Logical questions calmed her. “Semidirected? You mean you determined what I would…dream?” But she couldn’t maintain the detached tone. She was feeling too many things, not all of them good. “Drew—that’s what dreaming is like? That’s what Sleepers do?”
He shook his head. “No. Not often. I guess—I don’t really know yet what happened. You’re the first, Leisha!”
“I…dreamed about my father. And my mother.”
His eyes gleamed. “Good, good. I was working with shapes from my parents.” His young face suddenly darkened, lost in some private memory Leisha suddenly didn’t want to share. Dreaming…this was too public. Too irrational. Too much a letting go, a surrender. But if it were a surrender to sunlight, to sweetness…No. It wasn’t reality. Dreams were escape, she had always known that, she who had never dreamed. Dreams were as much an evasion of the real world as Alice’s Twin Group pseudoscience. But what she’d just experienced from Drew…
“I’m too old to have my world turned inside out like a sock!”
Drew suddenly grinned, a smile of such pure triumph unmixed with frustration or arrogance that Leisha was dazzled. But she held onto her reason, hard. She said, “Drew, the other four patients who had the same operation as you in that Mexican clinic—they didn’t come out of it with anything like this, any sort of change, any…” She couldn’t find the word.
“But they weren’t artists,” he said, with the absolute conviction of the reborn young. “I am.”
“But—” Leisha began, and got no farther because Drew, still smiling—still triumphant—leaned far over from his chair and kissed her hard on the mouth.
Leisha sat very still. She could feel her body respond, for the first time in…how long? Years. Her nipples hardened, her belly tightened…he smelled male, of male skin and hair. Her mouth opened of its own volition. Leisha drew sharply back.
“No, Drew.”
“Yes!”
She hated to spoil his triumph, his terrifying achievement—she had been dreaming. But about this she was sure. “No.”
“Why not?” He was pale now, but steady. His pupils were huge.
“Because I’m seventy-eight years old and you’re twenty. I know it doesn’t look that way to you, but to my mind—my mind, Drew—you’re a child. And you always will be to me.”
“Because I’m a Sleeper!”
“No. Because I’ve lived fifty-eight years you haven’t.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Drew said fiercely.
“No. I don’t. You have no idea what it means.” She covered his hand with her own. “I think of you as a son, Drew. A son. Not a lover.”
He looked her straight in the eyes. “And what did your dream tell you about mothers and fathers and children that was so terrifying?”
For a moment she felt the dream again, and she glimpsed something behind the dream, some obverse side of the sunlit path, the smiling Roger with his hands full of exotics, the loving Elizabeth as Elizabeth had never really been, not to her. Leisha couldn’t quite see that obverse side but it was there, deep in her mind, a way of ordering the world that had nothing to do with the law or economics or political integration or all the other things she had given her life to, not necessarily a worse way, or a better one, but different, alien…the glimpse slipped away.
She said, with all the compassion she could, “I’m sorry, Drew.”
As she left the room he said quietly after her, “I’ll get better at my art, Leisha. I’ll draw out more from your preconscious, I’ll show you things you never even…Leisha!”
She couldn’t answer him. It would only make it worse. She went out and softly closed the door.
By evening, when she had figured out how to discuss it with him, what to say to put the whole dizzying episode into rational perspective, Stella told her Drew had packed and was gone.
Miri took her seat in the Council dome. It was a new seat, added to the room at her sixteenth birthday, the fifteenth chair bolted to the floor around the polished metal table. From now on, the 51 percent of Sanctuary stock owned by the Sharifi family would be voted in seven equal blocks. Next year, when Tony took his seat, there would be eight. The chair squeaked slightly as Miri sat in it.
“The Sanctuary Council is proud to welcome Miranda Serena Sharifi as a voting member,” Jennifer said formally. The councilors applauded. Miri smiled. Her grandmother had for a moment eased the tension in the room, so thick its currents could have been graphed on a Heller matrix. Miri glanced around the table from under lowered eyes; she habitually ducked her head now, since in her mirror that seemed to minimize her twitching and jerking. Her mother applauded without looking directly at Miri. Her father smiled with that resigned melancholy that was always in his eyes now. Beautiful Aunt Najla, pregnant with another Super, stared at Miri with unblinking determination.
The term councilors smiled, but she didn’t know them well enough to know what the smiles meant. She wondered if they were jealous of her sudden power. The Sanctuary charter, she knew from the library, was far more generous within the family than any family corporation on Earth would be. And on the newsgrid “dramas,” usual community procedure on Earth seemed to be for young males to kill the fathers who ran business empires or ranches or orbital corporations, in order to gain power. Then they apparently married their dead fathers’ young third wives. This was such a barbaric and appalling social system that Miri concluded it couldn’t be the way the beggars really ran things; they must like their “dramas” to explore situations that bore no relation to reality. This was such a silly idea that for the second time she had given up the dramas in disgust and returned to the sex channels.
“We have a full agenda,” Jennifer said in her graceful voice. “Councilor Drexler, will you start with the treasurer’s report?”
The treasurer’s report, routine and positive, did nothing to reduce the tension. Miri, unobserved now, studied one face after another from under her lowered brow. Something was very wrong. What?
The agricultural, legal, judicial, and medical committee heads made their reports. Hermione twisted a strand of her honey-colored hair (when was the last time Miri had touched her mother’s hair? Years) around one finger, transferred the curl to a second finger, around and around. Twist, twist. Najla rubbed her swollen belly. Councilor Devore, a thin young man with large soft eyes, looked as if he were sitting on hot coals.
Finally Jennifer said, “One more addendum to the medical report, which I asked Councilor Devore to leave to general discussion. As most of you know, we have had an accident.” Abruptly Jennifer lowered her head, and Miri saw with astonishment that Jennifer needed a moment before she could go on. Miri was used to thinking of her grandmother as invulnerable.
“Tabitha Selenski, of Kenyon International, was repairing a power-conversion input in Business Building Three and received a power charge that…Her gross tissues are regenerating, very slowly. But parts of her nervous system are so destroyed there’s nothing to regenerate. She won’t ever be fully conscious again, although there’s partial consciousness, at about the level an animal might have…She will need constant care, including such basic tasks as diaper changes, feeding, restraint. Moreover, she will never again be a productive member of the community.”