Beggars in Spain (28 page)

“But there is one requirement of the beggars we cannot dismiss,” Jennifer said. “Beggars do not work to support their own lives; they depend, snarling, on their betters to do that. To support the millions of nonproductive ‘Livers’ in the United States, Sanctuary—as an entity and as individuals—is forcibly robbed of a total of 64.8 percent of its annual productivity through the legal thievery of state and federal taxes. We cannot fight this, not without risk to Sanctuary itself. We cannot resist. All we can do is remember what this means—morally, practically, politically, and historically. And on April 15 of every year, as our resources are taken from us with nothing given in return, we do remember.”

Joan’s pretty face was puffy and streaked—she had been
crying.
Miri tried to remember the last time she had seen someone as old as Joan cry. Little children cried, when they fell down or couldn’t do a terminal problem or fought with each other over toys. But Joan was thirteen. Adults, catching sight of her face as Joan elbowed through the crowd, tried kindly to question her. Joan ignored them, pushing toward Miri.

“We remember the hatred toward Sleepless on Earth. We remember—”

“Come with me,” Joan said fiercely to Miri. She grabbed her friend and half-dragged her around the power dome, until the curved black surface completely hid Jennifer from view. Jennifer’s voice, however, floated toward them, as clear as if she stood beside Joan’s trembling body. Strings exploded in Miri’s mind. She had never seen a Norm twitch.

“Do you know what they’ve done?
Do
you, Miri?”

“Wh-who? Wh-wh-wh-what?”

“They’ve killed the baby!”

Blackness swept through Miri. Her knees gave way and she sank to the ground. “The b-b-b-beggars? H-h-h-how?” Joan’s mother had been only a few weeks pregnant and she hadn’t left Sanctuary; did that mean there were beggars
here.
…

“Not the beggars! The Council! Led by your precious grandmother!”

Strings unraveled, and ripped. Miri gripped the ends firmly. Her nervous system, always revved up to the edge of biochemical hysteria, began to slide over that edge. Miri closed her eyes and breathed deeply until she was in control.

“Wh-what h-happened, J-J-J-Joan?”

Miri’s calm, fragile as it was, seemed to calm Joan. She slid to the grass beside Miri and wrapped her arms around her knees. There was a scratch, not yet fully regenerated, on her left calf.

“My mother called me in to her study just before I was going to change for Remembrance Day. She’d been crying. And she was lying on the pallet she and Daddy use for sex.”

Miri nodded; her mind made strings of why a Sleepless would be in bed if she were not having sex or injured.

Joan said, “She told me that the Council had made the decision to abort the baby. I thought that was strange—if the prefetal tests show DNA failure in a major area the parents naturally abort. What does the Council have to do with it?”

“Wh-wh-what d-d-do they?”

“I asked where the DNA failure was. She said there wasn’t one.”

Around them floated Jennifer’s voice: “—the assumption that,
because
they are weak, they are automatically owed the labor of the strong—”

“I asked my mother why the Council ordered an abortion if the baby was normal. She said it wasn’t an order but a strong recommendation, and she and Daddy were going to comply. She started crying again. She told me the gene analysis showed that the baby is…was…”

She couldn’t say it. Miri put her arm around her friend.

“…was a Sleeper.”

Miri took her arm away. The next minute she regretted it, bitterly, but it was too late. Joan scrambled to her feet. “You think Mom should abort too!”

Did she? Miri wasn’t sure. Strings whirled in her head: genetic regression, DNA information redundancy, spiraling children in the playground, the nursery, the lab, productivity…beggars. A baby, soft in Joan’s mother’s arms. She remembered Tony in her own mother’s arms, her grandmother holding Miri up to see the stars…

Jennifer’s voice came louder: “Above all, to remember that morality is defined by what contributes to life, not what leeches from it…”

Joan cried, “I’ll never be friends with you again, Miranda Sharifi!” She ran away, her long legs flashing under the green shorts she should not have been wearing on Remembrance Day.

“W-w-wait!” Miri cried. “W-wait! I think the C-C-Council is wr-wr-wrong!” But Joan didn’t wait.

Miri would never catch her.

Slowly, awkwardly, she got up from the ground and went to the lab in Science Dome Four. Her and Tony’s work terminals were both on, running programs. Miri turned them off, then swept all the hard-copy off her desk with one lash of her arm.

“D-d-damn!” The word was not enough; there must be more such words, must be…something to do with this pain. Her strings were not enough. Their incompleteness taunted her yet again, like a missing piece of an equation you knew was missing even though you had never seen it before, because otherwise there was a hole in the center of the idea. There was a hole in Miri, and a Sleeper baby spiraled through it—Joan’s Sleeper brother, who by this time tomorrow wouldn’t exist any more than the missing piece of the thought equation existed, had ever existed, was ever out there somewhere. And now Joan hated her.

Miri curled herself under Tony’s desk and sobbed.

Jennifer found her there two hours later, after the Remembrance Day speeches were over and the huge chunk of credit, the equation for productive labor, had been transmitted to the government which gave nothing back in return. Miri heard her grandmother pause in the
doorway, then unhesitatingly cross the room, as if she already knew where Miri was.

“Miranda. Come out from there.”

“N-n-no.”

“Joan told you that her mother is carrying a Sleeper fetus that must be aborted.”

“N-n-not ‘m-must.’ The b-b-baby c-could l-l-l-live. It’s n-normal in every other w-w-way. And th-th-they
w-want
it!”

“The parents are the ones who made the decision, Miri. No one else could make it for them.”

“Then wh-wh-wh-wh-
why
are J-Joan and her m-mother c-c-c-crying?”

“Because sometimes necessary things are hard things. And because neither of them has yet learned to accept hard necessity without making it worse by regret. That’s a vital lesson, Miri. Regret is not productive. Nor is guilt, nor grief, although I have felt both over the five Sleeper fetuses we’ve had in Sanctuary.”

“F-f-five?”

“So far. Five in thirty-one years. And every set of parents has made the decision Joan’s parents have, because every set saw the hard necessity. A Sleeper child is a beggar, and the productive strong do not acknowledge the parasitic claims of beggars. Charity, perhaps—that is an individual matter. But a claim, as if weakness had the moral right over strength, were somehow superior to strength—no. We don’t acknowledge that.”

“A S-S-Sleeper b-baby would be p-p-productive! It’s n-n-normal otherwise!”

Jennifer sat down gracefully on Tony’s desk chair. The folds of her black
abbaya
trailed on the ground beside Miri’s crouching body. “For the first part of its life, yes. But productivity is a relative thing. A Sleeper may have fifty productive years, starting at, say, twenty. But unlike us, by sixty or seventy their bodies are weakened, prey to breakdowns, wearing out. Yet they may live for as many as thirty more years, a burden on the community, a shame to themselves because it is a shame to not work when
others do. Even if a Sleeper was industrious, amassed credit against his old age, purchased robots to care for him, he would end up isolated, not able to take part in Sanctuary’s daily life, degenerating. Dying. Would parents who loved a child bring it into such an eventual fate? Could a community support many such people without putting a spiritual burden on itself? A few, yes—but what about the principles involved?

“A Sleeper raised among us would not only be an outsider here—unconscious and brain-dead eight hours a day while the community goes on without him—he would also have the terrible burden of knowing that someday he will have a stroke, or a heart attack, or cancer, or one of the other myriad diseases the beggars are prone to. Knowing that he will
become
a burden. How could a principled man or woman live with that? Do you know what he would have to do?”

Miri saw it. But she would not say it.

“He would have to commit suicide. A terrible thing to force onto a child you loved!”

Miri crawled out from under the desk. “B-b-but, G-G-Grandma—w-w-we all m-m-must d-die s-s-s-someday. Even y-y-y-you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I w-w-will,” Miri said.

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

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

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

“Now!” somebody yelled.

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

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

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

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

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

“You! What for?”

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

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

“If she isn’t, she should be.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jailer,” Eric said, “we’re going.”

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

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

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

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

“Hey!”

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

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

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

Eric drove.

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

Later, there were straps on the bed.

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

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

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

They left him there, tied, all night.

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

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

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

“I’m not going in there!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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