Jennifer said, in a voice she didn’t recognize—but calm, calm—“Strip them now. All technology, even if you don’t recognize it. And…And detain my son, too. With them.”
Ricky Sharifi only smiled.
Miri began taking off her own clothes. After a stunned moment and a quick command from Nikos—a command Jennifer didn’t understand, did they have their own language?—the other children began to undress as well. Allen Sheffield tossed his lapel comlink on the polished metal table; it made a clink loud in the paralyzed silence, and Allen smiled. Not even the youngest of the Supers cried.
Miri pulled her shirt over her head. “You’ve given your life to your community. But we Supers aren’t in that community now, are we? And you killed the one of us who might have made a bridge between your community and ours, the best and most generous of us all. You killed him because he didn’t fit your definition of a community any more. And now we don’t, either. For one thing, we dream. Did you know that, Jennifer? Lucid dreaming. Taught to us by a Sleeper.” Miri kicked off her sandals.
Cassie Blumenthal said, panic in her voice, “I can’t regain control of the communications system.”
“Stop this,” Charles Stauffer said. “Children, put your clothes back on!”
“No,” Miri said. “Because then we’d look like members of your community, wouldn’t we, Jennifer? And we’re not. We never can be again.”
Someone said over a comlink, “We have Terry Mwakambe. He’s not resisting.”
Miri said, “And not even your own community really matters to you. Otherwise you would have taken us up on the choice we offered you. That way only you would have faced trial for treason. The beggars below would have granted the rest of the Council immunity. Now they’ll all be indicted for conspiracy to treason. You could have saved them and you didn’t, because that would have meant giving up your own control over who is in your community and who is out, wouldn’t it? Well, you lost it anyway. The day you killed Tony.” Miri yanked down her shorts. She stood naked, the other Supers behind her. Some of the girls covered their budding breasts with crossed arms; a few of the boys held hands in front of their genitals. But none of them cried. They stared at Jennifer with cold, unchildlike eyes, as if she had confirmed something for them, as if they were thinking…thinking unknowable things…Miri stood uncovered, the nipples on her small breasts erect, her dark pubic hair as thick as Jennifer’s own. Her large misshappen head was held high. She smiled.
Ricky came forward, holding his own shirt. He put it around Miri’s shoulders and drew it closed across her breasts, and for the first time the girl looked at someone else besides Jennifer. She glanced at her father, blushed painfully, and whispered, “Thank you, Daddy.”
Cassie Blumenthal said tiredly, “A delayed-timing broadcast just left for the White House. There’s a duplicate here. It contains all the locations and neutralizing procedures for every virus packet we planted in the United States.”
Charles Stauffer said, “None of the Sanctuary external defenses are operative.”
Caroline Renleigh said, “Emergency security on the detention dome is down. Overrides don’t regain control…”
Cassie Blumenthal said, “Second delayed-timing broadcast beamed at…at New Mexico…”
Only Miranda said nothing. She was sobbing, an overwrought sixteen-year-old girl, on her father’s shoulder.
25
Leisha watched the hologrids of the rioting in Atlanta over dead pigeons, the rioting in New York over clogged ground traffic leaving the city, the rioting in Washington over rioting. All the old banners had come out—NUKE THE SLEEPLESS!—did they just keep the placards and banners in some dusty basement between crises thirty or forty years apart? All the old rhetoric was out, all the old attitudes, even—on the worst of the Liver grids—all the old jokes. “What do you get if you cross a Sleepless with a pit bull? A set of jaws that really never let go.” Leisha had heard that one when she was at Harvard. Sixty-seven years ago.
She said out loud, “And I looked and saw that there was nothing new under the sun, and the race was not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor favor to men of skill…” Jordan and Stella watched her worriedly. It wasn’t fair to worry them with melodramatic tag lines. Especially not after hours of silence. She should talk to them, explain to them what she was feeling…
She was so tired.
For more than seventy years she had seen the same things, over and over, starting with Tony Indivino. “If you walked down a street in Spain and a hundred beggars each asked for a dollar and you wouldn’t give it to them so they jumped on you in fury…” Sanctuary. The law, that illusory creator of common community. Calvin Hawke. Sanctuary, again. And throughout it all, the United States: rich, prosperous, myopic, magnificent in aggregate and petty in specifics, unwilling—always, always—to accord mass respect to the mind. To good fortune, to luck, to rugged individualism, to faith in God, to patriotism, to beauty, to spunk or pluck or grit or git, but never to complex intelligence and complex thought. It wasn’t sleeplessness that had caused all the rioting; it was thought and its twin consequences, change and challenge.
Was it different in other countries, other cultures? Leisha didn’t know. In eighty-three years she’d never once traveled outside the United States for longer than a weekend. Nor particularly wanted to. Surely that was singular, in such a global economy?
“I always loved this country,” Leisha said, also aloud, and realized instantly how this disconnected sentiment must sound.
“Leisha, dear, would you like a brandy? Or a cup of tea?” Stella said.
Despite herself, Leisha smiled. “You sounded just like Alice when you said that.”
“Well…” Stella said.
“Leisha,” Drew said, “I think it might be a good idea if you—”
“Leisha Camden!” said the holostage. Stella gasped.
The newsgrid coverage of the White House, the rioting in New York, the satellite shots of Sanctuary, had all disappeared. A young girl with a large, slightly bulging head and great dark eyes stood stiffly on the holostage, in a scientific lab filled with unfamiliar equipment. She wore a thin synthetic shirt, shorts, and simple slippers, and her unruly dark hair was tied back with a red ribbon. Richard, whom Leisha had forgotten was in the room, made a strangled sound.
The girl said, “This is Miranda Serena Sharifi, in Sanctuary. I’m the granddaughter of Jennifer Sharifi and Richard Keller. I’m beaming this broadcast directly to your New Mexico equipment. It’s an override on all other Sanctuary communication nets. It’s also unauthorized by the Sanctuary Council.”
The girl paused, and a slight falter came into the serious young face. So serious—this child looked as if she never smiled. How old was she? Fourteen? Sixteen? Her voice had a slight accent, as if English were being spoken differently in Sanctuary. More precisely and more formally, both contrary to the way language usually evolved. The differences, too, lent seriousness to her words. Leisha took an involuntary step toward the holostage.