Mayleen watched him from the guardhouse. At this distance, he couldn’t read her expression. He had met her oldest daughter once, a skittish girl with the same tow-headed, skinny looks as Mayleen. RoboTech school. Hookworm. Jobs.
Jordan started back toward the scooter factory. Mayleen opened the gate for him, and he went inside.
Susan Melling’s wrinkled face on the comscreen was backed not by her adobe-walled study in the New Mexican desert but by a laboratory dense with terminals, plastiware, and robotic arms.
“Susan, where are you?” Leisha said.
“Chicago Med,” Susan said crisply. “Research. They’ve given me a guest lab.” The deep lines in her face pulled taut with excitement.
Leisha said slowly, “You’ve been working on—”
“Yes,” Susan interrupted, “that genetic problem we discussed in New Mexico. The one the med school has classified.”
The comlink, Leisha realized, was not shielded. Or else not shielded enough. She almost laughed: in the current circumstances, what could possibly constitute “enough”?
Susan said, “I just wanted you to know that we’ve begun, and that my distinguished Chinese colleague has arrived safely to join me.”
Chinese? Susan was staring at her steadily, significantly; Leisha suddenly remembered that Claude Gaspard-Thiereux was genemod for intelligence, and that he had told Susan once, during a drunken party at an international symposium, that the genetic material woven into his had come originally from a Chinese donor. This fact had, for some reason, fascinated him. He began to collect imitation Ming vases and holopictures on the Forbidden City, which had in turn fascinated Susan. Leisha had thought the whole thing unimportant, but Susan obviously expected her to remember it now.
Gaspard-Thiereux at Chicago Med. He would have flown in from Paris only if Susan had been able to offer him proof that Walcott’s findings were feasible.
Susan said crisply, “We worked through the first part of the problem, replicating earlier work in the same area, and now we’ve hit a sort of snag. But we’re working on it, and we’ll keep you informed. We’re applying Mr. Wong’s work to the end of the problem, rather than the beginning, because the end has the most problematical gap.”
Susan was enjoying this, Leisha saw: not just the research but the pseudosecrecy, the theatrical code words. Her voice danced; if Leisha closed her eyes she would see the Susan of forty years ago, braids bobbing with inexhaustible energy as she led two small girls in controlled-testing “games.” Sudden tenderness choked Leisha.
To say something, she said, “Starting at the end? That sounds like applying the verdict instead of the evidence to a trial brief.”
“Not a justified analogy,” Susan said gleefully. Her voice softened. “How are you doing, Leisha?”
“The trial starts next week,” Leisha said, as if it were an answer. Which it was.
“Is Richard still—”
“No change,” Leisha said.
“And Kevin—”
“He’s not coming back.”
“Damn him,” Susan said. But Leisha didn’t want to discuss Kevin. What hurt most about his defection, she’d realized, was that Kevin had betrayed the Sleepless as a group, not just her. Did that mean she no longer had personal loves, only political ones? The question was troubling.
“Susan, do you know what occurred to me yesterday? That in the whole world, there are only three people who understand why I’m testifying against a Sleepless, against what the press call ‘my own kind.’ Only three. You, and Richard, and…Daddy.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “Roger never felt class solidarity outweighed truth. In fact, he never felt class solidarity, period. He considered himself in a class of one. But there are undoubtedly more than three, Leisha. In the whole world.”
Leisha looked across the room, at the pile of kiosk hard-copies heaped on the desk, the floor, the chair. From being unable to read them she had gone to being unable not to read them.
“It doesn’t feel like more than three.”
“Ah,” Susan said. It was a sound Alice made, too. Leisha had never before made the connection. “Did you know that in the United States year-to-date the officially recorded number of in vitro genemods to produce Sleepless babies was 142?”
“That’s all?”
“Down from thousands, ten years ago. Even fair and thoughtful people don’t want their own children to undergo the danger and the discrimination. But if your Dr. Walcott’s research…” She left the sentence unfinished.
“Not mine,” Leisha said. “Definitely not mine.”
“Ah,” Susan said again, the single word a multilayered sigh.
13
“The People versus Jennifer Fatima Sharifi. All rise.” Leisha, seated in the witness section, rose. One hundred sixty-two people—spectators, jury, press, witnesses, counsel—rose with her, one body with one hundred sixty-two warring brains. Security fields encased the courtroom, courthouse, town of Conewango, like layered gloves. No comlinks could function through the two tightest layers. Fifteen years ago, in another of the judicial system’s periodic swings between the public’s right to know and the individual’s right to privacy, New York State had once more banned recording devices from criminal trials. The press were all state-certified augments with eidectic memories, aural-neural bio-implants, or both. Leisha wondered cynically how many just happened to also possess unmentioned genemods.
Next to the reporters, the newsgrid holo-artists held their CAD’s on their packed-together laps, minute flexes of their fingers sculpting the holos for the afternoon news. There was no identified gene site for artistic ability.
“Oyez, oyez. The Superior Court for the County of Cattaraugus, State of New York, is now in session, the Honorable Daniel J. Deepford, judge, presiding. Draw near and give your attention and you shall be heard. God save the United States and this honorable court!”
Leisha wondered if only she heard the fevered exclamation point.
It was the first day of testimony. Two and a half weeks of relentless questioning had been needed to empanel a jury: Do you, Ms. Wright, think you can make an unbiased decision about the defendant? Have you, Mr. Aratina, seen anything on the newsgrids about this case? Are you, Ms. Moranis, a member of We-Sleep? Of Awake, America! Of Mothers for Biological Parity? Three hundred eighty-nine dismissals for cause, an unthinkable number in any other voir dire. The jury had ended up eight men and four women. Seven white, three black, one Asian, one Latino. Five college-educated, seven with high-school certification or less. Nine younger than fifty, three older. Eight biological parents, three childless, one with legal egg-donor surrogate status. Six working, six on the Dole. No Sleepless.
“A citizen shall be tried by a jury of his peers.”
“You may begin, Mr. Hossack,” the judge said to the prosecuting attorney, a heavy man with thick gray hair and the considerable trial asset of being able to command attention through stillness. Like everyone else in the United States with access to a comprehensive database, Leisha now knew all about Geoffrey Hossack. He was fifty-four years old, had a win/loss ratio of 23 to 9, and had never been audited by the IRS or reprimanded by the ABA. His wife bought only real-wheat bread, three loaves a week. Hossack subscribed to two newsgrids and a private channel for Civil War buffs. His oldest daughter was failing trigonometry.
He and Judge Deepford both had records as fair, honest, and capable practitioners of the law.