Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Leisha? Your voice still sounds the same. This is Stewart Sutter.”

  “Stewart.” She had not seen him for years. Their romance had lasted two years and then dissolved, not from any painful issue so much as from the press of both their studies. Standing by the comm terminal, hearing his voice, Leisha suddenly felt again his hands on her breasts in the cramped dormitory bed: All those years before she had found a good use for a bed. The phantom hands became Richard’s hands, and a sudden pain pierced her.

  “Listen,” Stewart said, “I’m calling because there’s some information I think you should know. You take your bar exams next week, right? And then you have a tentative job with Morehouse, Kennedy, & Anderson.”

  “How do you know all that, Stewart?”

  “Men’s room gossip. Well, not as bad as that. But the New York legal community—that part of it, anyway—is smaller than you think. And, you’re a pretty visible figure.”

  “Yes,” Leisha said neutrally.

  “Nobody has the slightest doubt you’ll be called to the bar. But there is some doubt about the job with Morehouse, Kennedy. You’ve got two senior partners, Alan Morehouse and Seth Brown, who have changed their minds since this . . . flap. ‘Adverse publicity for the firm,’ ‘turning law into a circus,’ blah blah blah. You know the drill. But you’ve also got two powerful champions, Ann Carlyle and Michael Kennedy, the old man himself. He’s quite a mind. Anyway, I wanted you to know all this so you can recognize exactly what the situation is and know whom to count on in the in-fighting.”

  “Thank you,” Leisha said. “Stew . . . why do you care if I get it or not? Why should it matter to you?”

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone. Then Stewart said, very low, “We’re not all noodleheads out here, Leisha. Justice does still matter to some of us. So does achievement.”

  Light rose in her, a bubble of buoyant light.

  Stewart said, “You have a lot of support here for that stupid zoning fight over Sanctuary, too. You might not realize that, but you do. What the Parks Commission crowd is trying to pull is . . . but they’re just being used as fronts. You know that. Anyway, when it gets as far as the courts, you’ll have all the help you need.”

  “Sanctuary isn’t my doing. At all.”

  “No? Well, I meant the plural you.”

  “Thank you. I mean that. How are you doing?”

  “Fine. I’m a daddy now.”

  “Really! Boy or girl?”

  “Girl. A beautiful little bitch, drives me crazy. I’d like you to meet my wife sometime, Leisha.”

  “I’d like that,” Leisha said.

  She spent the rest of the night studying for her bar exams. The bubble stayed with her. She recognized exactly what it was: joy.

  It was going to be all right. The contract, unwritten, between her and her society—Kenzo Yagai’s society, Roger Camden’s society—would hold. With dissent and strife and yes, some hatred: She suddenly thought of Tony’s beggars in Spain, furious at the strong because they themselves were not. Yes. But it would hold.

  She believed that.

  She did.

  7

  Leisha took her bar exams in July. They did not seem hard to her. Afterward three classmates, two men and a woman, made a fakely casual point of talking to Leisha until she had climbed safely into a taxi whose driver obviously did not recognize her, or stop signs. The three were all Sleepers. A pair of undergraduates, clean-shaven blond men with the long faces and pointless arrogance of rich stupidity, eyed Leisha and sneered. Leisha’s female classmate sneered back.

  Leisha had a flight to Chicago the next morning. Alice was going to join her there. They had to clean out the big house on the lake, dispose of Roger’s personal property, put the house on the market. Leisha had had no time to do it earlier.

  She remembered her father in the conservatory, wearing an ancient flat-topped hat he had picked up somewhere, potting orchids and jasmine and passion flowers.

  When the doorbell rang she was startled; she almost never had visitors. Eagerly, she turned on the outside camera—maybe it was Jonathan or Martha, back in Boston to surprise her, to celebrate—why hadn’t she thought before about some sort of celebration?

  Richard stood gazing up at the camera. He had been crying.

  She tore open the door. Richard made no move to come in. Leisha saw that what the camera had registered as grief was actually something else: tears of rage.

  “Tony’s dead.”

  Leisha put out her hand, blindly. Richard did not take it.

  “They killed him in prison. Not the authorities—the other prisoners. In the recreation yard. Murderers, rapists, looters, scum of the earth—and they thought they had the right to kill him because he was different.”

  Now Richard did grab her arm, so hard that something, some bone, shifted beneath the flesh and pressed on a nerve. “Not just different—better. Because he was better, because we all are, we goddamn just don’t stand up and shout it out of some misplaced feeling for their feelings . . . God!”

  Leisha pulled her arm free and rubbed it, numb, staring at Richard’s contorted face.

  “They beat him to death with a lead pipe. No one even knows how they got a lead pipe. They beat him on the back of the head and they rolled him over and—”

  “Don’t!” Leisha said. It came out a whimper.

  Richard looked at her. Despite his shouting, his violent grip on her arm, Leisha had the confused impression that this was the first time he had actually seen her. She went on rubbing her arm, staring at him in terror.

  He said quietly, “I’ve come to take you to Sanctuary, Leisha. Dan Walcott and Vernon Bulriss are in the car outside. The three of us will carry you out, if necessary. But you’re coming. You see that, don’t you? You’re not safe here, with your high profile and your spectacular looks—you’re a natural target if anyone is. Do we have to force you? Or do you finally see for yourself that we have no choice—the bastards have left us no choice—except Sanctuary?”

  Leisha closed her eyes. Tony, at fourteen, at the beach. Tony, his eyes ferocious and alight, the first to reach out his hand for the glass of interleukin-1. Beggars in Spain.

  “I’ll come.”

  She had never known such anger. It scared her, coming in bouts throughout the long night, receding but always returning again. Richard held her in his arms, sitting with their backs against the wall of her library, and his holding made no difference at all. In the living room Dan and Vernon talked in low voices.

  Sometimes the anger erupted in shouting, and Leisha heard herself and thought I don’t know you. Sometimes it became crying, sometimes talking about Tony, about all of them. Not the shouting nor the crying nor the talking eased her at all.

  Planning did, a little. In a cold dry voice she didn’t recognize, Leisha told Richard about the trip to close the house in Chicago. She had to go; Alice was already there. If Richard and Dan and Vernon put Leisha on the plane, and Alice met her at the other end with union bodyguards, she should be safe enough. Then she would change her return ticket from Boston to Belmont and drive with Richard to Sanctuary.

  “People are already arriving,” Richard said. “Jennifer Sharifi is organizing it, greasing the Sleeper suppliers with so much money they can’t resist. What about this townhouse here, Leisha? Your furniture and terminal and clothes?”

  Leisha looked around her familiar office. Law books lined the walls, red and green and brown, although most of the same information was on-line. A coffee cup rested on a print-out on the desk. Beside it was the receipt she had requested from the taxi driver this afternoon, a giddy souvenir of the day she had passed her bar exams; she had thought of having it framed. Above the desk was a holographic portrait of Kenzo Yagai.

  “Let it rot,” Leisha said.

  Richard’s arm tightened around her.

  “I’ve never seen you like this,” Alice said, subdued. “It’s more than just clearing out the house, isn’t it?”
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br />   “Let’s get on with it,” Leisha said. She yanked a suit from her father’s closet. “Do you want any of this stuff for your husband?”

  “It wouldn’t fit.”

  “The hats?”

  “No,” Alice said. “Leisha—what is it?”

  “Let’s just do it!” She yanked all the clothes from Camden’s closet, piled them on the floor, scrawled FOR VOLUNTEER AGENCY on a piece of paper and dropped it on top of the pile. Silently, Alice started adding clothes from the dresser, which already bore a taped paper scrawled ESTATE AUCTION.

  The curtains were already down throughout the house; Alice had done that yesterday. She had also rolled up the rugs. Sunset glared redly on the bare wooden floors.

  “What about your old room?” Leisha said. “What do you want there?”

  “I’ve already tagged it,” Alice said. “A mover will come Thursday.”

  “Fine. What else?”

  “The conservatory. Sanderson has been watering everything, but he didn’t really know what needed how much, so some of the plants are—”

  “Fire Sanderson,” Leisha said curtly. “The exotics can die. Or have them sent to a hospital, if you’d rather. Just watch out for the ones that are poisonous. Come on, let’s do the library.”

  Alice sat slowly on a rolled-up rug in the middle of Camden’s bedroom. She had cut her hair; Leisha thought it looked ugly, jagged brown spikes around her broad face. She had also gained more weight. She was starting to look like their mother.

  Alice said, “Do you remember the night I told you I was pregnant? Just before you left for Harvard?”

  “Let’s do the library!”

  “Do you?” Alice said. “For God’s sake, can’t you just once listen to someone else, Leisha? Do you have to be so much like Daddy every single minute?”

  “I’m not like Daddy!”

  “The hell you’re not. You’re exactly what he made you. But that’s not the point. Do you remember that night?”

  Leisha walked over the rug and out the door. Alice simply sat. After a minute Leisha walked back in. “I remember.”

  “You were near tears,” Alice said implacably. Her voice was quiet. “I don’t even remember exactly why. Maybe because I wasn’t going to college after all. But I put my arms around you, and for the first time in years—years, Leisha—I felt you really were my sister. Despite all of it—the roaming the halls all night and the show-off arguments with Daddy and the special school and the artificially long legs and golden hair—all that crap. You seemed to need me to hold you. You seemed to need me. You seemed to need.”

  “What are you saying?” Leisha demanded. “That you can only be close to someone if they’re in trouble and need you? That you can only be a sister if I was in some kind of pain, open sores running? Is that the bond between you Sleepers? ‘Protect me while I’m unconscious, I’m just as crippled as you are’ ?”

  “No,” Alice said. “I’m saying that you could be a sister only if you were in some kind of pain.”

  Leisha stared at her. “You’re stupid, Alice.”

  Alice said calmly, “I know that. Compared to you, I am. I know that.”

  Leisha jerked her head angrily. She felt ashamed of what she had just said, and yet it was true, and they both knew it was true, and anger still lay in her like a dark void, formless and hot. It was the formless part that was the worst. Without shape, there could be no action; without action, the anger went on burning her, choking her.

  Alice said, “When I was twelve Susan gave me a dress for our birthday. You were away somewhere, on one of those overnight field trips your fancy progressive school did all the time. The dress was silk, pale blue, with antique lace—very beautiful. I was thrilled, not only because it was beautiful but because Susan had gotten it for me and gotten software for you. The dress was mine. Was, I thought, me.” In the gathering gloom Leisha could barely make out her broad, plain features. ‘The first time I wore it a boy said, ‘Stole your sister’s dress, Alice? Snitched it while she was sleeping?’ Then he laughed like crazy, the way they always did.

  “I threw the dress away. I didn’t even explain to Susan, although I think she would have understood. Whatever was yours was yours, and whatever wasn’t yours was yours, too. That’s the way Daddy set it up. The way he hard-wired it into our genes.”

  “You, too?” Leisha said. “You’re no different from the other envious beggars?”

  Alice stood up from the rug. She did it slowly, leisurely, brushing dust off the back of her wrinkled skirt, smoothing the print fabric. Then she walked over and hit Leisha in the mouth.

  “Now do you see me as real?” Alice asked quietly.

  Leisha put her hand to her mouth. She felt blood. The phone rang, Camden’s unlisted personal line. Alice walked over, picked it up, listened, and held it calmly out to Leisha. “It’s for you.”

  Numb, Leisha took it.

  “Leisha? This is Kevin. Listen, something’s happened. Stella Bevington called me, on the phone not Groupnet, I think her parents took away her modem. I picked up the phone and she screamed, ‘This is Stella! They’re hitting me he’s drunk—’ and then the line went dead. Randy’s gone to Sanctuary—hell, they’ve all gone. You’re closest to her, she’s still in Skokie. You better get there fast. Have you got bodyguards you trust?”

  “Yes,” Leisha said, although she hadn’t. The anger—finally—took form. “I can handle it.”

  “I don’t know how you’ll get her out of there,” Kevin said. “They’ll recognize you, they know she called somebody, they might even have knocked her out . . .”

  “I’ll handle it,” Leisha said.

  “Handle what?” Alice said.

  Leisha faced her. Even though she knew she shouldn’t, she said, “What your people do. To one of ours. A seven-year-old kid who’s getting beaten up by her parents because she’s Sleepless—because she’s better than you are—” She ran down the stairs and out to the rental car she had driven from the airport.

  Alice ran right down with her. “Not your car, Leisha. They can trace a rental car just like that. My car.”

  Leisha screamed, “If you think you’re—”

  Alice yanked open the door of her battered Toyota, a model so old the Y-energy cones weren’t even concealed but hung like drooping jowls on either side. She shoved Leisha into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and rammed herself behind the wheel. Her hands were steady. “Where?”

  Blackness swooped over Leisha. She put her head down, as far between her knees as the cramped Toyota would allow. Two—no, three—days since she had eaten. Since the night before the bar exams. The faintness receded, swept over her again as soon as she raised her head.

  She told Alice the address in Skokie.

  “Stay way in the back,” Alice said. “And there’s a scarf in the glove compartment—put it on. Low, to hide as much of your face as possible.”

  Alice had stopped the car along Highway 42. Leisha said, “This isn’t—”

  “It’s a union quick-guard place. We have to look like we have some protection, Leisha. We don’t need to tell him anything. I’ll hurry.”

  She was out in three minutes with a huge man in a cheap dark suit. He squeezed into the front seat beside Alice and said nothing at all. Alice did not introduce him.

  The house was small, a little shabby, with lights on downstairs, none upstairs. The first stars shone in the north, away from Chicago. Alice said to the guard, “Get out of the car and stand here by the car door—no, more in the light—and don’t do anything unless I’m attacked in some way.” The man nodded. Alice started up the walk. Leisha scrambled out of the back seat and caught her sister two-thirds of the way to the plastic front door.

  “Alice, what the hell are you doing? I have to—”

  “Keep your voice down,” Alice said, glancing at the guard. “Leisha, think. You’ll be recognized. Here, near Chicago, with a Sleepless daughter—these people have looked at your picture in magazines for year
s. They’ve watched long-range holovids of you. They know you. They know you’re going to be a lawyer. Me they’ve never seen. I’m nobody.”

  “Alice—”

  “For Chrissake, get back in the car!” Alice hissed, and pounded on the front door.

  Leisha drew off the walk, into the shadow of a willow tree. A man opened the door. His face was completely blank.

  Alice said, “Child Protection Agency. We got a call from a little girl, this number. Let me in.”

  “There’s no little girl here.”

  “This is an emergency, priority one,” Alice said. “Child Protection Act 186. Let me in!”

  The man, still blank-faced, glanced at the huge figure by the car. “You got a search warrant?”

  “I don’t need one in a priority-one child emergency. If you don’t let me in, you’re going to have legal snarls like you never bargained for.”

  Leisha clamped her lips together. No one would believe that, it was legal gobbledygook . . . . Her lip throbbed where Alice had hit her.

  The man stood aside to let Alice enter.

  The guard started forward. Leisha hesitated, then let him. He entered with Alice.

  Leisha waited, alone, in the dark.

  In three minutes they were out, the guard carrying a child. Alice’s broad face gleamed pale in the porch light. Leisha sprang forward, opened the car door, and helped the guard ease the child inside. The guard was frowning, a slow puzzled frown shot with wariness.

  Alice said, “Here. This is an extra hundred dollars. To get back to the city by yourself.”

  “Hey . . .” the guard said, but he took the money. He stood looking after them as Alice pulled away.

  “He’ll go straight to the police,” Leisha said despairingly. “He has to, or risk his union membership.”

  “I know,” Alice said. “But by that time we’ll be out of the car.”

  “Where?”

  “At the hospital,” Alice said.

  “Alice, we can’t—” Leisha didn’t finish. She turned to the back seat.”Stella? Are you conscious?”

  “Yes,” said the small voice.