“Objection!” Hossack cried.
“I’ll allow it,” Deepford said. His face sagged.
“—had not protected your children from being dangerously menaced by a We-Sleep mob at Stars and Stripes Airport, had not protected your marine-research ship from being sunk by parties unknown but allegedly Sleepers—after all these failures of the law to protect you in these circumstances, your motive for turning in your wife was concern for her under the law?”
“Yes,” Richard said hoarsely. “There was no other way to stop Jennifer. I told her—I begged her—I went to Leisha before I knew about Herlinger…I hadn’t…Leisha didn’t tell me—”
Even Judge Deepford glanced away.
Sandaleros repeated scathingly, “And your motives for exposing your wife to Ms. Camden were conjugal concern and good citizenship. Very commendable. Tell me, Mr. Keller, were you and Leisha Camden ever lovers?”
“Objection!” Hossack all but screamed. “Irrelevant! Your Honor—”
Deepford studied his gavel. Leisha, through her numbness, saw that he was going to allow the question. Out of a concern for fairness to the minority, the persecuted, the habitually discriminated against.
“Overruled.”
“Mr. Keller,” Sandaleros said between clenched teeth; he was becoming, Leisha saw, the avenging angel, layer by layer, cell by cell. Gene by gene. The original Will Sandaleros was almost gone. “Were you and Leisha Camden, the woman to whom you exposed your wife’s alleged wrongdoing, ever lovers?”
“Yes,” Richard said.
“Since your marriage to Jennifer Sharifi?”
“Yes,” Richard said.
“When?” Kevin’s face was quiet on the hotel comscreen.
Leisha said carefully, “Before you and I started living together. Jennifer was obsessed with Tony’s memory, and Richard felt—it doesn’t matter, Kevin.” As soon as the words were out, she knew how stupid they were. It mattered profoundly. To the trial. To Richard. Perhaps—even, still—to Jennifer, although how could Leisha guess what mattered to Jennifer? She didn’t understand Jennifer. Obsession fell within Leisha’s comprehension; obsessive secrecy, the preference for dark and silent plotting rather than lighted battles, did not. “Jennifer knows. She knew at the time. Sometimes it almost seemed…as if she wanted me to reach out to Richard.”
Kevin said, as if it were an answer, “I’m taking the Sanctuary oath.”
It was a moment before Leisha answered. “Why?”
“I can’t do business otherwise, Leisha. Baker Enterprises is too deeply meshed with Donald Pospula’s firm, with Aerodyne, with half a dozen other Sleepless companies. My losses would be enormous.”
“You don’t know the first thing about real losses!”
“Leisha, it isn’t a personal decision. Please try to see that. It’s purely financial—”
“Is that the only thing that matters?”
“Of course not. But Sanctuary isn’t asking for anything immoral, only for community solidarity based firmly on economic solidarity. That isn’t—”
Leisha broke the comlink. She believed Kevin; his decision was purely economic, within boundaries he could construe as moral. Emotional obsession like Jennifer’s would never move him, never touch that smooth clear face, nor the smooth, clear brain beneath it. Obsessions like Jennifer’s—and like her own for the necessity of law.
Days ago, she had asked herself what she had left to lose. Now, she knew.
Security encoded in secret pendants. Oaths of fealty. Planted evidence—because Will Sandaleros was right, no Sleepless would have ever left that pendant there. They were, all of them, too careful. But that fact would not be admissible in court. Generalities—even if profoundly true, even if crucial—never were.
Leisha sat on the edge of the hotel bed. It dominated the room, that bed. She had assumed, on first checking in at Conewango, that that was because sex was so important to the business of hotels. Wrong assumption. Reasoning from parochial experience.
It was sleep that was central. To everyone’s assumptions.
It wasn’t that she expected the practice of law to be clean. No trial lawyer expected that, not after years of plea bargains and perjury and crooked cops and political deals and misapplied statutes and biased juries. But she had believed that the law itself, apart from its practice, was, if not clean, at least large. Large enough.
She remembered the day she had realized that Yagaiist economics were not large enough. Their stress on individual excellence left out too many phenomena, too many people: those who had no excellence and never would. The beggars, who nonetheless had definite if obscure roles to play in the way the world ran. They were like parasites on a mammal that torment it to a scratching frenzy that draws blood, but whose eggs serve as food for other insects that feed yet others who fatten the birds that are prey for the rodents the tormented mammal eats. A bloody ecology of trade, replacing the linear Yagaiist contracts occurring in a vacuum. The ecology was large enough to take Sleepers and Sleepless, producers and beggars, the excellent and the mediocre and the seemingly worthless. And what kept the ecology functioning was the law.
But if the law itself was not large enough?
Not large enough to take in what a Sleepless would do, unprovable but clear as air? To take in what had happened between Richard and her. To take in not only what Jennifer had done, but why. Most of all, to take in that ineffable envy, as potent as genetic structure itself but not able to be spliced, altered, engineered out of existence. Envy for the powerful. The law had never been able to take that in. It had created endless civil rights legislation to correct prejudice against the biologically identifiable: Blacks. Women. Chicanos. The handicapped. But never before in the United States had the objects of envy and the objects of biological prejudice been the same group. And United States law was not large enough to take that in.
Leisha put her head between her knees. It was clear how the rest of the trial would go. Her own testimony would be discredited by Sandaleros as maneuverings by a jealous other woman against the legal wife. Richard would be discredited. Hossack would hit hard on his strong point: Sanctuary’s power. Sleepless power. Sandaleros would not allow Jennifer to testify; her composure would look like coldbloodedness to a jury of Sleepers, her desire to protect her own like an attack on the Outside—
Which it had been.
The jury could go either way: acquit on the supposed love triangle, and then Jennifer would escape the law. Or convict because she was a powerful Sleepless, and then Jennifer would never survive her fellow inmates. Sanctuary would withdraw deeper into itself, a powerful spider spinning electronic webs for its own protection around a country of Sleepers increasingly filled with fear of people they seldom saw, never netted with, and would not buy from lest the Sleepless ruin the economy of which they were either shadow or source, no one could tell for sure. They control things secretly, you know. They want to enslave us. They work with international competitors to bring us to our knees. And they don’t stop at murder.
And so prove that all along Jennifer had been right to protect her own.
It was a snake swallowing its own tail. Because the law, in its striving to be fair and treat all equally, left too much out. It was not large enough. It was not as large as the genetic and technological future which, outgrowing it, would be lawless.