SLEEPLESS MUTIE BEGS for reversal of gene tampering,” screamed the headline in the Food Mart. “’Please Let Me Sleep Like Real People!’ Child Pleads.”
Leisha typed in her credit number and pressed the news kiosk for a printout, although ordinarily she ignored the electronic tabloids. The headline went on circling the kiosk. A Food Mart employee stopped stacking boxes on shelves and watched her. Bruce, Leisha’s bodyguard, watched the employee.
She was twenty-two, in her final year at Harvard Law, editor of the Law Review, clearly first in her graduating class. The closest three contenders were Jonathan Cocchiara, Len Carter, and Martha Wentz. All Sleepless.
In her apartment she skimmed the printout. Then she accessed the Groupnet run from Austin. The files had more news stories about the child, with comments from other Sleepless, but before she could call them up Kevin Baker came online himself, on voice.
“Leisha. I’m glad you called. I was going to call you.”
“What’s the situation with this Stella Bevington, Kev? Has anybody checked it out?”
“Randy Davies. He’s from Chicago but I don’t think you’ve met him; he’s still in high school. He’s in Park Ridge, Stella’s in Skokie. Her parents wouldn’t talk to him — they were pretty abusive, in fact — but he got to see Stella face-to-face anyway. It doesn’t look like an abuse case, just the usual stupidity: parents wanted a genius child, scrimped and saved, and now they can’t handle that she is one. They scream at her to sleep, get emotionally abusive when she contradicts them, but so far no violence.”
“Is the emotional abuse actionable?”
“I don’t think we want to move on it yet. Two of us will keep in close touch with Stella — she does have a modem, and she hasn’t told her parents about the net — and Randy will drive out weekly.”
Leisha bit her lip. “A tabloid shitpiece said she’s seven years old.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe she shouldn’t be left there. I’m an Illinois resident, I can file an abuse grievance from here if Candy’s got too much in her briefcase… Seven years old.
“No. Let it sit a while. Stella will probably be all right. You know that.”
She did. Nearly all of the Sleepless stayed all right, no matter how much opposition came from the stupid segment of society. And it was only the stupid segment, Leisha argued, a small if vocal minority. Most people could, and would, adjust to the growing presence of the Sleepless, when it became clear that that presence included not only growing power but growing benefits to the country as a whole.
Kevin Baker, now twenty-six, had made a fortune in microchips so revolutionary that Artificial Intelligence, once a debated dream, was yearly closer to reality. Carolyn Rizzolo had won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for her play Morning Light. She was twenty-four. Jeremy Robinson had done significant work in superconductivity applications while still a graduate student at Stanford. William Thaine, Law Review editor when Leisha first came to Harvard, was now in private practice. He had never lost a case. He was twenty-six, and the cases were becoming important. His clients valued his ability more than his age.
But not everyone reacted that way.
Kevin Baker and Richard Keller had started the datanet that bound the Sleepless into a tight group, constantly aware of each other’s personal fights. Leisha Camden financed the legal battles, the educational costs of Sleepless whose parents were unable to meet them the support of children in emotionally bad situations. Rhonda Lavelier got herself licensed as a foster mother in California, and whenever possible the Group maneuvered to have young Sleepless who were removed from their homes assigned to Rhonda. The Group now had three licensed lawyers; within the next year it would gain four more, licensed to practice in five different states.
The one time they had not been able to remove an abused Sleepless child legally, they kidnapped him.
Timmy DeMarzo, four years old. Leisha had been opposed to the action. She had argued the case morally and pragmatically — to her they were the same thing — thus: If they believed in their society, in its fundamental laws and in their ability to belong to it as free-trading productive individuals, they must remain bound by the society’s contractual laws. The Sleepless were, for the most part, Yagaiists. They should already know this. And if the FBI caught them, the courts and press would crucify them.
They were not caught.
Timmy DeMarzo — not even old enough to call for help on the datanet, they had learned of the situation through the automatic police record scan Kevin maintained through his company — was stolen from his own back yard in Wichita. He had lived the last year in an isolated trailer in North Dakota; no place was too isolated for a modem. He was cared for by a legally irreproachable foster mother who had lived there all her life. The foster mother was second cousin to a Sleepless, a broad cheerful woman with a much better brain than her appearance indicated. She was a Yagaiist. No record of the child’s existence appeared in any data bank: not the IRS’s, not any school’s, not even the local grocery store’s computerized checkout slips. Food specifically for the child was shipped in monthly on a truck owned by a Sleepless in State College, Pennsylvania. Ten of the Group knew about the kidnapping, out of the total 3,428 sleepless born in the United States. Of those, 2,691 were part of the Group via the net. An additional 701 were as yet too young to use a modem. Only thirty-six Sleepless, for whatever reason, were not part of the Group.
The kidnapping had been arranged by Tony Indivino.
“It’s Tony I wanted to talk to you about,” Kevin said to Leisha. “He’s started again. This time he means it. He’s buying land.”
She folded the tabloid very small and laid it carefully on the table. “Where?”
“Allegheny Mountains. In southern New York State. A lot of land. He’s putting in the roads now. In the spring, the first buildings.”
“Jennifer Sharifi still financing it?” It had been six years since the interleukin-1 drinking in the woods, but the evening remained vivid to Leisha. So did Jennifer Sharifi.
“Yes. She’s got the money to do it. Tony’s starting to get a following, Leisha.”
“I know.”
“Call him.”
“I will. Keep me informed about Stella.”
She worked until midnight at the Law Review, then until 4:00 A.M. preparing her classes. From four to five she handled legal matters for the Group. At 5:00 A.M. she called Tony, still in Chicago. He had finished high school, done one semester at Northwestern, and at Christmas vacation had finally exploded at his mother for forcing him to live as a Sleeper. The explosion, it seemed to Leisha, had never ended.
“Tony? Leisha.”
“The answers are yes, yes, no, and go to hell.”
Leisha gritted her teeth. “Fine. Now tell me the questions.”
“Are you really serious about the Sleepless withdrawing into their own self-sufficient society? Is Jennifer Sharifi willing to finance a project the size of building a small city? Don’t you think that’s a cheat of all that can be accomplished by patient integration of the Group into the mainstream? And what about the contradictions of living in an armed restricted city and still trading with the Outside?”
“I would never tell you to go to hell.”
“Hooray for you,” Tony said. After a moment he added, “I’m sorry. That sounds like one of them.”
“It’s wrong for us, Tony.”
“Thanks for not saying I couldn’t pull it off.”
She wondered if he could. “We’re not a separate species, Tony.”
“Tell that to the Sleepers.”
“You exaggerate. There are haters out there, there are always haters, but to give up…”
“We’re not giving up. Whatever we create can be freely traded: software, hardware, novels, information, theories, legal counsel. We can travel in and out. But we’ll have a safe place to return to. Without the leeches who think we owe them blood because we’re better than they are.”
“It isn’t a matter of owing.”
“Really?” Tony said. “Let’s have this out, Leisha. All the way. You’re a Yagaiist — what do you believe in?”
“Tony…”
“Do it,” Tony said, and in his voice she heard the fourteen-year-old she had been introduced to by Richard. Simultaneously, she saw her father’s face: not as he was now, since the bypass, but as he had been when she was a little girl, holding her on his lap to explain that she was special.
“I believe in voluntary trade that is mutually beneficial. That spiritual dignity comes from supporting one’s life through one’s own efforts, and from trading the results of those efforts in mutual cooperation throughout the society. That the symbol of this is the contract. And that we need each other for the fullest, most beneficial trade.”
“Fine,” Tony bit off. “Now what about the beggars in Spain?”
“The what?”
“You walk down a street in a poor country like Spain and you see a beggar. Do you give him a dollar?”
“Probably.”
“Why? He’s trading nothing with you. He has nothing to trade.”
“I know. Out of kindness. Compassion.”
“You see six beggars. Do you give them all a dollar?”
“Probably,” Leisha said.
“You would. You see a hundred beggars and you haven’t got Leisha Camden’s money. Do you give them each a dollar?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Leisha reached for patience. Few people could make her want to cut off a comlink; Tony was one of them. “Too draining on my own resources. My life has first claim on the resources I earn.”
“All right. Now consider this. At Biotech Institute — where you and I began, dear pseudo-sister — Dr. Melling has just yesterday—”
“Who?”
“Dr. Susan Melling. Oh, God, I completely forgot she used to be married to your father!”
“I lost track of her,” Leisha said. “I didn’t realize she’d gone back to research. Alice once said… never mind. What’s going on at Biotech?”
“Two crucial items, just released. Carla Dutcher has had first-month fetal genetic analysis. Sleeplessness is a dominant gene. The next generation of the Group won’t sleep either.”
“We all knew that,” Leisha said. Carla Dutcher was the world’s first pregnant Sleepless. Her husband was a Sleeper. “The whole world expected that.”
“But the press will have a field day with it anyway. Just watch. Muties Breed! New Race Set to Dominate Next Generation Of Children!”
Leisha didn’t deny it. “And the second item?”
“It’s sad, Leisha. We’ve just had our first death.”
Her stomach tightened. “Who?”
“Bernie Kuhn. Seattle.” She didn’t know him. “A car accident. It looks pretty straightforward; he lost control on a steep curve when his brakes failed. He had only been driving a few months. He was seventeen. But the significance here is that his parents have donated his brain and body to Biotech, in conjunction with the pathology department at the Chicago Medical School. They’re going to take him apart to get the first good look at what prolonged sleeplessness does to the body and brain.”
“They should,” Leisha said. “That poor kid. But what are you so afraid they’ll find?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. But whatever it is, if the haters can use it against us, they will.”
“You’re paranoid, Tony.”
“Impossible. The Sleepless have personalities calmer and more reality-oriented than the norm. Don’t you read the literature?”
“Tony—”
“What if you walk down that street in Spain and a hundred beggars each want a dollar and you say no and they have nothing to trade you but they’re so rotten with anger about what you have that they knock you down and grab it and then beat you out of sheer envy and despair?”
Leisha didn’t answer.
“Are you going to say that’s not a human scenario, Leisha? That it never happens?”
“It happens,” Leisha said evenly. “But not all that often.”
“Bullshit. Read more history. Read more newspapers. But the point is: What do you owe the beggars then? What does a good Yagaiist who believes in mutually beneficial contracts do with people who have nothing to trade and can only take?”
“You’re not—”
“What, Leisha? In the most objective terms you can manage, what do we owe the grasping and nonproductive needy?”
“What I said originally. Kindness. Compassion.”
“Even if they don’t trade it back? Why?”
“Because…” She stopped.
“Why? Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by just laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing them anything? Be as honest as I know you are.”
Leisha put her head between her knees. The question gaped beneath her, but she didn’t try to evade it. “I don’t know. I just know we do.”
“Why?”
She didn’t answer. After a moment, Tony did. The intellectual challenge was gone from his voice. He said, almost tenderly, “Come down in the spring and see the site for Sanctuary. The buildings will be going up then.”
“No,” Leisha said.
“I’d like you to.”
“No. Armed retreat is not the way.”
Tony said, “The beggars are getting nastier Leisha. As the Sleepless grow richer. And I don’t mean in money.”
“Tony—” she said, and stopped. She couldn’t think what to say.
“Don’t walk down too many streets armed with just the memory of Kenzo Yagai.”
* * *
In March, a bitterly cold March with wind whipping down the Charles River, Richard Keller came to Cambridge. Leisha had not seen him for three years. He didn’t send her word on the Groupnet that he was coming. She hurried up the walk to her townhouse, muffled to the eyes in a red wool scarf against the snowy cold, and he stood there blocking the doorway. Behind Leisha, her bodyguard tensed.
“Richard! Bruce, it’s all right, this is an old friend.”
“Hello, Leisha.”
He was heavier, sturdier-looking, with a breadth of shoulder she didn’t recognize. But the face was Richard’s, older but unchanged: dark low brows, unruly dark hair. He had grown a beard.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
Inside, she handed him a cup of coffee. “Are you here on business?” From the Groupnet she knew that he had finished his master’s and had done outstanding work in marine biology in the Caribbean but had left that a year ago and disappeared from the net.
“No. Pleasure.” He smiled suddenly, the old smile that opened up his dark face. “I almost forgot about that for a long time. Contentment, yes. We’re all good at the contentment that comes from sustained work. But pleasure? Whim? Caprice? When was the last time you did something silly, Leisha?”
She smiled. “I ate cotton candy in the shower.”
“Really? Why?”
“To see if it would dissolve in gooey pink patterns.”
“Did it?”
“Yes. Lovely ones.”
“And that was your last silly thing? When was it?”
“Last summer,” Leisha said, and laughed.
“Well, mine is sooner than that. It’s now. I’m in Boston for no other reason than the spontaneous pleasure of seeing you.”
Leisha stopped laughing. “That’s an intense tone for a spontaneous pleasure, Richard.”
“Yup,” he said, intensely. She laughed again. He didn’t.
“I’ve been in India, Leisha. And China and Africa. Thinking, mostly. Watching. First I traveled like a Sleeper, attracting no attention. Then I set out to meet the Sleepless in India and China. There are a few, you know, whose parents were willing to come here for the operation. They pretty much are accepted and left alone. I tried to figure out why desperately poor countries — by our standards anyway; over there Y-energy is mostly available only in big cities — don’t have any trouble accepting the superiority of Sleepless, whereas Americans, with more prosperity than any time in history, build in resentment more and more.”
Leisha said, “Did you figure it out?”
“No. But I figured out something else, watching all those communes and villages and kampongs. We are too individualistic.”
Disappointment swept Leisha. She saw her father’s face: Excellence is what counts, Leisha. Excellence supported by individual effort… She reached for Richard’s cup. “More coffee?”
He caught her wrist and looked up into her face. “Don’t misunderstand me, Leisha. I’m not talking about work. We are too much individuals in the rest of our lives. Too emotionally rational. Too much alone. Isolation kills more than the free flow of ideas. It kills joy.”
He didn’t let go of her wrist. She looked down into his eyes, into depths she hadn’t seen before. It was the feeling of looking into a mineshaft, both giddy and frightening, knowing that at the bottom might be gold or darkness. Or both.
Richard said softly, “Stewart?”
“Over long ago. An undergraduate thing.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own.
“Kevin?”
“No, never — we’re just friends.”
“I wasn’t sure. Anyone?”
“No.”
He let go of her wrist. Leisha peered at him timidly. He suddenly laughed. “Joy, Leisha.” An echo sounded in her mind, but she couldn’t place it, and then it was gone and she laughed too, a laugh airy and frothy and pink cotton candy in summer.
* * *
“Come home, Leisha. He’s had another heart attack.”
Susan Melling’s voice on the phone was tired. Leisha said, “How bad?”
“The doctors aren’t sure. Or say they’re not sure. He wants to see you. Can you leave your studies?”
It was May, the last push toward her finals. The Law Review proofs were behind schedule. Richard had started a new business, marine consulting to Boston fishermen plagued with sudden inexplicable shifts in ocean currents, and was working twenty hours a day. “I’ll come,” Leisha said.
Chicago was colder than Boston. The trees were half-budded. On Lake Michigan, filling the huge east windows of her father’s house, whitecaps tossed up cold spray. Leisha saw that Susan was living in the house; her brushes were on Camden’s dresser, her journals on the credenza in the foyer.
“Leisha,” Camden said. He looked old. Grey skin, sunken cheeks, the fretful and bewildered look of men who accepted potency like air, indivisible from their lives. In the corner of the room, on a small eighteenth-century slipper chair, sat a short, stocky woman with brown braids.
“Alice.”
“Hello, Leisha.”
“Alice. I’ve looked for you…” The wrong thing to say. Leisha had looked, but not very hard, deterred by the knowledge that Alice had not wanted to be found. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” Alice said. She seemed remote, gentle, unlike the angry Alice of six years ago in the raw Pennsylvania hills. Camden moved painfully on the bed. He looked at Leisha with eyes which, she saw, were undimmed in their blue brightness.
“I asked Alice to come. And Susan. Susan came a while ago. I’m dying, Leisha.”
No one contradicted him. Leisha, knowing his respect for facts, remained silent. Love hurt her chest.
“John Jaworski has my will. None of you can break it. But I wanted to tell you myself what’s in it. The past few years I’ve been selling, liquidating. Most of my holdings are accessible now. I’ve left a tenth to Alice, a tenth to Susan, a tenth to Elizabeth, and the rest to you, Leisha, because you’re the only one with the individual ability to use the money to its full potential for achievement.”
Leisha looked wildly at Alice, who gazed back with her strange remote calm. “Elizabeth? My… mother? Is alive?”
“Yes,” Camden said.
“You told me she was dead! Years and years ago!”
“Yes. I thought it was better for you that way. She didn’t like what you were, was jealous of what you could become. And she had nothing to give you. She would only have caused you emotional harm.”
Beggars in Spain…
“That was wrong, Daddy. You were wrong. She’s my mother…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
Camden didn’t flinch. “I don’t think I was. But you’re an adult now. You can see her if you wish.”
He went on looking at her with his bright, sunken eyes, while around Leisha the air heaved and snapped. Her father had lied to her. Susan watched her closely, a small smile on her lips. Was she glad to see Camden fall in his daughter’s estimation? Had she all along been that jealous of their relationship, of Leisha…?
She was thinking like Tony.
The thought steadied her a little. But she went on staring at Camden, who went on staring back implacably, unbudged, a man positive even on his deathbed that he was right.
Alice’s hand was on her elbow, Alice’s voice so soft that no one but Leisha could hear. “He’s done talking now, Leisha. And after a while you’ll be all right.”
* * *
Alice had left her son in California with her husband of two years, Beck Watrous, a building contractor she had met while waiting on tables in a resort on the Artificial Islands. Beck had adopted Jordan, Alice’s son.
“Before Beck there was a real bad time,” Alice said in her remote voice. “You know, when I was carrying Jordan I actually used to dream that he would be Sleepless? Like you. Every night I’d dream that, and every morning I’d wake up and have morning sickness with a baby that was only going to be a stupid nothing like me. I stayed with Ed — in the Appalachian Mountains, remember? You came to see me there once for two more years. When he beat me, I was glad. I wished Daddy could see. At least Ed was touching me.”
Leisha made a sound in her throat.
“I finally left because I was afraid for Jordan. I went to California, did nothing but eat for a year. I got up to 190 pounds.” Alice was, Leisha estimated, five-foot-four. “Then I came home to see Mother.”
“You didn’t tell me,” Leisha said. “You knew she was alive and you didn’t tell me.”
“She’s in a drying-out tank half the time,” Alice said, with brutal simplicity. “She wouldn’t see you if you wanted to. But she saw me, and she fell slobbering all over me as her ‘real’ daughter, and she threw up on my dress. And I backed away from her and looked at the dress and knew it should be thrown up on, it was so ugly. Deliberately ugly. She started screaming how Dad had ruined her life, ruined mine, all for you. And do you know what I did?”
“What?” Leisha said. Her voice was shaky.
“I flew home, burned all my clothes, got a job, started college, lost fifty pounds, and put Jordan in play therapy.”
The sisters sat silent. Beyond the window the lake was dark, unlit by moon or stars. It was Leisha who suddenly shook, and Alice who patted her shoulder.
“Tell me…” Leisha couldn’t think what she wanted to be told, except that she wanted to hear Alice’s voice in the gloom, Alice’s voice as it was now, gentle and remote, without damage any more from the damaging fact of Leisha’s existence. Her very existence as damage. “Tell me about Jordan. He’s five now? What’s he like?”
Alice turned her head to look levelly into Leisha’s eyes. “He’s a happy, ordinary little boy. Completely ordinary.”
* * *
Camden died a week later. After the funeral, Leisha tried to see her mother at the Brookfield Drug and Alcohol Abuse Center. Elizabeth Camden, she was told, saw no one except her only child, Alice Camden Watrous.
Susan Melling, dressed in black, drove Leisha to the airport. Susan talked deftly, determinedly, about Leisha’s studies, about Harvard, about the Law Review. Leisha answered in monosyllables, but Susan persisted, asking questions, quietly insisting on answers: When would Leisha take her bar exams? Where was she interviewing for jobs? Gradually Leisha began to lose the numbness she had felt since her father’s casket was lowered into the ground. She realized that Susan’s persistent questioning was a kindness.
“He sacrificed a lot of people,” Leisha said suddenly.
“Not me,” Susan said. “Only for a while there, when I gave up my work to do his. Roger didn’t respect sacrifice much.”
“Was he wrong?” Leisha said. The question came out with a kind of desperateness she hadn’t intended.
Susan smiled sadly. “No. He wasn’t wrong. I should never have left my research. It took me a long time to come back to myself after that.”
He does that to people, Leisha heard inside her head. Susan? Or Alice? She couldn’t, for once, remember clearly. She saw her father in the old conservatory, now empty, potting and repotting the exotic flowers he had loved.
She was tired. It was muscle fatigue from stress, she knew; twenty minutes of rest would restore her. Her eyes burned from unaccustomed tears. She leaned her head back against the car seat and closed her eyes.
Susan pulled the car into the airport parking lot and turned off the ignition. “There’s something I want to tell you, Leisha.”
Leisha opened her eyes. “About the will?”
Susan smiled tightly. “No. You really don’t have any problems with how he divided the estate, do you? It seems reasonable to you. But that’s not it. The research team from Biotech and Chicago Medical has finished its analysis of Bernie Kuhn’s brain.”
Leisha turned to face Susan. She was startled by the complexity of Susan’s expression. It held determination, and satisfaction, and anger, and something else Leisha could not name.
Susan said, “We’re going to publish next week, in the New England Journal of Medicine. Security has been unbelievably restricted — no leaks to the popular press. But I want to tell you now, myself, what we found. So you’ll be prepared.”
“Go on,” Leisha said. Her chest felt tight.
“Do you remember when you and the other Sleepless kids took interleukin-1 to see what sleep was like? When you were sixteen?”
“How did you know about that?”
“You kids were watched a lot more closely than you think. Remember the headache you got?”
“Yes.” She and Richard and Tony and Carol and Brad and Jeanine… no, not Jeanine. Jennifer. It had been Jennifer in the woods with them.
“Interleukin-I is what I want to talk about. At least partly. It’s one of a whole group of substances that boost the immune system. They stimulate the production of antibodies, the activity of white blood cells, and a host of other immuno-enhancements. Normal people have surges of IL-1 released during the slow-wave phases of sleep. That means that they were getting boosts to the immune system during sleep. One of the questions we researchers asked ourselves twenty-eight years ago was: will Sleepless kids who don’t get those surges of IL-1 get sick more often?”
“I’ve never been sick,” Leisha said.
“Yes, you have. Chicken pox and three minor colds by the end of your fourth year,” Susan said precisely. “But in general you were all a very healthy lot. So we researchers were left with the alternate theory of sleep-driven immuno-enhancement: that the burst of immune activity existed as a counterpart to a greater vulnerability of the body in sleep to disease, probably in some way connected to the fluctuations in body temperature during REM sleep. In other words, sleep caused the immune vulnerability that endogenous pyrogens like IL-1 counteracted. Sleep was the problem, immune-system enhancements were the solution. Without sleep, there would be no problem. Are you following this?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you are. Stupid question.” Susan brushed her hair off her face. It was going gray at the temples. There was a tiny brown age spot beneath her right ear.
“Over the years we collected thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands” of Single Photon Emission Topography scans of you kids’ brains, plus endless EEGS, samples of cerebrospinal fluid, and all the rest of it. But we couldn’t really see inside your brains, really know what’s going on in there. Until Bernie Kuhn hit that embankment.”
“Susan,” Leisha said, “give it to me straight. Without more buildup.”
“You’re not going to age.”
“What?”
“Oh, cosmetically, a little — sagging due to gravity, maybe. But the absence of sleep peptides and all the rest of it affects the immune and tissue-restoration systems in ways we don’t understand. Bernie Kuhn had a perfect liver. Perfect lungs, perfect heart, perfect lymph nodes, perfect pancreas, perfect medulla oblongata. Not just healthy, or young-perfect. There’s a tissue regeneration enhancement that clearly derives from the operation of the immune system but is radically different from anything we ever suspected. Organs show no wear and tear, not even the minimal amount expected in a seventeen-year-old. They just repair themselves, perfectly, on and on… and on.”
“For how long?” Leisha whispered.
“Who the hell knows? Bernie Kuhn was young. Maybe there’s some compensatory mechanism that cuts in at some point and you’ll all just collapse, like an entire fucking gallery of Dorian Grays. But I don’t think so. Neither do I think it can go on forever; no tissue regeneration can do that. But a long, long time.”
Leisha stared at the blurred reflections in the car windshield. She saw her father’s face against the blue satin of his casket, banked with white roses. His heart, unregenerated, had given out.
Susan said, “The future is all speculative at this point. We know that the peptide structures that build up the pressure to sleep in normal people resemble the components of bacterial cell walls. Maybe there’s a connection between sleep and pathogen receptivity. We don’t know. But ignorance never stopped the tabloids. I wanted to prepare you because you’re going to get called supermen, homo perfectus, who-all knows what. Immortal.”
The two women sat in silence. Finally Leisha said, “I’m going to tell the others. On our datanet. Don’t worry about the security. Kevin Baker designed Groupnet; nobody knows anything we don’t want them to.”
“You’re that well organized already?”
“Yes.”
Susan’s mouth worked. She looked away from Leisha. “We better go in. You’ll miss your flight.”
“Susan…”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Susan said, and in her voice Leisha heard the thing she had seen before in Susan’s expression and had not been able to name: it was longing.
* * *
Tissue regeneration. A long, long time, sang the blood in Leisha’s ears on the flight to Boston. Tissue regeneration. And, eventually: immortal. No, not that, she told herself severely. Not that. The blood didn’t listen.
“You sure smile a lot,” said the man next to her in first class, a business traveler who had not recognized Leisha. “You coming from a big party in Chicago?”
“No. From a funeral.”
The man looked shocked, then disgusted. Leisha looked out the window at the ground far below. Rivers like microcircuits, fields like neat index cards. And on the horizon, fluffy white clouds like masses of exotic flowers, blooms in a conservatory filled with light.
* * *
The letter was no thicker than any hard-copy mail, but hard-copy mail addressed by hand to either of them was so rare that Richard was nervous. “It might be explosive.” Leisha looked at the letter on their hall credenza. MS. LIESHA CAMDEN. Block letters, misspelled.
“It looks like a child’s writing,” she said.
Richard stood with head lowered, legs braced apart. But his expression was only weary. “Perhaps deliberately like a child’s. You’d be more open to a child’s writing, they might have figured.”
“’They’? Richard, are we getting that paranoid?”
He didn’t flinch from the question. “Yes. For the time being.”
A week earlier the New England Journal of Medicine had published Susan’s careful, sober article. An hour later the broadcast and datanet news had exploded in speculation, drama, outrage, and fear. Leisha and Richard, along with all the Sleepless on the Groupnet, had tracked and charted each of four components, looking for a dominant reaction: speculation (“The Sleepless may live for centuries, and this might lead to the following events…”); drama (“If a Sleepless marries only Sleepers, he may have lifetime enough for a dozen brides, and several dozen children, a bewildering blended family…”); outrage (“Tampering with the law of nature has only brought among us unnatural so-called people who will live with the unfair advantage of time: time to accumulate more kin, more power, more property than the rest of us could ever know…”); and fear (“How soon before the Super-race takes over?”)
“They’re all fear, of one kind or another,” Carolyn Rizzolo finally said, and the Groupnet stopped its differentiated tracking.
Leisha was taking the final exams of her last year of law school. Each day comments followed her to the campus, along the corridors and in the classroom; each day she forgot them in the grueling exam sessions, in which all students were reduced to the same status of petitioner to the great university. Afterward, temporarily drained, she walked silently back home to Richard and the Groupnet, aware of the looks of people on the street, aware of her bodyguard Bruce striding between her and them.
“It will calm down,” Leisha said. Richard didn’t answer.
The town of Salt Springs, Texas, passed a local ordinance that no Sleepless could obtain a liquor license, on the grounds that civil rights statutes were built on the “all men were created equal” clause of the Declaration of Independence, and Sleepless clearly were not covered. There were no Sleepless within a hundred miles of Salt Springs and no one had applied for a new liquor license there for the past ten years, but the story was picked up by United Press and by Datanet News, and within twenty-four hours heated editorials appeared, on both sides of the issue, across the nation.
More local ordinances were passed. In Pollux, Pennsylvania, the Sleepless could be denied an apartment rental on the grounds that their prolonged wakefulness would increase both wear-and-tear on the landlord’s property and utility bills. In Cranston Estates, California, Sleepless were barred from operating twenty-four hour businesses: “unfair competition.” Iroquois County, New York, barred them from serving on county juries, arguing that a jury containing Sleepless, with their skewed idea of time, did not constitute “a jury of one’s peers.”
“All those statutes will be thrown out in superior courts,” Leisha said. “But God! The waste of money and docket time to do it!” A part of her mind noticed that her tone as she said this was Roger Camdens.
The state of Georgia, in which some sex acts between consenting adults were still a crime, made sex between a Sleepless and a Sleeper a third-degree felony, classing it with bestiality.
Kevin Baker had designed software that scanned the newsnets at high speed, flagged all stories involving discrimination or attacks on Sleepless, and categorized them by type. The files were available on Groupnet. Leisha read through them, then called Kevin. “Can’t you create a parallel program to flag defenses of us? We’re getting a skewed picture.”
“You’re right,” Kevin said, a little startled. “I didn’t think of it.”
“Think of it,” Leisha said, grimly. Richard, watching her, said nothing.
She was most upset by the stories about Sleepless children. Shunning at school, verbal abuse by siblings, attacks by neighborhood bullies, confused resentment from parents who had wanted an exceptional child but had not bargained for one who might live centuries. The school board of Cold River Iowa, voted to bar Sleepless children from conventional classrooms because their rapid learning “created feelings of inadequacy in others, interfering with their education.” The board made funds available for Sleepless to have tutors at home. There were no volunteers among the teaching staff. Leisha started spending as much time on Groupnet with the kids, talking to them all night long, as she did studying for her bar exams, scheduled for July.
Stella Bevington stopped using her modem.
Kevin’s second program cataloged editorials urging fairness toward Sleepless. The school board of Denver set aside funds for a program in which gifted children, including the Sleepless, could use their talents and build teamwork through tutoring even younger children. Rive Beau, Louisiana, elected Sleepless Danielle du Cherney to the City Council, although Danielle was twenty-two and technically too young to qualify. The prestigious medical research firm of Halley-Hall gave much publicity to their hiring of Christopher Amren, a Sleepless with a Ph.D. in cellular physics.
Dora Clarq, a Sleepless in Dallas, opened a letter addressed to her and a plastic explosive blew off her arm.
Leisha and Richard stared at the envelope on the hall credenza. The paper was thick, cream-colored, but not expensive, the kind of paper made of bulky newsprint dyed the shades of vellum. There was no return address. Richard called Liz Bishop, a Sleepless who was majoring in criminal justice in Michigan. He had never spoken with her before neither had Leisha — but she came on the Groupnet immediately and told them how to open it. Or, she could fly up and do it if they preferred. Richard and Leisha followed her directions for remote detonation in the basement of the townhouse. Nothing blew up. When the letter was open, they took it out and read it:
Dear Ms. Camden,
You been pretty good to me and I’m sorry to do this but I quit. They are making it pretty hot for me at the union not officially but you know how it is. If I was you I wouldn’t go to the union for another bodyguard I’d try to find one privately. But be careful. Again I’m sorry but I have to live too.
Bruce
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Leisha said. “The two of us getting all this equipment, spending hours on this setup so an explosive won’t detonate…”
“It’s not as if I at least had a whole lot else to do,” Richard said. Since the wave of anti-Sleepless sentiment, all but two of his marine consulting clients, vulnerable to the marketplace and thus to public opinion, had canceled their accounts.
Groupnet, still up on Leisha’s terminal, shrilled in emergency override. Leisha got there first. It was Tony Indivino.
“Leisha. I need your legal help, if you’ll give it. They’re trying to fight me on Sanctuary. Please fly down here.”
* * *
Sanctuary was raw brown gashes in the late-spring earth. It was situated in the Allegheny Mountains of southern New York State, old hills rounded by age and covered with pine and hickory. A superb road led from the closest town, Conewango, to Sanctuary. Low, maintenance-free buildings, whose design was plain but graceful, stood in various stages of completion. Jennifer Sharifi, unsmiling, met Leisha and Richard. She hadn’t changed much in six years but her long black hair was uncombed and her dark eyes enormous with strain. “Tony wants to talk to you, but first he asked me to show you both around.”
“What’s wrong?” Leisha asked quietly.
Jennifer didn’t try to evade the question. “Later. First look at Sanctuary. Tony respects your opinion enormously, Leisha; he wants you to see everything.”
The dormitories each held fifty, with communal rooms for cooking, dining, relaxing, and bathing, and a warren of separate offices and studios and labs for work. “We’re calling them ‘dorms’ anyway, despite the etymology,” Jennifer said, and even in this remark, which from anybody else would have been playful, Leisha heard the peculiar combination of Jennifer’s habitual deliberate calm with her present strain.
She was impressed, despite herself, with the completeness of Tony’s plans for lives that would be both communal and intensely private. There was a gym, a small hospital — “By the end of next year, we’ll have eighteen board/certified doctors, you know, and four of them are thinking of coming here” — a daycare facility, a school, and an intensive-crop farm. “Most of the food will come in from the outside, of course. So will most people’s jobs, although they’ll do as much of them as possible from here, over datanets. We’re not cutting ourselves off from the world, only creating a safe place from which to trade with it.” Leisha didn’t answer.
Apart from the power facilities, self-supported Y-energy, she was most impressed with the human planning. Tony had interested Sleepless from virtually every field they would need both to care for themselves and to deal with the outside world. “Lawyers and accountants come first,” Jennifer said. “That’s our first line of defense in safeguarding ourselves. Tony recognizes that most modern battles for power are fought in the courtroom and boardroom.”
But not all. Last, Jennifer showed them the plans for physical defense. For the first time, her taut body seemed to relax slightly.
Every effort had been made to stop attackers without hurting them. Electronic surveillance completely circled the 150 square miles Jennifer had purchased. Some counties were smaller than that, Leisha thought, dazed. When breached, a force field a half-mile within the E-gate activated, delivering electric shocks to anyone on foot — “but only on the outside of the field. We don’t want any of our kids hurt,” Jennifer said. Unmanned penetration by vehicles or robots was identified by a system that located all moving metal above a certain mass within Sanctuary. Any moving metal that did not carry a special signaling device designed by Donald Pospula, a Sleepless who had patented important electronic components, was suspect.
“Of course, we’re not set up for an air attack or an outright army assault,” Jennifer said. “But we don’t expect that. Only the haters in self-motivated hate.”
Leisha touched the hard-copy of the security plans with one finger. They troubled her. “If we can’t integrate ourselves into the world… Free trade should imply free movement.”
Jennifer said swiftly, “Only if free movement implies free minds,” and at her tone Leisha looked up. “I have something to tell you, Leisha.”
“What?”
“Tony isn’t here.”
“Where is he?”
“In Cattaraugus County jail in Conewango. It’s true we’re having zoning battles about Sanctuary — zoning! In this isolated spot! But this is something else, something that just happened this morning. Tony’s been arrested for the kidnapping of Timmy DeMarzo.”
The room wavered. “FBI?”
“Yes.”
“How… how did they find out?”
“Some agent eventually cracked the case. They didn’t tell us how. Tony needs a lawyer, Leisha. Bill Thaine has already agreed, but Tony wants you.”
“Jennifer — I don’t even take the bar exams until July!
“He says he’ll wait. Bill will act as his lawyer in the meantime. Will you pass the bar?”
“Of course. But I already have a job lined up with Morehouse, Kennedy Anderson in New York…” She stopped. Richard was looking at her hard, Jennifer inscrutably. Leisha said quietly, “What will he plead?”
“Guilty,” Jennifer said, “with — what is it called legally? Extenuating circumstances.” Leisha nodded. She had been afraid Tony would want to plead not guilty: more lies, subterfuge, ugly politics. Her mind ran swiftly over extenuating circumstances, precedents, tests to precedents… They could use Clements v. Voy…
“Bill is at the jail now,” Jennifer said. “Will you drive in with me?” She made the question a challenge.
“Yes,” Leisha said.
In Conewango, the county seat, they were not allowed to see Tony. William Thaine, as his attorney, could go in and out freely. Leisha, not officially an attorney at all, could go nowhere. This was told to them by a man in the D.A.’s office whose face stayed immobile while he spoke to them, and who spat on the ground behind their shoes when they turned to leave, even though this left him with a smear of spittle on his courthouse floor.
Richard and Leisha drove their rental car to the airport for the flight back to Boston. On the way Richard told Leisha he was leaving. He was moving to Sanctuary, now, even before it was functional, to help with the planning and building.
* * *
She stayed most of the time in her townhouse, studying ferociously for the bar exams or checking on the Sleepless children through Groupnet. She had not hired another bodyguard to replace Bruce, which made her reluctant to go outside very much; the reluctance in turn made her angry with herself. Once or twice a day she scanned Kevin’s electronic news clippings.
There were signs of hope. The New York Times ran an editorial, widely reprinted on the electronic news services:
PROSPERITY AND HATRED:
A LOGIC CURVE WE’D RATHER NOT SEE
The United States has never been a country that much values calm, logic, and rationality. We have, as a people, tended to label these things “cold.” We have, as a people, tended to admire feeling and action: We exalt in our stories and our memorials — not the creation of the Constitution but its defense at Iwo Jima; not the intellectual achievements of a Linus Pauling but the heroic passion of a Charles Lindbergh; not the inventors of the monorails and computers that unite us but the composers of the angry songs of rebellion that divide us.
A peculiar aspect of this phenomenon is that it grows stronger in times of prosperity. The better off our citizenry, the greater their contempt for the calm reasoning that got them there, and the more passionate their indulgence in emotion. Consider, in the past century, the gaudy excesses of the roaring twenties and the antiestablishment contempt of the sixties. Consider, in our own century, the unprecedented prosperity brought about by Y-energy-and then consider that Kenzo Yagai, except to his followers, was seen as a greedy and bloodless logician, while our national adulation goes to neo-nihilist writer Stephen Castelli, to “feelie” actress Brenda Foss, and to daredevil gravity-well diver Jim Morse Luter.
But most of all, as you ponder this phenomenon in your Y-energy houses, consider the current outpouring of irrational feeling directed at the “Sleepless” since the publication of the joint findings of the Biotech Institute and the Chicago Medical School concerning Sleepless tissue regeneration.
Most of the Sleepless are intelligent. Most of them are calm, if you define that much-maligned word to mean directing one’s energies into solving problems rather than to emoting about them. (Even Pulitzer Prize winner Carolyn Rizzolo gave us a stunning play of ideas, not of passions run amuck.) All of them show a natural bent toward achievement, a bent given a decided boost by the one-third more time in their days to achieve. Their achievements lie, for the most part, in logical fields rather than emotional ones: Computers. Law. Finance. Physics. Medical research. They are rational, orderly, calm, intelligent, cheerful, young, and possibly very long-lived.
And, in our United States of unprecedented prosperity, they are increasingly hated.
Does the hatred that we have seen flower so fully over the past few months really grow, as many claim, from the “unfair advantage” the Sleepless have over the rest of us in securing jobs, promotions, money, and success? Is it really envy over the Sleepless’ good fortune? Or does it come from something more pernicious, rooted in our tradition of shoot-from-the-hip American action. hatred of the logical, the calm, the considered? Hatred in fact of the superior mind?
If so, perhaps we should think deeply about the founders of this country: Jefferson, Washington, Paine, Adams — inhabitants of the Age of Reason, all. These men created our orderly and balanced system of laws precisely to protect the property and achievements created by the individual efforts of balanced and rational minds. The Sleepless may be our severest internal test yet of our own sober belief in law and order. No, the Sleepless were not, “created equal,” but our attitudes toward them should be examined with a care equal to our soberest jurisprudence. We may not like what we learn about our own motives, but our credibility as a people may depend on the rationality and intelligence of the examination.
Both have been in short supply in the public reaction to last month’s research findings.
Law is not theater. Before we write laws reflecting gaudy and dramatic feelings, we must be very sure we understand the difference.
Leisha hugged herself, gazing in delight at the screen, smiling. She called the New York Times and asked who had written the editorial. The receptionist, cordial when she answered the phone, grew brusque. The Times was not releasing that information, “prior to internal investigation.”
It could not dampen her mood. She whirled around the apartment, after days of sitting at her desk or screen. Delight demanded physical action. She washed dishes, picked up books. There were gaps in the furniture patterns where Richard had taken pieces that belonged to him; a little quieter now, she moved the furniture to close the gaps.
Susan Melling called to tell her about the Times editorial; they talked warmly for a few minutes. When Susan hung up, the phone rang again.
“Leisha? Your voice still sounds the same. This is Stewart Sutter.”
“Stewart.” She had not seen him for four years. Their romance had lasted two years and then dissolved, not from any painful issue so much as from the press of both their studies. Standing by the comm-terminal, hearing his voice, Leisha suddenly felt again his hands on her breasts in the cramped dormitory bed: All those years before she had found a good use for a bed. The phantom hands became Richard’s hands, and a sudden pain pierced her.
“Listen,” Stewart said, “I’m calling because there’s some information I think you should know. You take your bar exams next week, right? And then you have a tentative job with Morehouse, Kennedy Anderson.”
“How do you know all that, Stewart?”
“Men’s room gossip. Well, not as bad as that. But the New York legal community — that part of it, anyway — is smaller than you think. And you’re a pretty visible figure.”
“Yes,” Leisha said neutrally.
“Nobody has the slightest doubt you’ll be called to the bar. But there is some doubt about the job with Morehouse, Kennedy. You’ve got two senior partners, Alan Morehouse and Seth Brown, who have changed their minds since this… flap. ‘Adverse publicity for the firm,’ ‘turning law into a circus,’ blah blah blah. You know the drill. But you’ve also got two powerful champions, Ann Carlyle and Michael Kennedy, the old man himself. He’s quite a mind. Anyway, I wanted you to know all this so you can recognize exactly what the situation is and know whom to count on in the infighting.”
“Thank you,” Leisha said. “Stew… why do you care if I get it or not? Why should it matter to you?”
There was a silence on the other end of the phone. Then Stewart said, very low, “We’re not all noodle heads out here, Leisha. Justice does still matter to some of us. So does achievement.”
Light rose in her, a bubble of buoyant light.
Stewart said, “You have a lot of support here for that stupid zoning fight over Sanctuary, too. You might not realize that, but you do. What the Parks Commission crowd is trying to pull is… but they’re just being used as fronts. You know that. Anyway, when it gets as far as the courts, you’ll have all the help you need.”
“Sanctuary isn’t my doing. At all.”
“No? Well, I meant the plural you.”
“Thank you. I mean that. How are you doing?”
“Fine. I’m a daddy now.”
“Really! Boy or girl?”
“Girl. A beautiful little bitch named Justine, drives me crazy. I’d like you to meet my wife sometime, Leisha.”
“I’d like that,” Leisha said.
She spent the rest of the night studying for her bar exams. The bubble stayed with her. She recognized exactly what it was: joy.
It was going to be all right. The contract, unwritten, between her and her society — Kenzo Yagai’s society, Roger Camden’s society would hold. With dissent and strife and yes, some hatred. She suddenly thought of Tony’s beggars in Spain, furious at the strong because the beggars were not. Yes. But it would hold.
She believed that.
She did.