“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.