Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  Miri nodded.

  “D-d-d-d-defense. Ours,” Allen got out.

  “Inc-c-c-cluding N-N-N-Norms who are…r-r-r-r-r-right,” Diane Clarke said, and the others intuited the strings she meant by the word “right.”

  Jonathan Markowitz said, “S-S-S-S-Sam S-S-S-S-Smith.”

  Sarah Cerelli said, “J-J-J-Joan L-Lucas. H-her unborn b-b-bb-b-baby b-b-b-b-b-brother.” Miri again saw herself and Joan crouched by the power dome on Remembrance Day, heard again her own narrow hardness about Joan’s grief over the abortion of her Sleeper brother. Miri winced. How could she have been so hard on Joan? How could she not have seen?

  Because it hadn’t yet happened to her.

  “W-w-w-we n-n-n-n-need a n-n-n-name,” Diane said. She took Allen’s place in front of the console and called up her own string program. When she made room for Miri to see the results, Miri saw a complex thought edifice about the power of names for self-identification, of self-identification for community, about the Supers’ position in the Sanctuary community if the need for their own defense never arose again. It might not. It might happen that no one of their number was ever again hurt or endangered by the Norms, and the two communities could exist for decades side by side, with only one of them actually knowing there were two. The power of a name.

  Miri’s mouth twisted. She said, “A n-n-n-n-name.”

  “Y-yes. A n-name,” Diane said.

  She looked at them all. Diane’s strings flowed in holographic projection, detailing both their separateness and the complex limits of their physical and emotional dependency. A name.

  “The B-B-B-B-Beggars,” Miri said.

  “I HAD NO CHOICE,” JENNIFER SAID. “I had no choice!”

  “No, you didn’t,” Will Sandaleros said. “She’s just too young to hold a Council seat, Jenny. Miri hasn’t learned yet to control herself, or to direct her talents toward her own good. She will. In a few years you can restore her seat. It was just a misjudgment, dear heart. That’s all.”

  “But she won’t talk to me!” Jennifer cried. In another moment she had regained control of herself. She smoothed the folds of her black abbaya and reached to pour herself and Will more tea. Her long slim fingers were steady on the antique pot; the fragrant stream of singleaf tea, a genemod developed on Sanctuary, fell unwaveringly into the pretty alloy cups Najla had molded for her mother’s sixtieth birthday. But sharp lines ran from Jennifer’s nose to her mouth. Looking at his wife, Will realized that pain could look like age.

  “Jenny,” he said gently, “give her more time. She had a bad shock and she’s still a child. Don’t you remember yourself at sixteen?”

  Jennifer gave him a penetrating look. “Miri is not like us.”

  “No, but—”

  “It’s not only Miri. Ricky refuses to talk to me either.”

  Will put down his teacup. His words had the careful sound of a courtroom statement. “Ricky has always been a little unstable for a Sleepless. A little weak. Like his father.”

  Jennifer said, as if it were an answer, “Ricky and Miri will both have to recognize what Richard never could: The first duty of a community is to protect its laws and its culture. Without the willingness to do that, without that patriotism, you have nothing but a collection of people who happen to live in the same place. Sanctuary must protect itself.” After a moment she added, “Especially now.”

  “Especially now,” Will agreed. “Give her time, Jenny. She’s your granddaughter, after all.”

  “And Ricky is my son.” Jennifer rose, lifting the tea tray. She didn’t look at her husband. “Will?”

  “Yes?”

  “Put Ricky’s office and Miranda’s lab under surveillance.”

  “We can’t. Not Miri, anyway. The Supers have been experimenting with security. Whatever Tony designed isn’t breakable. Not by us, anyway, without leaving obvious traces.”

  At Tony’s name, fresh grief broke into Jennifer’s eyes. Will rose and put his arms around her, despite the tea tray. But her voice was composed.

  “Then move Miri to a different lab, in a different building. Where we can effect surveillance.”

  “Yes, dear heart. Today. But Jenny—it is just childish grief and shock. She’s a brilliant girl. She’ll come around to right and necessity.”

  “I know she will,” Jennifer answered. “Move her today.”

  23

  A WEEK AFTER TONY’S DEATH, Miri went in search of her father. Orbital Facilities had thrown her out of her lab—hers and Tony’s, where he had once worked and laughed and talked with her—and moved Miri to a new lab in Science Building Two. That same afternoon Terry Mwakambe had come to her lab. Terry was the most brilliant of all the Supers at systems control, better even than Tony, but he and Tony had seldom worked together because Terry’s strings made communication difficult. Radical genemod add-on’s, with neurochemical consequences not yet fully understood, made him strange even to other Supers. Most of his strings consisted of mathematical formulas based on chaos theory and on the newer disharmony phenomena. He was twelve years old.

  Terry spent hours at Miri’s terminals and wall panels, his eyes blinking furiously and his young mouth a thin, twitching line. He said nothing at all to Miri. Eventually she realized that his silence was a fury as great as her own. Terry loved his parents, Norms who had altered his genes to create his weird, extraordinary intelligence, his Super abilities that now those same Norms were putting under surveillance as if Miri, one of his own, were some looting beggar. Terry’s sense of betrayal filled the lab like heat.

  When he was done, the Council surveillance equipment worked perfectly. It showed Miri playing endless games of chess against her terminal. A defense against grief. An assertion of power by someone who had discovered she was powerless against death. Miri’s body, tracked on infrared scanner, slumped over the hologram board, taking a long time to make each move. Systems surveillance programs made available every move in every game. Miri won them all, although she made an occasional sloppy defense.

  “Th-th-there,” Terry said, and slammed out of the lab. It was the only word he’d spoken.

  Miri found her father sitting in the park beneath the spot where the playground had floated. His and Hermione’s second Norm child sat on his lap. The baby was almost two, a beautiful boy named Giles, with genemod chestnut curls and wide dark eyes. Ricky held him as if he might break, and Giles squirmed to get down.

  “He doesn’t talk yet,” was the first thing Ricky said to Miri. She ran through the implications of this remark.

  “H-h-he w-w-w-will. N-N-N-Norms s-sometimes just s-s-save it up and then s-start t-t-t-t-talking in s-s-sentences.”

  Ricky clutched the fretting baby tighter. “How do you know that, Miri? You’re not a mother; you’re still a child yourself. How do you all know?”

  She couldn’t answer him. Without strings and edifices of thought, the answer to his real question—how do you think, Miri—would be so incomplete it would be worthless. But her father couldn’t comprehend strings. He couldn’t ever understand.

  She said instead, “You l-l-l-l-loved T-T-Tony.”

  He looked at her over the baby’s head. “Of course I did. He was my son.” But a moment later he added, “No. You’re right. Your mother didn’t love him.”

  “N-n-n-nor m-m-m-me either.”

  “She wanted to.” Giles began to whimper. Ricky loosened his grip slightly but did not put Giles down. “Miri—your grandmother has had you dropped as a Council member. She introduced a motion to raise the age for Council participation for family members to twenty-one, the same as it is for term Council members. The vote passed.”

  Miri nodded. She wasn’t surprised. Of course her grandmother would want her dropped from the Council now, and of course the Council would agree. There had always been those who resented different criteria for Sharifi voting shares than for general shares, although how the Sharifi family apportioned its votes was its own business. Or perhaps the resentment over her seat had
arisen from the same source as the justification: She was a Super.

  Giles gave a tremendous kick of his sturdy legs and started to howl. Ricky finally put him down, and smiled wanly. “I guess I thought if I held him long enough, he’d come out with a complete sentence. Something like, ‘Please, father, let me down to explore.’ At two, you would have.”

  Miri touched Giles, now happily investigating the genemod grass. The grass’s ion pump operated so efficiently it needed only minute nutrients. Giles’s hair felt soft and silky. “H-h-he’s n-n-n-not m-mm-me.”

  “No. I’ll have to remember that. Miri, what were you and all the other Supers doing meeting in Allen’s lab the other night?”

  Alarm ran through her. If Ricky had noticed and speculated, had other adults? Could speculation alone harm the Beggars? Terry and Nikos said no one could crack the security they had set up, but anyone could wonder why such heavy security existed in the first place. Would wonder be enough to trigger retaliation? What did Miri, or any other Super, know about how Norms really thought?

  “I think,” Ricky said carefully, “that you were all mourning, in your own way, and in privacy. I think that if you all happen to meet again, and if any Norms ask what you’re doing, that’s what you’ll tell them.”

  Miri let go of Giles’s hair. She slipped her hand into her father’s. Her fingers, the blood racing hot and fast from her Super metabolism, the muscles jerking, twitched against his cold ones.

  “Y-y-y-y-yes, D-D-D-Daddy,” she said. “W-w-we w-w-will.”

  IT TOOK THEM A MONTH AND A HALF to program hidden overrides into Sanctuary’s major systems: life-support, external defense, security, communications, maintenance, and records. Terry Mwakambe, Nikos Demetrios, and Diane Clarke did most of the work. There were a few program failsafes they couldn’t crack, mostly in external defense. Terry worked doggedly, twenty-three hours a day, under cover of a surveillance-cheat program of his own devising. Miri wondered what it showed him doing, but she didn’t ask. Terry’s wordless frustration at not being able to crack the last few failsafes was almost a physical entity, like air pressure. Miri, in contrast, was surprised how quickly the Beggars had, in essence, taken over the orbital, even though they had as yet actually changed nothing. Perhaps they never would. Perhaps they wouldn’t have to.

  At the start of the second month, Terry broke a major failsafe. He and Nikos called a meeting in Nikos’s office. Both boys were pale as salt. A web of red capillaries pulsed in Terry’s forehead above his mask. In the last month a dozen of the Supers had taken to wearing these masks, molded plasper that covered the bottom half of their faces, chin to eyes, with a hole left for breathing. A few of the girls decorated their masks. The children closest to their Norm parents, Miri noticed, didn’t wear masks. She didn’t know if anyone had questioned those who did, or had connected the appearance of the masks with Tony Sharifi’s death.

  “Sh-Sh-Sh-Sharifi L-L-L-L-L-L-L-” Terry made a slashing gesture that meant, roughly, “Fuck it.” In the past month their nonverbal signals, always a part of Super communication, had become more violent.

  Nikos tried. “Sh-Sh-Sharifi L-Labs has m-m-m-made and stst-stored a f-f-f-f-f-” He, too, was too agitated. Terry called up the string on his terminal; like most of Terry’s strings, it was incomprehensible to anyone but Terry. Nikos then created a string in his own program and converted it to Miri’s, still the format most accessible to the group as a whole. The twenty-seven children crowded near.

  Sharifi Labs had developed and synthesized an instantly fatal, airborne, highly communicable genemod organism, built from the code of a virus but highly different in important phenotypes. Packets of the organism, in a frozen state that could be unfrozen and dispersed by remote control from Sanctuary, had been installed in the United States by selected Sleepless graduate students studying on Earth. There were packets secreted in New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and on Kagura orbital, which Sharifi Labs now owned. The packets were virtually undetectable by conventional methods. The virus could kill every aerobic organism evolved enough to possess a nervous system before the organism’s own brief life cycle ended, in roughly seventy-two hours. Unlike every other virus that had ever existed, this one could not reproduce itself indefinitely. All copies self-destructed seventy-two hours after being unfrozen. It was a gorgeous piece of genemod engineering.

  Nobody said anything.

  Finally Allen stammered, “F-f-f-f-for d-d-d-d-defense. N-n-not t-t-t-t-to b-be used except if S-S-S-S-S-Sanctuary is att-tt-ttacked f-first! N-n-n-never p-p-p-p-pre-emptive—”

  “Y-y-yes!” Diane said eagerly. “Only f-f-f-for d-d-defense! It h-h-h-has t-to b-b-b-be. W-w-w-we w-w-w-wouldn’t—”

  Christy said desperately, “L-l-l-like us. L-like the B-B-Beggars are d-d-doing.”

  Voices broke out, stammering and shouting. They all wanted to believe that Sanctuary was doing no different from they themselves, setting up secret self-defense mechanisms the Council would never need to actually use. The packets existed for verbal bargaining, for posturing threats that were, after all, the only thing Sleepers understood. Everybody knew that. Sleepless had a right to self-defense if Sanctuary were directly attacked. Sleepless were not killers. The Sleepers were the killers. Everybody knew that, too.

  Miri looked first at Terry’s face, then Nikos’s, then Christy’s, then Allen’s. She looked back at her grandmother’s biological weapon, secret even from the Sanctuary Council, known only to the handful of Sharifi Lab partners who had developed, synthesized, and secreted it in cities full of other children.

  Did her father know?

  Miri thought suddenly, inanely, that she, too, would make herself a molded plasper mask.

  In the end, after hours of agitated discussion, the Beggars did nothing about the biological weapon. There was nothing they could do. If they told the Council what the Supers knew, the Council would guess their real abilities. If they disabled the remote mechanisms, the adults would also guess. If that happened, the Beggars would lose the covert chance to protect their own—as they had not been able to protect Tony. And anyway, if the virus was only for defense, created in the fervent hope it would never be needed, then how was what Sharifi Labs did different from what the Beggars themselves were doing?

  The children couldn’t think of anything to do beyond installing defensive overrides, so they did nothing.

  Miri walked slowly back to her own lab, and Terry’s surveillance-cheat program kicked in to show her winning game after game of nonexistent chess.

  THE BEGGARS’ DISCOVERY AGITATED MIRI for days. She tried to work on her old neurological research to inhibit stammering. She broke a delicate bioscanner, misspoke a vital piece of code into the work terminal, and threw a beaker across the room. She kept seeing her father, with Giles squirming on his lap. Ricky loved her. He loved her enough to suspect the Supers were withdrawing into their own community and to not…what? What could he do anyway? What did he want to do?

  Strings blew through her mind, like clouds swirled from maintenance jets: Loyalty. Betrayal. Self-preservation. Solidarity. Parents and children.

  The comlink chimed. Despite her agitation, Miri went as still as possible when she saw Joan Lucas’s face appear.

  “Miri. If you’re there, will you turn on two-way?”

  Miri didn’t move. Joan had brought her the news of Tony’s death, crying herself. Joan was a Norm. Was Joan her old friend? Her new enemy? Categories no longer held.

  “Either you’re not there, or you don’t want to talk to me,” Joan said. She had grown even prettier over the past year, a seventeen-year-old genemod beauty with a strong jaw and huge violet eyes. “That’s all right. I know you’re still…hurting over Tony. But if you are there, I wanted to tell you to access newsgrid twenty-two from the United States. Right now. There’s an artist on that I watch sometimes. He helped me with…some problems I was having in my mind. It might help you to watch him, too. It’s just a thought.” Joan glanced down, as if she we
re weighing words carefully and did not want Miri to see the expression in her eyes. “If you do access, don’t let it record on the master log. I’m sure all you Supers know how to do that.”

  For the first time, Miri realized that Joan had been calling on a scrambled-code link.

  Miri stood irresolutely, chewing a strand of unkempt hair, a habit she had started since Tony’s death. How could watching an “artist” from Earth help Joan with “problems in her mind”? And what kind of problems would someone like Joan, perfectly fitted to her community, have anyway?

  Nothing in common with Miri’s.

  She picked up the beaker she had hurled, and washed and disinfected it. She went back to the DNA code for a synthetic neurotransmitter modeled on her work terminal, and resumed the tedious task of computer-testing minute hypothetical pinpoint alterations in this formula, which might or might not even be the right starting point. The program wouldn’t run, there was a glitch someplace. Miri banged on the side of the terminal. “F-f-f-f-fuck!”

  Nikos or Terry would have known how to fix it instantly. Or Tony.

  Miri collapsed onto a chair. Waves of grief washed through her. When the worst had passed, she turned again to the terminal. Even with the maintenance program, she couldn’t find the glitch.

  She turned to the comlink and accessed U.S. newsgrid twenty-two.

  It was completely black. Another glitch? Miri had leaped up to shove her fist into the miniature holographic stage and pound on its floor when the stage center suddenly brightened. A man in a chair, eight inches high, started to speak.

  “‘Happy those early days when I/ Shined in my Angel-infancy!/ Before I understood this place…’”

  This? A man in a chair reciting some kind of beggar poetry? Joan broke years of virtual silence to tell Miri to watch this?

  As the man began to speak, the blackness behind him took shape. No—shapes came out of it, repetitive but also subtly different, oddly compelling. Strings formed in Miri’s head, and she saw that they, too, although made of the most mundane thoughts, were also subtly different from her usual strings, the overall shape not unlike the ones slithering past the man reciting from the wheelchair. Maybe Diane should see this: She was working out equations to describe the formation of thought strings, building on the work Tony had done before he died.