Alice said, “Eric said to tell you that as part of his studies he walked into the Pacific and got his ass wiped. What does that mean?”
Drew laughed. “Really? Eric said that? I guess he has changed.” The brooding bitterness returned to his voice.
Stella ran into the room, looking distracted. She had put on weight and now looked like a painting by Titian, with plump, healthy flesh under youthfully red hair. “Leisha, there’s a—Drew! What are you doing home?”
“He’s visiting,” Alice said. “There’s a what, dear?”
“There’s a visitor to see Leisha. Actually, three visitors.” Stella smiled, and her chins wobbled with excitement. “Here they are!”
“Richard!”
Leisha catapulted across the room into his arms. Richard caught her, laughing, then let her go. Leisha turned immediately to his wife, Ada, a slim Polynesian girl who smiled shyly. Ada still had trouble with English.
When Richard had first brought Ada to the New Mexico compound, after twenty years of solitary, aimless wandering around the globe, Leisha had been wary. She and Richard had never again been lovers; Leisha had recoiled from the thought of sleeping with Jennifer’s husband. And Richard had never asked. He had grieved for years for his lost children, Najla and Ricky, a silent bitter grieving so unlike a Sleepless that Leisha had not known how to respond. She had been relieved when he traveled for years at a time, disappearing with only his credit ring and the clothes on his back into India, Tibet, the Antarctic colonies, the central South American desert—always somewhere technologically backward, as close to primitive as a world fueled by Kenzo Yagai still possessed. Leisha never asked him about his journeys; he never volunteered information. She suspected he passed as a Sleeper.
Then four years ago he had returned for one of his infrequent stays bringing Ada. His wife. She came from one of the South Pacific voluntary cultural preserves. Ada was slim and brown, with long lustrous black hair and a habit of ducking her head when anyone addressed her. She spoke no English. She was 15 years old.
Leisha had welcomed her, set about learning Samoan, and tried to hide the fact that she was hurt to the heart. It wasn’t that Richard had rejected her; it was that he had rejected all the choices of being Sleepless. Choosing accomplishment. Choosing ambition. Choosing the mind.
But gradually Leisha had come to understand. The point for Richard was not only that Ada, with her shy smiles and halting speech and youthful adoration of Richard, was so different from Leisha. It was that Ada was so different from Jennifer Sharifi.
And Richard seemed happy. He had done what Leisha had not, and had made his own kind of peace with their Sleepless past. And if that peace looked like a surrender, could Leisha say that her own solution—the moribund Susan Melling Foundation, which had had all of ten applicants last year—was really any better?
“I see you, Leisha,” Ada said in English. “I see you gladly.”
“And I see you gladly,” Leisha said warmly. For Ada, this was a long speech of great intellectual power.
“I see you gladly, Mirami Alice.” Mirami, Richard had once said, was a term of great respect for the honored old. Ada had flatly—shyly and sweetly, but flatly nonetheless—refused to believe that Alice and Leisha were twins.
“And I see you gladly, dear,” Alice said. “You remember Drew?”
“Hey,” Drew said, smiling. Ada smiled slightly and looked away, as was proper for a married woman to an unrelated man. Richard said genially, “Hey, Drew,” which was such a change from the usual shadowed pain in his eyes when he spoke to Drew that Leisha blinked. She had never really understood that pain: Drew was a generation younger than Richard’s lost son. And, of course, he was a Sleeper.
Alice’s voice quavered, which meant she was tiring. “Stella said three visitors…”
Stella entered then, carrying a baby.
“Oh, Richard,” Leisha said. “Oh, Richard…”
“This is Sean. After my father.”
The baby looked absurdly like Richard: low brow, thick dark hair, dark eyes. Only his coffee-colored skin proclaimed Ada’s genes. They had evidently not had him modified at all. Leisha took the infant in her arms, not sure what she felt. Sean gazed at her solemnly. Leisha’s heart turned over.
“He’s beautiful…”
“Let me hold him,” Alice said hungrily, and Leisha surrendered the baby. She was glad for Richard, who had always wanted a family, an anchor, an intimate community…Two years ago Leisha had medical tests to confirm that her own eggs were inert. Gametes, Susan had warned her decades ago, did not regenerate.
Kevin Baker, the only prominent Sleepless left in the United States, had four children by his young Sleepless wife.
Jennifer Sharifi, she knew from consulting United States birth records, had two children and four grandchildren.
Alice may have lost Moira, emigrant to Mars colony, but she had Jordan and his three children.
Stop it, she told herself, and did.
The baby was passed around. Stella bustled in with cookies and coffee. Alice, tired, was wheeled to her room to sleep. Jordan came in from a field he was cultivating with experimental genemod sunflowers. Richard talked, seemingly freely and yet with something odd in his manner, about his and Ada’s wanderings through the Artificial Islands Game Sanctuary off the African coast.
“Hey,” Drew said, and at the sound in his voice everybody looked up. “Hey—this baby’s sleeping.”
Leisha sat still. Then she stood, walked to Drew’s chair, and stared down at the infant carryall parked at Drew’s feet. Sean lay with his tiny fists flung above his head, asleep. His closed eyelids fluttered. Leisha’s stomach clenched. Richard had felt such hatred of his own kind, his own people, that he had had in vitro genemod to reverse sleeplessness.
He was gazing at her. “No, Leisha,” he said quietly. “I didn’t. It’s natural.”
“Natural…”
“Yes. That’s where we’ve been the last month, after the Artificial Islands—Chicago Medical Institute. Looking for answers to a spontaneous regression. But there’s nobody there who’s doing more than cookbook carrying out of old discoveries—hell, there’s no geneticists left anywhere who can do more than that, except in agribusiness.” He fell silent; Leisha and he both knew this was not true. There was Sanctuary.
Leisha said thickly, “Do they know at least if it’s widespread, or on the increase…statistical parameters…”
“It seems to be pretty rare. Of course, there’s so few Sleepless now they can’t construct any statistical profiles.”
Again that silence, heavy with the unnamed.
It was Ada who broke the silence. She couldn’t have followed much of the conversation between Leisha and her husband, but she rose gracefully to move beside Leisha. Ada stooped and picked up her baby. Gazing tenderly down at him, she said, “I see you gladly, Sean. I see you sleep,” and then her gaze rose to meet Leisha’s directly, for the first time that Leisha could ever remember.
Even when everything in the country had changed, nothing had changed.
19
Jennifer, Will, the two geneticists, Doctors Toliveri and Blure, and their technicians stood watching the creation of a miniature world.
Five hundred miles away in space, a plastic bubble floated. As the Sanctuary team watched via screen in Sharifi Labs, Special Enterprises Division, the bubble reached maximum inflation. Inside it, thousands of plastic membranes pulled taut. The interior was a honeycomb of thin-walled tunnels, chambers, and diaphragms, some with pinhole pricks, some as porous as standard Earth building materials, some open. None was more than four inches high. When the bubble was fully inflated with standard atmospheric mix, the hologrid in the lab’s ceiling projected downward a transparent, three-dimensional model of the bubble and its internal partitions.