Beggars in Spain (24 page)

“Having trouble with real food, aren’t you,” Eric taunted him. “Used to that Liver soysynth stuff, and real food rips at your gut. Why don’t you shit it out right here, you mannerless little vermin?”

“What’s your problem, you?” Drew said quietly. Eric had followed him to the enormous cottonwood by the creek, a place Drew liked to be alone. Now he stood, tensed, and started a slow turn to get the water at his back.

“You’re my problem, vermin,” Eric said. “You’re a parasite here. You don’t contribute, you don’t belong, you can’t read, you can’t even eat. You aren’t even clean. Why don’t you just take a walk into the ocean and let the waves wipe your ass!”

As Drew slowly turned, Eric did too. That was good: Eric might have twenty pounds and two years on him, but he didn’t know how to maneuver for fighting advantage. The sun appeared over Drew’s left shoulder. He kept turning.

He said, “I don’t see
you
contributing so fucking much, you. Your grandmom says you’re the biggest worry she got, her.”

Eric’s face turned purple. “You never talk about me with my own family!” he yelled, and charged forward.

Drew dropped to one knee, ready to leverage Eric over one shoulder and throw him into the creek. But just before Eric reached Drew, he leapt into the air, a controlled leap that brought instant sickening waves through Drew’s chest: he had made a bad mistake. Eric was trained; it was just a kind of training Drew hadn’t recognized. The toe of Eric’s boot caught Drew under the chin. Pain exploded through his jaw. His head whipped backward and he felt something snap in his spine. The force of the kick hurtled him backward, over the shallow embankment into the creek.

Everything went wet and red.

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

His neck wouldn’t move.

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

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

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

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

“What happened…me?”

“You had a fight with Eric.”

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

“I hurt.”

“I know you do, honey.”

“I can’t move my neck, me.”

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

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

Something in his head whispered,
this is important
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Couldn’t walk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had them.

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

C
oming next: A Nation Becalmed: The United States at its Tricentennial,” said the newsgrid announcer. “A special CNS broadcast in depth.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She remembered the day that stopped.

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

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

Joan said, “Your head is too big.”

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

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

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

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

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

She remembered this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I suppose you know more than the terminal!”

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

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

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

“Is there a problem here, girls?”

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

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

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

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

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

Ms. Patterson said in a funny voice, “And that’s a reasonable analogy. Meteor
does
bear a definable relationship to orbital: one natural and inhuman, one constructed and human.”

Miri wasn’t sure what all Ms. Patterson’s words meant. This wasn’t going right. Ms. Patterson looked a little scary, and Joan looked lost. She plunged ahead anyway. “Th-then f-f-for ‘b-b-baby,’ the f-f-first
str-string l-l-leads to ‘sm-small.’ Th-that leads t-t-to ‘p-protect,’ l-l-like I d-do T-T-Tony, b-b-b-because he’s sm-smaller than m-m-m-m-me and m-might g-get h-h-hurt if he c-climbs t-t-too h-h-h-high. Then the l-l-little str-string g-goes to ‘c-c-community’ b-b-because the c-community pr-protects p-p-p-p-people, and the f-fourth little str-str-string h-has to g-g-go t-to ‘p-people’ b-because a c-c-community
is
p-people, and b-b-b-because it w-was that w-way upside d-d-down under ‘pl-plastic,’ and a l-l-l-lot of our orbital is m-m-m-made of p-plastic.”

Ms. Patterson still had her funny voice. “So at the end of three sets of four strings—Joan, don’t change the terminal screen just yet—at the end of these strings of yours, the problem reads ‘meteor is to orbital as people is to blank.’ And you typed in ‘God.’”