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.”