point. Or maybe it is.
She yearns to belong the way only an outsider can. And she doesn’t. She
knows that. She put her grandmother and that gang in jail, and so the
Sleepless have rejected her. She’s so superior to the donkeys they
can’t accept her on principle; she’s too much of a threat. And the idea
of her trying to find common ground communicating with Livers is
ludicrous. There’s no common language.”
I looked carefully away, out the window, at the desert. You never
see that clear crystalline light anywhere else. Like the air itself,
the light is both solid and yet completely transparent.
Leisha says, “All Miri has, outside of you, is twenty-six other
SuperSleepless. That’s it. Do you know what makes a revolutionary,
Drew? Being an outsider looking in, coupled with the idealistic desire
to
create the one true, just community, coupled with the belief that you
can
.
Idealists on the inside don’t become revolutionaries. They just become
reformers. Like me. Reformers think that things need a little
improvement, but the basic structure is sound. Revolutionaries think
about wiping everything out and starting all over. Miri’s a
revolutionary. A revolutionary with Superintelligent followers,
unimaginable technology, huge amounts of money, and passionate ideals.
Do you wonder that I’m scared?
“What are they doing in Huevos Verdes?”
I couldn’t meet Leisha’s eyes. So many words pouring out of her, so
much argument, so many complicated definitions. The shapes in my mind
were dark, confused, angry, with dangerous trailing cables hard as
steel. But they weren’t Leisha’s shapes. They were mine.
“Drew,” Leisha said, softly now, the outsider pleading with me.
“Please tell me what she’s doing?”
“I don’t know,” I lied.
==========
Two days later I sat in a skimmer speeding over the open sea toward
Huevos Verdes. The sun on the Gulf of Mexico was blinding. My driver, a
freckled kid of about fourteen whom I’d never seen before, was young
enough to enjoy skimming water. He edged the gravboat’s nose downward
to just touch the ocean, and blue-white spray flew. The kid grinned.
The second time he did it, he suddenly turned his head to make sure I
wasn’t getting wet, sitting in my powerchair in the back of the
skimmer. Clearly he’d forgotten I was there. Sudden guilt and the new
angle changed his face, and I recognized him. One of Kevin Baker’s
greatgrandchildren.
“Not wet at all,” I said, and the kid grinned again. A Sleepless, of
course. I could see that now in the shape of him in my mind: compact
and bright-colored and brisk-moving. Born owning the world. And, of
course, no security risk for Huevos Verdes.
But with their defenses, Huevos Verdes wouldn’t be risking security
even if passengers were being ferried by the director of the Genetic
Standards Enforcement Agency.
I had worked hard to understand the triple-shield security around
Huevos Verdes.
The first shield, a translucent shimmer, rose from the sea a quarter
mile out from the island. Spherical, the shield extended underwater,
cutting through the rock of the island itself, an all-enveloping egg.
Terry Mwakambe, the Supers’ strangest genius, had invented the field.
Nothing else like it existed anywhere in the world. It scanned DNA, and
nothing not recorded in the data banks got through. Not dolphins, not
navy frogmen, not seagulls, not drifting algae. Nada.
The second shield, a hundred yards beyond, stopped all nonliving
matter not accompanied by DNA that
was
stored in the data
banks. No unmanned ‘bot vessel carrying anything—sensors, bombs,
spores—passed this field. No matter how small. If there wasn’t a
registered DNA code accompanying it, it didn’t get through. We skimmed
through the shield’s faint blue shimmer as if through a soap bubble.
The third shield, at the docks, was manually controlled and visually
monitored. The registered DNA had to be alive and talking. I don’t know
how they
She yearns to belong the way only an outsider can. And she doesn’t. She
knows that. She put her grandmother and that gang in jail, and so the
Sleepless have rejected her. She’s so superior to the donkeys they
can’t accept her on principle; she’s too much of a threat. And the idea
of her trying to find common ground communicating with Livers is
ludicrous. There’s no common language.”
I looked carefully away, out the window, at the desert. You never
see that clear crystalline light anywhere else. Like the air itself,
the light is both solid and yet completely transparent.
Leisha says, “All Miri has, outside of you, is twenty-six other
SuperSleepless. That’s it. Do you know what makes a revolutionary,
Drew? Being an outsider looking in, coupled with the idealistic desire
to
create the one true, just community, coupled with the belief that you
can
.
Idealists on the inside don’t become revolutionaries. They just become
reformers. Like me. Reformers think that things need a little
improvement, but the basic structure is sound. Revolutionaries think
about wiping everything out and starting all over. Miri’s a
revolutionary. A revolutionary with Superintelligent followers,
unimaginable technology, huge amounts of money, and passionate ideals.
Do you wonder that I’m scared?
“What are they doing in Huevos Verdes?”
I couldn’t meet Leisha’s eyes. So many words pouring out of her, so
much argument, so many complicated definitions. The shapes in my mind
were dark, confused, angry, with dangerous trailing cables hard as
steel. But they weren’t Leisha’s shapes. They were mine.
“Drew,” Leisha said, softly now, the outsider pleading with me.
“Please tell me what she’s doing?”
“I don’t know,” I lied.
==========
Two days later I sat in a skimmer speeding over the open sea toward
Huevos Verdes. The sun on the Gulf of Mexico was blinding. My driver, a
freckled kid of about fourteen whom I’d never seen before, was young
enough to enjoy skimming water. He edged the gravboat’s nose downward
to just touch the ocean, and blue-white spray flew. The kid grinned.
The second time he did it, he suddenly turned his head to make sure I
wasn’t getting wet, sitting in my powerchair in the back of the
skimmer. Clearly he’d forgotten I was there. Sudden guilt and the new
angle changed his face, and I recognized him. One of Kevin Baker’s
greatgrandchildren.
“Not wet at all,” I said, and the kid grinned again. A Sleepless, of
course. I could see that now in the shape of him in my mind: compact
and bright-colored and brisk-moving. Born owning the world. And, of
course, no security risk for Huevos Verdes.
But with their defenses, Huevos Verdes wouldn’t be risking security
even if passengers were being ferried by the director of the Genetic
Standards Enforcement Agency.
I had worked hard to understand the triple-shield security around
Huevos Verdes.
The first shield, a translucent shimmer, rose from the sea a quarter
mile out from the island. Spherical, the shield extended underwater,
cutting through the rock of the island itself, an all-enveloping egg.
Terry Mwakambe, the Supers’ strangest genius, had invented the field.
Nothing else like it existed anywhere in the world. It scanned DNA, and
nothing not recorded in the data banks got through. Not dolphins, not
navy frogmen, not seagulls, not drifting algae. Nada.
The second shield, a hundred yards beyond, stopped all nonliving
matter not accompanied by DNA that
was
stored in the data
banks. No unmanned ‘bot vessel carrying anything—sensors, bombs,
spores—passed this field. No matter how small. If there wasn’t a
registered DNA code accompanying it, it didn’t get through. We skimmed
through the shield’s faint blue shimmer as if through a soap bubble.
The third shield, at the docks, was manually controlled and visually
monitored. The registered DNA had to be alive and talking. I don’t know
how they
Similar Books
