A few people smiled; a few shifted uneasily around the polished table. Councilor Ames went on staring, wide-eyed, at the convulsing baby. Hermione caught the young woman’s horrified gaze; immediately she wrapped Miranda in her blanket. The thin yellow material jerked and twitched. Along the hem were embroidered white butterflies and dark blue stars.
Drew Arlen stood before Leisha Camden with his legs braced firmly apart. Leisha thought that she had never seen such a contrast as this child with the teen-age reporter who had just left, and whose name she had already forgotten.
Drew was the filthiest ten-year-old she had ever seen. Mud caked his brown hair and smeared the remains of his plastic shirt, pants, and torn Dole-issue shoes. So much dirt clung to a deep scratch on his exposed left arm that Leisha thought it must surely be infected; the skin had a red, angry look around elbow bones like chisels. One tooth had been knocked out of a face that was remarkable only for eyes as green as Leisha’s own and a sort of stubborn eagerness, as if Drew were prepared to fight for something with every fiber of his dirty, skinny, clearly non-donkey self.
“I’m Drew Arlen, me,” he said. It might have been a fanfare.
“Leisha Camden,” Leisha said gravely. “You insisted on seeing me.”
“I want to be in your Fountain.”
“Foundation. Where did you hear about my Foundation?”
Drew waved this away as of no consequence. “From somebody. After he told me, I done come a long way to get here, me. From Louisiana.”
“On foot? By yourself?”
“I stole rides when I could,” the boy said, again as if this were not worth mentioning. “It took a long time. But now I’m here, me, and I’m ready for you to start.”
Leisha said to the household robot, “Bring sandwiches from the refrigerator. And milk.” The robot glided soundlessly away. Drew watched it with total absorption until it left the room. He turned to Leisha. “Is that the kind that can wrestle with you? For muscle training. I see them on the newsgrids, me.”
“No. It’s just a basic retrieve-and-record ’bot. Now what is it you’re ready for, Drew?”
He said impatiently, “To get started. Your Fountain. Making me into somebody.”
“And just what does that mean to you?”
“You know—You’re the Fountain lady! Get cleaned up, me, and educated, and be somebody!”
“You want to become a donkey?”
The boy frowned. “No, but thass where I got to start, me, don’t I? Then go on from there.”
The robot returned. Drew looked longingly at the food; Leisha gestured and he fell on it like a filthy little dog, tearing at the sandwiches with teeth on the left side of his face and wincing with pain whenever the sore, empty hole on the right came in contact with bread or meat. Leisha watched.
“When did you eat last?”
“Yesterday morning. Thass good.”
“Do your parents know where you are?”
Drew picked up a crumb from the floor and ate it. “My mom don’t care. She’s at brainie parties, her, all the time now. My daddy’s dead.” He said this last harshly, looking straight at Leisha from his green eyes, as if she should know already about his father’s death. Leisha pulled the terminal from the wall.
“Won’t do no good to call them,” Drew said. “We got no terminal, us.”
“I’m not going to call them, Drew. I’m going to find out something about you. Where in Louisiana did you live?”
“Montronce Point.”
“Personal bio search, all primary databanks,” Leisha said. “Drew, what’s your Dole security number?”
“842-06-3421-889.”
Montronce was a tiny Delta town, no donkey economy to speak of. One thousand nine hundred twenty-two people, school with 16 percent attendance for students, 62 percent for volunteer teachers, who kept the building open fifty-eight days a year. Drew was one of the 16 percent, off and on. His medical history was nonexistent, but those of his parents and two younger sisters were recorded. Leisha listened to it all, and grew very still.
When the terminal was done, she said, “Your grades, even in what passes for a school in Montronce, weren’t terrific.”
“No,” the boy agreed. His eyes never left her face.
“You don’t seem to have unusual abilities in athletics, music, or anything else.”
“No, I don’t, me.”
“And you don’t really want to be educated for a donkey job.”
“Thass all right,” he said aggressively. “I can do that.”
“But you don’t really want to. The Susan Melling Foundation exists to help people become what they want to become. What is it you want your future to hold?” It seemed an absurd question to ask a ten-year-old, especially this ten-year-old. Poorer than even most Livers. Not particularly talented. Scrawny. Smelly. A Sleeper.
And yet not ordinary, either—the bright green eyes looked at Leisha with a directness most adult Sleepers never managed, not even in the relaxed, hedonistic tolerance of the tricentennial social climate. In fact, Leisha thought, there was more than directness in Drew’s eyes: There was a confidence in her help that Foundation applicants almost never had. Most of them looked at her with uncertainty (“Why should you help me?”) or suspicion (“Why should you help me?”) or a nervous obsequiousness that inevitably reminded her of groveling dogs. Drew looked as if he and Leisha were business partners in a sure thing.
“You heard the terminal say how my Grampy died, him.”
Leisha said, “He was a workman building Sanctuary. A metal strut tore loose in space and ripped his suit.”
Drew nodded. His voice held the same buoyant confidence, without grief. “My Daddy was a little boy then. The Dole didn’t hardly provide nothin’ then.”
“I remember,” Leisha said wryly; what the Dole had provided, courtesy of basic cheap Y-energy and social conscience, was nothing compared to what donkeys and government now provided, courtesy of the need for votes. Bread and circuses, saved from Roman barbarism only by that same cheap affluence. Comfortable and courted, Livers lacked the pent-up rage for the arena.
She had expected Drew to pass over her reference to remembering his father’s era; most children regarded the past as irrelevant. But he surprised her. “You remember, you? How it was? How old you be, Leisha?”
He doesn’t know any better than to use my first name, Leisha thought indulgently—and immediately saw, for the first time, Drew’s gift. His interest in her was so intense, so fresh and real shining from the green eyes, that she was willing to indulge him. He carried blamelessness on him like a scent. She began to see how he could have made the trip from Louisiana to New Mexico still healthy: people would help him. In fact, the blood on his arm was fresh and so was the knocked-out tooth; it was possible he had met with nothing but help until he encountered Eric Bevington-Watrous outside Leisha’s walls.
And he was only ten years old.
She said, “I’m sixty-seven.”
His eyes widened. “Oh! You don’t look like an old lady, you!”
You should see my feet. She laughed, and the child smiled. “Thank you, Drew. But you still haven’t answered my question. What is it you want from the Foundation?”
“My daddy grew up without his daddy and so he grew up rough, him, drinking too much,” Drew said, as if it were an answer. “He hit my mom. He hit my sisters. He hit me. But my mom told me he wouldn’t a been like that, him, if his daddy had lived. He’d a been a different man, him, kind and nice, and it warn’t his fault.”