Beggars in Spain (11 page)

“Hawke? Coltrane say you’all want to see me?”

“Yes, Tina. Thank you. This lady is interested in our plant. Would you mind telling her a little about your job here?”

Tina turned obediently, and without recognition, to Leisha. “I work Station Nine,” she said. “Before that, I don’t have nothing. My family don’t have nothing. We walk to Dole, pick up the food, walk home, eat it. We wait to die.” She went on, telling a story familiar by now to Jordan, different only in Tina’s melodramatic approach to telling it. Which was undoubtedly why Hawke had had her waiting. Fed, sheltered, clothed cheaply by the Dole—and completely unable to compete beyond that economic level. Until Calvin Hawke and the We-Sleep
Movement provided a job that paid wages, because the market for it had been wrested out of the national market on wholly uneconomic terms. “I buy only We-Sleep products, I get to sell my We-Sleep products,” Tina chanted fervently. “The only way we get any of the pie!”

Hawke said, “And if somebody in your community buys a different product because it’s cheaper or better…”

“That somebody ain’t
in
my community very long,” Tina said darkly. “We take care of our own.”

“Thank you, Tina,” Hawke said. Tina seemed to know this was dismissal; she left, but not before throwing Hawke the same look they all did. Jordan hoped that Leisha recognized the look from legal clients she had kept from a different sort of prison. His stomach relaxed slightly.

Leisha said wryly to Hawke, “Quite a performance.”

“More than just a performance. The dignity of individual effort—an old Yagaiist tenet, isn’t it? Or can’t you allow yourself to recognize economic facts?”

“I recognize all the limitations of a free-market economy, Mr. Hawke. Supply and demand puts workers on the exact same footing as widgets, and people are not widgets. But you cannot create economic health by unionizing consumers the way you would unionize workers.”

“That’s just how I
am
creating economic health, Ms. Camden.”

“Only temporarily,” Leisha said. Abruptly she leaned forward. “Do you expect your consumers to stay away from better products forever on the basis of class hatred? Class hatred diminishes when prosperity lets people rise in class.”

“My people will never rise in class to equal Sleepless. And you know it. Yours is the Darwinian edge. So we capitalize on what we
do
have: sheer numbers.”

“But it doesn’t have to be a Darwinian struggle!”

Hawke stood. The muscle in his neck was still now; Jordan could see that Hawke felt he’d won. “Doesn’t it, Ms. Camden? Who made it so? The Sleepless control 28 percent of the economy now, despite the fact that you’re a tiny minority. The percentage is growing. You yourself
are a stockholder, through the Aurora Holding Company, in the Samsung-Chrysler plant across the river.”

Jordan was jolted. He had not known that. For a second, suspicion flooded him, corrosive as acid. His aunt had asked to come here, asked to talk to Hawke….He looked again at Leisha. She was smiling. No, that wasn’t her motive. What was wrong with him? Would he spend his whole life uncertain about everything?

Leisha said, “There is nothing illegal in owning stock, Mr. Hawke. I do it for the most obvious of reasons: to turn a profit. A profit on the best possible goods and services that can be produced in fair competition, offered to anyone who wishes to buy.
Anyone.
”

“Very commendable,” Hawke said bitingly. “But of course, not everyone
can
buy.”

“Just so.”

“Then we agree on at least one thing: Some people are shut out of your wonderful Darwinian economy. Do you want them to take that meekly?”

Leisha said, “I want to open the doors and bring them in.”

“How, Ms. Camden? How do we compete on equal grounds with the Sleepless, or with mainstream companies funded in whole or in part by Sleepless financial genius?”

“Not with hatred creating two economies.”

“Then with what? Tell me.”

Before Leisha could answer, the door suddenly swung open and three men leaped into the room.

Leisha’s bodyguards immediately blocked her, guns drawn. But the men must have expected this: They brandished cameras, not guns, and began filming. Since all they could see was the phalanx of bodyguards, they filmed that. This bewildered the guards, who looked at one another sideways. Meanwhile Jordan, backed into a corner, was the only one who saw the sudden, slight, telltale brightening of an optic panel high on the wall, in a room widely touted as being without surveillance of any kind.

“Out,”
the head bodyguard, or whatever he was called, said between
his teeth. The film crew obligingly left. And no one but Jordan had seen Hawke’s camera.

Why? What did Hawke want with a clandestine still he could claim was taken by a legitimate film crew? And should Jordan tell his aunt that Hawke had it? Could it harm her?

Hawke was watching Jordan. Hawke nodded once, with such warmth in his eyes, such tender understanding of Jordan’s dilemma that Jordan was immediately reassured. Hawke meant no personal harm to Leisha. He didn’t operate that way. His goals were large ones, sweeping ones,
right
ones, but they took note of individuals, as no Sleepless except Leisha ever seemed to do. No matter what the history books said was necessary, Hawke did not break individual eggs to create his revolution.

Jordan relaxed.

Hawke said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Camden.”

Leisha looked at him bleakly. “No harm done, Mr. Hawke.” After a moment she added deliberately, “Is there?”

“No. Let me give you a memento of your visit.”

“A…”

“A memento.” From a closet—the bodyguards tensed all over again—Hawke wheeled a We-Sleep scooter. “Of course, it probably won’t go as fast, or far, or reliably as the one you already have. If you ever deign to use a scooter instead of a ground-or aircar, as over 50 percent of the population has to do.”

Leisha, Jordan saw, had finally lost her patience. She let her breath out between her teeth; it whistled fitfully. “No thank you, Mr. Hawke. I ride a Kessler-Eagle. A high-quality scooter made, I believe, at a factory owned by Native American Sleepers in New Mexico. They are trying very hard to market a superior product at a fair price, but of course they represent a minority without a built-in protected market. Hopi, I believe.”

Jordan didn’t dare look at Hawke’s face.

As she climbed into her car, Leisha said to Jordan, “I’m sorry for that last jab.”

“Don’t be,” Jordan said.

“Well, for your sake. I know you believe in what you’re doing here, Jordan—”

“Yes,” Jordan said quietly. “I do. Despite.”

“When you say that, you look like your mother.”

The same couldn’t be said for Leisha, Jordan thought, and he felt immediately disloyal. But it was true. Alice looked older than forty-three, Leisha much younger. The aging caused by gravity was in the fine-boned face; the aging caused by tissue decay was not. Shouldn’t she, then, look 21.5? Half the aging. She didn’t; she looked about thirty and, apparently, always would. A beautiful and tense thirty, the faint lines around her eyes more like delicate micro-circuitry than soft gullies.

Leisha said, “How is your mother?”

Jordan heard all the complexities in the question. He didn’t feel up to grappling with them. “Fine,” he said. And then, “Are you going from here to Sanctuary?”

Leisha, half in and half out of her car, lifted her face to his. “How did you know?”

“You have the look you get when you’re going to or coming from.”

She looked down; he shouldn’t have mentioned Sanctuary. She said, “Tell Hawke I won’t make a legal fuss over the wall camera. And don’t you agonize about not telling me, either. You’ve got enough contradictions to reconcile already, Jordy. But you know, I get tired of these overwhelming physical presences like your Mr. Hawke. All charisma and outsized ego, using the intensity of their beliefs to hit you like a fist. It’s wearing.”

She swung her long legs into the car. Jordan laughed, a sound that made Leisha glance at him, a slight question in her green eyes, but he just shook his head, kissed her, and closed the car door. As the car pulled away he straightened, not laughing.
Charisma. Outsized egos. Overwhelming physical presences.

How was it possible, after all this time, that Leisha didn’t know she was one, too?

Leisha leaned her head against the leather seat of the Baker Enterprises corporate plane. She was the only passenger. Below her the Mississippi plain began to climb into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Leisha’s hand brushed the book on the seat beside her and she picked it up. It was a diversion from Calvin Hawke.

They had made the cover too garish. Abraham Lincoln, beardless, stood in black frock coat and top hat against the background of a burning city—Atlanta? Richmond?—grimacing horribly. Crimson and marigold flames licked at a purple sky. Crimson and marigold and
fuchsia
. Online, the colors would be even more lurid. In three-dimensional hologram, they would be practically fluorescent.

Leisha sighed. Lincoln had never stood in a burning city. At the time of her book’s events, he had been bearded. And the book itself was a careful scholarly study of Lincoln’s speeches in the light of Constitutional law, not the light of battle. Nothing in it grimaced. Nothing burned.

She ran her finger over the embossed name on the cover: Elizabeth Kaminsky.

“Why?” Alice had asked in her blunt way.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Leisha had said. “My law cases get too much notoriety as it is. I want the book to earn whatever scholarly attention it’s really worth rather than a—”

“I see
that
,” Alice retorted. “But why that pseudonym, of all choices?” Leisha hadn’t had an answer. A week later she thought of one, but by that time the stiff little visit was over and Leisha wasn’t in California to deliver it. Leisha almost phoned her, but it was 4:00
A.M.
in Chicago, 2:00
A.M.
in Morro Bay, and of course Alice and Beck would be asleep. And she and Alice seldom phoned each other anyway.

Because of something Lincoln said in 1864, Alice. Combined with the facts that I’m 43 years old, the same age our father was when we were born, and that no one, not even you, believes that I get tired of it all.

But the truth was, she probably wouldn’t have said that to Alice, not in Chicago nor in California. Somehow whatever she said to Alice
turned faintly pompous. And whatever Alice said to her—like that mystic nonsense of the Twin Group—seemed to Leisha riddled with holes in both logic and evidence. They were like two people trying to communicate in a language foreign to both of them, reduced to nodding and smiling, the initial good will not quite enough to offset the strain.

Twenty years ago, for one moment, it had seemed as if it might be different between them. But now…

Twenty-two thousand Sleepless on Earth, 95 percent of them in the United States. Eighty percent of those within Sanctuary. And since nearly all Sleepless babies were now born, not created
in vitro,
most Sleepless were now born inside Sanctuary. Parents across the country continued to purchase other genetic alterations: enhanced IQ, sharpened sight, a strong immune system, high cheekbones—anything at all, it sometimes seemed to Leisha, within the legal parameters, no matter how trivial. But not Sleeplessness. Genetic alterations were expensive; why purchase for your beloved baby a lifetime of bigotry, prejudice, and physical danger? Better to choose an assimilated genemod. Beautiful or brainy children might encounter natural envy, but usually not virulent hatred. They were not viewed as a different race, one endlessly conspiring at power, endlessly controlling behind the scenes, endlessly feared and scorned. The Sleepless, Leisha had written for a national magazine, were to the twenty-first century what Jews had been to the fourteenth.

Twenty years of legal fighting to change that perception, and nothing had changed.

“I am tired,” Leisha said experimentally, aloud. The pilot didn’t turn around; he wasn’t much for conversation. The foothills, unchanging, continued to slide away 20,000 feet below.

Leisha unfolded her work station. It accomplished no good to be tired: not of the troubling gulf between her and Alice, not of Calvin Hawke in the fight behind her, not of Sanctuary in the fight ahead. They would all still be there. And meanwhile, she could at least get some work done. Three more hours to upstate New York, two back to Chicago, enough time to finish the brief for
Calder
v.
Hansen Metallurgy
.
She had a client meeting in Chicago at 4:00
P.M
., a deposition at 5:30
P.M
., another client meeting at 8:00
P.M
., and then the rest of the night to prepare for trial tomorrow. She might just fit everything in.

The law was the one thing she never tired of. The one thing—despite twenty years of the inevitable crap that went with its practice—she still believed in. A society with a functioning, reasonably uncorrupted (say, 80 percent) judicial system was a society that still believed in itself.

More cheerful now, Leisha settled into a knotty question of
prima facie
assumption. But the book still lay on the seat, distracting her, along with Alice’s question, and her unspoken answer.

In April 1864 Lincoln had written to Kentuckian A. G. Hodges. The northern states were enraged over the racial massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow, the federal treasury was nearly empty, the war was costing the Union two million dollars a day. Daily Lincoln was reviled in the press; weekly he was locked in combat with Congress. In the next month Grant would lose 10,000 men at Cold Harbor, more at Spotsylvania Courthouse. Lincoln wrote to Hodges, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

Leisha shoved her book under the seat of the plane and bent over her workstation, leaning into the law.

Jennifer Sharifi raised her forehead from the ground, rose gracefully, and bent to roll up her prayer rug. The rough mountain grass was slightly wet; blades clung crookedly to the underside of the rug. Holding it away from the white folds of her
abbaya
, Jennifer walked across the small clearing in the woods to her aircar. Her long, unbound black hair stirred in the faint wind.