Her office, at the cylindrical orbital’s arbitrarily designated “south” end, shared dome space with the Sanctuary Council chamber. To the “north,” farms and living domes and labs and parks made a pleasant, orderly vista that curved gently into the sky. To the “south.” the office abutted the transparent, super-tough plastic sealing the orbital. Jennifer’s desk faced space.
When she was younger, she had kept her console turned away from that blackness. In her office, at Council meetings, Jennifer had always faced Sanctuary, and its soft artificial sun. She had come, over the long years in prison on Earth, to understand that this was unallowable weakness. Now she placed her chair so that she always confronted space. Sometimes she faced a void, with stars too far for even Sleepless technology: the unreachable escape. Sometimes she faced Earth, oppressively filling the window, reminding her of why her people needed escape. Jennifer contemplated both views. For the discipline.
She could take her people no farther from the enemy. The moon, yes—but Miranda had gone there, with her traitors. The genemod generation who were supposed to be the way around genetic regression to the mean, ensuring that the Sleepless continued to expand their superiority over Sleepers. And who instead had betrayed their creators and loving parents, sending them to prison for treason.
Mars was colonized by several nations, but most ambitiously by the New Empire of China, powerful and dangerous. Sleepless there received a bullet in the back of the head.
Titan belonged to the Japanese. They were spreading to the other moons of the solar system as well. More reasonable than the New Empire, they nonetheless had never taken well to ethnic outsiders. In one generation—or two, or three—they might turn against a Saturn- or Jupiter-orbit Sanctuary, just as the United States had turned against the original Sanctuary, on Earth. And then Jennifer’s great-great-grandchildren would have to dance the whole bloody dance again.
No, she could take her people nowhere else but this orbital, this fragile haven of titanium and steel, built even before nanotechnology. Nor could she challenge Earth directly. She had tried that, and failed, and spent twenty-seven years in prison. When you had an enemy that hounded and reviled and murdered your people, an enemy that you could neither fight nor flee, then you must operate underground. Use cunning. Stealth. Turn the enemy’s own weakness against him, and arrange it so he never knew what robbed him of his effectiveness. There was no overt triumph that way, but Jennifer had learned that she could do without overt triumph. Provided that she gained what was most important: safety for her people. That was her responsibility.
Responsibility, self-control, duty. The moral virtues, without which no accomplishment was possible, and no greatness. They had forgotten those virtues on Earth. Strukov, the classic mercenary, betrayed his own kind every time he engineered pathological viruses for money. The aristocrats of the New Empire of China settled Mars, but left their own poor to struggle in the genemod-virus hell that warring factions had made of West China. And the American donkeys, who kept Sanctuary legally and financially tethered to the United States for the huge taxes the orbital paid, had abandoned their own morals to pursue empty pleasures in the Y-sealed enclaves.
That left space.
Sanctuary orbital, the last bastion of responsibility to one’s own. Of responsibility, self-control, duty. Of a morality that was able to look beyond the pleasure of the moment, the individualistic needs of any one person, to the needs of the community. The rest of the world had forgotten that “community” had a biological base as well as a social one. A human being belonged not only to those communities he chose, professional and geographical, but to that into which he was born. His first obligation must be loyalty to the community that had nurtured him, or the entire chain of nurturing generations broke down. And that loyalty must be a choice, not a mindless dogma. That was, finally, what it meant to be fully human: not the pack loyalty of wolves, but that people could choose other than their pack—and choose not to. The moral choice.
The Sleepers, dazzled by the technology that should be servant and not master, had forgotten that kind of morality. Too bad for the Sleepers. They would destroy themselves. It was Jennifer’s task to make sure they were incapable of destroying Sanctuary first.
She completed her ink drawing. An intricate geometric figure, the lines and angles as precise as if she’d used a protractor. She always drew geometric figures. But there were four minutes left in her drawing time. She started another figure at the bottom of the page.
“Jennifer? Something here you should see.” Paul Aleone, Vice President of Finance for Sharifi Enterprises, stood in the doorway. Paul, like Caroline Renleigh, had been one of the twelve Sleepless behind the plan to force the United States to allow Sanctuary to secede. He, too, had been betrayed by his own grandchildren, had been convicted, had served ten years in Allendale Federal Prison. He could be trusted. Jennifer swiveled her chair to fully face him, and smiled.
“Look,” Paul said, handing her a sheaf of printouts. Genemod handsome, he still moved with the lightness of a young man. But, then, he was only seventy. “Caroline’s newsgrid program flagged these among the Earth channels. The flag was ‘Billy Washington.’ He’s the Liver who—”
“I remember who he was,” Jennifer said. Sanctuary always monitored the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency data banks, of course, along with most other governmental agencies. Billy Washington, his wife Annie Francy, and her child had been the first guinea pigs for Miranda’s biological experiments. Along with a donkey GSEA agent in such deep cover that not even Sanctuary had been able to find out who he or she was.
Paul said, “The program also flagged ‘Lizzie Francy,’ Washington’s stepdaughter. She’s now seventeen. She and her so-called tribe are trying to elect a candidate to governmental office.”
“A Liver candidate?” Jennifer scanned the printouts. Although they reflected the usual Sleeper sensationalism, she was able to discern the facts under the bombast. Livers in Willoughby County, Pennsylvania, had registered to vote—something Livers used to do faithfully, but did no longer since Miranda Sharifi had turned eighty percent of civilization back into nomads who followed neither game nor herds, but merely the sun. These Pennsylvania voters planned to elect their own candidate to county office in a special election April 1. A Liver candidate.
Jennifer sat motionless, considering. Paul said, “In terms of our interests, there are two ways to look at this. One is that the more dissension among the Sleepers, the more attention they’ll devote to struggling with each other and the less attention they could ever devote to us—no matter what we choose to do. The other, negative view is that Livers in power creates a second entity we have to protect against, and an unknown and less predictable one than the Sleeper aristocracy. And those newsgrids do seem to assume that Liver power is a possibility. Even allowing for their hysterical exaggerations.”
Jennifer glanced again at the printout headlines:
THE THREAT TO EFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT: “WE WANT TO RUN THINGS THE LIVER WAY FOR A CHANGE” SAYS PA CANDIDATE FOR DISTRICT SUPERVISOR
LETTING THE CHILDREN RUN THE ORPHANAGE: A REVERSAL OF FOURTEENTH-AMENDMENT PRIORITIES