Eventually Miri discovered answers to these questions, either by databank research or by talking with her father or grandmother. The trouble was, the answers weren’t very interesting. Scooter races were important because Livers thought they were important—was that all? Was there no standard except what pleased at the moment?
Her mind created long strings out of this question, pulling in the Heisenberg Principle, Epicurus, a defunct philosophy called existentialism, the Rahvoli constants for neural reinforcement, mysticism, epileptic storms in the so-called “visionary” centers of the brain, social democracy, the utility of the social organism, and Aesop’s fables. The string was a good one, but the part supplied by the Earth newsgrid was still essentially uninteresting.
The same was true for the answers to the rest of Miri’s questions. Political organization and resource allocation depended on a precarious balance between Liver votes and donkey power, and that balance seemed to be the results of a haphazard social evolution, not of planning or principles. Things in the United States were the way they were because they were the way they were. If there was more depth than that, the newsgrids didn’t reveal it.
She decided it was just the United States, coddled by cheap Y-energy, rich from licensing those same patents abroad, as decadent as her grandmother had always said. She learned Russian, French, and Japanese and spent a few months watching newsgrids in those languages. The answers were different but no more interesting. Things happened because they happened; they were the way they were because that was the point they’d come to. Minor border wars were fought, or they weren’t. Trade agreements were signed, or they weren’t. Important Sleepers died, or they had operations and recovered. A French broadcaster, one of the most prominent, always closed his broadcast the same way: Ça va toujours.
Nowhere on the popular newsgrids could Miri find any mention of scientific research or breakthroughs that were not clear sensationalism, of political excitement, of complex musical sounds like the Bach or Mozart or O’Neill in the library banks, of ideas as complex as those she discussed with Tony every day.
After six months, she stopped watching the newsgrids.
One thing had changed, however. Often her grandmother was busy, spending more and more time in the Sharifi Labs, and it was her father whom Miri took questions to. He didn’t have all the answers, and the ones he did have made short, lopsided strings in her mind. He had left Earth, he told her, when he was ten, and although he sometimes went there on business, he seldom spent much time with Sleepers. Usually he did business through a middleman, a Sleepless who nonetheless lived on Earth, a man named Kevin Baker.
Miri knew about Baker; he was extensively documented in the databanks. She wasn’t much interested in him. He seemed faintly contemptible to her: A man who lived alone with the beggars, profited from them, and preferred those profits—which were apparently huge—to the connections of community. But she listened while her father talked, because through the newsgrids she had become interested in her father. Unlike her mother, he could look directly at Miri’s twitching face and oversized head, her jerking body, without looking away. He could listen to her stutter. He sat, a dark low-browed man with his hands resting quietly on his knees, and listened to her patiently, and in his dark eyes was something she couldn’t name, no matter how many strings she wrapped around it. All the strings started with pain.
“D-D-Daddy, wh-wh-wh-where were y-y-you?”
“Sharifi Labs. With Jennifer.” Her father, unlike Aunt Najla, often referred to his mother by her name. Miri wasn’t sure when that had started.
She looked at him. There was a light sweat on his forehead, although Miri thought her lab was cool. His face looked shaken. Miri’s strings included seismic tremors, adrenalin effects, the compression of gases that form the ignition of stars. She said, “Wh-wh-wh-what are the L-L-L-L-L-Labs d-doing?”
Ricky Keller shook his head. He said abruptly, “When do you join the Council?”
“S-sixteen. T-two years and t-t-two m-months.”
Her father smiled, and the smile started a string that spun itself, surprisingly, to a Sleeper newsgrid she had seen months ago and had not thought of since: a story, evidently fiction, from a mystic book central to several Sleeper religions. A man called Job had been looted of one possession after another without either fighting in his own defense or devising ways to regain or replace them. Miri had thought Job spineless, or stupid, or both, and had lost interest in the broadcast before it was over. But her father’s smile reminded her now of the actor’s resigned face. All her father would say, however, was, “Good. We need you on the Council.”
“Wh-wh-wh-why?” Miri said sharply, hating that it took so long to get the word out, even while she was warmed by his need.
He didn’t answer.
Will Sandaleros said, “now.”
Jennifer leaned forward, staring at the three-dimensional holographic bubble. A thousand miles away in space, the original inflated, pressurized with standard air, and released the mice from their semi-hypothermic state. Tiny drip-patches on their collars brought their biological systems back to full functioning in minimum time. Within minutes the biometers on their collars showed them dispersed throughout the interior of the bubble, which was a complex internal topography mathematically congruent to Washington, D.C.
“Ready,” Dr. Toliveri said, “Stand by. Six, five, four, three, two, one, go.”
The genemod viruses were released. Air currents matched to winds five miles per hour from the southwest wafted through the temperature-controlled bubble. Jennifer shifted her attention to the biometer read-out screen on the far wall. Within three minutes, it showed no activity.
“Yes,” Will said. He wasn’t smiling, but he took her hand. “Yes.”
Jennifer nodded. To Toliveri, Blure, and the three technicians she said, “A superb job.” She turned to Will. Her beautiful, composed voice was very low. “We’re ready for the next stage.”
“Yes,” he said again.
“Start the purchase negotiations for Kagura orbital. Don’t go through Kevin Baker. Keep it blind.”
Will Sandaleros looked as if he didn’t mind being told what had actually been decided between them years earlier. He looked as if he understood his wife’s need to issue orders. Then he looked again at the biometer, his eyes gleaming.
Miri opened the door to Tony’s lab. He had moved to his own work quarters in Science Building Two six months ago, when there was no longer room in one lab for both their projects. Every time Miri looked at his half of the partners’ desk she felt sad, although she thought perhaps part of the sadness came from her own work’s going so badly. In two years she had modeled every genetic modification she could think of, without coming closer to any that would correct the stutters and twitches of all the Supers’ hyped-up electrochemical processes. The work had begun to feel sterile to her, to remind her of the missing component, whatever it was, of the strings themselves. Elusive, sterile, and nonproductive. Today had been another failure. She was in a terrible mood, a terrible, fast-moving, chaotic-string, sterile mood. She wanted Tony’s comfort and encouragement. She wanted Tony.