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—”