Miri’s strings rippled in her mind with chaos theory, with mythic images, with angels and flyers and Icarus and acceleration ratios and Orville Wright and Mercury astronauts and membraned mammals and escape velocities and muscle-strength-weight ratios. With delight.
“Come inside here,” Joan shouted over the shrieking. “I have a secret to tell you!” She grabbed Miri, stuffed her into a translucent suspended box, and crowded in after her. Inside it was marginally less noisy.
Joan said, “Miri, guess what—my mom’s pregnant!”
“W-w-wonderful!” Miri said. Joan’s mother’s eggs were Type r-14, difficult to penetrate even in vitro. Joan was thirteen; Miri knew she had wanted a baby sister or brother with the same tenacity that Tony wanted a Litov-Hall auto-am. “I’m s-s-s-so g-g-g-glad!”
Joan hugged her. “You’re my best friend, Miri!” Abruptly she launched herself out of the box. “Catch me!”
Miri never would, of course. She was too clumsy, compared to Joan’s Norm agility. But that didn’t matter. She hurtled herself after Joan, shrieking with the others just for the pleasure of making noise, while below her the world tumbled over and over in patterns of hydrofields and domes and parks as beautiful as strings.
The Tuesday after the playground opened was Remembrance Day. Miri dressed carefully in black shorts and tunic. She could feel the somber shape of her strings, shifting with her thoughts in compact, flattened ovals as dark as everyone’s clothes. Religious holidays in Sanctuary varied from family to family; some kept Christmas, Ramadan, Easter, Yom Kippur, or Divali; many kept nothing at all. The two holidays held in common were the Fourth of July and Remembrance Day, April 15.
The crowd gathered in the central panel. The park had been expanded by covering surrounding fields of super-high-yield plants with a temporary spray-plastic latticework strong enough to stand on and large enough to accommodate every person in Sanctuary. Those few who could not leave their work or had temporary illnesses watched on their comlinks. A temporary platform for the speaker loomed above the crowd. High above the platform floated the deserted playground.
Most people stood with their families. Miri and Tony, however, clustered with the other Supers who were older than eight or nine, half hidden in the shadows of a power dome. The Supers were happier apart from crowds of Norms, whom they couldn’t keep up with physically, and happier together. Miri didn’t think her mother had even looked for her or Tony or Ali. Hermione had a new baby to whom she was devoted. No one had explained to Miri why this one, like little Rebecca, was a Norm. Miri hadn’t asked.
Where was Joan? Miri twisted and turned, but she couldn’t see the Lucas family anywhere.
Jennifer Sharifi, wearing a black abbaya, mounted the platform. Miri’s heart swelled with pride. Grandma was beautiful, more beautiful even than Mother or Aunt Najla. She was as beautiful as Joan. And on Grandma’s face was the composed, set look that always evoked in Miri strings and cross-references of human intelligence and will. There was no one like Grandmother.
“Citizens of Sanctuary,” Jennifer began. Her voice, amplified, carried to every corner of the orbital without once being raised. “I call you that because although the United States government calls us citizens of that country, we know better. We know that no government founded without the consent of the governed has the right to claim us. We know that no government without the ability to recognize the reality of men having been created unequal has the vision to claim us. We know that no government operating on the principle that beggars have a right to the productive labor of others has the morality to claim us.
“On this Remembrance Day, April 15, we recognize that Sanctuary has the right to its own consenting government, its own clear-eyed reality, the fruits of its own productive labor. We have the right to these things, but we do not yet possess the actualities. We are not free. We are not yet allowed the ‘separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle’ us. We have Sanctuary, thanks to the Sleepless vision of our founder Anthony Indivino, but we do not have freedom.”
“Y-y-yet,” Tony whispered grimly to Miri. She squeezed his hand and stood on tiptoe to search the crowd for Joan.
“And yet we have created for ourselves as much of the measure of freedom as we can,” Jennifer continued. “Assigned without our consent to a New York State court jurisdiction, we have never in thirty-two years either filed or incurred a lawsuit. Instead, we have set up our own judicial system, unknown to the beggars below, and administered it ourselves. Assigned without our consent to licensing regulations for our brokers, doctors, lawyers, even teachers of our own children, we have complied with all the regulations. We have done this even when it means living for awhile among the beggars. Assigned to comply with meaningless statistical regulations that number us equal with beggars, we have counted and measured and tested ourselves as required and then dismissed the result as the irrelevant pap it surely is.”
Miri spotted Joan. She was pushing through the crowd, heedlessly elbowing people, and Miri was shocked to see that Joan hadn’t changed into Remembrance Day black. She wore a forest-green halter and shorts. Miri raised her arm as far as she could beyond the shadow of the power dome and waved frantically.
“But there is one requirement of the beggars we cannot dismiss,” Jennifer said. “Beggars do not work to support their own lives; they depend, snarling, on their betters to do that. To support the millions of nonproductive ‘Livers’ in the United States, Sanctuary—as an entity and as individuals—is forcibly robbed of a total of 64.8 percent of its annual productivity through the legal thievery of state and federal taxes. We cannot fight this, not without risk to Sanctuary itself. We cannot resist. All we can do is remember what this means—morally, practically, politically, and historically. And on April 15 of every year, as our resources are taken from us with nothing given in return, we do remember.”
Joan’s pretty face was puffy and streaked—she had been crying. Miri tried to remember the last time she had seen someone as old as Joan cry. Little children cried, when they fell down or couldn’t do a terminal problem or fought with each other over toys. But Joan was thirteen. Adults, catching sight of her face as Joan elbowed through the crowd, tried kindly to question her. Joan ignored them, pushing toward Miri.
“We remember the hatred toward Sleepless on Earth. We remember—”
“Come with me,” Joan said fiercely to Miri. She grabbed her friend and half-dragged her around the power dome, until the curved black surface completely hid Jennifer from view. Jennifer’s voice, however, floated toward them, as clear as if she stood beside Joan’s trembling body. Strings exploded in Miri’s mind. She had never seen a Norm twitch.
“Do you know what they’ve done? Do you, Miri?”
“Wh-who? Wh-wh-wh-what?”