Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  “The EEG shows delta activity because he’s deeply rooted in slow-wave sleep now,” the doctor said. It wasn’t clear whether he was talking to Eric or himself. “Most dreaming goes on during REM sleep, but some goes on during SWS, and that’s very important. This whole treatment is based on the fact that decreased SWS is associated with schizophrenia, with histories of violence, with poor sleep regulation in general. By forging artificial pathways between unconscious impulses and the state of SWS, we force the brain to confront and subdue those impulses that create disordered behavior. The theory says that the result is a state of heightened tranquility, a tranquility without the logy aspects of the usual depressant drugs, in fact a true tranquility based on the brain’s new connection among its warring—no one can get past the Y-field security on this building, Mr. Bevington-Watrous.”

  “Who designed the security?”

  “Kevin Baker. Through a blind subsidiary of ours, of course.”

  Eric smiled.

  Drew breathed evenly and deeply, his eyes closed, his powerful torso and wasted legs still.

  He was master of the cosmos. Everything in it moved through his mind, and he shaped them through lucid dreaming, and they were his. He, who had possessed nothing, been nothing, was master of it all.

  Dimly, through dreams, Drew heard the first alarm chime.

  IT HAD TAKEN HER FOUR DAYS TO TRACE THEM. She had only succeeded because she had, finally, called Kevin. And asked for his help.

  Staring at Drew strapped into machines, at Eric clutching one elbow with the opposite palm like a defiant schoolboy, Leisha thought: now we can’t ever go back. The thought was clear, cold, deliberate, and she didn’t care that it was both theatrical and vague. Alice’s grandson stood over the Sleeper he had used, as if Drew were a lab rat or a defective chromosome, as if Eric were any of the haters that for three-quarters of a century had seen Sleepless as experiments or defects. As if Eric were Calvin Hawke, or Dave Hannaway, or Adam Walcott. Or Jennifer Sharifi.

  Alice’s grandson. A Sleepless.

  Drew lay naked. With the bitterness smoothed out of his face by sleep, he looked younger than nineteen, more like the child who had first come to her in the desert compound full of swaggering confidence. “I’m gonna own Sanctuary, me.” The wasted legs didn’t seem to belong to the muscled, adult torso. There was a knife scar on his chest, a fresh burn on his right shoulder, bruises on his jaw. Leisha knew she and hers were responsible for all of it. Better to have left Drew alone, turned him away nine years ago, never tried to make him something he could never be. “Daddy, when I’m grown up I’m going to find a way to make Alice special, too!” And you’ve never stopped trying, have you, Leisha? With all the Alices, all the have-nots, all the beggars who would have been better off if you’d left them, in your hubristic specialness, alone.

  Tony—you were right. They’re too different from us.

  Tony…

  To Eric she said coldly, “Tell me exactly what you’ve done to him. And why.”

  The little doctor said eagerly, “Ms. Camden, this is an experiment—”

  “You,” Leisha said to Eric. “You tell me.” Bodyguards stepped between her and the doctor, cutting him off. The room was full of bodyguards.

  Eric said shortly, “I owed him.”

  “This?”

  “A last chance to be human.”

  “He was human! How can you experiment on—”

  “We’re experiments, and we worked out all right,” Eric said, with a faith in the logic of reduction that took her breath away. Had she ever been that young?

  Eric went on. “You always expect the worst, Leisha. I took a chance, yes, but four other experimental patients have benefited—”

  “A chance! With a life not your own! This isn’t even a licensed medical facility!”

  “Excuse me,” the doctor said, “I have a permit that—”

  “How many experimental ones are, anymore?” Eric said. “The donkeys don’t allow it. They cut off genemod research before it could turn into an even bigger weapon to blast away at their status quo that isn’t—Leisha, the other four patients for this operation are doing well. They’re calmer, they seem to have more control of their own emotions that—”

  “Eric, this was not your decision to make. Do you hear me? Drew didn’t choose this!”

  For a moment Eric looked again the sulky, angry child he had been. “I didn’t ask to be the way I am, either. Dad chose that for me by marrying a Sleepless. Who ever gets to choose?”

  Leisha stared at him. He didn’t see the distinction—he truly did not. Alice’s grandson, both privileged and outcast all his life, who thought those conditions had conferred wisdom.

  But hadn’t they all thought that? From Tony onward?

  Drew’s lips made soft movements in his profound sleep, sucking at a nonexistent breast.

  THE ROOM BRIGHTENED SLOWLY: First gray shadows, then pearly haze through which shapes moved dimly, and then light, clean and pale. Drew tried to move his head. He felt spittle trickle from his mouth.

  There was something moving inside his head, several somethings, of utmost importance. Drew turned his attention away from them. He could afford to do that; he knew, with complete confidence, that whatever the new thing was inside his head, it wasn’t going to leave before he examined it. It wasn’t ever going to leave. He had it; it was him. What he didn’t have was knowledge of this room. What had happened in it. Who was here. Why.

  Someone in white said, “He’s awake.”

  Faces blossomed above him, an amorphous mass that only slowly separated. Nurses’ faces, glancing sideways at each other. A short, olive-skinned doctor, his left eye twitching frantically. The twitch reached Drew: He saw the man’s nervousness, his fear, as a jagged red line that suddenly grew, took three-dimensional shape, and as it did the other thing in Drew’s head moved gracefully forward to meet it. It met, too, the shapes of fear and guilt from the corners of his mind, detached from him and yet still his. The shapes of the doctor’s fear and of Drew’s merged—Eric, the Molotov cocktails, Karl burning—and Drew looked at those shapes, and felt them, and he knew that he knew this man. This doctor, who all his life took chances on the edge of fear not for the good fortune the chances might bring, but to escape the nothingness he carried inside. This man for whom success was never enough—could I have done it better? Will someone else do it better?—but for whom failure was annihilation. Drew saw the shapes for how the doctor would have reacted to a failed test in medical school, to an appointment that went to someone else, to an arrest for this facility here, now. The first two were the defeated hunched shapes of failure; the third was a burning glee in failure that he had not caused himself, that had been inflicted on him from the outside. And so it was a kind of triumph, and Drew saw the shapes for that too, shapes without words, that fastened not on his heart—he felt no particular sympathy—but through the successive layers of his mind, like a plant putting down very deep roots. An unshakable tree. The tree of knowledge, wordless, as all trees are wordless against a still sky.

  Drew blinked. It had all taken only a moment. And he would know it forever.

  “Lift your head,” the doctor said harshly, as if Drew had been the one to injure him and not the other way around, and Drew saw the shapes for the harshness, too. Other shapes from deep in himself drifted toward it, merged with it. Drew watched. The shapes were him, but he was something else, too, something separate, something that watched and understood.

  He lifted his head. A screen to his right began to beep softly, in an atonal pattern. The doctor studied the screen intently.

  Leisha rushed into the room.

  At the sight of her, so many shapes exploded in Drew’s head that he couldn’t speak. She bent over him, glancing at the screen, putting a cool hand on his forehead. “Drew…”

  “Hello, Leisha.”

  “How…how are you feeling?”

  He smiled, because the question was so impossible to answer. />
  She said tightly, “You’re going to be all right, but there’s a lot you have a right to know,” and Drew saw how clearly the words took the shape of Leisha herself: a right to know. He saw the shape, the intricate balance, of all the questions of rights and privileges she had struggled with all her life, had made into her life. He saw the clean, basically austere shape of Leisha herself, struggling with the messy other shapes that sent off shoots and pseudopods and could not be captured, as she consistently struggled to do, in principles and laws. The struggle itself had a shape, and he groped to find a word for it, but the words were not there. For him, the words had seldom been there. The closest word he could find was an antique one—knight—and it was wrong, was too pale for the intense poignancy of the shape of Leisha struggling to codify the lawless world. The word was wrong. He frowned.

  Leisha said “Oh—don’t cry, Drew, dear heart!”

  He had been nowhere near crying. She didn’t understand. How could she? He didn’t understand himself this thing that had happened to him, or been done to him, or whatever it was. Eric had wanted to hurt him, yes, but this wasn’t hurt, this was only making Drew more himself, like a man who had been able to run two miles and now could run ten. Still himself—his muscles, his bones, his heart—but more so, and that more moved him from something ordinary to something…else. Extraordinary. He seemed to himself extraordinary.

  Leisha said, “Doctor, he can’t speak!”

  “He can speak,” the doctor said shortly, and briefly his shapes came to Drew again: the hysterical pumped-up excitement that was fear, the triumph of not showing it. “The brain scans show no impairment in the speech centers!”

  “Say something, Drew!” Leisha begged.

  “You are beautiful.”

  He had never seen it before: how could he not have seen it? Leisha bent above him, her hair golden as a young girl’s, her face stamped with the decisive power of a woman in her prime. Drew saw the shapes that had formed that power: they were the shapes of intelligence and suffering. How could he not have seen it before? Her breasts swelled softly under the thin fabric of her shirt; her neck rose from the shirt like a warm column, white hollowed delicately with blue. And he’d never seen it before. Not at all. How beautiful Leisha was.

  Leisha drew back slightly, frowning. She said, “Drew—what year is it? What town were you arrested in?”

  He laughed. The laugh hurt his chest, and he realized for the first time that there was tape across his ribs, and that his arms were still strapped down. Eric entered the room and stood at the foot of Drew’s bed, and at the sight of Eric’s rigid face more shapes crowded Drew’s head. He saw why Eric had done what he had done, all of it, clear back to the day by the cottonwood when two boys had fought to what would have been the death if either of them had been strong enough to make it so. Following that came the shapes for Drew’s father, beating his children in a drunken rage, and for Karl pierced and burning from the bomb he had failed to hurl high enough. They were all, in fact, the same shape, and so ugly that for the first time Drew felt the other, separate self, the self who watched the shapes, burned by them. He closed his eyes.

  “He’s fainted!” Leisha said, and the doctor snapped back, “No, he hasn’t!” and even with his eyes closed Drew saw the shapes he and Eric had made, so there was no point in keeping his eyes closed. He opened them. He knew now what the point was. Would have to be.

  “Leisha…” His voice surprised him: it came out weak and faint. Yet he didn’t feel weak. He tried again. “Leisha, I need…”

  “Yes? What? Anything, Drew, anything.”

  That other day came back to him, the day he had been crippled. Lying on the bed just like this, Eric’s father bending above him saying, “We’ll do everything we can…everything,” and himself thinking, now I’ve got them. The same shapes. Always, throughout a man’s life—and more than his own life—testified deep shapes stirring far down in his mind, flicking tails and fluttering gills, more than his own life.

  “What, Drew? What do you need?”

  “A Staunton-Carey programmable hologram projector.”

  “A—”

  “Yes,” Drew whispered with the last of his strength. “Now. I need it now.”

  21

  MIRI WAS THIRTEEN. For a year she had been watching the Sleeper broadcasts, on both the Liver and the donkey newsgrids. The first few months the grids were absorbing because they raised so many questions: Why were scooter races so important? Why did the beautiful young men and women on Bedtime Stories change sex partners so often when they seemed so ecstatic with the ones they already had? Why did the women have such huge breasts, the men such big penises? Why should a congresswoman from Iowa make a resentful speech about the spending of a congressman from Texas when, it seemed, the congresswoman was spending just as much herself, and they weren’t members of the same community anyway? At least, they didn’t seem to define themselves that way. Why did all the newsgrids praise the Livers for doing nothing—“creative leisure”—and hardly mention the people who worked to run things, when it turned out the people who ran things also ran the newsgrids?

  Eventually Miri discovered answers to these questions, either by databank research or by talking with her father or grandmother. The trouble was, the answers weren’t very interesting. Scooter races were important because Livers thought they were important—was that all? Was there no standard except what pleased at the moment?

  Her mind created long strings out of this question, pulling in the Heisenberg Principle, Epicurus, a defunct philosophy called existentialism, the Rahvoli constants for neural reinforcement, mysticism, epileptic storms in the so-called “visionary” centers of the brain, social democracy, the utility of the social organism, and Aesop’s fables. The string was a good one, but the part supplied by the Earth newsgrid was still essentially uninteresting.

  The same was true for the answers to the rest of Miri’s questions. Political organization and resource allocation depended on a precarious balance between Liver votes and donkey power, and that balance seemed to be the results of a haphazard social evolution, not of planning or principles. Things in the United States were the way they were because they were the way they were. If there was more depth than that, the newsgrids didn’t reveal it.

  She decided it was just the United States, coddled by cheap Y-energy, rich from licensing those same patents abroad, as decadent as her grandmother had always said. She learned Russian, French, and Japanese and spent a few months watching newsgrids in those languages. The answers were different but no more interesting. Things happened because they happened; they were the way they were because that was the point they’d come to. Minor border wars were fought, or they weren’t. Trade agreements were signed, or they weren’t. Important Sleepers died, or they had operations and recovered. A French broadcaster, one of the most prominent, always closed his broadcast the same way: Ça va toujours.

  Nowhere on the popular newsgrids could Miri find any mention of scientific research or breakthroughs that were not clear sensationalism, of political excitement, of complex musical sounds like the Bach or Mozart or O’Neill in the library banks, of ideas as complex as those she discussed with Tony every day.

  After six months, she stopped watching the newsgrids.

  One thing had changed, however. Often her grandmother was busy, spending more and more time in the Sharifi Labs, and it was her father whom Miri took questions to. He didn’t have all the answers, and the ones he did have made short, lopsided strings in her mind. He had left Earth, he told her, when he was ten, and although he sometimes went there on business, he seldom spent much time with Sleepers. Usually he did business through a middleman, a Sleepless who nonetheless lived on Earth, a man named Kevin Baker.

  Miri knew about Baker; he was extensively documented in the databanks. She wasn’t much interested in him. He seemed faintly contemptible to her: A man who lived alone with the beggars, profited from them, and preferred those profits—which were a
pparently huge—to the connections of community. But she listened while her father talked, because through the newsgrids she had become interested in her father. Unlike her mother, he could look directly at Miri’s twitching face and oversized head, her jerking body, without looking away. He could listen to her stutter. He sat, a dark low-browed man with his hands resting quietly on his knees, and listened to her patiently, and in his dark eyes was something she couldn’t name, no matter how many strings she wrapped around it. All the strings started with pain.

  “D-D-Daddy, wh-wh-wh-where were y-y-you?”

  “Sharifi Labs. With Jennifer.” Her father, unlike Aunt Najla, often referred to his mother by her name. Miri wasn’t sure when that had started.

  She looked at him. There was a light sweat on his forehead, although Miri thought her lab was cool. His face looked shaken. Miri’s strings included seismic tremors, adrenalin effects, the compression of gases that form the ignition of stars. She said, “Wh-wh-wh-what are the L-L-L-L-L-Labs d-doing?”

  Ricky Keller shook his head. He said abruptly, “When do you join the Council?”

  “S-sixteen. T-two years and t-t-two m-months.”

  Her father smiled, and the smile started a string that spun itself, surprisingly, to a Sleeper newsgrid she had seen months ago and had not thought of since: a story, evidently fiction, from a mystic book central to several Sleeper religions. A man called Job had been looted of one possession after another without either fighting in his own defense or devising ways to regain or replace them. Miri had thought Job spineless, or stupid, or both, and had lost interest in the broadcast before it was over. But her father’s smile reminded her now of the actor’s resigned face. All her father would say, however, was, “Good. We need you on the Council.”

  “Wh-wh-wh-why?” Miri said sharply, hating that it took so long to get the word out, even while she was warmed by his need.

  He didn’t answer.

  WILL SANDALEROS SAID, “NOW.”

  Jennifer leaned forward, staring at the three-dimensional holographic bubble. A thousand miles away in space, the original inflated, pressurized with standard air, and released the mice from their semi-hypothermic state. Tiny drip-patches on their collars brought their biological systems back to full functioning in minimum time. Within minutes the biometers on their collars showed them dispersed throughout the interior of the bubble, which was a complex internal topography mathematically congruent to Washington, D.C.