“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.