Tonight he was late. Leisha found herself glancing at the clock, disliking the habit but unable to stop. This was the first time in her life she had found it hard to be alone. Or was it? Had she ever really been alone before? In the beginning there had been Daddy and Alice, then Richard and Carol and Jeanine and Tony…then, later, Stewart, and Richard again, and then Kevin. And always, always, there had been the law. To study, to question, to apply. The law made it possible for people of widely differing beliefs, abilities, and goals to live side by side in something more than barbarism. And Kevin had believed in his own version of that credo: that a social system was built not on the parochial limits of common culture nor the romantic ones of “the family” nor even on the contemporary manifest destiny of unlimited technological advance for all, but on the twin foundations of consensual legal and economic systems. Only in the presence of both could there be any social or personal security. Money and law. Kevin understood that, as Richard never had. It was the bond between them.
Where was he?
The terminal in the library chimed, the override code for personal calls. Leisha froze. The demonstrators, the We-Sleep fanatics, Sanctuary itself—there were so many enemies for someone like Kevin, even apart from his connection with her…She ran to the library.
But it was Kevin himself calling.
“Leisha—listen, honey, I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier. I tried, but…” His voice trailed off, unlike Kevin. On the comscreen his jawline sagged slightly. He looked to her left. “Leisha, I’m not coming home. We’re in the middle of an important negotiation—the Stieglitz contract, you know about it—and I have to be available. I may have to fly on very short notice to Argentina to deal with some political ramifications in their Bahia Blanca subsidiary. If I have to fight my way in and out of the apartment building, or if those crazies keep blocking air lanes on the roof…I can’t risk it.” After a moment he added, “I’m sorry.”
She said nothing.
“I’ll stay here at the office. Maybe when this is over…hell, no ‘maybe’ about it, when the Stieglitz contract is signed and the trial is over, then I’ll come home.”
“Sure, Kev,” Leisha said. “Sure.”
“I knew you’d understand, honey.”
“Yes,” Leisha said. “I do. I understand you.”
“Leisha—”
“Goodbye, Kevin.”
She walked from the library to the kitchen and made herself a sandwich, wondering if he would call back. He didn’t. She threw the sandwich down the organic chute and went back to the library. The holo of Kenzo Yagai had shifted. Yagai bent over the Y-energy cone prototype, his dark eyes serious and intelligent, the sleeves of his white turn-of-the-century lab coat pushed above the elbows.
Leisha sat down on a straight wooden chair and put her head between her knees. But that position made her think of Richard, slumped in his room, and the thought was unbearable. She walked to the window, cleared it, and watched the street from eighteen floors above, until sudden increased agitation in the mass of distant, tiny demonstrators made it probable that someone with a zoom lens had seen her. She opaqued the windows, returned to the chair, and sat straight-backed.
Afterward, she could never remember how long she had sat there. Instead she remembered something decades old. Once, when she had been an undergraduate at Harvard, she and Stewart Sutter had gone for a walk along the Charles River. The wind had been cold and sharp, and they had run straight into it, laughing, Stewart’s cheeks red as apples. Despite the cold they sat on the banks of the river, kissing, until a Mutilation Reminder had staggered, nearly naked, over the withered grass. The MuRems were a bizarre, horrifying religious sect in the service of great ideals. They mutilated their bodies to remind the world of suffering in countries under tyranny, then begged money to alleviate that global suffering. This one had amputated three of his fingers and half of his left foot. The MuRem’s mangled hand was tatooed “Egypt,” his bare blue foot “Mongolia,” and his hideously scarred face “Chile.”
He held out his begging bowl to Leisha and Stewart. Leisha, filled with the familiar shamed repugnance, had slipped in a hundred dollars. “Half for Chile, half for Mongolia. For the suffering,” he had croaked; his vocal cords, too, had been offered up as a reminder. The look he gave Leisha was so crystalline, so suffused with joy, that she was unable to gaze back. She laid her head on her knees and twined her hand hard in the icy grass. Stewart had put his arms around her and murmured against her cheek. “He’s happy, Leisha. He is. He’s begging for a purpose, he raises a great deal of money for world suffering. He’s doing what he chooses to do, and he’s doing it well. He doesn’t mind being mutilated. And anyway, he’s going away now. He’s leaving. Look—he’s already gone.”
12
The Profit Faire on the levee was in full swing by 8:00 P.M. Below the foamstone walls the Mississippi River slid past, dark and silent. A Y-field had been set up for security, invisible walls enclosing a bubble the diameter of a football field. The bubble covered an arc of river, a hundred yards of broad levee, and a semicircle of rough grass and dark bushes between the scooter factory and the river. From the farthest bushes came occasional giggles, accompanied by much thrashing.
On the south end of the broad levee people flocked around the refreshment kiosks, the hologame booths, the terminals where We-Sleep partially subsidized chances at major newsgrid lotteries. At the north end a noisy band whose name Jordan had forgotten blasted the night with dance music. Every thirty seconds a remote-guided holo of the We-Sleep logo, three-dimensional and six feet high, flashed in a different cubic volume of air: ten feet above the ground, two inches over the water, in the midst of the whirling dancers. Across the river, slightly blurred by the edges of the Y-bubble, the Samsung-Chrysler lights shone chastely.
“The basic flaw in your Aunt Leisha is that she belongs to the eighteenth century, not the twenty-first,” Hawke said. “Have some ice cream, Jordy.”
“No,” Jordan said. He didn’t want ice cream; even less did he want to talk to Hawke about Leisha. Again. He tried to deflect their path toward the north end of the Faire, where the dance music would drown Hawke’s voice.
Hawke neither deflected nor drowned. “The ice cream’s a new biopatent from GeneFresh Farms. Unbelievable in strawberry. Two cones, please.”
“I don’t really—”
“What do you think, Jordy? Could you ever guess they started with soybean genes? Profit margin of 17 percent last quarter.”
“Amazing,” Jordan said, a little sourly. He hoped the ice cream would be mediocre, but it was the best he’d ever tasted.
Hawke laughed, eyeing him keenly over his own strawberry cone. Jordan guessed that tomorrow GeneFresh Farms would be approached by a We-Sleep organizer, if they weren’t already under negotiation. The Profit Faire on the levee was to celebrate companies like GeneFresh, which were (or would be) new cells in the We-Sleep revolution. Average profits had risen an astounding 74 percent since the Sharifi murder case had hit the media. The connection between Timothy Herlinger’s death and We-Sleep buying, to Jordan as painful as it was hysterical, had brought millions of new consumers under Hawke’s rhetoric. “I knew it!” We-Sleepers cried in triumph, fear, anger, and greed. “The Sleepless are afraid of us! They’re spooked enough to try to control us through murder!”