“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.