Jennifer would never forget. She would remember for all of them.
She said, “Vigilance is not paranoia. And trust outside the community is not a survival skill. It could endanger us all.”
Ricky said nothing more; he would never endanger the community. None of them, Jennifer knew, would ever do that.
“I have a proposal to put in front of you,” Jennifer said. Will, the only one who knew what she was going to say, grew taut. Ready.
“All our safety measures are defensive. Not even retaliatory defensive, merely damage-control defensive. But the core of our existence is the survival of the community and its rights, and among the rights of the community is self-defense. It’s time for Sanctuary to develop bargaining power through defensive weapons. We’ve been prevented from doing that by the careful international monitoring of every Sanctuary transaction with Earth, no matter how covert. The only way we’ve kept the beggars out of here for twenty-four years is by never giving the slightest legal excuse for the issuance of a search warrant.”
Jennifer searched her audience’s faces, tallying: Will and Victor Lin solidly with her—that was good, Lin was influential; three more listening with receptive body language; three closed and frowning; eight with the faces of surprise or uncertainty, including young Lucy Ames. And both her children.
She went on composedly, “The only way to both prevent penetration of Sanctuary by Sleepers and to create defensive weapons is through the use of our one undeniably superior technology: genetics. We’ve already done that with the new genemods for Miranda and the other children. Now we need to think about using our strength to create defensive weapons.”
A storm of protest broke out. She and Will had expected this. Sanctuary, a refuge, had no military tradition. They listened carefully, not so much for the arguments as for the alliances. Who might be persuaded, who would never be, who was open to what moves along the decision tree. All the moves would be open and legitimate: community above all. But communities changed. The eight non-family councilors held their seats for only two years. And even family composition was open to change. Lars Johnson was Najla’s second husband; she might have a third, or Ricky might have a new wife. And at sixteen, the next generation would take voting seats on the Council. Sixteen, for a genemod Sleepless, was old enough to make intelligent choices; Miranda’s choices would be superintelligent.
Jennifer and Will could wait. They would force no one. That was the way a community worked. Not among the beggars, but here, in Sanctuary, that was the way the community worked. It worked through the slow shaping of consensus among the members, the productive who were entitled to their individual viewpoints because they were productive. Jennifer could wait for her community to take action.
But the Sharifi Labs research facilities did not belong to the community. They were hers, built and financed with her money, not the Sanctuary Corporation funds. And what was hers could begin work immediately. That way, the biological weapons would be ready when the community needed them.
“I think,” Najla said, “that we should discuss this in terms of the next generation. What relationships will we have with the federal government twenty years down the line? If we feed all the variables into the Geary-Tollers social-dynamics equations…”
Her daughter. Bright, productive, committed. Jennifer smiled across the table at Najla with love. She would protect her daughter.
And start the research on genemod bioweapons.
Drew had two problems at Leisha’s place in the desert: Eric Bevington-Watrous and food.
The way he figured it, nobody but him even knew these were problems. On the other hand, they thought he had all kinds of problems that Drew himself didn’t see as bothersome at all. They thought he was worried by the strange manners, the confusing number of people to keep straight, the donkey talk he’d never heard before, the need to sleep that only a few others shared, and the time he had to wait, doing nothing until September when they shipped him off to the donkey school they were paying for.
None of these were problems for Drew, especially the doing nothing. Nobody in his short life had ever done otherwise. But doing nothing, he saw on the first day, was not going to keep the scooter up in this place. Not here. These people were afraid of doing nothing.
So he kept busy, and made sure everybody saw him keeping busy, at all the things they thought were his problems. He learned the names of everybody in the compound—that’s what they called it, a “compound,” which up till that very minute Drew had thought was a double fuck at a brainie party, something he had once observed with great interest. He learned how they were related: Leisha and her sister, the old lady with a stroke who was a Sleeper, and her Sleeper son Jordan and his Sleepless wife Stella, whom Drew saw pretty quick he had better call “Mr. Watrous” and “Mrs. Bevington-Watrous.” That’s just the way they were. They had three kids, Alicia and Eric and Seth. Alicia was grown-up—she might be as old as eighteen—but not married, which Drew thought strange. In Montronce, women of eighteen usually had their first baby. Maybe donkeys were different.
There were other people, too, mostly Sleepless but not always, who lived there. Drew learned what all these people did—law and money and donkey things like that—and he tried to stay interested. When he couldn’t stay interested he tried to at least stay useful, running errands and asking people if they needed anything. “Obsequious little lackey,” he heard Alicia say once, but then the old lady cut her off pretty sharp by saying, “Don’t you dare misunderstand him, young lady. He’s doing the best he can with the genes he’s got, and I won’t have you trampling on his feelings!” Drew hadn’t felt trampled; he didn’t know what either “obsequious” or “lackey” meant. But he’d learned that the old lady liked him, and after that he spent a lot of time doing things for her, who after all needed it the most anyway since she was so old.
“Are you by any chance a twin, Drew?” she asked him once. She was working, very slowly, at a terminal.
“No, ma’am,” he answered promptly. The idea gave him crawlies. Nobody else was like him!
“Ah,” the old lady said, smiling a little. “Determinedly discontinuous.”
They used a lot of words he didn’t understand: words, ideas, manners. They talked about the shift of electoral power—what kind was that? Was it different from Y-energy? About genemod diatoms feeding Madagascar, about the advantages of circumlunar orbitals compared to the older circumterrestial ones. They told him to cut his meat with fork and knife, not talk with his mouth full, say thank you even for stuff he didn’t want. He did it all. They told him he had to learn to read, and he worked at the terminal every day, even though it was slow scooting and he didn’t see how he would ever use it. Terminals spoke you whatever you wanted to know, and when there were words on the screen there wasn’t as much room for graphics. Graphics made more sense to Drew than words anyway. They always had. He felt things in graphics, colors and shapes in the bottom of his brain that somehow floated up to the top and filled his head. The old lady was a spiral, brown and rust-colored; the desert at night filled him with soft sliding purple. Like that. But they said to learn to read, so he did.