Beggars in Spain

8

Jordan Watrous stood just outside the front gate of the We-Sleep scooter factory, facing the dusty Mississippi road. Electrified fence eight feet high stretched away on either side. Not a Y-energy field, not sophisticated technology, but it would do. For now, anyway, while attacks on the factory were minor, unorganized, and verbal. Later on, they would need a Y-field. Hawke said so.

Across the river, in Arkansas, the Y-energy cones of the Samsung-Chrysler plant glinted in the early morning sun.

Jordan squinted down the road. Sweat matted his hair and trickled down his neck. The guard, a stringy, tow-headed woman in faded jeans, stuck her head out of her kiosk and called, “Hot enough for you, Jordan?”

Over his shoulder he said, “Always is, Mayleen.”

She laughed. “You California boys just wilt up in God’s natural heat.”

“I guess we’re not as tough as you river rats.”

“Boy, ain’t nobody as tough as us. You just look at Mr. Hawke.”

As if were possible for anyone at a We-Sleep factory to do otherwise! Not that Hawke hadn’t earned the reverence in Mayleen’s voice. When Mayleen had been hired last winter, Jordan, only four weeks into his own job as Hawke’s personal assistant, had gone with Hawke to her shack for the interview. Although adequately heated and provisioned through the cheap Y-energy that was every citizen’s right under the Dole, the shack had no indoor plumbing, little furniture, and few toys for the skinny tow-headed kids that had stared at Jordan’s leather jacket and lapel comlink. Last week, Mayleen had announced with pride that she’d just bought a toilet and a lace pillow set. The pride, Jordan now knew, was as practical as the toilet. He knew because Calvin Hawke had taught him.

Jordan returned to studying the road. Mayleen said, “Expecting someone?”

Slowly Jordan turned around. “Didn’t Hawke call it in?”

“Call what in? He didn’t tell me nothing.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jordan said. The terminal in the kiosk shrilled and Mayleen pulled her head back in. Jordan watched her through the plastiglass. As she listened, her face hardened as only these Mississippi faces could. Instantaneous ice in the steaming heat. He had never seen that in California.

Obviously, Hawke was telling her not only to admit a visitor, but who the visitor was.

“Yes, sir,” she mouthed at the terminal, and Jordan winced. Nobody at the plant called Hawke “sir” unless they were furious. And nobody got furious at Hawke. They displaced it. Always.

Mayleen stepped away from her kiosk. “This your doing, Jordan?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” She spat the word, and Jordan finally, finally—Hawke said it always took him too long to get angry—felt his own face harden.

“Is that your business, Mayleen?”

“Anything goes on in this here plant’s my business,” Mayleen said, which was only the truth. Hawke had made it the truth, for all 800 employees. “We don’t want her kind here.”

“Hawke apparently does.”

“I asked you why.”

“Why don’t you ask him why?”

“I’m asking you. Why, dammit?”

Along the road, a dust cloud advanced. A groundcar. Jordan felt a sudden stab of dread: had anyone told her not to come in a Samsung-Chrysler? But she could be trusted to already know something like that. She always did.

Mayleen snarled, “I done asked you a question, Jordan! What’s Mr. Hawke doing letting one of them in our plant?”

“You made a demand, not asked a question.” The anger felt good now, sweeping away his nervousness. “But I’ll answer it anyway, Mayleen. Just for you. Leisha Camden is here because she asked to come and Hawke gave her permission.”

“I can see that! What I can’t see is why!”

The car pulled up at the gate. It was heavily armored, and packed with bodyguards. The driver got out to open the doors. The car was not a Samsung-Chrysler.

“Why?” Mayleen repeated, with such hatred that even Jordan was startled. He turned. Her thin mouth twisted in a snarl, but in her eyes was a fear that Jordan recognized—Hawke had taught him to recognize it—a fear not of bone-and-blood people but of the degrading choices those people had indirectly caused: two dollars for a half pack of cigarettes, or two dollars for a pair of warm socks? Extra milk for the kids above the Dole allotment, or a haircut? The fear was not of starving, not in a country of prosperity built on cheap energy, but of being shut out from that prosperity. Second class. Not good enough for that basic badge of adult dignity, work. A parasite. The anger oozed out of Jordan; sadly he felt it go. Anger was so much easier.

As gently as he could, he said to Mayleen, “Leisha Camden’s here because she’s my mother’s sister. My aunt.”

He wondered how long it would take Hawke this time to redeem him.

“And each scooter takes sixteen assembly-line operations?” Leisha asked.

“Yes,” Jordan said. They stood with Leisha’s bodyguards, everybody in hard hats and goggles, watching Station 8-E. Two dozen scooters were swarmed over by three workers, who in their zeal completely ignored the visitors. The zeal was more notable than the results. But of course Leisha would already know that.

Six months ago, at his little sister’s eighteenth birthday party in California, Leisha had questioned Jordan about the factory so closely that he had known, like cold water around his bones, that eventually she would ask to visit. What he hadn’t expected was that Hawke would let her.

She said, “I thought Mr. Hawke might join us. I came to meet him, after all.”

“He said to bring you to the office after the tour.”

Beneath the heavy safety glasses, Leisha’s mouth smiled. “Showing me my place?”

“I guess so,” Jordan said heavily. He hated it when Hawke, always unpredictable, descended to playing one-upmanship.

To Jordan’s surprise, Leisha laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t mind on my behalf, Jordan. It’s not as if he’s not entitled.”

And what could Jordan say to that? Entitlement, after all, was the entire issue. Who got what, and how, and why.

Somehow Jordan didn’t feel like the proper person to comment on that. He wasn’t even certain who within his own family was entitled to what, or why.

His mother and his aunt had such a strange relationship. Or maybe “strained” was a better word. And yet it wasn’t. Leisha visited the Watrous family in California only on ceremonial occasions; Alice never visited Leisha in Chicago at all. Yet Alice, who loved gardening, had a fresh bouquet from her garden flown to Leisha’s apartment every single day, at a cost Jordan considered insane. And the flowers were ordinary, hardy garden blooms: phlox and sunflowers and day lilies and lemon-drop marigolds, which Leisha could have bought on the streets of Chicago for a few dollars. “Doesn’t Aunt Leisha prefer those indoor exotics?” Jordan asked once. “Yes,” his mother said, smiling.

Leisha always brought Jordan and his sister Moira wonderful presents: junior electronics kits, telescopes, two shares of a stock to follow on the datanets. Alice always seemed as pleased by the gifts as the kids were. Yet when Leisha showed Jordan and Moira how to use each one—how to adjust the telescope to azimuth and altitude, how to do Japanese calligraphy on rice paper—Alice always left the room. After the first few years, Jordan sometimes wished Leisha would leave, too, and let him and Moira just read the instructions themselves. Leisha explained too fast, and too hard, and too long, and got upset that Jordan and Moira didn’t remember everything the first time. It didn’t even help that Aunt Leisha’s upset seemed to be with herself, not with them. It made Jordan feel stupid. “Leisha has her own ways,” was all that Alice would say. “And we have ours.”

Strangest of all was Alice’s Twin Group. Leisha had looked first shocked, then sad, then angry when she heard about the Twin Group. Alice volunteered there three days a week. The Group kept datafiles about twins who could communicate with each other across vast distances, who knew what each other was thinking, who felt pain when the other was in trouble. They also studied pairs of twins in preschool to see how they learned to differentiate themselves as separate people. This jumble of ESP, parapsychology, and scientific method bewildered Jordan, then seventeen. “Aunt Leisha says the statistics of coincidence can account for most of your ‘ESP.’ And I thought you and her weren’t even monozygotic twins!” “We’re not,” Alice said.

In the last two years Jordan had seen a lot of his aunt, without telling his mother. Leisha was a Sleepless, the economic enemy. She was also fair, generous, and idealistic. It troubled him.

So many things troubled him.

Touring the plant took over an hour. Jordan tried to see the place through Leisha’s eyes: people instead of cost-efficient robots, shouted arguments on the line, rock music blaring. Rejected parts from Receiving Inspection half-repacked in dirty cartons. Somebody’s gnawed-on sandwich kicked into a corner.

When Jordan finally led Leisha into Hawke’s office, Hawke rose from behind his massive, rough-hewn desk of Georgia pine. “Ms. Camden. An honor.”

“Mr. Hawke.”

She held out her hand. Hawke took it, and Jordan watched her slight recoil. People meeting Calvin Hawke for the first time usually recoiled; not until that second had Jordan realized how intently he’d wondered if Leisha would. It wasn’t Hawke’s huge size as much as his disconcerting physical sharpness: beaked nose, cheekbones like chisels, piercing black eyes, even the necklace of sharpened wolf’s teeth which had belonged to his great-great-great-grandfather, a mountain man who had married three Indian women and killed three hundred braves. Or so Hawke said. Would wolf’s teeth nearly two hundred years old, Jordan wondered, still be so sharp?

Hawke’s would.

Leisha smiled up at Hawke, nearly a foot taller despite her own height, and said, “Thank you for letting me come.” When Hawke said nothing, she added directly, “Why did you?”

He pretended she’d asked a different question. “You’re safe enough here. Even without your goons. There is no baseless hatred in my plants.”

Jordan thought of Mayleen, but said nothing. You didn’t contradict Hawke in public.

Leisha said coolly, “An interesting use of ‘baseless,’ Mr. Hawke. In the law we call a usage like that insinuating. But now that I am here, I’d like to ask some questions, if I may.”

“Of course,” Hawke said. He folded his enormous arms across his chest and leaned back against his desk, apparently all agreeable helpfulness. On the desk sat a comlink, a coffee mug with the Harvard logo, and a Cherokee ceremonial doll. None of them had been there this morning. Hawke, Jordan saw, had been assembling his stage set. The back of Jordan’s neck prickled.

Leisha said, “Your scooters are stripped-down models, with the simplest possible Y-cones and fewer options than any other model on the market.”

“That’s right,” Hawke said pleasantly.

“And their reliability is less than any other model. They need more replacement parts, sooner. In fact, nothing but the Y-cone deflector shield carries any kind of warranty, and of course the deflectors are under patent and aren’t subcontracted here.”

“You’ve done your homework,” Hawke said.

“The scooters can reach a maximum of only thirty miles per hour.”

“True.”

“They sell for 10 percent more than a comparable Schwinn or Ford or Sony.”

“Also true.”

“Yet you’ve captured 32 percent of the domestic market, you’ve opened three new plants in the last year, and you’ve filed a corporate return on assets of 28 percent when the industry average is barely 11 percent.”

Hawke smiled.

Leisha took a step toward him. She said intently, “Don’t go on doing it, Mr. Hawke. It’s a terrible mistake. Not for us—for you.”

Hawke said genially, “Are you threatening my plant, Ms. Camden?”

Jordan’s stomach tightened. Hawke was deliberately misinterpreting what Leisha had said, turning it from a plea into a threat so he could have a fight instead of a discussion. So this was why he’d let her visit a We-Sleep plant: he wanted the cheap thrill of a face-to-face confrontation. The dirt-poor leader of a national political movement going to the mat with the big-time Sleepless lawyer. Disappointment swept through Jordan; Hawke was bigger than that.

He needed Hawke to be bigger than that.

Leisha said, “Of course I’m not threatening you, Mr. Hawke, and you know it. I’m merely trying to point out that your We-Sleep Movement is dangerous to the country, and to yourselves. Don’t be so hypocritical as to pretend not to understand.”

Hawke went on smiling genially, but Jordan saw a tiny muscle in his neck, just above a yellowed wolf tooth, begin to beat rhythmically.

“I could hardly help understand, Ms. Camden. You’ve hammered on this one stone in the press for years now.”

“And I’ll go on hammering. Whatever drives Sleepers and Sleepless farther apart is ultimately no good for either of us. You have people buying your scooters not because they’re good, not because they’re cheap, not because they’re beautiful, but solely because they’re made by Sleepers, with profits going only to Sleepers. You—and all your followers in other industries—are splitting the country in two economically, Mr. Hawke, creating a dual economy based on hate. That’s dangerous for everyone!”

“But especially for the economic interests of Sleepless?” Hawke asked, apparently all disinterested interest. Jordan saw that he thought he’d gained ground by Leisha’s sudden emotion.

“No,” Leisha said wearily. “Come on, Mr. Hawke, you know better. Sleepless economic interests are based in the global economy, especially in finance and high-tech skills. You could manufacture every vehicle, building, and widget in America and not touch them.”

Them, Jordan thought. Not us. He tried to see if Hawke had noticed.

Hawke said silkily, “Then why are you here, Ms. Camden?”

“For the same reason I go to Sanctuary. To rail against stupidity.”

The tiny muscle in Hawke’s neck beat faster; Jordan saw that he hadn’t expected Leisha to bracket him with Sanctuary, the enemy. Hawke reached across his desk and pressed a buzzer. Leisha’s bodyguards tensed. Hawke tossed them a look of contempt: traitors to their own biological side. The office door opened and a young black woman entered, looking puzzled.

“Hawke? Coltrane say you’all want to see me?”

“Yes, Tina. Thank you. This lady is interested in our plant. Would you mind telling her a little about your job here?”

Tina turned obediently, and without recognition, to Leisha. “I work Station Nine,” she said. “Before that, I don’t have nothing. My family don’t have nothing. We walk to Dole, pick up the food, walk home, eat it. We wait to die.” She went on, telling a story familiar by now to Jordan, different only in Tina’s melodramatic approach to telling it. Which was undoubtedly why Hawke had had her waiting. Fed, sheltered, clothed cheaply by the Dole—and completely unable to compete beyond that economic level. Until Calvin Hawke and the We-Sleep Movement provided a job that paid wages, because the market for it had been wrested out of the national market on wholly uneconomic terms. “I buy only We-Sleep products, I get to sell my We-Sleep products,” Tina chanted fervently. “The only way we get any of the pie!”

Hawke said, “And if somebody in your community buys a different product because it’s cheaper or better…”

“That somebody ain’t in my community very long,” Tina said darkly. “We take care of our own.”

“Thank you, Tina,” Hawke said. Tina seemed to know this was dismissal; she left, but not before throwing Hawke the same look they all did. Jordan hoped that Leisha recognized the look from legal clients she had kept from a different sort of prison. His stomach relaxed slightly.

Leisha said wryly to Hawke, “Quite a performance.”

“More than just a performance. The dignity of individual effort—an old Yagaiist tenet, isn’t it? Or can’t you allow yourself to recognize economic facts?”

“I recognize all the limitations of a free-market economy, Mr. Hawke. Supply and demand puts workers on the exact same footing as widgets, and people are not widgets. But you cannot create economic health by unionizing consumers the way you would unionize workers.”

“That’s just how I am creating economic health, Ms. Camden.”

“Only temporarily,” Leisha said. Abruptly she leaned forward. “Do you expect your consumers to stay away from better products forever on the basis of class hatred? Class hatred diminishes when prosperity lets people rise in class.”

“My people will never rise in class to equal Sleepless. And you know it. Yours is the Darwinian edge. So we capitalize on what we do have: sheer numbers.”

“But it doesn’t have to be a Darwinian struggle!”

Hawke stood. The muscle in his neck was still now; Jordan could see that Hawke felt he’d won. “Doesn’t it, Ms. Camden? Who made it so? The Sleepless control 28 percent of the economy now, despite the fact that you’re a tiny minority. The percentage is growing. You yourself are a stockholder, through the Aurora Holding Company, in the Samsung-Chrysler plant across the river.”

Jordan was jolted. He had not known that. For a second, suspicion flooded him, corrosive as acid. His aunt had asked to come here, asked to talk to Hawke…He looked again at Leisha. She was smiling. No, that wasn’t her motive. What was wrong with him? Would he spend his whole life uncertain about everything?

Leisha said, “There is nothing illegal in owning stock, Mr. Hawke. I do it for the most obvious of reasons: to turn a profit. A profit on the best possible goods and services that can be produced in fair competition, offered to anyone who wishes to buy. Anyone.”

“Very commendable,” Hawke said bitingly. “But of course, not everyone can buy.”

“Just so.”

“Then we agree on at least one thing: Some people are shut out of your wonderful Darwinian economy. Do you want them to take that meekly?”

Leisha said, “I want to open the doors and bring them in.”

“How, Ms. Camden? How do we compete on equal grounds with the Sleepless, or with mainstream companies funded in whole or in part by Sleepless financial genius?”

“Not with hatred creating two economies.”

“Then with what? Tell me.”

Before Leisha could answer, the door suddenly swung open and three men leaped into the room.

Leisha’s bodyguards immediately blocked her, guns drawn. But the men must have expected this: They brandished cameras, not guns, and began filming. Since all they could see was the phalanx of bodyguards, they filmed that. This bewildered the guards, who looked at one another sideways. Meanwhile Jordan, backed into a corner, was the only one who saw the sudden, slight, telltale brightening of an optic panel high on the wall, in a room widely touted as being without surveillance of any kind.

“Out,” the head bodyguard, or whatever he was called, said between his teeth. The film crew obligingly left. And no one but Jordan had seen Hawke’s camera.

Why? What did Hawke want with a clandestine still he could claim was taken by a legitimate film crew? And should Jordan tell his aunt that Hawke had it? Could it harm her?

Hawke was watching Jordan. Hawke nodded once, with such warmth in his eyes, such tender understanding of Jordan’s dilemma that Jordan was immediately reassured. Hawke meant no personal harm to Leisha. He didn’t operate that way. His goals were large ones, sweeping ones, right ones, but they took note of individuals, as no Sleepless except Leisha ever seemed to do. No matter what the history books said was necessary, Hawke did not break individual eggs to create his revolution.

Jordan relaxed.

Hawke said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Camden.”

Leisha looked at him bleakly. “No harm done, Mr. Hawke.” After a moment she added deliberately, “Is there?”

“No. Let me give you a memento of your visit.”

“A…”

“A memento.” From a closet—the bodyguards tensed all over again—Hawke wheeled a We-Sleep scooter. “Of course, it probably won’t go as fast, or far, or reliably as the one you already have. If you ever deign to use a scooter instead of a ground-or aircar, as over 50 percent of the population has to do.”

Leisha, Jordan saw, had finally lost her patience. She let her breath out between her teeth; it whistled fitfully. “No thank you, Mr. Hawke. I ride a Kessler-Eagle. A high-quality scooter made, I believe, at a factory owned by Native American Sleepers in New Mexico. They are trying very hard to market a superior product at a fair price, but of course they represent a minority without a built-in protected market. Hopi, I believe.”

Jordan didn’t dare look at Hawke’s face.

As she climbed into her car, Leisha said to Jordan, “I’m sorry for that last jab.”

“Don’t be,” Jordan said.

“Well, for your sake. I know you believe in what you’re doing here, Jordan—”

“Yes,” Jordan said quietly. “I do. Despite.”

“When you say that, you look like your mother.”

The same couldn’t be said for Leisha, Jordan thought, and he felt immediately disloyal. But it was true. Alice looked older than forty-three, Leisha much younger. The aging caused by gravity was in the fine-boned face; the aging caused by tissue decay was not. Shouldn’t she, then, look 21.5? Half the aging. She didn’t; she looked about thirty and, apparently, always would. A beautiful and tense thirty, the faint lines around her eyes more like delicate micro-circuitry than soft gullies.

Leisha said, “How is your mother?”

Jordan heard all the complexities in the question. He didn’t feel up to grappling with them. “Fine,” he said. And then, “Are you going from here to Sanctuary?”

Leisha, half in and half out of her car, lifted her face to his. “How did you know?”

“You have the look you get when you’re going to or coming from.”

She looked down; he shouldn’t have mentioned Sanctuary. She said, “Tell Hawke I won’t make a legal fuss over the wall camera. And don’t you agonize about not telling me, either. You’ve got enough contradictions to reconcile already, Jordy. But you know, I get tired of these overwhelming physical presences like your Mr. Hawke. All charisma and outsized ego, using the intensity of their beliefs to hit you like a fist. It’s wearing.”

She swung her long legs into the car. Jordan laughed, a sound that made Leisha glance at him, a slight question in her green eyes, but he just shook his head, kissed her, and closed the car door. As the car pulled away he straightened, not laughing. Charisma. Outsized egos. Overwhelming physical presences.

How was it possible, after all this time, that Leisha didn’t know she was one, too?

Leisha leaned her head against the leather seat of the Baker Enterprises corporate plane. She was the only passenger. Below her the Mississippi plain began to climb into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Leisha’s hand brushed the book on the seat beside her and she picked it up. It was a diversion from Calvin Hawke.

They had made the cover too garish. Abraham Lincoln, beardless, stood in black frock coat and top hat against the background of a burning city—Atlanta? Richmond?—grimacing horribly. Crimson and marigold flames licked at a purple sky. Crimson and marigold and fuchsia. Online, the colors would be even more lurid. In three-dimensional hologram, they would be practically fluorescent.

Leisha sighed. Lincoln had never stood in a burning city. At the time of her book’s events, he had been bearded. And the book itself was a careful scholarly study of Lincoln’s speeches in the light of Constitutional law, not the light of battle. Nothing in it grimaced. Nothing burned.

She ran her finger over the embossed name on the cover: Elizabeth Kaminsky.

“Why?” Alice had asked in her blunt way.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Leisha had said. “My law cases get too much notoriety as it is. I want the book to earn whatever scholarly attention it’s really worth rather than a—”

“I see that,” Alice retorted. “But why that pseudonym, of all choices?” Leisha hadn’t had an answer. A week later she thought of one, but by that time the stiff little visit was over and Leisha wasn’t in California to deliver it. Leisha almost phoned her, but it was 4:00 A.M. in Chicago, 2:00 A.M. in Morro Bay, and of course Alice and Beck would be asleep. And she and Alice seldom phoned each other anyway.

Because of something Lincoln said in 1864, Alice. Combined with the facts that I’m 43 years old, the same age our father was when we were born, and that no one, not even you, believes that I get tired of it all.

But the truth was, she probably wouldn’t have said that to Alice, not in Chicago nor in California. Somehow whatever she said to Alice turned faintly pompous. And whatever Alice said to her—like that mystic nonsense of the Twin Group—seemed to Leisha riddled with holes in both logic and evidence. They were like two people trying to communicate in a language foreign to both of them, reduced to nodding and smiling, the initial good will not quite enough to offset the strain.

Twenty years ago, for one moment, it had seemed as if it might be different between them. But now…

Twenty-two thousand Sleepless on Earth, 95 percent of them in the United States. Eighty percent of those within Sanctuary. And since nearly all Sleepless babies were now born, not created in vitro, most Sleepless were now born inside Sanctuary. Parents across the country continued to purchase other genetic alterations: enhanced IQ, sharpened sight, a strong immune system, high cheekbones—anything at all, it sometimes seemed to Leisha, within the legal parameters, no matter how trivial. But not Sleeplessness. Genetic alterations were expensive; why purchase for your beloved baby a lifetime of bigotry, prejudice, and physical danger? Better to choose an assimilated genemod. Beautiful or brainy children might encounter natural envy, but usually not virulent hatred. They were not viewed as a different race, one endlessly conspiring at power, endlessly controlling behind the scenes, endlessly feared and scorned. The Sleepless, Leisha had written for a national magazine, were to the twenty-first century what Jews had been to the fourteenth.

Twenty years of legal fighting to change that perception, and nothing had changed.

“I am tired,” Leisha said experimentally, aloud. The pilot didn’t turn around; he wasn’t much for conversation. The foothills, unchanging, continued to slide away 20,000 feet below.

Leisha unfolded her work station. It accomplished no good to be tired: not of the troubling gulf between her and Alice, not of Calvin Hawke in the fight behind her, not of Sanctuary in the fight ahead. They would all still be there. And meanwhile, she could at least get some work done. Three more hours to upstate New York, two back to Chicago, enough time to finish the brief for Calder v. Hansen Metallurgy. She had a client meeting in Chicago at 4:00 P.M., a deposition at 5:30 P.M., another client meeting at 8:00 P.M., and then the rest of the night to prepare for trial tomorrow. She might just fit everything in.

The law was the one thing she never tired of. The one thing—despite twenty years of the inevitable crap that went with its practice—she still believed in. A society with a functioning, reasonably uncorrupted (say, 80 percent) judicial system was a society that still believed in itself.

More cheerful now, Leisha settled into a knotty question of prima facie assumption. But the book still lay on the seat, distracting her, along with Alice’s question, and her unspoken answer.

In April 1864 Lincoln had written to Kentuckian A. G. Hodges. The northern states were enraged over the racial massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow, the federal treasury was nearly empty, the war was costing the Union two million dollars a day. Daily Lincoln was reviled in the press; weekly he was locked in combat with Congress. In the next month Grant would lose 10,000 men at Cold Harbor, more at Spotsylvania Courthouse. Lincoln wrote to Hodges, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

Leisha shoved her book under the seat of the plane and bent over her workstation, leaning into the law.

Jennifer Sharifi raised her forehead from the ground, rose gracefully, and bent to roll up her prayer rug. The rough mountain grass was slightly wet; blades clung crookedly to the underside of the rug. Holding it away from the white folds of her abbaya, Jennifer walked across the small clearing in the woods to her aircar. Her long, unbound black hair stirred in the faint wind.

Alight plane streaked overhead. Jennifer frowned: Leisha Camden, already. Jennifer was late.

Let Leisha wait. Or let Richard deal with her. Jennifer had not wanted Leisha here in the first place. Why should Sanctuary welcome a woman who worked against it at every turn? Even the Quran, in its quaint pre-globalnet simplicity, was explicit about traitors: “Whosoever commits aggression against you, you commit/ him like as he has committed against you.”

The small plane with the Baker Enterprises logo disappeared into the trees.

Jennifer slipped into her car, her mind busy with the rest of the day ahead. Were it not for the solace and quiet of morning and afternoon prayer, she didn’t think she could face some of her days. “But you have no religious faith,” Richard had said, smiling, “you’re not even a believer.” Jennifer hadn’t tried to explain to him that religious belief was not the point. The will to believe created its own power, its own faith, and, ultimately, its own will. Through the practice of faith, whatever its specific rituals, one brought into existence the object of that faith. The believer became the Creator.

I believe, Jennifer said each dawn and each noon, kneeling on the grass or the leaves or the snow, in Sanctuary.

She shaded her eyes, trying to see exactly where Leisha’s plane had disappeared. It was being tracked, Jennifer assumed, by both the Langdon sensors and the antiaircraft lasers. She lifted her aircar, flying well under the Y-field dome.

What would her paternal great-grandmother, Najla Fatima Noor el-Dahar, have said about a faith such as hers? On the other hand, her maternal great-grandmother, whose granddaughter became an American movie star, had herself survived as an Irish immigrant turned Brooklyn cleaning lady and thus probably understood something about power and will.

Not that great-grandmothers, anybody’s great-grandmothers, mattered any longer. Nor grandfathers nor fathers. A new race had always been required to sacrifice its roots to its own survival. Zeus, Jennifer would guess, had mourned neither Cronus nor Rhea.

Sanctuary spread below her in the morning sun. In twenty-two years it had grown to nearly 300 square miles, occupying a fifth of Cattaraugus County, New York. Jennifer had acquired the Allegany Indian Reservation, immediately after the repeal of Congressional trust restrictions. She had paid a sum that made the Seneca tribe that sold it comfortable in Manhattan, Paris, and Dallas. There hadn’t actually been very many Senecas left to sell; not all threatened groups, Jennifer well knew, had the adaptable skills of the Sleepless—skills such as buying land when the owners were initially reluctant to sell. Or acquiring antiaircraft lasers on the international arms market. Or, if those other groups did have these skills, they lacked the cause to make them focused and clean and holy. To call survival itself what it actually was: a holy war. Jihad.

Allegany had been unique among Native American reservations in containing an entire non-Indian city, Salamanca, leased from the Senecas by city residents since 1892. Salamanca had been included in Jennifer’s purchase. The lessees all had received eviction notices, and after multiple court fights for which Salamanca residents had little money and Sanctuary had the donated services of the best Sleepless lawyers in the country, the city’s outdated buildings, gutted, had become the shells of Sanctuary’s high-tech city—research hospital, college, securities exchange, power and maintenance centers, and the most sophisticated telecommunications in existence, all surrounded by ecologically maintained woodland.

In the distance, beyond Sanctuary’s gates, Jennifer could see the daily line of trucks toiling up the mountain road, bringing in food, building materials, low-tech supplies—everything Sanctuary would rather import than produce, which included everything nonchallenging, nonprofitable, or nonessential. Not that Sanctuary was dependent on the daily trucks. It had enough of everything to run self-sufficiently for a year, if necessary. It wouldn’t be necessary. Sleepless controlled too many factories, distribution channels, agricultural research projects, commodity exchanges, and law offices on the Outside. Sanctuary had not ever been planned as a survivalist retreat; it was a fortified command center.

The airfield groundcar was already parked in front of the house Jennifer shared with her husband and two children at the edge of Argus City. The house was a geodesic dome, graceful and efficient, but not opulent. Build the security facilities first, Tony Indivino had argued twenty-two years ago. Then build the technical and educational facilities, then the storage warehouses, and the individual dwellings last. Only now was Sanctuary getting around to new individual dwellings.

Jennifer adjusted the folds of her abbaya, took a deep breath, and entered her house.

Leisha stood by the southern glass wall of the living room, staring at the gold-framed holo portrait of Tony, who stared back from smiling, youthful eyes. Sunlight caught in Leisha’s blonde hair and blazed. When she heard Jennifer and turned, Leisha was backlit by the windows and Jennifer couldn’t see her expression.

The two women stared at each other.

“Jennifer.”

“Hello, Leisha.”

“You’re looking well.”

“As are you.”

“And Richard? How are he and the kids?”

“Fine, thank you,” Jennifer said.

There was a silence, prickly as heat.

Leisha said, “I think you know why I’m here.”

“Why, no, I don’t,” Jennifer said, although of course she did. Sanctuary monitored the movements of all Sleepless who remained outside, but none more than Leisha Camden and Kevin Baker.

Leisha made a brief, impatient noise. “Don’t be evasive with me, Jennifer. If we can’t agree on anything else, let’s at least agree to be honest.”

She never changed, Jennifer thought. All that intelligence, all that experience, and yet she did not change. A triumph of naive idealism over both intelligence and experience.

The deliberately blind deserved not to see.

“All right, Leisha. We’ll be honest. You’re here to find out if yesterday’s attack on the We-Sleep textile factory in Atlanta originated in Sanctuary.”

Leisha stared before she exploded. “Good God, Jennifer, of course I’m not! Don’t you think I know you don’t fight that way? Especially not against a low-tech operation grossing less than half a million annual?”

Jennifer muffled a smile; the pairing of objections, moral and economic, was pure Leisha. And of course Sanctuary hadn’t directed the attack. The We-Sleep people were insignificant. She said, “I’m relieved to hear your opinion of us has improved.”

Leisha waved her arm. Inadvertently, her hand brushed Tony’s holo; the image turned its head in her direction. “My opinion is irrelevant, as you’ve made clear enough. I’m here because Kevin gave me this.” She pulled hard-copy from her pocket and thrust it at Jennifer, who realized with a nasty jolt what it was.

She made her face impassive, realizing too late that impassivity would tell Leisha just as much as emotion. How had Leisha and Kevin gotten the hard-copy? Her mind ran over the possibilities, but she wasn’t a datanet expert. She would have to pull Will Rinaldi and Cassie Blumenthal off their other projects immediately to go over the entire net for gates and bubbles and geysers…

“Don’t bother,” Leisha said. “Kevin’s wizards didn’t get it off the Sanctuary net. This was mailed to me—to me directly—by one of your own.”

That was even worse. Someone inside Sanctuary, someone who secretly sided with the Sleeper-lovers, someone who was without the ability to recognize a war of survival… Unless of course Leisha was lying. But Jennifer had never caught Leisha in a lie. It was part of Leisha’s pathetic, dangerous naivete to prefer unadjusted truth.

Leisha crumpled the paper in her hand and threw it across the living room. “How could you divide us further like this, Jennifer? Set up a separate Sleepless Council in secret, with membership limited to those who take this so-called oath of solidarity; ‘I vow to hold the interests of Sanctuary above all other loyalties, personal, political, and economic, and to pledge, to its survival and so to my own, my life, fortune, and sacred honor.’ Good God—what an unholy alliance of religious fanaticism and the Declaration of Independence! But you always did have a tin ear!”

Jennifer gazed at her impassively. “You are being stupid.” It was the worst epithet either of them had. “Only you and Kevin and your handful of soft-minded doves don’t see that this is a war of survival. War demands clearly drawn lines, especially for strategic information. We can’t afford voting privileges for the fifth column.”

Leisha’s eyes narrowed. “This is not a war. A war is attack and response. If we don’t counterattack, if we go on being productive and law-abiding citizens, eventually we’ll win assimilation by sheer economic power—like every other newly-franchised group. But not if we split into factions like this! You used to know that, Jenny!”

She said sharply, “Don’t call me that!” Just barely did she stop herself from glancing at Tony’s picture.

Leisha didn’t apologize.

More calmly, Jennifer added, “Assimilation doesn’t come with economic power alone. It’s won by political power, which we don’t have, and in a democracy never will have. There aren’t enough of us to form a significant voting bloc. You used to know that.”

“You’ve already set up the strongest covert lobby in Washington. You buy the votes you need. Political power flows from money, it always has; the concept of society is about money. Any values we want to change or advocate, we have to change or advocate within the framework of money. And we are. But how can we advocate a single trade ecology for Sleeper and Sleepless if you split us into warring factions?”

“We wouldn’t be split if you and yours could recognize a war when you saw one.”

“I recognize hatred when I see it. It’s in your stupid oath.”

They had reached an impasse, the same old impasse. Jennifer crossed the room to the bar. Her black hair floated behind her. “Would you like a drink, Leisha?”

“Jennifer…” Leisha said, and stopped. After a moment, with a visible effort, she went on. “If your Sanctuary Council becomes a reality…you’ll shut us out. Me and Kevin and Jean-Claude and Stella and the others. We won’t have a voting voice in statements to the media, we won’t be included in governance decisions, we won’t even be able to help with the new Sleepless kids because nobody who takes the oath will be allowed to use Groupnet, only the Sanctuary net… What’s next? A boycott on doing business with any of us?”

Jennifer didn’t answer, and Leisha said slowly, “Oh my God. You are. You are thinking of an economic boycott…”

“That would not be my decision. It would take the whole Sanctuary Council. I doubt they would vote such a boycott.”

“But you would.”

“I was never a Yagaiist, Leisha. I don’t believe in the predominance of individual excellence over the welfare of the community. Both are important.”

“This isn’t about Yagaiism and you know it. This is about control, Jennifer. You hate everything you can’t control—just like the worst of the Sleepers do. But you go farther than they do. You make control into something holy because you need holiness as well. This is all about what you, Jennifer Sharifi, need. Not what the community needs.”

Jennifer walked from the room, gripping her hands together to keep them from shaking. It was her own fault, of course, that any other person had enough power over her to cause them to shake. A fault, a weakness, that she had failed to root out. Her failure. In the hall her children barreled into her from their playroom.

“Mom! Come see what we built!”

Jennifer put one hand on each of their heads. There was a knot somewhere in Najla’s coarse hair. Ricky’s, darker than his older sister’s but finer, felt like cool silk. Jennifer’s hands steadied.

The children caught sight of the living room. “Aunt Leisha! Aunt Leisha’s here!” Their hair left Jennifer’s fingers. “Aunt Leisha, come see what we built on CAD!”

“Of course,” Jennifer heard Leisha’s voice say. “I want to. But let me just ask your mother one more thing.”

Jennifer didn’t turn around. If the traitor Inside had mailed Leisha notice of the oath of solidarity, what else had she been mailed?

But all Leisha said was, “Did Richard receive the subpoena for Simpson v. Offshore Fishing?”

“Yes. He did. He’s preparing his expert testimony now, in fact.”

“Good,” Leisha said bleakly.

Ricky looked from Leisha to his mother. His voice had lost some of its exuberance. “Mom…should I go get Dad? Aunt Leisha will want to see Dad…won’t she?”

Jennifer smiled at her son. She could feel the lavishness of her own smile, lush with relief. Offshore fishing rights: Almost she could pity Leisha. Her days were given to such triviality. “Yes, of course, Ricky,” she said, turning the lavish smile on Leisha, “go get your father. Your Aunt Leisha will want to visit with him. Of course she will.”

9

“Leisha,” said the receptionist in her law office, “This gentleman has been waiting to see you for three hours. He doesn’t have an appointment. I told him you might not even be back today, but he stayed anyway.”

The man stood, lurching a little with the stiffness of someone who has held muscles too long in one tense position. He was short and thin, oddly wispy, dressed in a rumpled brown suit that was neither cheap nor expensive. In one hand he held a folded kiosk tabloid. Sleeper, Leisha thought. She always knew.

“Leisha Camden?”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not seeing any new clients. If you need a lawyer, you’ll need to ask elsewhere.”

“I think you’ll take this case,” the man said, surprising her. His voice was considerably less wispy than his appearance. “At any rate, you’ll want to know about it. Please give me ten minutes.” He opened the tabloid and held it out to her. On the front page was her picture with Calvin Hawke, over the headline, “Sleepless Worried Enough to Investigate We-Sleep Movement… Have We Got Them on the Run?”

Now she knew why Hawke had permitted her to visit the scooter factory.

“It says this picture was taken this morning,” the man said. “My, my, my,” and Leisha knew he did not work in telecommunications.

“Come into my office, Mr…”

“Adam Walcott. Dr. Adam Walcott.”

“A medical doctor?”

He looked directly at her. His eyes were a pale, milky blue, like frosted glass. “Genetic researcher.”

The sun was setting over Lake Michigan. Leisha transluced the glass wall, sat down opposite Dr. Walcott, and waited.

Walcott twisted his legs, which were remarkably spindly, into pretzels around the legs of his chair. “I work for a private research firm, Ms. Camden. Samplice Biotechnical. We develop refinements on genetic modeling and alteration and offer these products to the bigger houses that do in vitro gene altering. We developed the Pastan procedure for preternaturally sharp hearing.”

Leisha nodded neutrally; preternaturally sharp hearing had always struck her as a terrible idea. The benefits of hearing a whisper six rooms away were outweighed by the pain of hearing shatter-rock three rooms away. P-hearing kids were fitted for sound-control implants at two months of age.

“Samplice gives its researchers a lot of leeway.” Walcott stopped to cough, a sound so thin and tentative that Leisha thought of ghosts coughing. “They say they hope we’ll stumble on something wonderful, but the truth is that the company is in a terrible state of disorganization and they just don’t know how to supervise scientists. About two years ago I asked for permission to work on some of the peptides associated with Sleeplessness.”

Leisha said wryly, “I wouldn’t think there was anything associated with Sleeplessness that hadn’t been researched already.”

Walcott seemed to find this funny; he gave a gasping chuckle, un-twisted his skinny legs from around the chair, and twisted them around each other. “Most people think not. But I was working with the peptides in adult Sleepless, and I was using some new approaches pioneered at L’Institut Technique de Lyons. By Gaspard-Thiereux. Do you know his work?”

“I’ve heard of him.”

“You probably don’t know this new approach. It’s very new itself.” Walcott wound a hand through his hair and tugged; both hand and hair were insubstantial. “I should have started by asking how secure this office was.”

“Completely,” Leisha said. “Or you wouldn’t be in it.” But Walcott only nodded; apparently he was not one of those Sleepers offended by Sleepless security. Her estimation of him rose a little.

“To shorten this recital, what I think I’ve found is a way to create sleeplessness in adults who were born Sleepers.”

Leisha’s hands moved to pick up…what? Something. The hands stopped. She stared at them. “To…”

“Not all the problems are worked out yet.” Walcott launched into a complicated thesis of altered peptide manufacture, neuron synapses, and redundant information coding in DNA, none of which Leisha could follow. She sat quietly, while the universe took a different shape.

“Dr. Walcott…you’re sure?”

“About lysine transference redundancy?”

“No. About creating sleeplessness in Sleepers—”

Walcott ran his other hand through his hair. “No, of course we’re not sure. How could we be? We need controlled experiments, additional replications, not to mention funding for—”

“But in theory you can do it.”

“Oh, theory,” Walcott said, and even in her shock this seemed an odd dismissal for a scientist to make. Evidently Walcott was a pragmatist. “Yes, we can do it in theory.”

“With all the side effects? Including…longevity?”

“Well, that’s one of the things we don’t know. This is all very rough yet. But before we go any further, we need a lawyer.”

The sentence centered Leisha. Something was not right here. She found it. “Why are you here alone, Dr. Walcott? Surely any legal situation connected with this research is the responsibility of Samplice, and surely the firm has its own counsel.”

“Director Lee doesn’t know I’m here. I’m acting on my own. I need a lawyer in a personal capacity.”

Leisha picked up a paper magnet—that must have been what her fingers had been searching for, yes, why not—turned it on, turned it off, stroked it with her fingers. The transluced window glowed behind Walcott’s head. “Go on.”

“When I first realized where this line of research was heading, my assistant and I took it off-line. Completely. We kept no records in the company datanet, ran no simulations on anything except free-standing computers, wiped all programs each night, and took hard-copies—the only copies—of all progress home with us each night in portable safes, in duplicate. We told no one what we were doing, not even the director.”

“Why did you do that, Doctor?”

“Because Samplice is a public company, and 62 percent of the stock is divided between two mutual funds controlled by Sleepless.”

When he turned his head, the pale milky eyes seemed to absorb light.

“One of the mutual funds is offered by Canniston Fidelity; the other is traded from Sanctuary. Forgive me, Ms. Camden, for being so blunt, and even more for the reasoning behind the bluntness. But Director Lee is not a particularly admirable man. He has been indicted before—although not convicted—of misuse of funds. My assistant and I were afraid that if he was approached by anyone from Sanctuary to discontinue the research…or anything…in the beginning my assistant and I had only a glimmer. A wild enough glimmer that we weren’t sure we could interest any other reputable research company. To tell the truth, we’re still not. It’s still just theory. And Sanctuary could have offered so very much money to just cut the whole thing off…”

Leisha was careful to not answer.

“Well. Two months ago, something odd happened. We knew, of course, that the Samplice net probably wasn’t secure—what net is, realistically? That’s why we weren’t on it. But Timmy and I—Timmy is my assistant, Dr. Timothy Herlinger—didn’t realize that people scanned the nets not only for what was on it, but for what wasn’t. Apparently they do. Somebody outside the company must have been routinely matching lists of employees with net files, because Timmy and I came into our lab one morning and there was a message on our terminal: ‘What the hell have you two guys been working on for two months?’ ”

Leisha said, “How do you know the message was from outside the company and not a snide hint of discovery from your director?”

“Because our director couldn’t discover a boil on his ass,” Walcott said, surprising her again. “Although that’s not the real reason. The message was signed ‘stockholder.’ But what really scared us, Timmy and me, was that it was on a free-standing computer. No telelinks of any kind. Not even electricity. It’s an IBM-Y, running directly off Y-energy cones. And the lab was locked.”

Something prickled in Leisha’s stomach. “Other keys?”

“Only Director Lee. Who was at a conference in Barbados.”

“He gave his key to someone. Or a duplicate of it. Or lost it. Or Dr. Herlinger did.”

Walcott shrugged. “Not Timmy. But let me go on with my story. We ignored the message. But we decided to put the work we had—by this time we were almost there—somewhere safe. So we destroyed all but a single copy, rented a safe-deposit box in the downtown branch of the First National Bank, and took just one key. At night we buried the key in my back yard, under a rose bush. An Endicott Perfection—triple roses blooming consecutively throughout your spring and fall garden.”

Leisha looked at Walcott as if he had lost his mind. He smiled faintly. “Didn’t you read pirate books as a child, Ms. Camden?”

“I never read much fiction.”

“Well. I suppose it sounds melodramatic, but we couldn’t think what else to do.” He ran his left hand again through the thinning hair, which had begun to look like tangled fringe. All at once his voice lost its confident strength, turning wispy and tired. “The key is still there, under the rose bush. I dug it up this morning. But the research papers are gone from the safe-deposit box. It’s empty.”

Leisha got up and walked to the window. Unthinking, she cleared the glass. Blood-red light low over Lake Michigan stained the water. In the east a crescent moon rode high.

“When did you discover this theft?”

“This morning. I dug up the key to go get the papers so Timmy and I could add something, and then we went to the bank. I told the bank officials the box was empty. They said there was nothing registered as in it. I told them I had personally put nine sheets of paper into the box.”

“You verified that on-line at the time of rental.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Did you get a hard-copy receipt?”

“Yes.” He passed it to her. Leisha examined it. “But then when the bank manager called up the electronic record, it showed that Dr. Adam Walcott had come back the next day and removed all the papers, and that Dr. Adam Walcott had signed a receipt to that effect. And Ms. Camden—they had that receipt.”

“With your signature.”

“Yes. But I never signed it! It’s a forgery!”

“No, it’ll be your handwriting,” Leisha said. “How many documents a month do you sign at Samplice, Doctor?”

“Dozens, I suppose.”

“Supplies requests, fund disbursements, routing slips. Do you read them all?”

“No, but—”

“Have any secretaries left recently?”

“Why…I suppose so. Director Lee has great trouble keeping support staff.” The wispy brows rushed together. “But the director had no idea what we were working on!”

“No, I’m sure he didn’t.” Leisha put both hands across her stomach. Long ago clients had stopped making her queasy. Any lawyer who practiced for twenty years got used to misfits, criminals, manipulators, heroes, charlatans, nut cases, victims, and shitballs. You put your belief in the law, not in the client.

But no lawyer had ever before had a client who could turn Sleepers into Sleepless.

She willed the queasiness away. “Go on, Doctor.”

“It’s not that anyone could duplicate our work,” Walcott said, still in that faint, die-away voice. “For one thing, we didn’t get to put on the last, very critical equations, which Timmy and I are still working out. But all of the work is ours, and we want it back. Timmy gave up several chamber-music rehearsals to our efforts. And, of course, there will be medical prizes someday.”

Leisha gazed at Walcott’s face. An alteration in body chemistry that could transform the human race, and this wispy man seemed to see it primarily in terms of rose bushes, pirate games, prizes, and chamber music. She said, “You wanted a lawyer to tell you where you stood legally. Personally.”

“Yes. And to represent Timmy and me against the bank, or Samplice, if it comes to that.” Suddenly he looked at her with that disconcerting directness that he seemed able to summon but not maintain. “We came to you because you’re a Sleepless. And because you’re Leisha Camden. Everyone knows you don’t believe in separating the human race into two so-called species, and of course our work would end that sort of…this sort of…” He waved the tabloid picture of her and Calvin Hawke. “And, of course, theft is theft, even within a company.”

“Samplice didn’t steal your research, Dr. Walcott. Neither did the bank.”

“Then who…”

“I have no evidence. But I’d like to see both you and Dr. Herlinger here tomorrow at 8:00 A.M. And in the meantime—this is important—don’t write anything down. Anywhere.”

“I understand.”

She said, not knowing she was going to speak until the words were out, “Making Sleepers into Sleepless…”

“Yes,” he said, “well.” And he turned away from her face to stare across her otherwise utilitarian office at the exotic flowers, riotous with color or pale as moonlight, planted under artificial light in their specially-built corner bed.

“They’re all legitimate,” Kevin said. He came into Leisha’s study from his own, hard-copy in hand. She looked up from her brief for Simpson v. Offshore Fishing. The flowers that Alice insisted on sending daily sat on her desk: sunflowers and daisies and genemod alumbines. The things never wilted before the next shipment arrived. Even in winter the apartment was filled with California blooms Leisha didn’t really like but couldn’t bring herself to throw away.

Lamplight glowed on Kevin’s glossy brown hair, strong smooth face. He looked younger than 47, younger in fact than Leisha, although he was four years older. Blanker, Alice had said to Leisha, but she had only said it once.

“All legitimate?”

“The whole file drawer,” he said. “Walcott was State University of New York at Potsdam and Deflores University, not distinguished but acceptable. Middling student. Two minor publications, clean police record, sits square with the IRS. Two teaching posts, two research, no official acrimony when he left either of them, so maybe he’s just a restless type. Herlinger is different. He’s only twenty-five, this is his first job. Berkeley and U.C. Irvine in biochemistry, graduated in the top five percent of his class, promising future. But just before his Ph.D. was granted he was arrested, tried, and convicted for gene-altering controlled substances. He got a suspended sentence, but that’s enough to make problematical a job anywhere better than Samplice. At least for a while. No tax problems, but then no income yet either to speak of.”

“Which controlled substance?”

“Luna snow, altered for electrical storms in the limbic. Makes you think you’re a religious prophet. Trial records show Herlinger saying he had no other way to make med school tuition. He appears very bitter; maybe you want to call up the records for yourself.”

Leisha said, “I will. Does it feel to you like a young man’s temporary bitterness over a bad break? Or a part of his character?”

Kevin shrugged. She should have known better; that was not the kind of determination Kevin would make. Consequences interested him; motivations didn’t. Leisha said, “Only two minor publications for Walcott, and mediocre school performance, yet he’s capable of a breakthrough like this?”

Kevin smiled. “You always were an intellectual snob, my darling.”

“As are we all. All right, researchers get lucky. Or maybe Herlinger did the real DNA work, not Walcott; maybe Herlinger’s very capable intellectually but either is an exploitable innocent or just can’t follow rules. What about Samplice?”

“Legitimate, struggling company, mediocre earnings profile, ROA less than 3 percent last year, which is low for a high-tech organization that made no major capital investments. I give them another year, two at the most. It’s badly managed; the director, Lawrence Lee, has the job solely because of his name. His father was Stanton Lee.”

“Nobel Prize in physics?”

“Yes. And Director Lee claims descent from General Robert E. as well, although that claim’s bogus. But it looks good in publicity releases. Walcott told you the truth; record-keeping at Samplice is a mess. I doubt they can find things in their own electronic files. There’s no leadership. And Lee has a board of directors’ reprimand for mismanagement of funds.”

“And First National Bank?”

“Absolutely square. All the records for that safe-deposit box are complete and accurate. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they weren’t tampered with from the outside, both electronically and in hard-copy. But I’d be really surprised if the bank is involved.”

“I never thought it was,” Leisha said grimly. “It’s got strong security?”

“The best. We designed it.”

She hadn’t known that. “Then there are only two groups that can manage that kind of electronic wizardry, and your company’s one of them.”

Kevin said gently, “That may not be true. There are Sleepers who are good deck rats…”

“Not that good.”

Kevin didn’t repeat his statement about her intellectual snobbery. Instead he said quietly, “If Walcott’s research is accurate, this could change the world, Leisha. Again.”

“I know.” She found herself staring at him, and wondered what emotions had been on her face. “Want a glass of wine, Kevin?”

“I can’t, Leisha. I’ve got all this work to finish.”

“Actually, so do I. You’re right.”

He went back to his study. Leisha picked up her notes for Simpson v. Offshore Fishing. She had trouble concentrating. How long had it been since she and Kevin had made love? Three weeks? Four?

There was so much work to do. Events were happening so fast. Maybe she could see him before she left again in the morning. No—he was taking the other plane to Bonn. Well then, later in the week. If they were in the same city, if they both had time. She felt no sense of urgency about sex with Kevin. But, then, she never had.

A memory twisted in her: Richard’s hands on her breasts.

She leaned closer to the terminal, widening her search for legal precedents in marine law.

Leisha said levelly, “You stole Adam Walcott’s research papers from a safe-deposit box in the First National Bank in Chicago.”

Jennifer Sharifi raised her eyes to Leisha’s. The two women stood at opposite ends of Jennifer’s living room in Sanctuary. Behind the glossy mound of Jennifer’s bound hair, the portrait of Tony Indivino blinked and smiled.

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “I did.”

“Jennifer!” Richard cried, in anguish.

Leisha turned slowly toward him. It seemed to her that the anguish was not for the deed, but for the admitting of it. Richard knew.

He stood on the balls of his feet, his head with the bushy eyebrows lowered. He looked just the same as he had at seventeen, the day she’d gone to meet him in the small suburban house in Evanston. Almost thirty years ago. Richard had found something in Sanctuary, something he needed, some sense of community—maybe he had always needed it. And Sanctuary was, always had been, Jennifer. Jennifer and Tony. Nonetheless, to be part of this criminal theft, Richard must have changed. To be a part of this, he must have changed beyond her knowing.

He said thickly, “Jennifer will say nothing without her lawyer present.”

Leisha said acidly, “Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult. How many lawyers has Sanctuary captured by now? Candace Holt. Will Sandaleros. Jonathan Cocchiara. How many others?”

Jennifer sat down on the sofa, drawing the folds of her abbaya around her. Today the glass wall was opaqued; soft blue-green patterns played over it. Jennifer, Leisha remembered suddenly, had never liked cloudy days.

Jennifer said, “If you’re bringing legal charges, Leisha, deliver the warrant.”

“You know I’m not a prosecutor. I represent Dr. Walcott.”

“Then you plan on handing this alleged theft over to the D.A.?”

Leisha hesitated. She knew, and probably Jennifer knew, there was insufficient evidence for even a grand jury session. The papers were gone, but the bank record showed that Dr. Walcott had been the one to remove them. The best she could possibly do was establish that some new employee or other at First National also had access to the receipts—if it had even been a new employee. How thorough was Sanctuary’s advance planning? Their covert information net was extensive enough to cover minor researchers working in third-rate biotechs, if the minor research concerned Sleepless. And Leisha would bet her eyes that no new employee at First National had ever been an old employee at Samplice. She had nothing but hearsay—and, of course, her knowledge of what Jennifer, a Sleepless, would do. But the law was not interested in her inner knowledge. That, too, was only hearsay.

Hopelessness swamped her, frightening because it was so rare, followed by memory: Richard at seventeen, running in and out of the surf with her and Tony and Carol and Jeanine, all of them laughing, sand and water and sky opening up all around in infinite receding light… She sought Richard’s eyes.

He turned his back.

Jennifer said composedly, “Why exactly are you here, Leisha? If you have no legal business to transact with me or Richard or Sanctuary, and if your client has nothing to do with us—”

“You just told me you took the papers.”

“Did I?” Jennifer smiled. “No, you’re mistaken. I would not do or say that.”

“I see. You just wanted me to know. And now you just want me to leave.”

“I do,” Jennifer said, and for a bizarre moment Leisha heard echoes of the marriage ceremony. Jennifer’s mind was opaque to her. Standing in her living room, watching the green swirls form and break and reform on the window, watching Richard’s hunched shoulders, Leisha suddenly knew she would never stand anywhere in Sanctuary again.

To Richard—not Jennifer—she said, “The research is still in Walcott’s and Herlinger’s heads. You can’t stop this from coming, if it’s real. When I go back to Chicago, I’m going to have my client write it all out and put multiple copies in very safe places. I want you to know this, Richard.”

He did not turn around. She watched the bent curve of his spine.

Jennifer said, “Have a nice flight.”

Adam Walcott did not take disappointment well. “You mean there’s nothing we can do? Nothing?”

“There’s insufficient evidence.” Leisha got up from her desk and walked around it to sit in a chair opposite Walcott’s. “You have to understand, Doctor, that the courts are still struggling with the limitations of electronic documents as evidence. They’ve been struggling with it longer than I’ve been alive. At first computer-generated documents were treated as hearsay because they weren’t originals. Then they were barred because there were just too many people who could break systems security. Now since Sabino v. Lansing they’re treated as a separate, inherently weaker category of evidence. Signed hard-copies are what count, which means burglars and thieves who can manipulate the tangible are kings of even electronic crime. Right back where we started.”

Walcott did not look interested in this informal judicial history. “But, Ms. Camden—”

“Dr. Walcott, you don’t seem to be focused on the main point here. You have all the research in your head, research that could change the world. And whoever took your documents has only nine-tenths of it because the final piece is only in your head. That’s what you told me, correct?”

“Correct.”

“So write it down again. Now. Here.”

“Now?” The wispy little man seemed taken aback by this idea. “Why?”

And Jennifer thought that Leisha was an innocent. Leisha spoke very carefully, choosing her words. “Dr. Walcott, this research is potentially a very valuable property. Worth billions, over time, to you or to Samplice or, more likely, to you both in some percentage deal. I’m prepared to represent you with that, if you so choose—”

“Oh, goody,” Walcott said. Leisha looked at him hard, but he truly did not seem sarcastic. His left hand wrapped absently around the back of his head to scratch his right ear.

She said patiently, “But you must realize that whenever billions are involved, thieves are involved. You’ve already seen that. And you’ve told me you haven’t yet filed for any patents because you didn’t want Director Lee to know what you were working on.” After a moment she added, “Correct?” There was no point in assuming anything with this man.

“Correct.”

“Fine. Then what you must also realize is that people who will thieve for millions might also—I don’t say this would happen, only that it could—might also—”

She couldn’t finish the sentence. The pains in her stomach were back, and she folded her arms across her abdomen. Richard, holding her in his shabby bedroom in Evanston, she fifteen years old, meeting a fellow Sleepless for the first time and filled with exhilaration like light…

Walcott said, “You mean the thieves might try to kill me. Me and Timmy. Even without the final part of the research.”

Leisha said, “Write it all down. Now. Here.”

She gave him a free-standing computer and a private office. He was only in it twenty-five minutes, which surprised her. But, then, how long could formulas and assumptions take to write down? It wasn’t like a legal brief.

She realized that she’d been expecting him to fumble over the task because he was a Sleeper.

She made eight hard-copies of the papers on the small free-standing copier she used for privileged client-attorney information, resisting the desire to read them. She probably wouldn’t have understood them anyway. She gave him one copy, plus the free-standing deck. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding, Doctor. These seven copies will go into various vaults. One in the safe here, one at Baker Enterprises, Kevin Baker’s firm, which I assure you is impregnable.” Walcott gave no sign of knowing who Kevin Baker was; it wasn’t possible for any genetic researcher to not know who Kevin Baker was.

“Tell as many people as you like that there are multiple copies of your current unnamed research project with different people. I’ll do the same. The more people who know, the less of a target you are. Also, I urge you as counsel to tell Director Lee what you’ve been doing and to file patents on this work, in your own name. I should be with you when you approach Lee, if we’re going to establish personal ownership of part of this work apart from Samplice.”

“Fine,” Walcott said. He combed his hand through his negligible hair. “You’ve been so frank…I feel I have to be frank, too.”

Something in his tone made Leisha glance up sharply.

“The fact is, I…the research I just wrote out for you…” He ran the other hand through his hair and stood on one foot, an embarrassed diminutive crane.

“Yes?”

“It’s not all there. I left off the last piece. The piece the thieves don’t have either.”

He was more cautious, then, than she had suspected. On the whole, Leisha approved; reckless clients were worse than untrusting ones. Even when the person untrusted was the client’s own attorney.

Walcott looked past her, out the window. He still stood on one foot. The weirdly intermittent forcefulness returned to his voice. “You said yourself you don’t know who stole the first copy. But it’s potentially very valuable to replicate. Or not replicate. And you’re a Sleepless, Ms. Camden.”

“I understand. But it’s important that you write down that last piece as well, Doctor, for your own protection. If not here, then somewhere else completely secure.” And where, she wondered, was that? “You should also—this is an important point—tell as many people as possible that all the research exists somewhere else besides your head.”

Walcott finally lowered his raised foot to the floor. He nodded. “I’ll think about that. Do you really think I could be in actual physical danger, Ms. Camden?”

Leisha thought of Sanctuary. The queasiness returned to her stomach; it had nothing to do with what did or did not happen to Walcott. She folded her arms across her belly.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

10

Jordan Watrous poured himself another drink at the Hepplewhite secretary set up as a bar in his mother’s living room. His third? Fourth? Maybe no one was counting. From the deck cantilevered over the ocean floated the sound of laughter. To Jordan’s ears the laughter sounded nervous, as well it might. What the hell was Hawke saying now? And to whom?

He hadn’t wanted to bring Hawke. This was his stepfather’s fiftieth birthday; Beck had wanted a small family party. But Jordan’s mother had just finished decorating her new house and she wanted to show it off. For twenty years Alice Camden Watrous had lived as if she had no money, not touching the inheritance from her father except, Jordan later learned, to pay for his and Moira’s schooling and computers and sports. She had treated her money as if it were a large, dangerous dog she had custody of but would not approach. Then, on her fortieth birthday, something apparently happened inside his mother, something Jordan didn’t understand. That didn’t surprise him. Much of people’s behavior baffled him.

His mother had suddenly built this big house on the ocean at Morro Bay, where a few miles out gray whales lifted their flukes and spouted past. She had furnished it with expensive, understated British antiques bought in Los Angeles, New York, and London. Beck, easily the sweetest-tempered man Jordan had ever met, smiled indulgently, even though his wife had hired a different contractor, not Beck, to build the house. Some days Jordan, driving out to the site with his mother, had found Beck working alongside the union carpenters and their robots, nailing boards and aligning joists. When the house was finished, Jordan had waited apprehensively for what new sides of his mother might emerge. Social climbing? Plastic surgery? Lovers? But Alice had ignored their fashionable neighbors, let her stocky figure stay stocky, and hummed contentedly about her British antiques and her beloved garden.

“Why British?” Jordan had said once, fingering the back of a Sheraton chair. “Why antiques?”

“My mother was British,” Alice said, the first and last time Jordan had ever heard her mention her mother.

The birthday party for Beck was also a housewarming. Alice had invited all of her and Beck’s friends, her colleagues from the Twin Group, Moira’s graduate-school friends and professors, Leisha Camden and Kevin Baker, and a Sleepless whom Jordan had never laid eyes on before, a pretty young redhead named Stella Bevington whom Alice had hugged and kissed as if she were another Moira. Calvin Hawke had invited himself.

“I don’t think so, Hawke,” Jordan had said in the factory office in Mississippi, and with anyone else that would have ended it.

“I’d like to meet your mother, Jordy. Most men don’t speak as well of their mothers as you do. Or as often.”

Jordan couldn’t help it; he felt himself flush. Since he was in grade school he had been open to the charges of being a mama’s boy. Hawke hadn’t meant anything…or had he? Lately everything Hawke said stung. Was that Jordan’s fault or Hawke’s? Jordan couldn’t tell.

“It’s really a family celebration, Hawke.”

“I certainly wouldn’t want to intrude on family,” Hawke said smoothly. “But didn’t you say it was a big housewarming, too? I have a gift I’d like your mother to have for her house. Something that belonged to my mother.”

“That’s very generous of you,” Jordan said, and Hawke grinned. The manners Alice had drilled into her son amused Hawke. Jordan was astute enough to see this, but not astute enough to know what to do about it. He steeled himself to frankness. “But I don’t want you there. My aunt will be there. And some other Sleepless.”

“I perfectly understand,” Hawke said, and Jordan thought the matter was closed. But somehow it kept coming up. And somehow the stings got worse in Hawke’s innocent-sounding phrases, and because they were innocent Jordan felt guilty at snapping back at Hawke. And somehow now Hawke stood out on his mother’s deck talking to Beck and Moira and an admiring crowd of Moira’s college friends while Leisha, completely silent, watched Hawke with a blank expression, and Jordan slipped away to splash his third—fourth?—whiskey into his glass so fast it spilled on his mother’s new pale-blue rug.

“It’s not your fault,” said a voice behind him. Leisha. He hadn’t heard her footsteps.

He said, “What do you do for whiskey spills? Carbo-eaters? Or would they hurt the rug?”

“Forget the rug. I mean it’s not your fault that Hawke is here. I’m sure you didn’t want him to be, and I’m sure he steamrolled right over you. Don’t blame yourself, Jordan.”

“No one can ever tell him no,” Jordan said miserably.

“Oh, Alice could have, if she’d wanted to. Don’t doubt that. He’s here because she said it was all right, not because he maneuvered you into an invitation.”

The question had bothered him for a long time. “Leisha, does Mom approve of what I do? Of the whole We-Sleep Movement?”

Leisha was silent for a long time. Finally she said, “She wouldn’t tell me, Jordan,” which was of course true. It had been a stupid question, stupidly blurted out. He mopped ineffectively at the rug with a napkin.

Leisha said, “Why don’t you ask her?”

“We don’t talk about…Sleepers and Sleeplessness.”

“No, I can believe that,” Leisha said. “There’s a lot this family doesn’t talk about, isn’t there?”

He said, “Where’s Kevin?”

Leisha looked at him with genuine surprise. “That wasn’t a non sequitur, was it?”

Embarrassment flooded him. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

“It’s all right, Jordan. Stop apologizing all the time. Kevin had to see a client on an orbital.”

Jordan whistled. “I didn’t know there were Sleepless on any of the orbitals.”

Leisha frowned. “There aren’t. But most of Kevin’s work is for international clients who aren’t necessarily, or even usually, Sleepless but who—”

“—are rich enough to afford him,” Hawke said, coming up behind them. “Ms. Camden, you haven’t spoken to me all night.”

“Was I supposed to?”

He laughed. “Certainly not. Why would Leisha Camden have anything to say to a union organizer of underclass morons who waste a third of their life in zombie nonproductivity?”

She said evenly, “I have never thought of Sleepers that way.”

“Really? Do you think of them as equals? Do you know what Abraham Lincoln said about equality, Ms. Camden? You published a book about Lincoln’s view of the Constitution, didn’t you, under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kaminsky?”

She didn’t answer. Jordan said, “That’s enough, Hawke.”

Hawke said, “Lincoln said about the man who is denied economic equality: ‘When you have put him down and made it impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul in this world and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out as in the darkness of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have roused will not turn and rend you?’ ”

Leisha said, “Do you know what Aristotle said about equality? ‘Equals revolt that they may become superior. Such is one state of mind that creates revolutions.’ ”

Hawke’s face sharpened. To Jordan it actually seemed the bones grew even more pointed; something moved behind Hawke’s eyes. He started to say something, evidently thought better of it, and smiled enigmatically. Then he turned and walked away.

After a moment Leisha said, “I’m sorry, Jordan. That was unforgivable at a party. I’m too used to courtrooms, I guess.”

“You look terrible,” Jordan said abruptly, surprising himself. “You’ve lost too much weight. Your neck is all scrunched up, and your face is drawn.”

“Looking my age,” Leisha said, suddenly amused. Now why should that amuse her? Maybe it wasn’t the Sleepless he didn’t understand; maybe it was women. He turned his head toward the deck for a glimpse of the tiny flashing lights Stella Bevington wore in her red hair.

Leisha leaned forward and gripped his wrist. “Jordan—do you ever wish you could become a Sleepless?”

He stared into her green eyes, so different from Hawke’s: her eyes reflected all light back at you. Like a parcel refused. All of a sudden his uncertainty left him. “Yes, Leisha. I do wish it. We all do. But we can’t. That’s why I work with Hawke in unionizing underclass morons who waste a third of their life asleep. Because we can’t be you.”

His mother came up behind them. “Is everything all right in here?” Alice asked, looking from her son to her sister. She wore, Jordan suddenly noticed, her usual warm expression and a truly hideous dress, an expensive green silk that did nothing to flatter her stoutness. Around her neck was the antique pendant Beck had given her. It had once belonged to some British duchess.

“Fine,” Jordan said, and couldn’t think of anything else to say. Twins—they were twins. The three of them smiled at each other, silent, until Alice spoke. Jordan was startled to see that his mother was a little drunk.

“Leisha, did I tell you about the new case registered with our Twin Group? Twins raised apart from birth, but when one broke his arm, the other felt pain for weeks in the same arm and couldn’t figure out why?”

“Or thought he felt the pain,” Leisha said, “in retrospect.”

“Ah,” Alice said, as if Leisha had answered some other question entirely, and Jordan saw that his mother’s eyes were more knowing than he had ever seen them, and fully as dark as Calvin Hawke’s own.

In the early morning the New Mexico desert was incandescent with pearly light. Sharp-edged shadows, blue and pink and colors Leisha had never imagined shadows could be, crept like living things across the vast emptiness. On the distant horizon the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rose clear and precise.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Susan Melling said.

Leisha said, “I never knew light could look like that.”

“Not everybody likes the desert. Too desolate, too empty, too hostile to human life.”

“You like it.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “I do. What do you want, Leisha? This isn’t just a social visit; your crisis air is at gale force. A civilized gale. Solemn urgent sweeps of very cold air.”

Despite herself, Leisha smiled. Susan, now seventy-eight, had left medical research when her arthritis worsened. She had moved to a tiny town fifty miles from Santa Fe, a move inexplicable to Leisha. There was no hospital, no colleagues, few people to talk to. Susan lived in a thick-walled adobe house with sparse furniture and a sweeping view from the roof, which she used as a terrace. On the deep, whitewashed window sills and few tables she set out rocks, polished to a high gloss by the wind, or vases of tough-stemmed wildflowers, or even animal bones, bleached by the sun to the same incandescent whiteness as the snow on the distant mountains. Walking uneasily through the house for the first time, Leisha had felt a palpable relief, like a small pop in her chest, when she saw the terminal and medical journals in Susan’s study. All Susan would say about her retirement was, “I worked with my mind for a long time. Now I’m groping for the rest of it,” a statement that Leisha understood intellectually—she had doggedly read the standard mystics—but no other way. The ‘rest’ of what, exactly? She had been reluctant to question Susan further, in case this was like Alice’s Twin Group: pseudopsychology tricked out as scientific fact. Leisha didn’t think she could bear to see Susan’s fine mind seduced by the deceptive comforts of hokum. Not Susan.

Susan said now, “Let’s go inside, Leisha. The desert is wasted on you. You’re not old enough for it yet. I’ll make tea.”

The tea was good. Sitting beside Susan on her sofa, Leisha said, “Have you kept up with your field, Susan? With, for instance, the genetic-alteration research Gaspard-Thiereux published last year?”

“Yes,” Susan said. A gleam of amusement came and went in her eyes, sunken now but still bright. She had stopped dying her hair; it hung in white braids only slightly less thick than Leisha remembered from childhood. But Susan’s skin had the veined transparency of eggshells. “I haven’t renounced the world like some flagellant monk, Leisha. I access the journals regularly, although I have to say it’s been a long time since there was anything really worth studying, except the work of Gaspard-Thiereux.”

“There is now.” Leisha told her about Walcott, Samplice, the research and its theft. She didn’t mention Jennifer, or Sanctuary. Susan sipped her tea, listening quietly. When Leisha finished, Susan said nothing.

“Susan?”

“Let me see the research notes.” She put down her tea cup; it rattled hard on the glass table.

Susan studied the papers for a long time. Then she disappeared into her study to run some equations. “Use only a free-standing deck,” Leisha said, “and wipe the program afterward. Completely.” After a moment Susan nodded slowly.

Leisha wandered around the living room, gazing at rocks with holes bored through them by freak winds, rocks so smooth they might have lain for a million years at the bottom of an ocean, rocks with sudden protuberances like malignant growths. She picked up an animal skull and ran her fingers across the clean bone.

When Susan returned, she was calmer, all critical faculties at full RAM. “Well, it looks like a genuine line of research, as far as it goes. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

“Does it go far enough?”

“Depends on what’s in that missing piece. What he has here is new, but it’s new more in the way of not having been explored before because it’s a semibizarre byway, rather than being new because it’s an inevitable but difficult extension of existing knowledge, if you see the difference.”

“I do see it. But what is there that could logically support a final piece that could actually alter Sleepers into Sleepless?”

“It’s possible,” Susan said. “He’s made some unorthodox departures on Gaspard-Thiereux’s work, but as far as I can tell from this…yes. Yes. It’s possible.”

Susan sank onto the sofa and covered her face with her hands.

Leisha said, “How many of the side effects might be…is it possible that…”

“Are you asking me whether Sleepers who become Sleepless beyond in vitro might still have the non-aging organs of the rest of you? God, I don’t know. The biochemistry of that is still so murky.” Susan lowered her hands and smiled, without humor. “You Sleepless don’t provide us with enough research specimens. You don’t die often enough.”

“Sorry,” Leisha said dryly. “We all have such full calendars.”

“Leisha,” Susan said, her voice not quite steady, “what happens now?”

“Apart from the infighting at Samplice? We file for patents in Walcott’s name. Actually, I’ve already started that, before anybody else can. Then, after Walcott and Herlinger—and that’s another problem.”

“What’s another problem?”

“Walcott-and-Herlinger. I suspect that Herlinger might have done much of this work, and that Walcott is not going to want to share credit with him if he can avoid it. Walcott’s a sort of meek belligerent. Walks absently through the world, oblivious of how it actually functions, until someone crosses him, and then he howls and hangs on with all his incisors.”

“I know the type,” Susan said. “Nothing like your father.”

Leisha looked at her; Susan rarely spoke of Roger Camden. Susan picked up the same animal skull Leisha bad been fingering. “What do you know about Georgia O’Keeffe?”

“An artist, wasn’t she? Nineteenth century?”

“Twentieth. She painted these skulls. And this desert. Many times.” Susan suddenly dropped the skull; it shattered on the stone floor. “Leisha, have that baby you and Kevin are always talking about. There’s no guarantee that just because no female Sleepless has gone into menopause yet, you never will. Even Fallopian tubes that don’t themselves seem to age can’t manufacture new gametes. Your eggs are forty-three years old.”

Leisha moved toward her. “Susan—are you saying you regret…that you wish…”

“No, I’m not,” Susan said crisply. “I had you, and Alice, and I still do. Biological daughters couldn’t be more important to me than you two. But who do you have, Leisha? Kevin—”

Leisha said quickly, “Kevin and I are fine.”

Susan looked at her with a tender, skeptical expression that made Leisha repeat, “We’re fine, Susan. We work together really well. That’s what really matters, after all.”

But Susan only went on looking at her with the same tender doubt, Adam Wolcott’s research papers in her arthritic hands.

Simpson v. Offshore Fishing was a complicated case. Leisha’s client, James Simpson, was a Sleepless fisherman alleging deliberate disruptions of Lake Michigan fish-migration patterns through the illegal use of retroviruses, themselves legal, by a competing firm. The competitor, Offshore Fishing, Limited, was owned by Sleepers. The case would turn on judicial interpretation of the Canton-Fenwick Act governing uses of biotechnology in restraint of trade. Leisha had to be in court by 10:00 A.M., so she had asked for a seven o’clock meeting at Samplice.

“Well, nobody’s likely to be there at seven o’clock,” Walcott had grumbled, “including me.” Leisha had stared hard at his wispy face on her comlink, amazed all over again at the petty obtuseness of the mind that was going to remake the biological and social world. Had Newton been like this? Einstein? Callingwood? Actually, they had. Einstein could not remember his stops on trains; Callingwood, the genius of Y-energy applications, regularly lost the shoes off his feet and refused to allow anyone to change his bedsheets for months at a time. Walcott wasn’t unique, he was a type, although not a common one. Sometimes it seemed to Leisha that the process of intellectual maturity was merely discovering that exotics and uniques were only members of rarer sets. She called Samplice herself and insisted on the 7:00 A.M. meeting.

Director Lawrence Lee, a tanned, handsome man who wore Italian silk headbands a little too young for him, turned out to be as difficult as Walcott said he was. “We own this research, whatever the hell it is, even if it turns out to be valuable, and believe you me, I have my doubts. These two…researchers work for me, and don’t any of you fancy lawyers forget it!”

Leisha was the only fancy lawyer in sight. Samplice legal counsel was Arnold Seeley, a hard-eyed man with an aggressively shaved head who nonetheless fumbled questions on which he should have been pressing Leisha hard. She leaned across the table. “I forget very little, Mr. Lee. There are legal precedents about scientific work, especially scientific work with commercial applications. Dr. Walcott is not in the same labor category as a carpenter fixing your front porch. There are also ambiguities in the contract Dr. Walcott signed with Samplice at the beginning of his employment. I presume you have a copy with you, Mr. Seeley?”

“Uh, no…wait…”

“Why don’t you?” Lee snapped. “Where is it? What’s it say?”

“I’d need to check…”

Impatience filled Leisha, the same impatience she always felt in the presence of incompetence. She pushed the impatience down; this was too important to jeopardize with inept shows of bad feeling. Or additional shows of it. Lee and Seeley and Walcott, who in their ineptly warring hands held eight hours a day for hundreds of thousands of people, all searched electronic notebooks for the employment contract.

“Got it?” Leisha said crisply. “All right, second paragraph, third line…” She took them through the poorly-phrased language, the legal precedents for shared scientific copyrights, the landmark Boeing v. Fain “auteur” ruling. Seeley shifted his hard eyes over his screen and drummed his fingers on the table. Lee blustered. Walcott sat with a small smug smile. Only Herlinger, the twenty-five-year-old assistant, listened with comprehension. He had surprised Leisha: heavyset and already balding at twenty-five, Herlinger would have looked like a thug except for a kind of bitter dignity, a stoic disillusionment that didn’t seem to belong either with his youth or with Walcott’s spiky, eccentric presumed-genius. They were an unlikely team.

“…and so I’d like to suggest an out-of-court settlement about the patents.”

Lee started to bluster again. Seeley said quickly, “What type of settlement? A percentage or an up-front sum?”

Leisha kept her face impassive. She had him. “We would have to work that out, Mr. Seeley.”

Lee almost shouted, “If you think you can get away with taking from me what belongs to this firm—”

Seeley turned coolly to him. “I think the shareholders might disagree about whose firm it was.”

The “shareholders” included Sanctuary, although Lee would not necessarily know that Leisha knew that. Leisha and Seeley both waited for Lee to come to this realization. As he did, his small button mouth pursed, and he looked at Leisha with a fearful sneer. She thought that it had been a long time since she had disliked someone so much.

“Maybe,” Lee said, “we could talk about a settlement. On my terms.”

Leisha said, “Fine. Let’s talk terms.”

She had him.

Afterward, Walcott accompanied her and her bodyguard to the car. “Will they settle?”

“Yes,” Leisha said. “I think so. You have an interesting set of colleagues, Doctor.”

He eyed her warily.

“Your director forgets he runs a publicly-traded company, your firm’s lawyer can’t put together a decent class-six employee contract, and your assistant in Sleepless genetic research is riding away on a We-Sleep scooter.”

Walcott airily waved his hand. “He’s young. Can’t afford a car. And of course, if this research goes through, there won’t be any We-Sleep Movement. Nobody will have to sleep.”

“Except those who can’t afford the operation. Or a car.”

Walcott regarded her with amusement. “Shouldn’t you be arguing the other side, Ms. Camden? In favor of the economic elite? After all, very few people can afford to genetically alter their in vitro embryos for sleeplessness.”

“I was not arguing, Dr. Walcott. Merely correcting your false statement.” In a subtler way, he was just as unlikable as Lee.

Walcott waved his hand. “Ah, well, I suppose you can’t help it. Once a lawyer…”

She slammed the car door hard enough that her bodyguard jumped.

She was late for court. The judge was looking around irritably. “Ms. Camden?”

“I’m sorry, Your Honor. I was unavoidably detained.”

“Avoid it, Counselor.”

“Yes, Your Honor.” The courtroom was nearly empty, despite the importance of the case to Constitutional law. Fish-migration patterns did not rivet the newsgrids. In addition to the opposing parties and their counsel, she saw one reporter, state and federal environmental officials, three youngsters she guessed to be either law or ecology students, one ex-judge, and three witnesses.

And Richard Keller, who was not due to testify as her expert witness until tomorrow.

He sat in the back of the room, as upright as if on brainies, a thick-set man surrounded by four bodyguards. That must be what happened when you lived year in and year out in Sanctuary; the rest of the world looked even more dangerous than it was. Richard caught her eye. He didn’t smile. Something in Leisha’s chest turned cold.

“If you’re finally ready to start, Counselor…”

“Yes, Your Honor. We are. I call Carl Tremolia to the stand.”

Tremolia, a burly fisherman who was a hostile witness, stalked up the aisle. Leisha’s client’s eyes narrowed. Tremolia wore a We-Sleep electronic pin on his lapel. There was a disturbance by the door; someone was talking to the bailiff in an insistent undertone.

“Your Honor, I petition the court to order the witness to remove his lapel pin,” Leisha said. “Given the circumstances of the case, political opinions of the witness, whether expressed by words or jewelry, are prejudicial.”

The judge said, “Remove the pin.”

The fisherman tore if off his jacket. “You can make me take off the pin but you can’t make me buy Sleepless!”

“Strike that,” the judge said. “Mr. Tremolia, if you do not answer only when spoken to I will charge you with contempt…What is it, Bailiff?”

“Sorry, Your Honor. Message for Ms. Camden. Personal and urgent.”

He handed Leisha a slip of hard-copy. Call Kevin Baker at office immediately. Urgent and personal. “Your Honor…”

The judge sighed. “Go, go.”

In the corridor she pulled a comlink from her briefcase. Kevin’s face appeared on the miniature screen.

“Leisha. About Walcott—”

“This is an unshielded link, Kevin—”

“I know. It doesn’t matter, this is in the public record. Hell, in a few hours the whole fucking world will know. Walcott can’t file for those patents.”

“Why not? Samplice—”

“Forget Samplice. The patents were filed two months ago. Neat, clean, unbreakable. In the name of Sanctuary, Incorporated…Leisha?”

“I’m here,” she said numbly. Kevin had always told her that nobody could falsify the government’s patent files. There were too many backups, electronic and hard-copy and free-standing off-line. Nobody.

Kevin said, “There’s more. Leisha…Timothy Herlinger is dead.”

“Dead! I saw him not a half-hour ago! Riding away on a scooter!”

“He was hit by a car. The deflection shields on his scooter failed. A cop happened to come by a few minutes later, put it right on the Med-Net, and of course I have all nets monitored to flag key names.”

She said unsteadily, “Who hit him?”

“A woman named Stacy Hillman, gave her address as Barrington. I have wizards checking her now. But it looks like an accident.”

“Scooter deflector shields are Y-energy cones. They don’t fail; it’s one of their main marketing points. They just don’t. Not even on a shoddy We-Sleep scooter.”

Kevin whistled. “He was riding a We-Sleep scooter?”

Leisha closed her eyes. “Kevin, send two bodyguards to find Walcott. The best bodyguards you can hire. No—your own. He was at Samplice a half-hour ago. Have him escorted to our apartment. Or would your office be safer?”

“My office.”

“I can’t leave court until two at the earliest. And I can’t ask for a recess. Not again.” She had already used recesses in this case to go to Mississippi and to Sanctuary. To Sanctuary twice.

Kevin said, “Just go ahead with your case. I’ll keep Walcott safe.”

Leisha opened her eyes. From the courtroom door the bailiff watched her. She had always liked that bailiff, a gentle old man who liked to show her too-expensive holos of his grandchildren. At the other end of the corridor stood Richard Keller, back preternaturally straight, waiting. For her. He knew what Kevin’s call was about, and now he stood waiting. She knew it, as certainly as she knew her own name.

How had he known what Kevin was about to tell her?

She went back to court to ask the judge for a recess.

Leisha led Richard to her office a block away, not touching him as they walked, not looking at him. Inside, she opaqued the window all the way to black. The exotics, passion flowers and ginger and flame orchids, began to close.

She said quietly, “Tell me.”

Richard gazed at the closing flowers. “Your father grew those.”

She knew that tone of voice; she had heard it in police interrogation rooms, in jails, in court: the voice of a man who will say anything that comes into his head, anything at all, because he has already lost everything. The tone carried a certain amount of freedom, of a kind that always made Leisha want to look away.

She didn’t look away now. “Tell me, Richard.”

“Sanctuary stole Walcott’s research papers. There’s a network, Inside wizards and Outside Sleeper underworld, very complex. Jennifer’s been building it for years. They did it all: Samplice, First National Bank.”

This was nothing new. Richard had told her as much in Sanctuary, in Jennifer’s presence. “I have to say something, Richard. Listen carefully. You’re talking to Walcott’s counsel, and nothing you say here is off the record. Nothing. Marital privilege of confidentiality won’t apply to anything Jennifer said to you in front of a third party or parties, such as the Sanctuary Council—Article 861 of United States Code. You can be required to repeat what you say here under oath. Do you understand?”

He smiled, almost whimsically. The tone was still in his voice. “Of course. That’s why I’m here. Record it if you like.”

“Recording on.” To Richard she said, “Go on.”

“Sanctuary altered the file patents. Again, both electronically and hard-copy. The dates were chosen carefully—all the hard-copy applications in Washington are stamped ‘Received,’ but none have reached the review stage of significant official signatures or fingerprints. That’s what Kevin was telling you, wasn’t he?”

“He told me he didn’t think anybody could get into the federal system, not even his people.”

“Ah, but he would be trying from the Outside alone.”

“Do you have specifics? Names, dates, said in front of third parties as part of conversations that would have taken place even if you and Jennifer weren’t husband and wife?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have written proof?”

Richard smiled slightly. “No. All hearsay.”

Leisha burst out, “Why, Richard? Not Jennifer—but you? Why did you?”

“Could anybody give a simple answer to a question like that? It’s a whole lifetime of decisions. To go to Sanctuary, to marry Jennifer, to have the kids—” He got up and walked over to the flowers. The way he fingered their hairy leaves made Leisha rise and follow him.

“Then why tell me this now?”

“Because this is the only way I have left to stop Jennifer.” He raised his eyes to Leisha, but she knew he didn’t see her. “For her sake. There’s no one in Sanctuary who can stop her anymore—hell, they encourage her, especially Cassie Blumenthal and Will Sandaleros. My kids…Criminal charges over the patents will at least scare off some of her Outside contacts. They’re scary people, Leisha, and I don’t want her dealing with them. I know that even with my testimony, unsupported hearsay, you don’t have much of a case, and probably the whole thing will get thrown out of court—do you think I’d be here if I thought she could be indicted for anything? I studied Wade v. Tremont and Jastrow v. United States very carefully and I want it on the record that I did. I just want Jenny stopped. My kids—the hatred for Sleepers they’re learning, the sense of entitlement to do anything—anything, Leisha—in the name of self-protection; it scares me. This isn’t what Tony intended!”

Leisha and Richard had never, after the first time, been able to discuss what Tony Indivino had intended.

Richard said, outwardly more calm, “Tony was wrong. I was wrong. You become different, walled away with only other Sleepless for decades. My kids—”

“Different how?”

But Richard only shook his head. “What happens now, Leisha? You turn this over to the U.S. Attorney and he brings charges? For theft and tampering with government records?”

“No. For murder.”

She watched him closely. His eyes widened and flared, and she would have bet her life, then, that he knew nothing about Timothy Herlinger’s death. But a week ago she would have bet her life that Richard knew nothing about stealing, either.

“Murder?”

“Timothy Herlinger died an hour ago. Under suspicious circumstances.”

“And you think—”

Her mind was ahead of his. She saw him catch up, and she took a step backward.

He said slowly, “You’re going to charge Jennifer with murder. And make me testify against her. Because of what I’ve said here.”

Somehow she got the word out. “Yes.”

“Nobody at Sanctuary planned a murder!” When she didn’t answer he seized her wrist hard. “Leisha—nobody at Sanctuary…not even Jennifer…nobody…”

His faltering was the worst thing yet. Richard was unsure that his wife was incapable of political murder. Leisha looked at him levelly. She had to hear it, all of it, because…because why? Because she did. Because she had to know.

But there was no more of it to hear. Richard’s fist closed on the flower he held and he started to laugh. “Don’t!” she begged, but he went on laughing anyway, a braying heaving sound that went on and on, until Leisha opened the office door and told her secretary to call the District Attorney.

11

The foamstone cell was five paces by six. It held a built-in bed platform, two recyclable blankets, one pillow, a sink, a chair, and a toilet, but no window or terminal. Will Sandaleros, prisoner’s counsel, had protested the lack of a terminal; all but isolation cells had some sort of simple read-only terminal of unbreakable alloy, welded to the wall. His client was allowed access to newsgrids, to approved library items, and to the United States E-postal system. The county jailer ignored the protest; he wasn’t trusting any Sleepless with a terminal. Nor would he allow the prisoner communal exercise or dining, or visitors in the cell, even Sandaleros. Twenty years ago the same Cattaraugus County jailer, younger and harder, had lost a Sanctuary Sleepless to a prison killing. Not again. Not in his jail.

Jennifer Sharifi told the lawyer to discontinue his protests.

The first day, she carefully scrutinized the four corners of her cell. The southeast corner was assigned to prayer. By closing her eyes she could see the rising sun rather than the foamstone wall; within a few days she did not need to close her eyes. The sun was there, summoned by will and belief.

The northeast corner held the sink. She washed completely twice a day, stepping out of her abbaya and washing that too, refusing the prison laundry and the prison garb. If the surveillance panel broadcast her daily nakedness, that was as irrelevant as the foamstone wall was to seeing the sun. Only what she did was relevant, not how subhumans viewed what she did. By their prurient viewing they had forfeited the humanity that would have allowed her to consider them.

The remaining two corners were spanned by the cot. She left the bedding folded under it, day after day, untouched. The bed itself became her place of learning. She sat on the edge, straight-backed in her still-wet abbaya. When hard-copies she requested were given her, erratically and intermittently, she read them, permitting herself one reading only of each tabloid, each law book, each library printout. When there was nothing to read, she learned by thinking, creating detailed scenarios covering every contingency she could imagine. She thought of the contingencies of her legal situation. Of Walcott’s research. Of the future of Sanctuary. Of Leisha Camden’s choices. Of the economic underpinnings of each division, each organization, each significant personal or professional relationship within Sanctuary. Each contingency branched at several places; she learned them all until she could close her eyes and see the entire great structure, decision tree after decision tree branching and rebranching, dozens of them. As new data came to her from hard-copies or from Sandaleros, she mentally redrew every affected branch. For each decision point she assigned a text from the Quran or, if there were conflicting possible applications, more than one text. When she could see the enormous balanced whole spread out behind her closed lids, she opened her eyes and taught herself to see it in three dimensions within the cell, filling the space, palpable growing branches like the tree of life itself.

“All she does is sit and stare,” the matron reported to the District Attorney. “Sometimes with her eyes open, sometimes closed. Hardly ever moves.”

“Does it seem to you a state of catatonia that needs medical attention?”

The matron shook her head, then nodded, then shook her head again. “How the hell would I know what one of them needs!”

The District Attorney didn’t answer.

Wednesdays and Sundays were visiting days, but the only visitor she would ever permit was Will Sandaleros, who came daily to the usually empty visiting gallery, where she sat separated from him by thick plastiglass under a ring of surveillance panels.

“Jennifer, the grand jury returned an indictment against you.”

“Yes,” Jennifer said. There were no branches on her decision tree in which the grand jury did not indict her. “Have they set a trial date?”

“December 8. Motion to reconsider bail was denied.”

“Yes,” Jennifer said. There had been no branches for bail, either. “Leisha Camden testified to the grand jury.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes. The testimony has been released to counsel; I’m trying to get a hard-copy to you.”

“There have been no hard-copies brought to me in two days.”

“I’ll move again on that. The newsgrids are about the same; you don’t want to see them.”

“Yes,” Jennifer said, “I do.” The newsgrid hysteria was necessary: not to her learning but to the strengthening of her prayer. “A reminder to believers,” the Quran said. “Sleepless Murder to Control World!” “First Money—Now Blood?” “Secret Sleepless Cartel Plots Overthrow of United States—Through Murder!” “Turncoat Sleepless to Reveal Death Total of Sanctuary Mafia.” “Local Gang Claims Fatal Beating of Teen: ‘He Was Sleepless.’ ”

“I guess maybe you do want them,” Sandaleros said. He was twenty-five years old and had grown up in Sanctuary from the age of four, his custody voluntarily signed over by parents who had not gotten what they expected in a genetically-altered child. After Harvard Law, Sandaleros had returned to Sanctuary to base his practice there, leaving only to consult with clients or appear in court. Even for that he did not like to leave. He barely remembered his parents, and not with affection. He had been Jennifer’s first choice for counsel.

“One thing more,” Sandaleros said. “I have a message from your children.”

Jennifer sat very straight. Each time, this was the hardest; this was why she disciplined herself day after night on the very edge of the hard metal cot, back straight, mind forced into calm planning. For this. “Go ahead.”

“Najla says to tell you she has finished the Physics Three software. Ricky says he found a new fish-migration pattern in the live data from the Gulf Stream, and is mapping it against his father’s work in the Global Directory.”

Ricky almost always found a way to include his father in his messages; Najla never did. They had been told that their father would testify against their mother in court. Jennifer had insisted that Sandaleros tell them. This was not a world in which Sleepless children could afford sheltered ignorance.

“Thank you,” Jennifer said composedly. “Now tell me our defense options.”

Later, after Sandaleros had gone, she sat for a long time on the edge of the cot, growing decision trees in the free spaces of her mind.

“Are you really going to do it?” Stella Bevington’s pretty face on the comlink was set and cold. “You’re really going to testify against one of us?”

“Stella,” Leisha said, “I have to.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s wrong. And because—”

“It’s not wrong to take care of your own, even if it means breaking the law! You were the one who taught me that—you and Alice!”

“This isn’t the same,” Leisha said, as evenly as she could. Behind Stella’s head on the comlink screen were California genemod palms, long blue fronds bisected by silver. What was Stella doing in California? No outdoor link was ever adequately shielded. “Jennifer is hurting us. All of us, Sleepless and Sleeper alike—”

“Not me. She’s not hurting me; you’re doing that, by shattering the only family some of us have left. We’re not all as lucky as you, Leisha!”

“I—” Leisha began, but Stella had already broken the link and Leisha was staring at a blank screen.

Adam Walcott stood in the library of Leisha and Kevin’s penthouse, looking distractedly at the rows of law books, the framed holo of Kenzo Yagai, the sculpture hewn from virgin Luna rock by Mondi Rastell. The sculpture was an androgynous human figure in a soaring heroic pose, arms stretched upward, face illuminated by intelligence. Leisha watched Walcott stand on one foot, run his left hand through his hair, run his right hand through his hair, twitch his wispy shoulders, and lower his foot. Weird—there was no other word for him. Walcott was the weirdest client she’d ever had. She couldn’t even tell if he understood what she’d summoned him here to explain.

“Dr. Walcott, you understand that you can still fight the patent case against both Samplice and Sanctuary, simultaneously with the Sharifi murder case.” Her voice was steady on the words. Sometimes, in the forced isolation, of her apartment, she practiced saying them aloud: the Sharifi murder case.

“But you won’t be my lawyer,” he said irritably. “You’re just dropping the whole thing.”

Patiently Leisha started over again. He truly didn’t seem to understand. “I am in protective custody until the trial, Dr. Walcott. There have been serious threats against my life. Those aren’t my bodyguards you passed in the lobby and the elevator and on the roof—those are federal marshals. I’m in custody here instead of anywhere else because the security here is better than anywhere else. Almost. But I can’t represent your patent case in court, and I don’t consider it advisable for you to wait until I can. In your own best interests, you should get different counsel, and I’ve made a list for you to consider.”

She held out the hard-copy; Walcott made no move to take it. He stood on his other foot, and the intermittent strength returned to his voice. “It isn’t fair!”

“Isn’t…”

“Fair. For a man to work on a genetic revolution, put in his heart blood for a stinking petty company that couldn’t recognize genius if it tripped over it…I was promised, Ms. Camden! Promises were made!”

She was listening intently now, despite herself. The little man’s large intensity was somehow frightening. “What kind of promises, Doctor?”

“Recognition! Fame! The attention I deserve, that no one but Sleepless ever gets now!” He spread his arms wide and stood on tiptoe, his voice rising to a shriek. “I was promised!”

Abruptly he seemed aware that Leisha was studying him. He dropped his arms to his side and smiled at her, a smile of such obvious, sickly insincerity that she felt her neck prickle. It was difficult to imagine Director Lee of Samplice, a man too self-absorbed and insecure to recognize others’ dreams, ever making such promises. Something was wrong here. “Who promised you those things, Dr. Walcott?”

“Ah, well,” he said airily, not meeting her eyes, “you know how it is. You have youthful dreams. Life promises you. And the promise goes away.”

She said, more harshly than she intended, “Everybody discovers that, Dr. Walcott. About more worthy dreams than fame and attention.”

He didn’t seem to have heard her. He stood staring at the portrait of Yagai, and his left arm came up behind his head to thoughtfully rub his right ear.

Leisha said, “Get another lawyer, Dr. Walcott.”

“Yes,” he said, almost absently, “I will. Thank you. Goodbye. I’ll show myself out.”

Leisha sat on the library sofa for a long time, wondering why Walcott disturbed her so much. It wasn’t anything to do with this particular case; it was larger than that. Was it because she expected competence to be rational? That was the American myth: the competent man, suffused with both individualism and common sense, in control of himself and the material world. History didn’t bear that myth out; competent men frequently were out of control or irrational. Lincoln’s melancholy, Michelangelo’s outrageous temper, Newton’s megalomania. Her model had been Kenzo Yagai, but why shouldn’t Yagai have been an aberration? Why should she necessarily expect the same logical and disciplined behavior from Walcott? Or from Richard, who could summon the moral strength to stop his wife’s destructive and immoral behavior but who now spent his own days in protective custody sitting slumped in a corner, without the will to eat or wash or speak unless he was forced to do those things? Or from Jennifer, who used a brilliant strategic brain in the service of an obsessive need for control?

Or was it she, Leisha, who was not rational, by expecting that all these people would not do those things?

She got off the sofa and wandered through the apartment. All the terminals were off; there had come an hour, two days ago, when she could no longer bear the hysterical newsgrids. The windows were transluced to shut out the intermittent three-way scuffles between police and the two warring semipermanent groups of demonstrators below her window. KILL SLEEPLESS BEFORE THEY KILL US! shrilled the electronic signs of one side, answered by FORCE SANCTUARY TO SHARE PATENTS! THEY ARE NOT GODS! Occasionally the two groups, tired of fighting with police, fought with each other. The past two nights Kevin, coming home for dinner, had to run for the building between cordons of bodyguards, police, and screaming rioters, robot newsgrid holocams swooping to within inches of his face for close-ups.

Tonight he was late. Leisha found herself glancing at the clock, disliking the habit but unable to stop. This was the first time in her life she had found it hard to be alone. Or was it? Had she ever really been alone before? In the beginning there had been Daddy and Alice, then Richard and Carol and Jeanine and Tony…then, later, Stewart, and Richard again, and then Kevin. And always, always, there had been the law. To study, to question, to apply. The law made it possible for people of widely differing beliefs, abilities, and goals to live side by side in something more than barbarism. And Kevin had believed in his own version of that credo: that a social system was built not on the parochial limits of common culture nor the romantic ones of “the family” nor even on the contemporary manifest destiny of unlimited technological advance for all, but on the twin foundations of consensual legal and economic systems. Only in the presence of both could there be any social or personal security. Money and law. Kevin understood that, as Richard never had. It was the bond between them.

Where was he?

The terminal in the library chimed, the override code for personal calls. Leisha froze. The demonstrators, the We-Sleep fanatics, Sanctuary itself—there were so many enemies for someone like Kevin, even apart from his connection with her…She ran to the library.

But it was Kevin himself calling.

“Leisha—listen, honey, I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier. I tried, but…” His voice trailed off, unlike Kevin. On the comscreen his jawline sagged slightly. He looked to her left. “Leisha, I’m not coming home. We’re in the middle of an important negotiation—the Stieglitz contract, you know about it—and I have to be available. I may have to fly on very short notice to Argentina to deal with some political ramifications in their Bahia Blanca subsidiary. If I have to fight my way in and out of the apartment building, or if those crazies keep blocking air lanes on the roof…I can’t risk it.” After a moment he added, “I’m sorry.”

She said nothing.

“I’ll stay here at the office. Maybe when this is over…hell, no ‘maybe’ about it, when the Stieglitz contract is signed and the trial is over, then I’ll come home.”

“Sure, Kev,” Leisha said. “Sure.”

“I knew you’d understand, honey.”

“Yes,” Leisha said. “I do. I understand you.”

“Leisha—”

“Goodbye, Kevin.”

She walked from the library to the kitchen and made herself a sandwich, wondering if he would call back. He didn’t. She threw the sandwich down the organic chute and went back to the library. The holo of Kenzo Yagai had shifted. Yagai bent over the Y-energy cone prototype, his dark eyes serious and intelligent, the sleeves of his white turn-of-the-century lab coat pushed above the elbows.

Leisha sat down on a straight wooden chair and put her head between her knees. But that position made her think of Richard, slumped in his room, and the thought was unbearable. She walked to the window, cleared it, and watched the street from eighteen floors above, until sudden increased agitation in the mass of distant, tiny demonstrators made it probable that someone with a zoom lens had seen her. She opaqued the windows, returned to the chair, and sat straight-backed.

Afterward, she could never remember how long she had sat there. Instead she remembered something decades old. Once, when she had been an undergraduate at Harvard, she and Stewart Sutter had gone for a walk along the Charles River. The wind had been cold and sharp, and they had run straight into it, laughing, Stewart’s cheeks red as apples. Despite the cold they sat on the banks of the river, kissing, until a Mutilation Reminder had staggered, nearly naked, over the withered grass. The MuRems were a bizarre, horrifying religious sect in the service of great ideals. They mutilated their bodies to remind the world of suffering in countries under tyranny, then begged money to alleviate that global suffering. This one had amputated three of his fingers and half of his left foot. The MuRem’s mangled hand was tatooed “Egypt,” his bare blue foot “Mongolia,” and his hideously scarred face “Chile.”

He held out his begging bowl to Leisha and Stewart. Leisha, filled with the familiar shamed repugnance, had slipped in a hundred dollars. “Half for Chile, half for Mongolia. For the suffering,” he had croaked; his vocal cords, too, had been offered up as a reminder. The look he gave Leisha was so crystalline, so suffused with joy, that she was unable to gaze back. She laid her head on her knees and twined her hand hard in the icy grass. Stewart had put his arms around her and murmured against her cheek. “He’s happy, Leisha. He is. He’s begging for a purpose, he raises a great deal of money for world suffering. He’s doing what he chooses to do, and he’s doing it well. He doesn’t mind being mutilated. And anyway, he’s going away now. He’s leaving. Look—he’s already gone.”

12

The Profit Faire on the levee was in full swing by 8:00 P.M. Below the foamstone walls the Mississippi River slid past, dark and silent. A Y-field had been set up for security, invisible walls enclosing a bubble the diameter of a football field. The bubble covered an arc of river, a hundred yards of broad levee, and a semicircle of rough grass and dark bushes between the scooter factory and the river. From the farthest bushes came occasional giggles, accompanied by much thrashing.

On the south end of the broad levee people flocked around the refreshment kiosks, the hologame booths, the terminals where We-Sleep partially subsidized chances at major newsgrid lotteries. At the north end a noisy band whose name Jordan had forgotten blasted the night with dance music. Every thirty seconds a remote-guided holo of the We-Sleep logo, three-dimensional and six feet high, flashed in a different cubic volume of air: ten feet above the ground, two inches over the water, in the midst of the whirling dancers. Across the river, slightly blurred by the edges of the Y-bubble, the Samsung-Chrysler lights shone chastely.

“The basic flaw in your Aunt Leisha is that she belongs to the eighteenth century, not the twenty-first,” Hawke said. “Have some ice cream, Jordy.”

“No,” Jordan said. He didn’t want ice cream; even less did he want to talk to Hawke about Leisha. Again. He tried to deflect their path toward the north end of the Faire, where the dance music would drown Hawke’s voice.

Hawke neither deflected nor drowned. “The ice cream’s a new biopatent from GeneFresh Farms. Unbelievable in strawberry. Two cones, please.”

“I don’t really—”

“What do you think, Jordy? Could you ever guess they started with soybean genes? Profit margin of 17 percent last quarter.”

“Amazing,” Jordan said, a little sourly. He hoped the ice cream would be mediocre, but it was the best he’d ever tasted.

Hawke laughed, eyeing him keenly over his own strawberry cone. Jordan guessed that tomorrow GeneFresh Farms would be approached by a We-Sleep organizer, if they weren’t already under negotiation. The Profit Faire on the levee was to celebrate companies like GeneFresh, which were (or would be) new cells in the We-Sleep revolution. Average profits had risen an astounding 74 percent since the Sharifi murder case had hit the media. The connection between Timothy Herlinger’s death and We-Sleep buying, to Jordan as painful as it was hysterical, had brought millions of new consumers under Hawke’s rhetoric. “I knew it!” We-Sleepers cried in triumph, fear, anger, and greed. “The Sleepless are afraid of us! They’re spooked enough to try to control us through murder!”

In the Mississippi scooter factory, where Hawke continued to maintain headquarters in an artificially rustic manner that irritated Jordan, production had doubled before leveling off. Hawke had posted production trend charts on the factory wall, smiled one of his lavish, secret smiles, and announced the Profit Faire on the levee, “where the local politicians of my great-great-grandfather’s day held their catfish fries.”

Jordan, a Californian who had no idea who his great-great-grandfather was, hadn’t realized unmodified catfish was edible. He looked sideways at Hawke, who laughed. “Not my Cherokee great-great-grandfather, Jordan. A different one, in a much different position. Although he wasn’t one of your lords of the earth, either.”

“Not ‘my’ lords of the earth. I don’t come from that class,” Jordan said, nettled. Hawke’s laugh disturbed him.

“Of course not,” Hawke had said, and laughed again.

Now Hawke said—just as if the discussion about GeneFresh Farms hadn’t happened, just as if Jordan hadn’t tried to change the subject—“The basic flaw in your Aunt Leisha is that she doesn’t belong to this century at all. She belongs to the eighteenth. It’s always fatal to be born out of your own time.”

“Let’s not talk about Leisha tonight, Hawke. All right?”

“The eighteenth-century values were social conscience, rational thought, and a basic belief in the goodness of order. With those attitudes, they were going to remake or stabilize the world, all the Lockes and Rousseaus and Franklins and even Jane Austens, who was also in the wrong century. Sound like Leisha Camden?”

“I said—”

“But of course the Romantics swept all that away, and we never worked back to it. Until the Sleepless came along. Don’t you think that’s interesting, Jordan? A biological innovation turning the social-value clock backwards?”

Jordan stopped walking and faced Hawke. Somewhere to his left, over the river, the We-Sleep holo appeared, shimmered, and disappeared in a burst of electronic light. “You really don’t care what I say, do you, Hawke? You just steamroll right over it. Only your words count.”

Hawke was silent, watching him keenly.

“Why did you even hire me? All you want is to snipe at me, delete my objections, have somebody to show up as stupid and—”

“All I want,” Hawke said quietly, his ice cream dripping over his hands, “is for you to get angry.”

“Get—”

“Angry. Do you think you’re of any use to me when you let me show you up as stupid? When you don’t insist on whatever you say to me? I want you to feel your own fury when somebody is stepping on you, or you’ll never be any use to the Movement. What in hell do you suppose the We-Sleep idea is all about in the first place? Waking up to anger!”

There was a flaw in that someplace, something not quite right, or maybe the not-quite-right was the sight of Hawke with strawberry ice cream dripping over his hands, his words to Jordan impassioned but his eyes focused on the levee, scanning the crowd—for what? To see if he was being overheard? Only one young couple, walking toward them from the StarHolo booth, could even possibly overh—

The Mississippi exploded. Water geysered upwards, and beneath Jordan’s feet the levee rocked and split. A second explosion, and the StarHolo booth crumpled. The young couple were flung to the pavement like dolls. People screamed. A fissure opened at Jordan’s feet; the next moment Hawke tackled him, knocking him to safety. Even while Jordan was in the air he saw the remote-guided holo burst out above him, swollen to a monstrous ten feet visible throughout the entire Faire. But somehow it wasn’t the We-Sleep logo but letters, red and gold, silhouetted against the twinkling lights across the river: Samsung-Chrysler.

No one believed it. Samsung-Chrysler, outraged, disclaimed responsibility for the attack. It was an old and honorable firm; not even the workers in the scooter factory believed S-C had set underwater explosives along the levee. The media didn’t believe it; the We-Sleep Council didn’t believe it; Jordan didn’t believe it.

“You did it,” he said to Hawke.

Hawke merely looked at him. Over his desk in the dusty factory office were spread the kiosk tabloids in hard-copy: “Sanctuary Behind Bombing of We-Sleep Faire! Sleepless Resort to Violence—Again!” The cheap paper had already curled around the tiny rips made by the kiosk printer, a flimsy We-Sleep unit built and marketed from Wichita. Two of Hawke’s huge fingers worked at the largest tear. From the factory floor came irregular staccato bursts of manual machinery and shatter-rock.

“You’ll use anything,” Jordan said. “The media hysteria over the Herlinger murder—it’s not a question of truth for you. It’s just a question of taking any advantage that happens to turn up for your cause. You’re no better than Sanctuary!”

Hawke said, “Nobody got hurt at the Faire.”

“They might have!”

“No,” Hawke said. “There was no chance of that.”

It took a moment for Jordan to understand. “The ice cream melting over your hands. That was the detonator, wasn’t it? A temperature-sensitive microchip just under the skin. So you could pick a time when no one would be hurt.”

Hawke said softly, “Are you angry yet, Jordan? Do you want to come with me to see more babies without medical care or running water because under Yagaiism nutrition and Y-energy are basic Dole rights but medicine and plumbing fixtures are free-market contractual enterprises? Do you want to see more adults who sit around all day and rot, knowing they can’t compete with automation for low-level jobs or with genemods for skilled ones? Do you want to see more toddlers with hookworm, more marauding teenagers who can have all the law they want but no real work? Are you angry yet?”

“The ends don’t justify these means!” Jordan shouted.

“The hell they don’t.”

“You’re not helping the Sleeper underclass, you’re just—”

“I’m not? Have you talked to Mayleen lately? Her oldest kid just got accepted to RoboTech training. And she can pay for it. Now.”

“You’re helping, but you’re stirring up more hate to do it!”

“Wake up, Jordan. No social movement has ever progressed without emphasizing division, and doing that means stirring up hate. The American revolution, abolitionism, unionization, civil rights—”

“That wasn’t—”

“At least we didn’t invent this particular division—the Sleepless did. Feminism, gay rights, Dole franchisement—”

“Stop it! Stop throwing sterile intellectualizations at me!”

To Jordan’s astonishment—even through his anger, he felt the astonishment—Hawke grinned. His black eyes were aquiline. “ ‘Sterile intellectualizations’—you’re one of us already. What would Aunt Leisha say, that high priestess of reason?”

Jordan said, “I quit.”

Hawke didn’t seem surprised. He nodded; the sharp dark gaze sliced the air like a lance. “All right. Quit. You’ll be back.”

Jordan started for the door.

“Do you know why you’ll be back, Jordy? Because if you were to get married—say, tomorrow—and have a child, you’d alter that child’s genes to be a Sleepless. Wouldn’t you? And you wouldn’t be able to stand yourself for doing it.”

The door slid open.

Behind him Hawke said softly, “When you do come back, you’ll be welcome, Jordan.”

It was only outside the gates, the Mississippi sliding placidly toward the Delta, that Jordan realized there was no place else he wanted to go.

Mayleen watched him from the guardhouse. At this distance, he couldn’t read her expression. He had met her oldest daughter once, a skittish girl with the same tow-headed, skinny looks as Mayleen. RoboTech school. Hookworm. Jobs.

Jordan started back toward the scooter factory. Mayleen opened the gate for him, and he went inside.

Susan Melling’s wrinkled face on the comscreen was backed not by her adobe-walled study in the New Mexican desert but by a laboratory dense with terminals, plastiware, and robotic arms.

“Susan, where are you?” Leisha said.

“Chicago Med,” Susan said crisply. “Research. They’ve given me a guest lab.” The deep lines in her face pulled taut with excitement.

Leisha said slowly, “You’ve been working on—”

“Yes,” Susan interrupted, “that genetic problem we discussed in New Mexico. The one the med school has classified.”

The comlink, Leisha realized, was not shielded. Or else not shielded enough. She almost laughed: in the current circumstances, what could possibly constitute “enough”?

Susan said, “I just wanted you to know that we’ve begun, and that my distinguished Chinese colleague has arrived safely to join me.”

Chinese? Susan was staring at her steadily, significantly; Leisha suddenly remembered that Claude Gaspard-Thiereux was genemod for intelligence, and that he had told Susan once, during a drunken party at an international symposium, that the genetic material woven into his had come originally from a Chinese donor. This fact had, for some reason, fascinated him. He began to collect imitation Ming vases and holopictures on the Forbidden City, which had in turn fascinated Susan. Leisha had thought the whole thing unimportant, but Susan obviously expected her to remember it now.

Gaspard-Thiereux at Chicago Med. He would have flown in from Paris only if Susan had been able to offer him proof that Walcott’s findings were feasible.

Susan said crisply, “We worked through the first part of the problem, replicating earlier work in the same area, and now we’ve hit a sort of snag. But we’re working on it, and we’ll keep you informed. We’re applying Mr. Wong’s work to the end of the problem, rather than the beginning, because the end has the most problematical gap.”

Susan was enjoying this, Leisha saw: not just the research but the pseudosecrecy, the theatrical code words. Her voice danced; if Leisha closed her eyes she would see the Susan of forty years ago, braids bobbing with inexhaustible energy as she led two small girls in controlled-testing “games.” Sudden tenderness choked Leisha.

To say something, she said, “Starting at the end? That sounds like applying the verdict instead of the evidence to a trial brief.”

“Not a justified analogy,” Susan said gleefully. Her voice softened. “How are you doing, Leisha?”

“The trial starts next week,” Leisha said, as if it were an answer. Which it was.

“Is Richard still—”

“No change,” Leisha said.

“And Kevin—”

“He’s not coming back.”

“Damn him,” Susan said. But Leisha didn’t want to discuss Kevin. What hurt most about his defection, she’d realized, was that Kevin had betrayed the Sleepless as a group, not just her. Did that mean she no longer had personal loves, only political ones? The question was troubling.

“Susan, do you know what occurred to me yesterday? That in the whole world, there are only three people who understand why I’m testifying against a Sleepless, against what the press call ‘my own kind.’ Only three. You, and Richard, and…Daddy.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “Roger never felt class solidarity outweighed truth. In fact, he never felt class solidarity, period. He considered himself in a class of one. But there are undoubtedly more than three, Leisha. In the whole world.”

Leisha looked across the room, at the pile of kiosk hard-copies heaped on the desk, the floor, the chair. From being unable to read them she had gone to being unable not to read them.

“It doesn’t feel like more than three.”

“Ah,” Susan said. It was a sound Alice made, too. Leisha had never before made the connection. “Did you know that in the United States year-to-date the officially recorded number of in vitro genemods to produce Sleepless babies was 142?”

“That’s all?”

“Down from thousands, ten years ago. Even fair and thoughtful people don’t want their own children to undergo the danger and the discrimination. But if your Dr. Walcott’s research…” She left the sentence unfinished.

“Not mine,” Leisha said. “Definitely not mine.”

“Ah,” Susan said again, the single word a multilayered sigh.

13

“The People versus Jennifer Fatima Sharifi. All rise.” Leisha, seated in the witness section, rose. One hundred sixty-two people—spectators, jury, press, witnesses, counsel—rose with her, one body with one hundred sixty-two warring brains. Security fields encased the courtroom, courthouse, town of Conewango, like layered gloves. No comlinks could function through the two tightest layers. Fifteen years ago, in another of the judicial system’s periodic swings between the public’s right to know and the individual’s right to privacy, New York State had once more banned recording devices from criminal trials. The press were all state-certified augments with eidectic memories, aural-neural bio-implants, or both. Leisha wondered cynically how many just happened to also possess unmentioned genemods.

Next to the reporters, the newsgrid holo-artists held their CAD’s on their packed-together laps, minute flexes of their fingers sculpting the holos for the afternoon news. There was no identified gene site for artistic ability.

“Oyez, oyez. The Superior Court for the County of Cattaraugus, State of New York, is now in session, the Honorable Daniel J. Deepford, judge, presiding. Draw near and give your attention and you shall be heard. God save the United States and this honorable court!”

Leisha wondered if only she heard the fevered exclamation point.

It was the first day of testimony. Two and a half weeks of relentless questioning had been needed to empanel a jury: Do you, Ms. Wright, think you can make an unbiased decision about the defendant? Have you, Mr. Aratina, seen anything on the newsgrids about this case? Are you, Ms. Moranis, a member of We-Sleep? Of Awake, America! Of Mothers for Biological Parity? Three hundred eighty-nine dismissals for cause, an unthinkable number in any other voir dire. The jury had ended up eight men and four women. Seven white, three black, one Asian, one Latino. Five college-educated, seven with high-school certification or less. Nine younger than fifty, three older. Eight biological parents, three childless, one with legal egg-donor surrogate status. Six working, six on the Dole. No Sleepless.

“A citizen shall be tried by a jury of his peers.”

“You may begin, Mr. Hossack,” the judge said to the prosecuting attorney, a heavy man with thick gray hair and the considerable trial asset of being able to command attention through stillness. Like everyone else in the United States with access to a comprehensive database, Leisha now knew all about Geoffrey Hossack. He was fifty-four years old, had a win/loss ratio of 23 to 9, and had never been audited by the IRS or reprimanded by the ABA. His wife bought only real-wheat bread, three loaves a week. Hossack subscribed to two newsgrids and a private channel for Civil War buffs. His oldest daughter was failing trigonometry.

He and Judge Deepford both had records as fair, honest, and capable practitioners of the law.

Weeks ago Leisha, sitting before her terminal after her meticulous combing of Deepford’s trial record, had pondered Deepford’s and Hossack’s dossiers. She hadn’t expected that Sanctuary could manipulate the choice of either judge or prosecuting attorney; Sleepless power was mostly economic, not political. There weren’t enough of them to constitute a voting bloc, and they were too resented to gain elected office. Sanctuary could of course buy individual judges, lawyers, or congressmen, and probably did, but nothing indicated that Hossack or Deepford were for sale.

More important, Deepford was not a Sleeper fanatic. Whatever his personal feelings, he had presided over nine civil suits with Sleepless litigants—there were very few criminal cases against Sleepless—and in each case Deepford’s performance had been fair and reasonable. He tended to adhere closely to narrow interpretations of both the rules of evidence and the law itself, but that was the only point on which Leisha would have challenged him.

Hossack’s opening statement to the jury set out his case swiftly and cleanly: Evidence existed to prove that the Y-energy deflector on Dr. Timothy Herlinger’s scooter had been tampered with. Further evidence would tie this tampering to Jennifer Sharifi. “The scooter was equipped with a retina scanner, ladies and gentlemen, which showed three prints: a neighbor child who had been playing outside that morning. Dr. Herlinger himself. And the print of an adult Sleepless female. We will further demonstrate that this Sleepless woman was someone in the very highest reaches of Sanctuary power, someone who controlled the most advanced technology in the world.”

Hossack paused. “We will be entering in evidence a pendant found in the parking garage at Samplice, beside the spot occupied by Dr. Herlinger’s scooter. That pendant contains a microchip so advanced, so different, that government experts still can’t duplicate it. We can’t understand how it was made, but we can understand what it does. We tried it. It opens the gates of Sanctuary. In short, the State will prove that the scooter tampering was part of an elaborate illegal scheme planned and carried out by Sanctuary. We will then prove that the only person who could have masterminded this scheme was Jennifer Sharifi, creator and director of illicit power networks that include infiltration of the national banking system and even of government data storage, a concern so grave it is currently under investigation by a special task force at the United States Justice Department—”

“Objection!” Will Sandaleros called.

“Mr. Hossack,” said the judge, “you are clearly beyond the boundaries of an opening statement. The jury will disregard all reference to any parallel investigations, by anybody, in this murder case.”

The jury were all staring at Jennifer, straight-backed in her white abbaya behind a bulletproof shield. The word “power” hung in the air like a high-density charge. Jennifer never glanced sideways.

“Ms. Sharifi’s motive,” Hossack continued, “was to suppress patents which, if developed and marketed, would enable Sleepers to become Sleepless, with the same biological advantages as Sleepless. Sanctuary does not want us—you and me—to have these advantages. Sanctuary, led by Jennifer Sharifi, was willing to commit murder in order to prevent that.”

Leisha studied the jury. They were listening hard, but she could tell nothing from the rigid Sleeper faces.

In contrast to Hossack, Will Sandaleros sailed into his opening statement in low key. “I’m at a loss to refute the prosecution’s actual case,” he began. His handsome, sharply-chiseled face—the Sleeper parents who rejected him, Leisha remembered, had purchased extensive appearance genemods—looked modestly bewildered. No Sleepless, Leisha well knew, could afford to approach a jury with anything that could be interpreted as arrogance. She leaned forward, ignoring the inevitable curious stares from other spectators, studying Sandaleros closely. He looked focused and energetic. He looked competent.

“The fact is,” Sandaleros continued, “that there is no case to refute. Jennifer Sharifi is innocent of murder. The prosecution has no conclusive evidence, as I shall show, to tie Jennifer Sharifi, or the corporate entity of Sanctuary, to the scooter tampering, to any patent dispute, or to any murder conspiracy. What the prosecution does have, ladies and gentlemen, is a thin web of circumstance, hearsay, and forced connections. And something else.”

Sandaleros moved very close to the jury box, closer than Leisha ever allowed herself to get, and leaned forward. A woman in the first row shrank back slightly. “What the prosecution has, ladies and gentlemen, is a thicker web—much thicker than its web of evidence—of innuendo, prejudice, and unwarranted connections built on hatred and suspicion of Ms. Sharifi because she is a Sleepless.”

“Objection!” Hossack called. Sandaleros rolled on as if he hadn’t heard.

“I say this to bring the real issues of this trial out where we all can see them. Jennifer Sharifi is a Sleepless. I am a Sleepless—”

“Objection!” Hossack called again, with real anger. “Counsel is attempting to put the prosecution on trial here. The law makes no distinction between Sleeper and Sleepless in the commission of a crime, and neither shall our use of the rules of evidence.”

Every pair of eyes in the courtroom—Sleeper, Sleepless, augmented, clouded, tunnel-visioned, uncertain, fanatic—looked at Judge Deepford, who didn’t hesitate. He had obviously thought this issue through beforehand. “I will allow it,” he said quietly, thereby departing from his own record, and making clear how very wide a latitude he would allow Sandaleros to avoid the appearance of prejudice in his courtroom. Leisha found that the nails of her right hand were digging into her left. There was a trap here…

“Your Honor—” Hossack began, very still.

“Objection overruled, Mr. Hossack. Mr. Sandaleros, proceed.”

“Jennifer Sharifi is a Sleepless,” Sandaleros repeated. “I am a Sleepless. This is the trial of a Sleepless accused of murdering a Sleeper, accused because she is a Sleepless—”

“Objection! The defendant stands accused by a grand jury’s consideration of the evidence!”

Everyone gazed at Hossack. Leisha saw the moment he realized he had played into Sandaleros’s hands. No matter what the evidence said, everyone in the courtroom knew that Jennifer Sharifi had been indicted by the twenty-three Sleepers on the grand jury because she was Sleepless. Fear, not evidence, had indicted her. By denying it, Hossack himself looked either dishonest or stupid. A man who could not name ugly reality. A man whose statements should be doubted.

Hossack, Leisha saw, had just had his own sense of fairness and justice used against him, to make him look like a hypocritical ass.

Jennifer Sharifi never moved.

The first witnesses were people who had been at the site of Timothy Herlinger’s death. Hossack paraded a variety of street-team police, pedestrians, and the driver of the car, a nervous thin woman who barely restrained herself from crying. Through them, Hossack established that Herlinger had been exceeding the speed limit, had made a sharp left turn, and, like most scooter drivers, had probably relied on the automatic Y-energy deflector shield to keep him the standard foot away from anything on the other side of him. Instead he had crashed head-first into the side of the groundcar driven by Ms. Stacy Hillman, who had already started to pull forward as the traffic field changed. Herlinger never wore a helmet; deflectors made helmets superfluous. He had died instantly.

The street-team police robot had made its gross check of the scooter and discovered the failed deflector—or, rather, since deflectors never failed and such a possibility was not in its programming, it had listed the scooter as performing safely. This was so contrary to witness reports that a policeman had cautiously mounted the scooter, tried it, and discovered the failure for himself. The scooter had been sent to Forensic, Energy for expert analysis.

Ellen Kassabian, chief of Forensic, Energy, was a large woman with the slow, measured speech that juries found authoritative but which, Leisha knew, could conceal a stubborn inflexibility. Hossack questioned her closely about the scooter.

“What specifically was the nature of the tampering?”

“The shield was set to fail at the first impact at a speed above fifteen miles per hour.”

“Is that an easy tampering to create?”

“No. A device was attached to the Y-cone to bring the failure about.” She described the device, quickly becoming incomprehensibly technical. Nevertheless, the jury listened intently.

“Have you ever seen such a device before?”

“No. To my knowledge, it’s a new invention.”

“Then how do you know it does what you tell us it does?”

“We tested it extensively.”

“Could you now, as a result of your testing, duplicate the device?”

“No. Oh, I’m sure someone could. But it’s complicated. We had Defense Department specialists look at it—”

“We’ll be calling them as witnesses.”

“—and they said,” Kassabian continued, undeflectable, “that it involved new technology.”

“So a very sophisticated—even unusual—intelligence would be needed to engineer this tampering?”

“Objection,” Sandaleros said. “Witness is being asked for her opinion.”

Hossack said, “Her professional opinion is well within the ground established by her credentials.”

“I’ll allow it,” the judge said.

Hossack repeated his question. “So a very sophisticated—even unusual—intelligence would be necessary to do this tampering?”

“Yes,” Kassabian said.

“An extremely unusual person, or group of persons.”

“Yes.”

Hossack let that hang in the air while he examined his notes. Leisha watched how the jurors’ eyes searched the courtroom for the Sleepless, an intelligent and unusual group of persons.

Hossack said, “Now let’s consider the third retina print registered on the scanner the morning Dr. Herlinger died. How can you be so sure it was that of an adult Sleepless female?”

“Retina prints are scans of tissue. Like all tissue, it breaks down with age. There’s what we call ‘blurring,’ places where cells are broken and haven’t regenerated—it’s nerve tissue, remember—or are malformed. Sleepless tissue doesn’t do that. It regenerates, somehow—” Leisha heard the ambivalence on ‘somehow,’ the bitter wistfulness she had first heard twenty-one years ago from Susan Melling “—and the retina scans are very distinctive. Sharp. No blurring. The older the subject, the more surely we can identify a Sleepless print. With young children, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference, even for the computer. But this was an adult female Sleepless.”

“I see. And it matches with no known Sleepless?”

“No. The print isn’t on file.”

“Clarify something for the court, Ms. Kassabian. When the defendant, Jennifer Sharifi, was arrested, her retina print was taken?”

“Yes.”

“And does it match with the scan on Dr. Herlinger’s scooter?”

“It does not.”

“There is no way Ms. Sharifi tampered with that scooter herself.”

“No,” Kassabian said, thereby allowing the prosecution to make this point before the defense could put it to more dramatic use.

“Does the print match that of Leisha Camden, who had been in the same building with Dr. Herlinger just before his death?”

“No.”

All eyes turned towards Leisha.

“But it was a Sleepless who bent close to that scanner—the last person to do so—sometime between the time Herlinger left home that morning and the time he died at 9:32 A.M. A Sleepless who therefore tampered with the scooter.”

“Objection,” Sandaleros called. “An inference on the part of the witness!”

“Withdrawn,” Hossack said. He was silent a moment, again drawing all eyes to him by the profound, taut quality of his stillness. Then he repeated slowly, “A Sleepless print. A Sleepless.” And only then, “Nothing further.”

Sandaleros was savage about the retina print. Gone was the bewildered modesty of his opening statement. “Ms. Kassabian, how many retina prints of Sleepless are stored in the law-enforcement net of the United States?”

“One hundred thirty-three.”

“Only 133? Out of a Sleepless population of over 20,000?”

“That’s correct,” Kassabian said, and from the small shift of her weight on the witness chair Leisha saw, for the first time, that Ellen Kassabian disliked Sleepless.

“That seems a very small number,” Sandaleros marveled. “Tell me, under what circumstances does a person’s retina print enter the law-enforcement file?”

“When he’s booked for arrest.”

“That’s the only way?”

“Or if he’s part of the law-enforcement system itself. Police personnel, judges, prison guards. Like that.”

“Attorneys, too?”

“Yes.”

“So that is how, say, Leisha Camden’s print was available for you to check.”

“Yes.”

“Ms. Kassabian, what percentage of those 133 retina prints from Sleepless belong to law-net personnel?”

Kassabian clearly didn’t like answering this. “Eighty percent.”

“Eighty? You mean, only 20 percent of 133 Sleepless—27 people—have been arrested in the nine years that retina-print records have been kept?”

“Yes,” Kassabian said, too neutrally.

“Do you know what those arrests were for?”

“Three disorderly conduct, two petty larceny, twenty-two public disturbance.”

“It would appear,” Sandaleros said dryly, “that Sleepless are a pretty law-abiding lot, Ms. Kassabian.”

“Yes.”

“In fact, it would appear from the retina records that the most usual Sleepless crime is simply existing, thereby constituting a public disturbance.”

“Objection,” called Hossack.

“Sustained. Mr. Sandaleros, do you have any additional questions pertinent to Ms. Kassabian’s actual testimony?”

And yet, thought Leisha, Deepford had allowed the introduction of the retina statistics, clearly not in proof order and only marginally relevant.

“I do,” Sandaleros snapped. His whole demeanor changed; he seemed suddenly taller, subtly fiercer. As he had with the jury, he moved slightly closer to the forensic expert. “Ms. Kassabian, can a retina scanner be loaded with a retina print by a third party?”

“No. No more than a third party could, for instance, leave your fingerprint on a gun if you were not there.”

“But a third party could substitute a gun with my fingerprints for one with somebody else’s. Could a scanner with prerecorded retina prints be substituted for an existing scanner, without detection, if the person doing the substitution kept his face well away from the scanner as he did so?”

“Well…it would be very difficult. Scanners are protected by security measures that—”

“Would it be possible?”

Kassabian said reluctantly, “Only by someone with immense engineering knowledge and experience, an unusual person—”

“May it please the Court,” Sandaleros said crisply, “I would like to have replayed that portion of the record in which Ms. Kassabian discussed the qualifications of the person we know tampered with the scooter-deflection field.”

“Recorder, search and read,” Deepford said.

The computer read, “Mr. Hossack: ‘So a very sophisticated—even unusual—intelligence would be needed to engineer this tampering.’ Dr. Kassabian: ‘Yes.’ Mr. Hossack: ‘An extremely unusual person, or group of persons.’ Dr. Kassabian: ‘Yes.’ Mr. Hossack: ‘How much prior—’ ”

“Sufficient,” Sandaleros said. “So what we have here is someone who is capable of tampering with Y-energy and so must be, in your own words, Dr. Kassabian, also capable of substituting a preloaded scanner for the one already on Dr. Herlinger’s scooter.”

“I didn’t say—”

“Is that scenario possible?”

“It would have to—”

“Just answer the question. Is it possible?”

Ellen Kassabian drew a deep breath. Her brows rushed together; clearly, she would have liked to tear Sandaleros apart. A long moment passed. Finally she said, “It is possible.”

“No further questions.”

The forensic chief stared at Sandaleros in silent fury.

Leisha walked to the window of her library and looked out over the midnight lights of Chicago. The trial had recessed for the weekend and she had gone home, unable to bear the motel in Conewango longer than necessary. The apartment was very quiet. Sometime during the past week, Kevin had moved out his furniture and pictures.

She walked back to her terminal. The message hadn’t changed: SANCTUARY NET. ACCESS DENIED.

“Password override, voice and retina identification, previous command.”

ACCESS DENIED.

The Sanctuary net, which had always been open to every Sleepless in the world, would not even acknowledge her in stringent I.D. mode. But that was illusory. Leisha knew it; there was more Jennifer wanted her to discover than just the bald fact of her exclusion.

“Personal call, urgent, for Jennifer Sharifi, password override, voice and retina identification.”

ACCESS DENIED.

“Personal call, urgent, for Richard Keller, password override, voice and retina identification.”

ACCESS DENIED.

She tried to think. There was a heaviness around her skull, like being deep underwater. The newest vase of Alice’s perpetual flowers filled the air with oppressive sweetness.

“Personal call, urgent, for Tony Indivino, password override, voice and retina identification.”

Cassie Blumenthal, a member of the Sanctuary Council, appeared on screen.

“Leisha. I’m speaking for Jennifer, whenever you access this recorded message. The Sanctuary Council has voted in the oath of solidarity. Those who have not taken the oath are denied access to the Sanctuary net, to Sanctuary itself, and to all commerce with anyone who has taken the oath. You are hereby denied all such access permanently and irrevocably. Jennifer further asked me to tell you to reread Abraham Lincoln’s speech to the Illinois Republican Convention of June, 1858, and to add that the historic precepts of the past have not been recalled simply because Kenzo Yagai inflated personal achievement above the value of community. As of the first of next month, all Sanctuary oath holders will begin divestiture of commercial relationships with you, with Camden Enterprises, with subsidiary holdings thereof, and with all direct and indirect holdings of Kevin Baker, including Groupnet, if he continues to refuse community solidarity. That is all.”

The screen went blank.

Leisha sat still a long moment.

She directed the library bank to bring up Lincoln’s speech. Words scrolled across the screen and the sonorous voice of an actor began to recite, but she needed neither; at the first words she remembered which speech it was. Lincoln, his law practice rebuilt after debts and disillusionment, accepted the Republican nomination to run for Congress against Stephen Douglas, brilliant proponent of territories’ right to choose slavery for themselves. Lincoln addressed the contentious and fiery convention: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Leisha turned off the terminal. She walked to the room she and Kevin had used for their infrequent sex. He had taken the bed with him. After a while she lay down on the floor, palms flat at her side, breathing carefully.

Richard. Kevin. Stella. Sanctuary.

She wondered how much more she had left to lose.

Jennifer faced Will Sandaleros through a prison security screen that shimmered slightly, just enough to soften the hard young line of his genemod jaw. She said, “The evidence connecting me to the scooter tampering is mostly circumstantial. Is the jury bright enough to see that?”

He didn’t lie to her. “Sleeper juries…” There was a long silence.

“Jennifer, are you eating? You don’t look well.”

She was genuinely surprised. He still thought all of that mattered—how she looked, whether she ate. On the heels of surprise came displeasure. She had thought Sandaleros was beyond that sort of sentimentality. She needed him to be beyond it, to understand that such things were perfectly irrelevant in the face of what she had to do, and what she needed him to do for her. For what else was she disciplining herself, if not for the subordination of such things as how she looked or felt? To what was really important—to Sanctuary? She was in a place now where nothing else mattered, could be allowed to matter, and she had fought very hard to get to this place. She had turned the confinement and the isolation and the separation from her children and the personal shame into roads to reach this place, and so into triumphs of will and achievement. She had thought Will Sandaleros could see that. He must travel that same road, would have to travel it, because she needed him at its end.

But she musn’t try to bring him to that place too fast. That had been her mistake with Richard. She had thought Richard was traveling beside her, as cleanly and as swiftly, and instead he had faltered and she had not seen it, and Richard had broken. The responsibility for that was hers, because she had not seen the faltering. Richard had been tied to the Outside in ways she had overlooked: to the outside, to outworn ideals, and perhaps still to Leisha Camden. The realization brought no jealousy. Richard had not been strong enough, that was all. Will Sandaleros, raised in Sanctuary, owing his life to Sanctuary, would be. Jennifer would make him strong enough. But not too fast.

So she said, “I’m fine. What else do you have for me?”

“Leisha accessed the net last night.”

She nodded. “Good. And the others on our list?”

“All but Kevin Baker. Although he did move out of their apartment.”

Pleasure flooded her. “Can he be persuaded to the oath?”

“I don’t know. If he can be, do you want him Inside?”

“No. Outside.”

“He’ll be difficult to hold under electronic surveillance. God, Jennifer, he invented most of that stuff.”

“I don’t want him under surveillance. At all. That’s not the way to hold a man like Kevin. Nor is solidarity. We’ll do it with economic interests and contractual rules. The tools of Yagaiism, in our own interests. And everything unguarded.”

Sandaleros looked dubious, but he didn’t argue. That was another thing she would have to shape in him. He must learn to argue with her. The forged metal was always stronger than the unforged.

She said, “Who else Outside has taken the oath?”

He gave her the names, with plans to move each to Sanctuary. She listened carefully; the other name she wanted to hear was not there. “Stella Bevington?”

“No.”

“There’s time.” She bent her head, and then asked it, the one question per visit she allowed herself. The last weakness left. “And my children?”

“They’re well. Najla—”

“Give them my love. Now there is something you must begin for me, Will. An important next step. Maybe the most important Sanctuary’s ever taken.”

“What?”

She told him.

Jordan closed his office door. Sound stopped instantly—the rat-a-tat-tat of machinery on the factory floor, the rock music, the calling voices, and—most of all—the newsgrid coverage of the Sharifi trial on the two superscreens Hawke had rented and set up at either end of the cavernous main building. It all stopped. Jordan had had his office soundproofed, paying for it himself.

He leaned against the closed door, grateful for silence. The comlink shrilled.

“Jordan, you there?” Mayleen said from the security kiosk. “Trouble in Building Three, I can’t find Mr. Hawke nowhere, you better git.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Fight, looks like. Screen ain’t positioned well over there, somebody should take a look at it. If they don’t break it first.”

“I’m going,” Jordan said, yanking open the door.

“So I told her—” “Hand me that there number five—” “Latest Testimony Seems to Reveal Doubts on the Part of Dr. Adam Walcott, Alleged Victim of Sanctuary Conspiracy to—” “Daaan-cing All Ni-ight with Yoooouuu—” “—Vicious Attack on Sleepless Firm of Carver & Daughter Last Night by Unspecified—”

When his vacation came, Jordan thought, he would spend all of it somewhere silent, deserted, empty. Alone.

He ran the length of the main plant, outside, and across a narrow lot—the Mississippians called it “the yard”—toward the smaller buildings used to inspect and store parts from suppliers, to stock scooter inventory, and to service equipment. Building Three was Receiving Inspection: half warehouse, half sorting station to separate incoming We-Sleep scooter parts into the defective and the usable. There were a lot of defective. Sprayfoam packing crates littered the floor. In the back, between high storage shelves, people shouted. As Jordan ran toward the sound, an eight-foot-high section of shelf crashed to the floor, scattering parts like shrapnel. A woman screamed.

Plant security was already there, two burly uniformed men restraining a man and a woman, both struggling and yelling. The guards looked bewildered; assault was rare among We-Sleep employees brought to a fever pitch of loyalty by Hawke. On the floor a third man sat moaning, holding his head. Beyond him a huge figure lay still, soaked with blood.

“What the hell happened here?” Jordan demanded. “Who’s that—Joey?”

“He’s a Sleepless!” the woman shrieked. She tried to kick the prostrate giant with the toe of her boot. The guard yanked her backwards. The huge bloody figure stirred.

“Joey a Sleepless?” Jordan said. He stepped over the moaning employee and turned the giant over; it was like turning a beached whale. Joey—he had no other name—weighed 350 pounds and stood six feet five, a mentally retarded man of immense strength whom Hawke let live, work, and eat at the factory. Joey hauled boxes and did other menial work that at any but a We-Sleep factory would have been automated. He worked just as tirelessly as a robot, Hawke said, and he was a bona fide member of that class We-Sleep was lifting out of dependent degradation. It had struck Jordan that Joey was now as dependent on Hawke as he ever could have been on the Dole, as degraded by his coworkers’ cruel jokes as he would have been in any government dorm. Jordan had kept such observations to himself. Joey seemed happy, and he was slavishly grateful to Hawke. Weren’t they all?

“He’s a Sleepless!” the woman spat. “We got no place here for his kind!”

Joey a Sleepless? That made no sense. Jordan said coldly to the man still straining against the guard’s grip, “Jenkins, Security’s going to let you go. If you make one move toward Joey before I get to the bottom of this, you’re through here. Got that?” Jenkins nodded sullenly. To the guard Jordan said, “Report in to Mayleen that this is under control. Tell her to call for an ambulance, two patients. Now you, Jenkins, tell me what happened here.”

Jenkins said, “Bastard’s a Sleepless. We don’t want no—”

“What makes you think he’s a Sleepless?”

“We been watching him,” Jenkins said. “Turner and Holly and me. He don’t sleep. Never.”

“Spying on us!” the woman shrilled. “Prob’ly a spy for Sanctuary and that murdering bitch Sharifi!”

Jordan turned his back on her. Kneeling, he peered into Joey’s bloody face. The eyelids were closed but twitching, and Jordan knew suddenly that Joey was pretending unconsciousness. The giant wore the cheapest of plastic clothing, now badly torn. With his untrimmed beard and hair, his unwashed smell, and the blood smeared across his huge body, he looked to Jordan like some cornered mangy animal, a battered bull elephant or limping bison. Jordan had never heard of a mentally retarded Sleepless, but if Joey were old enough—he looked older than God—he might have had only his sleep-regulating genes modified, without even a check on the rest. And if his natural IQ was very low…but why would he be here? Sleepless took care of their own.

Jordan’s body blocked the others’ view of Joey’s face. The stupid woman was still shouting about spies and sabotage. Softly Jordan said, “Joey, are you a Sleepless?”

The grimy eyelids twitched frantically.

“Joey, answer me. Now. Are you a Sleepless?”

Joey opened his eyes; he always obeyed direct orders. Tears trickled through the blood and dirt. “Mr. Watrous—don’t tell Mr. Hawke! Please, please, please don’t tell Mr. Hawke!”

Pity scalded Jordan. He stood. To his surprise, Joey also staggered to his feet, steadying himself against another shelf, which shivered precariously. Joey shrank against Jordan, overwhelming Jordan with his smell. The giant was terrified. Of Jenkins, looking sullenly at the floor; of Turner, moaning and bleeding; of the filthy-mouthed Holly, who weighed maybe 105 pounds.

“Shut up,” Jordan said to her. “Campbell, you stay with Turner until the ambulance gets here. Jenkins, you and she start cleaning this mess up, get someone off Station Six to make sure parts flow to the lines isn’t interrupted. Both of you report to Hawke’s office at three this afternoon. Joey, you go with Campbell and Turner in the ambulance.”

“Nooo,” Joey whimpered. He clutched Jordan’s arm. Outside, ambulance sirens shrieked.

How did ambulance medics react to Sleepless?

“All right,” Jordan snapped. “All right, Joey. I’ll tell them to check you here.”

Joey’s cuts were actually superficial; there was more blood than damage. After the medics had checked him out, Jordan led Joey around the outside of the main building, in the side door, and to his own office, all the while marveling: Joey, a Sleepless? Incompetent, dirty, terrified, stupid, dependent Joey?

The soundproofed door extinguished all noise. “Now you tell me, Joey. How did you come to this factory?”

“I walked.”

“I mean, why? Why did you come to a We-Sleep factory?”

“I dunno.”

“Did someone tell you to come here?”

“Mrs. Cheever. Oh, Mr. Watrous, don’t tell Mr. Hawke! Please, please, please don’t tell Mr. Hawke!”

“Don’t be afraid, Joey. Just listen to me. Where did you live before Mrs. Cheever brought you here?”

“I dunno!”

“But you—”

“I dunno!”

Jordan kept at it, gently and persistently, but Joey didn’t know. Not where he was born, not what had happened to his parents, not how old he was. All he seemed to remember, repeated over and over, was that Mrs. Cheever told him never to tell anyone he was a Sleepless or people would hurt him. At night he should go away by himself and lie down. This Joey did faithfully, because Mrs. Cheever had told him to. He couldn’t remember who Mrs. Cheever was, or why she’d been kind to him, or what had happened to her.

“Joey,” Jordan said, “did you—”

“Don’t tell Mr. Hawke!”

Mayleen’s face appeared on the comlink. “Jordan, Mr. Hawke is coming in now. Holly Newman told me what happened.” Her image peered curiously at Joey. “He’s a Sleepless?”

“Don’t you start, Mayleen!”

“Shit, all I said was—”

Hawke rolled into the room on a tide of sound. Immediately the office was his. He filled it with his presence, nearly as large as Joey’s but so much more compelling that Jordan, who thought he was used to Hawke, felt himself dwindle once more into insignificance.

“Campbell told me what happened. Joey’s a Sleepless?”

“Uuuunnnhhh,” Joey moaned. He put his hands over his face. The fingers were like bloody bananas.

Jordan expected that Hawke would immediately grasp his mistake and remedy it. Hawke was good with people. But instead Hawke went on gazing silently at Joey, smiling faintly, not amused but oddly pleased, as if something about Joey made him feel good and there was no reason to hide that.

“Mr. Hawke, d-d-do I—” in his anguish, the giant started to stutter “—h-h-have t-to g-g-g-go…”

“Why no, of course not, Joey,” Hawke said. “You can stay here if you want.”

Hope struggled grotesquely on Joey’s face. “Even if I n-n-n-never s-sleep?”

“Even if you’re a Sleepless,” Hawke agreed smoothly. He still smiled. “We can use you here.”

Joey staggered to Hawke and fell to his knees. He threw his arms around Hawke’s waist, buried his head against Hawke’s hard belly, and sobbed. Hawke didn’t shrink from the smell, the dirt, the blood. He went on staring down at Joey, smiling faintly.

Jordan went sick inside.

“Hawke, he can’t stay here. You know that. He can’t.”

Hawke stroked Joey’s filthy hair.

Jordan said harshly, “Joey, leave my office. This is still my office. Leave it now. Go—” He couldn’t send Joey onto the plant floor, word would be all over the factory by now. Hawke’s office was locked, the outbuildings were worse yet, there was no place at We-Sleep that Joey would be safe from his coworkers…

“Send him to my security shack,” Mayleen’s image said. Jordan had forgotten the comlink was still open. “Ain’t nobody going to bother him here.”

Startled, Jordan considered rapidly. Mayleen controlled weapons—but, no. She wouldn’t. He heard that, somehow, in her voice.

“Go to Mayleen’s guard shack, Joey,” Jordan said, with as much authority as he could. “Go now.”

Joey didn’t move.

“Go on, Joey,” Hawke said in his amused voice, and Joey went.

Jordan faced his boss. “They’ll kill him if he stays here.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do, and so do you. You’ve encouraged so much hate for Sleepless…” He stopped. This was what We-Sleep meant, then. Not just hatred for Kevin Baker and Leisha Camden and Jennifer Sharifi, powerful smart people who could take care of themselves, who were economic opponents with all the best economic weapons on their side. But also hatred for Joey No-Name, who wouldn’t recognize an economic weapon if he tripped over it. Which he probably would.

“Don’t think like that, Jordan,” Hawke said quietly. “Joey is an anomaly. A blip in the Sleepless statistics. He’s insignificant in the real war for justice.”

“Not insignificant enough for you to ignore. If you really thought he was insignificant you’d send him away, to safety. They’ll kill him here, and you’ll let them, because that’s one more way to gain the thrill of a triumph over the Sleepless, isn’t it?”

Hawke sat down on Jordan’s desk, with the expansive, easy movement Jordan had seen him make a hundred times before. A hundred, a thousand, counting all the times Hawke had haunted him in dreams. Hawke was settling in with his easy movements for a pleasant picking at Jordan’s reasoning, a pleasant demolishment of Jordan’s naive beliefs, an easy triumph over a mind that couldn’t begin to match Hawke’s.

Not this time.

Hawke said easily, “You’re overlooking a crucial point, Jordy. The basis for any individual dignity must be individual choice. Joey chooses to stay here. Every proponent of human dignity, from Kenzo Yagai back through Abraham Lincoln clear back to Euripides, has argued that individual choice must supersede community pressure. Why, Lincoln himself said—I know your wonderful Aunt Leisha could supply the whole quotation—on the subject of the danger to emancipated slaves—”

Jordan said, “I quit.”

Hawke smiled. “Now, Jordy, haven’t we been through this before? And with what results?”

Jordan walked out. Hawke would let him, Jordan, be killed, too, in a different way. He had been doing just that, in fact, all along, and Jordan had never seen it. Or was this, too—this goading of Jordan through poor Jordy—was this, too, deliberate on Hawke’s part? Did Hawke want him to quit?

There was no way to be sure.

The noise of the plant rushed over him. On the north superscreen was framed an aerial shot of Sanctuary, wilderness surrounding the high-tech domes of Salamanca. “Military Buffs Have Long Enjoyed Devising Feasible Hypothetical Assaults on This Supposedly Impregnable—” Rat a-tat-tat. “Halooo-ooogin with My Baa-by—” Jordan walked out the side door. Joey outweighed him by 175 pounds; there was no way Jordan could get him away from the factory by force. Joey wasn’t persuadable, not by anyone but Hawke. Jordan couldn’t leave him here. How?

In the security kiosk, Joey’s huge body slumped against the one wall not made of transparent plastic. Mayleen cut off the comlink to Hawke’s office; she must have heard the entire discussion between Jordan and Hawke. She avoided Jordan’s eyes, gazing down at the unconscious Joey.

“I give him some of my great-gramama’s tea.”

“Tea…”

“We river rats know a lot you California boys don’t never guess,” Mayleen said wearily. “Git him out of here, Jordan. I done called Campbell. He’ll help you load Joey into your car, if Mr. Hawke don’t tell him different first. Move fast.”

“Why, Mayleen? Why help a Sleepless?”

Mayleen shrugged. Then her voice turned passionate. “Shit, look at him! Even my baby’s dirty diaper don’t smell like that. You think I need to fight that to get somewhere in this here world? He ain’t in my way, no matter if he don’t need to sleep or eat or even breathe.” Her tone changed yet again. “Poor beggar.”

Jordan brought his car to the front gate. He, Mayleen, and the unsuspecting Campbell heaved Joey into it. Just before he drove away, Jordan stuck his head out the car window. “Mayleen?”

“What?” She had turned prickly again. Her colorless hair straggled into her face, disordered by the effort of hauling Joey.

“Come with me. You don’t believe any more that this is right.”

Mayleen’s face closed. Heat into ice. “No.”

“But you see that—”

“This is all I got for hope, Jordan. This. Here.”

She went into the security kiosk and bent over her surveillance equipment. Jordan drove off, his captive, rescued Sleepless filling the back seat. Jordan didn’t look back at the We-Sleep factory. Not this time. This time, he wasn’t going back.

14

During the third week of the trial, while Richard Keller testified against his wife, activity in the press box became frantic. The holo-artists’ fingers flew; the color journalists whispered subvocal notes, the men’s Adam’s apples working soundlessly. On a few faces Leisha saw the small, cruel smiles of small, cruel people watching pain.

Richard wore a dark suit over a black bodystretch. Leisha remembered all the light colors he’d programmed into posters and windows everywhere he’d ever lived. Sea colors, usually: green, blue, the subtle grays and creams of foam. Richard sat slumped forward in the witness box, palms flat on his knees, the courtroom light flat on skin stretched taut over broad features. His nails, she saw, were ragged, not really clean. Richard, whose passion was the sea.

Hossack said, “When did you first realize your wife had stolen Dr. Walcott’s patents and filed them under the name of Sanctuary?”

Instantly Sandaleros was on his feet. “Objection! It has been established as fact nowhere—nowhere!—that patents were stolen, or by whom!”

“Sustained,” the judge said. He looked hard at Hossack. “You know better than that, Mr. Hossack.”

“When, Mr. Keller, did your wife first tell you that Sanctuary had filed patents on research to enable Sleepers to become Sleepless?”

Richard spoke in a monotone. “The morning of August 28.”

“Six weeks after the actual filing date.”

“Yes.”

“And what was your reaction?”

“I asked her,” Richard said, his hands still flat on his knees, “who in Sanctuary had developed the patents.”

“And what did she answer?”

“She told me that we had taken them from Outside and had them back-filed in the United States Patent Office system.”

“Objection! Hearsay!”

“Overruled,” Deepford said.

“She told you, in other words,” Hossack continued, “that she was responsible for both stealing and for invasion of United States datanets.”

“Yes. She told me that.”

“Did you question her on how this alleged theft had been accomplished?”

“Yes.”

“Tell the court what she said.”

This was what the press wanted; this was what the spectators jammed knee to thigh had come for. To hear the power of Sanctuary exposed from the inside, gutted by a Sleepless who was gutting himself to do it. Leisha could taste the tension. It had a coppery, salty taste, like blood.

Richard said, “I explained to Leisha Camden once that I am not a datanet expert. I don’t know how it was accomplished. I didn’t ask. What little I do know is on record with the United States Department of Justice. If you want to hear it, play the recording. I will not repeat it.”

Judge Deepford leaned sideways over the bench. “Mr. Keller, you are under oath. Answer the question.”

“No,” Richard said.

“If you don’t answer,” the judge said, not ungently, “I’ll place you in contempt.”

Richard began to laugh. “Contempt? Place me in contempt?” He stopped laughing and raised his hands to the height of his shoulders, like a dazed boxer. His hands dropped. He let them dangle limply by his sides. No matter what was said to him, he sat unanswering, only smiling once in a while and murmuring “Contempt,” until the judge declared an hour’s recess.

When court reconvened, Deepford looked tired. Everyone but Will Sandaleros looked tired. Dismembering a man, Leisha thought numbly, was hard work.

Will Sandaleros looked on fire.

Hossack dangled a pendant by its gold chain in front of the witness. “Do you recognize this, Mr. Keller?”

“Yes.” The skin on Richard’s face looked puffy, like old dough.

“What is it?”

“It’s a micro-power controller keyed to Sanctuary’s Y-field.”

The jury stared at the pendant in Hossack’s hand. A few leaned forward. One man slowly shook his head.

The pendant was tear-shaped, of some smooth, opaque substance the green of fresh apples. According to the testimony of the surly garage attendant, he had found the thing near Dr. Herlinger’s scooter slot just moments after seeing a figure, masked and gloved, run out a side entrance. The shield on the entrance had been taken down: “So it don’t record my every little coming and going all day, you know?” the attendant said. Surveillance tape verified this testimony. Leisha hadn’t doubted it in the first place. Long experience had taught her to recognize a witness too uninterested in justice to care about perverting it.

The green pendant swung gently in Hossack’s fingers.

“Who owns this device, Mr. Keller?”

“I don’t know.”

“The Sanctuary pendants aren’t individualized in any way? With initials, or by color, or anything at all?”

“No.”

“How many exist?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why is that?” Hossack said.

“I wasn’t in charge of their manufacture or distribution.”

“Who was?”

“My wife.”

“You mean the defendant, Jennifer Sharifi.”

“Yes.”

Hossack let that hang there while he consulted his notes. My wife. What, Leisha could almost hear the jury think, does it take to make a husband condemn his wife? Her fingers tightened against each other.

“Mr. Keller, you are a member of the Sanctuary Council. Why don’t you know how many of these pendants exist?”

“Because I didn’t want to know.”

If she had been Richard’s lawyer, Leisha thought, she would never have let him say that. But Richard had refused all counsel. She wondered suddenly if he had a pendant of his own. Did little Najla? Ricky?

Hossack said, “Wasn’t the reason you didn’t want to know anything about the pendants because your wife’s other activities appalled you so much?”

“Objection!” Sandaleros cried furiously. “Not only is Mr. Hossack feeding the witness prejudicial opinions, but—as I’ve repeatedly tried to point out—this entire line of evidence has not been tied directly to my client and is in fact irrelevant. Opposing counsel knows there are at least twenty other people with those pendants; he agreed to that stipulation. If Mr. Hossack thinks he can milk irrelevant circumstances for their thrill value—”

“Your Honor,” Hossack said, “we’re establishing that the link between Sanctuary and the scooter tampering is an unequivocally clear one that—”

“Objection! Do you think that even if that amulet could be shown to belong to a member of Sanctuary, that any Sleepless would be so stupid as to drop it? This is clearly a frame, and Ms. Sharifi—”

“Objection!”

“Counsel will approach the bench!”

Sandaleros made a visible effort to control himself. Hossack sailed forward, all grave mass. Deepford leaned over the bench toward them, his face rigid with anger. But he was not as angry as Sandaleros when the two lawyers returned. Leisha closed her eyes.

She knew now what to expect when Sandaleros cross-examined. She hadn’t been sure, before. Now she knew.

It wasn’t long coming. “And so you are telling this court, Mr. Keller,” Will Sandaleros began with clear disbelief, “that your motive for betraying your wife by going to Leisha Camden—”

“Move to strike,” Hossack said wearily. “ ‘Betrayal’ is clearly an inflammatory word.”

“Sustained,” the judge said.

“So you are telling this court that your motive for revealing to Leisha Camden your wife’s alleged surveillance activities and alleged theft—your motive for this was concern for her under a law that had not protected your business from being ruined by prejudice on the part of Sleepers, had not protected your friend Anthony Indivino from being murdered by Sleepers, had not—”

“Objection!” Hossack cried.

“I’ll allow it,” Deepford said. His face sagged.

“—had not protected your children from being dangerously menaced by a We-Sleep mob at Stars and Stripes Airport, had not protected your marine-research ship from being sunk by parties unknown but allegedly Sleepers—after all these failures of the law to protect you in these circumstances, your motive for turning in your wife was concern for her under the law?”

“Yes,” Richard said hoarsely. “There was no other way to stop Jennifer. I told her—I begged her—I went to Leisha before I knew about Herlinger…I hadn’t…Leisha didn’t tell me—”

Even Judge Deepford glanced away.

Sandaleros repeated scathingly, “And your motives for exposing your wife to Ms. Camden were conjugal concern and good citizenship. Very commendable. Tell me, Mr. Keller, were you and Leisha Camden ever lovers?”

“Objection!” Hossack all but screamed. “Irrelevant! Your Honor—”

Deepford studied his gavel. Leisha, through her numbness, saw that he was going to allow the question. Out of a concern for fairness to the minority, the persecuted, the habitually discriminated against.

“Overruled.”

“Mr. Keller,” Sandaleros said between clenched teeth; he was becoming, Leisha saw, the avenging angel, layer by layer, cell by cell. Gene by gene. The original Will Sandaleros was almost gone. “Were you and Leisha Camden, the woman to whom you exposed your wife’s alleged wrongdoing, ever lovers?”

“Yes,” Richard said.

“Since your marriage to Jennifer Sharifi?”

“Yes,” Richard said.

“When?” Kevin’s face was quiet on the hotel comscreen.

Leisha said carefully, “Before you and I started living together. Jennifer was obsessed with Tony’s memory, and Richard felt—it doesn’t matter, Kevin.” As soon as the words were out, she knew how stupid they were. It mattered profoundly. To the trial. To Richard. Perhaps—even, still—to Jennifer, although how could Leisha guess what mattered to Jennifer? She didn’t understand Jennifer. Obsession fell within Leisha’s comprehension; obsessive secrecy, the preference for dark and silent plotting rather than lighted battles, did not. “Jennifer knows. She knew at the time. Sometimes it almost seemed…as if she wanted me to reach out to Richard.”

Kevin said, as if it were an answer, “I’m taking the Sanctuary oath.”

It was a moment before Leisha answered. “Why?”

“I can’t do business otherwise, Leisha. Baker Enterprises is too deeply meshed with Donald Pospula’s firm, with Aerodyne, with half a dozen other Sleepless companies. My losses would be enormous.”

“You don’t know the first thing about real losses!”

“Leisha, it isn’t a personal decision. Please try to see that. It’s purely financial—”

“Is that the only thing that matters?”

“Of course not. But Sanctuary isn’t asking for anything immoral, only for community solidarity based firmly on economic solidarity. That isn’t—”

Leisha broke the comlink. She believed Kevin; his decision was purely economic, within boundaries he could construe as moral. Emotional obsession like Jennifer’s would never move him, never touch that smooth clear face, nor the smooth, clear brain beneath it. Obsessions like Jennifer’s—and like her own for the necessity of law.

Days ago, she had asked herself what she had left to lose. Now, she knew.

Security encoded in secret pendants. Oaths of fealty. Planted evidence—because Will Sandaleros was right, no Sleepless would have ever left that pendant there. They were, all of them, too careful. But that fact would not be admissible in court. Generalities—even if profoundly true, even if crucial—never were.

Leisha sat on the edge of the hotel bed. It dominated the room, that bed. She had assumed, on first checking in at Conewango, that that was because sex was so important to the business of hotels. Wrong assumption. Reasoning from parochial experience.

It was sleep that was central. To everyone’s assumptions.

It wasn’t that she expected the practice of law to be clean. No trial lawyer expected that, not after years of plea bargains and perjury and crooked cops and political deals and misapplied statutes and biased juries. But she had believed that the law itself, apart from its practice, was, if not clean, at least large. Large enough.

She remembered the day she had realized that Yagaiist economics were not large enough. Their stress on individual excellence left out too many phenomena, too many people: those who had no excellence and never would. The beggars, who nonetheless had definite if obscure roles to play in the way the world ran. They were like parasites on a mammal that torment it to a scratching frenzy that draws blood, but whose eggs serve as food for other insects that feed yet others who fatten the birds that are prey for the rodents the tormented mammal eats. A bloody ecology of trade, replacing the linear Yagaiist contracts occurring in a vacuum. The ecology was large enough to take Sleepers and Sleepless, producers and beggars, the excellent and the mediocre and the seemingly worthless. And what kept the ecology functioning was the law.

But if the law itself was not large enough?

Not large enough to take in what a Sleepless would do, unprovable but clear as air? To take in what had happened between Richard and her. To take in not only what Jennifer had done, but why. Most of all, to take in that ineffable envy, as potent as genetic structure itself but not able to be spliced, altered, engineered out of existence. Envy for the powerful. The law had never been able to take that in. It had created endless civil rights legislation to correct prejudice against the biologically identifiable: Blacks. Women. Chicanos. The handicapped. But never before in the United States had the objects of envy and the objects of biological prejudice been the same group. And United States law was not large enough to take that in.

Leisha put her head between her knees. It was clear how the rest of the trial would go. Her own testimony would be discredited by Sandaleros as maneuverings by a jealous other woman against the legal wife. Richard would be discredited. Hossack would hit hard on his strong point: Sanctuary’s power. Sleepless power. Sandaleros would not allow Jennifer to testify; her composure would look like coldbloodedness to a jury of Sleepers, her desire to protect her own like an attack on the Outside—

Which it had been.

The jury could go either way: acquit on the supposed love triangle, and then Jennifer would escape the law. Or convict because she was a powerful Sleepless, and then Jennifer would never survive her fellow inmates. Sanctuary would withdraw deeper into itself, a powerful spider spinning electronic webs for its own protection around a country of Sleepers increasingly filled with fear of people they seldom saw, never netted with, and would not buy from lest the Sleepless ruin the economy of which they were either shadow or source, no one could tell for sure. They control things secretly, you know. They want to enslave us. They work with international competitors to bring us to our knees. And they don’t stop at murder.

And so prove that all along Jennifer had been right to protect her own.

It was a snake swallowing its own tail. Because the law, in its striving to be fair and treat all equally, left too much out. It was not large enough. It was not as large as the genetic and technological future which, outgrowing it, would be lawless.

Sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark hotel room, Leisha could feel her belief in the law leave her, as if the air itself were being sucked out of the room. She was choking, falling into a vacuum of cold and dark. The law wasn’t large enough. It couldn’t hold Sleeper and Sleepless together after all, couldn’t provide any ethical way to judge behavior, and without judgment there was nothing. Only lawlessness and the mob and the void—

She tried to stand, but her knees buckled. Nothing like this had happened to her before. She found herself on the floor, on her hands and knees, and a still-rational part of her mind said, heart attack. But it couldn’t be. Sleepless hearts did not give out.

Cold—

Blackness—

Emptiness—

Daddy—

The opening of the hotel-room door brought her back. It opened from the outside, without alarms. Leisha staggered to her feet. Across the room, beyond the bed, a figure stood silhouetted in the doorway, a thick figure carrying something even thicker. Leisha didn’t move. Her own people—Kevin’s people—had installed the security for this room, making it identical to her apartment in Chicago. No one in Conewango had the entry codes.

If it was a stranger, if Sanctuary was organized for assassination as well as theft…

The assassin would at least be good. Sleepless always were.

An arm stretched out from the dark figure. A hand fumbled for the manual switches.

“Lights on,” Leisha said clearly.

The blocky shape was a suitcase. Alice stood blinking in the sudden light. “Leisha? Are you sitting in the dark?”

“Alice!”

“Your apartment codes opened both doors…don’t you think you should change them? There’s a bunch of reporters in the lobby—”

“Alice!” Then she was across the room, sobbing—she, who never cried—in Alice’s arms.

“Didn’t you know I’d come?” Alice said.

Leisha shook her head against Alice’s chest.

“I knew.” Alice released her, and Leisha saw that Alice’s face shone with some strong emotion. “I knew that this would be the night for you. The night you’d fall into the Hole. I knew it yesterday—I felt it.” She laughed suddenly, very shrill. “I felt it, Leisha, do you understand? It was like being hit with a load of bricks. I felt that you’d be in your worst trouble tonight, and I knew I had to come.”

Leisha stopped sobbing.

“I felt it,” Alice said yet again. “Across 3,000 miles. Just the way it’s happened to other twins!”

“Alice—”

“No, don’t say anything, Leisha. You weren’t there. I know what I felt.”

Leisha saw that the powerful emotion blazing on Alice’s face was triumph.

“I knew you needed me. And I’m here. It’s all right, Leisha, honey, I know about the Hole, I’ve been there—” She reached again for Leisha, putting her arms around her, laughing and crying. “I know, honey, it’s all right. You’re not alone. I’ve been there, I know…”

Leisha hung onto her sister with all her strength. Alice was pulling her back from the dark place. The void, the Hole. Alice, whose bulk anchored Leisha short of the edge, solid as earth. Alice, who now would never be unreachable again. Not now that Alice had known something before Leisha did. Not now that Alice had saved Leisha by becoming the one thing she hadn’t lost.

“I knew,” Alice whispered. And then, stronger, “Now I can stop sending all those damn flowers.”

It wasn’t until later, after they’d talked for hours and Alice was starting to look sleepy, that the comlink shrilled. Leisha had turned it off; only a priority override could get through. She turned her head toward the screen. Two passwords flashed there. The link’s fuzzy logic had admitted them simultaneously, apportioning one voice per speaker:

“Susan Melling here. I must—”

“This is Stella Bevington. I just accessed the nets. The—”

“—talk to you immediately. Call—”

“—pendant the newsgrids say was—”

“—me on a shielded—”

“—found at that parking garage—”

“—line as soon as you can!”

“—is mine.”

“We’ve finished our research,” Susan’s image said on the comscreen. Her gray hair straggled in greasy strands from a careless bun; her eyes burned. “Gaspard-Thiereux and I. On Walcott’s Sleepless redundancy codes in DNA.”

Leisha said evenly, “And?”

“Is this an unshielded line? Hell, forget that. Let the press tap. Let Sanctuary tap. Hey, Blumenthal—you listening?”

“Susan, please—”

“No please about it. No thank you, no nothing. That’s why I wanted to tell you this myself. No nothing. The equations can’t work.”

“Can’t—”

“There’s a gap that can’t be closed between shutting down the sleep mechanism at the preembryonic genetic level and trying to do the same thing after the brain has begun to differentiate at roughly eight days. The reasons the gap can’t be closed are quite clear, quite specific, quite biologically final. They have to do with the tolerance of genetic noise in those genetic texts that are repetitions of regulatory systems. You don’t need the details—the result is that we will never be able to convert a Sleeper into a Sleepless. Never. No one. Not Walcott, not the superbrains at Sanctuary, not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Walcott is lying.”

“I…I don’t understand.”

“He made the whole thing up. It’s very plausible, plausible enough to take good researchers a while to check. But essentially it’s a lie, and there’s no way a scientist with his famous withheld final step could not know that. Walcott knew. His research is a lie. He came to you with this stupendous discovery he knew would be shown to be a lie, and Sanctuary committed fraud for patents that are a lie, and Jennifer Sharifi is being tried for murder because of a lie.”

Leisha couldn’t take it in. None of it made any sense. She was very aware of Alice across the room, standing completely still. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Susan said. “But it’s a lie. You hear that, press? You hear that, Sanctuary? It’s a lie!”

She started to cry.

“Susan…oh, Susan…”

“No, no, don’t say anything. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry. That’s the one thing I didn’t mean to do…Who’s that with you? You’re not alone?”

“Alice,” Leisha said. “She—”

“It’s just that I thought maybe I could become what I created. Stupid idea, huh? All of literature shows that the creators can’t become the creations.”

Leisha said nothing. Susan stopped crying as abruptly as she had started, tears drying on her old, soft, wrinkled skin. “After all, Leisha, that wouldn’t do, would it? For the creators to become the creations? Who would there be to go on perfecting the art if we all got to be patrons?” Then, in a different voice, she said, “Bring Walcott down, Leisha. Like any other quack who sells worthless hope to the dying. Bring the bastard down.”

“I will,” Leisha said. But she didn’t mean Walcott. In a sudden dizzying rush, she saw who it was that had been committing theft, and how, and why.

15

Jordan opened his apartment door, sleepy and Astonished. It was 4:30 in the morning. Leisha Camden stood there with three silent bodyguards.

“Leisha! What…”

“Come with me. Quick—by now I’m sure Hawke knows I’m here. There was no way to tell you I was coming that he wouldn’t intercept. Get dressed, Jordan. We’re going to the We-Sleep factory.”

“I—”

“Now! Hurry!”

Jordan thought of telling her that he wasn’t going to the factory—not now, not ever. But another look convinced him that Leisha would go there alone, and he suddenly didn’t want that. Leisha wore a long blue sweater over a black bodystretch. Blue shadows pooled in the hollows under her eyes. She leaned a little forward on the balls of her feet, as if she were leaning into him, and it suddenly occurred to Jordan that she needed him with her. Not for physical protection—the three bodyguards collectively massed 640 pounds, not counting weapons—but for some other, edgy reason Jordan couldn’t define.

“Let me get dressed,” he said.

In the dark hallway Joey raised his head from his oversized cot. “Go back inside,” Jordan said. “It’s all right.” Leisha, in need of him.

There was a plane, apparently folded in on itself in some state-of-the-art way that let it land vertically, in the apartment-house parking lot. But this was no aircar—it was a definite plane. The control panel bore no identifying marks. In the air it unfolded itself and shot over the sleeping town toward the river.

“All right, Leisha. Tell me what this is all about.”

“Hawke killed Timothy Herlinger.”

Something shifted inside Jordan. He knew what it was: truth. Tiny, deadly, like one of those poison pellets that dissolve in the heart of suicides. All you had to do was swallow it and the hard part was over, the rest inevitable and unstoppable. Jordan felt it move, and knew it had already been there before Leisha spoke. It had been there in the Profit Faire, in Jordan’s ambiguous admiration of Hawke, in the argument over Joey, even in Mayleen’s new toilet and her lace tablecloth. It was in the We-Sleep Movement itself.

He looked at Leisha. She seemed to radiate light, a hard lurid light like the Y-fields designed to alert people to dangerous machinery. She said again, “Hawke killed Dr. Herlinger. He set it up.”

Jordan heard himself say, “And you’re glad.”

She turned a shocked face toward him. They regarded each other in the small cockpit of the plane, the three bodyguards a motionless blur behind them. Jordan had not meant to say it, but when the words were out he knew they, too, were true. She was glad. That it was Hawke and not a Sleepless. Gladness. That was the source of the lurid light, and of her need to have him with her.

“Witness for the persecution,” he said, in a voice so unlike his own that Leisha said, “What?”

“Never mind. Tell me.”

She didn’t even hesitate. “The retina print on the scanner will match Stella Bevington’s. Hawke must have taken it at your mother’s party for Beck, at the new house, when everybody was drinking and careless. The party he bullied you into bringing him to. And that’s when he got Stella’s pendant, too. Jennifer sent her one; she wanted Stella in Sanctuary and was trying to force Stella to choose. Stella was wearing the pendant but she took it off at the party because she saw all over again the kindness, the tolerance of Sleepers like your mother”…oh, Daddy, the specialness of Alice!…“Hawke took the pendant from her purse. She reported the loss to Jennifer but with no details; that was because of me…”

Leisha turned her head. Jordan allowed himself no sympathy, no compassion. Leisha, he thought, was losing nothing. The murderer was a Sleeper.

“Jennifer knew nobody would be able to figure out by accident what the pendant did, and it would self-destruct if they tried, so she wasn’t really worried that Stella lost it. Jennifer had already taken Hawke’s bait on the patents. Jordan, there never was any process to alter Sleepers to Sleepless. Hawke hired Walcott and Herlinger to pretend there was, make a false lead look scientifically plausible… God, he arranged the whole thing in detail. So Sanctuary would break into the government nets and back-file. Then he could use Walcott to report the theft, set the press going, and even without an indictment Sanctuary would take a beating. We-Sleep membership would soar.”

Which was exactly what had happened, Jordan thought. Hawke was always a good planner. The little plane began its descent over the factory.

“But then Herlinger changed his mind. He had a flash of conscience and was going to expose Walcott and Hawke. So Hawke had him killed.”

And that was typical of Leisha, too, Jordan thought. She didn’t think: Herlinger was trying to blackmail his partners, so they had him killed. Or, Herlinger got into a power struggle with Hawke and Hawke had him killed. No, she assumed a flash of conscience, even in this situation. She assumed the public-minded and decent cause. “An eighteenth-century sensibility,” Hawke had said. With scorn.

Jordan said, “You don’t know that you’re right. And if what you say is true and Hawke has me under such surveillance that he already knows we’re coming…there will be no evidence left when we get there.”

Leisha turned on him a brilliant gaze. “There wouldn’t have been anyway. Not discoverable evidence.”

“Then why are we going there?”

She didn’t answer.

The gate of the factory was unshielded. The guard—not Mayleen—waved them through.

Hawke waited in his office, leaning casually against the front of his desk, palms flat on the wooden surface behind him. The desk held the full parody display: the Cherokee dolls, the Harvard coffee mug, the model We-Sleep scooter, the pile of misspelled mail from grateful workers at their first job in years, the plaques and pen sets and gilded statuettes from We-Sleep businesses. Some of them Jordan had never seen; Hawke must have taken them out, item by item, and arranged them carefully on the desk so his big body would not block the sight of them from the door. All the cheap accolades from hard-scrabble businesses, all the totems of contradictory successes. Looking at them, Jordan felt coldness slide over him. It was real, then. Not just true, but real. Hawke had killed.

“Ms. Camden,” Hawke said.

Leisha wasted no words. Her voice was controlled, but the lurid light was still on her. “You killed Timothy Herlinger.”

Hawke smiled. “No. I did not.”

“Yes, you did,” Leisha said, but it didn’t sound to Jordan as if she were arguing, or trying to force agreement. “You set up Walcott’s phony research to fan the hatred toward Sleepless, and when you saw a chance to accuse a Sleepless of murder, you did that, too.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hawke said pleasantly.

As if he hadn’t spoken, Leisha went on. “You did it to increase We-Sleep profits. Or rather, you think you did it for that reason. But profits were increasing anyway. You really did it because you’re not a Sleepless, and never can be, and you’re one of the haters that always moves to destroy any superiority he can’t have.”

The flesh above Hawke’s collar started to redden. This was evidently not what he’d expected to hear. Jordan said, “Leisha…”

“It’s all right, Jordan,” she said clearly. “The three bodyguards are highly trained, the plane is equipped with surveillance equipment trained on my body, I am recording, and Mr. Hawke knows all this. There is no danger.” She turned to Hawke. “Not to you, either, of course. Nothing is provable. Not against you, not against Jennifer once the retina print is identified as Stella Bevington’s, because she can explain not only how she lost the pendant but where she was the morning Herlinger died. She was in a corporate meeting with fourteen executives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. You knew all that would surface, didn’t you, Mr. Hawke, as soon as the pendant was introduced in evidence and Stella realized it was hers. You knew the trial would fail, and no one would be convicted. But the hatred would have been inflamed a little more, and that’s what mattered to you.”

“You’re talking garbage, Ms. Camden,” Hawke said. Jordan saw that he was again in control of himself, his big body relaxed and powerful as he leaned against the desk. “But I’ll respond to your last statement anyway. I’ll tell you what matters. This—” he picked up the sheaf of letters behind him “—matters. Gratitude from people who did not have the dignity of work before, and because of We-Sleep have it now. This matters.”

“Dignity? Based on fraud and theft and murder?”

“The only theft I know of was committed by Sanctuary, stealing Walcott’s patents. At least, so I hear on the newsgrids.”

“Ah,” Leisha said. “Then let me tell you of one more theft, Mr. Hawke. Just so you understand. You stole something else, and you stole it from my sister Alice, and from my friend Susan Melling, and from every other Sleeper who believed there was a chance at the long life and increased powers that come with Sleeplessness. They believed that, for a little while. They hoped that, in those hours of the night when Sleepers lie awake and think about living and dying and not sleeping. You wonder how I know that. Let me tell you how I know. I know because Susan Melling is dying of an inoperable brain condition, and knows it, and wants desperately not to die. I know because my sister said to me during the trial—the trial you engineered for your own aggrandizement—she said, ‘The hardest thing I ever learned, Leisha, wasn’t to raise Jordan alone or earn a living or to accept that Daddy didn’t love me. The hardest thing I ever learned was that even if I blamed you, I was still going to have to do all those things. The hardest thing I learned was that there’s no way out.’ You held out the promise of a way out, Mr. Hawke, and then robbed Alice of it. Alice and Susan and every other Sleeper who doesn’t take hatred as a way out. You didn’t rob the haters. You robbed the others, the people who try to be too decent for hatred. That’s what you stole and who you stole it from.”

Hawke’s smile was stiff. There was a long silence. Finally he said mockingly, “Very pretty, Ms. Camden. You could easily find a job writing greeting cards.”

Leisha’s expression didn’t change. She turned to go, and in that single contemptuous movement Jordan suddenly saw how little she had expected from this meeting. She had not confronted Hawke expecting to change him, or to learn anything from him, or even to discharge her rage. Those were not the reasons she had come, or the reason she had needed Jordan to come with her.

No one stopped them as they left the factory. No one spoke until the plane skimmed over the dark fields sliced by the darker river. Jordan looked at his aunt. She didn’t know about Joey, didn’t know that Jordan had already left Hawke. “You came here for me. So I would see what Hawke is.”

Leisha took his hand. Her fingers were cold. “Yes, I came for you. That’s all there is, Jordan. You. And you and you and you and you and you. I thought there was something more, something larger, but I was wrong. One by one. That’s all there is.”

“Community,” Jennifer Sharifi said calmly to Najla and Ricky, “must always come first. That’s why Daddy won’t be coming home again. Daddy broke his solidarity with his community.”

The children looked at their shoes. They were afraid of her, Jennifer saw. That was not bad; fear was only the ancient word for respect.

Najla finally said in a small voice, “Why do we have to leave Sanctuary?”

“We aren’t leaving Sanctuary, Najla. Sanctuary goes with us. Wherever the community is, that’s Sanctuary. You’ll like the new place we’re taking Sanctuary. It’s safer for our people.”

Ricky raised his eyes to his mother. Richard’s eyes, in Richard’s face. “When will the orbital be ready for us?”

“Five years. We must plan it, construct it, pay for it.” Five years would be faster than an orbital had ever been constructed before, even given that they had purchased an existing shell from a Far East government that now would have to build itself another one.

Ricky said, “And we’ll never come back to Earth again?”

“Certainly you’ll come back to Earth,” Jennifer said. “On business, when you’re grown. Much of our business will still be here, among those few Sleepers who are not beggars or parasites. But we’ll conduct business from the orbital, and we’ll find ways to use genemods to build the strongest society ever known.”

Najla said doubtfully, “Is that legal?”

Jennifer rose, the folds of her abbaya falling around her sandals. The two children rose as well, Najla still looking doubtful, Ricky troubled. “It will be legal,” Jennifer said. “We’ll make it legal for you, and for all the children to come. Legal, and solid, and safe.”

“Mother—” Ricky said, and stopped.

“Yes, Ricky?”

He looked at her, and a shade passed over his small face. Whatever he had been going to say, he decided to keep it to himself. Jennifer bent and kissed him, kissed Najla, and turned to start toward the house. She would talk again to the children later, explaining to them in small doses they could absorb, making it all clear. Later. Right now there was so much else to do. To plan. To keep in control.

16

Susan Melling and Leisha Camden sat in lawn chairs on the roof of Susan’s house in the New Mexico desert and watched Jordan and Stella stroll toward a huge cottonwood beside the creek. Overhead the summer triangle, Vega and Altair and Deneb, shone faint beside a brilliant full moon. On the western horizon the last red faded from low clouds. Long darknesses moved over the desert toward the mountains, whose peaks still glowed with unseen sun. Susan shivered.

“I’ll get your sweater,” Leisha said.

“No, I’m fine,” Susan said.

“Shut up.”

Leisha climbed down the ladder from the roof, found the sweater in Susan’s cluttered study, and stopped a moment in the living room. All the polished skulls were gone. She climbed the ladder and put the sweater around Susan’s shoulders.

“Look at them,” Susan said, with pleasure. Just before the deeper darkness of the cottonwood, the silhouette that was Jordan blended with the shadow that was Stella. Leisha smiled; Susan’s eyes, at least, were still sharp.

The two women sat in silence. Finally Susan said, “Kevin called again.”

“No,” Leisha said simply.

The old woman shifted her slight, painful weight in her chair. “Don’t you believe in forgiveness, Leisha?”

“Yes. I do. But Kevin doesn’t know he’s done anything that requires it.”

“I take it he doesn’t know either that Richard is here with you.”

“I don’t know what he knows,” Leisha said indifferently. “Who can tell anymore?”

“Like you, for instance, couldn’t tell that Jennifer Sharifi was innocent of murder. And you won’t forgive yourself any more than you forgive Kevin.”

Leisha turned her head away. Moonlight ran up her cheek like a scalpel. From the cottonwood came low laughter. Leisha said suddenly, “I wish Alice were here.”

Susan smiled. The smile was strained; her painkillers needed to be increased again. “Maybe she’ll just show up again if you need her hard enough.”

“That’s not funny.”

“You don’t believe it happened, do you, Leisha? You don’t believe Alice had a paranormal perception about you.”

“I believe she believes it,” Leisha said carefully. Everything was different now between her and Alice, and the difference was too precious to risk. Alice was the only thing she’d gotten back from this year of cataclysmic loss. Alice and Susan, and Susan was dying.

Still, she had always been able to be honest with Susan. “You know I don’t believe in the paranormal. The normal is difficult enough to understand.”

“And the paranormal disturbs your world view a lot, doesn’t it?” After a minute Susan added in a softer tone, “Are you afraid Alice will disapprove of Jordan and Stella? A Sleepless and a Sleeper?”

“God, no. I know she’d approve.” She gave a sudden bark of harsh laughter. “Alice may be one of the twelve people in the world who would.”

Susan said, as if it were relevant, “You also got calls from Stewart Sutter, Kate Addams, Miyuki Yagai, and your secretary, what’s-his-name. I told them all you’d call back.”

“I won’t,” Leisha said.

“There are more than twelve,” Susan said. Leisha didn’t answer.

Below them, Richard emerged from the front door and walked toward the distant mesa. He moved slowly, limply, as if the direction didn’t matter to him. Leisha thought it probably didn’t. Very little did. That he was here at all was due only to Jordan, who had not hesitated but simply put Richard in the car and brought him. Jordan seldom hesitated any more. He acted. A moment later the huge figure of Joey, who loved walking anywhere, shambled happily after Richard.

Susan said, “You think the Sharifi trial ended all chance of real integration—Sleepers and Sleepless, We-Sleep and mainstream economy, have and have-nots.”

“Yes.”

“There’s never a last chance for anything, Leisha.”

“Really? Then how come you’re dying?” After a moment Leisha added, “I’m sorry.”

“You can’t hide here forever, Leisha, just because you’re disillusioned with law.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“What do you call it?”

“I’m living,” Leisha said. “Just living.”

“The hell you are. Not like this, not you. Don’t argue with me—I have the insight of the almost-eternal.”

Despite herself, Leisha laughed. The laugh hurt.

Susan said, “Damn right it’s funny. So call Stewart and Kate and Miyuki and that secretary.”

“No.”

Richard disappeared into the darkness, followed by Joey. Jordan and Stella, holding hands, started back toward the house. Susan said, with apparent guilelessness, “I wish Alice were here.”

Leisha nodded.

“Yes,” Susan said artlessly, “it would be good to collect your entire community.”

Leisha looked at her, but Susan was absorbed in studying the moonlight on the desert, while below them some small animal scurried by unseen and overhead the stars came out one by one by one by one.