“They’ve killed the baby!”
Blackness swept through Miri. Her knees gave way and she sank to the ground. “The b-b-b-beggars? H-h-h-how?” Joan’s mother had been only a few weeks pregnant and she hadn’t left Sanctuary; did that mean there were beggars here…
“Not the beggars! The Council! Led by your precious grandmother!”
Strings unraveled, and ripped. Miri gripped the ends firmly. Her nervous system, always revved up to the edge of biochemical hysteria, began to slide over that edge. Miri closed her eyes and breathed deeply until she was in control.
“Wh-what h-happened, J-J-J-Joan?”
Miri’s calm, fragile as it was, seemed to calm Joan. She slid to the grass beside Miri and wrapped her arms around her knees. There was a scratch, not yet fully regenerated, on her left calf.
“My mother called me in to her study just before I was going to change for Remembrance Day. She’d been crying. And she was lying on the pallet she and Daddy use for sex.”
Miri nodded; her mind made strings of why a Sleepless would be in bed if she were not having sex or injured.
Joan said, “She told me that the Council had made the decision to abort the baby. I thought that was strange—if the prefetal tests show DNA failure in a major area the parents naturally abort. What does the Council have to do with it?”
“Wh-wh-what d-d-do they?”
“I asked where the DNA failure was. She said there wasn’t one.”
Around them floated Jennifer’s voice: “—the assumption that, because they are weak, they are automatically owed the labor of the strong—”
“I asked my mother why the Council ordered an abortion if the baby was normal. She said it wasn’t an order but a strong recommendation, and she and Daddy were going to comply. She started crying again. She told me the gene analysis showed that the baby is…was…”
She couldn’t say it. Miri put her arm around her friend.
“…was a Sleeper.”
Miri took her arm away. The next minute she regretted it, bitterly, but it was too late. Joan scrambled to her feet. “You think Mom should abort too!”
Did she? Miri wasn’t sure. Strings whirled in her head: genetic regression, DNA information redundancy, spiraling children in the playground, the nursery, the lab, productivity…beggars. A baby, soft in Joan’s mother’s arms. She remembered Tony in her own mother’s arms, her grandmother holding Miri up to see the stars…
Jennifer’s voice came louder: “Above all, to remember that morality is defined by what contributes to life, not what leeches from it…”
Joan cried, “I’ll never be friends with you again, Miranda Sharifi!” She ran away, her long legs flashing under the green shorts she should not have been wearing on Remembrance Day.
“W-w-wait!” Miri cried. “W-wait! I think the C-C-Council is wr-wr-wrong!” But Joan didn’t wait.
Miri would never catch her.
Slowly, awkwardly, she got up from the ground and went to the lab in Science Dome Four. Her and Tony’s work terminals were both on, running programs. Miri turned them off, then swept all the hard-copy off her desk with one lash of her arm.
“D-d-damn!” The word was not enough; there must be more such words, must be…something to do with this pain. Her strings were not enough. Their incompleteness taunted her yet again, like a missing piece of an equation you knew was missing even though you had never seen it before, because otherwise there was a hole in the center of the idea. There was a hole in Miri, and a Sleeper baby spiraled through it—Joan’s Sleeper brother, who by this time tomorrow wouldn’t exist any more than the missing piece of the thought equation existed, had ever existed, was ever out there somewhere. And now Joan hated her.
Miri curled herself under Tony’s desk and sobbed.
Jennifer found her there two hours later, after the Remembrance Day speeches were over and the huge chunk of credit, the equation for productive labor, had been transmitted to the government which gave nothing back in return. Miri heard her grandmother pause in the doorway, then unhesitatingly cross the room, as if she already knew where Miri was.
“Miranda. Come out from there.”
“N-n-no.”
“Joan told you that her mother is carrying a Sleeper fetus that must be aborted.”
“N-n-not ‘m-must.’ The b-b-baby c-could l-l-l-live. It’s n-normal in every other w-w-way. And th-th-they w-want it!”
“The parents are the ones who made the decision, Miri. No one else could make it for them.”
“Then wh-wh-wh-wh-why are J-Joan and her m-mother c-c-c-crying?”
“Because sometimes necessary things are hard things. And because neither of them has yet learned to accept hard necessity without making it worse by regret. That’s a vital lesson, Miri. Regret is not productive. Nor is guilt, nor grief, although I have felt both over the five Sleeper fetuses we’ve had in Sanctuary.”
“F-f-five?”
“So far. Five in thirty-one years. And every set of parents has made the decision Joan’s parents have, because every set saw the hard necessity. A Sleeper child is a beggar, and the productive strong do not acknowledge the parasitic claims of beggars. Charity, perhaps—that is an individual matter. But a claim, as if weakness had the moral right over strength, were somehow superior to strength—no. We don’t acknowledge that.”
“A S-S-Sleeper b-baby would be p-p-productive! It’s n-n-normal otherwise!”
Jennifer sat down gracefully on Tony’s desk chair. The folds of her black abbaya trailed on the ground beside Miri’s crouching body. “For the first part of its life, yes. But productivity is a relative thing. A Sleeper may have fifty productive years, starting at, say, twenty. But unlike us, by sixty or seventy their bodies are weakened, prey to breakdowns, wearing out. Yet they may live for as many as thirty more years, a burden on the community, a shame to themselves because it is a shame to not work when others do. Even if a Sleeper was industrious, amassed credit against his old age, purchased robots to care for him, he would end up isolated, not able to take part in Sanctuary’s daily life, degenerating. Dying. Would parents who loved a child bring it into such an eventual fate? Could a community support many such people without putting a spiritual burden on itself? A few, yes—but what about the principles involved?
“A Sleeper raised among us would not only be an outsider here—unconscious and brain-dead eight hours a day while the community goes on without him—he would also have the terrible burden of knowing that someday he will have a stroke, or a heart attack, or cancer, or one of the other myriad diseases the beggars are prone to. Knowing that he will become a burden. How could a principled man or woman live with that? Do you know what he would have to do?”
Miri saw it. But she would not say it.
“He would have to commit suicide. A terrible thing to force onto a child you loved!”
Miri crawled out from under the desk. “B-b-but, G-G-Grandma—w-w-we all m-m-must d-die s-s-s-someday. Even y-y-y-you.”
“Of course,” Jennifer said composedly. “But when I do, it will be after a long and productive life as a full member of my community—Sanctuary, our heart’s blood. I would want no less for my children or grandchildren. I would settle for no less. Neither would Joan’s mother.”
Miri considered. Complex nets of thought knotted themselves in her head. Finally, painfully, she nodded.
Jennifer said, just as if she had not won, “I think, Miri, that you are old enough to start viewing broadcasts from Earth. We made the rule about being fourteen because we thought it would be best to form your principles first, you and the other children, before showing you their violation on Earth. Perhaps we were wrong, especially with you Supers. We’re still groping our way with you, dear heart. But perhaps it would be best if you saw the kind of wasted, parasitic lives that beggars—they call themselves ‘Livers’ now—actually prefer.”