Beggars in Spain

22

The 152nd congress of the United States faced an annual trade deficit that over the past ten years had increased six-hundred percent, a federal debt that had more than tripled, and a fiscal debt of twenty-six percent. For nearly a century, Y-energy patents had been licensed by Kenzo Yagai’s heirs exclusively to American firms, as specified in Yagai’s eccentric will. This had fueled the longest economic climb in history. Through Y-technology, the United States had pulled out of a dangerous turn-of-the-century international slump and an even more dangerous internal depression. Americans invented and built every known application of Y-energy, and everyone wanted Y-energy. American-designed and fueled orbitals circled the Earth; American-built aircraft spanned the skies; American-built weapons traded on the illegal arms market of every major nation in the world. The colonies on Mars and Luna survived on Y-generators. On Earth, a thousand engineering applications cleaned the air, recycled the wastes, warmed the cities, fueled the automated factories, grew the genetically-efficient food, powered the institutionalized Dole, and kept the expensive information flowing to the corporations that each year became richer, more shortsighted, and more driven, like an earlier age’s bloated aristocrats popping buttons off their waistcoats as they wagered fortunes at faro or E.O.

In 2080, the patents ran out.

The International Trade Commission opened international access to Y-energy patents. The nations that had nibbled at the crumbs of American prosperity—building the machine housings, sublicensing the less profitable franchises, surviving as middlemen and brokers—were ready. They had been ready for years, the factories in place, the engineers trained at the great American donkey universities, the designs prepared. Ten years later the United States had lost sixty percent of the global Y-energy market. The deficit climbed like a Sherpa.

Livers didn’t worry. That was what they elected their congressmen and women to do: to worry. To scramble in their donkey working fashion and find solutions, to take care of the problem, if there was a problem. The citizenry, those that were listening at all, didn’t see any problem. The public scooter races and Dole allotments and newsgrid entertainment and politically-funded mass rallies, with plenty of food and beer, and district building and energy grants continued to grow. And in districts where they didn’t grow, of course, the politicians just didn’t get returned. Votes, after all, had to be earned. Americans had always believed that.

The domestic deficit became critical.

Congress raised corporate taxes. Again in 2087, and then again in 2090. The donkey firms that sent daughters and fathers and cousins to Congress protested. By 2091 the issue could no longer be ignored. The House debate, which lasted six days and nights and revived the art of filibuster, was carried on the newsgrids. Hardly anyone outside of donkeys watched it. One of the few who did was Leisha Camden. Another was Will Sandaleros.

At the end of the sixth day, Congress passed a major tax package. Corporate taxes were recalibrated to the steepest sliding scale the world had ever seen. At the top of the scale, corporate entities that qualified were taxed at ninety-two percent of gross profit, with strict limitations on expense claims, as their share of governing America. At the next bracket, corporations were taxed at seventy-eight percent. After that, the brackets descended rapidly.

Of corporations taxed at seventy-eight percent, fifty-four percent were based on Sanctuary Orbital. Only one corporation met the ninety-two percent tax criteria: Sanctuary itself.

Congress passed the tax package in October. Leisha, watching a newsgrid in New Mexico, glanced involuntarily out the window, at the sky. It was blue and empty, without a single cloud.

Will Sandaleros made a full report to Jennifer Sharifi, who had been away from Sanctuary on Kagura Orbital, concluding a vital arrangement there. Jennifer listened calmly, the folds of her white abbaya falling gracefully around her feet. Her dark eyes glistened.

“Now, Jenny,” Will said. “Starting January 1.”

Jennifer nodded. Her eyes went to the holoportrait of Tony Indivino, hanging on the dome wall. After a moment they returned to Will, but he was bent over the hard-copy of projected Sanctuary tax figures, and had not noticed.

Miri couldn’t get Tabitha Selenski’s death to move from the front of her mind. No matter what she was thinking about—her neurochemical research, joking with Tony, washing her hair, anything—Tabitha Selenski, whom Miri had never met, tangled, knotted, tied herself into Miri’s strings and choked there.

Choked. She had researched the injection from which Tabitha had died; it would have stopped the heart instantly. Without the heart to pump, the lungs could not draw in air. Tabitha would have choked on her own already-breathed air, except of course she wouldn’t have known it because the injection had also immediately paralyzed what was left of her brain.

Miri sat alone in the suspended bubble playground at Sanctuary’s core and thought about Tabitha Selenski. Miri was too old for the playground. Still, she liked to go there when it was empty, sailing slowly from one handhold to another, her clumsiness canceled by the absence of both gravity and observers. Today her thought strings seemed as solitary as the playground.

No, not solitary—five other people, including her father, had voted with her to let Tabitha live in Sanctuary even as a beggar. But there was a difference in their votes, their reasons, their arguments for compassion. Miri felt the difference but she couldn’t name it, neither in words nor strings, and that was intensely frustrating. It was the old problem; something was missing from her thoughts, some unknown kind of association or connection. Why couldn’t she spin out an exploratory string about the difference between her vote and the others’, and so learn what that difference was? Explain it, examine it, integrate it into the ethical system that Tabitha Selenski’s accident had charred just as surely as it had charred her mind. There was something missing here, something important to Miri. A hole where an explanation should be.

She looked at the fields and domes and pathways below. Sanctuary was beautiful in the soft, UV-filtered sunlight. Clouds drifted at the far end; the maintenance team must be planning rain. She would have to check the weather calendar.

Sanctuary. (Refuge> churches> law> the protection of person and property> the balance of the rights of the individual with those of society> Locke> Paine> rebellion> Gandhi> the lone crusader on a higher moral plain…) Sanctuary was all of that for the Sleepless. Her community. Why, then, did she feel as if Tabitha’s death had pushed her to a place where the refuge was violated (Becket in the cathedral, blood on the stone floor…)? To a place where nothing was safe after all?

Slowly Miri climbed down from the playground bubble to look for Tony, who would not have the answers either but would understand the questions. He would understand as far as she did herself, anyway, which suddenly didn’t seem very far. Something vital was missing.

What?

In late October Alice had a heart attack. She was eighty-three years old. Afterward she lay quietly in bed, pain masked by drugs. Leisha sat by her bedside night and day, knowing it couldn’t be long. Much of the time Alice slept. Awake, she drifted in drugged dreams, and often there was a small smile on her wizened face. Leisha, holding her hand, had no idea where her sister’s mind wandered until the night Alice’s eyes cleared and focused and she gave Leisha a smile of such warm sweetness that Leisha caught her breath and leaned forward. “Yes, Alice? Yes?”

Alice whispered, “Daddy is w-watering the plants!”

Leisha’s eyes prickled. “Yes, Alice. Yes, he is.”

“He gave me one.”

Leisha nodded. Alice relapsed into sleep, smiling, in that place where a small girl had her father’s love.

She woke a second time a few hours later to clutch Leisha’s hand with unexpected strength. Her eyes were wild. She tried to sit up, gasping. “I made it! I made it, I’m still here, I didn’t die!” She fell back on the pillows.

Jordan, standing by Leisha at his mother’s bedside, turned his face away.

The last time Alice woke, she was lucid. She looked at Jordan with love, and Leisha saw that she would say nothing to him, because nothing was necessary. Alice had given her son everything she had, everything he needed, and he was safe. To Leisha she whispered, “Take…care of Drew.”

Of Drew, not Jordan or Eric or the other grandchildren. Alice knew, somehow, where need was greatest. Hadn’t she always known?

“Yes, I will. Alice—”

But Alice had already closed her eyes, and the smile was back on lips that twitched in private dreams.

Afterward, while Stella and her daughter pinned up the sparse gray hair and called the state government for the special permit for private burial, Leisha went to her own room. She took off all her clothes and stood in front of the mirror. Her skin was clear and rosy, her breasts sagged slightly from decades of gravity but were still full and smooth, the muscles in her long legs flexed when she pointed her toe. Her hair, still the bright blond Roger Camden had ordered, fell around her face in soft waves. She thought of seizing a scissors and hacking the hair into ragged chunks, but she felt too old, too tired, for theatrical gestures. Her twin sister was dead of old age. Asleep for good.

Leisha pulled on her clothes, not looking again at the mirror, and went to help Stella and Alicia with Alice’s body.

Richard and Ada and their son came to New Mexico for the funeral. Sean was nine now, an only child—was Richard afraid that a second baby might be Sleepless? Richard looked content, looked as settled as his and Ada’s wandering life could be, looked no older. He was mapping ocean currents in a highly-farmed section of the Indian Ocean, just off the continental shelf. The work was going well. He put his arms around Leisha and said how sorry he was about Alice. Leisha knew that Richard meant it, and through her grief a part of her mind reflected that this had been the most important man in her adult life and that as he held her she felt nothing. He was a stranger, linked to her only by the biology of parental choice and the past of finite dreams.

Drew, too, came home for the funeral.

Leisha had not seen him in four years, although she had followed his spectacular career on the newsgrids. She met him in the stone-floored courtyard, bright with cactuses kept in forced bloom and exotics under humidified, transparent Y-bubbles. He drove his chair up to her without hesitation. “Hello, Leisha.”

“Hello, Drew.” He still had the same intense green gaze, although in every other way he had changed yet again. Leisha thought of the dirty, skinny ten-year-old, the gawky teen trying hard to be a donkey in coat and tie and borrowed manners, the drama major with clipped hair and retro lace-cuffed clothing, the bearded drifter with sullen eyes and weak, dangerous resentments. Now Drew wore quiet, expensive clothes, except for a single, flashy, giveaway diamond arm cuff. His body had filled out, his face had matured. He was, Leisha saw without desire, a handsome man. Whatever else he was he had learned to keep hidden.

“I’m so sorry about Alice. She had the most generous soul I’ve ever known.”

“You knew that about her? Yes, she did. And she created it for herself, with very little help from those who should have helped her.”

He didn’t ask what she meant by that; words had never been Drew’s medium.

He said, “I’ll miss her tremendously. I know I haven’t been here in years.” He spoke without a tremor of embarrassment. Drew had apparently made his peace with the final awkward scene between him and Leisha. But if so, why stay away for four years? Leisha had sent enough messages inviting him home. “But even though I wasn’t here, Alice and I talked on comlink every Sunday. Sometimes for hours.”

Leisha hadn’t known that. She felt a flash of jealousy. But was she jealous of Drew, or of Alice?

She said, “She loved you, Drew. You were important to her. And you’re in her will, but that can all wait until after the funeral.”

“Yes,” Drew said, without apparent interest in his inheritance. Leisha warmed to that. The child Drew was still there, under the flashy arm cuff and the strange career neither of them mentioned. And yet she should mention it, shouldn’t she? This was Drew’s work, his achievement, his individual excellence.

“I’ve followed your career on the grids. You’ve been very successful, and we’re proud of you.”

A light kindled in his eyes. “You watched a grid performance?”

“No, not a performance. Just the reviews, the praise…”

The light went out. But his smile was still warm. “That’s all right, Leisha. I knew you couldn’t watch it.”

“Wouldn’t,” she said, before she could stop herself.

He smiled. “No—couldn’t. It’s all right. Even if you never let me put you into lucid dreaming again, you’re still the single most important influence on my work that I’ll ever have.”

Leisha opened her mouth to reply to this—to the sentiment, to the sting below the sentiment, to the stubborn ambivalence below both—but before she could speak Drew added, “I’ve brought someone with me for Alice’s funeral.”

“Who?”

“Kevin Baker.”

Leisha’s awkwardness vanished. Drew might confuse her still, this son she had not birthed who had become something she could neither envision nor understand, but Kevin was a known quantity. She had known him for sixty years—since before Drew’s father had been born.

“Why is he here?”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself,” Drew said shortly, and Leisha knew that Drew had learned, from Kevin or the datanets or somewhere, everything that had happened between her and Kevin. Sixty years’ worth of everything. Time just piled up, Leisha thought. Like dust.

“Where is Kevin now?”

“On the north patio.” Drew added to her back as she left the courtyard, “Leisha—one more thing. I haven’t changed. About what I want, I mean.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, although she did, and berated herself for petty cowardice.

He made an impatient gesture—exactly how old was he now? Twenty-five. “I don’t believe you, Leisha. I want what I’ve always wanted. You and Sanctuary.”

That did catch her by surprise—half of it, anyway. Sanctuary. It had been a decade since Drew had so much as mentioned it to her. Leisha thought the childish dream of revenge or justice or conquest, or whatever it was, had faded long ago. Drew sat in his chair, a powerfully-built man despite the crippled legs, and his eyes didn’t falter when they met hers. Sanctuary.

He was a child still, in spite of everything.

She went to the north patio. Kevin stood there alone, examining a stone shaped by desert wind into a long, tapered shape like a sandstone tear. At the sight of him Leisha realized that she felt no more than she had at the sight of Richard. Age had killed Alice’s body; it seemed to have worked instead on Leisha’s heart.

“Hello, Kevin.”

He turned quickly. “Leisha. Thank you for inviting me.”

So Drew had lied to him. It didn’t seem to matter. “You’re welcome.”

“I wanted to pay my last respects to Alice.” He stood awkwardly, and finally smiled ruefully. “Sleepless aren’t very good at this, are we? At death, I mean. We never think about it.”

“I do,” Leisha said. “Would you like to see Alice now?”

“Later. First there’s something I want to say to you, and I don’t know if I’ll get another chance. The funeral’s in an hour, isn’t it?”

“Kevin—listen. I don’t want to listen to any apologies or explanations or reconstructions of events forty years old. Not now. I just don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to apologize,” he said, a little stiffly, and Leisha suddenly remembered herself saying to Susan Melling, on the roof of this same house, Kevin doesn’t see there’s anything to forgive. “What I wanted to say to you was on a different topic altogether. I’m sorry to bring it up just before the funeral but as I said, there might not be another time. Has Drew told you what business I handle for him?”

“I didn’t know you handled any business for him.”

“Actually, I handle it all. Not his tour bookings—there’s an agency that does that—but his investments and security needs and so forth. He—”

“I should think the amount Drew makes would be pretty small compared to your usual corporate clients.”

“It is,” Kevin said, without self-consciousness, “but I do it for you. Indirectly. But what I wanted to say was that he insists I secure his investments exclusively in funds or speculations traded through Sanctuary.”

“So?”

“Most of my business is with Sanctuary anyway, but on their terms. Dealing Earth-side when they don’t want their own people to come down, and especially doing the security on their Earth-side transactions. There are still a lot of people out there who hate Sleepless, despite the benevolent social climate on the grids. You’d be surprised how many.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Leisha said. “What is it you want to tell me?”

“This: There’s something starting to happen on Sanctuary. I don’t know what it is, but I’m in a unique position to see the outer fringes of their planning for whatever it is. Especially through Drew’s tiny investments because he wants them as close into the heart of Sanctuary dealings as they’ll permit. Which, incidentally, was never very close, and now it’s getting even more distant. They’re liquidating whenever they can, converting investments not to credit but to equipment and to tangibles like gold, software, even art. That’s what my watchdog program flagged in the first place: There’s never been a Sleepless who collected art seriously. We’re just not interested.”

This was true. Leisha frowned.

Kevin continued, “So I went on digging, even in areas I don’t handle. The security is harder to crack than it used to be; they must have some very good younger wizards up there, although there’s no formal record of it anywhere. Sanctuary’s spent the last year moving all investment it doesn’t liquidate into holdings outside the United States. Will Sandaleros bought a Japanese orbital, Kagura, a very old one with a lot of internal damage, used mostly for genetic breeding experiments on altered meat animals for the luxury orbital trade. Sandaleros bought it in the name of Sharifi Enterprises, not of Sanctuary. They’ve acted strange with it—they evicted all the tenants but there’s no record of moving out any of the livestock. Not so much as a single disease-resistant goatow. Presumably they brought their own people in to care for the animals, but I can’t crack any of those records. And now they’ve started to move all their people on Earth back up to Sanctuary. The kids at grad school, the doctors doing residencies, the business liaisons, even the occasional kook who’s down here slumming. They’re all going back to Sanctuary, by ones and twos, inconspicuously. But they’re all going back.”

Leisha frowned. “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know.” Kevin put down the wind-sculpted stone. “I thought you might be able to guess. You knew Jennifer better than any of us left here.”

“Kev, I don’t think I ever really knew anybody in my life.” It just slipped out; she hadn’t planned to say anything so personal. Kevin smiled thinly.

Drew drove his chair onto the patio. His eyes were red. “Leisha, Stella wants you.”

She went, her mind full of Sanctuary’s movements, of Alice’s death, of the exploitive congressional tax package, of Drew’s investing in Sanctuary, of Kevin’s concern, of her irrational fear of Drew’s art—it was irrational, she knew that. She didn’t seem to have the energy to stay rational that she’d had when she was younger. There was no way to think about so many things at once. They were too different. The human mind could not encompass them. A different way of thinking was needed. Daddy, you failed—you should have provided that in the genemod, too. A better way of integrating thought, not just better thoughts.

Leisha smiled, without mirth. Poor Roger. Blamed for everything Alice wasn’t, everything Leisha was, everything Leisha wasn’t. It was funny, in a way. But only in the unhumorous way anything recent was funny. In another eighty years, maybe she would find it hilarious. All it took was enough time, piling up like dust.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

It was Jordan who had chosen the beautiful, painful, sentimental words, Drew knew. Drew had never heard the funeral service before and he wasn’t sure what all the archaic phrases meant, but looking at the faces gathered around Alice Camden Watrous’s grave, he was sure that Jordan had chosen the words, Leisha disliked them, and Stella was impatient with them. And Alice? She would have liked them, Drew knew, because her son had chosen them. That would be enough for Alice. And so for Drew, too.

Shapes slid quietly in and out of his conscious mind.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

It was Eric who read the words—Alice’s grandson, Drew’s old enemy. Drew looked at the handsome, solemn man Eric had become, and the shapes in his mind deepened, slithered faster. No, not shapes, this time he wanted the word. He was determined to find the word for Eric, who might be dust but if so only a high-quality real-leather solid-platinum dust that would never be passed over and known no more because Eric was a Sleepless, born to ability and power, no matter how much youthful rebellion he had acted out once. Drew wanted the word for Richard, eyes downcast beside his Sleeper wife and little boy, pretending he was like them. The word for Jordan, Alice’s son, torn in two all his life between his Sleeper mother and brilliant Sleepless aunt, defended only by his own decency. The word for Leisha, who had loved—if what Kevin Baker had told Drew was true—Sleepers far more than she had ever loved any of her own kind. Her father. Alice. Drew himself.

He couldn’t find the right word.

Jordan was reading now, from some different old book, they all knew so many old books: “Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war, death after life…”

Leisha looked up from the coffin. Her face was set, unyielding. Light from the desert sky washed over the planes of her cheeks, the pale firm lips. She didn’t look at Drew. She glanced at the wind-smoothed stones on either side of Alice’s in the little plot, BECKER EDWARD WATROUS and SUSAN CATHERINE MELLING, and then straight forward, at nothing. At air. But even though no glance passed between them, Drew suddenly knew, from the fluid shapes inside his mind and the rigid shape of Leisha outside it, that he would never bed her. She would never love him as anything but a son, because a son was how she had seen him first, and she didn’t change her major shapes. She couldn’t. She was what she was. So were most people, but for Leisha it was even more true. She didn’t bend, didn’t flex. It was something in her, something from the sleeplessness—no, it was something not in her. Something the very fact of sleeplessness left out. Drew couldn’t define what. But the Sleepless all had it, this inflexibility, this inability to change categories, and because of it Leisha would never love him the way he loved her. Never.

Pain clutched him, so strong that for a moment he couldn’t see Alice’s coffin below him on the ground. Alice, whose love had let Drew grow up in a way Leisha’s never could. His vision cleared and he let the pain flow freely, until it became another shape in his mind, jagged with lacerations but more than itself, more than himself. And so, bearable.

He could never have Leisha.

Then all that was left was Sanctuary.

Drew looked again around the circle. Stella had her face hidden against her husband’s shoulder. Their daughter Alicia rested both hands on the shoulders of her small daughters. Richard had not raised his head; Drew couldn’t see his eyes. Leisha stood alone, the clear desert light revealing her young skin, unlined eyes, rigidly compressed lips.

The word came to Drew, the word he had been hunting for, the word that fit them all, Sleepless mourning their best beloved who had not been one of them and for that very reason was their best beloved:

The word was “pity.”

Miri bent furiously over her terminal. Both the display and the readout said the same thing: This synthetic neurochemical model performed worse than the last one. Or the last two. Or the last ten. Her lab rats, their brains confused by what was supposed to be the answer to Miri’s experiment, stood irresolutely in their brain-scan stalls. The smallest of the three gave up: He lay down and went to sleep.

“T-t-t-terrific,” Miri muttered. What ever made her think she was a biochemical researcher? “Super”—yeah. Sure. Super-incompetent.

Strings of genetic code, phenotypes, enzymes, receptor sites formed and reformed in her head. None of it was any good. Waste, waste. She threw a calibration instrument clear across the lab, guaranteeing it would have to be recalibrated.

“Miri!”

Joan Lucas stood in the doorway, her pretty face twisted as rope. She and Miri had not talked in years. “Miri…”

“Wh-wh-what is it? J-J-J-Joan?”

“It’s Tony. Come right now. He…” Her face twisted even more. Miri felt the blood leave her heart.

“Wh-wh-what?”

“He fell. From the playground. Oh, Miri, come—”

From the playground. From the axis of the orbital…no, that wasn’t possible, the playground was sealed, and after a fall from that height there would be nothing left—

“From the elevator, I mean. The outside. You know how the boys dare each other to ride the outside of the elevator, on the construction ribs, and then duck in the repair hatch—”

Miri hadn’t known. Tony hadn’t told her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. She could only stare at Joan, who was crying. Behind Miri, one of the genemod rats gave a soft squeak.

“Come on!” Joan cried. “He’s still alive!”

Barely. The medical team had already reached him. They worked grimly on the smashed legs and broken shoulder before they moved him to the hospital. Tony’s eyes were closed; one side of his skull was covered with blood.

Miri rode in the emergency skimmer the short distance to the hospital. Doctors whisked Tony away. Miri sat unmoving, unseeing, looking up only when her mother arrived.

“Where is he!” Hermione cried, and a small, cruel part of Miri’s mind wondered if Hermione would finally look directly at her oldest son, now when everything that made looking worthwhile was gone. Tony’s smile. The expression in his eyes. His voice, stammering out his words. Tony’s words.

The brain scan showed massive damage. But, miraculously, consciousness survived. The drugs that dulled his pain also dulled what made him Tony, but Miri knew he was still there, somewhere. She sat by his side, holding his limp hand, hour after hour. People came and went around her but she spoke to none of them, looked at none of them.

Finally the doctor pulled a chair close to hers and put a hand on her shoulder. “Miranda.”

Tony’s eyelids fluttered more that time; she watched carefully—

“Miranda. Listen to me.” He took her chin gently in his hand and pulled her face toward his. “There’s nervous system damage beyond what can regenerate. There might be—we can’t be sure what we’re looking at. We’ve never seen this pattern of damage.”

“N-n-not even on T-T-T-Tabitha S-Selenski?” she said bitterly.

“No. That was different. Tony’s Mallory scans are showing highly aberrant brain activity. Your brother is alive, but he’s suffered major, nonreparable damage to the brain stem, including the raphe nuclei and related structures. Miranda, you know what that means, you research in this area, I have the readouts here for you—”

“I d-d-d-don’t w-w-want to s-s-s-see th-them!”

“Yes,” the doctor said, “You do. Sharifi, talk to her.”

Miri’s father bent over her. She hadn’t realized he was there. “Miri—”

“D-d-d-don’t d-d-do it! N-n-no, D-D-Daddy! N-not to T-T-T-Tony!”

Ricky Keller didn’t pretend to not understand her. Nor did he pretend to a strength Miri knew, under the chaotic horrible strings in her mind, he didn’t possess. Ricky looked at his broken son, then at Miri, and slowly, shoulders stooped, he left the room.

“G-g-get out!” Miri screamed at the doctor, at the nurses, at her mother, who stood closest to the door. Hermione made a small gesture with her hand and they all left her. With Tony.

“N-n-n-no,” she whispered to Tony. Her hand tightened convulsively in his. “I w-w-w-won’t—” The words would not come. Only thoughts, and not in complex strings: in the straight linear narrowness of fear.

I won’t let them. I’ll fight them every way I can. I’m as strong as they are, smarter, we’re Supers, for you I’ll fight; I won’t let them; they can’t stop me from protecting you; no one can stop me—

Jennifer Sharifi stood in the doorway.

“Miranda.”

Miri moved around the foot of the bed, between her grandmother and Tony. She moved slowly, deliberately, never taking her eyes off Jennifer.

“Miranda. He’s in pain.”

“L-l-l-life is p-p-pain,” Miri said, and didn’t recognize her own voice. “H-h-hard n-n-n-n-necessity. Y-y-you t-t-t-t-t-taught mme that.”

“He won’t recover.”

“Y-y-you d-d-don’t kn-know that! N-n-not y-y-y-yet!”

“We can be sure enough.” Jennifer moved swiftly forward. Miri had never seen her grandmother move so fast. “Don’t you think I feel it as passionately as you do? He’s my grandson! And a Super, one of the precious few we have, who in a few decades are going to make all the difference to us, when we need it most, when we have fewer and fewer resources from Earth to draw on and will have to invent our own from sources not even dreamed of yet. Our resources and genemod adaptions and technology to leave this solar system and colonize somewhere finally safe for us. We needed Tony for that, for the stars—we need every one of you! Don’t you think I feel his loss as passionately as you do?”

“If y-y-y-you k-k-k-k-kill T-T-T-T-T-” she couldn’t get the words out. The most important words she had ever said, and she couldn’t get them out—

Jennifer said, with pain, “No one has a right to make claims on the strong and productive because he is weak and useless. To set a higher value on weakness than on ability is morally obscene.”

Miri flew at her grandmother. She aimed for the eyes, curving her nails like claws, bringing up her knee to drive as hard as she could into Jennifer’s body. Jennifer cried out and went down. Miri dropped on top of her and tried to get her trembling, jerking hands around Jennifer’s throat. Other hands grabbed her, pulled her off her grandmother, tried to pin Miri’s arms to her sides. Miri fought, screaming—she had to scream loud enough for Tony to hear, to know what was happening, to make Tony wake up—

Everything went black.

Miri was drugged for three days. When she finally awoke, her father sat beside her pallet, his shoulders hunched forward and his hands dangling between his knees. He told her Tony had died of his injuries. Miri stared at him, saying nothing, then turned her face away to the wall. The foamstone wall was old, speckled with motes of black that might have been dirt, or mold, or the negatives of tiny stars in a galaxy flat and two-dimensional and dead.

Miri would not leave her lab, not even to eat. She locked herself in and for two days ate nothing. The adults couldn’t override the locking security, which Tony had designed, but neither did they try. At least Miri didn’t think they tried; she didn’t really care.

Her mother initiated contact once over the comlink. Miri blanked the screen, and her mother didn’t try again. Her father tried several times. Miri listened, stone, to what he had to say, in one-way mode so he could neither see nor hear her. There was nothing to hear anyway. She didn’t answer. Her grandmother did not try to call Miri.

She sat in a corner of the lab, on the floor, her knees drawn up to her chest and her thin, twitching arms clasped around her knees. Anger raged through her, storms of anger that periodically swept away all strings, all thought, swept away everything ordered and complex in torrents of primitive rage that did not frighten her. There was no room for being frightened. The anger left no room for anything else except a single thought, at the edge of what had been her previous self: The hypermods apply to emotions as much as to cortical processes. The thought didn’t seem interesting. Nothing seemed interesting except her fury at Tony’s death.

Tony’s murder.

On the third day an emergency override brought every screen in her lab alive, even those that couldn’t receive local transmissions. Miri looked up and clenched her fists. The adults were better than she had thought if they could get the computer system to do that, if they could override Tony’s programming…But they couldn’t, nobody had been as good with systems as Tony, nobody…Tony…

“M-M-M-Miri,” said Christina Demetrios’s face, “l-l-l-let us in. P-p-p-please.” And when Miri didn’t answer, “I l-l-l-l-l-l-loved h-him t-t-too!”

Miri crawled to the door, where Tony had installed a complex lock combining manual and Y-fields. Crawling nearly made her faint; she hadn’t realized her body was quite so weak. A hyped metabolism ordinarily consumed huge amounts of food.

She opened the door. Christina came in, carrying a large bowl of soypease. Behind her were Nikos Demetrios and Allen Sheffield, Sara Cerelli and Jonathan Markowitz, Mark Meyer and Diane Clarke, and twenty more. Every Super over the age of ten in Sanctuary. They crowded the lab, jerking and twitching, the broad faces on their large, slightly misshapen heads streaked with tears, or set with fury, or blinking frantically with hyped thought.

Nikos said, “Th-they d-d-d-d-did it b-b-b-b-because he w-ww-was one of us.”

Miri turned her head slowly to look at him.

“T-T-T-T-T-Tony w-w-w-w-w-w-” The word wouldn’t come. Nikos jerked over to Miri’s terminal and called up the program Tony had designed to construct strings according to Nikos’s thought patterns, and the conversion program to Miri’s patterns. He typed in the key words, studied the result, altered key points, studied and altered again. Christy wordlessly held out a bowl of soypease to Miri. Miri pushed it away, looked at Christy’s face, and ate a spoonful. Nikos pressed the key to convert his string edifice to Miri’s. She studied it.

It was all there: The Supers’ documented conviction that Tony’s death had been different from Tabitha Selenski’s. The medical differences were there: Tabitha had been proven cortically destroyed, but Tony’s brain scans and autopsy records showed only an uncertain degree of disablement, the readouts inconclusive about the amount of personality left. They were completely clear, however, about the destruction of certain brain-stem structures which regulated the production of genemod enzymes. Tony might or might not have still been Tony; he might or might not have still had his mental abilities intact; there had not been enough time allowed to find out. But either way he would, without doubt, have spent some unknown part of each day asleep.

The medical evidence, obtained from the Sanctuary hospital records without even a trace that they had been entered, didn’t stand alone on Miri’s hologrid. It was knotted into strings and cross-strings of concepts about community, about the social dynamics of prolonged organizational isolation, of xenophobia, of incidents that Miri recognized between the Supers and the Norms in school, in the labs, in the playground. Mathematical equations on social dynamics and on psychological defenses against feelings of inferiority were tied to Earthside historical patterns: Assimilation. Religious zeal against heretics. Class warfare. Serfdom and slavery. Karl Marx, John Knox, Lord Acton.

It was the most complex string Miri had ever seen. She knew without being told that it had taken Nikos the entire day since Tony’s autopsy to think through, that it represented the thoughts and contributions of the other Supers, and that it was the most important string she had ever studied—thought or felt—in her life.

And that something—still, always—was missing from it.

Nikos said, “T-T-T-Tony t-t-t-t-t-t-taught m-m-m-m-me h-h-h-how.” Miri didn’t answer. She saw that Nikos said that sentence, which was already self-evident, to keep from saying the other one that every element in the complex molecule of his string implied: The Norms think we Supers are so different from them that we are a separate community, created by them to serve the needs of their own. They don’t know they think this way, they would deny it—but they do it nonetheless.

She looked around at the faces of the other children. They all understood. They were not children, not even the eleven-year-olds, not even in the sense Miri had been a child at eleven. Each new genemod had opened the potential to more pathways in the brain. Each new genetic modification had expanded use of those cortical structures once only available in times of intense stress or intense insight. Each new modification had created more differences from the adult Norms who fashioned them. These Supers—especially the youngest—were children of the Normals only in the grossest biological sense.

And she, Miri herself, how much was she the child of Hermione Wells Keller, who could not bear to even look at her? The daughter of Richard Anthony Keller, whose intelligence was in defeated thrall to his mother? The granddaughter of Jennifer Fatima Sharifi, who had killed Tony for a community that was defined only as she chose to define it?

Christina said softly, “M-M-M-M-Miri, eat.”

Nikos said, “W-w-w-w-we m-m-m-m-m-m-must n-not l-l-llet them d-d-d-d-do it ag-g-gain.”

Allen said, “W-we c-c-c-c-c-c-” He jerked his shoulders in frustration. Speech had always been harder for Allen than even for the rest of them; sometimes he didn’t talk for days. He pushed Miri from the console, called up his own string program, keyed rapidly, and converted the result to Miri’s program. When he was done she saw, in beautifully ordered and composed strings, that if the Supers made blanket assumptions about Norms, they would be as ethically wrong as the Sanctuary Council. That each person, Super and Normal, would have to be judged as an individual, and that this might have to be carefully balanced with the need for security. They could already ensure complete, covert control of the Sanctuary systems, if necessary for their own defense, but they could not ensure complete control of the Norms they included in their defenses against never letting another Super be killed by the Council. It was a risk, to be balanced by the moral dilemma of becoming that which they were condemning in the Council. The moral factors glinted and dragged throughout Allen’s strings; they were unquestioned assumptions in Nikos’s.

Miri studied the projection, the strings in her own mind knotting and forming faster than they had ever done in her life. She didn’t feel moral; she felt hatred for everyone who had killed Tony. And yet she saw Allen was right. They could never just turn on their own parents, grandparents, other Sleepless—their community. They just couldn’t. Allen was right.

Miri nodded.

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

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

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

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

Because it hadn’t yet happened to her.

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

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

“Y-yes. A n-name,” Diane said.

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

“The B-B-B-B-Beggars,” Miri said.

“I had no choice,” Jennifer said. “I had no choice!”

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

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

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

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

“No, but—”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

23

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“N-n-n-nor m-m-m-me either.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody said anything.

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

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

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

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

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

Did her father know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing in common with Miri’s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ ‘But felt through all this fleshly dress/ Bright shoots of everlastingness,’ ” the man said. Miri realized suddenly that his chair was technologically enhanced, and that he must be somehow damaged or deformed. Not normal.

The strings in her mind grew flatter, calmer. The shapes in the hologrid had changed. She heard the man’s words, and yet she didn’t; the words were not what was really important. And wasn’t that right? Words had never been important, only strings, and the strings had shapes like—but not like—the ones around the man. Only the man had disappeared, too, and that was all right because she, Miri, Miranda Serena Sharifi, was disappearing, was sliding down a steep long chute and each meter she traveled she became smaller and smaller until she had disappeared and was invisible, a weightless transparent ghost that neither twitched nor stammered, in the corner of a room she had never seen before.

Below it, she knew, were other rooms. It was a deep building—deep, not tall—and each room was like this one, filled with light so palpable it was almost alive. In fact, it was alive, forming suddenly into a beast with fifteen heads. Miri held a sword. “No,” she said aloud, “I’m transparent, I can’t use a sword,” but this apparently made no difference, because the beast started toward her, roaring, and she hacked at a head. It fell off, and only then did she see it was her grandmother’s. Jennifer’s head lay on the floor, and as Miri watched in horror a hole opened in the floor and the head, smiling faintly, slid down it. Miri knew it was going to another, deeper room—this whole place was room after room, opening off each other—but the head wouldn’t vanish entirely. Nothing ever vanished entirely. The beast attacked again and she cut off another head, which dropped just as serenely through the floor. It had been her father’s.

Suddenly fury filled her. She hacked and hacked. Some of the heads she recognized as they burrowed deeper into the building, others she didn’t. The last one was Tony’s, and instead of vanishing it grew a body—not Tony’s but David Aronson’s genemod-perfect body, the body she had tried to seduce three years ago when he had rejected her. Tony/David started undressing her, and she immediately became excited. “I always wanted you,” she said. “I know,” he replied, “but I had to stop twitching first.” He entered her and the world above their heads exploded into strings of thought.

“No, wait a minute,” Miri said to Tony, “those aren’t the right strings.” She looked up, concentrated, and changed the strings at several points. Tony waited, smiling with his beautiful mouth on the motionless body. When Miri was done changing the strings, he reached out to hold her again and such tenderness, such peace flooded Miri that she said joyously, “It doesn’t matter about Mother!” “It never did,” Tony said, and she laughed and stroked him and—

—woke up.

Miri started in terror. The lab swam back into existence around her. It had been gone, been replaced by—

She had been asleep. She had been dreaming.

“N-n-n-no,” Miri moaned. How could she have been asleep? She? Dreams were what Sleepers had, dreams were thought-construct described in theoretical brain studies…The holoterminal was once more dark. Slowly the man faded back in.

The shapes. His equipment had projected shapes, and then there had been answering shapes in her mind. Like thought-string edifices—but not. From a different part of her brain, perhaps, not cortical? But the feeling of peace, of joy, of tremendous oneness with Tony, that could only have come from her cortex. She had dreamed it. He had—she dredged up the Earth word—“hypnotized” her with his mind shapes, his poetry on aloneness, and then the shapes in the hologram had drawn forth her own dreaming shapes…

But there had been more. Miri had changed the dream. She had concentrated on the strings above her and Tony’s heads and changed them, deliberately. She could see both versions now, in memory.

Miri sat very still, as still as she had in the dream.

“Drew Arlen,” a too-hearty voice was saying over the holo of the man in the chair, “Lucid Dreamer. The new art form that has taken the country by flash! This is a nonreplicable program, Livers out there in Holo-Land, so to purchase your own copy of one of Drew’s six different Lucid Dreaming performances—”

Miri pressed Tony’s code to replicate. The man in the chair froze in time.

She put her head between her knees, still dazed. She had been dreaming. She, Miranda Sharifi, Sleepless and Superbright. She could see Tony still, feel his arms around her, feel the depth of the building below her, its endless rooms. She could still see the thought strings, solid as matter, that she had reached up and changed.

Miri raised her head from her knees and went to her work terminal. She fixed the program glitch. It was easy; all she had to do was follow the strings she had seen in the dream, the ones she had changed. She typed in the pinpoint DNA code she had been hunting for three years and had never really seen. The program ran it against her parameters, probability tables, and neurochemical interactions. The comparisons and modeling would take a while to complete, but Miri already knew—the genemods were the right ones. They were the ones she had been searching for, had been circling around, but had not seen until a part of her dreaming mind had looked in a different way at the facts in her thought strings, and added what was missing.

That was right; her mind had added what was missing, what had always been missing, all her life. The ideas—not linear, not knotted into strings, not connected in perceptible ways—from the missing part of her mind. The dreaming part. No—the lucid dreaming part, which reached into a universe deeper than one story, to pull out things she had never guessed were there and yet were indubitably hers. Things she—the conscious Miri—could partially manipulate in the dream world.

Miri looked at the frozen holo of the artist in the chair. He was smiling faintly; unseen light glinted on his glossy hair. He had bright green eyes. She felt again the dream orgasm with Tony. Every fiber of her fierce, young, single-minded personality knotted itself around the figure of Drew Arlen, who had given her this gift, this redemption.

Lucid dreaming.

Miri rose. She wanted to synthesize her neuorological compound, test it, and take it. She knew it would work. It would inhibit the stuttering and stammering and twitching of the Supers without impairing their superabilities. It would let them be themselves, only with an added dimension.

Like lucid dreaming. Oneself, only more so.

But there was something else to do first. She called up the library program and set it for the widest possible preliminary search parameters: all data in Sanctuary records, in legal Earth databanks for which Sanctuary paid stiff fees, in illegal Earth ones for which they paid even stiffer fees. She added the search programs Tony had designed and taught her to use, the ones that accessed databanks their owners thought completely secure. Miri added anything else she could think of. She wanted wanted to know everything there was to know about Drew Arlen. Everything.

And then she would figure out how to get to him.

The beggars crowded into Raoul’s lab, sitting on benches, the desk, the floor. They talked softly, as they usually did to each other, allowing a long time for the words to come out. Most of the time they didn’t look directly at each other. Nearly all wore masks now, some elaborately ornamented.

Miri’s mask was undecorated. She wasn’t going to wear it long.

“N-n-n-nucleid p-p-p-p-p-prot-teins—”

“—f-f-f-found a n-new r-r-ribbon fl-flow—”

“—t-t-t-two p-pounds h-h-h-heavier—”

“M-my n-n-n-new si-si-sister—”

“C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C—” A grunt of frustration. The first terminal came out to call up a string program.

“Wait a minute before you turn to string communication,” Miri said. “I have something to show you.”

The room fell into frozen silence. Miri took off her mask and brushed her long bangs from her eyes. She gazed at them serenely from a face that didn’t twitch, or jerk, or tremble.

“Uhn-n-n-n-n,” someone said, as if punched in the stomach.

“I found the pinpoint code,” Miri said. “The enzyme is easily synthesized, has no predicted side effects and none observed in myself—so far anyway—and can be delivered by slow-drip subcutaneous patch.” She rolled up her sleeve to show them the slight scar, rapidly regenerating, on her upper left arm.

“The f-f-f-f-f-formula!” Raoul, the other biological researcher, demanded hungrily.

Miri called up the string edifice on her work terminal. Raoul pasted himself in front of it.

Christy said, “Wh-Wh-When?”

“I put the patch in three days ago. Since then I haven’t left the lab. No one has seen it but you.”

Nikos said, “D-d-d-d-do m-m-m-m-me!”

Miri had prepared twenty-seven subcutaneous patches. The Beggars formed an assembly line, with Susan disinfecting the upper arm of each of them, Raoul making the incision, Miri inserting the patch, and Diana bandaging tightly. There was no need for stitches; the skin would regenerate.

“It takes a few hours for the effects to kick in,” Miri said. “The enzyme has to direct the manufacture of a sufficient amount of neuro-transmitter.”

The Supers looked at Miri with shining, twitching eyes. She leaned forward. “Listen—there’s something else we have to talk about.

“You know I’ve been searching for this genemod for nearly four years; well, in the first two I was still exploring the problem. But I don’t think I would have found the solution at all if I hadn’t learned to do something else. It’s called lucid dreaming.”

She had their complete, formidable attention.

“It sounds like something Sleepers do, and a Sleeper led me to it. Through Joan Lucas. But we can do lucid dreaming, too, and although I don’t have any brain-scan data yet, I think we might do it differently from Sleepers. Or even from Norms.” Miri explained about Joan’s call, about Drew Arlen, about seeing her own research string in the lucid dream and reaching up to change it.

“It’s as if strings are one kind of thinking, one that effectively unites associative and linear thought, and lucid dreaming is some other kind. It uses…stories. Pulling from the unconscious, maybe, the way Sleeper dreams are supposed to do. But Sleepers don’t have string edifices to put together with the stories. They can’t—I don’t know!—maybe they can’t shape the lucid dreaming as well because they don’t have such coherent shapes to work with in the first place. Or maybe they can shape the dream, but without the visualized complexity of strings, the shaping only operates on an emotional level.” Miri shrugged. Who could say how Sleepers’ minds worked?

“Anyway, lucid dreaming is like…being reborn. Into a world with more dimensions than this one. And I want you to all try it.”

From the pocket of her shorts Miri pulled the program cartridge of her favorite of Drew’s performances, the second. Recording the entire series of six had been no challenge for Tony’s programs, no matter what the newsgrids claimed.

Terry Mwakambe had thrown one of his impenetrable security fields around Raoul’s lab before the meeting began. Miri inserted her cartridge into Raoul’s holoterminal. She turned her back to the miniature stage; she didn’t want to fall asleep herself, not this time. She wanted to watch the others.

One by one their eyes glazed, although they didn’t close. Drew Arlen’s musical voice licked at their eyelids, reciting words, suggesting ideas. The Supers dreamed.

When it was over, they awoke almost simultaneously. They laughed, and cried, and talked excitedly about their dreams—all but Terry, the most genetically modified, the most different. He sat slumped in a corner, his head bent so that all Miri could see was hair.

Somewhere in the middle of the laughing and exclaiming, Miri’s synthetic enzyme stimulated sufficient production of three different, interdependent brain chemicals to change the subtle, genetically-coded composition of cerebrospinal fluids.

Terry stood. His thin body and large head were held very still. He looked at all of them from eyes that neither blinked nor twitched.

He said, “I know how to remove the last Sharifi Labs failsafes. And I know what’s behind them.”

24

On New Year’s day Leisha walked along the creek, under the cottonwoods. A light snow glistened on the ground. She looked up to see Jordan, coatless, puffing toward her. The lines and wrinkles on his sun-battered face—he was sixty-seven—were pulled taut as wires.

“Leisha! Sanctuary has seceded from the United States!”

“Yes,” Leisha said, without surprise. She had decided shortly after Alice’s funeral that this must be Jennifer’s intent. It fit. It occurred to her that she and Kevin Baker were probably the only two people in the country who were not surprised. Or maybe Kevin was surprised. She had not talked to him since Alice’s funeral.

Leisha bent to pick up a stone: it was almost a perfect oval, polished by patient wind and ancient water. Under her fingers the stone felt icy. “Yes,” she said to Jordan. “I know.”

“Well, aren’t you coming in to watch the grids?”

“Don’t we always?” Leisha said, and at her tone, Jordan stared.

Sanctuary made its declaration at 8:00 A.M. January 1, 2092. The statement, released simultaneously to the country’s five most important newsgrids, the president, and the Congress of the United States, none of whom were fully functional at that hour on New Year’s Day, was not negotiable:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands 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 of 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 to the examining eye: That all men are not created equal. That all are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but that none are guaranteed these at the expense of others’ freedom, others’ labor, or others’ pursuit of their own happiness. That governments instituted among men to secure these rights derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. That a government which both fails to protect the rights of a people and to secure their consent has become destructive of those ends and it is the right of that people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

This should not be undertaken for light and trivial causes, but when a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to deprive a people of what is rightfully theirs, it is their duty to throw off such a government. The history of the present government of the United States is such a history of repeated injuries and usurpations. To prove this, let the facts be submitted to a candid world.

The United States has effectively denied to Sanctuary representation in any legislature or lawmaking body, due to widespread and ignorant hatred by Sleepers of the Sleepless.

The United States has levied ruinous taxes on Sanctuary, thus bringing about de facto taxation without representation, and thus also taking by the threat of force the fruits of the labor of Sanctuary’s citizens.

In return for such taxes, the United States has provided no protection, social benefits, legal representation, or trade advantages to Sanctuary. No citizen of Sanctuary uses federal or state roads, schools, libraries, hospitals, courts, police protection, fire protection, Dole benefits, public entertainment designed to gain voting representation, or any other governmental service. Such citizens of Sanctuary as attend graduate institutions in the United States fully pay their own fees and expenses, waiving public charity.

The United States has erected trade barriers against the business establishments of Sanctuary in the form of unequal taxes and trade quotas, forcing Sanctuary to trade with foreign powers or else to trade on terms which harass our people and eat out their substance.

The United States has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers on Sanctuary itself, so that we are deprived of the basic judicial right to trial by a jury of our peers.

Finally, the United States has used against Sanctuary the threat of military force if Sanctuary should not comply with all these unjust and immoral conditions, in effect abdicating true government on Sanctuary and waging war against us.

We therefore, the representatives of Sanctuary, in General Council assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the people of Sanctuary, solemnly publish and declare that this orbital colony is, and of right ought to be, a free and independent state; that we are absolved of all allegiance to the United States of America, and that all political connection between them and the United States is and ought to be dissolved. As a free and independent state, Sanctuary possesses the power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts which independent states have a right to do. We of Sanctuary further declare that our first act as an independent state is to throw off the yoke of foreign tribute in the form of ruinous and unequal Quarterly Estimated Corporate taxes unfairly levied January 15 of this year 2092, followed by other such taxes as the United States may try to impose to our ruin and detriment April 15 of this year.

In support of this Declaration we, the duly elected and appointed representatives of Sanctuary, mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor.

The newsgrid facsimile bore fourteen signatures, led by a large, scrawled Jennifer Fatima Sharifi. Jennifer’s usual handwriting, Leisha remembered, was small and neat.

Stella said, “They did it. They really did it.”

Jordan said, “Leisha—what will happen now?”

“The IRS will wait for the nonpayment of the January 15 taxes. When it doesn’t come, they’ll attach a jeopardy assessment to Sanctuary. That means they’ll have the right to physically seize the material assets to hold as protection against getting their money.”

“Physically seize Sanctuary? Without even a hearing or something?”

“Jeopardy assessment puts the seizure first, the hearing second. That’s probably why Jennifer chose this course of action. Everybody will have to move very fast. Half of Congress is away for the holidays.” Leisha noted how detached she sounded, how calm. How amazing.

Stella said, “But seizing Sanctuary—how, Leisha? With the army? An assault?”

Jordan said, “They could blow it out of the sky with a single Truth missile.”

“But they won’t,” Stella argued, “because that would just destroy the property the IRS is trying to seize. It’ll have to be a…an invasion. But that would be just as hard on Sanctuary—orbital environments are fragile. Leisha, what the hell is Jennifer thinking of?”

“I don’t know,” Leisha said. “Look at the signatures. Richard Anthony Keller Sharifi, Najla Sharifi Johnson, Hermione Wells Keller—Richard’s children have married. I don’t think Richard knows that.”

Stella and Jordan looked at each other. “Leisha,” Stella said in her acerbic way, “doesn’t it seem to you this is more than a matter of family news? It’s a civil war! Jennifer has finally succeeded in separating virtually all the Sleepless from the rest of the country, from the mainstream of American society—”

“And are you going to tell me,” Leisha asked, smiling without amusement, “that the twelve of us sitting out here in this forgotten compound in the desert haven’t done exactly the same thing?”

Neither of the others answered her.

“Do you think,” Stella said finally, “that Sanctuary is a match for the United States?”

“I don’t know,” Leisha said, and Stella and Jordan stared at each other, aghast. “I’m not the right person to ask. I’ve never once, in my entire life, been right about Jennifer Sharifi.”

“But, Leisha—”

“I’m going down to the creek,” Leisha said. “Call me if we go to war.”

She left Stella and Jordan staring at each other, bewildered and angry at her, unable to see the distinction between criminal indifference and what, to Leisha, was even worse: criminal uselessness.

The United States congress, from the first, took Sanctuary’s secession threat seriously. This was Sleepless. Senators and congressmen who had scattered to their constituencies for the winter holidays hastily reassembled in Washington. President Calvin John Meyerhoff, a big slow-moving man dubbed in the newsgrids “Silent Cal II,” nonetheless possessed a sharp brain, finely tuned to foreign policy. If it struck Meyerhoff as ironic that the major foreign crisis of his waning first term involved a section of the United States technically part of Cattaraugus County, New York, the irony was not present in any of the press releases from the Oval Office.

The Liver newsgrids, however, saw the Sanctuary threat as hysterically funny, raw material for the two-minute comedy sketches that were the favorite form of entertainment. Few Livers had ever dealt with, heard of, or known any Sleepless, whose dealings were with the donkey class that ran the businesses that ran the country. A Liver newsgrid gleefully made the prediction: “Next to Secede—Oregon! Inside story!” The sketch was dramatized with holoactors with taped-up eyelids standing in downtown Portland and ranting that it was necessary for Oregon people “to dissolve the political bands that connect them with another people.” FREE OREGON banners suddenly appeared at scooter races, at brainie parties, at the free dance palaces. A racer named Kimberly Sands won the Belmont Winter Race in a scooter painted with the Oregon flag superimposed over the United States flag.

On January 3, the White House issued a statement that Sanctuary had in effect made a statement of both sedition and terrorism, declaring its “power to levy war” while conspiring to overthrow the United States government as it pertained to a section of New York State. Neither terrorism nor sedition could be tolerated in a free democracy. The National Guard was put on alert. Sanctuary was told, in a statement released to the press as well, that on January 10 a delegation consisting of members from both the State Department and the IRS—a coupling seldom seen before in American diplomacy—would dock at Sanctuary “for discussion of the situation.”

Sanctuary replied that if any shuttle or other space-going vessel approached the orbital, Sanctuary would open fire.

Congress met in emergency session. The IRS levied a jeopardy assessment against all assets held by Sanctuary, Inc., and its principal shareholders, the Sharifi family. The tabloid newsgrids, more interested in drama than in federal tax procedure, whooped that the IRS would sell Sanctuary at an auction to pay the taxes and penalty: “Anybody want to buy a used shuttle? A slightly dented orbital panel? Oregon?” WBRN, “the Brainie Channel,” held a mock auction in which Oregon was won by a couple in Monterey, California, who announced that Crater Lake National Park wished to secede from Oregon.

On January 8, two days before Sanctuary was to receive the federal delegation, the New York Times, Newsgrid Division, in conjunction with its venerable donkey newspaper, offered an editorial called “Why Keep Oregon?” The newsgrid version was spoken on all six daily holobroadcasts by the leading anchorman; the hard-copy version was centered, alone, on the editorial page.

Drew arrived at the New Mexico compound the evening of January 6. The day had been unusually cold; he had wrapped a red muffler around his throat and a matching blanket over his legs. Both, Leisha noted, were of fine Irish wool. He powered his chair across the large open living room, built to provide a gathering place for seventy-five and lately never holding more than ten or twelve. Alice’s daughter Alicia and her family had moved back to California, Eric was in South America, Seth and his wife in Chicago. Drew, Leisha saw, had once more changed.

The strident flamboyance of the newly successful artist, a little too self-conscious, had softened. Success did that. Looking up at her face, greeting her, Drew’s gaze was open but in no way needy—not even of attention. He was sure, now, of what he was, without her confirmation. Nor did his gaze shut her out as automatically of less interest than himself, the way so many celebrities did. Drew still looked at the world as if willing to be interested, with the addition of a faint smiling challenge that said continued interest would have to be earned.

It was the look Leisha remembered, always, as her father’s.

“I thought I should come home,” Drew said, “in case this political situation becomes really tense.”

“You think it won’t?” Leisha said dryly. “But, then, you never knew Jennifer Sharifi.”

“No. But you did. Leisha—tell me. What’s going to happen to Sanctuary?”

In Drew’s intonations—Sanctuary—she heard all the old obsession. What did he himself make of that childish obsession now, in his strange adult profession? Did Sanctuary, transformed into the shapes of desire, fuel his lucid dreaming?

Leisha said, “The military won’t blow Sanctuary out of orbit, if that’s what you mean. They’re civilians up there, even if terrorist civilians, and about a fourth of them are children. Any weapons they have could be deadly, but Jennifer always had too much political acumen to cross the line where she could be hit back really hard.”

“People change,” Drew said.

“Maybe. But even if obsession has eroded Jennifer’s judgment, she has others up there to counteract it. A very smart lawyer named Will Sandaleros and Cassie Blumenthal and of course her children must be over forty by now—”

Abruptly Leisha remembered Richard saying, forty years ago, “You become different, walled away with only other Sleepless for decades…”

Drew said, watching her, “Richard’s here, too.”

“Richard?”

“With Ada and the kid. Stella was fussing over them when I came in. Apparently Sean has a flu or something. You seemed surprised that Richard’s here, Leisha.”

“I am.” She suddenly grinned. “You’re right, Drew—people change. Don’t you think that’s kind of funny?”

“I never thought you had much of a sense of humor, Leisha. With all your other wonderful qualities, I never suspected that one.”

She said sharply, “Don’t try to bait me, Drew.”

He said, “I wasn’t,” and she saw in his private smile that he meant it: He had never thought she had much of a sense of humor. Well, maybe their ideas of humor were very different. Along with so much else.

Richard came in, alone. He was abrupt. “Hello, Leisha. Drew. Hope you don’t mind the unannounced visit. I thought…”

She finished the thought for him. “That if Najla or Ricky had any communication to make to you, it would be through me? Richard, dear…I think Kevin would be a more likely choice. Sanctuary deals with him…”

“No. They wouldn’t use Kevin,” Richard said, and Leisha didn’t ask how he knew. “Leisha, what’s going to happen with Sanctuary?”

Everyone asked her that. Everyone assumed she was the political expert. She, who had sat—“sulked,” Susan Melling had called it—thirty years idle in the desert. What went on in people’s minds, even her own people? “I don’t know, Richard. What do you think Jennifer will do?”

Richard didn’t look at her. “I think she’d detonate the world if she thought it would finally make her feel safe.”

“You’re saying—do you know what you’re saying, Richard? That all of Sanctuary’s political philosophy still comes down to one person’s personal needs. Do you believe that?”

“I believe it about all political philosophies,” Richard said.

“No,” Leisha said, “Not all.”

“Yes,” and it was not Richard who made the rebuttal, but Drew.

“Not the Constitution,” Leisha said, surprising herself.

“We’ll see,” Drew said, and smoothed the fine, expensive Irish wool over his withered legs.

Sanctuary, without night or day, without seasons, had always kept eastern standard time. This fact, as familiar to Jennifer as the feeling of her own blood flowing through her veins, suddenly struck her as grotesque. Sanctuary, the refuge and homeland of the Sleepless, the pioneer in the next stage of human evolution, had all these years been tied to the out-worn United States by the most basic of man-made shackles, time. Standing at the head of the Sanctuary Council table at 6:00 P.M. EST, Jennifer resolved that when this crisis was over, those shackles would be cut. Sanctuary would devise its own system of measuring time, free from the planet-based idea of day and night, free from the degrading circadian rhythms that bound Sleepers. Sanctuary would conquer time.

“Now,” Will Sandaleros said. “Fire.”

None of the Council was seated; they all stood, palms flat on the polished metal table or clenched at their sides, eyes turned to the screens at one end of the room. Jennifer scanned each face: excited or determined or pained. But the few that were pained were also resolute, with the pain that accepts the necessity for the surgery. She had had the lottery system replaced by elections—that alone had taken nearly a decade. Then, she had maneuvered a long time for this particular Council. She had talked people into delaying candidacy, sometimes for decades. She had lent subtle support here, subtle discouragement there. She had reasoned, traded, probed, waited, accepted delays and indecision. And now she had a Council—all but one—capable of supporting her at the decisive moment for Sleepless everywhere, for all time, as time was described by the worn-out country that had ceased to matter to human evolution.

Robert Dey, seventy-five years old, the respected patriarch of a large and rich Sanctuary family, who had passed on to all of them, for decades, stories of Sleepless abused and hated in the United States of his childhood.

Caroline Renleigh, twenty-eight, a brilliant communications expert with a fanatic belief in Sleepless Darwinian superiority.

Cassie Blumenthal, with Jennifer since the earliest days of Sanctuary and instrumental in the events leading up to Jennifer’s trial—events considered ancient history on Sanctuary but still very real to Cassie’s tenacious mind.

Paul Aleone, forty-one, a mathematician-economist who had not only foreseen the collapse of the Y-energy-based American economy when the international patents expired, but had created a program that predicted exactly the past ten years’ worth of legerdemain and folly, even as the United States tried to deny that its bluebird of illusionary prosperity had in fact flown. Aleone had worked out the economic future of Sanctuary as an independent state dealing with other independent states more prudent than the United States.

John Wong, forty-five, a lawyer who was also Appeals Justice of Sanctuary’s seldom-used court system, proud of the fact that Sleepless, except for routine contract interpretations, seldom used it. There was little violence, little vandalism, less theft on Sanctuary. But Wong, a historian, understood the power of the judiciary among a law-abiding people in times of controversial change, and he believed in change.

Charles Stauffer, fifty-three, head of Sanctuary external security. Like all good soldiers, he was constantly prepared for attack, constantly ready to have his preparations justified. It was not such a long step, Jennifer thought, from preparation to actuality, from ready to eager.

Barbara Barcheski, sixty-three, the silent, thoughtful head of a firm dealing in corporate information modeling. For a long time Jennifer had been unsure about Barcheski. She was a student of political systems, coming over decades to believe that unlimited technological progress and community loyalty were basically incompatible, a premise she heavily supported by studies of societies in flux, from Renaissance Venice to the industrial revolution to the early orbital utopias. Study of a paradox, Jennifer knew, leads almost inevitably to evaluation—but not necessarily negative evaluation. She waited. Eventually Barbara Barcheski made up her methodical mind: When a society must choose, community loyalty carried the better long-term odds for survival than even technological progress. Barbara Barcheski loved Sanctuary. She supported Jennifer.

Dr. Raymond Toliveri, sixty-one, the brilliant chief researcher of Sharifi Labs. Jennifer had never questioned his support for this project; he’d created it. What had been difficult was to get Toliveri, whose fanatical work schedule made him a virtual recluse, elected to the Council. That had taken Jennifer a long time.

Then there were Will Sandaleros, Najla and her husband Lars Johnson, and Hermione Sharifi. All stood taut and proud, knowing fully the consequences of what they were about to do, and accepting those consequences without evasion, without weakness, without excuses.

Only Ricky stood slumped against the far wall of the Council dome, his eyes on the floor, his arms folded across his chest. Hermione, Jennifer saw, would not look at her husband. They must have fought over this. And it was Hermione—only Jennifer’s daughter-in-law, not her genetic son—who supported the side of justice. A complex emotion kindled in Jennifer—anger and pain and aching maternal guilt—but she pushed it away. There was no more time for Ricky’s failures. It was Sanctuary’s time.

“Now,” Will said, “Fire,” and he activated the all-Sanctuary communications net, comlink screens and holostages inside, speakers outside. Jennifer smoothed the folds of her white abbaya and stepped forward.

“Citizens of Sanctuary. This is Jennifer Sharifi, speaking to you from the Council dome, where the Sanctuary Council is in full emergency session. The United States has answered our Declaration of Independence as we expected, with the announcement of a Sleeper invasion tomorrow morning. This must not be allowed to happen. To permit this delegation to dock at Sanctuary would say that we permit negotiation where no negotiation is possible, would signal irresolution where we are resolute, would allow for the possibility of economic and judicial punishment where we are morally and evolutionarily right. The delegation must not dock at Sanctuary.

“But to try to stop the beggars by force might endanger or harm them. This too would send to the United States a false statement. Sleepless do not attack where there has been no attack. We understand self-defense, and we accept its necessity, but we do not want war. We want to be left alone, to pursue in our own way the lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness by our own labors that until now have been denied us.

“No, the most we can do to stop the beggars is give them a show of that force we will not use unless we are pressed to do so in defense. Accordingly, the following demonstration, created by the authority of all members of the Sanctuary Council, is being broadcast simultaneously to major United States newsgrids, overriding their own broadcasts.”

Caroline Renleigh keyed manual codes into her console. Will Sandaleros spoke on a closed link to Sanctuary internal security, a group so seldom used that most people had forgotten it existed—which had allowed Will free rein in building it up. On every comlink in Sanctuary, and every comlink on Earth turned to the five serious donkey newsgrids, there appeared an image of the decaying habitat Sanctuary had purchased from the Japanese, Kagura Orbital, whose name meant “god music.”

Jennifer’s voice spoke over the image. “This is the Sanctuary Council. The United States government has announced an invasion of Sanctuary tomorrow morning, in the form of a so-called peace-keeping delegation. But there can be no true peace where there is physical and economic coercion. We have not agreed to host this delegation. We are a peace-loving people who wish to be left alone. If the United States does not honor this wish, it in effect will be launching the first attack. We will not permit Sanctuary to be attacked.

“For the purpose of deterring this attack, and as a demonstration of the lengths to which we will go to protect our home, Sanctuary offers the following demonstration. The United States press has speculated on what weapons Sanctuary could possibly bring to bear to defend itself. We don’t want this to be a speculative question. We don’t want our secession from the United States to be tarred with any imputation of withholding vital information. We do want to avoid war by the illustration of how terrible such a war would be.

“This is Kagura Orbital, which Sanctuary now owns. There are no humans left on the orbital. Animal life does remain here: domestic livestock, insects used for pollination, birds and reptiles used for ecological balance, and miscellaneous rodents.”

Each holostage or comlink screen showed the interior of Kagura, first in a long pan and then in close-ups of grazing goatows and bicattle. The Japanese had fewer restraints on genetic engineering than the United States; the meat stock was thick, slow, juicy, contented, and stupid. The robot cameras followed the flight of a bird, the scuttle of an insect on a leaf.

“In a single hidden packet on this orbital is an organism developed by Sanctuary genetic engineers. It is wind-borne. Its genetic code includes a built-in seventy-two-hour destruct from the time it is released. This packet will now be released by remote from Sanctuary.”

The view of the orbital showed no change in sound or light. A gentle breeze created by maintenance ruffled some leaves. The meat animal munching them, a bicow, rolled its eyes. It made a single anguished, painful sound and crumpled.

Birds fell from the skies. The drone of insects stopped. Within two minutes nothing moved except the leaves, rustling in the lethal breeze.

Jennifer’s voice said quietly, “Kagura Orbital is open to any scientific expedition that wishes to verify this phenomenon. Wear full contamination suits if you arrive before seventy-two hours have passed, and exercise utmost caution. We advise you to wait until after that time.

“There are similar packets, in multiples, throughout the cities of New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

“Do not attempt to dock any delegation at Sanctuary tomorrow, or to fire upon Sanctuary in any way. If you do so, we will consider ourselves justified in retaliating. The retaliation will take the form you’ve just seen.

“We in Sanctuary leave you with a thought from one of your own great statesmen, Thomas Paine: ‘We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room for honest men to live.’ ”

Caroline Renleigh terminated the broadcast.

Immediately the Council screens filled with scenes from inside Sanctuary. People streamed into the central park where Remembrance Day speeches were held. The lattices had not been put up over the growing plants and Jennifer, watching intently, thought it a good sign that no one trampled any plants. Her people were angry, but not destructive. She looked from face to face, cataloging the anger.

No one in Sanctuary had been told about the Kagura demonstration except the Council, which had voted for it, the carefully-chosen graduate students who had planted the packets on Earth, and Will Sandaleros’s equally-carefully chosen security force. The secrecy had been a hard fight for Jennifer. The elected councilors, fiercely committed to their community, had wanted to discuss the weapon with their constituents. Jennifer had invoked her own trial, when someone inside the old Sanctuary in Cattaraugus County, someone never identified, had mailed the Sanctuary Oath to Leisha Camden before the Council was ready to release it. The same thing could happen again. And Richard Keller—Najla looked fiercely out the window, Ricky at his feet—had taken information about their operations to that same Leisha Camden, imperiling them all. The same thing could happen again. The Council had finally, reluctantly, agreed to secrecy.

“Sanctuary is not a military machine!” a face now shouted into the comlink. It was Douglas Wagner, an original settler, in his youth a peace activist. He had formidable organizational skills; he could be very powerful.

Will said, “I’ll sequester him and later I’ll talk to him myself.”

“Take him quietly,” Jennifer said, so softly that no one but Will heard. “Don’t create a rallying point.” She tried to watch all the screens at once.

“We should have been told!” a woman cried. “How is Sanctuary different from the beggars’ society if decisions are made for us, about us, without our knowledge or consent? We aren’t dependents, and we aren’t killers! This was no part of the independence plan we were told about!” A small crowd gathered to listen to the woman.

“I know her,” Councilor Barcheski said. “Will, have her brought here to a meeting room. I’ll talk to her.”

A face on Will’s security comlink said, “All quiet in B section, Will. People seem to agree that the demonstration was necessary, if distasteful.”

“Good,” Will said.

Councilor Dey said, “Here they come.”

A group of citizens stalked purposefully toward the Council dome, which had been opaqued. The surveillance screen showed the citizens try the door, try again, and realize that the dome was locked. A computer voice said smoothly, “The Council wants to hear all your opinions on the controversial demonstration of Sanctuary power, but right now we must concentrate on the reactions from Earth. Please come back later.” The Sleepless looked at each other: Indignation. Resignation. Anger. Fear. Jennifer studied their faces.

After ten minutes of loud protests, they went away.

The broadcasts from Earth began.

“…unprecedented terrorist threat from a quarter long suspected by many to be not only disloyal but dangerous…”

“Instant crisis in the developing standoff between the Sanctuary Orbital and the United States government from which it is trying to secede…”

“…dangerous panic in the four cities allegedly mined with deadly viruses, although officials are…”

“…a mistake to believe that just because a threat has been made the capability to carry out that threat necessarily exists. American genemod expert Dr. Stanley Kassenbaum is here with us now to…”

“Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States!”

The donkey grids were fast. Jennifer would give them that. She wondered if the other grids would continue their inane jokes about Oregon.

President Meyerhoff spoke in his slow, rich, reassuring voice, reassuring in part because it was heard so seldom and had therefore taken on the value of a scarce luxury, like three-carat natural diamonds.

“My fellow Americans, as most of you know, the United States has received a terrorist threat from Sanctuary Orbital. They claim the capability to cause serious harm to four major American cities through illegal genetically modified viruses. They threaten to release these viruses if the scheduled federal delegation attempts to dock at Sanctuary tomorrow. This situation is intolerable for several reasons. The longstanding policy of the United States has been to never bargain with terrorists, under any circumstances. At the same time, however, absolutely paramount must be the safety and well-being of our citizens. That is never negotiable.

“To the citizens of New York and Chicago, of Washington and Los Angeles, I say this: Do not panic. Do not leave your homes. The United States will allow no action that will imperil your safety. Even as I speak to you, expert teams of biological warfare specialists are securing the safety of our cities. Even as I speak to you, every attention is being given to this intolerable and cowardly threat. I repeat: The best thing you can do is remain in your homes…”

The newsgrids continued to show people fighting to leave Washington, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Aircars streamed above ground; super-rail cars were jammed; groundcars clogged the highways.

The White House broadcast never directly answered the question: Will the delegation attempt to dock at Sanctuary tomorrow morning?

“Keeping their options open,” Councilor Dey said grimly. “A mistake.”

“They’re Sleepers,” Councilor Aleone said, with contempt. But his breath came quickly.

An hour after the Kagura orbital demonstration, Sanctuary received a focused, high-powered communication from the White House, demanding immediate surrender of all illegal weapons, including the alleged criminal possession of biologicals. Sanctuary sent back a quote from Patrick Henry this one recognizable even to some of the Livers: “Give me liberty or…”

Two hours after the demonstration, Sanctuary sent another multi-channel conventional broadcast, audio only. It announced that the deadly genemod virus packets were cached not in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but in Washington, Dallas, New Orleans, and St. Louis.

People started to stream out of St. Louis, and to riot in New Orleans. The evacuation didn’t slow from Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles.

A hysterical woman in Atlanta reported that all the pigeons on her terrace had just died all at once. People began to leave Atlanta, while a team in contamination suits rushed out from the CDC. They found the pigeons had eaten rat poison, but by that time the newsgrids had replaced the story with one about dead cattle near Fort Worth.

Jennifer leaned closer to the screen. “They can’t plan. Can’t coordinate. Can’t think.”

The protests within Sanctuary had reached a peak and subsided. All its spontaneous leaders were either locked in rational argument with councilors, were “sequestered” in the building quietly prepared by Sandaleros’s security force, or were busy collecting signatures on the official petitions that were Sanctuary’s usual answer to dissent. Always before, it had been a sufficient answer.

“The beggars can’t plan at all,” Jennifer repeated. “Not even when it’s in their own best interests.”

Will Sandaleros smiled at her.

“Leisha,” Stella said timidly, “do you think we should do anything about…about security?”

Leisha didn’t answer. She sat in front of three comlinks, each turned to a different newsgrid. She sat easily, without strain, but with a stillness that not even Stella’s timidity—Stella! timid!—could penetrate.

“I should have thought of that!” Jordan said. “I didn’t…I mean, it’s been so long since anybody hated Sleepless…Stell, who’s here this week? Maybe we can set up a rotating guard, in case we need it, I mean…”

Drew said, “There’s a Class Six Y-field around the compound, patrolled by three armed guards.”

Stella and Jordan stared at him. Drew added, “Since this morning. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I hoped I was wrong and Sanctuary wouldn’t do this.”

“How did you even guess they would?” Stella snapped, her tartness back.

“Kevin Baker. He guessed.”

“He would,” Stella sniffed.

Jordan said, “Thank you, Drew,” and Stella had the grace to look slightly ashamed.

And Leisha said nothing, completely still.

“We have no choice,” Miri said to Nikos. They huddled in Raoul’s lab, eight Supers, all that had made for the same place when the announcement of the Kagura Orbital demonstration struck like a meteor. Some of the others had run to Miri’s lab, dodging protesters and uniformed security forces—since when had Sanctuary had uniforms? Some had run to Nikos. An official “stay-inside” command had come over all audio channels—since when had Sanctuary had official commands? The children activated the comlinks between the three buildings.

All the normal comlinks in Sanctuary were dead.

Miri looked at Terry Mwakambe a second before the Super exploded in words Miri had never heard put together before. A detached corner of her mind, a part not whirling with chaotic strings, noted that cursing combinations must have some relationship to mathematical progressions for Terry to do it so naturally.

He immediately activated the hidden communications net the Supers had spent two months programming into every function of Sanctuary, a shadowy second orbital command so well hidden it could not be detected by the first.

“Nikos? Are you there? Who’s with you?”

Nikos’s face came on-line. “Diane, Christy, Allen, James, Toshio.”

“Where’s Jonathan?”

“With me,” Mark said, cutting in on the link. “Miri, it’s happened. They did it.”

“What are we going to do?” Christy said. She had her arm tightly around Ludie, one of the eleven-year-olds, who was crying.

“We can’t do anything,” Nikos said. “That’s not our agreement. They’re not harming the Supers, they’re trying to get Sanctuary free for all of us.”

“They’re going to get all of us killed!” Raoul cried. “Or else they’re going to kill hundreds of thousands of other people in our name. Either way, we’re definitely harmed!”

“It’s an external defense issue,” Nikos argued. “Not one for the Beggars.”

“It’s a betrayal,” said Allen coldly. “And not just of us. Uniformed guards, stay-inside orders, cutting communications—Christ, they’re arresting people out there! I saw a guard drag Douglas Wagner into a building. For the crime of thinking differently! How is that different from killing Tony for becoming different? The Council has betrayed the citizens of Sanctuary, including us. But the others can’t do anything about it and we can!”

“They’re our parents…” Diane said, in anguish, and Miri heard all the strings in Diane’s voice.

Miri said, as resolutely as she could, “What we’re going to do first is link with all the Beggars, wherever they are. I don’t see Peter—does anybody know where he is? Terry, find him and link, unless he’s with Norms. Then we’re going to discuss this. Thoroughly. Everybody’s opinions. Then we’re going to make a group decision.”

For our good, she added to herself. But not aloud.

Three hours after the Kagura orbital demonstration, Sanctuary broadcast to the United States that the same remote capabilities that could release and disperse the genemod virus in major American cities could also destroy the viruses completely before release. Sanctuary was eager to do so, if Congress agreed to a presidential order that the corporate entity of Sanctuary Inc. was no longer part of the United States for purposes of governance, taxation, or citizenship, and would henceforth have the same status as other independent nations.

Those other nations took various stances. Those allied most closely with the United States issued official statements condemning the “rebels” for terrorist acts, but refused to enforce trade embargos. The White House did not push for this. Foreign commentators pointed out, with various degrees of candor, that White House pushing might lead to a too-frank disclosure of just how heavily American allies depended on the pervasive international financing and genemod research controlled from Sanctuary.

Those countries currently not allied with the United States issued statements condemning both sides as moral barbarians with no respect for even their own laws or citizens, a line so expected and so familiar it roused little attention. Only Italy, once more socialist with the peculiarly chaotic, fatalistic flamboyance of Italian socialism, managed an original position. Rome announced that the Sleepless were the leaders in a new liberation of the working classes oppressed by American media governance, and that Sanctuary would lead the world in a new era of responsible use of newsgrids in the service of labor. This puzzling statement went largely unanswered, except in Italy.

A shuttle containing an international scientific coalition launched toward Kagura. Immediately demonstrators in the United States screamed that it not be allowed to return to Earth.

A Sleepless living alone in New York, an inoffensive little man who had shunned other Sleepless for fifty years, was dragged from his apartment and beaten to death.

Sanctuary beamed another message to the United States: “ ‘No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent’—A. Lincoln.”

“That was for you,” Stella said angrily. “The Lincoln quote—it’s the wrong war. They’ve been mangling the Revolution, not the Civil War. Jennifer just put the Lincoln in there because you’re a Lincoln scholar!”

Leisha didn’t answer.

“For us to take over the orbital—just take it over, with no warning—would be as bad as Sanctuary’s releasing the virus on Earth with no warning,” Nikos said. He sent his string program to the other three buildings where Supers had gathered. The string was surprising for Nikos, who usually thought in bold strings with strong, clear cross-references. This string was delicately balanced, ethics and history and community solidarity carefully balanced, opposing values so almost equal that the shape was fragile with internal tension. The string was almost more characteristic of Allen than of Nikos. Miri studied it carefully. She approved of its pressured delicacy.

It meant Nikos was not that strongly committed to opposing her.

Christy said, “What if we gave them a warning?”

The idea had come up over an hour ago. But Christy’s string had new elements in it, drawn from military justification: Pre-emptive strikes versus clear-cut alternatives. The burden of blame in courts of war balanced with the options explored for peace. The weight of moral effort on the perceived extent of permissive force: Pearl Harbor. The Israeli homeland. Hiroshima. General William Tecumseh Sherman. The Paraguay Standoff. The Supers’ strings seldom included military history; Miri hadn’t known Christy’s memory had indexed these military stories enough to build strings on them.

“Yeeesss,” Nikos said slowly. “Yeessss…”

Ludie, only eleven, said, “I can’t threaten my mother. Not even indirectly!”

I could, Miri thought, and watched Nikos, and Christy, and Allen, and the unpredictable Terry.

“Yeeessss,” Nikos said. “And if—”

Strings of probability looped and knotted and spun.

“Will, there’s another group of citizens demanding admittance to the Council dome,” Councilor Renleigh said.

Sandaleros turned. “How did they get this far against the stay-inside order?”

“How?” Councilor Barcheski said, with some disgust; tensions were developing in the Council. “They walked. How many enforcers do you think you’ve got out there? And how afraid do you think our own citizens are of the ones you do have?”

Jennifer said calmly, “No one wants our people afraid.”

“They’re not,” Barbara Barcheski said. “They’re demanding to come in and talk to you.”

“No,” Sandaleros said. “When this is over, when we’ve got the independence from Earth—then we’ll talk.”

“When nobody cares what you did to get it,” Ricky Sharifi said. It was the first time he had spoken in three hours.

Caroline Renleigh said, “They’ve got Hank Kimball with them. I’ve worked with him on systems. The security field around the Council dome may not stand.”

Cassie Blumenthal looked up from her terminal. Her yellowish teeth gleamed. “It’ll stand.”

After a while, the protesters went away.

“Jennifer,” John Wong said, “Newsgrid Four is agitating heavily for a single nuclear surgical strike, blowing up Sanctuary and our ‘alleged detonators’ in one clean blow.”

Jennifer said, “They won’t do that. Not the United States.”

Ricky Sharifi said, “You’re relying on the decency of the beggars to win your war for you.”

“I think, Ricky,” Jennifer said composedly, “that if you remembered the events Will and I remember, you would not talk about the decency of the beggars. I think, too, that you should keep your further opinions silent.”

If her voice splintered a little, it was only a very little, and no one heard it but Ricky and Jennifer herself. Or, at least, no one acted as if they’d heard it.

Richard Keller had entered the holoroom so silently the others didn’t realize at first that he was there. He stood behind Stella and Jordan, far back against the wall, his dark eyes above the heavy beard deep and shadowed. Drew noticed him first. Drew had never much liked Richard, who seemed to him to have given up, retreated, although Drew couldn’t say from what. Richard, after all, had married again, had another child, traveled around the world, learning and working. Leisha, on the other hand, did none of these things. Yet it still seemed to Drew that Leisha, walled up in the desert, had not given up, and Richard had.

That made no sense. Drew wrestled with the abstractions a while longer and then, as usual, abandoned the attempt to think it out in words. Instead, he let cool shapes that were, and were not, Richard and Leisha slide through his mind.

Richard slouched against the wall, listening to strident newsgrid announcers scream for the death of the children he had not seen in forty years.

If the government blew up Sanctuary, Drew thought suddenly, Richard would still have Ada and Sean. And if Sean died in, say, some sort of accident—in Drew’s experience kids frequently died in accidents—then would Richard have another child, either with Ada or with somebody else? Yes, he would. And if that kid died, Richard would replace it with still another child. He would. And then another…

Drew began to see what it was that Richard, unlike Leisha, had given up.

“This is the President of the United States addressing Sanctuary, Incorporated.” Meyerhoff’s face, larger than life, filled the Sanctuary screen. Typical of Sleepers, Jennifer thought—they enlarged images, thinking that enlarged reality. In the Council dome, everyone not engaged in crucial monitoring gathered quickly around the screen. Najla bit her bottom lip and took a step toward her mother. Paul Aleone folded his hands tightly together.

It was a two-way link. “This is Jennifer Sharifi, chief executive officer of Sanctuary, Incorporated, and president of the Council of Sanctuary Orbital. We are receiving you, Mr. President. Please proceed.”

“Ms. Sharifi, you are in criminal violation of the United States Code. You must know that.”

“We are no longer citizens of the United States, Mr. President.”

“You are also in violation of the United Nations Accordance of 2042 and the Geneva Convention.”

Jennifer was silent, waiting for the president to realize that he had just implied to Sanctuary the status of independant nation. She saw the moment he did, although he was good at keeping the slip to just one moment. She said, “Put a resolution before Congress that Sanctuary is an entity independent of the United States, and there will no longer be a situation for the two of us to consider.”

“The United States is not going to do that, Ms. Sharifi. Nor will we negotiate with terrorists. What we will do is prosecute the Sanctuary Council, every member, to the fullest extent of the law, for treason.”

“It is not treason to seek independence from tyranny. Mr. President, if you have nothing new to say, I see no reason to continue this conversation.”

The president’s voice hardened. “I have this to say, Ms. Sharifi. Tomorrow morning the United States will attack Sanctuary with every means at our disposal if you do not, by midnight tonight, reveal to the secretary of state the location of every alleged weapon of biological warfare planted by Sanctuary in the United States.”

“We will not do that, Mr. President. Nor will your conventional means of detection—with which we are quite familiar—succeed in locating them. They are made of materials, and by methods, not available to the United States. In fact, Mr. President—”

Alarms sounded outside the Council dome. Cassie Blumenthal looked up, incredulous. The Y-field security had been breached. Will Sandaleros lunged to clear the windows. Before he could, the Council dome door opened and Miranda Sharifi entered at the head of a line of Superbright children.

“—we have nothing else to discuss at this time,” Jennifer finished. She had seen the president’s expression sharpen at the clearly audible alarms. She broke the comlink; Cassie Blumenthal quickly blacked out all transmissions to and from Earth.

The Supers kept crowding into the dome, twenty-seven of them.

Will Sandaleros said harshly, “What are you doing here? Go home!”

“No,” Miri said. A few of the adults glanced at each other; none of them was yet accustomed to the lack of stuttering and twitching. It made the children seem not less alien, but more.

“Miranda, go home!” Hermione thundered. Miri didn’t even glance at her mother. Jennifer moved swiftly to take charge of the situation, which must not be allowed to get out of control. Must not.

“Miranda, what are you doing here? You must know it’s both inappropriate and dangerous.”

“You’re the one that’s caused the danger,” Miri said. Jennifer was horrified at the look in the child’s eyes. She didn’t let her horror show.

“Miranda, you have two choices. You can either all leave now, immediately, or the guards will remove you by force. This is a war room, not a school room. Whatever you have to say to this Council can wait until this crisis is over.”

“No, it can’t,” Miri said. “It’s about the crisis. You threatened the United States without the consent of the rest of Sanctuary. You convinced the rest of the Council, or bullied them, or bribed them—”

“Remove the children,” Jennifer said to Will. Guards in their unfamiliar uniforms had already crowded into the packed dome. A woman seized Miri’s arms. Nikos said, very loudly, “Don’t do that. We Superbrights have complete control of all Sanctuary systems. Life support, communications, defense, everything. There are hidden programs you can’t begin to understand.”

“Any more than the Sleepers could understand your genemod viruses,” Miri said.

The woman holding Miri’s arms looked confused. Dr. Toliveri said, outraged, “That’s impossible!”

Nikos said, “Not for us.”

Jennifer scanned the children, her mind racing. “Where’s Terry Mwakambe?”

“Not here,” Nikos said. He spoke into his lapel link. “Terry—take control of Cassie Blumenthal’s terminal. Link her to Charles Stauffer’s external defense system.”

At her terminal, Cassie Blumenthal made a quick, choked sound. She spoke commands at her console, then switched to manual and keyed rapidly. Her eyes opened wide. Charles Stauffer sprang forward. He keyed what Jennifer, numb, thought must be override codes. Jennifer kept her voice calm.

“Councilor Stauffer?”

“We’ve lost control. But the missile bays are opening…Now they’re closing.”

Miranda said, “Tell the United States you’ll destroy the packets of viruses on Earth in exchange for immunity for the rest of Sanctuary, except for the Council members. Tell them you’ll destroy the organisms, give the United States the locations, and open Sanctuary to federal inspection. Or if you don’t do those things…then we Supers will.”

Robert Dey drew in a quick breath. “You can’t.”

Allen said, with utter conviction, “Yes. We can. Please believe it.”

“You’re children!” someone said, with such harshness it took Jennifer a minute to identify the voice. Hermione.

“We are what you made us,” Miri said.

Jennifer looked at her granddaughter. This…child, this girl who had never been spat upon because she was Sleepless…never locked in a room by a mother who was putrid with jealousy of a beauty her daughter would never lose, even as the mother’s beauty was inexorably fading…never locked in a cell away from her children…never betrayed by a husband who hated his own sleeplessness…this spoiled and pampered child who had been given everything was attempting to thwart her, Jennifer Sharifi, who had brought Sanctuary into its very being by the force of her own will. This petty child would undo everything Jennifer had worked for, suffered for, planned for a lifetime devoted to her people, to the well-being and independence of the Sleepless…No. No girl gone rotten and selfish at the core was going to ruin the future for her own people, the future Jennifer had fought for. Had created. Had willed, by her own spirit moving across what had been a hopeless void. No.

She said to the guards, “Take them all. Carry them to the detention building and put them in a secure room. Remove every bit of technology from every one of them first.” She hesitated, but only for a moment. “Strip search them for hidden technology, and let them have nothing, not even clothing that looks harmless. Nothing.”

“Jennifer—you can’t do that!” Robert Dey said. “They’re our—your—our children!”

“Make your choice,” Miranda said. “Or is that it?”

It had been years since Jennifer had allowed herself to feel hatred. It came surging up, black and viscous, from all those places in her mind she never allowed herself to go…For a moment she was so horrified she couldn’t see. Then her vision cleared and she could do the rest of it. “Find Terry Mwakambe. Immediately. Put him with the others. Be especially careful that he doesn’t have anything with him, not so much as a scrap of harmless-looking clothing.”

“Jennifer!” John Wong cried.

“You know, don’t you,” Miri said directly to Jennifer. “You know what Terry is. Even more than what I am, or Nikos, or Diane…or you think you know. You think you understand us the same way the Sleepers always thought they understood you. They never gave you credit for basic humanity, did they? You were different, so you weren’t part of their community. You were evil, scheming, cold—and much, much better than they were. And you did think you were better, all you Sleepless, that’s why you called them beggars. But we’re better than you are, and so you killed one of us because you could no longer control him, didn’t you? And now we’re capable of things you never even imagined. Who are the beggars now, Grandmother?”

Jennifer said, in a voice she didn’t recognize—but calm, calm—“Strip them now. All technology, even if you don’t recognize it. And…And detain my son, too. With them.”

Ricky Sharifi only smiled.

Miri began taking off her own clothes. After a stunned moment and a quick command from Nikos—a command Jennifer didn’t understand, did they have their own language?—the other children began to undress as well. Allen Sheffield tossed his lapel comlink on the polished metal table; it made a clink loud in the paralyzed silence, and Allen smiled. Not even the youngest of the Supers cried.

Miri pulled her shirt over her head. “You’ve given your life to your community. But we Supers aren’t in that community now, are we? And you killed the one of us who might have made a bridge between your community and ours, the best and most generous of us all. You killed him because he didn’t fit your definition of a community any more. And now we don’t, either. For one thing, we dream. Did you know that, Jennifer? Lucid dreaming. Taught to us by a Sleeper.” Miri kicked off her sandals.

Cassie Blumenthal said, panic in her voice, “I can’t regain control of the communications system.”

“Stop this,” Charles Stauffer said. “Children, put your clothes back on!”

“No,” Miri said. “Because then we’d look like members of your community, wouldn’t we, Jennifer? And we’re not. We never can be again.”

Someone said over a comlink, “We have Terry Mwakambe. He’s not resisting.”

Miri said, “And not even your own community really matters to you. Otherwise you would have taken us up on the choice we offered you. That way only you would have faced trial for treason. The beggars below would have granted the rest of the Council immunity. Now they’ll all be indicted for conspiracy to treason. You could have saved them and you didn’t, because that would have meant giving up your own control over who is in your community and who is out, wouldn’t it? Well, you lost it anyway. The day you killed Tony.” Miri yanked down her shorts. She stood naked, the other Supers behind her. Some of the girls covered their budding breasts with crossed arms; a few of the boys held hands in front of their genitals. But none of them cried. They stared at Jennifer with cold, unchildlike eyes, as if she had confirmed something for them, as if they were thinking…thinking unknowable things…Miri stood uncovered, the nipples on her small breasts erect, her dark pubic hair as thick as Jennifer’s own. Her large misshappen head was held high. She smiled.

Ricky came forward, holding his own shirt. He put it around Miri’s shoulders and drew it closed across her breasts, and for the first time the girl looked at someone else besides Jennifer. She glanced at her father, blushed painfully, and whispered, “Thank you, Daddy.”

Cassie Blumenthal said tiredly, “A delayed-timing broadcast just left for the White House. There’s a duplicate here. It contains all the locations and neutralizing procedures for every virus packet we planted in the United States.”

Charles Stauffer said, “None of the Sanctuary external defenses are operative.”

Caroline Renleigh said, “Emergency security on the detention dome is down. Overrides don’t regain control…”

Cassie Blumenthal said, “Second delayed-timing broadcast beamed at…at New Mexico…”

Only Miranda said nothing. She was sobbing, an overwrought sixteen-year-old girl, on her father’s shoulder.

25

Leisha watched the hologrids of the rioting in Atlanta over dead pigeons, the rioting in New York over clogged ground traffic leaving the city, the rioting in Washington over rioting. All the old banners had come out—NUKE THE SLEEPLESS!—did they just keep the placards and banners in some dusty basement between crises thirty or forty years apart? All the old rhetoric was out, all the old attitudes, even—on the worst of the Liver grids—all the old jokes. “What do you get if you cross a Sleepless with a pit bull? A set of jaws that really never let go.” Leisha had heard that one when she was at Harvard. Sixty-seven years ago.

She said out loud, “And I looked and saw that there was nothing new under the sun, and the race was not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor favor to men of skill…” Jordan and Stella watched her worriedly. It wasn’t fair to worry them with melodramatic tag lines. Especially not after hours of silence. She should talk to them, explain to them what she was feeling…

She was so tired.

For more than seventy years she had seen the same things, over and over, starting with Tony Indivino. “If you walked down a street in Spain and a hundred beggars each asked for a dollar and you wouldn’t give it to them so they jumped on you in fury…” Sanctuary. The law, that illusory creator of common community. Calvin Hawke. Sanctuary, again. And throughout it all, the United States: rich, prosperous, myopic, magnificent in aggregate and petty in specifics, unwilling—always, always—to accord mass respect to the mind. To good fortune, to luck, to rugged individualism, to faith in God, to patriotism, to beauty, to spunk or pluck or grit or git, but never to complex intelligence and complex thought. It wasn’t sleeplessness that had caused all the rioting; it was thought and its twin consequences, change and challenge.

Was it different in other countries, other cultures? Leisha didn’t know. In eighty-three years she’d never once traveled outside the United States for longer than a weekend. Nor particularly wanted to. Surely that was singular, in such a global economy?

“I always loved this country,” Leisha said, also aloud, and realized instantly how this disconnected sentiment must sound.

“Leisha, dear, would you like a brandy? Or a cup of tea?” Stella said.

Despite herself, Leisha smiled. “You sounded just like Alice when you said that.”

“Well…” Stella said.

“Leisha,” Drew said, “I think it might be a good idea if you—”

“Leisha Camden!” said the holostage. Stella gasped.

The newsgrid coverage of the White House, the rioting in New York, the satellite shots of Sanctuary, had all disappeared. A young girl with a large, slightly bulging head and great dark eyes stood stiffly on the holostage, in a scientific lab filled with unfamiliar equipment. She wore a thin synthetic shirt, shorts, and simple slippers, and her unruly dark hair was tied back with a red ribbon. Richard, whom Leisha had forgotten was in the room, made a strangled sound.

The girl said, “This is Miranda Serena Sharifi, in Sanctuary. I’m the granddaughter of Jennifer Sharifi and Richard Keller. I’m beaming this broadcast directly to your New Mexico equipment. It’s an override on all other Sanctuary communication nets. It’s also unauthorized by the Sanctuary Council.”

The girl paused, and a slight falter came into the serious young face. So serious—this child looked as if she never smiled. How old was she? Fourteen? Sixteen? Her voice had a slight accent, as if English were being spoken differently in Sanctuary. More precisely and more formally, both contrary to the way language usually evolved. The differences, too, lent seriousness to her words. Leisha took an involuntary step toward the holostage.

“There are a group of us here, Sleepless but also something more. Genemod construction. We’re called Superbrights, and I’m the oldest. There are 28 of us over the age of ten. We’re…different from the adults, and they have treated us differently. We’ve taken over Sanctuary, sent the location of all the biological weapons to your president, deactivated the Sanctuary defenses, and stopped the war for independence.”

“Oh dear God,” Jordan said. “Children.”

“If you receive this, it means we Superbrights are being held prisoner by my grandmother and the Sanctuary Council, but we don’t think that can last long. However, we won’t be able to stay here on Sanctuary. We have no real other place to go. I’ve researched you, Leisha Camden, and I’ve researched your ward Drew Arlen. The Lucid Dreamer. We Supers are all lucid dreamers. It’s become an important component of how we think.”

Leisha glanced at Drew. He stared intently at Miranda Sharifi, and at the look in his green eyes, Leisha glanced away.

“I don’t know what will happen next, or when,” Miranda continued. “Maybe Sanctuary will allow us a shuttle. Maybe your government will send for us, or a corporation you control can do that. Maybe some Superbrights, the younger ones, will stay here. But some of us, soon, will need a place to go away from Sanctuary, since we will have caused the arrest for conspiracy to treason of the entire Sanctuary Council. We need a place with security, a place with reasonable equipment we can modify further, and someone to help us with your legal and economic system. You were a lawyer, Ms. Camden. Can we come to you?”

Miranda paused. Leisha felt her eyes prickle.

“There will be with us, I think although I’m not sure, a few Normals. One will probably be my father, Richard Sharifi. I don’t think you can contact me directly to answer this broadcast, although I don’t know for sure what your capabilities are.”

“Not what theirs are,” Stella said, sounding dazed. Drew shot her an amused look.

“Thank you,” Miranda finished awkwardly. She shifted weight, one foot on top of the other, and suddenly looked even younger. “If…if Drew Arlen is with you when you receive this, and if you’re willing to let us Superbrights come to you, please ask him to stay. I’d like…I’d like to meet him.”

Suddenly Miranda smiled, a smile of such cynicism that Leisha was startled. This was no child after all. “You see,” Miranda said, “we come to you as beggars. Nothing to offer, nothing to trade. Just need.” She disappeared and a sudden three-dimensional graphic appeared on the screen, a complex globe made of strings of words looped and crossed and balanced, each word or phrase an idea that connected to the next, the whole thing color-coded in ways that emphasized the stresses and balances and trade-offs in meaning from concepts that opposed or reinforced or modified each other. The globe lingered, rotating slowly.

“What on earth is that?” Stella said.

Leisha got up and walked around the globe slightly faster than it rotated, studying it. Her knees felt shaky. “I think…I think it’s a philosophical argument.”

“Ahhhhhhhhh,” Drew said.

Leisha looked at the globe. Her eye snagged on a phrase in green in an outer layer: a house divided: Lincoln. Abruptly she sat down on the floor.

Stella took refuge in a flurry of domestic activity. “If there’s twenty-eight of them, and if they double up, we can open the west wing and move Richard and Ada to—”

“I won’t be here,” Richard said quietly.

“But Richard! Your son—” Stella broke off, looking embarrassed.

“That was another life.”

“But Richard—” Stella’s face began to redden. Richard slipped quietly from the room. The only one he looked at directly was Drew, who gazed steadily back.

Leisha saw none of this. She sat on the floor, studying Miranda’s string-globe until the broadcast ended and the hologram vanished. Then she looked up at the three left, Stella and Jordan and Drew. Stella took in a sharp breath.

“Leisha…your face…”

“Things change,” Leisha said, cross-legged and radiant on the floor. “There are second and third chances. And fourth and fifth.”

“Well, of course,” Stella said, puzzled. “Leisha, please get up!”

“Things do change,” Leisha repeated, like a little girl. “Not just changes in degree. Changes in kind. Even for us. After all. After all. After all.”

There were thirty-six of them, flown by government plane from Washington; the whole thing had taken much longer than anyone but Leisha, the ex-lawyer, had expected. Twenty-seven “Superbrights”: Miri, Nikos, Allen, Terry, Diane, Christy, Jonathan, Mark, Ludie, Joanna, Toshio, Peter, Sara, James, Raoul, Victoria, Anne, Marty, Bill, Audrey, Alex, Miguel, Brian, Rebecca, Cathy, Victor, and Jane. Such familiar names for such unfamiliar people. And with them there were four “Normal” Sleepless children: Joan, Sam, Hako, and Androula. There were five parents, looking for the most part tenser than their children. Among the parents was Ricky Sharifi.

His dark eyes were patient with pain and he moved hesitantly, as if unsure he had a right to walk on the Earth. When Leisha realized why this looked normal to her, she grimaced. Richard, who now looked younger than his son, had looked like that in the months after Jennifer’s trial.

Jennifer’s first trial. The Sanctuary Council members were all in prison in Washington.

“Is my father here?” Ricky asked Leisha quietly, the first afternoon.

“No. He…he left, Ricky.”

Ricky nodded, unsurprised. He looked as if he had expected this answer. Perhaps he had.

Miranda Sharifi—“Miri”—took the lead from the first. After the bustle of arrival, the equipment and suitcases and security nets and Stella’s elaborate rooming arrangements, Miri came with her father to Leisha’s study. “Thank you for letting us come here, Ms. Camden. We want to work out some form of rent as soon as our assets are unfrozen by your government.”

“Call me Leisha. And it’s your government, too. But no rent is necessary, Miri. We’re glad to have you here.”

Miri’s dark eyes studied her. They were strange eyes, Leisha thought, not for any physical attributes but because they seemed to see things no one else did. She was a little shocked to realize, despite the admiration she already had for Miri, that the girl’s eyes made her uncomfortable. How much did that unswerving gaze see about her? How much did that brain—enhanced, different, better—understand of Leisha’s private soul?

This must have been how Alice had once felt about Leisha. And Leisha had never known, never realized.

Miri smiled. The smile changed her whole face, opened and lighted it. “Thank you, Leisha. That’s very generous. More than that—I think you think of us as your community, and for that we really thank you. Community is an important concept to us. But we’d all prefer to pay you. We’re Yagaiists, you know.”

“I know,” Leisha said, wondering if among the things Miri’s better brain could better understand was irony. She was still sixteen years old.

“Is…is Drew Arlen still here? Or did he go back on tour?”

“He’s still here. He waited for you.”

Miri flushed. Oh, Leisha thought. Oh…

Leisha sent for Drew. He looked up at Miri from his powerchair, his handsome face openly interested, and held out his hand.

“Hello, Miranda.”

“I’d like to talk to you later about lucid dreaming,” Miranda said gracelessly, reddening more. “About the neurochemical effects on the brain. I’ve done some studies, you might be interested in the results, a chance to look at your art from the scientific side…” Leisha recognized the girl’s babbling for what it was: a gift. She was offering Drew what she conceived to be the best part of herself, her work.

“Thank you,” Drew said gravely. His eyes sparkled. “I’d like that.”

Leisha was amazed at herself. She had wondered if she would feel a brief, mild stab of jealousy at Drew’s defection from her to Miri—it had been all too obvious how ready he was to defect—but what she did feel was not brief or mild. Nor was it jealousy. Protectiveness flared in her like brush fire. If Drew was just using this extraordinary child to get to Sanctuary, she would flatten him. Completely. Miri deserved better, needed better, was better than that—

Astonished at herself, Leisha fell silent.

Miri smiled a second time. Her hand was still in Drew’s. “You changed our lives, Mr. Arlen. I’ll tell you later.”

“Please. And call me Drew.”

Leisha saw a dirty ten-year-old with reckless green eyes and appalling manners: I’m gonna own Sanctuary, me. She looked again at Miranda, the girl’s dark hair falling forward to hide her red face, the misshappen head. The brush fire raged. Miranda withdrew her hand from Drew’s.

“I think,” Ricky Sharifi said, “that Miri needs to eat again soon. Her metabolism differs from ours. Leisha, we’re going to be a great drain on your resources. Let us pay for it. You haven’t even seen what Terry and Nikos and Diane will do to your communications equipment.”

Ricky also had been watching Miranda and Drew. He looked at Leisha and smiled ruefully. Leisha saw that Ricky, too, was as afraid of his daughter’s powers as Leisha had been of Drew’s lucid dreaming, and as secretly proud.

“I wish,” Leisha said directly to Ricky, “that you had known my sister Alice. She died last year.”

He seemed to see as much in this simple statement as she intended. “I wish I had, too.”

Miri returned to the question of payment. “And once your—our—government satisfies itself enough to release our assets, we’ll all be rich by your standards. In fact, I was going to ask you if you would be interested in doing the legal work to help a number of us set up corporations registered in New Mexico. Most of us have run businesses or done commercial research, you know, but here we’re underage. We’re going to need legal structures to let us continue our businesses as part-time employees of corporate entities with adults named as CEO’s.”

“That wasn’t ever my field,” Leisha said carefully. “But I can suggest someone who could do it. Kevin Baker.”

“No. He was the liaison for Sanctuary.”

“Was he always honest?” Leisha said.

“Yes, but—”

“He would be for you, too.” And willing—Kevin was always willing to go where the business was.

Miri said, “I’ll bring it up with the others.” Leisha had already observed her with the other Superbrights, trading glances for which, Leisha knew, she was missing most of the meaning. Volumes worth of meaning she would never see. And how much more meaning she would never see was there in the string-globes they constructed for each other, or in the string-globes in their alien minds?

The string-globes that reminded her so uncomfortably of the shapes in Drew’s lucid dreaming.

“But even if we use Kevin Baker,” Miri continued, “we’ll still need a lawyer. Will you represent us?”

“Thank you, but I can’t,” Leisha said. She didn’t tell Miri why not. Not just yet. “But I can recommend some good lawyers. Justine Sutter, for instance. She’s the daughter of a very old friend of mine.”

“A Sleeper?” Miri said.

“She’s very good,” Leisha said. “And that’s what counts, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Miri said. And then, “A Sleeper.”

Ricky Sharifi said, “That might actually be best. Your lawyers are going to have to deal with United States property laws, after all. A beggar might know them best.”

Leisha said, “If you’re going to live here, Ricky, you’re going to have to stop using that word. Like that, anyway.”

After a moment Ricky said, “Yes. You’re right.”

Just like that. Jennifer Sharifi’s son, brought up in Sanctuary. And human beings thought they understood genetic manipulation!

Drew said abruptly to Miri, “Are you going to inherit Sanctuary someday?”

Miranda looked at him for a long time. Leisha couldn’t tell—nothing, not a clue—what was in the girl’s mind. “Yes,” Miri said finally, thoughtfully. “Although not for a very long time. Maybe a century. Or more. But someday, yes. I am.”

Drew didn’t answer. A century or more, Leisha thought. A look passed between Drew and Miri, a look Leisha couldn’t interpret. She had no idea at all what it meant when Drew finally smiled.

“Good enough,” he said.

Miri smiled, too.

26

Leisha sat on her favorite flat rock under the shade of a cottonwood tree. The creek at her feet was completely dry. A quarter mile downstream a Super moved slowly, face bent forward over the ground. It must be Joanna; she had become fascinated with fossils and was constructing a three-dimensional thought string which Leisha didn’t understand about the relation of coprolites to orbitals. It was poetry, Miri said, adding that none of them built poetry before they began lucid dreaming. That was the phrase she used: “built poetry.”

A kangaroo rat burrowed into a mound of dry earth a few feet away. Leisha watched it whir its short forelegs like a mechanical auger, then kick away the excavated dirt with long hind legs. The rat turned suddenly and looked at her: round ears and rounder, bulging, lustrous-black eyes. It had an odd bump on the top of its head: an incipient tumor, Leisha thought. The little animal returned to its work, incidentally aerating the soil and enriching it with nitrates from its droppings. Beyond, away from the cottonwood shade, the desert shimmered under heat already fierce in early June.

If she turned around, Leisha knew, she would see a different kind of shimmer. Forty feet above the compound, air molecules were distorted with a new kind of energy field Terry was experimenting with. It would, he said, be the next breakthrough in applied physics. Kevin Baker was in negotiation with Samsung, IBM, and Konig-Rottsler for selective licensing of Terry’s patents.

Leisha wriggled out of her boots and socks. This was mildly dangerous; she was beyond the area swept electronically clear of scorpions. But the rock, warm here even in the shade, felt pleasantly gritty under her bare feet. Suddenly she remembered studying her feet the morning of her sixty-seventh birthday. How odd—what a strange thing to remember. The memory actually pleased her; she had only just begun to realize how much, in eighty-three years, even a Sleepless forgot.

The Supers remembered everything. Always.

Leisha was waiting for Miri to explode out of the compound to accuse her. The explosion was already overdue; Miri must have been locked longer than usual in her lab. Or perhaps she was with Drew, home only a few days after his spring tour. If so they would be in his room; Miri’s didn’t have a bed.

The kangaroo rat disappeared into his mound.

“Leisha!”

Leisha turned. A figure in green shorts was running furiously toward her from the compound, arms and legs pumping. Eight, seven, six, five, four, three—

“Leisha! Why?”

The Supers always finished things before you expected them to.

“Because I choose to do it, Miri. Because I want to.”

“Want to? Defend my grandmother against charges of treason? You, Leisha, who wrote the definitive book on Abraham Lincoln?”

Leisha knew this wasn’t a non sequitur. She had begun, in the past three months, to learn a little about how the Supers thought. Not to the extent of following an entire complex string shape, woven from associations and reasoning and connections, glinting with shocks from lucid dreaming. And never to the extent of constructing one herself. Nor did Leisha want to construct one. That was not who she was. But she had become able to fill in the skipped links when this girl, more important to her than anyone had been since Alice, spoke to her. At least, Leisha could fill them in if Miri hadn’t skipped too many links. This time she hadn’t.

“Sit down, Miri. I want to explain to you why I’m Jennifer’s counsel. I’ve been waiting out here for you to ask.”

“I’ll stand!”

“Sit,” Leisha said, and after a moment Miri sat. She pushed the dark hair off her forehead, sweaty after even such a short run, and dropped angrily onto Leisha’s rock without even a glance for scorpions.

There were so many earthly things that Miri still didn’t know to look for.

Leisha had rehearsed her words carefully. “Miri, your grandmother and I are both part of a specific American generation, the first generation of Sleepless. That generation had certain things in common with the one before, the one that created us. Both generations saw that it’s not possible to have both equality, which is just another name for what you call community solidarity, and individual excellence. When individuals are free to become anything at all, some will become geniuses and some will become resentful beggars. Some will benefit themselves and their communities, and others will benefit no one and just loot whatever they can. Equality disappears. You can’t have both equality and the freedom to pursue individual excellence.

“So two generations chose inequality. My father chose it for me. Kenzo Yagai chose it for the American economy. A man called Calvin Hawke, whom you don’t know about—”

“Yes, I do,” Miri said.

Leisha smiled quietly. “Of course you do. Stupid comment. Well, Hawke picked the side of the born-unequal and tried to even up the equation a little, and excellence be damned. Of all of us, only Tony Indivino and your grandmother tried to create a community that put just as much value on its own solidarity—the ‘equality’ of those who were included as members—as on those members’ individual diverse achievements. Jennifer failed, because it can’t be done. The more Jennifer failed, the more fanatic she became about trying to do this thing, pushing the blame for all failures onto people who weren’t members of the community. Narrowing the definition more and more. Getting farther and farther away from any kind of balance at all. But I suspect you know even more about that than I do.”

Leisha waited, but Miri said nothing.

“But even while Jennifer got farther and farther away from her dream of community, that dream itself”—Tony’s dream—“was admirable. If impossible. It was an idealistic dream of uniting two great human needs, two great human longings. Can’t you forgive your grandmother on the basis of that initial dream?”

“No,” Miri said, her face rigid, and Leisha remembered again how young she was. The young don’t forgive. Had Leisha ever forgiven her own mother?

Miri said, “So that’s why you’re defending her? Because of what you see as her initial dream?”

“Yes.”

Miri stood. The rock had made tiny ridges on the backs of her legs, below her shorts. Her dark eyes bored into Leisha. “In narrowing her definitions of community, my grandmother killed my brother Tony.” She walked away.

Leisha, after a moment of shock, scrambled to her feet and ran barefoot after her. “Miri! Wait!”

Miri stopped, obedient, and turned. There were no tears on her face. Leisha sprinted forward, came down on a sharp rock, and hopped painfully. Miri helped her back to the rock where Leisha’s boots and socks lay limp in the heat.

“Check them for scorpions before you put them on,” Miri ordered, “or they might—why are you smiling?”

“Never mind. I never know what you do or don’t know. Miri—would you exclude me from your categories of defensible behavior? Or Drew? Or your father?”

“No!”

“But all of us have changed our minds over the decades about what is acceptable, or right, or even desirable. That’s the key, honey. That’s why I’m defending your grandmother.”

“What’s the key?” Miri snapped.

“Change. The unpredictable ways events can change people. And Miri, Sleepless live a long time. There’s a lot of time for a lot of events”—time piling up like dust—“and that means a lot of change. Even Sleepers can change. When Drew came to me, he was a beggar. Now he’s made a major contribution to the course of the world by the way he changed you Superbrights’ thinking. That’s the answer, Miri. You can’t call anyone indefensible, ever, because things change. Even your grandmother could change. Maybe especially your grandmother. Miri? Do you see what I mean?”

“I’ll think about it,” Miri growled.

Leisha sighed. Miri’s thinking about it would be so complex Leisha might not, if she saw the results in string-edifice hologram, even recognize her own argument.

But when Miri had gone back to the house and Leisha had put her boots and socks back on, she sat on the flat rock looking out over the desert, her arms clasped around her knees.

People change. Beggars can become artists. Productive lawyers can become despairing idlers, sulking like Achilles in his tent, sulking for decades, a world-class sulk—and then repass the bar and become lawyers again. Marine experts can become drifters. Sleep researchers can become failed wives, and then transform themselves back into brilliant researchers. Sleepers may not be able to become Sleepless—or could they? Just because Adam Walcott had failed 40 years ago, just because Susan Melling had said the thing was impossible, did that mean it would always be impossible? Susan had never known about the Superbrights.

Tony, Leisha said silently, there are no permanent beggars in Spain. Or anywhere else. The beggar you give a dollar to today might change the world tomorrow. Or become father to the man who will. Or grandfather, or great-grandfather. There is no stable ecology of trade, as I thought once, when I was very young. There is no stable anything, much less stagnant anything, given enough time. And no nonproductive anything, either. Beggars are only gene lines temporarily between communities.

The kangaroo rat came back out of its burrow and sniffed at a primrose. Leisha had a clear view of the growth on its head. It wasn’t natural. The fur was a different color, and grew in longer tufts; the growth was too perfectly round; the kangaroo rat tilted it forward to touch the tufts to the primrose and paused. The growth was a sensor of some kind. The animal was genemod—here in this distant place, against all rules and expectations.

Leisha tied her boot laces and stood. She suddenly felt wonderful, like the young girl her body still looked. Full of energy. Full of light.

There was so much to do.

She turned toward the compound and started to run.