They drove south in silence. Finally Alice said, “Where are we going to take her, Leisha?”
“I don’t know. Any one of the Sleepless would be the first place the police would check—”
“You can’t risk it. Not the way things are,” Alice said. She sounded weary. “But all my friends are in California. I don’t think we could drive this rust bucket that far before getting stopped.”
“It wouldn’t make it anyway.”
“What should we do?”
“Let me think.”
At an expressway exit was a pay phone. It wouldn’t be data-shielded, as Groupnet was. Would Kevin’s open line be tapped? Probably.
There was no doubt the Sanctuary line would be.
Sanctuary. All of them were going there or already there, Kevin had said. Holed up, trying to pull the worn Allegheny Mountains around them like a safe little den. Except for the children like Stella, who could not.
Where? With whom?
Leisha closed her eyes. The Sleepless were out; the police would find Stella within hours. Susan Melling? But she had been Alice’s all-too-visible stepmother, and was a cobeneficiary of Camden’s will; they would question her almost immediately. It couldn’t be anyone traceable to Alice. It could only be a Sleeper that Leisha knew, and trusted, and why should anyone at all fit that description? Why should she risk so much on anyone who did?
She stood a long time in the dark phone kiosk. Then she walked to the truck. Alice was asleep, her head thrown back against the seat. A tiny line of drool ran down her chin. Her face was white and drained in the bad light from the kiosk. Leisha walked back to the phone.
“Stewart? Stewart Sutter?”
“Yes?”
“This is Leisha Camden. Something has happened.” She told the story tersely, in bald sentences. Stewart did not interrupt.
“Leisha—” Stewart said, and stopped.
“I need help, Stewart.” ‘I’ll help you, Alice.’ ‘I don’t need your help.’ A wind whistled over the dark field beside the kiosk and Leisha shivered. She heard in the wind the thin keen of a beggar. In the wind, in her own voice.
“All right,” Stewart said, “this is what we’ll do. I have a cousin in Ripley, New York, just over the state line from Pennsylvania, the route you’ll be driving east. It has to be in New York; I’m licensed in New York. Take the little girl there. I’ll call my cousin and tell her you’re coming. She’s an elderly woman, was quite an activist in her youth. Her name is Janet Patterson. The town is—”
“What makes you so sure she’ll get involved? She could go to jail. And so could you.”
“She’s been in jail so many times you wouldn’t believe it. Political protests going all the way back to Vietnam. But no one’s going to jail. I’m now your attorney of record, I’m privileged. I’m going to get Stella declared a ward of the state. That shouldn’t be too hard with the hospital records you established in Skokie. Then she can be transferred to a foster home in New York. I know just the place, people who are fair and kind. Then Alice—”
“Stella’s resident in Illinois. You can’t—”
“Yes, I can. Since those research findings about the Sleepless life span have come out, legislators have been railroaded by stupid constituents scared or jealous or just plain angry. The result is a body of so-called law riddled with contradictions, absurdities, and loopholes. None of it will stand in the long run—or at least I hope not—but in the meantime it can all be exploited. I can use it to create the most goddamn convoluted case for Stella that anybody ever saw, and in the meantime she won’t be returned home. But that won’t work for Alice. She’ll need an attorney licensed in Illinois.”
“We have one,” Leisha said. “Candace Holt.”
“No, not a Sleepless. Trust me on this, Leisha. I’ll find somebody good. There’s a guy in—are you crying?”
“No,” Leisha said, crying.
“Ah, God,” Stewart said. “Bastards. I’m sorry all this happened, Leisha.”
“Don’t be,” Leisha said.
When she had directions to Stewart’s cousin, she walked back to the truck. Alice was still asleep, Stella still unconscious. Leisha closed the truck door as quietly as possible. The engine balked and roared, but Alice didn’t wake.
There was a crowd of people with them in the narrow and darkened cab: Stewart Sutter, Tony Indivino, Susan Melling, Kenzo Yagai, Roger Camden.
To Stewart Sutter she said, You called to inform me about the situation at Morehouse, Kennedy. You are risking your career and your cousin for Stella. And you stand to gain nothing. Like Susan telling me in advance about Bernie Kuhn’s brain. Susan, who lost her life to Daddy’s dream and regained it by her own strength. A contract without consideration for each side is not a contract: Every first-year student knows that.
To Kenzo Yagai she said, Trade isn’t always linear. You missed that. If Stewart gives me something, and I give Stella something, and ten years from now Stella is a different person because of that and gives something to someone else as yet unknown—it’s an ecology. An ecology of trade, yes, each niche needed, even if they’re not contractually bound. Does a horse need a fish? Yes.
To Tony she said, Yes, there are beggars in Spain who trade nothing, give nothing, do nothing. But there are more than beggars in Spain. Withdraw from the beggars, you withdraw from the whole damn country. And you withdraw from the possibility of the ecology of help. That’s what Alice wanted, all those years ago in her bedroom. Pregnant, scared, angry, jealous, she wanted to help me, and I wouldn’t let her because I didn’t need it. But I do now. And she did then. Beggars need to help as well as be helped.
And finally, there was only Daddy left. She could see him, bright-eyed, holding thick-leaved exotic flowers in his strong hands. To Camden she said, You were wrong. Alice is special. Oh, Daddy—the specialness of Alice! You were wrong.
As soon as she thought this, lightness filled her. Not the buoyant bubble of joy, not the hard clarity of examination, but something else: sunshine, soft through the conservatory glass, where two children ran in and out. She suddenly felt light herself, not buoyant but translucent, a medium for the sunshine to pass clear through, on its way to somewhere else.
She drove the sleeping woman and the wounded child through the night, east, toward the state line.
BOOK II: Sanctuary
2051
“A nation may be said to consist of its territories, its people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability.”
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.”