He had them.
“I know you will, you,” he said to Jordan. For a long moment the bubble held him, while Leisha and Jordan exchanged startled looks above his head. Then the bubble burst. He couldn’t hold it. It wasn’t gone entirely, it was still true and would come back, but he couldn’t hold it now. His legs were broken, and he would never walk again, and he started to cry, a ten-year-old strapped immobile on a hospital bed in a room with strangers who never slept.
18
“Coming next: A nation becalmed: The United States at its Tricentennial,” said the newsgrid announcer. “A special CNS broadcast in depth.”
“Hah,” Leisha said. “They couldn’t report in depth on a soysynth cooking bee.”
“Hush, I want to hear it,” Alice said. “Drew, hand me my glasses from the table.”
They formed a semicircle around the hologrid, twenty-six assorted people sitting or standing or leaning against the adobe walls. Drew handed Alice her glasses. Leisha spared a minute from the ridiculous broadcast to glance at him. Drew had been a year in his powerchair, and he maneuvered it as unthinkingly as a pair of shoes. In the months away at school he had grown taller, although no less skinny. He was quieter, less open, but wasn’t that normal for a boy approaching adolescence? Drew seemed all right: he was used to his chair, adjusted to his new life. Leisha turned her attention back to the hologrid.
It represented state-of-the-art donkey technology, a flattened rectangle fastened to the ceiling, pocked by various apertures and bulges. It projected the broadcast in three-dimensional holograms five feet high on the holostage below. The color was more vivid than reality, the outlines less vivid, so that all images took on the bright, soft look of children’s drawings.
“Three hundred years ago today,” said the preternaturally handsome narrator, obviously genemod, dressed in a spotless uniform of George Washington’s army, “the founders of our country signed the most historic document the world has ever known: The Declaration of Independence. The old words still move us: ‘When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal—’ ”
Alice snorted. Leisha glanced at her, but Alice was smiling.
“ ‘—that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—’ ”
Drew frowned. Leisha wondered if he knew what the words even meant; his grades at school had not been spectacular. A thin blanket covered his legs. Across the room Eric, subdued and sullen, lounged against a wall. He never looked directly at Drew but Drew, Leisha had noticed, almost seemed to go out of his way to power his chair up to Eric, talk to him, turn on him Drew’s dazzling smile. Revenge? But surely that was too subtle for an eleven-year-old. Reconciliation? Need? “All three,” Alice had said crisply. “But, then, Leisha, you never were very sensitive to theater.”
The picturesque narrator finished the Declaration of Independence and vanished. Scenes followed of July Fourth celebrations across the country: Livers roasting soysynth barbeque in Georgia; red-white-and-blue scooters parading in California; a donkey ball in New York, with the women in the new severe gowns that were stark straight falls of silk but were worn with elaborate collars and arm cuffs of heavy, jewel-studded gold.
The voice-over was electronically enhanced: “Independence indeed—from hunger, from want, from the factionalism that divided us for so long. From foreign entanglements—as George Washington advised 300 years ago—from envy, from class conflict. From innovation—it has been a decade since the United States has pioneered a single important technological breakthrough. Contentment, it seems, breeds comfort with familiarity. But was this what the founding fathers intended for us, this sweet comfort, this undisturbed political balance? Does the Tricentennial find us at a destination, or becalmed in stagnant waters?”
Leisha was startled: When was the last time she had heard even a donkey newsgrid ask the question? Jordan and Stella both leaned forward.
“And what effect,” the voice-over went on, “is this mellow balance having on our young? The working class—” scenes of the New York Stock Exchange, Congress in session, a meeting of Fortune 500 CEO’s—“still hustles. But the so-called Livers, the eighty percent of the population who control elections through sheer numbers, represent a shrinking pool from which to draw the best and the brightest to create America’s future. Becoming the best and the brightest must be preceded by a desire to excel—”
“Aw, switch the grid,” Eric said loudly. Stella glanced at him, her eyes angry; Jordan looked down at the floor. This middle child was breaking both their hearts.
“—and perhaps adversity itself is necessary to create that desire. The all-but-discredited ideals of Yagaiism that held such strong sway forty years ago when—”
Wall Street and scooter races vanished. The narrator went on, describing holoscenes that were not there, but the stage filled with a projection of dense blackness. “What the—” Seth said.
Stars appeared in the blackness. Space. The narrator’s voice went on describing the Tricentennial party at the White House. In front of the stars appeared an orbital, spinning slowly, and beneath it a banner with a quote from a different president in a different time—Abraham Lincoln: “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”
Babble filled the room. Leisha sat a moment, stunned, but then she understood. This was not a general broadcast. Sanctuary maintained a number of communications satellites, monitoring Earth broadcasts and conducting datanet business. They were capable of focused, very narrow beam frequencies. The image of Sanctuary was intended for no place else but the compound, for no one else but her. It had been twenty-five years since Leisha had communicated with Sanctuary, or its overt holdings, or its shadowy, covert business partners. That lack of communication, with its myriad ramifications, had forced all their idleness, their becalmed stagnation: hers and Jordan’s and Jordan’s children. Twenty-five years. Hence this broadcast.
Jennifer just wanted to remind her that Sanctuary was still there.
Miri’s earliest memory was stars. Her second earliest memory was Tony.
In the stars memory, her grandmother held her up to a long curved window, and beyond the window was black dotted with steady lights: glowing, wonderful lights, and as Miri watched, one of them flew past. “A meteor,” Grandma said, and Miri reached out her arms to touch the beautiful stars. Grandma laughed. “They’re too far for your hand. But not for your mind. Always remember that, Miranda.”
She did. She always remembered everything: every bit of what happened to her. But that couldn’t be true because she didn’t remember a time without Tony, and Mommy and Daddy told her there had been a whole year without him, before he was born to them just the way she had been. So there must be at least a year she didn’t remember.