“Not wet at all,” I said, and the kid grinned again. A Sleepless, of course. I could see that now in the shape of him in my mind: compact and bright-colored and brisk-moving. Born owning the world. And, of course, no security risk for Huevos Verdes.
But with their defenses, Huevos Verdes wouldn’t be risking security even if passengers were being ferried by the director of the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency.
I had worked hard to understand the triple-shield security around Huevos Verdes.
The first shield, a translucent shimmer, rose from the sea a quarter mile out from the island. Spherical, the shield extended underwater, cutting through the rock of the island itself, an all-enveloping egg. Terry Mwakambe, the Supers’ strangest genius, had invented the field. Nothing else like it existed anywhere in the world. It scanned DNA, and nothing not recorded in the data banks got through. Not dolphins, not navy frogmen, not seagulls, not drifting algae. Nada.
The second shield, a hundred yards beyond, stopped all nonliving matter not accompanied by DNA that was stored in the data banks. No unmanned ’bot vessel carrying anything — sensors, bombs, spores — passed this field. No matter how small. If there wasn’t a registered DNA code accompanying it, it didn’t get through. We skimmed through the shield’s faint blue shimmer as if through a soap bubble.
The third shield, at the docks, was manually controlled and visually monitored. The registered DNA had to be alive and talking. I don’t know how they checked for a drugged state. Nothing touched us, at least nothing I felt. The design was Terry Mwa-kambe’s. The monitoring was shared by everybody, in shifts. The paranoia was Miri’s. Unlike her grandmother, she didn’t want the Supers to secede permanently from the United States. But like her grandmother, she’d nonetheless constructed a defended refuge that government officials couldn’t touch. A sanctuary. She’d just done it better than Jennifer Sharifi had.
“Permission to dock,” the freckled kid said seriously. He gave a little half-mocking salute and grinned. This was still an adventure for him.
“Hi, Jason,” Christy Demetrios said. “Hello, Drew. Come on in.”
Jason Reynolds. That was the kid’s name. I remembered now. Kevin’s granddaughter Alexandra’s son. Something about him tugged at my memory, a nervous quick shape like a string of beads. I couldn’t remember.
Jason docked the boat expertly — they all did everything expertly — and we went ashore, Jason with quick bounds and me in my powerchair.
A hundred feet of genemod greenery, flowers and bushes and trees, all of it part of the project. Plants grew right to the water’s edge. When the sea threatened, a Y-shield switched on, capable of protecting even the most fragile genemod rose from a hurricane. Beyond the garden, the compound walls rose abruptly, thin as paper, stronger than diamonds. Miri told me they were only a dozen molecules thick, constructed by second-generation nano-machines that had themselves been made from nanomachines. In my mind I saw the walls’ glossy whiteness, to which no dirt could adhere, as hot dark red motion, thick and unstoppable as lava.
Nothing here was stoppable.
“Drew!” Miri ran to meet me, wearing white shorts and a loose shirt, her masses of dark hair tied back with a red ribbon. She had put on red lipstick. She still looked more like sixteen than twenty-nine. She threw her arms around me in my chair, and I felt the quick beating of her heart against my cheek. Super metabolism is revved up a lot higher than ours. I kissed her.
She murmured into my hair, “This time was too long. Four months!”
“It was a good tour, Miri.”
“I know. I watched sixteen performances on the grid, and the performance stats look good.”
She nestled into my lap. Jason and Christy had discreetly vanished. We were alone in the bright, newly created garden. I stroked Miri’s hair, not wanting to hear just yet about performance stats.
Miri said, “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I kissed her again, this time to keep from looking at her face. It would be blinding, white hot with love. It always was, when she saw me. Always. For thirteen years. He was capable of complete obsessiveness, Leisha had said about her father. He just wore people out.
“I miss you so much when you’re away, Drew.”
“I miss you, too.” This was true.
“I wish you could stay longer than a week.”
“Me, too.” This was not true. But there were no words.
She looked at me, then, a long moment. Something shifted behind her eyes. Carefully, so as not to hurt my crippled legs, she climbed off my lap, held out her hands, and smiled. “Come see the lab work.”
I recognized this for what it was: Miri offering me the best she had. The most valuable present in the world. The thing I desperately wanted to be part of, even though I wouldn’t understand it, because not to be part of it was to be unimportant. Insignificant. She was offering me what I needed most.
I couldn’t do less.
I pulled her back onto my lap, forced my hands to move over her breasts. “Later. Can we be alone first…”
Her face was the curving shape of joy, too bright to be any color at all.
Miri’s bedroom, like every other bedroom at La Isla, was spartan. Bed, dresser, terminal, an oval green rug made of some soft material Sara Cerelli had invented. On the dresser was a green pottery vase of fragrant genemod flowers I didn’t recognize. These people, who could command all luxury, rarely indulged in any. The only jewelry Miri ever wore was the ring I had given her, a slim gold band set with rubies. I had never seen the other Sleepless wear any jewelry at all. All their extravagances, Miri had told me once, were mental. Even the light was ordinary: flat, without shadows.
I thought of the library in Leisha’s New Mexico house.
Miri unbuttoned her shirt. Her breasts looked the same as they had at sixteen: full, milky, tipped with pale brown aureoles. She pulled down her shorts. Her hips were full, her waist chunky. Her pubic hair was bushy and wiry and the same black as the hair on her head, where it was confined by a red ribbon. I reached up and pulled the ribbon free.
“Oh, Drew, I’ve missed you so much…”
I hoisted myself from my powerchair to her narrow bed, and then pulled her on top of me. Her breasts spread over my chest: soft on hard. On tour or not, I exercised my upper body fanatically, to make up for my crippled legs. Miri loved that. She liked to feel my arms crush her against me. She liked my thrusts to be hard, definite, even ramming. I tried to give her that, but this time I stayed soft.
She looked at me questioningly, brushing the wild black hair back from her face. I didn’t meet her eyes. She reached down and took me in her hand, massaging gently.
This had happened only a few times, all of them recent. Miri massaged harder.
“Drew…”
“Give me a minute, love.”
She smiled uncertainly. I tried to concentrate, and then not to concentrate.
“Drew…”
“Shhhh… just a minute.”
The gray shapes of failure snapped their teeth in my mind.
I closed my eyes, pulled Miri closer, and thought of Leisha. Leisha in the New Mexico twilight, a dim golden shape against the sunset. Leisha singing me to sleep when I was ten years old. Leisha running across the desert, slim and swift, tripping in a kangaroo-rat hole and twisting her ankle. I had carried her back to the compound, her body light and sweet in my eighteen-year-old arms. Leisha at her sister’s funeral, tears making her eyes reflect all light, naked to sorrow. Leisha naked, as I had never seen her …