“I don’t know, sir. Will you…will you come to the terminal?”
“No,” Eric said.
The nurse was back in ninety seconds. “Sir, Ms. Camden says if you don’t talk to her she’ll be here in two hours.”
“I won’t talk to her,” Eric said stubbornly, but the pupils of his eyes widened, making him suddenly look much younger. “Doctor, what happens if this treatment is interrupted now?”
“It cannot be interrupted now. We don’t know exactly how the—but there would certainly be grave mental consequences. Certainly.”
Eric went on staring at Drew.
The images became shapes. In doing that they didn’t lose identity but gained it: The shapes were the images plus more. The shapes were the essence of the images, and they were both Drew’s and not Drew’s: both his personal angels, demons, heroes, fears, yearnings, drives, and everyone’s. No one saw them but him, no one had ever seen them, but they were his translations of universals: he knew that. Even through the strange drugs and electrodes and semitrance state, a part of his conscious mind knew that. It recognized the images and Drew knew he would never forget them, and that he was not done with making them.
“We’re introducing theta activity now,” the doctor said. “We’re electronically forcing his cortex into brain waves characteristic of slow-wave sleep.”
Eric said nothing. A clock on the wall flashed the time, and he seemed unable to take his eyes off it.
“Of course, Mr. Bevington-Watrous, you signed all the legal waivers for this treatment for Mr. Smithson, but you also assured us that if there were extradition ramifications you are in a position to—”
“Not all Sleepless are equally powerful, Doctor. I, for instance, am as powerful as the extradition authorities, but not as powerful as my aunt. You might as well accept that fact now. Because she’ll make sure we both do.”
Drew slept. And yet it was not sleep. The images kept marching over the reinforced highway from the limbic to his accessible mind, and he saw them, and he knew them. But now he moved among them, Drew, a sleepwalker with a sleepwalker’s privileged duality: asleep and yet in control of his muscles. He moved among the shapes, and he changed them, remade them, and shaped them through lucid dreaming.
“The EEG shows delta activity because he’s deeply rooted in slow-wave sleep now,” the doctor said. It wasn’t clear whether he was talking to Eric or himself. “Most dreaming goes on during REM sleep, but some goes on during SWS, and that’s very important. This whole treatment is based on the fact that decreased SWS is associated with schizophrenia, with histories of violence, with poor sleep regulation in general. By forging artificial pathways between unconscious impulses and the state of SWS, we force the brain to confront and subdue those impulses that create disordered behavior. The theory says that the result is a state of heightened tranquility, a tranquility without the logy aspects of the usual depressant drugs, in fact a true tranquility based on the brain’s new connection among its warring—no one can get past the Y-field security on this building, Mr. Bevington-Watrous.”
“Who designed the security?”
“Kevin Baker. Through a blind subsidiary of ours, of course.”
Eric smiled.
Drew breathed evenly and deeply, his eyes closed, his powerful torso and wasted legs still.
He was master of the cosmos. Everything in it moved through his mind, and he shaped them through lucid dreaming, and they were his. He, who had possessed nothing, been nothing, was master of it all.
Dimly, through dreams, Drew heard the first alarm chime.
It had taken her four days to trace them. She had only succeeded because she had, finally, called Kevin. And asked for his help.
Staring at Drew strapped into machines, at Eric clutching one elbow with the opposite palm like a defiant schoolboy, Leisha thought: now we can’t ever go back. The thought was clear, cold, deliberate, and she didn’t care that it was both theatrical and vague. Alice’s grandson stood over the Sleeper he had used, as if Drew were a lab rat or a defective chromosome, as if Eric were any of the haters that for three-quarters of a century had seen Sleepless as experiments or defects. As if Eric were Calvin Hawke, or Dave Hannaway, or Adam Walcott. Or Jennifer Sharifi.
Alice’s grandson. A Sleepless.
Drew lay naked. With the bitterness smoothed out of his face by sleep, he looked younger than nineteen, more like the child who had first come to her in the desert compound full of swaggering confidence. “I’m gonna own Sanctuary, me.” The wasted legs didn’t seem to belong to the muscled, adult torso. There was a knife scar on his chest, a fresh burn on his right shoulder, bruises on his jaw. Leisha knew she and hers were responsible for all of it. Better to have left Drew alone, turned him away nine years ago, never tried to make him something he could never be. “Daddy, when I’m grown up I’m going to find a way to make Alice special, too!” And you’ve never stopped trying, have you, Leisha? With all the Alices, all the have-nots, all the beggars who would have been better off if you’d left them, in your hubristic specialness, alone.
Tony—you were right. They’re too different from us.
Tony…
To Eric she said coldly, “Tell me exactly what you’ve done to him. And why.”
The little doctor said eagerly, “Ms. Camden, this is an experiment—”
“You,” Leisha said to Eric. “You tell me.” Bodyguards stepped between her and the doctor, cutting him off. The room was full of bodyguards.
Eric said shortly, “I owed him.”
“This?”
“A last chance to be human.”
“He was human! How can you experiment on—”
“We’re experiments, and we worked out all right,” Eric said, with a faith in the logic of reduction that took her breath away. Had she ever been that young?
Eric went on. “You always expect the worst, Leisha. I took a chance, yes, but four other experimental patients have benefited—”
“A chance! With a life not your own! This isn’t even a licensed medical facility!”
“Excuse me,” the doctor said, “I have a permit that—”
“How many experimental ones are, anymore?” Eric said. “The donkeys don’t allow it. They cut off genemod research before it could turn into an even bigger weapon to blast away at their status quo that isn’t—Leisha, the other four patients for this operation are doing well. They’re calmer, they seem to have more control of their own emotions that—”
“Eric, this was not your decision to make. Do you hear me? Drew didn’t choose this!”
For a moment Eric looked again the sulky, angry child he had been. “I didn’t ask to be the way I am, either. Dad chose that for me by marrying a Sleepless. Who ever gets to choose?”
Leisha stared at him. He didn’t see the distinction—he truly did not. Alice’s grandson, both privileged and outcast all his life, who thought those conditions had conferred wisdom.
But hadn’t they all thought that? From Tony onward?
Drew’s lips made soft movements in his profound sleep, sucking at a nonexistent breast.
The room brightened slowly: First gray shadows, then pearly haze through which shapes moved dimly, and then light, clean and pale. Drew tried to move his head. He felt spittle trickle from his mouth.
There was something moving inside his head, several somethings, of utmost importance. Drew turned his attention away from them. He could afford to do that; he knew, with complete confidence, that whatever the new thing was inside his head, it wasn’t going to leave before he examined it. It wasn’t ever going to leave. He had it; it was him. What he didn’t have was knowledge of this room. What had happened in it. Who was here. Why.