decision Joan’s parents have, because every set saw the hard necessity. A Sleeper child is a beggar, and the productive strong do not acknowledge the para
sitic claims of beggars. Charity, perhaps—that is an individual matter. But a claim, as if weakness had the moral right over strength, were somehow superior to strength—no. We don’t acknowledge that.”

  “A S-S-Sleeper b-baby would be p-p-productive! It’s n-n-normal otherwise!”

  Jennifer sat down gracefully on Tony’s desk chair. The folds of her black abbaya trailed on the ground beside Miri’s crouching body. “For the first part of its life, yes. But productivity is a relative thing. A Sleeper may have fifty productive years, starting at, say, twenty. But unlike us, by sixty or seventy their bodies are weakened, prey to breakdowns, wearing out. Yet they may live for as many as thirty more years, a burden on the community, a shame to themselves because it is a shame to not work when others do. Even if a Sleeper was industrious, amassed credit against his old age, purchased robots to care for him, he would end up isolated, not able to take part in Sanctuary’s daily life, degenerating. Dying. Would parents who loved a child bring it into such an eventual fate? Could a community support many such people without putting a spiritual burden on itself? A few, yes—but what about the principles involved?

  “A Sleeper raised among us would not only be an outsider here—unconscious and brain-dead eight hours a day while the community goes on without him—he would also have the terrible burden of knowing that someday he will have a stroke, or a heart attack, or cancer, or one of the other myriad diseases the beggars are prone to. Knowing that he will become a burden. How could a principled man or woman live with that? Do you know what he would have to do?”

  Miri saw it. But she would not say it.

  “He would have to commit suicide. A terrible thing to force onto a child you loved!”

  Miri crawled out from under the desk. “B-b-but, G-G-Grandma—w-w-we all m-m-must d-die s-s-s-someday. Even y-y-y-you.”