Ms. Patterson took her to Grandma. Miri had to explain the whole thing all over again, but this time it was easier because Grandma drew the design while Miri talked. Miri wondered why she hadn’t thought of this herself. The drawing let her put in all the cross-connections and it was much clearer that way, even if some of the lines she drew were wobbly because the light pen in her fist wouldn’t go as straight as the picture in her mind.
When she was done, the drawing looked very simple to her. But, then, it was simple, just a little set of strings to practice reading:
dolclass="underline" plastic baby: ? ↓ ↓ toy: invented smalclass="underline" ↓ ↓ pretend: people protect: ↓ ↓ shooting star: community community: ↓ ↓ meteor: orbital people: God
Afterward, grandma was quiet a long time.
“Miri, do you always think this way? In strings that make designs?”
“Y-y-yes,” Miri said, astonished. “D-d-don’t y-you?”
Grandma didn’t answer that. “Why did you want to type in the analogy that exists four little strings down on the terminal?”
“Y-you m-m-mean instead of ei-eight or t-t-ten str-strings d-d-down?” Miri said, and Grandma’s eyes got very wide.
“Instead of…of no strings down. The one the terminal wanted. Didn’t you know that was what it wanted?”
“Y-yes. B-but…” Miri squirmed in her chair “…I g-g-g-get b-bored with the t-t-top str-strings. S-s-sometimes.”
“Ah,” Grandma said. After another long silence she said, “Where did you hear that God is a planned community of minds?”
“On a n-n-newsgrid. M-M-Mommy w-was pl-playing it whwh-when I w-was h-h-h-home for a v-v-visit.”
“I see.” Grandma stood. “You are very special, Miri.”
“T-T-Tony is t-t-too. And N-N-Nikos and Ch-Christina and Al-Al-Allen and S-Sara. G-G-Grandma, w-will the n-n-new b-baby M-M-Mommy w-wants to h-h-have be sp-special wh-when it’s b-b-b-born?”
“Yes.”
“W-will it t-t-twitch l-like we d-d-d-do? And st-st-stutter? And eat s-s-so m-m-m-much?”
“Yes.”
“And th-think in str-str-strings?”
“Yes,” Grandma said, and Miri always remembered the expression on her face.
There were no more newsgrid broadcasts from Earth. They had never come into the nursery, only into Mommy and Daddy’s dome, but now Miri never saw them there either. “When you are older,” Grandma said. “There are beggar ideas you’ll have to encounter soon enough, but not just yet. Learn first what’s right.”
It was Grandma, or sometimes Grandpa Will, who decided what was right. Daddy was gone a lot on business. Mommy was often there, but sometimes it seemed to Miri she didn’t want to be. She would turn her head away from Miri and Tony when they entered a room.
“It’s b-b-because w-we t-tw-twitch and st-stutter,” she said to Tony. “M-M-M-Mommy d-d-doesn’t-like us.”
Tony started to cry. Miri put her arms around him and cried too, but she wouldn’t take the words back. They were true; Mommy was too beautiful to like anyone who twitched and stuttered and drooled, and truth was paramount to a community. “I’m y-your c-c-c-community,” she told Tony, and that was an interesting sentence because it was both true and of limited truth, with substrings and cross-connections that went down sixteen strings and formed a pattern that drew on what she had been learning in mathematics and astronomy and biology, a glorious pattern intricate and balanced as the molecular structure of a crystal. The pattern was almost worth Tony’s tears. Almost.
As she grew older, however, Miri began to feel there was something missing in her patterns. She couldn’t tell what. She had drawn a number of them for Grandma and Dr. Toliveri, until they got so complicated she knew she was leaving things out. Besides, every time she drew a string pattern, thinking and drawing it made new patterns, each with multilevel strings and crosshatching of their own, and there was no way to draw those, too, because if she did, drawing them would just generate more. Drawing and explaining could never keep up with thinking, and Miri grew impatient with the attempts to try.
She understood, by the time she was eight, the biology of what had been done to her and the others like her. SuperSleepless, they were called. She understood, too, that it must never be allowed to interfere with the twin truths Sanctuary was built on: productivity and community. To be productive was to be fully human. To share your productivity with the community in strict fairness was to create strength and protection for all. Anyone who would try to violate either truth—to reap the benefits of community without in turn contributing productively to it—was obscene, an inhuman beggar. Miri recoiled from the thought. No one could be that morally repulsive. On Earth, yes, which was full of what Grandma called beggars in Spain, some of whom were even Sleepless. But never in Sanctuary.
The alterations to her nervous system—to Tony’s, Christina’s, Allen’s, Mark’s, Joanna’s—were to make her more productive, more use to the community and herself, more intelligent than humans had been before. They were all taught that, even the non-Supers, and eventually they all accepted it. Joan and Miri played together, now, every day. Miri was filled with gratitude.
But much as she liked Joan, much as she admired Joan’s long brown curls and ability to play the guitar and high sweet laugh, Miri knew that it was with her own kind, the other Supers, that she felt the most community. She tried to hide this; it was wrong. Except for Tony, of course, who was her brother, and who one day would, with her and baby Ali—who had turned out to not be a Super after all, despite what Grandma said—join the Sharifi voting block that controlled 51 percent of Sanctuary stock, plus the family economic holdings. These were the things that guaranteed they were not beggars.
The economic structure of Sanctuary interested her. Everything interested her. She learned to play chess, and for a month refused to do anything else—the game let you make dozens of generations of strings, all intricately knotted to your opponent’s string! But after a month, chess palled. There were, after, all, only two sets of strings involved, even though they got very long.
Neurology interested her more. The brain had a hundred billion neurons, each with multiple receptor sites for neurotransmitters, of which there were so many variants that the strings you could construct were nearly infinite. By the time Miri was ten she was conducting experiments in neurotransmitter dosage, using herself and the willing Tony as primary subjects, Christina and Nikos as controls. Dr. Toliveri encouraged her. “Soon you will be contributing yourself, Miranda, to the next generation of Supers!”
But it was all not enough. There was still something missing in her strings, something Miri felt so obscurely she could not discuss it with anyone but Tony, who, it turned out, didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Y-y-you m-mean, M-Miri, s-some str-str-strings h-have weak p-p-p-places d-due to insufficient d-d-databases t-to draw c-concepts fr-fr-from?”
She heard the spoken words, but she also heard more: the strings that came with them, the Tony-strings in his own head, which she could guess at because she knew him so well. He sat supporting his big head in his hands, as they all frequently did, his mouth and eyelids and temples twitching, the thick dark hair jerking rhythmically over his forehead with the convulsions of his body. His strings were lovely, strong and sharp, but Miri knew that they were not as long as hers, or as complex in their crosshatching. He was nine years old.