Beggars in Spain

17

On the morning of her sixty-seventh birthday, Leisha Camden sat on the edge of a chair in her New Mexico compound and contemplated her feet.

They were narrow and high-arched, the skin healthy and fresh right up to the toes, which were strong and straight. The toenails, cut straight across, glowed faintly pink. Susan Melling would have approved. Susan had set great store by feet: their strength, the condition of their veins and bones, their general usefulness as a barometer of aging. Or not aging.

It made her laugh. Feet—to be remembering Susan, dead for 23 years, in terms of feet. And not even Susan’s feet, which might be logical, but Leisha’s own feet, which was ridiculous. In memoriam bipedalis.

When had she begun to find funny such things as feet? Not, certainly, when she was young, in her twenties or thirties or fifties. Everything had been so serious then, of such world-shaking consequence. Not just the things that actually might have shaken the world, but everything. She must have been very tiresome. Perhaps there was no way for the young to be serious without being tiresome. They lacked that all-important dimension of physics: torque. Too much time ahead, too little behind, like a man trying to carry a horizontal ladder with a grip at one end. Not even an honorable passion could balance very well. And while jiggling hard to just keep your balance, how could anything ever be funny?

“What are you laughing at?” Stella said, coming into Leisha’s office after only the most peremptory knock. “That reporter is waiting for you in the board room.”

“Already?”

“He’s early.” Stella sniffed; she hadn’t wanted Leisha to talk to any reporters. “Let them have their tricentennial without us,” she had said. “What does it have to do with us? Now?” Leisha hadn’t had an answer, but she’d agreed to see the reporter anyway. Stella could be so incurious. But, then, Stella was only fifty-two and found hardly anything funny.

“Tell him I’m coming,” Leisha said, “but not until I check on Alice. Give him some coffee or something. Let the kids play him their flute solo; that ought to keep him enthralled.” Seth and Eric had just learned to make flutes from animal bones they scavenged in the desert. Stella sniffed again and went out.

Alice had just awoken. She sat on the edge of her bed while her nurse eased the nightgown over her head. Leisha ducked back into the hall; Alice hated to have Leisha see her naked body. Not until Leisha heard the nurse say, “There, Ms. Watrous,” did she come back into the room.

Alice wore loose, cotton pants and a white top cut wide enough for her to put on herself with just her right arm; the left was useless since her stroke. Her white curls had been combed. The nurse knelt on the floor, easing her charge’s feet into soft slippers.

“Leisha,” Alice said, with pleasure. “Happy birthday.”

“I wanted to say it to you first!”

“Too bad,” Alice said. “Sixty-seven years.”

“Yes,” Leisha said, and the two women held each other’s gaze, Leisha straight-backed in her white shorts and halter, Alice steadying herself with one veined hand on the footboard of the bed.

“Happy birthday, Alice.”

“Leisha!” Stella again, in top managerial mode. “You have a comlink conference at nine, so if you’re going to see that reporter…”

From the right side of her mouth, so softly that Stella couldn’t hear, Alice murmured, “My poor Jordan…”

Leisha murmured back, “You know he loves it,” and went to the board room to meet the reporter.

He surprised her by looking about sixteen, a lanky boy with too-sharp elbows and bad skin, dressed in what must be the latest adolescent fashion: balloon-shaped shorts and plastic blouse trimmed with tiny dangling plastic scooters in red, white, and blue. He perched nervously in a chair while Eric and Seth danced around him playing flutes, badly. Leisha sent her grandnephews from the room. Seth went cheerfully; Eric scowled and slammed the door. In the sudden quiet Leisha sat down across from the boy.

“What newsgrid did you say you represent, Mr… Cavanaugh?”

“My high school net,” he blurted. “Only I didn’t tell the lady that when I made the appointment.”

“Of course not,” Leisha said. Forget her feet—this was funny. The first interview she had granted in ten years, and it turned out to be to a kid for his high-school grid. Susan would have loved it.

“Well, then, let’s begin,” she said. She knew the boy had never spoken to a Sleepless before. It was written all over him: the curiosity, the uneasiness, the furtive assessment. But no envy, in any of its virulent forms. That was the remarkable thing: its absence in this unremarkable boy.

He was better organized than he looked. “My mom says it used to be different than it was now. She says donkeys and even Livers hated Sleepless. How come?”

“How come you don’t?”

The question seemed to genuinely surprise him. He frowned, then looked at her with a sideways embarrassment that told Leisha, more clearly than words, how decent he was. “Well, I don’t mean to offend you or anything, but…why would I hate you? I mean, donkeys are the ones—Sleepless are really just sort of super-donkeys, aren’t they?—who have to do all the work. We Livers just get to enjoy the results. To live. You know,” he said, in a burst of ingenuous confiding, “I can never figure out why donkeys don’t see that and hate us.”

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing, Mr. Cavanaugh. Are there any donkeys in your school?”

“Nah. They have their own schools.” He looked at Leisha as if she was supposed to know that, which of course she did. The United States was a three-tiered society now: the have-nots, who by the mysterious hedonistic opiate of the Philosophy of Genuine Living had become the recipients of the gift of leisure. Livers, eighty percent of the population, had shed the work ethic for a gaudy populous version of the older aristocratic ethic: the fortunate do not have to work. Above them—or below—were the donkeys, genetically-enhanced Sleepers who ran the economy and the political machinery, as dictated by, and in exchange for, the lordly votes of the new leisure class. Donkeys managed; their robots labored. Finally, the Sleepless, nearly all of whom were invisible in Sanctuary anyway, were disregarded by Livers, if not by donkeys. All of it, the entire trefoil organization—id, ego, and superego, some wit had labeled it sardonically—was underwritten by cheap, ubiquitous Y-energy, powering automated factories making possible a lavish Dole that traded bread and circuses for votes. The whole thing, Leisha thought, was peculiarly American, managing to combine democracy with materialism, mediocrity with enthusiasm, power with the illusion of control from below.

“Tell me, Mr. Cavanaugh, what do you and your friends do with all your free time?”

“Do?” He seemed startled.

“Yes. Do. Today, for instance. When you’re done recording this interview, what will you do?”

“Well…drop off the recording at school. The teacher will put it on the school newsgrid, I guess. If he wants to.”

“Is he a Liver or a donkey?”

“A Liver, of course,” he said, a little scornfully. Her stock, Leisha saw, was dropping rapidly. “Then I might work on reading till school’s out at noon—I can almost read, but not quite. It’s pretty useless, but my mom wants me to learn. Then there’s the scooter races at noon, I’m going with some friends—”

“Who pays for and organizes those?”

“Our local assemblyman, of course. Cathy Miller. She’s a donkey.”

“Of course.”

“Then some friends are having a brainie party, our congressman passed out some new stuff from Colorado or someplace, then there’s this virtual-reality holovid I want to do—”

“What’s that called?”

“Tamarra of the Martian Seas. Aren’t you going to see it? It’s agro.”

“Maybe I’ll catch it,” Leisha said. Feet, reporters, Tamarra of the Martian Seas. Moira, Alice’s daughter, had emigrated to a Martian colony. “You know there aren’t really any seas on Mars, don’t you?”

“That so?” he said, without interest. “Then some friends and I are going to play ball, then my girl and I are going to fuck. After that, if there’s time, I might join my parents at my mom’s lodge, because they’re having a dance. If there’s not time—Ms. Camden? Is something funny?”

“No,” Leisha gasped. “I’m sorry. No eighteenth-century aristo could have had a fuller social schedule.”

“Yeah, well, I’m an agro Liver,” the boy said modestly. “But I’m supposed to ask you questions. Now, is…no, wait…what’s this—foundation you run? What does it do?”

“It asks beggars why they’re beggars and provides funding for those who want to be something else.”

The boy looked bewildered.

“If, for instance,” Leisha said, “you wanted to become a donkey, the Susan Melling Foundation might help send you to school, finance augments for you, whatever was necessary.”

“Why would I ever want to do that?”

“Why indeed?” Leisha said. “But some people do.”

“Nobody I know,” the boy said decidedly. “Sounds a little wormy to me. One more question: Why do you do it? Run this foundation thing?”

“Because,” Leisha said with precision, “what the strong owe beggars is to ask each one why he is a beggar and act accordingly. Because community is the assumption, not the result, and only by giving nonproductiveness the same individuality as excellence, and acting accordingly, does one fulfill the obligation to the beggars in Spain.”

She saw that the boy had understood not one word of this. Nor did he ask. He stood, picked up his recording equipment with obvious relief—the day’s work over—and held out his hand. “Well, I guess that’s it. The teacher said four questions are enough. Thanks, Ms. Camden.”

She took his hand. Such a polite boy, so devoid of envy or hatred, so satisfied. So stupid. “Thank you, Mr. Cavanaugh. For answering my questions. Will you answer one more?”

“Sure.”

“If your teacher does put this interview on the student newsgrid, will anybody watch it?” He looked away; she saw he didn’t want to embarrass her with the answer. Such a polite boy. “Do you watch the newsgrids at all, Mr. Cavanaugh?”

Now he did meet her eyes, his young face shocked. “Of course! My whole family does! How else would my mom and dad know which donkeys would give us the most for our vote?”

“Ah,” Leisha said. “The American Constitution at work.”

“And next year’s the tricentennial year,” the boy said proudly; Livers were all patriots. “Well, thanks again.”

“Thank you,” Leisha said. Stella, stern at the doorway, ushered the boy out.

“Your comlink call is in two minutes, Leisha, and right now there’s a—”

“Stella—how many applications has the Foundation processed this quarter?”

“One hundred sixteen,” Stella said precisely. She kept all Foundation records, including financials.

“Down what percentage from last quarter?”

“Six percent.”

“And from last year-to-date?”

“Eight percent. You know that.” Leisha did; Stella would have more to occupy her if the Foundation were still running at the heady pace of its first years. She wouldn’t be trying to make secretarial and maternal duties fill up a first-rate brain, leaning on everybody else in the process. Stella must have guessed what Leisha was thinking. She said suddenly, “You could go back to law. Or write another book. Or start another corporation, if you’d even consider competing with the donkeys at what you do even better.”

“Sanctuary competes,” Leisha said mildly. “And the new economic order isn’t based on competition anyway, it’s based on quality living. A young man just told me so. Don’t badger me, Stella, it’s my birthday. What’s all that noise out there?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. There’s a child out beyond the gate, screaming his head off to see you and nobody but you.”

“A Sleepless child?” Leisha asked, her blood quickening. It still happened, sometimes: an illegal genemod, a confused child learning slowly over years that he was different, that the scooter races and holovids and brainie parties somehow weren’t enough for him as they were for his friends. Then there would be the chance learning of the Susan Melling Foundation, usually from a kind donkey, and the scary, determined journey in search of his own kind even before he knew what it meant to belong to his own kind. Taking these Sleepless children or teenagers or sometimes even adults inside the compound, helping them to become what they were, had been Leisha’s sweetest pleasure during her two and a half decades in the isolated desert.

But Stella said, “No. Not a Sleepless. He’s about ten years old, a dirty kid yelling his head off that he has to see you and nobody else. I sent Eric out to tell him you had open reception tomorrow, but he socked Eric in the eye and said he couldn’t wait.”

“Did Eric flatten him?” Leisha said. Stella’s twelve-year-old son had strength mods. And karate lessons. And a disposition no Sleepless should have.

“No,” Stella said, with pride, “Eric’s growing up. He’s learned not to hit unless there’s a clear physical need for defense.”

Leisha doubted this. Eric Bevington-Watrous troubled her. But all she said was, “Let the boy in. I’ll see him now.”

“Leisha! Tokyo is on the comlink this very minute!”

“Tell them I’ll call back. Humor me, Stella—it’s my birthday. I’m old.”

“Alice is old,” Stella said, altering the mood instantly. After a moment she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Let the kid in. At least it will stop that yelling. What did you say his name was?”

“Drew Arlen,” Stella said.

In orbit over the Pacific Ocean, the Sanctuary Council broke into spontaneous applause.

Fourteen men and women sat around the polished metal table shaped like a stylized double helix in the Council dome. A plastiglass window three feet above the floor ran around the entire dome, occasionally crossed with thin metal support struts. The dome itself sat as close as possible to one end of the cylindrical orbital, so the view from the conference room, which neatly occupied half the Council dome, was appealingly varied. To the “north” stretched agricultural fields, dotted with domes, curving gently upward until lost in the hazy sky. To the “south” was space, uncompromising in the relatively thin layer of air that lay between the Council dome and the plastiglass end of the orbital cylinder. To the north, a warm and sunny “day” as sunlight streamed into the orbital through the long unopaqued window sections; to the south, endless night, filled variously with stars or an oppressively huge Earth. The uneven curvature of the conference table and the chairs bolted to the floor meant that six Council members faced stars, eight faced sun.

Jennifer Sharifi, permanent Council leader, always faced north, toward the sun.

She said, pleasure sparkling in her dark eyes, “All the brain scans, fluid analyses, spinal cartography results, and of course DNA analyses indicate nothing but success. Doctors Toliveri and Clement are to be warmly congratulated. And so, of course, are Ricky and Hermione.” She smiled warmly at her son and daughter-in-law. Ricky smiled back; Hermione ducked her head and a spasm crossed her extravagantly beautiful face. About half of Sanctuary’s families no longer altered genes, content with the intellectual and psychological benefits of Sleeplessness and wanting to preserve family resemblances. Hermione, violet-eyed and sleek-limbed, belonged to the other half.

Councilor Victor Lin said eagerly, “Can’t we see the baby? Certainly the environment has to be sterile enough.” Several people laughed.

“Yes, please,” Councilor Lucy Ames said, and blushed. She was only twenty-one, born on the orbital, and still a little overwhelmed that her name had come up for a Council term in the citizen lottery. Jennifer smiled at her.

“Yes, of course. We can all see the baby. But I want to repeat what you have been told before: This round of genetic alteration has gone far beyond anything that any of us are privileged to enjoy. If we wish to keep our advantage over the Sleepers on Earth, we must explore every avenue of superiority open to us. But there are sometimes minor, unavoidable prices to pay as we move forward.”

This speech sobered everyone. The eight councilors with lottery terms, those not of the Sharifi family that controlled 51 percent of Sanctuary financially and hence 51 percent of Council votes, glanced at each other. The six permanent councilors—Jennifer, Ricky, Hermione, Najla, Najla’s husband Lars Johnson and Jennifer’s husband Will Sandaleros—went on smiling determinedly. Except for Hermione.

“Bring in the baby,” Jennifer said to her. Hermione left. Ricky reached out a tentative hand as his wife passed, but didn’t touch her. He drew his hand back and stared out the dome window. Nobody spoke until Hermione returned with a wrapped bundle.

“This,” Jennifer said, “is Miranda Serena Sharifi. Our future.”

Hermione put the baby on the conference table and unwrapped its yellow blanket. Miranda was ten weeks old. Her skin was pale, without rosiness, and her hair was a thick mat of black. She gazed around the conference table from bright, very dark eyes. The eyes bulged in their sockets and darted constantly, unable to remain still. The strong, tiny body twitched ceaselessly. The minute fists opened and closed so fast it was hard to count her fingers. The baby radiated a manic vitality, an overwrought tension so intense it seemed her gaze would bore a zigzag hole in the dome wall.

Young Councilor Ames put her fist to her mouth.

“At first glance,” Jennifer said in her composed voice, “you might think that our Miranda’s symptoms look like certain nervous-system disorders the unaltered beggars are prey to. Or perhaps symptoms of para-amphetamines. But this is something very different. Miri’s brain is operating at three or four times the speed of ours, with superbly enhanced mnemonic capacities and equally enhanced concentration. There is no loss of nerve-tissue control, although there is some minor loss of motor control as a side effect. Miri’s genemods include high intelligence, but what the changes to her nervous system will do is give her ways to use that intelligence that we cannot now predict. This genemod is the best way around the well-known phenomenon of intellectual regression to the mean, in which superior parents have children of only normal intelligence, providing a lesser platform from which new genemods can launch.”

A few people around the table nodded at this lecture; a few more, familiar with the lesser accomplishments of Najla and Ricky compared to Jennifer herself, looked down at the table. Councilor Ames continued to stare at the twitching infant, her eyes wide and her hand to her mouth.

“Miranda is the first,” Jennifer said. “But not the last. We in Sanctuary represent the best minds of the United States. It is our obligation to keep that advantage. For all our sakes.”

Councilor Lin said quietly, “Our usual Sleepless, genemod babies are already doing that.”

“Yes,” Jennifer said, smiling brilliantly, “but at any time the beggars on Earth could decide to reverse their shortsighted policy and begin to do that again themselves. We need more. We need everything we can create for ourselves from the genetic technology we dare to use to its fullest and they do not—mind, technology, defense—”

Will Sandaleros put his hand lightly on her arm.

For a second fury blazed in Jennifer’s eyes. Then it was gone, and she smiled at Will, who gazed at her tenderly. Jennifer laughed. “Was I orating again? I’m sorry. I know you all understand the Sanctuary philosophy as well as I do.”

A few people smiled; a few shifted uneasily around the polished table. Councilor Ames went on staring, wide-eyed, at the convulsing baby. Hermione caught the young woman’s horrified gaze; immediately she wrapped Miranda in her blanket. The thin yellow material jerked and twitched. Along the hem were embroidered white butterflies and dark blue stars.

Drew Arlen stood before Leisha Camden with his legs braced firmly apart. Leisha thought that she had never seen such a contrast as this child with the teen-age reporter who had just left, and whose name she had already forgotten.

Drew was the filthiest ten-year-old she had ever seen. Mud caked his brown hair and smeared the remains of his plastic shirt, pants, and torn Dole-issue shoes. So much dirt clung to a deep scratch on his exposed left arm that Leisha thought it must surely be infected; the skin had a red, angry look around elbow bones like chisels. One tooth had been knocked out of a face that was remarkable only for eyes as green as Leisha’s own and a sort of stubborn eagerness, as if Drew were prepared to fight for something with every fiber of his dirty, skinny, clearly non-donkey self.

“I’m Drew Arlen, me,” he said. It might have been a fanfare.

“Leisha Camden,” Leisha said gravely. “You insisted on seeing me.”

“I want to be in your Fountain.”

“Foundation. Where did you hear about my Foundation?”

Drew waved this away as of no consequence. “From somebody. After he told me, I done come a long way to get here, me. From Louisiana.”

“On foot? By yourself?”

“I stole rides when I could,” the boy said, again as if this were not worth mentioning. “It took a long time. But now I’m here, me, and I’m ready for you to start.”

Leisha said to the household robot, “Bring sandwiches from the refrigerator. And milk.” The robot glided soundlessly away. Drew watched it with total absorption until it left the room. He turned to Leisha. “Is that the kind that can wrestle with you? For muscle training. I see them on the newsgrids, me.”

“No. It’s just a basic retrieve-and-record ’bot. Now what is it you’re ready for, Drew?”

He said impatiently, “To get started. Your Fountain. Making me into somebody.”

“And just what does that mean to you?”

“You know—You’re the Fountain lady! Get cleaned up, me, and educated, and be somebody!”

“You want to become a donkey?”

The boy frowned. “No, but thass where I got to start, me, don’t I? Then go on from there.”

The robot returned. Drew looked longingly at the food; Leisha gestured and he fell on it like a filthy little dog, tearing at the sandwiches with teeth on the left side of his face and wincing with pain whenever the sore, empty hole on the right came in contact with bread or meat. Leisha watched.

“When did you eat last?”

“Yesterday morning. Thass good.”

“Do your parents know where you are?”

Drew picked up a crumb from the floor and ate it. “My mom don’t care. She’s at brainie parties, her, all the time now. My daddy’s dead.” He said this last harshly, looking straight at Leisha from his green eyes, as if she should know already about his father’s death. Leisha pulled the terminal from the wall.

“Won’t do no good to call them,” Drew said. “We got no terminal, us.”

“I’m not going to call them, Drew. I’m going to find out something about you. Where in Louisiana did you live?”

“Montronce Point.”

“Personal bio search, all primary databanks,” Leisha said. “Drew, what’s your Dole security number?”

“842-06-3421-889.”

Montronce was a tiny Delta town, no donkey economy to speak of. One thousand nine hundred twenty-two people, school with 16 percent attendance for students, 62 percent for volunteer teachers, who kept the building open fifty-eight days a year. Drew was one of the 16 percent, off and on. His medical history was nonexistent, but those of his parents and two younger sisters were recorded. Leisha listened to it all, and grew very still.

When the terminal was done, she said, “Your grades, even in what passes for a school in Montronce, weren’t terrific.”

“No,” the boy agreed. His eyes never left her face.

“You don’t seem to have unusual abilities in athletics, music, or anything else.”

“No, I don’t, me.”

“And you don’t really want to be educated for a donkey job.”

“Thass all right,” he said aggressively. “I can do that.”

“But you don’t really want to. The Susan Melling Foundation exists to help people become what they want to become. What is it you want your future to hold?” It seemed an absurd question to ask a ten-year-old, especially this ten-year-old. Poorer than even most Livers. Not particularly talented. Scrawny. Smelly. A Sleeper.

And yet not ordinary, either—the bright green eyes looked at Leisha with a directness most adult Sleepers never managed, not even in the relaxed, hedonistic tolerance of the tricentennial social climate. In fact, Leisha thought, there was more than directness in Drew’s eyes: There was a confidence in her help that Foundation applicants almost never had. Most of them looked at her with uncertainty (“Why should you help me?”) or suspicion (“Why should you help me?”) or a nervous obsequiousness that inevitably reminded her of groveling dogs. Drew looked as if he and Leisha were business partners in a sure thing.

“You heard the terminal say how my Grampy died, him.”

Leisha said, “He was a workman building Sanctuary. A metal strut tore loose in space and ripped his suit.”

Drew nodded. His voice held the same buoyant confidence, without grief. “My Daddy was a little boy then. The Dole didn’t hardly provide nothin’ then.”

“I remember,” Leisha said wryly; what the Dole had provided, courtesy of basic cheap Y-energy and social conscience, was nothing compared to what donkeys and government now provided, courtesy of the need for votes. Bread and circuses, saved from Roman barbarism only by that same cheap affluence. Comfortable and courted, Livers lacked the pent-up rage for the arena.

She had expected Drew to pass over her reference to remembering his father’s era; most children regarded the past as irrelevant. But he surprised her. “You remember, you? How it was? How old you be, Leisha?”

He doesn’t know any better than to use my first name, Leisha thought indulgently—and immediately saw, for the first time, Drew’s gift. His interest in her was so intense, so fresh and real shining from the green eyes, that she was willing to indulge him. He carried blamelessness on him like a scent. She began to see how he could have made the trip from Louisiana to New Mexico still healthy: people would help him. In fact, the blood on his arm was fresh and so was the knocked-out tooth; it was possible he had met with nothing but help until he encountered Eric Bevington-Watrous outside Leisha’s walls.

And he was only ten years old.

She said, “I’m sixty-seven.”

His eyes widened. “Oh! You don’t look like an old lady, you!”

You should see my feet. She laughed, and the child smiled. “Thank you, Drew. But you still haven’t answered my question. What is it you want from the Foundation?”

“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 knew 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. But 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.

Everything went wet and red.

When he came to, he lay on a bed. Wires and needles ran from his body to machines that whirred and hummed. His head whirred and hummed, too. He tried to raise it from the pillow.

His neck wouldn’t move.

Instead, he turned it slowly to the side as far as it would go, a few inches. A bulky figure sat in a chair beside his bed: Jordan Watrous.

“Drew!” Jordan jumped up from his chair. “Nurse! He’s awake!”

There were a great many people in his room, then, most of them not in Drew’s careful catalog of compound-dwellers. He didn’t see Leisha. His head hurt, his neck hurt. “Leisha!”

“I’m here, Drew.” She came around to his head. Her hand was cool on his cheek.

“What happened…me?”

“You had a fight with Eric.”

He remembered. Looking at Leisha, he was astonished to see that there were tears in her eyes. Why was she crying? The answer came, slowly—she was crying over him. Drew. Him.

“I hurt.”

“I know you do, honey.”

“I can’t move my neck, me.”

Leisha and Jordan exchanged looks. She said, “It’s strapped down. There’s nothing wrong with your neck. But your legs—”

“Leisha—not yet,” Jordan begged, and Drew turned his head slowly, painfully, toward Jordan. He had never heard that kind of voice from a grown man. From his mom or his sisters, after Daddy whomped them good, but not from a grown man.

Something in his head whispered, this is important.

“Yes, now,” Leisha said steadily. “The truth is best, and Drew’s tough. Honey—something broke in your spine. We did a lot of repair work, but nerve tissue doesn’t regenerate…at least not in people like…the doctors did muscle augments, other things. I know you don’t understand what that means yet. What you can understand is that your neck is all right, or will be in a month or so. Your arms and body are all right. But your legs…” Leisha turned her head. The harsh overhead light made her tears shiny. “You won’t walk again, Drew. The rest of your body functions normally, but you won’t walk. You’ll have a powerchair, the best we can buy or build or invent, but…you won’t walk.”

Drew was silent. It was too enormous; he couldn’t take it all in. Then, abruptly, he could. Colors and shapes exploded in his mind.

He said fiercely, “Does this mean I can’t go to no school in September, me?”

Leisha looked startled. “Honey, it’s past September. But yes, of course you can still go to school, next term, if you want to. Of course you can.” She looked across the bed at Jordan, and her look held so much pain that Drew looked too.

Jordan looked burned. Drew knew what it was to look burned—he had seen it on men whose scooters, illegally modified, went up in flames and took part of them with it. He had seen it on a woman whose baby had drowned in the big river. He had seen it on his mom. It was a look not to get yourself any feelings about, because the feelings would hurt so bad you couldn’t help nobody. Not even yourself. And that look should mean some help for somebody, Drew had always thought, or how come people had to go through having it gnaw at their faces?

He said, “Mr. Watrous, sir—” he had learned that word, they liked it here “—it warn’t Eric’s fault. I started it.”

Jordan’s face changed. First the look went away, then it came back, then it hardened into something else, and then it came back again, worse than before.

Leisha said, “We know that’s not true. Eric told us what happened.”

Drew thought about that; maybe it was true. He didn’t understand Eric all the way through, him, he’d already known that. And if things had been backside-to, so that Drew had been the one to make it so Eric couldn’t walk…

Couldn’t walk.

“Honey, don’t,” Leisha said, and now she was begging, too. “I know it seems terrible, but it isn’t the end of the world. You can still go to school, learn to ‘be somebody’ the way you said…Be brave, Drew. I know you are brave.”

Well, he was. He was a brave kid, him, everybody always said that, even in stinking Montronce. He was Drew Arlen, who was going to own Sanctuary someday. And he would never, ever, ever look as burned as Mr. Watrous did now. Not Drew Arlen, him.

He said to Leisha, “Will the powerchair be the kind that can float three inches above the floor and go down stairs?”

“It will be the kind that can fly to the moon if you want it to!”

Drew smiled. He made himself smile. He saw something now, sitting clean in front of him, like a big shimmery bubble he didn’t know how he’d missed before. It was big and warm and shining, and he not only saw it, he felt the bubble in every little bone in his body. Mr. Watrous said brokenly, “Drew, nothing can make this up to you, but we’ll do everything we can, everything…”

And they would. That was the bubble. Drew hadn’t had words for it before—he somehow never had words till somebody gave them to him—but that was the bubble. Right there. He didn’t have to run errands for the old lady anymore or learn the manners they shoved at him or even eat the real food. He would go on doing these things because some of them he wanted to learn and some of them he liked. But he didn’t have to. They would do anything for him, now. They would have to. Now and for the rest of his life.

He had them.

“I know you will, you,” he said to Jordan. For a long moment the bubble held him, while Leisha and Jordan exchanged startled looks above his head. Then the bubble burst. He couldn’t hold it. It wasn’t gone entirely, it was still true and would come back, but he couldn’t hold it now. His legs were broken, and he would never walk again, and he started to cry, a ten-year-old strapped immobile on a hospital bed in a room with strangers who never slept.

18

“Coming next: A nation becalmed: The United States at its Tricentennial,” said the newsgrid announcer. “A special CNS broadcast in depth.”

“Hah,” Leisha said. “They couldn’t report in depth on a soysynth cooking bee.”

“Hush, I want to hear it,” Alice said. “Drew, hand me my glasses from the table.”

They formed a semicircle around the hologrid, twenty-six assorted people sitting or standing or leaning against the adobe walls. Drew handed Alice her glasses. Leisha spared a minute from the ridiculous broadcast to glance at him. Drew had been a year in his powerchair, and he maneuvered it as unthinkingly as a pair of shoes. In the months away at school he had grown taller, although no less skinny. He was quieter, less open, but wasn’t that normal for a boy approaching adolescence? Drew seemed all right: he was used to his chair, adjusted to his new life. Leisha turned her attention back to the hologrid.

It represented state-of-the-art donkey technology, a flattened rectangle fastened to the ceiling, pocked by various apertures and bulges. It projected the broadcast in three-dimensional holograms five feet high on the holostage below. The color was more vivid than reality, the outlines less vivid, so that all images took on the bright, soft look of children’s drawings.

“Three hundred years ago today,” said the preternaturally handsome narrator, obviously genemod, dressed in a spotless uniform of George Washington’s army, “the founders of our country signed the most historic document the world has ever known: The Declaration of Independence. The old words still move us: ‘When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal—’ ”

Alice snorted. Leisha glanced at her, but Alice was smiling.

“ ‘—that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—’ ”

Drew frowned. Leisha wondered if he knew what the words even meant; his grades at school had not been spectacular. A thin blanket covered his legs. Across the room Eric, subdued and sullen, lounged against a wall. He never looked directly at Drew but Drew, Leisha had noticed, almost seemed to go out of his way to power his chair up to Eric, talk to him, turn on him Drew’s dazzling smile. Revenge? But surely that was too subtle for an eleven-year-old. Reconciliation? Need? “All three,” Alice had said crisply. “But, then, Leisha, you never were very sensitive to theater.”

The picturesque narrator finished the Declaration of Independence and vanished. Scenes followed of July Fourth celebrations across the country: Livers roasting soysynth barbeque in Georgia; red-white-and-blue scooters parading in California; a donkey ball in New York, with the women in the new severe gowns that were stark straight falls of silk but were worn with elaborate collars and arm cuffs of heavy, jewel-studded gold.

The voice-over was electronically enhanced: “Independence indeed—from hunger, from want, from the factionalism that divided us for so long. From foreign entanglements—as George Washington advised 300 years ago—from envy, from class conflict. From innovation—it has been a decade since the United States has pioneered a single important technological breakthrough. Contentment, it seems, breeds comfort with familiarity. But was this what the founding fathers intended for us, this sweet comfort, this undisturbed political balance? Does the Tricentennial find us at a destination, or becalmed in stagnant waters?”

Leisha was startled: When was the last time she had heard even a donkey newsgrid ask the question? Jordan and Stella both leaned forward.

“And what effect,” the voice-over went on, “is this mellow balance having on our young? The working class—” scenes of the New York Stock Exchange, Congress in session, a meeting of Fortune 500 CEO’s—“still hustles. But the so-called Livers, the eighty percent of the population who control elections through sheer numbers, represent a shrinking pool from which to draw the best and the brightest to create America’s future. Becoming the best and the brightest must be preceded by a desire to excel—”

“Aw, switch the grid,” Eric said loudly. Stella glanced at him, her eyes angry; Jordan looked down at the floor. This middle child was breaking both their hearts.

“—and perhaps adversity itself is necessary to create that desire. The all-but-discredited ideals of Yagaiism that held such strong sway forty years ago when—”

Wall Street and scooter races vanished. The narrator went on, describing holoscenes that were not there, but the stage filled with a projection of dense blackness. “What the—” Seth said.

Stars appeared in the blackness. Space. The narrator’s voice went on describing the Tricentennial party at the White House. In front of the stars appeared an orbital, spinning slowly, and beneath it a banner with a quote from a different president in a different time—Abraham Lincoln: “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

Babble filled the room. Leisha sat a moment, stunned, but then she understood. This was not a general broadcast. Sanctuary maintained a number of communications satellites, monitoring Earth broadcasts and conducting datanet business. They were capable of focused, very narrow beam frequencies. The image of Sanctuary was intended for no place else but the compound, for no one else but her. It had been twenty-five years since Leisha had communicated with Sanctuary, or its overt holdings, or its shadowy, covert business partners. That lack of communication, with its myriad ramifications, had forced all their idleness, their becalmed stagnation: hers and Jordan’s and Jordan’s children. Twenty-five years. Hence this broadcast.

Jennifer just wanted to remind her that Sanctuary was still there.

Miri’s earliest memory was stars. Her second earliest memory was Tony.

In the stars memory, her grandmother held her up to a long curved window, and beyond the window was black dotted with steady lights: glowing, wonderful lights, and as Miri watched, one of them flew past. “A meteor,” Grandma said, and Miri reached out her arms to touch the beautiful stars. Grandma laughed. “They’re too far for your hand. But not for your mind. Always remember that, Miranda.”

She did. She always remembered everything: every bit of what happened to her. But that couldn’t be true because she didn’t remember a time without Tony, and Mommy and Daddy told her there had been a whole year without him, before he was born to them just the way she had been. So there must be at least a year she didn’t remember.

She did remember when Nikos and Christina Demetrios came. And soon after the twins, Allen Sheffield came, and then Sara Cerelli. Six of them, tumbling around the nursery under the watchful eye of Ms. Patterson or Grandma Sheffield, going home to their domes with their parents for visits, playing games with the electrodes on their heads for Dr. Toliveri and Dr. Clement. They all liked Dr. Toliveri, who laughed easily, and they even liked Dr. Clement, who didn’t. They all liked everything, because everything was so interesting.

Their nursery was in the same dome as another one, and for part of every “day”—Miri wasn’t sure what that word meant yet except that it had something to do with counting something, and she liked counting—the plasti-wall between them was opened. The kids in the other nursery rushed into Miri’s, or the other way around, and Miri tumbled over the floor with Joan or tussled over toys with Robbie or piled blocks on top of each other with Kendall.

She remembered the day that stopped.

It started with Joan Lucas, who was bigger than Miri and had curly, bright brown hair shiny as stars. Joan said to her, “Why do you wiggle all over like that?”

“I d-d-d-don’t kn-know,” Miri said. She had noticed of course that she and Tony and the others in her nursery twitched, and Joan and the others in hers did not. And Joan never stuttered, either, the way Miri and Tony and Christina and Allen did. But Miri hadn’t thought about it. Joan had brown hair; she had black; Allen had yellow. Twitching seemed like that.

Joan said, “Your head is too big.”

Miri felt it. It didn’t feel bigger than before.

“I don’t want to play with you,” Joan said abruptly. She walked away. Miri stared after her. Ms. Patterson was there immediately. “Joan, do you have a problem?”

Joan stopped walking and stared at Ms. Patterson. All the children knew that tone. Joan’s face crumpled.

“You are being silly,” Ms. Patterson said. “Miri is a member of your community, of Sanctuary. You will play with her now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Joan said. None of the children was exactly sure what a community was, but when the adults said the word, they obeyed. Joan picked up the doll she and Miri had been trying to dress. But Joan’s face stayed crumpled, and after a while Miri didn’t want to play anymore.

She remembered this.

They had lessons every “day,” three nurseries of kids learning together in a community. Miri remembered vividly the moment she realized that a terminal was not just to watch or listen to; you could make it do things. You could make it tell you things. She asked it what a “day” was, why the ceiling was up, what Tony had for breakfast, how old Daddy was, how many days till her birthday. It always knew; it knew more than Grandma or Mommy or Daddy. It was very wise. It told you to do things, too, and if you did them right it made a smiling face and if you didn’t you got to try again.

She remembered the first day she noticed that sometimes the terminal was wrong.

It was Joan who made Miri see it. They were working on a terminal together, which everyone had to do part of each day—Miri knew the word, now—because they were a community. Miri didn’t like working with Joan; Joan was very slow. Left alone, Joan would still be on the second problem when Miri was on the tenth. She sometimes thought Joan didn’t like working with her either.

The terminal was in visual mode only: they were practicing reading. The problem was “doll: plastic baby:?” Miri said, “M-m-my t-t-turn,” and typed in “God.” The terminal flashed a frowning face.

“That’s not right,” Joan said, with some satisfaction.

“Y-y-yes, it is,” Miri said, troubled. “The t-t-t-terminal’s wr-wrong.”

“I suppose you know more than the terminal!”

“G-God is r-r-r-right,” Miri insisted. “It’s f-f-four st-str-strings d-d-down.”

Despite herself, Joan looked interested. “What do you mean, ‘four strings down’? There’s no strings in this problem.”

“N-n-not in the p-p-p-p-p-problem,” Miri said. She tried to think how to explain it; she could see it in her mind, but explaining it was harder. Especially to Joan. Before she could begin, Ms. Patterson was there.

“Is there a problem here, girls?”

Joan said, not nastily, “Miri has a wrong answer, but she says it’s right.”

Ms. Patterson looked at the screen. She knelt down beside the children. “How is it right, Miri?”

Miri tried. “It’s f-f-four l-l-l-little str-strings down, M-M-Ms. P-P-Patterson. S-s-s-see, a ‘d-doll’ is a ‘t-t-t-toy’—the f-f-first string g-goes f-from d-d-doll t-to t-t-toy. A t-toy is f-f-f-for ‘p-pretend,’ and one thing w-w-we p-p-p-pretend is th-that a shooting st-st-st-star is a r-r-real st-st-star, so you c-can p-put ‘sh-sh-sh-shooting star’ n-next in the f-f-f-irst string. T-t-to m-make the p-p-p-pattern w-w-w-w-work.” So many words was hard work; Miri wished she didn’t have to explain so hard. “Th-Then a shooting st-sst-star is r-really a m-m-m-meteor, and you have to m-m-make the str-string g-g-go r-real now b-b-because b-b-before you m-m-made it p-pretend, so the end of the f-f-first str-string, f-four l-l-little str-strings d-down, is ‘m-m-m-m-meteor.’ ”

Ms. Patterson was staring at her. “Go on, Miri.”

“Th-then for ‘p-plastic,’ ” Miri said, a little desperately, “the f-f-first string l-l-leads t-t-to ‘invented.’ It h-h-h-has to, you s-see, bb-because ‘t-toy’ led t-t-t-t-to ‘p-pretend.’ ” She tried to think of a way to explain that the fact that the little strings were one place off from each other was part of the whole design, echoed in the inversion she was going to make of the same words between substrings two and three, but that was too hard to explain. She stuck to the strings themselves, not the overall design, which troubled her because the overall design was just as important. It just took too long to explain in her stammering speech. “ ‘Invented’ g-g-goes t-t-to ‘p-p-people,’ of c-course, b-because p-people invent things. The p-p-people st-string l-leads to ‘c-c-community,’ a l-l-lot of p-people, and that st-string has to g-g-go t-to ‘orbital,’ b-b-because then the t-t-two str-strings l-l-lined up n-next t-t-to each other m-make the p-problem s-s-s-say ‘m-m-meteor: orbital.’ ”

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, Christina 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. Ricky 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.

She stood in front of her work terminal, munching an apple and listening to the program recite the fourth chapter of her book on Thomas Paine. The room glowed with sunlight. Alice’s bed had been dragged to the window so she could see the flowers. Leisha hastily swallowed a bite of apple and addressed the terminal.

“Text change: ‘Paine rushing to Philadelphia’ to ‘Paine’s rushing to Philadelphia.’ ”

“Changed,” the terminal said.

Alice said, “Do you really think anyone still cares about those old rules for verbals?”

“I care,” Leisha said. “Alice, you haven’t touched your lunch.”

“I’m not hungry. And you don’t care about verbals; you’re just filling time. Listen, there’s a whole lot of commotion in the front of the house.”

“Hungry or not, you have to eat. You have to.” Alice was seventy-five but looked much older. Gone was the stocky figure that had plagued her all her life; now her skin stretched thin over bones revealed as delicate wirework. She had had another stroke, and after that she’d put away her terminal. Leisha, in desperation, had even suggested that Alice resume her work on twin parapsychology. Alice had smiled sadly—the twin work was the only thing they had never been able to really discuss—and had shaken her head. “No, dear. It’s too late. To convince you.”

But the stroke hadn’t impaired Alice’s love for her family. She grinned as the commotion from the front of the house exploded into the room.

“Drew!”

“I’m home, Grandma Alice! Hey, Leisha!”

Alice held out her arms hungrily, and Drew powered his chair to go into them. Unlike Alice’s grandchildren, with their own perfect health, Drew was never repulsed by the frozen left side of Alice’s face, the spittle at the left corner of her mouth, the slightly slurred speech. Alice hugged him tightly.

Leisha put down her apple—it lacked flavor anyway; whatever the agrogene combines had done this time was a step backward—and tensed on her toes, waiting. When Drew finally turned to her she said, “You’ve been kicked out of another school.”

Drew started his ingratiating grin, got a closer look at Leisha’s face, and stopped smiling. “Yes.”

“What for this time?”

“Not grades, Leisha. This time I studied.”

“Well, then?”

“Fighting.”

“Who’s hurt?”

He said sullenly, “A son of a bitch named Lou Bergin.”

“And I presume I’ll be hearing from Mr. Bergin’s lawyer.”

“He started it, Leisha. I just finished it.”

Leisha studied Drew. He was sixteen, and despite the powerchair—or because of it—he exercised fanatically, keeping his upper body superbly conditioned. She could well believe he was a lethal fighter. His adolescent features didn’t yet fit together: nose too big, chin too small, skin spotted by acne where it wasn’t still rounded by baby fat. Only his eyes were handsome, vivid green fringed by thick black lashes, with a concentrated gaze that could still make almost anyone think that Drew found him completely fascinating. Leisha was an exception. For the past two years there had been antagonism between them, periodically mitigated by clumsy attempts on his part to remember how much he owed her, and on hers to remember the engaging child he had been.

This was the fourth school that had expelled him. The first time, Leisha had been indulgent: He was a small crippled Liver, and the intellectual demands of a school full of donkey children, most genetically modified for intelligence and physical health, must have been over-whelming for him. The second time she had been less indulgent. Drew had failed every single subject, simply ceasing to go to class at all, spending solitary hours with his semiautomatic guitar or games terminal. No one had disturbed him. The school expected its students, most of whom would run the country someday, to be self-motivated.

Leisha sent him next to the most structured school she could find. Drew loved it immediately; he discovered the drama program. He was the star of his acting class. “I’ve found my destiny!” he said on a comlink call home. Leisha winced; Alice laughed. But four months later Drew was home, bitter and silent. He had failed to get a part in either Death of a Salesman or Morning Light. Alice asked gently, “Was it because they didn’t want a Willy Loman or Kelland Vie in a powerchair?” “It was donkey politics,” Drew spat. “And it always will be.”

Leisha then searched hard for a school with an untaxing academic program, a strong artistic one, a structured school day, and as high a percentage as possible of students from families without much political clout, impressive financial connections, or illustrious histories. She found one that seemed to qualify in Springfield, Massachusetts. Drew had seemed to like the school and Leisha had thought things were going well. Yet here he was again.

“Look at your face,” Drew said sullenly. “Why don’t you say it aloud? ‘Here’s Drew back again, fucked-up Drew who thinks he’s going to be somebody but can’t finish anything. What the shit should we do about poor little Liver Drew?’ ”

“What are we going to do?” Leisha said cruelly.

“Why don’t you just give up on me?”

Alice said, “Oh, no, Drew.”

“Not you, Grandma Alice. Her. Her that insists that people be wonderful or they don’t exist.”

Leisha said, “As opposed to thinking they’re wonderful just because they exist, but do nothing to fulfill their own existence?”

Alice rapped out, “That’s enough, you two!”

It wasn’t enough for Leisha. Drew’s goading had hurt parts of her she hadn’t known still existed. She said, “Now that you’re home, Drew, you’ll want to see Eric. He’s straightened himself out wonderfully and is making genuine progress with global atmospheric curves. Jordan is immensely proud of him.”

Drew’s green eyes blazed. Leisha turned her back. She was suddenly, sickeningly, ashamed of herself. She was seventy-five years old—an incredible fact in itself; she never felt seventy-five—and this boy was sixteen. Unmodified, a Sleeper, not even drawn from the donkey class…As she got older, she lost compassion. Why else was she shut away from the world in this New Mexico fortress, in retreat from a country she had once hoped to help improve for everyone? Youthful dreams.

Dreams which Drew didn’t even have.

Alice said wearily, “All right, Leisha. Drew, Eric asked me to give you a message.”

“What?” she heard Drew snarl. But it was a softened snarl; he could never stay angry at Alice. Not at Alice.

Alice said, “Eric said to tell you that as part of his studies he walked into the Pacific and got his ass wiped. What does that mean?”

Drew laughed. “Really? Eric said that? I guess he has changed.” The brooding bitterness returned to his voice.

Stella ran into the room, looking distracted. She had put on weight and now looked like a painting by Titian, with plump, healthy flesh under youthfully red hair. “Leisha, there’s a—Drew! What are you doing home?”

“He’s visiting,” Alice said. “There’s a what, dear?”

“There’s a visitor to see Leisha. Actually, three visitors.” Stella smiled, and her chins wobbled with excitement. “Here they are!”

“Richard!”

Leisha catapulted across the room into his arms. Richard caught her, laughing, then let her go. Leisha turned immediately to his wife, Ada, a slim Polynesian girl who smiled shyly. Ada still had trouble with English.

When Richard had first brought Ada to the New Mexico compound, after twenty years of solitary, aimless wandering around the globe, Leisha had been wary. She and Richard had never again been lovers; Leisha had recoiled from the thought of sleeping with Jennifer’s husband. And Richard had never asked. He had grieved for years for his lost children, Najla and Ricky, a silent bitter grieving so unlike a Sleepless that Leisha had not known how to respond. She had been relieved when he traveled for years at a time, disappearing with only his credit ring and the clothes on his back into India, Tibet, the Antarctic colonies, the central South American desert—always somewhere technologically backward, as close to primitive as a world fueled by Kenzo Yagai still possessed. Leisha never asked him about his journeys; he never volunteered information. She suspected he passed as a Sleeper.

Then four years ago he had returned for one of his infrequent stays bringing Ada. His wife. She came from one of the South Pacific voluntary cultural preserves. Ada was slim and brown, with long lustrous black hair and a habit of ducking her head when anyone addressed her. She spoke no English. She was 15 years old.

Leisha had welcomed her, set about learning Samoan, and tried to hide the fact that she was hurt to the heart. It wasn’t that Richard had rejected her; it was that he had rejected all the choices of being Sleepless. Choosing accomplishment. Choosing ambition. Choosing the mind.

But gradually Leisha had come to understand. The point for Richard was not only that Ada, with her shy smiles and halting speech and youthful adoration of Richard, was so different from Leisha. It was that Ada was so different from Jennifer Sharifi.

And Richard seemed happy. He had done what Leisha had not, and had made his own kind of peace with their Sleepless past. And if that peace looked like a surrender, could Leisha say that her own solution—the moribund Susan Melling Foundation, which had had all of ten applicants last year—was really any better?

“I see you, Leisha,” Ada said in English. “I see you gladly.”

“And I see you gladly,” Leisha said warmly. For Ada, this was a long speech of great intellectual power.

“I see you gladly, Mirami Alice.” Mirami, Richard had once said, was a term of great respect for the honored old. Ada had flatly—shyly and sweetly, but flatly nonetheless—refused to believe that Alice and Leisha were twins.

“And I see you gladly, dear,” Alice said. “You remember Drew?”

“Hey,” Drew said, smiling. Ada smiled slightly and looked away, as was proper for a married woman to an unrelated man. Richard said genially, “Hey, Drew,” which was such a change from the usual shadowed pain in his eyes when he spoke to Drew that Leisha blinked. She had never really understood that pain: Drew was a generation younger than Richard’s lost son. And, of course, he was a Sleeper.

Alice’s voice quavered, which meant she was tiring. “Stella said three visitors…”

Stella entered then, carrying a baby.

“Oh, Richard,” Leisha said. “Oh, Richard…”

“This is Sean. After my father.”

The baby looked absurdly like Richard: low brow, thick dark hair, dark eyes. Only his coffee-colored skin proclaimed Ada’s genes. They had evidently not had him modified at all. Leisha took the infant in her arms, not sure what she felt. Sean gazed at her solemnly. Leisha’s heart turned over.

“He’s beautiful…”

“Let me hold him,” Alice said hungrily, and Leisha surrendered the baby. She was glad for Richard, who had always wanted a family, an anchor, an intimate community…Two years ago Leisha had medical tests to confirm that her own eggs were inert. Gametes, Susan had warned her decades ago, did not regenerate.

Kevin Baker, the only prominent Sleepless left in the United States, had four children by his young Sleepless wife.

Jennifer Sharifi, she knew from consulting United States birth records, had two children and four grandchildren.

Alice may have lost Moira, emigrant to Mars colony, but she had Jordan and his three children.

Stop it, she told herself, and did.

The baby was passed around. Stella bustled in with cookies and coffee. Alice, tired, was wheeled to her room to sleep. Jordan came in from a field he was cultivating with experimental genemod sunflowers. Richard talked, seemingly freely and yet with something odd in his manner, about his and Ada’s wanderings through the Artificial Islands Game Sanctuary off the African coast.

“Hey,” Drew said, and at the sound in his voice everybody looked up. “Hey—this baby’s sleeping.”

Leisha sat still. Then she stood, walked to Drew’s chair, and stared down at the infant carryall parked at Drew’s feet. Sean lay with his tiny fists flung above his head, asleep. His closed eyelids fluttered. Leisha’s stomach clenched. Richard had felt such hatred of his own kind, his own people, that he had had in vitro genemod to reverse sleeplessness.

He was gazing at her. “No, Leisha,” he said quietly. “I didn’t. It’s natural.”

“Natural…”

“Yes. That’s where we’ve been the last month, after the Artificial Islands—Chicago Medical Institute. Looking for answers to a spontaneous regression. But there’s nobody there who’s doing more than cookbook carrying out of old discoveries—hell, there’s no geneticists left anywhere who can do more than that, except in agribusiness.” He fell silent; Leisha and he both knew this was not true. There was Sanctuary.

Leisha said thickly, “Do they know at least if it’s widespread, or on the increase…statistical parameters…”

“It seems to be pretty rare. Of course, there’s so few Sleepless now they can’t construct any statistical profiles.”

Again that silence, heavy with the unnamed.

It was Ada who broke the silence. She couldn’t have followed much of the conversation between Leisha and her husband, but she rose gracefully to move beside Leisha. Ada stooped and picked up her baby. Gazing tenderly down at him, she said, “I see you gladly, Sean. I see you sleep,” and then her gaze rose to meet Leisha’s directly, for the first time that Leisha could ever remember.

Even when everything in the country had changed, nothing had changed.

19

Jennifer, Will, the two geneticists, Doctors Toliveri and Blure, and their technicians stood watching the creation of a miniature world.

Five hundred miles away in space, a plastic bubble floated. As the Sanctuary team watched via screen in Sharifi Labs, Special Enterprises Division, the bubble reached maximum inflation. Inside it, thousands of plastic membranes pulled taut. The interior was a honeycomb of thin-walled tunnels, chambers, and diaphragms, some with pinhole pricks, some as porous as standard Earth building materials, some open. None was more than four inches high. When the bubble was fully inflated with standard atmospheric mix, the hologrid in the lab’s ceiling projected downward a transparent, three-dimensional model of the bubble and its internal partitions.

From each of four chambers on the outside of the bubble, five mice were released. The mice squeezed through the tunnels, whose low height prevented free fall, squeaking hysterically. On the hologrid model twenty black dots traced their path. A screen on another wall displayed twenty sets of readings from the biometers implanted in each mouse.

The mice ran free for ten minutes. Then from a single source inside the bubble was released the genemod organism, distantly related to a virus, that Toliveri and Blure had spent seven years creating.

One by one, the biometer readings faltered and the squeaking, amplified on audio, disappeared. The first three ceased transmitting within three minutes; the next six a few minutes later; five more within ten minutes. The last six transmitted for nearly thirty-one minutes.

Dr. Blure fed the data into an extrapolation program. He frowned. He was very young, no more than twenty-five, and since he was very blond the beard he seemed trying hard to grow was a soft stubble, like down. “No good. At that rate, the configurations of the smallest orbital project at over an hour. And of a beggar city, on a still day, over five hours for saturation.”

“Too slow,” Will Sandaleros said. “It won’t convince.”

“No,” Blure said. “But we’re closer.” He glanced again at the flat bioreadings. “Imagine people who would actually use such a thing.”

“The beggars would,” Jennifer Sharifi said.

No one contradicted her.

Miri and Tony sat in their shared lab in Science Dome Four. Ordinarily children used school laboratories, not professional ones, for their learning projects; space on an orbital was too precious to dole out indiscriminately. But Miri and Tony Sharifi were not ordinary children and their projects were not just learning experiences. The Sanctuary Council, Sharifi Labs, and the Board of Education had held a meeting to explore the issues: Should Miri’s neurological experiments and Tony’s datasystems improvements be considered class projects, patentable private enterprises, or work for hire for Sanctuary Corporation? Should any potential profits belong to the family business, to the corporation, or to a trust fund arranged for Miri and Tony until they were no longer minors under New York State law? Everyone at the meeting had smiled, and the discussion had been happy; they were all too proud of the Supers to fight over them. The decision had been that their work belonged to Sanctuary with a 60 percent royalty share to the children themselves of any commercial applications, plus college credit. Miri was twelve, Tony eleven.

“L-l-look at th-this,” Tony said. Miri didn’t answer for forty-five seconds, which meant she was at a crucial point in thought-string construction and the string Tony’s words had started was knotted in only at the periphery. Tony waited cheerfully. He was usually cheerful, and Miri could seldom detect any black strings among the thought edifices he mapped for her on his hologrid. That was his current project: mapping how the Supers thought. He had started with one sentence: “No adult has an automatic claim on the production of another; weakness does not constitute a moral claim on strength.” Tony had spent weeks eliciting from twelve Supers every string and cross-string this sentence evoked, entering each into a program he had written himself.

It had been slow work. Jonathan Markowitz and Ludie Calvin, the youngest Supers in the experiment, had lost patience with the opaque, stammering slowness of spoken words and had twice flounced out of Tony’s dogged sessions. Mark Meyer’s strings had been so bizarre that the program refused to recognize them as valid until Tony rewrote sections of the code. Nikos Demetrios had clear strings and cooperated eagerly, but in the middle of his interrogation he caught cold, was quarantined for three days, and came back with such different strings for the same phrases that Tony threw out all his data for contamination by artistic rearrangement.

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 parasitic 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.”

“Of course,” Jennifer said composedly. “But when I do, it will be after a long and productive life as a full member of my community—Sanctuary, our heart’s blood. I would want no less for my children or grandchildren. I would settle for no less. Neither would Joan’s mother.”

Miri considered. Complex nets of thought knotted themselves in her head. Finally, painfully, she nodded.

Jennifer said, just as if she had not won, “I think, Miri, that you are old enough to start viewing broadcasts from Earth. We made the rule about being fourteen because we thought it would be best to form your principles first, you and the other children, before showing you their violation on Earth. Perhaps we were wrong, especially with you Supers. We’re still groping our way with you, dear heart. But perhaps it would be best if you saw the kind of wasted, parasitic lives that beggars—they call themselves ‘Livers’ now—actually prefer.”

Miri felt a strange reluctance to watch the Earth broadcasts, a reluctance she certainly had not felt before today. But again she nodded. Her grandmother smelled of some scented soap, light and clean; her long hair, bound in a twist, gleamed like black glass. Miri put one hand shyly on Jennifer’s knee.

“And one more thing, dear heart,” Jennifer said. “Twelve is too old to cry, Miri, especially over hard necessity. Survival alone demands too much of us for tears. Remember that.”

“I w-w-will,” Miri said.

The next day she saw Joan, walking from her parents’ dome to the park. Miri called to her, but Joan kept walking and didn’t turn her head. After a moment, Miri lifted her chin and walked in the other direction.

20

The five young men crept toward the chain-link fence, keeping to the shadows of unpruned bushes, trees, and an abandoned and sagging bench in what might once have been a park. The moon rode high in the east, gilding the fence with silver. The fence links were wide apart, worked in scrolls that were both uneven and insubstantial; the fence was undoubtedly only a marker, with a Y-field providing the real security. If so, the field’s faint shimmer wasn’t visible in the darkness and there was no way to assess its height.

“Throw high,” Drew whispered from his powerchair to the boy next to him, whoever it was. All five wore dark plasti-suits and black boots. Drew could only remember three of their names. He had met them this afternoon at a bar, shortly after he’d drifted into town. He guessed they were younger than his nineteen; it didn’t matter. They had Dole credits for liquor and brainies, so why should it matter? Why should anything matter?

“Now!” somebody yelled.

They rushed forward. Drew’s chair caught on a clump of tough, uncut weeds and he pitched forward. The straps caught him and the chair righted itself and drove on, but the others reached the Y-shield first. They hurled their makeshift bombs, made with gasoline foraged from an abandoned field-style farm. No one but Drew had known what the stuff was, just as no one but Drew had ever heard of a “Molotov cocktail.” He was the only one who could read.

“Shit!” screamed the youngest boy. His bomb hit what might have been the top part of the energy fence, exploded, and rained fire and plastic back onto the dry grass. It caught. Two of the other bombs did the same; the fourth boy dropped his and ran screaming. His shirt had caught fire from an exploding fragment.

Drew raced his chair to six feet from the fence, pulled back his arm, and threw. His heavily muscled arms, the result of unremitting exercise, sent the bomb sailing over the top of the Y-fence. Grass on both sides of the shield blazed.

“Karl’s hit!” someone yelled. The three other boys rushed back toward their scooters. One of them tackled Karl and rolled him, screaming, in the grass. Drew sat in his chair, unmoving, watching the fire and listening to the alarm shriek even louder than the burning boy.

“Someone to get you out, fartsucker,” the deputy sheriff said. He released the Y-lock and banged the jail door open. Drew looked up insolently from the foamstone cot, a look that vanished when his rescuer entered.

“You! What for?”

“Expecting Leisha again?” Eric Bevington-Watrous said. “Too bad. This time you get me.”

Drew drawled, “She get tired of bailing me out?”

“If she isn’t, she should be.”

Drew studied him, trying to match Eric’s cool contempt. The furious boy who had fought him beside the cottonwood might never have existed. Eric wore black cotton pants, ruffled bodystretch, and a black bias-cut coat, all conservative but fashionable. His boots were Argentinian leather, his hair barbered, his skin glowing. He looked like a handsome, decisive donkey used to running things, while Drew knew he looked like a Liver gone too bad to do any Living. Which he was. Stepping outside his own field of vision, which was the only way he cared to see anything these days, Drew saw Eric and himself as a smooth cool ovoid floating beside a ragged misshapen pyramid, every point dented or spiked or saw-toothed.

Who had done the misshaping in the first place? Who had crippled him? Whose fucking charity had shown him just how worthless he was next to all the fartsucking donkeys in the world?

“What if I don’t want to be bailed out?”

“Then rot here,” Eric said. “I don’t care.”

“Why should you? In your take-charge donkey suit and your Sleepless superiority and your aunt’s money?”

Eric was beyond that kind of taunt. “My money, now. I earn it. Unlike you, Arlen.”

“It’s a little harder for some of us.”

“Oh, and aren’t we supposed to feel sorry for you because of that? Poor Drew. Poor stinking crippled petty-criminal Drew.” Eric said this in a disinterested tone, so adult that Drew blinked. Eric was only two years older than Drew; not even Leisha managed that much detachment.

Would either of them be here in this cell if she did?

The thought was a spiny worm, sliding through his mind, leaving a trail of slime that glowed even in the dark.

“Jailer,” Eric said, “we’re going.”

No one answered. No one mentioned criminal charges, lawyers, bail money, the whole legal system that was supposed to function with equal justice for all men fucking-shit equal.

Drew dragged himself on his elbows across the floor and climbed into his chair, parked just beyond the bars. No one helped him. He followed Eric—why not? What the fuck did it matter if he were in jail or out, rotting in this one-scooter town or rotting somewhere else? By his sheer indifference he demonstrated the stupidity of either choice.

“If you really thought that, you’d stay here,” Eric said over his shoulder, not breaking stride, and Drew had his face rubbed in it all over again: They were just smarter. They knew. Fucking Sleepless.

A groundcar waited. Drew turned his chair in another direction, but before he moved it Eric had slapped a Y-lock over the control panel on the chair’s arm.

“Hey!”

“Shut up,” Eric said. Drew aimed a right cross but Eric was quicker, and had the advantage of mobility. His fist caught Drew under the chin, not hard enough to break his jaw but sufficient to send pain lancing through his face clear to the temples. When the pain receded slightly, Drew was manacled.

He started cursing, summoning every filth he had learned in eighteen months on the road. Eric ignored him. He picked Drew out of his chair and threw him in the back seat of the car, already occupied by a bodyguard who righted Drew, looked him deeply in the eyes, and said simply, “Don’t.”

Eric slid behind the wheel. This was new among donkeys: driving themselves. Drew ignored the guard and raised both arms, manacled together, over his head to bring them down hard on Eric’s neck. Eric never even turned around. The guard caught Drew’s arms at the top of their swing and did something so painful to his shoulder that he collapsed, blinded by agony, in the back seat. He started to sob.

Eric drove.

They took him to a Liver motel, the kind rented for brainie or sex parties on Dole credit. Eric and the guard stripped him and dumped him into the cheap, oversized bathtub meant for four. Drew’s head went under. He breathed water until he could pull himself up; neither of them helped him. Eric poured a half bottle of genemod dirt-eaters into the water. The bodyguard stripped, climbed in with Drew, and started to scrub him down.

Later, there were straps on the bed.

Tied down, helpless without his chair, Drew lay cursing his own tears while Eric loomed above him and the bodyguard took a walk.

“I don’t know why she wants to bother with you, Arlen. I do know why I’m here. First, because otherwise she would have to be, and second, because otherwise you would be on your feet and I could knock you down the way you deserve. You’ve been given every opportunity, every consideration, and you burned them all. You’re stupid and you’re undisciplined and at nineteen years old you don’t have even the minimum ethics that would let you ask what happened to your friend back there who got set on fire by your pointless destruction. You’re a disaster as a human being, even a Liver human being, but I’m giving you one more chance. Note this well: None of what’s going to happen to you is Leisha’s idea. She doesn’t even know about it. This is my present to you.”

Drew spat at him. The spittle fell short, landing on the foamstone floor. Eric didn’t even grimace before he turned away.

They left him there, tied, all night.

The next morning the bodyguard fed Drew from a spoon, like a baby. Drew spat the food back in his face. The bodyguard, expressionless, slugged him in the jaw, to the right of where Eric had hit him, and threw the rest of the breakfast in the disposal chute. He threw Drew a clean set of jacks, the cheapest possible Dole clothing, drawstring pants and loose shirt in undyed, biodegradable gray. Drew struggled to pull on the pants only because he suspected they would otherwise throw him into the car naked. He couldn’t manage the shirt over his manacles. He clutched it to his chest as the bodyguard carried him, barefoot, outside.

They drove for four or five hours, stopping once. Just before they stopped, the guard blindfolded Drew. He listened intently as Eric got out of the car, but all he heard was soft murmuring in what might or might not have been Spanish. The car started again. Eventually the guard removed the blindfold; the flat desert countryside hadn’t changed. Drew’s bladder ached, until he finally just let go in the car. Neither of the others commented. The plastic pants held the piss against his skin.

They stopped again in front of a low, large, windowless building like a sealed airport hangar. Drew didn’t know what town they were in, what state. Eric had said nothing the entire morning.

“I’m not going in there!”

“Strip off those wet pants first, Pat,” Eric said, with disgust. The bodyguard grabbed the hem of his pants and yanked. Drew struggled, but his ineffective thrashing stopped when a roadrunner walked casually across his line of vision. A snake dangled from the roadrunner’s beak, half eaten. The snake’s skin was green, with orange letters spelling out “puta.”

They were someplace where illegal genetic engineering didn’t even have to be hidden from the cops.

Inside were endless gray corridors, each blocked with a Y-field. At each checkpoint Eric stepped up to the retina scanner and was cleared without saying a word. This, whatever it was, had all been arranged.

The fear in Drew was a gray spreading ooze, shapeless, and its lack of shape was what made it fearsome.

A small room, finally, with a clean white stretcher. Pat dumped him onto it. Drew rolled off, hitting the floor with an unprotected splat. He tried to drag himself, naked, toward the door. Pat scooped him up effortlessly—augmented muscles—threw him back on the gurney, and strapped him down. Someone he couldn’t see touched his head with an electrode.

Drew screamed. The room turned orange, then red with bright hot dots, each a burn on flesh. But that was in his mind, nothing had touched him yet but cold metal. But they were going to, they were going to bum out his mind—

“Drew,” Eric said softly, very close to his ear, “listen to me. This is not an electronic lobotomy. This is a new genemod technique. They’re going to infect your brain with an altered virus that will make it impossible for you to block the flow of images to the cortex from the limbic. That’s the older, more primitive part of the brain. Then biofeedback adjusts your brainwaves until the cortex learns the pathways for processing the images into theta activity. Do you understand?”

He understood nothing. The fear engulfed the rest of his mind, gray bubbling ooze shot through with hot red burns, and when someone screamed he was flooded with shame that it was himself. Then the machine turned on, and the room was gone.

He lay on the stretcher for six days. An IV dripped nutrients into his arm; a catheter removed urine. Drew was aware of neither. For six days subtle electrochemical pathways in his brain were reinforced, widened as a highway is widened by a road crew that builds sturdily but doesn’t know what will march over the road. Images flowed freely, without chemical inhibitors, from Drew’s subconscious mind, from his racial memory, from the older reptilian parts of the brain to the newer, society-conditioned cortex, which usually received them unfiltered through dreams and symbols and would have broken down in shrieking confusion without the strong scaffolding of genemod drugs holding it together.

He crouched on a rock in the sunlight and he had claws, teeth, fur, feathers, scales. His jaws tore and rendered the thing wailing helplessly, and the blood flew in his face, snout, crown. The blood-smell excited him, and the wordless rushing in his ears said, “Mine, mine, mine, mine…”

He reared up on his hind legs, powerful as pistons, and brought the rock down again on the other’s head. His father, writhing in the vomit of his last drunk, held up clasped hands and pleaded for mercy. Drew brought the rock down hard, and in the corner of the den his mother crouched, her fur glistening with brainies, waiting for the penis that was already engorged with killing…

They were chasing him, all of them, Leisha and his father and the howling things that wanted to cut his throat, and he was running running through a landscape that kept shifting: trees that would not hold still, bushes that opened jaws and snapped at him, rivers that tried to suck him under into blackness…then the landscape became the desert compound and Leisha was there; too, screaming at him that he was a failure and he deserved to die because he could never do anything right, could not even stay awake the way real people could. He grabbed Leisha and threw her down and with the action came such astonishing freedom, such an exultant state of potency that he laughed out loud and then both he and Leisha were naked and she was tied up and he looked around her study and said gloatingly “All of this is mine, mine, mine…”

“He isn’t in pain,” the doctor said. “The writhing is no more than stepped-up muscular reflexes in response to cortical bombardment. Not unlike dreaming.”

“Dreaming,” Eric repeated, staring at Drew’s writhing body. “Dreaming…”

The doctor shrugged, a gesture not of indifference but of tremendous tension. This was only the fourth time the experimental psychiatric technique had been used. The other three people had had no powerful relatives, or whatever this Mr. Smithson was to Bevington-Watrous. The doctor didn’t care what he was. They were outside United States borders, and in Mexico the genemod laws functioned by expensive permits. The doctor had a permit. Not to do what he was doing, of course, but then who ever had that sort of permit? He shrugged again.

“It’s been three days,” Eric said. “When does this phase…stop?”

“We start the artificial reinforcement this afternoon. We—yes, nurse, what is it?”

“Comlink for Mr. Bevington-Watrous.” The young Mexican nurse sounded scared. “It’s Ms. Leisha Camden.”

Eric turned slowly. “How did she find us?”

“I don’t know, sir. Will you…will you come to the terminal?”

“No,” Eric said.

The nurse was back in ninety seconds. “Sir, Ms. Camden says if you don’t talk to her she’ll be here in two hours.”

“I won’t talk to her,” Eric said stubbornly, but the pupils of his eyes widened, making him suddenly look much younger. “Doctor, what happens if this treatment is interrupted now?”

“It cannot be interrupted now. We don’t know exactly how the—but there would certainly be grave mental consequences. Certainly.”

Eric went on staring at Drew.

The images became shapes. In doing that they didn’t lose identity but gained it: The shapes were the images plus more. The shapes were the essence of the images, and they were both Drew’s and not Drew’s: both his personal angels, demons, heroes, fears, yearnings, drives, and everyone’s. No one saw them but him, no one had ever seen them, but they were his translations of universals: he knew that. Even through the strange drugs and electrodes and semitrance state, a part of his conscious mind knew that. It recognized the images and Drew knew he would never forget them, and that he was not done with making them.

“We’re introducing theta activity now,” the doctor said. “We’re electronically forcing his cortex into brain waves characteristic of slow-wave sleep.”

Eric said nothing. A clock on the wall flashed the time, and he seemed unable to take his eyes off it.

“Of course, Mr. Bevington-Watrous, you signed all the legal waivers for this treatment for Mr. Smithson, but you also assured us that if there were extradition ramifications you are in a position to—”

“Not all Sleepless are equally powerful, Doctor. I, for instance, am as powerful as the extradition authorities, but not as powerful as my aunt. You might as well accept that fact now. Because she’ll make sure we both do.”

Drew slept. And yet it was not sleep. The images kept marching over the reinforced highway from the limbic to his accessible mind, and he saw them, and he knew them. But now he moved among them, Drew, a sleepwalker with a sleepwalker’s privileged duality: asleep and yet in control of his muscles. He moved among the shapes, and he changed them, remade them, and shaped them through lucid dreaming.

“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 apparently 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.

“Ready,” Dr. Toliveri said, “Stand by. Six, five, four, three, two, one, go.”

The genemod viruses were released. Air currents matched to winds five miles per hour from the southwest wafted through the temperature-controlled bubble. Jennifer shifted her attention to the biometer read-out screen on the far wall. Within three minutes, it showed no activity.

“Yes,” Will said. He wasn’t smiling, but he took her hand. “Yes.”

Jennifer nodded. To Toliveri, Blure, and the three technicians she said, “A superb job.” She turned to Will. Her beautiful, composed voice was very low. “We’re ready for the next stage.”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Start the purchase negotiations for Kagura orbital. Don’t go through Kevin Baker. Keep it blind.”

Will Sandaleros looked as if he didn’t mind being told what had actually been decided between them years earlier. He looked as if he understood his wife’s need to issue orders. Then he looked again at the biometer, his eyes gleaming.

Miri opened the door to Tony’s lab. He had moved to his own work quarters in Science Building Two six months ago, when there was no longer room in one lab for both their projects. Every time Miri looked at his half of the partners’ desk she felt sad, although she thought perhaps part of the sadness came from her own work’s going so badly. In two years she had modeled every genetic modification she could think of, without coming closer to any that would correct the stutters and twitches of all the Supers’ hyped-up electrochemical processes. The work had begun to feel sterile to her, to remind her of the missing component, whatever it was, of the strings themselves. Elusive, sterile, and nonproductive. Today had been another failure. She was in a terrible mood, a terrible, fast-moving, chaotic-string, sterile mood. She wanted Tony’s comfort and encouragement. She wanted Tony.

His lab door was locked, but Miri’s retina print was in the authorized file and the STERILE ENVIRONMENT light was off. She placed her right eye to the scanner and pushed open the door.

Tony lay on the floor, twitching and jerking, on top of Christina Demetrios. Over his thrusting body Miri saw Christy’s eyes widen, then darken. “Oh!” Christy said. Tony said nothing; possibly he hadn’t heard Miri, or even Christina. His naked buttocks contracted powerfully and his whole body shuddered with orgasm. Miri backed out of the lab, closed the door, and ran to her own lab.

She sat with her hands clasped, twitching, on her desk, her head bowed. Tony hadn’t told her—well, why should he tell her? It was his business, not hers; she was only his sister. Not his lover—his sister. Strings formed and reformed in her head: For the first time, various ancient and obscure stories, which she had remembered only because she remembered everything, made sense to her. Hera and Io. Othello and Desdemona. She knew the entire physiology of sex—hormone-influenced secretions, vascular engorgement, pheromone triggers. She knew everything. She knew nothing.

Jealousy. One of the most community-destroying emotions there was. A beggar emotion.

Miri stood up and paced distractedly. No. She would not give in to the degradation of jealousy. She was better than that. Tony deserved better than that of his sister. Idealism. (Stoicism, Epicureanism “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love,” Tony’s butt pumping away in Christina…) She would solve this problem her own way (darkness, fullness, the throbbing ache, gravitational pressure to ignite gases into thermonuclear reactions, cepheid variables…).

Miri washed her face and hands. She put on a clean pair of white shorts and tied a red ribbon in her dark hair. Her lips, despite their constant twitching, set together hard. She didn’t have to think whom to approach; she already knew, and knew that she knew, and knew all the implications of already knowing (darkness, fullness, lying on her belly on her lab floor or under the genemod soy plants that met in a concealing arc, her hands between her legs).

His name was David Aronson. He was three years older than she, a Norm but fairly intelligent, an intense believer in the Sanctuary Oath and in her grandmother’s leadership. He had dark curling hair, as dark as Miri’s own, but very light eyes of clear, black-lashed gray. His legs were long, his shoulders at eighteen were as broad and powerful as a grown man’s. His mouth was generous, wide mobile lips of an almost molded firmness. Miri had spent the past six months looking at David’s mouth.

She found him where she expected to: at the orbital’s shuttle port, poring over CAD displays of machinery. In two months he would leave for a doctoral program in engineering at Stanford, his first trip to Earth.

“Hello, Miri.” He had a deep voice, a little rough. Miri liked the roughness. She could find no reason why.

“D-D-David. I w-w-w-want t-to ask you s-s-something.”

He looked slightly to one side of her, at the CAD holo. “What?”

She had no trouble being direct; all her life, the trouble in communication had come from the difficulty and simplicity of speech compared to the enormous complexity of her thoughts. She was used to simplifying things for Norms as much as possible. This was already a simple thing; it seemed to her to fit admirably, as almost nothing else did, to the limitations of language.

“W-w-will y-you have s-s-s-sex with m-m-m-me?”

David straightened. Color mounted in his cheeks. He continued to look past her. “I’m sorry. Miri, but that’s not possible.”

“Wh-wh-why n-not?”

“I already have a lover.”

“Wh-wh-who?”

“Don’t you think that’s my business?”

He sounded cold; Miri couldn’t see why. Noncommercial information, surely, was for community use, and what information could be more public? She was used to having questions answered. If they were not, she was used to exploring why not. “Wh-wh-why w-w-won’t you t-t-tell me who?”

David bent ostentatiously closer to his screen. His beautiful mouth set. “I think this conversation is over, Miri.”

“Wh-wh-why?”

He didn’t answer her. The strings of her thoughts suddenly tangled, tightened around her like a noose. “B-b-bec-c-cause I’m ugly? I t-tt-t-twitch?”

“I said I didn’t have anything else to say!” Frustration, or embarrassment, or anger, overcame courtesy, and he finally looked directly at her before stalking off. Miri recognized the look: She had often seen it on her mother’s face before Hermione turned to fiddling with a screen, or a cup of coffee, or anything handy. Miri recognized, too, that she was the reason for the frustration or embarrassment or anger, and that she had somehow contributed enough of it to justify the discourtesy. He didn’t want her, and she had had no right to press him—but all she’d wanted was answers. By pressing him, she’d only humiliated herself. He didn’t want her. She twitched, her head was too big, she stuttered, she wasn’t pretty like Joan was. No Norm would want her.

She walked carefully, as if she were a chemical compound that shouldn’t be jarred, back to her laboratory. Sitting at her desk, she again clasped her hands—jerking, twitching—and tried to calm herself. To think. To construct orderly, balanced nets of thought that would hold everything useful to the problem, everything relevant—intellectually, emotionally, biochemically—everything productive. After twenty minutes, she got up again and left the lab.

Nikos Demetrios, Christina’s twin, was fascinated by money. Its international flow, fluctuations, uses, changes, symbolism were, he had once told Miri, more complex than any natural Gaea patterns on Earth, just as useful to biological survival, and more interesting. At fourteen, he’d already made suggestions about international trading to the adult Norms with seats on the Sanctuary Exchange. They purchased his suggestions on investment opportunities around the globe: new wind-shear-detection technology under development in Seoul, a catalytic antibody application marketed in Paris, the embryonic Moroccan aerospace industry. Miri found him in the central communications building, in his tiny office ringed with datascreens.

“N-N-N-Nikos…”

“H-h-h-hello, M-M-M-M-Miri.”

“W-w-will you have s-s-s-s-sex with m-me?”

Nikos regarded her steadily. Mottled color swept from his neck to his forehead. Miri saw that, like David Aronson, Nikos was embarrassed, but unlike David he didn’t seem embarrassed by the directness of the question. She could only think of one other reason he could be embarrassed. She turned and stumbled from the office.

Nikos called, “W-w-w-wait! M-Miri!” His voice sounded genuinely distressed; they had been playmates their entire lives. He couldn’t coordinate his movements even as well as she could. She easily outdistanced him.

Back in her lab, door locked and STERILE ENVIRONMENT seal activated, Miri sat, fiercely willing herself not to cry. Her grandmother had been right: There were hard necessities to face. One did not cry.

After that she was courteous and distant with Nikos, who didn’t seem to know what to do about that. Eventually she saw him with a Norm, a pretty fourteen-year-old named Patricia who seemed fascinated by Nikos’s skill with money. Miri had never talked much with Christina; now she talked less. David she never saw. With Tony she was the same as always: he was her workmate, friend, beloved confidant. Her brother. Now there was just this one area where the confiding didn’t extend, was all. It was unimportant. She wouldn’t let it be important. Hard necessity.

Two weeks later, Miri resumed watching the newsgrids from Earth, but only the sex channels. There were a lot of them. She found one she liked, removed all retina prints except her own from her lab-door programming, and learned to masturbate efficiently. She did it twice a day, her neurochemical responses being as hyped in this area as every other. She never permitted herself to think about Tony while she did it, and Tony never asked her why he could no longer enter her lab unannounced. There was no need. He knew. He was her brother.

Seating herself in the chair Drew indicated, Leisha had a funny thought: I wish I smoked. She remembered her father smoking, reaching for his monogrammed gold cigarette case, making a ritual out of lighting a cigarette. His eyes would half-close and his cheeks would hollow with the first long inward drag. Roger always said it relaxed him. Even then Leisha had known he was lying: It revitalized him.

Which did she want now, tranquility or revitalization? It seemed she was in need of both, and that what Drew would offer her would provide neither.

He had insisted on her being the first one, and alone. “A new art form, Leisha,” he’d said, with that peculiar intensity that had marked him since Eric’s illegal experimentation. Drew had always been intense, but this was different. He looked at Leisha from under those thick dark lashes, and she was afraid for him. This, then, was what it felt like to be a parent, this fear that your child was not going to be able to obtain what he’d set his heart on. That he would fail, and you would hurt for him more than you ever did for your own failures. How had Alice stood it? How had Stella?

But not Roger. He had been sure, from the beginning, that his child would not fail. Surprise, Daddy. Look at me now, sulking idly in the desert for twenty years, an Achilles whose Agamemnon was fighting her own stupid war while Leisha raised a son whose major talent was petty crime and who was not, in fact, even hers.

She said to Drew, not gently, “You should know that I’ve never been particularly sensitive to art, in any form. Maybe somebody else—”

“I know you’re not. That’s why I want it to be you.”

She settled herself into the chair. “All right. Let’s start.” It sounded more resigned than she’d intended.

“Lights off,” Drew said. The room in the New Mexico compound, fitted over the past seven months with a half-million dollars of theatrical equipment, darkened. Leisha heard Drew’s chair move across the floor. When the holograph projector on the ceiling came on, he was seated directly beneath it, the console on his lap. Around him was nothing: not floor or walls or ceiling, just Drew suspended in the velvety blackness of a fairly standard null-projection.

He started to talk in a low voice. For a moment, all Leisha heard was the voice itself, calm and musical: She had never realized that Drew had such a beautiful voice. In normal surroundings, you didn’t notice it. Then the words penetrated. Poetry. Drew—Drew—was reciting an old poem, something about golden groves unleaving…Leisha knew she had heard it before but couldn’t think of the author. She was a little embarrassed for Drew. His voice was beautiful and soothing, but reciting poetry to holographic illustrations was about as juvenile artsy as you could get. Her heart tightened. Another false step, another failure…

Shapes swam toward her out of the darkness.

They weren’t quite identifiable, and yet she recognized them. They passed above Drew, behind him, in front of him, even through him, while he finished the poem and started it again. The same poem. At least she thought it was the same poem. Leisha wasn’t sure because it was hard to concentrate on the words; she had never much liked poetry anyway but even if she had it would be hard to concentrate. She couldn’t take her eyes off the shapes. They slipped behind Drew and she tried to follow them with her eyes, see through him to see them, but she couldn’t. The effort was tiring. When the wavering shapes emerged again from behind Drew, they were different. She strained forward to make out exactly what they were…she recognized them…

Drew started the poem a third time. “ ‘What, Margaret, are you grieving over golden groves unleaving…’ ”

She was grieving, but not over leaves. The shapes slid in and out of her mind and suddenly Drew had vanished…He must be good to have programmed that…and the grief welled and filled her. She recognized a shape, finally: It was her father. Roger. He stood in the old conservatory in the house on Lake Michigan, the house that had been torn down twenty-six years ago. He was holding an exotic in his hands, thick-petaled and creamy white, with a flushed pink center. She cried out and he said clearly, “You haven’t failed, Leisha. Not with Sanctuary, not with trying to make Alice special too, not with Richard, not with the law. The only failure is to not use your individual capacities, and you have done that. All your life. You tried.”

Leisha gave a little scream and rose from her chair. She walked toward her father and he didn’t vanish, not even when she stood with him directly under the holographic projection equipment. But the flower in his arms vanished and he took both her hands, saying gently, “You were the whole point of my individual striving,” and Leisha shook her head violently. There was a blue ribbon on her head: She was a child again. Mamselle came in with Alice, and Alice said, “You never wronged me, Leisha. Never. There’s nothing to forgive.” Then Alice and Roger both vanished and Leisha was running through a forest filled with sunshine, green and golden slanting bars of light pouring through the trees. She was laughing, and in the light was the warmth of living plants and the scent of spring and the taste of forgiveness. Never had Leisha felt so free and joyous, as if she were doing exactly what she had always been meant to do. She laughed again and ran harder, because at the end of the sunlit, flowered path was her mother, holding out her arms and laughing too, her face alight with love.

There were tears on her cheeks. She sat in her chair in the adobe room. The lights were on. Immediately nausea hit her.

Drew said eagerly, “What did you see?”

Leisha doubled over, fighting her stomach. Finally she gasped, “What…did you do?”

“Tell me what you saw.” He was inexorable: the young artist.

“No!”

“It was powerful, then.” He leaned back in his wheelchair, smiling.

Leisha straightened slowly, hanging onto the back of her chair. Drew’s face was triumphant. She said, more calmly now, “What did you do?”

He said, “I made you dream.”

Dream. Sleep. Six teenagers in the woods, and a vial of interleukin-1…but this had been nothing like that. Nothing.

What this had been like was the night Alice had come to her in the Conewango hotel room, during Jennifer Sharifi’s trial. The night Leisha had lost her belief in the power of the law to create a common community, and had stood trembling at the edge—

Darkness—

The void—

But this dream of Drew’s had been light, not darkness. Yet it was the same. Leisha was sure of it. The edge of something vast and lawless, something that could swallow the tiny careful light of her reason…And then Alice had come. Across that vast unknown, Alice had somehow heard Leisha, in some way that had nothing to do with the careful light. I knew, Alice had whispered. And she had gone straight to Leisha, against all reason.

And now Drew, against all reason, had somehow manipulated an unknown part of her mind…

Drew said eagerly, “It starts with a kind of hypnosis, but one that reaches around the cortex to call on universal…shapes I call them. They’re more than that. But I don’t have the words, Leisha, you know I never did. I just know they’re in me and everybody else. I bring them out, call them out, so that they can take their own shapes in the person’s dream. It’s a kind of lucid dreaming, semidirected, but more than that. It’s new.” He sucked in a deep breath. “It’s mine.”

Logical questions calmed her. “Semidirected? You mean you determined what I would…dream?” But she couldn’t maintain the detached tone. She was feeling too many things, not all of them good. “Drew—that’s what dreaming is like? That’s what Sleepers do?”

He shook his head. “No. Not often. I guess—I don’t really know yet what happened. You’re the first, Leisha!”

“I…dreamed about my father. And my mother.”

His eyes gleamed. “Good, good. I was working with shapes from my parents.” His young face suddenly darkened, lost in some private memory Leisha suddenly didn’t want to share. Dreaming…this was too public. Too irrational. Too much a letting go, a surrender. But if it were a surrender to sunlight, to sweetness…No. It wasn’t reality. Dreams were escape, she had always known that, she who had never dreamed. Dreams were as much an evasion of the real world as Alice’s Twin Group pseudoscience. But what she’d just experienced from Drew…

“I’m too old to have my world turned inside out like a sock!”

Drew suddenly grinned, a smile of such pure triumph unmixed with frustration or arrogance that Leisha was dazzled. But she held onto her reason, hard. She said, “Drew, the other four patients who had the same operation as you in that Mexican clinic—they didn’t come out of it with anything like this, any sort of change, any…” She couldn’t find the word.

“But they weren’t artists,” he said, with the absolute conviction of the reborn young. “I am.”

“But—” Leisha began, and got no farther because Drew, still smiling—still triumphant—leaned far over from his chair and kissed her hard on the mouth.

Leisha sat very still. She could feel her body respond, for the first time in…how long? Years. Her nipples hardened, her belly tightened…he smelled male, of male skin and hair. Her mouth opened of its own volition. Leisha drew sharply back.

“No, Drew.”

“Yes!”

She hated to spoil his triumph, his terrifying achievement—she had been dreaming. But about this she was sure. “No.”

“Why not?” He was pale now, but steady. His pupils were huge.

“Because I’m seventy-eight years old and you’re twenty. I know it doesn’t look that way to you, but to my mind—my mind, Drew—you’re a child. And you always will be to me.”

“Because I’m a Sleeper!”

“No. Because I’ve lived fifty-eight years you haven’t.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Drew said fiercely.

“No. I don’t. You have no idea what it means.” She covered his hand with her own. “I think of you as a son, Drew. A son. Not a lover.”

He looked her straight in the eyes. “And what did your dream tell you about mothers and fathers and children that was so terrifying?”

For a moment she felt the dream again, and she glimpsed something behind the dream, some obverse side of the sunlit path, the smiling Roger with his hands full of exotics, the loving Elizabeth as Elizabeth had never really been, not to her. Leisha couldn’t quite see that obverse side but it was there, deep in her mind, a way of ordering the world that had nothing to do with the law or economics or political integration or all the other things she had given her life to, not necessarily a worse way, or a better one, but different, alien…the glimpse slipped away.

She said, with all the compassion she could, “I’m sorry, Drew.”

As she left the room he said quietly after her, “I’ll get better at my art, Leisha. I’ll draw out more from your preconscious, I’ll show you things you never even…Leisha!”

She couldn’t answer him. It would only make it worse. She went out and softly closed the door.

By evening, when she had figured out how to discuss it with him, what to say to put the whole dizzying episode into rational perspective, Stella told her Drew had packed and was gone.

Miri took her seat in the Council dome. It was a new seat, added to the room at her sixteenth birthday, the fifteenth chair bolted to the floor around the polished metal table. From now on, the 51 percent of Sanctuary stock owned by the Sharifi family would be voted in seven equal blocks. Next year, when Tony took his seat, there would be eight. The chair squeaked slightly as Miri sat in it.

“The Sanctuary Council is proud to welcome Miranda Serena Sharifi as a voting member,” Jennifer said formally. The councilors applauded. Miri smiled. Her grandmother had for a moment eased the tension in the room, so thick its currents could have been graphed on a Heller matrix. Miri glanced around the table from under lowered eyes; she habitually ducked her head now, since in her mirror that seemed to minimize her twitching and jerking. Her mother applauded without looking directly at Miri. Her father smiled with that resigned melancholy that was always in his eyes now. Beautiful Aunt Najla, pregnant with another Super, stared at Miri with unblinking determination.

The term councilors smiled, but she didn’t know them well enough to know what the smiles meant. She wondered if they were jealous of her sudden power. The Sanctuary charter, she knew from the library, was far more generous within the family than any family corporation on Earth would be. And on the newsgrid “dramas,” usual community procedure on Earth seemed to be for young males to kill the fathers who ran business empires or ranches or orbital corporations, in order to gain power. Then they apparently married their dead fathers’ young third wives. This was such a barbaric and appalling social system that Miri concluded it couldn’t be the way the beggars really ran things; they must like their “dramas” to explore situations that bore no relation to reality. This was such a silly idea that for the second time she had given up the dramas in disgust and returned to the sex channels.

“We have a full agenda,” Jennifer said in her graceful voice. “Councilor Drexler, will you start with the treasurer’s report?”

The treasurer’s report, routine and positive, did nothing to reduce the tension. Miri, unobserved now, studied one face after another from under her lowered brow. Something was very wrong. What?

The agricultural, legal, judicial, and medical committee heads made their reports. Hermione twisted a strand of her honey-colored hair (when was the last time Miri had touched her mother’s hair? Years) around one finger, transferred the curl to a second finger, around and around. Twist, twist. Najla rubbed her swollen belly. Councilor Devore, a thin young man with large soft eyes, looked as if he were sitting on hot coals.

Finally Jennifer said, “One more addendum to the medical report, which I asked Councilor Devore to leave to general discussion. As most of you know, we have had an accident.” Abruptly Jennifer lowered her head, and Miri saw with astonishment that Jennifer needed a moment before she could go on. Miri was used to thinking of her grandmother as invulnerable.

“Tabitha Selenski, of Kenyon International, was repairing a power-conversion input in Business Building Three and received a power charge that…Her gross tissues are regenerating, very slowly. But parts of her nervous system are so destroyed there’s nothing to regenerate. She won’t ever be fully conscious again, although there’s partial consciousness, at about the level an animal might have…She will need constant care, including such basic tasks as diaper changes, feeding, restraint. Moreover, she will never again be a productive member of the community.”

Jennifer looked at each Council member in turn. Miri’s strings knotted themselves into horrible nets. To be helpless, dependent on others for everything, a drain on someone else’s time and resources without giving anything back…

A beggar.

She saw what the issue was, and her stomach lurched.

“I once knew a woman on Earth,” Jennifer said, “when I was a child. A friend’s mother. After my friend, the woman had another child, one with a profound neural disorder. As part of its so-called treatment, the mother was required to move its arms and legs in the rhythmic patterns of crawling, trying to impress those patterns on the brain and so stimulate brain development. She had to do this for an hour, six times every day. Between sessions, she fed the child, washed it, suctioned wastes from its colon, played prescribed tapes to stimulate its senses, bathed it, and talked to it nonstop for three half-hour sessions equally spaced around the clock. This woman had once played the piano professionally, but now she never touched it. When the child was four, its doctors added more to the treatments. Four times a day the mother was required to wheel the child around the yard for exactly fifteen minutes, encountering the same objects in the same order but under different weather conditions, again to build certain response patterns into the brain. My friend helped with all this, but after years of it, she hated to even go home. So did the woman’s husband, who eventually didn’t go home at all. Neither of them was there the day the mother shot both herself and her child.”

Jennifer paused. She picked up a paper. “The Council has a petition from Tabitha Selenski’s husband, to end her suffering. We must decide now.”

Councilor Letty Rubin, a young woman with angular features that could have been turned on a lathe, said passionately, “Tabitha can still smile, still respond a little. I visited her and she tried to smile at the sound of my voice! She has a right to her life, whatever it is now!”

Jennifer said, “My friend’s mother’s child could smile, too. The real question is, do we have the right to sacrifice someone else’s life to the care of hers?”

“It wouldn’t have to be a sacrifice of one life! If we divide up the caretaking, in for instance two-hour shifts, the burden would be spread among so many that nobody would really be sacrificed.”

Will Sandaleros said, “The principle would still be there. A claim on the strong by the weak because of weakness. A beggar’s claim, that says the fruits of a person’s labor belong to whoever can’t labor for himself. Or won’t. We don’t recognize that weakness has a moral claim on competency.”

Councilor Jamison, an engineer nearly as old as her grandmother whose only genemod was Sleeplessness, shook his head. He had a long, plain face with a sharp knobby chin. “This is a human life, Councilor Sandaleros. A member of our community. Doesn’t the community owe its members full support?”

Will said, “But what constitutes a member of a community? Is it automatic—once you have joined, you are included for good? That leads to institutional morbidity. Or does being a member of a community mean that you continue to actively support the community, and actively contribute to it? Would, for instance, your insurance company, Councilor Jamison, continue to include a subscriber in the client list if he stopped paying his premiums?”

Jamison was silent.

Letty Rubin cried, “But a community is not congruent with a business arrangement! It must mean more!”

Jennifer’s voice cut sharply across her last words. “What it should mean is that Tabitha Selenski shouldn’t want to be a burden on her community. She should have the principles and dignity to not want to continue so-called life as a beggar, which means she should have included the standard life-termination clause in her will. I have, Will has, you have, Letty. Since Tabitha didn’t, she’s abandoned the principles of this community and declared herself no longer a member.”

Ricky Sharifi said, “Self-preservation is an innate drive, Mother.”

Jennifer said, “Innate drives can be modified for the good of civilization. This happens all the time. Sexual fidelity, formal laws to settle disputes, incest taboos—what are they but modifications imposed by will for the good of all? The innate drives would be to kill for revenge or to fuck our brains out whenever the urge struck.”

Miri stared at her grandmother—never, never had she heard Jennifer use language like that. Her grandmother’s speech was always formal, almost pedantic. The next moment she saw that it had been deliberate, theatrical, and she felt a slight distaste, followed by renewed stomach churning. Her grandmother did not trust her arguments alone to convince the Council to kill Tabitha Selenski.

To kill.

Strings whirled in her head.

Jean-Michel Devore said nervously, “What are the Sleepless except modifications of innate drives?”

Jennifer smiled at him.

Najla Sharifi said, “The definition of a community is key here. I think we all agree on that. Our definition seems to involve certain traits—like Sleeplessness—certain abilities, and certain principles. Which of these are crucial? Which are optional?”

“A good place to start,” Will Sandaleros approved.

Jennifer said, “A member of the community must possess all three. The trait of Sleeplessness, the ability to contribute to the community rather than drain it, the principles to value the community’s profound good above his own immediate preferences. Anyone who does not possess these things is not only too different from us but an active danger.” She leaned forward, palms flat on the table. “Believe me, I know.”

There was a little silence.

Into the silence Hermione said quietly, “Anyone who thinks too differently from us is not really a member of our community.”

Miri’s head jerked up. She stared at her mother, who didn’t look back. All the strings in Miri’s head turned over once, slowly, inside out. For a moment she couldn’t breathe.

But her mother had meant anyone who thought differently about principles…

Words from two dozen languages weaved themselves into her strings: Harijan. Proscrit. Bui doi. Inquisición. Kristalnacht. Gulag.

“Ac-c-c-community d-d-d-d-” she couldn’t, in her emotion, get the damn words out, “d-divided on f-f-f-fundamentals w-w-will d-destroy itself.”

“Which is why we must not divide into the able and the parasitic,” Jennifer said swiftly.

“Th-th-that’s not whh-wh-wh-what I m-m-meant!”

They argued for five hours. Only Najla, her back aching from pregnancy, left, making over her proxy to her husband. In the end, the vote was nine to six: Tabitha Selenski must leave the community. She could, if her husband wished, be sent to Earth, among the beggars.

Miri had voted with the minority. So, to her surprise, had her father. The majority decision upset her, although of course she would abide by it. Sanctuary was owed her allegiance. But she felt confused and she wanted to discuss it all with Tony, as only they could, in the full depth and breadth of all the cross-references, tertiary associations, strings of meaning. Tony’s computer program was a success. The Supers now used it routinely for communication among themselves, exchanging massive programmed edifices of meaning without the everlasting barricades of speech. She hurried to Tony.

Outside the Council dome, her father stopped her. Ricky Keller had hollows under his eyes. It occurred to Miri that seeing him sit in Council beside his mother, most people would conclude that Jennifer was the younger. Each year Ricky’s manner became gentler. He said now, one hand on Miri’s shoulder, “I wish you had met my father, Miri.”

“Y-y-y-your f-father?” No one ever spoke of Richard Keller. Miri had been told about the trial; what he had done to Jennifer, his wife, was monstrous.

“I think in many ways you’re like him, despite being a Super. Genetic inheritance is trickier than we know, despite our smugness. It’s not all in quantifiable chromosomes.”

He walked away. Miri didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted. Richard Keller, the traitor to Sanctuary. People usually said she was like her grandmother, “a strong-minded woman.” But her father’s eyes had been soft under their melancholy. Miri stared after his retreating, stooped figure.

The next day, Tabitha Selenski died by fatal injection. A persistent rumor circulated that Tabitha had injected the dose herself, but Miri didn’t believe that. If Tabitha had been capable of doing that, the Council wouldn’t have voted as it did. Tabitha had been nearly a vegetable. That was the truth. Miri’s grandmother had said so.