Leisha could see it: The abused mother, not yet thirty herself, exonerating the man to his abused children, and eventually coming to believe the excuse herself because she too needed an excuse, to keep from leaving. It wasn’t his fault becomes It isn’t my fault. She spends all her time at brainie parties, Drew had said. There were brainies and there were brainies: Not all met the FDA’s guidelines for either mildness or non-accumulation of side effects.
“It warn’t my Daddy’s fault,” Drew repeated. “But I figure, it warn’t mine, neither, me. So I had to get out of Montronce.”
“Yes, but…what do you want?”
The green eyes changed. Leisha wouldn’t have thought a child could look like that. Hatred, yes—she had seen children’s eyes full of hate. But this wasn’t hate, or anger, or even childish aggrievement. This was a completely adult look, such as not even adults wore much anymore, an old-fashioned look: icy determination.
Drew said, “I want Sanctuary.”
“Want it? What do you mean, you want it? To get even? To destroy it? To hurt people?”
The green eyes softened; they looked amused, an even more adult look, even more disconcerting. Leisha stood up, then sat down again.
“’Course not, silly,” Drew said. “I wouldn’t hurt nobody, me. I don’t want to destroy Sanctuary.”
“Then—”
“Someday, me, I’m gonna own it.”
The alarm sounded all over the orbital, loud and unmistakable. Technicians grabbed suits. Mothers picked up the babies shrieking at the noise, and instructed terminals in voices that trembled almost enough to obscure identification. The Sanctuary Exchange immediately froze all transactions; no one would profit from any dimension of the disaster, whatever it was.
“Get a flyer,” Jennifer said to Will Sandaleros, already in his contamination suit. She pulled on hers and ran out of their dome. This one could be it. Any one of them could be it.
Will lifted the flyer. As they approached the free-fall zone along the orbital’s center axis, the comlink said, “Fourth panel. It’s a projectile, Will. ’Bots thirty-three seconds away; tech crew a minute and a half. Watch the vacuum pull—”
“We won’t get there fast enough for that,” Will said crisply. Under the crispness Jennifer heard the satisfaction. Will didn’t like her to rush personally to damage sites. To keep her away, he’d have to tie her down.
She could see the hole now, a ragged gash in an agricultural panel. The robots were already there, spraying the first coat of tough plastic over the breach, anchored against the outrush of Sanctuary’s precious air by Y-powered suction cups that could have held asteroids together. When a robot had to move, the suction simply cut off in alternate feet. The tech crew flyers spun in gracefully, and the crew in their sanitary suits were out in seconds, spraying the crops in a wide semicircle with a different sealant, one that would not harm anything organic until it could be analyzed at the DNA level, for whatever might be there.
Weapons were only half the danger; the worse half was contamination. Not all the nations of Earth placed sanctions on genetic research.
“Where’s the projectile?” Jennifer said over the comlink to the tech chief. His suit had audio only, but he didn’t have to ask who was speaking.
“H section. They’ve got it sealed. It dented the panel on impact but didn’t puncture.” That was good; the projectile was available for analysis without retrieving it from space. “What does it look like?”
“Meteor.”
“Maybe,” Jennifer said and Will, beside her, nodded. She was glad it was Will. Sometimes it was Ricky when damage happened, and that was always tiresome.
Will flew more slowly back across the orbital. He was a good pilot, and proud of his skill. Below them Sanctuary stretched—fields and domes, roads and power plants, window panels continuously cleaned by the tiny ’bots that did nothing else. Bright warm artificial sunshine suffused the air with golden haze. As they landed, the spicy smell of soyflowers, the newest decorative edible, wafted toward Jennifer.
“I want the Council assembled to hear the lab reports,” she said.
Will, out of his helmet, looked first startled, then comprehending. “I’ll call them.”
You could never rest. The Quran and United States history agreed on at least that one point: “And they who fulfill their covenant and endure with fortitude misfortune, hardship, and peril—these are they who are true in their faith.” And then, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
Not that Sanctuary had genuine liberty.
Jennifer stood before her Council. Ricky looked at her face, and his own grew set. Najla stared out the window. Councilor Lin leaned forward; Councilor Ames held her hands tightly clasped together on the metal table.
“The lab reports are all negative,” Jennifer said. “This time. The composition of the projectile is consistent with J-class meteors, although that of course does not rule out its capture and subsequent use as a weapon. It appeared to contain no active microbes, and such spores as were found are consistent with J-class. The soil does not contain any foreign microbes, genetically altered or otherwise, that we could identify, although of course that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, hidden through DNA mimicry with gene triggers for later activation.”
“Mother,” Ricky said carefully, “nobody but us is capable of that level of genetic work. And even we’re not very good at it yet.”
Jennifer smiled brilliantly at him. “No one we know about.”
“We monitor every lab on Earth, practically, through data-tapping—”
“Note the word ‘practically,’ ” Jennifer said. “We don’t actually know we have them all, do we?”
Ricky shifted position in his chair. He was thirty-one, a stocky man with thick hair over a low brow and dark eyes. “Mother, this is the sixteenth damage alert in two years, and not one of them has been an attack. Eight meteor hits, with three punctures. Three temporary malfunctions, almost immediately corrected. Two spontaneous microbe mutations from the space radiation we can’t do a thing about. One—”
“Sixteen we know about,” Jennifer said. “Can you guarantee that right now there are not DNA-mimetic microbes in the air you’re breathing? That your baby is breathing?”
Councilor Ames said timidly, “But in the absence of proof—”
“Political proof is a beggar concept,” Jennifer said. “You don’t know that, Lucy, because you’ve never been on Earth. The concept of scientific proof is perverted there, used selectively to advance whatever cause the government is espousing to make claims on its betters. They can ‘prove’ anything, in their courts of law, in their newsgrids, in their financial dealings. What were your taxes last year to the IRS, Lucy? To New York State? And what did you get back in return? Yet the president of the United States would offer you proof that you have an obligation to support the weak by paying them, and further proof that if you don’t, his military has the right to seize or destroy the very facilities you use to support your life and the life of your community.”
“But,” Councilor Ames said, bewildered, “Sanctuary pays its taxes. They’re unfair, but we pay them.”
Jennifer did not answer. After a moment Will Sandaleros said smoothly, “Yes. We do.”
Ricky Keller said, “The point is, none of these damage incidents have been attacks. Yet our assumption always is that they are, and even evidence to the contrary is suspect. Have we carried this paranoia too far?”
Jennifer looked at her son. Strong, loyal, productive, a member of the community to be proud of. She was proud of him. She loved him and Najla as much as when they had been children, but her love had done them a disservice. She knew that now. Through her protection, her fierce shielding of them from what the beggars could do, they had grown up too secure. They didn’t understand how it was, outside this enclave where community was strength, safety, survival, and where strength and safety and survival let a person use his talents for the fulfillment of his life. Her children did not understand the clawing, hot-eyed hatred the beggars felt toward that attitude, because beggars could never fulfill their own lives without looting the lives of their betters. Ricky and Najla had seen that only secondhand, in newsgrid broadcasts from Earth, and then usually contemporary broadcasts. Like wild animals who have eaten to satiety, the beggars were relatively quiet now under the Dole, under the absence of Sleepless before their very eyes. They dozed in the sun of cheap Y-energy, and it was easy to forget how dangerous they really were. Especially if, like her children, you had spent most of your life in safety.