“Apart from the infighting at Samplice? We file for patents in Walcott’s name. Actually, I’ve already started that, before anybody else can. Then, after Walcott and Herlinger—and that’s another problem.”
“What’s another problem?”
“Walcott-and-Herlinger. I suspect that Herlinger might have done much of this work, and that Walcott is not going to want to share credit with him if he can avoid it. Walcott’s a sort of meek belligerent. Walks absently through the world, oblivious of how it actually functions, until someone crosses him, and then he howls and hangs on with all his incisors.”
“I know the type,” Susan said. “Nothing like your father.”
Leisha looked at her; Susan rarely spoke of Roger Camden. Susan picked up the same animal skull Leisha bad been fingering. “What do you know about Georgia O’Keeffe?”
“An artist, wasn’t she? Nineteenth century?”
“Twentieth. She painted these skulls. And this desert. Many times.” Susan suddenly dropped the skull; it shattered on the stone floor. “Leisha, have that baby you and Kevin are always talking about. There’s no guarantee that just because no female Sleepless has gone into menopause yet, you never will. Even Fallopian tubes that don’t themselves seem to age can’t manufacture new gametes. Your eggs are forty-three years old.”
Leisha moved toward her. “Susan—are you saying you regret…that you wish…”
“No, I’m not,” Susan said crisply. “I had you, and Alice, and I still do. Biological daughters couldn’t be more important to me than you two. But who do you have, Leisha? Kevin—”
Leisha said quickly, “Kevin and I are fine.”
Susan looked at her with a tender, skeptical expression that made Leisha repeat, “We’re fine, Susan. We work together really well. That’s what really matters, after all.”
But Susan only went on looking at her with the same tender doubt, Adam Wolcott’s research papers in her arthritic hands.
Simpson v. Offshore Fishing was a complicated case. Leisha’s client, James Simpson, was a Sleepless fisherman alleging deliberate disruptions of Lake Michigan fish-migration patterns through the illegal use of retroviruses, themselves legal, by a competing firm. The competitor, Offshore Fishing, Limited, was owned by Sleepers. The case would turn on judicial interpretation of the Canton-Fenwick Act governing uses of biotechnology in restraint of trade. Leisha had to be in court by 10:00 A.M., so she had asked for a seven o’clock meeting at Samplice.
“Well, nobody’s likely to be there at seven o’clock,” Walcott had grumbled, “including me.” Leisha had stared hard at his wispy face on her comlink, amazed all over again at the petty obtuseness of the mind that was going to remake the biological and social world. Had Newton been like this? Einstein? Callingwood? Actually, they had. Einstein could not remember his stops on trains; Callingwood, the genius of Y-energy applications, regularly lost the shoes off his feet and refused to allow anyone to change his bedsheets for months at a time. Walcott wasn’t unique, he was a type, although not a common one. Sometimes it seemed to Leisha that the process of intellectual maturity was merely discovering that exotics and uniques were only members of rarer sets. She called Samplice herself and insisted on the 7:00 A.M. meeting.
Director Lawrence Lee, a tanned, handsome man who wore Italian silk headbands a little too young for him, turned out to be as difficult as Walcott said he was. “We own this research, whatever the hell it is, even if it turns out to be valuable, and believe you me, I have my doubts. These two…researchers work for me, and don’t any of you fancy lawyers forget it!”
Leisha was the only fancy lawyer in sight. Samplice legal counsel was Arnold Seeley, a hard-eyed man with an aggressively shaved head who nonetheless fumbled questions on which he should have been pressing Leisha hard. She leaned across the table. “I forget very little, Mr. Lee. There are legal precedents about scientific work, especially scientific work with commercial applications. Dr. Walcott is not in the same labor category as a carpenter fixing your front porch. There are also ambiguities in the contract Dr. Walcott signed with Samplice at the beginning of his employment. I presume you have a copy with you, Mr. Seeley?”
“Uh, no…wait…”
“Why don’t you?” Lee snapped. “Where is it? What’s it say?”
“I’d need to check…”
Impatience filled Leisha, the same impatience she always felt in the presence of incompetence. She pushed the impatience down; this was too important to jeopardize with inept shows of bad feeling. Or additional shows of it. Lee and Seeley and Walcott, who in their ineptly warring hands held eight hours a day for hundreds of thousands of people, all searched electronic notebooks for the employment contract.
“Got it?” Leisha said crisply. “All right, second paragraph, third line…” She took them through the poorly-phrased language, the legal precedents for shared scientific copyrights, the landmark Boeing v. Fain “auteur” ruling. Seeley shifted his hard eyes over his screen and drummed his fingers on the table. Lee blustered. Walcott sat with a small smug smile. Only Herlinger, the twenty-five-year-old assistant, listened with comprehension. He had surprised Leisha: heavyset and already balding at twenty-five, Herlinger would have looked like a thug except for a kind of bitter dignity, a stoic disillusionment that didn’t seem to belong either with his youth or with Walcott’s spiky, eccentric presumed-genius. They were an unlikely team.
“…and so I’d like to suggest an out-of-court settlement about the patents.”
Lee started to bluster again. Seeley said quickly, “What type of settlement? A percentage or an up-front sum?”
Leisha kept her face impassive. She had him. “We would have to work that out, Mr. Seeley.”
Lee almost shouted, “If you think you can get away with taking from me what belongs to this firm—”
Seeley turned coolly to him. “I think the shareholders might disagree about whose firm it was.”
The “shareholders” included Sanctuary, although Lee would not necessarily know that Leisha knew that. Leisha and Seeley both waited for Lee to come to this realization. As he did, his small button mouth pursed, and he looked at Leisha with a fearful sneer. She thought that it had been a long time since she had disliked someone so much.
“Maybe,” Lee said, “we could talk about a settlement. On my terms.”
Leisha said, “Fine. Let’s talk terms.”
She had him.
Afterward, Walcott accompanied her and her bodyguard to the car. “Will they settle?”
“Yes,” Leisha said. “I think so. You have an interesting set of colleagues, Doctor.”
He eyed her warily.
“Your director forgets he runs a publicly-traded company, your firm’s lawyer can’t put together a decent class-six employee contract, and your assistant in Sleepless genetic research is riding away on a We-Sleep scooter.”
Walcott airily waved his hand. “He’s young. Can’t afford a car. And of course, if this research goes through, there won’t be any We-Sleep Movement. Nobody will have to sleep.”
“Except those who can’t afford the operation. Or a car.”
Walcott regarded her with amusement. “Shouldn’t you be arguing the other side, Ms. Camden? In favor of the economic elite? After all, very few people can afford to genetically alter their in vitro embryos for sleeplessness.”
“I was not arguing, Dr. Walcott. Merely correcting your false statement.” In a subtler way, he was just as unlikable as Lee.