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Beggars in Spain
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Chapters 22-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 4: “Beggars”
Book 4, Chapter 22 Summary
The year is 2091. Over much of the last century, the United States had exclusive rights to Kenzo Yagai's Y-energy patents, amassing enormous wealth but also growing complacent as innovators. Finally in 2080, the patents ran out, leading to a 600% increase in the United States' annual trade deficit and a tripling of the national debt as the country struggled to keep up Dole payments to Livers. As a result, Congress passes a major tax package with a steep sliding scale for the largest corporations. At the highest bracket, corporations will be taxed at 92%. Only one corporation meets that threshold: Sanctuary.
At the age of 83, Alice dies of a massive heart attack. Her last words to Leisha are, “Take care of Drew” (321). At Alice's funeral, Kevin tells Leisha that Sanctuary is liquidating most of its assets and buying tangibles like gold and fine art. He also tells her that Sanctuary has moved all of its people off its second space station, the Kagura orbital, and now uses it solely for livestock.
On Sanctuary, Joan interrupts another of Miri's failed neurotransmitter experiments to tell her that Tony is badly hurt after falling down an elevator shaft. A doctor tells Miri that Tony suffered massive damage to his brain stem. For Jennifer, the choice to euthanize Tony is clear. Furious, Miri physically attacks Jennifer before being sedated. When she wakes, Miri is told that Tony died from his injuries.
Utterly despondent, Miri locks herself in her lab for days. A group of Supers led by Nikos Demetrios manages to override the locks so they can check to make sure Miri is okay. Referring to Tony's death, Nikos says, “Th-they d-d-d-d-did it b-b-b-b-because he w-ww-was one of us” (334). Using technology built by Tony, the Supers begin communicating with one another through a thought-string interface that is far more efficient than their stilted speech. They develop a plan to mount self-defense protocols in the event that Jennifer or any of the other Norms go after one of their own again. Miri suggests they call themselves, “The B-B-B-B-Beggars” (337).
Book 4, Chapter 23 Summary
Miri learns that Jennifer placed her lab under surveillance. With the help of a brilliant 12-year-old Super named Terry Mwakambe, Miri makes it appear to the surveillance equipment that she plays computer chess all day in her grief. Meanwhile, the Supers add hidden overrides to virtually all of Sanctuary's systems, allowing them to take over the orbital in the event of a crisis. Finally, they learn that Jennifer has hidden packets of her bioweapon in major American cities including New York City, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles as leverage against a possible attack from the U.S. government. While this troubles the Supers, they rationalize that it is no different than the fail-safe mechanisms on Sanctuary they've built for themselves.
One day, Joan calls Miri and tells her to watch a particular newsgrid program. Joan says, “There's an artist on that I watch sometimes. He helped me with... some problems I was having in my mind” (346). The artist is Drew, and at first Miri is as mystified by his performance as Leisha was. Miri suddenly hallucinates herself fighting a dragon and cutting off its head, which turns into Jennifer's head. She cuts off another dragon's head, only this time the severed head turns into that of her father's, Ricky. Then she sees Tony's head attached to a muscular body of a Norm. They have sex, and when she returns from her “dream,” Miri realizes the flaw in her neurotransmitter experiments. She quickly refashions a new formula that successfully rids her and the rest of the Supers of their twitching and stuttering. Freed from the linear constraints of logic, “her mind had added what was missing, what had always been missing, all her life” (349).
Book 4, Chapter 24 Summary
On January 1, 2092, Sanctuary secedes from the United States in protest of its 92% corporate tax. Everyone besides Leisha is shocked. Richard arrives at the compound after a long absence and provides his analysis on the matter: “I think she'd detonate the world if she thought it would finally make her safe” (364). Meanwhile, most Livers and Liver newsgrids treat the secession announcement with mocking condescension.
It turns out that most people on Sanctuary were unaware of the secession plans until Jennifer announced them. As a result, a measure of social unrest breaks out on Sanctuary, which Jennifer seeks to pacify by having her own security force temporarily “sequester” the loudest voices of dissent. Meanwhile, the United States vows to send a delegation to convince Sanctuary that it must abandon its secession plans. To send a message that negotiation is not an option, Jennifer announces that if the delegation attempts to dock at Sanctuary, she will detonate bioweapon packets in New York, DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles. As a demonstration, she releases the bioweapon in the Kagura orbital where only animals currently live: “Within two minutes, nothing moved except the leaves, rustling in the lethal breeze” (369).
Chaos erupts in the targeted cities, and anti-Sleepless sentiment rises to a level not seen since the We-Sleep era. The anti-Sleepless mob kills at least one Sleepless man. Kevin and Drew arrive at the New Mexico compound and set up a Y-field perimeter, just in case rioters attack.
Back on Sanctuary, the Supers formulate and carry out their plan. In an effort led by Terry, they take over all of Sanctuary's systems, including security, communications, and weaponry. They storm the council and give Jennifer a choice: she can provide the exact locations of the bioweapon packets to the White House in return for immunity for all non-council Sanctuary members, or the Supers will reveal the locations themselves. When Jennifer refuses, Miri tells her that the community doesn’t matter to her anymore, only the control she has over it. Jennifer should’ve gone down for treason as an individual and spared the community: “You could have saved them and you didn't, because that would have meant giving up your own control over who is in your community and who is out, wouldn't it? Well, you lost it anyway. The day you killed Tony” (384).
Moments later, two time-delayed broadcasts created by the Supers leave Sanctuary: one directed at the White House containing the locations and neutralization procedures of the packets, and the other directed at Leisha's New Mexico compound.
Book 4, Chapter 25 Summary
In a message to Leisha, Miri seeks refuge at her compound for the Supers until they come of age: “We come to you as beggars,” Miri says, “Nothing to offer, nothing to trade. Just need” (389). A few days later, Leisha welcomes into the compound 27 Supers led by Miri, four “Norm” Sleepless children, including Joan, and five parents, including Ricky. Shortly after arriving, Miri asks to meet Drew. Leisha notices an immediate attraction between the two.
Book 4, Chapter 26 Summary
Miri is angry to learn that Leisha plans to come out of retirement to serve as Jennifer's lawyer at her treason trial. While Jennifer's fanaticism blinded her to the pain she caused, Leisha believes that her dream—of building a community where equality and excellence coexisted—was admirable, though ultimately impossible. Miri is unmoved, telling Leisha, “In narrowing her definitions of community, my grandmother killed my brother Tony” (398). The best justification Leisha can provide to Miri is that people can and do change. After Miri departs, unconvinced but intrigued by this argument, Leisha further ponders the idea of change while engaging in a dialogue with the ghost of Tony. She tells him that there are no “permanent beggars,” and that a dollar to one might change who he is or who his son will be.
Book 4, Chapters 22-26 Analysis
The term “beggars” carries different connotations throughout the novel. In most of Book 1, it refers to literal beggars on the street who, from a Yagaiist perspective, are owed nothing by society's earners. By Book 2, Leisha thinks of beggars not so much in economic terms, but as part of a larger “ecology of help.” Then in Book 3, beggars exist as a formalized American institution in the form of Livers, and on Sanctuary the term becomes an epithet for anyone who isn't Sleepless.
The most dramatic recalibration of the term comes when Miri christens her rebel group of Supersleepless, “the Beggars.” It serves as a reclamation of the word that positions the Supers as representing values contrary to Jennifer and the Sanctuary council. These values include compassion for the weak and a desire for a true community rather than a closed system selected for genetic superiority. That isn't to say the Supers don't still prize individual excellence, but they never do so at the expense of a community member. In this way, they are less a community and more a family. Furthermore, the Supers recognize that even they, with all their productivity and earning potential, are sometimes beggars based on the situation. For example, when Miri asks Leisha if she will provide the Supers a safe haven in the wake of the bioweapons showdown between Sanctuary and the United States, she says, “We come to you as beggars. Nothing to offer, nothing to trade. Just need” (389).
Meanwhile, Sanctuary's secession from the United States raises some interesting questions about what types of revolutions are worthwhile and what types are excoriated throughout history. In her secession address, Jennifer repeatedly invokes the American Revolution, accusing the United States government of “taxation without representation” (355), a political slogan used in the 18th century by proponents of American independence. At the same time, however, Jennifer subverts the language of the Declaration of Independence when she says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident to the examining eye: That all men are not created equal” (355). In this, Sanctuary's rebellion is more akin to the secession of the South during the Civil War, a revolution based not on a demand for equality but a demand for superiority over others. Here, the words of Aristotle are once again relevant: “Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior.” When superiors like the Sleepless revolt, based on Jennifer's increasingly fascist behavior, they do so to achieve a kind of power reserved only for the most authoritarian and repressive governments.
These chapters also bring the book's examination of dreams and their relationship to the Sleepless to full fruition. After Miri watches one of Drew's performances on a newsgrid transmission, she dreams for the first time. Her reaction to the experience couldn't differ more from Leisha's. Rather than be disturbed by the breakdown of traditional reason and linear thinking, Miri is thrilled. It even allows her to solve the critical problem of training her neurotransmitters to prevent her from twitching and stuttering. “That was right; her mind had added what was missing, all her life.
Leisha too begins to relent a bit in her slavish devotion to reason. Her recognition of the unexplainable and the unpredictable, however, comes not from dreaming—which still disturbs her too much to attempt a second time— but from Jennifer. In explaining to Miri why she plans to return to the law and defend Jennifer, Leisha explains that people can and do change in unpredictable ways; Drew became an artist. Conversely, Leisha became a “despairing idler” (399). Jennifer, faced with the failure of her impossible dream to create a community of both total equality and total individual excellence, may change as well. It's somewhat of a despairing idea to think that in any society where some are born with greater advantages than others, class warfare is an inevitability. Class warfare, ugly as it is, is preferable to Jennifer's brutal and murderous eugenics.
Yet, Leisha is even open to forgiving Jennifer for this: “Even your grandmother could change. Maybe especially your grandmother” (399). The fact that Leisha—who began the book adhering to a philosophy inspired by Objectivism—now endorses what sounds a lot like moral relativism represents a fairly dramatic turn for her character. Of course, Leisha isn't saying that right and wrong don't exist, or that objective reality based on reason doesn't exist outside of our perceptions. She simply says that these realities change so quickly and chaotically that a rigid adherence to any one philosophical system—Kenzo Yagai's or John Locke's or Jennifer's—can present major problems in an ever-changing world. In reflecting on this point, Leisha reasons:
There is no stable ecology of trade, as I thought once, when I was very young. There is no stable anything, much less stagnant anything, given enough time. […] And no nonproductive anything, either. Beggars are only gene lines temporarily between communities (399).
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