“That’s just how I am creating economic health, Ms. Camden.”
“Only temporarily,” Leisha said. Abruptly she leaned forward. “Do you expect your consumers to stay away from better products forever on the basis of class hatred? Class hatred diminishes when prosperity lets people rise in class.”
“My people will never rise in class to equal Sleepless. And you know it. Yours is the Darwinian edge. So we capitalize on what we do have: sheer numbers.”
“But it doesn’t have to be a Darwinian struggle!”
Hawke stood. The muscle in his neck was still now; Jordan could see that Hawke felt he’d won. “Doesn’t it, Ms. Camden? Who made it so? The Sleepless control 28 percent of the economy now, despite the fact that you’re a tiny minority. The percentage is growing. You yourself are a stockholder, through the Aurora Holding Company, in the Samsung-Chrysler plant across the river.”
Jordan was jolted. He had not known that. For a second, suspicion flooded him, corrosive as acid. His aunt had asked to come here, asked to talk to Hawke…He looked again at Leisha. She was smiling. No, that wasn’t her motive. What was wrong with him? Would he spend his whole life uncertain about everything?
Leisha said, “There is nothing illegal in owning stock, Mr. Hawke. I do it for the most obvious of reasons: to turn a profit. A profit on the best possible goods and services that can be produced in fair competition, offered to anyone who wishes to buy. Anyone.”
“Very commendable,” Hawke said bitingly. “But of course, not everyone can buy.”
“Just so.”
“Then we agree on at least one thing: Some people are shut out of your wonderful Darwinian economy. Do you want them to take that meekly?”
Leisha said, “I want to open the doors and bring them in.”
“How, Ms. Camden? How do we compete on equal grounds with the Sleepless, or with mainstream companies funded in whole or in part by Sleepless financial genius?”
“Not with hatred creating two economies.”
“Then with what? Tell me.”
Before Leisha could answer, the door suddenly swung open and three men leaped into the room.
Leisha’s bodyguards immediately blocked her, guns drawn. But the men must have expected this: They brandished cameras, not guns, and began filming. Since all they could see was the phalanx of bodyguards, they filmed that. This bewildered the guards, who looked at one another sideways. Meanwhile Jordan, backed into a corner, was the only one who saw the sudden, slight, telltale brightening of an optic panel high on the wall, in a room widely touted as being without surveillance of any kind.
“Out,” the head bodyguard, or whatever he was called, said between his teeth. The film crew obligingly left. And no one but Jordan had seen Hawke’s camera.
Why? What did Hawke want with a clandestine still he could claim was taken by a legitimate film crew? And should Jordan tell his aunt that Hawke had it? Could it harm her?
Hawke was watching Jordan. Hawke nodded once, with such warmth in his eyes, such tender understanding of Jordan’s dilemma that Jordan was immediately reassured. Hawke meant no personal harm to Leisha. He didn’t operate that way. His goals were large ones, sweeping ones, right ones, but they took note of individuals, as no Sleepless except Leisha ever seemed to do. No matter what the history books said was necessary, Hawke did not break individual eggs to create his revolution.
Jordan relaxed.
Hawke said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Camden.”
Leisha looked at him bleakly. “No harm done, Mr. Hawke.” After a moment she added deliberately, “Is there?”
“No. Let me give you a memento of your visit.”
“A…”
“A memento.” From a closet—the bodyguards tensed all over again—Hawke wheeled a We-Sleep scooter. “Of course, it probably won’t go as fast, or far, or reliably as the one you already have. If you ever deign to use a scooter instead of a ground-or aircar, as over 50 percent of the population has to do.”
Leisha, Jordan saw, had finally lost her patience. She let her breath out between her teeth; it whistled fitfully. “No thank you, Mr. Hawke. I ride a Kessler-Eagle. A high-quality scooter made, I believe, at a factory owned by Native American Sleepers in New Mexico. They are trying very hard to market a superior product at a fair price, but of course they represent a minority without a built-in protected market. Hopi, I believe.”
Jordan didn’t dare look at Hawke’s face.
As she climbed into her car, Leisha said to Jordan, “I’m sorry for that last jab.”
“Don’t be,” Jordan said.
“Well, for your sake. I know you believe in what you’re doing here, Jordan—”
“Yes,” Jordan said quietly. “I do. Despite.”
“When you say that, you look like your mother.”
The same couldn’t be said for Leisha, Jordan thought, and he felt immediately disloyal. But it was true. Alice looked older than forty-three, Leisha much younger. The aging caused by gravity was in the fine-boned face; the aging caused by tissue decay was not. Shouldn’t she, then, look 21.5? Half the aging. She didn’t; she looked about thirty and, apparently, always would. A beautiful and tense thirty, the faint lines around her eyes more like delicate micro-circuitry than soft gullies.
Leisha said, “How is your mother?”
Jordan heard all the complexities in the question. He didn’t feel up to grappling with them. “Fine,” he said. And then, “Are you going from here to Sanctuary?”
Leisha, half in and half out of her car, lifted her face to his. “How did you know?”
“You have the look you get when you’re going to or coming from.”
She looked down; he shouldn’t have mentioned Sanctuary. She said, “Tell Hawke I won’t make a legal fuss over the wall camera. And don’t you agonize about not telling me, either. You’ve got enough contradictions to reconcile already, Jordy. But you know, I get tired of these overwhelming physical presences like your Mr. Hawke. All charisma and outsized ego, using the intensity of their beliefs to hit you like a fist. It’s wearing.”
She swung her long legs into the car. Jordan laughed, a sound that made Leisha glance at him, a slight question in her green eyes, but he just shook his head, kissed her, and closed the car door. As the car pulled away he straightened, not laughing. Charisma. Outsized egos. Overwhelming physical presences.
How was it possible, after all this time, that Leisha didn’t know she was one, too?
Leisha leaned her head against the leather seat of the Baker Enterprises corporate plane. She was the only passenger. Below her the Mississippi plain began to climb into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Leisha’s hand brushed the book on the seat beside her and she picked it up. It was a diversion from Calvin Hawke.
They had made the cover too garish. Abraham Lincoln, beardless, stood in black frock coat and top hat against the background of a burning city—Atlanta? Richmond?—grimacing horribly. Crimson and marigold flames licked at a purple sky. Crimson and marigold and fuchsia. Online, the colors would be even more lurid. In three-dimensional hologram, they would be practically fluorescent.
Leisha sighed. Lincoln had never stood in a burning city. At the time of her book’s events, he had been bearded. And the book itself was a careful scholarly study of Lincoln’s speeches in the light of Constitutional law, not the light of battle. Nothing in it grimaced. Nothing burned.