Beggars in Spain (29 page)

“We start the artificial reinforcement this afternoon. We—yes, nurse, what is it?”

“Comlink for Mr. Bevington-Watrous.” The young Mexican nurse sounded scared. “It’s Ms. Leisha Camden.”

Eric turned slowly. “How did she find us?”

“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.

Someone in white said, “He’s awake.”

Faces blossomed above him, an amorphous mass that only slowly separated. Nurses’ faces, glancing sideways at each other. A short, olive-skinned doctor, his left eye twitching frantically. The twitch reached Drew: He saw the man’s nervousness, his fear, as a jagged red line that suddenly grew, took three-dimensional shape, and as it did the other thing in Drew’s head moved gracefully forward to meet it. It met, too, the shapes of fear and guilt from the corners of his mind, detached from him and yet still his. The shapes of the doctor’s fear and of Drew’s merged—
Eric, the Molotov cocktails, Karl burning
—and Drew looked at those shapes, and felt them, and he knew that he knew this man. This doctor, who all his life took chances on the edge of fear not for the good fortune the chances might bring, but to escape the nothingness he carried inside. This man for whom success was never enough—could I have done it better? Will someone else do it better?—but for whom failure was annihilation. Drew saw the shapes for how the doctor would have reacted to a failed test in medical school, to an appointment that went to someone else, to an arrest for this facility here, now. The first two were the defeated hunched shapes of failure; the third was a burning glee in failure that he had not caused himself, that had been inflicted on him from the outside. And so it was a kind of triumph, and Drew saw the shapes for that too, shapes without words, that fastened not on his heart—he felt no particular sympathy—but through the successive layers of his mind, like a plant putting down very
deep roots. An unshakable tree. The tree of knowledge, wordless, as all trees are wordless against a still sky.

Drew blinked. It had all taken only a moment. And he would know it forever.

“Lift your head,” the doctor said harshly, as if Drew had been the one to injure him and not the other way around, and Drew saw the shapes for the harshness, too. Other shapes from deep in himself drifted toward it, merged with it. Drew watched. The shapes were him, but he was something else, too, something separate, something that watched and understood.

He lifted his head. A screen to his right began to beep softly, in an atonal pattern. The doctor studied the screen intently.

Leisha rushed into the room.

At the sight of her, so many shapes exploded in Drew’s head that he couldn’t speak. She bent over him, glancing at the screen, putting a cool hand on his forehead. “Drew…”

“Hello, Leisha.”

“How…how are you feeling?”

He smiled, because the question was so impossible to answer.

She said tightly, “You’re going to be all right, but there’s a lot you have a right to know,” and Drew saw how clearly the words took the shape of Leisha herself:
a right to know
. He saw the shape, the intricate balance, of all the questions of rights and privileges she had struggled with all her life, had made into her life. He saw the clean, basically austere shape of Leisha herself, struggling with the messy other shapes that sent off shoots and pseudopods and could not be captured, as she consistently struggled to do, in principles and laws. The struggle itself had a shape, and he groped to find a word for it, but the words were not there. For him, the words had seldom been there. The closest word he could find was an antique one—
knight
—and it was wrong, was too pale for the intense poignancy of the shape of Leisha struggling to codify the lawless world. The word was wrong. He frowned.

Leisha said “Oh—don’t cry, Drew, dear heart!”

He had been nowhere near crying. She didn’t understand. How
could she? He didn’t understand himself this thing that had happened to him, or been done to him, or whatever it was. Eric had wanted to hurt him, yes, but this wasn’t hurt, this was only making Drew more himself, like a man who had been able to run two miles and now could run ten. Still himself—his muscles, his bones, his heart—but more so, and that more moved him from something ordinary to something…else. Extraordinary. He seemed to himself extraordinary.

Leisha said, “Doctor, he can’t speak!”

“He can speak,” the doctor said shortly, and briefly his shapes came to Drew again: the hysterical pumped-up excitement that was fear, the triumph of not showing it. “The brain scans show no impairment in the speech centers!”

“Say something, Drew!” Leisha begged.

“You are beautiful.”

He had never seen it before: how could he not have seen it? Leisha bent above him, her hair golden as a young girl’s, her face stamped with the decisive power of a woman in her prime. Drew saw the shapes that had formed that power: they were the shapes of intelligence and suffering. How could he not have seen it before? Her breasts swelled softly under the thin fabric of her shirt; her neck rose from the shirt like a warm column, white hollowed delicately with blue. And he’d never seen it before. Not at all. How beautiful Leisha was.

Leisha drew back slightly, frowning. She said, “Drew—what year is it? What town were you arrested in?”

He laughed. The laugh hurt his chest, and he realized for the first time that there was tape across his ribs, and that his arms were still strapped down. Eric entered the room and stood at the foot of Drew’s bed, and at the sight of Eric’s rigid face more shapes crowded Drew’s head. He saw why Eric had done what he had done, all of it, clear back to the day by the cottonwood when two boys had fought to what would have been the death if either of them had been strong enough to make it so. Following that came the shapes for Drew’s father, beating his children in a drunken rage, and for Karl pierced and burning from the bomb he had failed to hurl high enough. They were all, in fact, the same
shape, and so ugly that for the first time Drew felt the other, separate self, the self who watched the shapes, burned by them. He closed his eyes.

“He’s fainted!” Leisha said, and the doctor snapped back, “No, he hasn’t!” and even with his eyes closed Drew saw the shapes he and Eric had made, so there was no point in keeping his eyes closed. He opened them. He knew now what the point
was
. Would have to be.