Leisha said, “Do you know what Aristotle said about equality? ‘Equals revolt that they may become superior. Such is one state of mind that creates revolutions.’ ”
Hawke’s face sharpened. To Jordan it actually seemed the bones grew even more pointed; something moved behind Hawke’s eyes. He started to say something, evidently thought better of it, and smiled enigmatically. Then he turned and walked away.
After a moment Leisha said, “I’m sorry, Jordan. That was unforgivable at a party. I’m too used to courtrooms, I guess.”
“You look terrible,” Jordan said abruptly, surprising himself. “You’ve lost too much weight. Your neck is all scrunched up, and your face is drawn.”
“Looking my age,” Leisha said, suddenly amused. Now why should that amuse her? Maybe it wasn’t the Sleepless he didn’t understand; maybe it was women. He turned his head toward the deck for a glimpse of the tiny flashing lights Stella Bevington wore in her red hair.
Leisha leaned forward and gripped his wrist. “Jordan—do you ever wish you could become a Sleepless?”
He stared into her green eyes, so different from Hawke’s: her eyes reflected all light back at you. Like a parcel refused. All of a sudden his uncertainty left him. “Yes, Leisha. I do wish it. We all do. But we can’t. That’s why I work with Hawke in unionizing underclass morons who waste a third of their life asleep. Because we can’t be you.”
His mother came up behind them. “Is everything all right in here?” Alice asked, looking from her son to her sister. She wore, Jordan suddenly noticed, her usual warm expression and a truly hideous dress, an expensive green silk that did nothing to flatter her stoutness. Around her neck was the antique pendant Beck had given her. It had once belonged to some British duchess.
“Fine,” Jordan said, and couldn’t think of anything else to say. Twins—they were twins. The three of them smiled at each other, silent, until Alice spoke. Jordan was startled to see that his mother was a little drunk.
“Leisha, did I tell you about the new case registered with our Twin Group? Twins raised apart from birth, but when one broke his arm, the other felt pain for weeks in the same arm and couldn’t figure out why?”
“Or thought he felt the pain,” Leisha said, “in retrospect.”
“Ah,” Alice said, as if Leisha had answered some other question entirely, and Jordan saw that his mother’s eyes were more knowing than he had ever seen them, and fully as dark as Calvin Hawke’s own.
In the early morning the New Mexico desert was incandescent with pearly light. Sharp-edged shadows, blue and pink and colors Leisha had never imagined shadows could be, crept like living things across the vast emptiness. On the distant horizon the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rose clear and precise.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Susan Melling said.
Leisha said, “I never knew light could look like that.”
“Not everybody likes the desert. Too desolate, too empty, too hostile to human life.”
“You like it.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “I do. What do you want, Leisha? This isn’t just a social visit; your crisis air is at gale force. A civilized gale. Solemn urgent sweeps of very cold air.”
Despite herself, Leisha smiled. Susan, now seventy-eight, had left medical research when her arthritis worsened. She had moved to a tiny town fifty miles from Santa Fe, a move inexplicable to Leisha. There was no hospital, no colleagues, few people to talk to. Susan lived in a thick-walled adobe house with sparse furniture and a sweeping view from the roof, which she used as a terrace. On the deep, whitewashed window sills and few tables she set out rocks, polished to a high gloss by the wind, or vases of tough-stemmed wildflowers, or even animal bones, bleached by the sun to the same incandescent whiteness as the snow on the distant mountains. Walking uneasily through the house for the first time, Leisha had felt a palpable relief, like a small pop in her chest, when she saw the terminal and medical journals in Susan’s study. All Susan would say about her retirement was, “I worked with my mind for a long time. Now I’m groping for the rest of it,” a statement that Leisha understood intellectually—she had doggedly read the standard mystics—but no other way. The ‘rest’ of what, exactly? She had been reluctant to question Susan further, in case this was like Alice’s Twin Group: pseudopsychology tricked out as scientific fact. Leisha didn’t think she could bear to see Susan’s fine mind seduced by the deceptive comforts of hokum. Not Susan.
Susan said now, “Let’s go inside, Leisha. The desert is wasted on you. You’re not old enough for it yet. I’ll make tea.”
The tea was good. Sitting beside Susan on her sofa, Leisha said, “Have you kept up with your field, Susan? With, for instance, the genetic-alteration research Gaspard-Thiereux published last year?”
“Yes,” Susan said. A gleam of amusement came and went in her eyes, sunken now but still bright. She had stopped dying her hair; it hung in white braids only slightly less thick than Leisha remembered from childhood. But Susan’s skin had the veined transparency of eggshells. “I haven’t renounced the world like some flagellant monk, Leisha. I access the journals regularly, although I have to say it’s been a long time since there was anything really worth studying, except the work of Gaspard-Thiereux.”
“There is now.” Leisha told her about Walcott, Samplice, the research and its theft. She didn’t mention Jennifer, or Sanctuary. Susan sipped her tea, listening quietly. When Leisha finished, Susan said nothing.
“Susan?”
“Let me see the research notes.” She put down her tea cup; it rattled hard on the glass table.
Susan studied the papers for a long time. Then she disappeared into her study to run some equations. “Use only a free-standing deck,” Leisha said, “and wipe the program afterward. Completely.” After a moment Susan nodded slowly.
Leisha wandered around the living room, gazing at rocks with holes bored through them by freak winds, rocks so smooth they might have lain for a million years at the bottom of an ocean, rocks with sudden protuberances like malignant growths. She picked up an animal skull and ran her fingers across the clean bone.
When Susan returned, she was calmer, all critical faculties at full RAM. “Well, it looks like a genuine line of research, as far as it goes. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”
“Does it go far enough?”
“Depends on what’s in that missing piece. What he has here is new, but it’s new more in the way of not having been explored before because it’s a semibizarre byway, rather than being new because it’s an inevitable but difficult extension of existing knowledge, if you see the difference.”
“I do see it. But what is there that could logically support a final piece that could actually alter Sleepers into Sleepless?”
“It’s possible,” Susan said. “He’s made some unorthodox departures on Gaspard-Thiereux’s work, but as far as I can tell from this…yes. Yes. It’s possible.”
Susan sank onto the sofa and covered her face with her hands.
Leisha said, “How many of the side effects might be…is it possible that…”
“Are you asking me whether Sleepers who become Sleepless beyond in vitro might still have the non-aging organs of the rest of you? God, I don’t know. The biochemistry of that is still so murky.” Susan lowered her hands and smiled, without humor. “You Sleepless don’t provide us with enough research specimens. You don’t die often enough.”
“Sorry,” Leisha said dryly. “We all have such full calendars.”
“Leisha,” Susan said, her voice not quite steady, “what happens now?”