Still, she had always been able to be honest with Susan. “You know I don’t believe in the paranormal. The normal is difficult enough to understand.”
“And the paranormal disturbs your world view a lot, doesn’t it?” After a minute Susan added in a softer tone, “Are you afraid Alice will disapprove of Jordan and Stella? A Sleepless and a Sleeper?”
“God, no. I know she’d approve.” She gave a sudden bark of harsh laughter. “Alice may be one of the twelve people in the world who would.”
Susan said, as if it were relevant, “You also got calls from Stewart Sutter, Kate Addams, Miyuki Yagai, and your secretary, what’s-his-name. I told them all you’d call back.”
“I won’t,” Leisha said.
“There are more than twelve,” Susan said. Leisha didn’t answer.
Below them, Richard emerged from the front door and walked toward the distant mesa. He moved slowly, limply, as if the direction didn’t matter to him. Leisha thought it probably didn’t. Very little did. That he was here at all was due only to Jordan, who had not hesitated but simply put Richard in the car and brought him. Jordan seldom hesitated any more. He acted. A moment later the huge figure of Joey, who loved walking anywhere, shambled happily after Richard.
Susan said, “You think the Sharifi trial ended all chance of real integration—Sleepers and Sleepless, We-Sleep and mainstream economy, have and have-nots.”
“Yes.”
“There’s never a last chance for anything, Leisha.”
“Really? Then how come you’re dying?” After a moment Leisha added, “I’m sorry.”
“You can’t hide here forever, Leisha, just because you’re disillusioned with law.”
“I’m not hiding.”
“What do you call it?”
“I’m living,” Leisha said. “Just living.”
“The hell you are. Not like this, not you. Don’t argue with me—I have the insight of the almost-eternal.”
Despite herself, Leisha laughed. The laugh hurt.
Susan said, “Damn right it’s funny. So call Stewart and Kate and Miyuki and that secretary.”
“No.”
Richard disappeared into the darkness, followed by Joey. Jordan and Stella, holding hands, started back toward the house. Susan said, with apparent guilelessness, “I wish Alice were here.”
Leisha nodded.
“Yes,” Susan said artlessly, “it would be good to collect your entire community.”
Leisha looked at her, but Susan was absorbed in studying the moonlight on the desert, while below them some small animal scurried by unseen and overhead the stars came out one by one by one by one.
BOOK III: Dreamers
2075
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”
17
On the morning of her sixty-seventh birthday, Leisha Camden sat on the edge of a chair in her New Mexico compound and contemplated her feet.
They were narrow and high-arched, the skin healthy and fresh right up to the toes, which were strong and straight. The toenails, cut straight across, glowed faintly pink. Susan Melling would have approved. Susan had set great store by feet: their strength, the condition of their veins and bones, their general usefulness as a barometer of aging. Or not aging.
It made her laugh. Feet—to be remembering Susan, dead for 23 years, in terms of feet. And not even Susan’s feet, which might be logical, but Leisha’s own feet, which was ridiculous. In memoriam bipedalis.
When had she begun to find funny such things as feet? Not, certainly, when she was young, in her twenties or thirties or fifties. Everything had been so serious then, of such world-shaking consequence. Not just the things that actually might have shaken the world, but everything. She must have been very tiresome. Perhaps there was no way for the young to be serious without being tiresome. They lacked that all-important dimension of physics: torque. Too much time ahead, too little behind, like a man trying to carry a horizontal ladder with a grip at one end. Not even an honorable passion could balance very well. And while jiggling hard to just keep your balance, how could anything ever be funny?
“What are you laughing at?” Stella said, coming into Leisha’s office after only the most peremptory knock. “That reporter is waiting for you in the board room.”
“Already?”
“He’s early.” Stella sniffed; she hadn’t wanted Leisha to talk to any reporters. “Let them have their tricentennial without us,” she had said. “What does it have to do with us? Now?” Leisha hadn’t had an answer, but she’d agreed to see the reporter anyway. Stella could be so incurious. But, then, Stella was only fifty-two and found hardly anything funny.
“Tell him I’m coming,” Leisha said, “but not until I check on Alice. Give him some coffee or something. Let the kids play him their flute solo; that ought to keep him enthralled.” Seth and Eric had just learned to make flutes from animal bones they scavenged in the desert. Stella sniffed again and went out.
Alice had just awoken. She sat on the edge of her bed while her nurse eased the nightgown over her head. Leisha ducked back into the hall; Alice hated to have Leisha see her naked body. Not until Leisha heard the nurse say, “There, Ms. Watrous,” did she come back into the room.
Alice wore loose, cotton pants and a white top cut wide enough for her to put on herself with just her right arm; the left was useless since her stroke. Her white curls had been combed. The nurse knelt on the floor, easing her charge’s feet into soft slippers.
“Leisha,” Alice said, with pleasure. “Happy birthday.”
“I wanted to say it to you first!”
“Too bad,” Alice said. “Sixty-seven years.”
“Yes,” Leisha said, and the two women held each other’s gaze, Leisha straight-backed in her white shorts and halter, Alice steadying herself with one veined hand on the footboard of the bed.
“Happy birthday, Alice.”
“Leisha!” Stella again, in top managerial mode. “You have a comlink conference at nine, so if you’re going to see that reporter…”
From the right side of her mouth, so softly that Stella couldn’t hear, Alice murmured, “My poor Jordan…”
Leisha murmured back, “You know he loves it,” and went to the board room to meet the reporter.
He surprised her by looking about sixteen, a lanky boy with too-sharp elbows and bad skin, dressed in what must be the latest adolescent fashion: balloon-shaped shorts and plastic blouse trimmed with tiny dangling plastic scooters in red, white, and blue. He perched nervously in a chair while Eric and Seth danced around him playing flutes, badly. Leisha sent her grandnephews from the room. Seth went cheerfully; Eric scowled and slammed the door. In the sudden quiet Leisha sat down across from the boy.
“What newsgrid did you say you represent, Mr… Cavanaugh?”
“My high school net,” he blurted. “Only I didn’t tell the lady that when I made the appointment.”
“Of course not,” Leisha said. Forget her feet—this was funny. The first interview she had granted in ten years, and it turned out to be to a kid for his high-school grid. Susan would have loved it.