Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  Leisha put her head between her knees. It was clear how the rest of the trial would go. Her own testimony would be discredited by Sandaleros as maneuverings by a jealous other woman against the legal wife. Richard would be discredited. Hossack would hit hard on his strong point: Sanctuary’s power. Sleepless power. Sandaleros would not allow Jennifer to testify; her composure would look like coldbloodedness to a jury of Sleepers, her desire to protect her own like an attack on the Outside—

  Which it had been.

  The jury could go either way: acquit on the supposed love triangle, and then Jennifer would escape the law. Or convict because she was a powerful Sleepless, and then Jennifer would never survive her fellow inmates. Sanctuary would withdraw deeper into itself, a powerful spider spinning electronic webs for its own protection around a country of Sleepers increasingly filled with fear of people they seldom saw, never netted with, and would not buy from lest the Sleepless ruin the economy of which they were either shadow or source, no one could tell for sure. They control things secretly, you know. They want to enslave us. They work with international competitors to bring us to our knees. And they don’t stop at murder.

  And so prove that all along Jennifer had been right to protect her own.

  It was a snake swallowing its own tail. Because the law, in its striving to be fair and treat all equally, left too much out. It was not large enough. It was not as large as the genetic and technological future which, outgrowing it, would be lawless.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark hotel room, Leisha could feel her belief in the law leave her, as if the air itself were being sucked out of the room. She was choking, falling into a vacuum of cold and dark. The law wasn’t large enough. It couldn’t hold Sleeper and Sleepless together after all, couldn’t provide any ethical way to judge behavior, and without judgment there was nothing. Only lawlessness and the mob and the void—

  She tried to stand, but her knees buckled. Nothing like this had happened to her before. She found herself on the floor, on her hands and knees, and a still-rational part of her mind said, heart attack. But it couldn’t be. Sleepless hearts did not give out.

  Cold—

  Blackness—

  Emptiness—

  Daddy—

  The opening of the hotel-room door brought her back. It opened from the outside, without alarms. Leisha staggered to her feet. Across the room, beyond the bed, a figure stood silhouetted in the doorway, a thick figure carrying something even thicker. Leisha didn’t move. Her own people—Kevin’s people—had installed the security for this room, making it identical to her apartment in Chicago. No one in Conewango had the entry codes.

  If it was a stranger, if Sanctuary was organized for assassination as well as theft…

  The assassin would at least be good. Sleepless always were.

  An arm stretched out from the dark figure. A hand fumbled for the manual switches.

  “Lights on,” Leisha said clearly.

  The blocky shape was a suitcase. Alice stood blinking in the sudden light. “Leisha? Are you sitting in the dark?”

  “Alice!”

  “Your apartment codes opened both doors…don’t you think you should change them? There’s a bunch of reporters in the lobby—”

  “Alice!” Then she was across the room, sobbing—she, who never cried—in Alice’s arms.

  “Didn’t you know I’d come?” Alice said.

  Leisha shook her head against Alice’s chest.

  “I knew.” Alice released her, and Leisha saw that Alice’s face shone with some strong emotion. “I knew that this would be the night for you. The night you’d fall into the Hole. I knew it yesterday—I felt it.” She laughed suddenly, very shrill. “I felt it, Leisha, do you understand? It was like being hit with a load of bricks. I felt that you’d be in your worst trouble tonight, and I knew I had to come.”

  Leisha stopped sobbing.

  “I felt it,” Alice said yet again. “Across 3,000 miles. Just the way it’s happened to other twins!”

  “Alice—”

  “No, don’t say anything, Leisha. You weren’t there. I know what I felt.”

  Leisha saw that the powerful emotion blazing on Alice’s face was triumph.

  “I knew you needed me. And I’m here. It’s all right, Leisha, honey, I know about the Hole, I’ve been there—” She reached again for Leisha, putting her arms around her, laughing and crying. “I know, honey, it’s all right. You’re not alone. I’ve been there, I know…”

  Leisha hung onto her sister with all her strength. Alice was pulling her back from the dark place. The void, the Hole. Alice, whose bulk anchored Leisha short of the edge, solid as earth. Alice, who now would never be unreachable again. Not now that Alice had known something before Leisha did. Not now that Alice had saved Leisha by becoming the one thing she hadn’t lost.

  “I knew,” Alice whispered. And then, stronger, “Now I can stop sending all those damn flowers.”

  IT WASN’T UNTIL LATER, after they’d talked for hours and Alice was starting to look sleepy, that the comlink shrilled. Leisha had turned it off; only a priority override could get through. She turned her head toward the screen. Two passwords flashed there. The link’s fuzzy logic had admitted them simultaneously, apportioning one voice per speaker:

  “Susan Melling here. I must—”

  “This is Stella Bevington. I just accessed the nets. The—”

  “—talk to you immediately. Call—”

  “—pendant the newsgrids say was—”

  “—me on a shielded—”

  “—found at that parking garage—”

  “—line as soon as you can!”

  “—is mine.”

  “WE’VE FINISHED OUR RESEARCH,” Susan’s image said on the comscreen. Her gray hair straggled in greasy strands from a careless bun; her eyes burned. “Gaspard-Thiereux and I. On Walcott’s Sleepless redundancy codes in DNA.”

  Leisha said evenly, “And?”

  “Is this an unshielded line? Hell, forget that. Let the press tap. Let Sanctuary tap. Hey, Blumenthal—you listening?”

  “Susan, please—”

  “No please about it. No thank you, no nothing. That’s why I wanted to tell you this myself. No nothing. The equations can’t work.”

  “Can’t—”

  “There’s a gap that can’t be closed between shutting down the sleep mechanism at the preembryonic genetic level and trying to do the same thing after the brain has begun to differentiate at roughly eight days. The reasons the gap can’t be closed are quite clear, quite specific, quite biologically final. They have to do with the tolerance of genetic noise in those genetic texts that are repetitions of regulatory systems. You don’t need the details—the result is that we will never be able to convert a Sleeper into a Sleepless. Never. No one. Not Walcott, not the superbrains at Sanctuary, not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Walcott is lying.”

  “I…I don’t understand.”

  “He made the whole thing up. It’s very plausible, plausible enough to take good researchers a while to check. But essentially it’s a lie, and there’s no way a scientist with his famous withheld final step could not know that. Walcott knew. His research is a lie. He came to you with this stupendous discovery he knew would be shown to be a lie, and Sanctuary committed fraud for patents that are a lie, and Jennifer Sharifi is being tried for murder because of a lie.”

  Leisha couldn’t take it in. None of it made any sense. She was very aware of Alice across the room, standing completely still. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Susan said. “But it’s a lie. You hear that, press? You hear that, Sanctuary? It’s a lie!”

  She started to cry.

  “Susan…oh, Susan…”

  “No, no, don’t say anything. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry. That’s the one thing I didn’t mean to do…Who’s that with you? You’re not alone?”

  “Alice,” Leisha said. “She—”

  “It’s just
that I thought maybe I could become what I created. Stupid idea, huh? All of literature shows that the creators can’t become the creations.”

  Leisha said nothing. Susan stopped crying as abruptly as she had started, tears drying on her old, soft, wrinkled skin. “After all, Leisha, that wouldn’t do, would it? For the creators to become the creations? Who would there be to go on perfecting the art if we all got to be patrons?” Then, in a different voice, she said, “Bring Walcott down, Leisha. Like any other quack who sells worthless hope to the dying. Bring the bastard down.”

  “I will,” Leisha said. But she didn’t mean Walcott. In a sudden dizzying rush, she saw who it was that had been committing theft, and how, and why.

  15

  JORDAN OPENED HIS APARTMENT DOOR, sleepy and Astonished. It was 4:30 in the morning. Leisha Camden stood there with three silent bodyguards.

  “Leisha! What…”

  “Come with me. Quick—by now I’m sure Hawke knows I’m here. There was no way to tell you I was coming that he wouldn’t intercept. Get dressed, Jordan. We’re going to the We-Sleep factory.”

  “I—”

  “Now! Hurry!”

  Jordan thought of telling her that he wasn’t going to the factory—not now, not ever. But another look convinced him that Leisha would go there alone, and he suddenly didn’t want that. Leisha wore a long blue sweater over a black bodystretch. Blue shadows pooled in the hollows under her eyes. She leaned a little forward on the balls of her feet, as if she were leaning into him, and it suddenly occurred to Jordan that she needed him with her. Not for physical protection—the three bodyguards collectively massed 640 pounds, not counting weapons—but for some other, edgy reason Jordan couldn’t define.

  “Let me get dressed,” he said.

  In the dark hallway Joey raised his head from his oversized cot. “Go back inside,” Jordan said. “It’s all right.” Leisha, in need of him.

  There was a plane, apparently folded in on itself in some state-of-the-art way that let it land vertically, in the apartment-house parking lot. But this was no aircar—it was a definite plane. The control panel bore no identifying marks. In the air it unfolded itself and shot over the sleeping town toward the river.

  “All right, Leisha. Tell me what this is all about.”

  “Hawke killed Timothy Herlinger.”

  Something shifted inside Jordan. He knew what it was: truth. Tiny, deadly, like one of those poison pellets that dissolve in the heart of suicides. All you had to do was swallow it and the hard part was over, the rest inevitable and unstoppable. Jordan felt it move, and knew it had already been there before Leisha spoke. It had been there in the Profit Faire, in Jordan’s ambiguous admiration of Hawke, in the argument over Joey, even in Mayleen’s new toilet and her lace tablecloth. It was in the We-Sleep Movement itself.

  He looked at Leisha. She seemed to radiate light, a hard lurid light like the Y-fields designed to alert people to dangerous machinery. She said again, “Hawke killed Dr. Herlinger. He set it up.”

  Jordan heard himself say, “And you’re glad.”

  She turned a shocked face toward him. They regarded each other in the small cockpit of the plane, the three bodyguards a motionless blur behind them. Jordan had not meant to say it, but when the words were out he knew they, too, were true. She was glad. That it was Hawke and not a Sleepless. Gladness. That was the source of the lurid light, and of her need to have him with her.

  “Witness for the persecution,” he said, in a voice so unlike his own that Leisha said, “What?”

  “Never mind. Tell me.”

  She didn’t even hesitate. “The retina print on the scanner will match Stella Bevington’s. Hawke must have taken it at your mother’s party for Beck, at the new house, when everybody was drinking and careless. The party he bullied you into bringing him to. And that’s when he got Stella’s pendant, too. Jennifer sent her one; she wanted Stella in Sanctuary and was trying to force Stella to choose. Stella was wearing the pendant but she took it off at the party because she saw all over again the kindness, the tolerance of Sleepers like your mother”…oh, Daddy, the specialness of Alice!…“Hawke took the pendant from her purse. She reported the loss to Jennifer but with no details; that was because of me…”

  Leisha turned her head. Jordan allowed himself no sympathy, no compassion. Leisha, he thought, was losing nothing. The murderer was a Sleeper.

  “Jennifer knew nobody would be able to figure out by accident what the pendant did, and it would self-destruct if they tried, so she wasn’t really worried that Stella lost it. Jennifer had already taken Hawke’s bait on the patents. Jordan, there never was any process to alter Sleepers to Sleepless. Hawke hired Walcott and Herlinger to pretend there was, make a false lead look scientifically plausible… God, he arranged the whole thing in detail. So Sanctuary would break into the government nets and back-file. Then he could use Walcott to report the theft, set the press going, and even without an indictment Sanctuary would take a beating. We-Sleep membership would soar.”

  Which was exactly what had happened, Jordan thought. Hawke was always a good planner. The little plane began its descent over the factory.

  “But then Herlinger changed his mind. He had a flash of conscience and was going to expose Walcott and Hawke. So Hawke had him killed.”

  And that was typical of Leisha, too, Jordan thought. She didn’t think: Herlinger was trying to blackmail his partners, so they had him killed. Or, Herlinger got into a power struggle with Hawke and Hawke had him killed. No, she assumed a flash of conscience, even in this situation. She assumed the public-minded and decent cause. “An eighteenth-century sensibility,” Hawke had said. With scorn.

  Jordan said, “You don’t know that you’re right. And if what you say is true and Hawke has me under such surveillance that he already knows we’re coming…there will be no evidence left when we get there.”

  Leisha turned on him a brilliant gaze. “There wouldn’t have been anyway. Not discoverable evidence.”

  “Then why are we going there?”

  She didn’t answer.

  The gate of the factory was unshielded. The guard—not Mayleen—waved them through.

  Hawke waited in his office, leaning casually against the front of his desk, palms flat on the wooden surface behind him. The desk held the full parody display: the Cherokee dolls, the Harvard coffee mug, the model We-Sleep scooter, the pile of misspelled mail from grateful workers at their first job in years, the plaques and pen sets and gilded statuettes from We-Sleep businesses. Some of them Jordan had never seen; Hawke must have taken them out, item by item, and arranged them carefully on the desk so his big body would not block the sight of them from the door. All the cheap accolades from hard-scrabble businesses, all the totems of contradictory successes. Looking at them, Jordan felt coldness slide over him. It was real, then. Not just true, but real. Hawke had killed.

  “Ms. Camden,” Hawke said.

  Leisha wasted no words. Her voice was controlled, but the lurid light was still on her. “You killed Timothy Herlinger.”

  Hawke smiled. “No. I did not.”

  “Yes, you did,” Leisha said, but it didn’t sound to Jordan as if she were arguing, or trying to force agreement. “You set up Walcott’s phony research to fan the hatred toward Sleepless, and when you saw a chance to accuse a Sleepless of murder, you did that, too.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hawke said pleasantly.

  As if he hadn’t spoken, Leisha went on. “You did it to increase We-Sleep profits. Or rather, you think you did it for that reason. But profits were increasing anyway. You really did it because you’re not a Sleepless, and never can be, and you’re one of the haters that always moves to destroy any superiority he can’t have.”

  The flesh above Hawke’s collar started to redden. This was evidently not what he’d expected to hear. Jordan said, “Leisha…”

  “It’s all right, Jordan,” she said clearly. “The three bodyguards are highly tra
ined, the plane is equipped with surveillance equipment trained on my body, I am recording, and Mr. Hawke knows all this. There is no danger.” She turned to Hawke. “Not to you, either, of course. Nothing is provable. Not against you, not against Jennifer once the retina print is identified as Stella Bevington’s, because she can explain not only how she lost the pendant but where she was the morning Herlinger died. She was in a corporate meeting with fourteen executives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. You knew all that would surface, didn’t you, Mr. Hawke, as soon as the pendant was introduced in evidence and Stella realized it was hers. You knew the trial would fail, and no one would be convicted. But the hatred would have been inflamed a little more, and that’s what mattered to you.”

  “You’re talking garbage, Ms. Camden,” Hawke said. Jordan saw that he was again in control of himself, his big body relaxed and powerful as he leaned against the desk. “But I’ll respond to your last statement anyway. I’ll tell you what matters. This—” he picked up the sheaf of letters behind him “—matters. Gratitude from people who did not have the dignity of work before, and because of We-Sleep have it now. This matters.”

  “Dignity? Based on fraud and theft and murder?”

  “The only theft I know of was committed by Sanctuary, stealing Walcott’s patents. At least, so I hear on the newsgrids.”

  “Ah,” Leisha said. “Then let me tell you of one more theft, Mr. Hawke. Just so you understand. You stole something else, and you stole it from my sister Alice, and from my friend Susan Melling, and from every other Sleeper who believed there was a chance at the long life and increased powers that come with Sleeplessness. They believed that, for a little while. They hoped that, in those hours of the night when Sleepers lie awake and think about living and dying and not sleeping. You wonder how I know that. Let me tell you how I know. I know because Susan Melling is dying of an inoperable brain condition, and knows it, and wants desperately not to die. I know because my sister said to me during the trial—the trial you engineered for your own aggrandizement—she said, ‘The hardest thing I ever learned, Leisha, wasn’t to raise Jordan alone or earn a living or to accept that Daddy didn’t love me. The hardest thing I ever learned was that even if I blamed you, I was still going to have to do all those things. The hardest thing I learned was that there’s no way out.’ You held out the promise of a way out, Mr. Hawke, and then robbed Alice of it. Alice and Susan and every other Sleeper who doesn’t take hatred as a way out. You didn’t rob the haters. You robbed the others, the people who try to be too decent for hatred. That’s what you stole and who you stole it from.”