“Y-y-y-your f-father?” No one ever spoke of Richard Keller. Miri had been told about the trial; what he had done to Jennifer, his wife, was monstrous.
“I think in many ways you’re like him, despite being a Super. Genetic inheritance is trickier than we know, despite our smugness. It’s not all in quantifiable chromosomes.”
He walked away. Miri didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted. Richard Keller, the traitor to Sanctuary. People usually said she was like her grandmother, “a strong-minded woman.” But her father’s eyes had been soft under their melancholy. Miri stared after his retreating, stooped figure.
The next day, Tabitha Selenski died by fatal injection. A persistent rumor circulated that Tabitha had injected the dose herself, but Miri didn’t believe that. If Tabitha had been capable of doing that, the Council wouldn’t have voted as it did. Tabitha had been nearly a vegetable. That was the truth. Miri’s grandmother had said so.
BOOK IV: Beggars
2091
“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”
22
The 152nd congress of the United States faced an annual trade deficit that over the past ten years had increased six-hundred percent, a federal debt that had more than tripled, and a fiscal debt of twenty-six percent. For nearly a century, Y-energy patents had been licensed by Kenzo Yagai’s heirs exclusively to American firms, as specified in Yagai’s eccentric will. This had fueled the longest economic climb in history. Through Y-technology, the United States had pulled out of a dangerous turn-of-the-century international slump and an even more dangerous internal depression. Americans invented and built every known application of Y-energy, and everyone wanted Y-energy. American-designed and fueled orbitals circled the Earth; American-built aircraft spanned the skies; American-built weapons traded on the illegal arms market of every major nation in the world. The colonies on Mars and Luna survived on Y-generators. On Earth, a thousand engineering applications cleaned the air, recycled the wastes, warmed the cities, fueled the automated factories, grew the genetically-efficient food, powered the institutionalized Dole, and kept the expensive information flowing to the corporations that each year became richer, more shortsighted, and more driven, like an earlier age’s bloated aristocrats popping buttons off their waistcoats as they wagered fortunes at faro or E.O.
In 2080, the patents ran out.
The International Trade Commission opened international access to Y-energy patents. The nations that had nibbled at the crumbs of American prosperity—building the machine housings, sublicensing the less profitable franchises, surviving as middlemen and brokers—were ready. They had been ready for years, the factories in place, the engineers trained at the great American donkey universities, the designs prepared. Ten years later the United States had lost sixty percent of the global Y-energy market. The deficit climbed like a Sherpa.
Livers didn’t worry. That was what they elected their congressmen and women to do: to worry. To scramble in their donkey working fashion and find solutions, to take care of the problem, if there was a problem. The citizenry, those that were listening at all, didn’t see any problem. The public scooter races and Dole allotments and newsgrid entertainment and politically-funded mass rallies, with plenty of food and beer, and district building and energy grants continued to grow. And in districts where they didn’t grow, of course, the politicians just didn’t get returned. Votes, after all, had to be earned. Americans had always believed that.
The domestic deficit became critical.
Congress raised corporate taxes. Again in 2087, and then again in 2090. The donkey firms that sent daughters and fathers and cousins to Congress protested. By 2091 the issue could no longer be ignored. The House debate, which lasted six days and nights and revived the art of filibuster, was carried on the newsgrids. Hardly anyone outside of donkeys watched it. One of the few who did was Leisha Camden. Another was Will Sandaleros.
At the end of the sixth day, Congress passed a major tax package. Corporate taxes were recalibrated to the steepest sliding scale the world had ever seen. At the top of the scale, corporate entities that qualified were taxed at ninety-two percent of gross profit, with strict limitations on expense claims, as their share of governing America. At the next bracket, corporations were taxed at seventy-eight percent. After that, the brackets descended rapidly.
Of corporations taxed at seventy-eight percent, fifty-four percent were based on Sanctuary Orbital. Only one corporation met the ninety-two percent tax criteria: Sanctuary itself.
Congress passed the tax package in October. Leisha, watching a newsgrid in New Mexico, glanced involuntarily out the window, at the sky. It was blue and empty, without a single cloud.
Will Sandaleros made a full report to Jennifer Sharifi, who had been away from Sanctuary on Kagura Orbital, concluding a vital arrangement there. Jennifer listened calmly, the folds of her white abbaya falling gracefully around her feet. Her dark eyes glistened.
“Now, Jenny,” Will said. “Starting January 1.”
Jennifer nodded. Her eyes went to the holoportrait of Tony Indivino, hanging on the dome wall. After a moment they returned to Will, but he was bent over the hard-copy of projected Sanctuary tax figures, and had not noticed.
Miri couldn’t get Tabitha Selenski’s death to move from the front of her mind. No matter what she was thinking about—her neurochemical research, joking with Tony, washing her hair, anything—Tabitha Selenski, whom Miri had never met, tangled, knotted, tied herself into Miri’s strings and choked there.
Choked. She had researched the injection from which Tabitha had died; it would have stopped the heart instantly. Without the heart to pump, the lungs could not draw in air. Tabitha would have choked on her own already-breathed air, except of course she wouldn’t have known it because the injection had also immediately paralyzed what was left of her brain.
Miri sat alone in the suspended bubble playground at Sanctuary’s core and thought about Tabitha Selenski. Miri was too old for the playground. Still, she liked to go there when it was empty, sailing slowly from one handhold to another, her clumsiness canceled by the absence of both gravity and observers. Today her thought strings seemed as solitary as the playground.
No, not solitary—five other people, including her father, had voted with her to let Tabitha live in Sanctuary even as a beggar. But there was a difference in their votes, their reasons, their arguments for compassion. Miri felt the difference but she couldn’t name it, neither in words nor strings, and that was intensely frustrating. It was the old problem; something was missing from her thoughts, some unknown kind of association or connection. Why couldn’t she spin out an exploratory string about the difference between her vote and the others’, and so learn what that difference was? Explain it, examine it, integrate it into the ethical system that Tabitha Selenski’s accident had charred just as surely as it had charred her mind. There was something missing here, something important to Miri. A hole where an explanation should be.
She looked at the fields and domes and pathways below. Sanctuary was beautiful in the soft, UV-filtered sunlight. Clouds drifted at the far end; the maintenance team must be planning rain. She would have to check the weather calendar.