Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Leisha groped until her fingers found the rear-seat illuminator. Stella lay stretched out on the back seat, her face distorted with pain. She cradled her left arm in her right. A single bruise colored her face, above the left eye.

  “You’re Leisha Camden,” the child said, and started to cry.

  “Her arm’s broken,” Alice said.

  “Honey, can you . . .” Leisha’s throat felt thick, she had trouble getting the words out “. . . can you hold on till we get you to a doctor?”

  “Yes,” Stella said. “Just don’t take me back there!”

  “We won’t,” Leisha said. “Ever.” She glanced at Alice and saw Tony’s face.

  Alice said, “There’s a community hospital about ten miles south of here.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was there once. Drug overdose,” Alice said briefly. She drove hunched over the wheel, with the face of someone thinking furiously. Leisha thought, too, trying to see a way around the legal charge of kidnapping. They probably couldn’t say the child came willingly: Stella would undoubtedly cooperate but at her age and in her condition she was probably non sui juris, her word would have no legal weight . . .

  “Alice, we can’t even get her into the hospital without insurance information. Verifiable on-line.”

  “Listen,” Alice said, not to Leisha but over her shoulder, toward the back seat, “here’s what we’re going to do, Stella. I’m going to tell them you’re my daughter and you fell off a big rock you were climbing while we stopped for a snack at a roadside picnic area. We’re driving from California to Philadelphia to see your grandmother. Your name is Jordan Watrous and you’re five years old. Got that, honey?”

  “I’m seven,” Stella said. “Almost eight.”

  “You’re a very large five. Your birthday is March 23. Can you do this, Stella?”

  “Yes,” the little girl said. Her voice was stronger.

  Leisha stared at Alice. “Can you do this?”

  “Of course I can,” Alice said. “I’m Roger Camden’s daughter.”

  Alice half-carried, half-supported Stella into the emergency room of the small community hospital. Leisha watched from the car: the short stocky woman, the child’s thin body with the twisted arm. Then she drove Alice’s car to the farthest corner of the parking lot, under the dubious cover of a skimpy maple, and locked it. She tied the scarf more securely around her face.

  Alice’s license plate number, and her name, would be in every police and rental-car databank by now. The medical banks were slower; often they uploaded from local precincts only once a day, resenting the governmental interference in what was still, despite a half-century of battle, a private-sector enterprise. Alice and Stella would probably be all right in the hospital. Probably. But Alice could not rent another car.

  Leisha could.

  But the data file that would flash to rental agencies on Alice Camden Watrous might or might not include that she was Leisha Camden’s twin.

  Leisha looked at the rows of cars in the lot. A flashy luxury Chrysler, an Ikeda van, a row of middle-class Toyotas and Mercedes, a vintage ’99 Cadillac—she could imagine the owner’s face if that were missing—ten or twelve cheap runabouts, a hovercar with the uniformed driver asleep at the wheel. And a battered farm truck.

  Leisha walked over to the truck. A man sat at the wheel, smoking. She thought of her father.

  “Hello,” Leisha said.

  The man rolled down his window but didn’t answer. He had greasy brown hair.

  “See that hovercar over there?” Leisha said. She made her voice sound young, high. The man glanced at it indifferently; from this angle you couldn’t see that the driver was asleep. “That’s my bodyguard. He thinks I’m in the hospital, the way my father told me to, getting this lip looked at.” She could feel her mouth swollen from Alice’s blow.

  “So?”

  Leisha stamped her foot. “So I don’t want to be inside. He’s a shit and so’s Daddy. I want out. I’ll give you four thousand bank credits for your truck. Cash.”

  The man’s eyes widened. He tossed away his cigarette, looked again at the hovercar. The driver’s shoulders were broad, and the car was within easy screaming distance.

  “All nice and legal,” Leisha said, and tried to smirk. Her knees felt watery.

  “Let me see the cash.”

  Leisha backed away from the truck, to where he could not reach her. She took the money from her arm clip. She was used to carrying a lot of cash; there had always been Bruce, or someone like Bruce. There had always been safety.

  “Get out of the truck on the other side,” Leisha said, “and lock the door behind you. Leave the keys on the seat, where I can see them from here. Then I’ll put the money on the roof where you can see it.”

  The man laughed, a sound like gravel pouring. “Regular little Dabney Engh, aren’t you? Is that what they teach you society debs at your fancy schools?”

  Leisha had no idea who Dabney Engh was. She waited, watching the man try to think of a way to cheat her, and tried to hide her contempt. She thought of Tony.

  “All right,” he said, and slid out of the truck.

  “Lock the door!”

  He grinned, opened the door again, locked it. Leisha put the money on the roof, yanked open the driver’s door, clambered in, locked the door, and powered up the window. The man laughed. She put the key into the ignition, started the truck, and drove toward the street. Her hands trembled.

  She drove slowly around the block twice. When she came back, the man was gone, and the driver of the hovercar was still asleep. She had wondered if the man would wake him, out of sheer malice, but he had not. She parked the truck and waited.

  An hour and a half later Alice and a nurse wheeled Stella out of the Emergency Entrance. Leisha leaped out of the truck and yelled, “Coming, Alice!” waving both her arms. It was too dark to see Alice’s expression; Leisha could only hope that Alice showed no dismay at the battered truck, that she had not told the nurse to expect a red car.

  Alice said, “This is Julie Bergadon, a friend that I called while you were setting Jordan’s arm.” The nurse nodded, uninterested. The two women helped Stella into the high truck cab; there was no back seat. Stella had a cast on her arm and looked drugged.

  “How?” Alice said as they drove off.

  Leisha didn’t answer. She was watching a police hovercar land at the other end of the parking lot. Two officers got out and strode purposefully towards Alice’s locked car under the skimpy maple.

  “My God,” Alice said. For the first time, she sounded frightened.

  “They won’t trace us,” Leisha said. “Not to this truck. Count on it.”

  “Leisha.” Alice’s voice spiked with fear. “Stella’s asleep.”

  Leisha glanced at the child, slumped against Alice’s shoulder. “No, she’s not. She’s unconscious from painkillers.”

  “Is that all right? Normal? For . . . her?”

  “We can black out. We can even experience substance-induced sleep.” Tony and she and Richard and Jeanine in the midnight woods . . . “Didn’t you know that, Alice?”

  “No.”

  “We don’t know very much about each other, do we?”

  They drove south in silence. Finally Alice said, “Where are we going to take her, Leisha?”

  “I don’t know. Any one of the Sleepless would be the first place the police would check—”

  “You can’t risk it. Not the way things are,” Alice said. She sounded weary. “But all my friends are in California. I don’t think we could drive this rust bucket that far before getting stopped.”

  “It wouldn’t make it anyway.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Let me think.”

  At an expressway exit stood a pay phone. It wouldn’t be data-shielded, as Groupnet was. Would Kevin’s open line be tapped? Probably.

  There was no doubt the Sanctuary line would be.

  Sanctuary. All of them going there
or already there, Kevin had said. Holed up, trying to pull the worn Allegheny Mountains around them like a safe little den. Except for the children like Stella, who could not.

  Where? With whom?

  Leisha closed her eyes. The Sleepless were out; the police would find Stella within hours. Susan Melling? But she had been Alice’s all-too-visible stepmother, and was co-beneficiary of Camden’s will; they would question her almost immediately. It couldn’t be anyone traceable to Alice. It could only be a Sleeper that Leisha knew, and trusted, and why should anyone at all fit that description? Why should she risk so much on anyone who did? She stood a long time in the dark phone kiosk. Then she walked to the truck. Alice was asleep, her head thrown back against the seat. A tiny line of drool ran down her chin. Her face was white and drained in the bad light from the kiosk. Leisha walked back to the phone.

  “Stewart? Stewart Sutter?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Leisha Camden. Something has happened.” She told the story tersely, in bald sentences. Stewart did not interrupt.

  “Leisha—” Stewart said, and stopped.

  “I need help, Stewart.”

  “I’ll help you, Alice.”

  “I don’t need your help.” A wind whistled over the dark field beside the kiosk and Leisha shivered. She heard in the wind the thin keen of a beggar. In the wind, in her own voice.

  “All right,” Stewart said, “this is what we’ll do. I have a cousin in Ripley, New York, just over the state line from Pennsylvania on the route you’ll be driving east. It has to be in New York, I’m licensed in New York. Take the little girl there. I’ll call my cousin and tell her you’re coming. She’s an elderly woman, was quite an activist in her youth, her name is Janet Patterson. The town is—”

  “What makes you so sure she’ll get involved? She could go to jail. And so could you.”

  “She’s been in jail so many times you wouldn’t believe it. Political protests going all the way back to Vietnam. But no one’s going to jail. I’m now your attorney of record, I’m privileged. I’m going to get Stella declared a ward of the state. That shouldn’t be too hard with the hospital records you established in Skokie. Then she can be transferred to a foster home in New York, I know just the place, people who are fair and kind. Then Alice—”

  “She’s resident in Illinois. You can’t—”

  “Yes, I can. Since those research findings about the Sleepless life span have come out, legislators have been railroaded by stupid constituents scared or jealous or just plain angry. The result is a body of so-called ‘law’ riddled with contradictions, absurdities, and loopholes. None of it will stand in the long run—or at least I hope not—but in the meantime it can all be exploited. I can use it to create the most goddamn convoluted case for Stella that anybody ever saw, and in meantime she won’t be returned home. But that won’t work for Alice—she’ll need an attorney licensed in Illinois.”

  “We have one,” Leisha said. “Candace Holt.”

  “No, not a Sleepless. Trust me on this, Leisha. I’ll find somebody good. There’s a man in—are you crying?”

  “No,” Leisha said, crying.

  “Ah, God,” Stewart said. “Bastards. I’m sorry all this happened, Leisha.”

  “Don’t be,” Leisha said.

  When she had directions to Stewart’s cousin, she walked back to the truck. Alice was still asleep, Stella still unconscious. Leisha closed the truck door as quietly as possible. The engine balked and roared, but Alice didn’t wake. There was a crowd of people with them in the narrow and darkened cab: Stewart Sutter, Tony Indivino, Susan Melling, Kenzo Yagai, Roger Camden.

  To Stewart Sutter she said, You called to inform me about the situation at Morehouse, Kennedy. You are risking your career and your cousin for Stella. And you stand to gain nothing. Like Susan telling me in advance about Bernie Kuhn’s brain. Susan, who lost her life to Daddy’s dream and regained it by her own strength. A contract without consideration for each side is not a contract: Every first-year student knows that.

  To Kenzo Yagai she said, Trade isn’t always linear. You missed that. If Stewart gives me something, and I give Stella something, and ten years from now Stella is a different person because of that and gives something to someone else as yet unknown—it’s an ecology. An ecology of trade, yes, each niche needed, even if they’re not contractually bound. Does a horse need a fish? Yes.

  To Tony she said, Yes, there are beggars in Spain who trade nothing, give nothing, do nothing. But there are more than beggars in Spain. Withdraw from the beggars, you withdraw from the whole damn country. And you withdraw from the possibility of the ecology of help. That’s what Alice wanted, all those years ago in her bedroom. Pregnant, scared, angry, jealous, she wanted to help me, and I wouldn’t let her because I didn’t need it. But I do now. And she did then. Beggars need to help as well as be helped.

  And finally, there was only Daddy left. She could see him, bright-eyed, holding thick-leaved exotic flowers in his strong hands. To Camden she said, You were wrong. Alice is special. Oh, Daddy—the specialness of Alice! You were wrong.

  As soon as she thought this, lightness filled her. Not the buoyant bubble of joy, not the hard clarity of examination, but something else: sunshine, soft through the conservatory glass, where two children ran in and out. She suddenly felt light herself, not buoyant but translucent, a medium for the sunshine to pass clear through, on its way to somewhere else.

  She drove the sleeping woman and the wounded child through the night, east, toward the state line.

  PEACE OF MIND

  Nancy Kress is the author of five novels, including The Prince of Morning Bells, An Alien Light, and, most recently, Brain Rose. Her short fiction, including the awardwinning “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” has been collected in Trinity and Other Stories.

  Her work is remarkable for the depth of its characterization and its refusal to settle for easy answers. Both qualities are evident in “Peace of Mind.”

  She lives in Brockport, New York, with her two sons and her husband, writer Marcos Donnelly.

  The plane stayed on the ground at Dallas-Ft. Worth for three solid hours: “troop movements.” Martin’s hands tightened over the opaque plastic bag holding the wet diaper. But it really did seem to be troop movements; after the first hour, young men and women in khaki flowed back and forth across runways like dirty water. Martin felt his hip twinge, the old spot. The soldiers all shouted something, mouths open pinkly, the words lost in the thick airplane glass. He closed his eyes.

  What did they feel, he wondered. Did any of them actually think about where they were going?

  “Trans World Airlines offers our apologies for this unavoidable delay,” said the disembodied voice of a stewardess. The voice reminded Martin of Fran’s: the same soft breathiness cut with a hint of humor, a promise that nothing would ever seriously discompose her. Fran’s voice had lied. Jesus Christ Martin you’ve been home exactly two whole days since May the kids don’t remember what you look like we said it would never be this way not for us—and then the ultimate thrust, the one that could reach clear back to 1968, unerring as one of those fiber-optic missiles these children in khaki admired so much—you’ve changed you’ve turned out just like your father I guess different politics don’t really matter so much after all don ‘t really change anything—

  The plane lurched forward, shifting Martin’s package against his hands. He opened his eyes.

  Soldiers still marched on the neighboring tarmac, maybe three hundred of them. All at once three hundred heads swiveled sharply to the right, eyes alert, chins up. Martin craned forward to see what had commanded their attention, but a plane blocked his line of sight. Or maybe the plane itself had prompted the eyes right. Gray-green, a troop plane, the flag painted sharp and small on the tapered nose. It didn’t look much like the ones Martin remembered in the endless enraging pictures from Vietnam. He noticed that the nose pointed toward South America, and told himself not to be so goddamned metap
horical.

  In 1968 Fran and he had burned a flag, a huge cloth flag, much bigger than this metal one. Martin had shouted with incoherent passion, his whole attention so focused on the flag that he had not noticed the pig who had clubbed him from behind and broken his right hip. He had been nineteen years old, the same age as these shiny-eyed kids who were so willing to climb into this plane and fly wherever they were flown and kill whoever happened to be standing in front of whatever way their government told them to point their guns. They would do that. They would still do that. How about that, Fran? he said to the tarmac rolling slowly past. Has that changed? Have I changed what I believe about if!

  He would never have believed he and Fran could say things like that to each other. The pain in his hip then had been nothing to that night. Two nights ago. Saturday. You think because your cause is so “pure” you don’t have to take any personal responsibility—

  Martin held the package carefully. The plane picked up speed.

  “Attention,” Martin said to the four young recruits seated around the table in the cramped motel room, “is partly a function of brain chemistry. Specifically, for our purposes, the transmitter in the XAL group that you read so much about in the newspapers.”

  Four heads nodded solemnly; not one face looked as if it had ever heard of XAL. But Martin knew they had. Paul had screened this lot, and Paul was good. More likely the four were humoring him, lying low psychologically until they thought they had a handle on this old radical, this aging underground peacenik, this leftover activist who was a part of the thrilling plan to change the world. Martin rubbed his eyes, aware of how theatrical the gesture must seem. Four gazes followed the up-and-down movements of his fingers.

  “XAL was only isolated five years ago. The evolutionists have made it their darling,” Martin said. How far could he go telling them what they already knew before they showed a human flicker of impatience? “XAL did serve a crucial purpose in evolution. It allowed man to focus attention on one thing at a time, without being distracted by all the signals and memories being handled by a cortex getting more and more complex each generation. XAL meant that Og could concentrate on dismembering a lynx without being distracted by thoughts of how the river was rising or by memories of how mad at him his chief was.”