She ran her finger over the embossed name on the cover: Elizabeth Kaminsky.
“Why?” Alice had asked in her blunt way.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Leisha had said. “My law cases get too much notoriety as it is. I want the book to earn whatever scholarly attention it’s really worth rather than a—”
“I see that,” Alice retorted. “But why that pseudonym, of all choices?” Leisha hadn’t had an answer. A week later she thought of one, but by that time the stiff little visit was over and Leisha wasn’t in California to deliver it. Leisha almost phoned her, but it was 4:00 A.M. in Chicago, 2:00 A.M. in Morro Bay, and of course Alice and Beck would be asleep. And she and Alice seldom phoned each other anyway.
Because of something Lincoln said in 1864, Alice. Combined with the facts that I’m 43 years old, the same age our father was when we were born, and that no one, not even you, believes that I get tired of it all.
But the truth was, she probably wouldn’t have said that to Alice, not in Chicago nor in California. Somehow whatever she said to Alice turned faintly pompous. And whatever Alice said to her—like that mystic nonsense of the Twin Group—seemed to Leisha riddled with holes in both logic and evidence. They were like two people trying to communicate in a language foreign to both of them, reduced to nodding and smiling, the initial good will not quite enough to offset the strain.
Twenty years ago, for one moment, it had seemed as if it might be different between them. But now…
Twenty-two thousand Sleepless on Earth, 95 percent of them in the United States. Eighty percent of those within Sanctuary. And since nearly all Sleepless babies were now born, not created in vitro, most Sleepless were now born inside Sanctuary. Parents across the country continued to purchase other genetic alterations: enhanced IQ, sharpened sight, a strong immune system, high cheekbones—anything at all, it sometimes seemed to Leisha, within the legal parameters, no matter how trivial. But not Sleeplessness. Genetic alterations were expensive; why purchase for your beloved baby a lifetime of bigotry, prejudice, and physical danger? Better to choose an assimilated genemod. Beautiful or brainy children might encounter natural envy, but usually not virulent hatred. They were not viewed as a different race, one endlessly conspiring at power, endlessly controlling behind the scenes, endlessly feared and scorned. The Sleepless, Leisha had written for a national magazine, were to the twenty-first century what Jews had been to the fourteenth.
Twenty years of legal fighting to change that perception, and nothing had changed.
“I am tired,” Leisha said experimentally, aloud. The pilot didn’t turn around; he wasn’t much for conversation. The foothills, unchanging, continued to slide away 20,000 feet below.
Leisha unfolded her work station. It accomplished no good to be tired: not of the troubling gulf between her and Alice, not of Calvin Hawke in the fight behind her, not of Sanctuary in the fight ahead. They would all still be there. And meanwhile, she could at least get some work done. Three more hours to upstate New York, two back to Chicago, enough time to finish the brief for Calder v. Hansen Metallurgy. She had a client meeting in Chicago at 4:00 P.M., a deposition at 5:30 P.M., another client meeting at 8:00 P.M., and then the rest of the night to prepare for trial tomorrow. She might just fit everything in.
The law was the one thing she never tired of. The one thing—despite twenty years of the inevitable crap that went with its practice—she still believed in. A society with a functioning, reasonably uncorrupted (say, 80 percent) judicial system was a society that still believed in itself.
More cheerful now, Leisha settled into a knotty question of prima facie assumption. But the book still lay on the seat, distracting her, along with Alice’s question, and her unspoken answer.
In April 1864 Lincoln had written to Kentuckian A. G. Hodges. The northern states were enraged over the racial massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow, the federal treasury was nearly empty, the war was costing the Union two million dollars a day. Daily Lincoln was reviled in the press; weekly he was locked in combat with Congress. In the next month Grant would lose 10,000 men at Cold Harbor, more at Spotsylvania Courthouse. Lincoln wrote to Hodges, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
Leisha shoved her book under the seat of the plane and bent over her workstation, leaning into the law.
Jennifer Sharifi raised her forehead from the ground, rose gracefully, and bent to roll up her prayer rug. The rough mountain grass was slightly wet; blades clung crookedly to the underside of the rug. Holding it away from the white folds of her abbaya, Jennifer walked across the small clearing in the woods to her aircar. Her long, unbound black hair stirred in the faint wind.
Alight plane streaked overhead. Jennifer frowned: Leisha Camden, already. Jennifer was late.
Let Leisha wait. Or let Richard deal with her. Jennifer had not wanted Leisha here in the first place. Why should Sanctuary welcome a woman who worked against it at every turn? Even the Quran, in its quaint pre-globalnet simplicity, was explicit about traitors: “Whosoever commits aggression against you, you commit/ him like as he has committed against you.”
The small plane with the Baker Enterprises logo disappeared into the trees.
Jennifer slipped into her car, her mind busy with the rest of the day ahead. Were it not for the solace and quiet of morning and afternoon prayer, she didn’t think she could face some of her days. “But you have no religious faith,” Richard had said, smiling, “you’re not even a believer.” Jennifer hadn’t tried to explain to him that religious belief was not the point. The will to believe created its own power, its own faith, and, ultimately, its own will. Through the practice of faith, whatever its specific rituals, one brought into existence the object of that faith. The believer became the Creator.
I believe, Jennifer said each dawn and each noon, kneeling on the grass or the leaves or the snow, in Sanctuary.
She shaded her eyes, trying to see exactly where Leisha’s plane had disappeared. It was being tracked, Jennifer assumed, by both the Langdon sensors and the antiaircraft lasers. She lifted her aircar, flying well under the Y-field dome.
What would her paternal great-grandmother, Najla Fatima Noor el-Dahar, have said about a faith such as hers? On the other hand, her maternal great-grandmother, whose granddaughter became an American movie star, had herself survived as an Irish immigrant turned Brooklyn cleaning lady and thus probably understood something about power and will.
Not that great-grandmothers, anybody’s great-grandmothers, mattered any longer. Nor grandfathers nor fathers. A new race had always been required to sacrifice its roots to its own survival. Zeus, Jennifer would guess, had mourned neither Cronus nor Rhea.
Sanctuary spread below her in the morning sun. In twenty-two years it had grown to nearly 300 square miles, occupying a fifth of Cattaraugus County, New York. Jennifer had acquired the Allegany Indian Reservation, immediately after the repeal of Congressional trust restrictions. She had paid a sum that made the Seneca tribe that sold it comfortable in Manhattan, Paris, and Dallas. There hadn’t actually been very many Senecas left to sell; not all threatened groups, Jennifer well knew, had the adaptable skills of the Sleepless—skills such as buying land when the owners were initially reluctant to sell. Or acquiring antiaircraft lasers on the international arms market. Or, if those other groups did have these skills, they lacked the cause to make them focused and clean and holy. To call survival itself what it actually was: a holy war. Jihad.