Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  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 inside, 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 4,000 bank credits for your truck. Cash.”

  The man’s eyes widened. He tossed away his cigarette and 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, trying 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, and 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 toward 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 was 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 were 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 a cobeneficiary 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, 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—”

  “Stella’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 the meantime she won’t be returned h
ome. 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 guy 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.

  BOOK II: SANCTUARY

  2051

  “A nation may be said to consist of its territories, its people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability.”

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Message to Congress, December 1, 1862

  8

  JORDAN WATROUS STOOD JUST OUTSIDE THE FRONT GATE of the We-Sleep scooter factory, facing the dusty Mississippi road. Electrified fence eight feet high stretched away on either side. Not a Y-energy field, not sophisticated technology, but it would do. For now, anyway, while attacks on the factory were minor, unorganized, and verbal. Later on, they would need a Y-field. Hawke said so.

  Across the river, in Arkansas, the Y-energy cones of the Samsung-Chrysler plant glinted in the early morning sun.

  Jordan squinted down the road. Sweat matted his hair and trickled down his neck. The guard, a stringy, tow-headed woman in faded jeans, stuck her head out of her kiosk and called, “Hot enough for you, Jordan?”

  Over his shoulder he said, “Always is, Mayleen.”

  She laughed. “You California boys just wilt up in God’s natural heat.”

  “I guess we’re not as tough as you river rats.”

  “Boy, ain’t nobody as tough as us. You just look at Mr. Hawke.”

  As if were possible for anyone at a We-Sleep factory to do otherwise! Not that Hawke hadn’t earned the reverence in Mayleen’s voice. When Mayleen had been hired last winter, Jordan, only four weeks into his own job as Hawke’s personal assistant, had gone with Hawke to her shack for the interview. Although adequately heated and provisioned through the cheap Y-energy that was every citizen’s right under the Dole, the shack had no indoor plumbing, little furniture, and few toys for the skinny tow-headed kids that had stared at Jordan’s leather jacket and lapel comlink. Last week, Mayleen had announced with pride that she’d just bought a toilet and a lace pillow set. The pride, Jordan now knew, was as practical as the toilet. He knew because Calvin Hawke had taught him.

  Jordan returned to studying the road. Mayleen said, “Expecting someone?”

  Slowly Jordan turned around. “Didn’t Hawke call it in?”

  “Call what in? He didn’t tell me nothing.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Jordan said. The terminal in the kiosk shrilled and Mayleen pulled her head back in. Jordan watched her through the plastiglass. As she listened, her face hardened as only these Mississippi faces could. Instantaneous ice in the steaming heat. He had never seen that in California.

  Obviously, Hawke was telling her not only to admit a visitor, but who the visitor was.

  “Yes, sir,” she mouthed at the terminal, and Jordan winced. Nobody at the plant called Hawke “sir” unless they were furious. And nobody got furious at Hawke. They displaced it. Always.

  Mayleen stepped away from her kiosk. “This your doing, Jordan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” She spat the word, and Jordan finally, finally—Hawke said it always took him too long to get angry—felt his own face harden.

  “Is that your business, Mayleen?”

  “Anything goes on in this here plant’s my business,” Mayleen said, which was only the truth. Hawke had made it the truth, for all 800 employees. “We don’t want her kind here.”

  “Hawke apparently does.”

  “I asked you why.”

  “Why don’t you ask him why?”

  “I’m asking you. Why, dammit?”

  Along the road, a dust cloud advanced. A groundcar. Jordan felt a sudden stab of dread: had anyone told her not to come in a Samsung-Chrysler? But she could be trusted to already know something like that. She always did.

  Mayleen snarled, “I done asked you a question, Jordan! What’s Mr. Hawke doing letting one of them in our plant?”

  “You made a demand, not asked a question.” The anger felt good now, sweeping away his nervousness. “But I’ll answer it anyway, Mayleen. Just for you. Leisha Camden is here because she asked to come and Hawke gave her permission.”

  “I can see that! What I can’t see is why!”

  The car pulled up at the gate. It was heavily armored, and packed with bodyguards. The driver got out to open the doors. The car was not a Samsung-Chrysler.

  “Why?” Mayleen repeated, with such hatred that even Jordan was startled. He turned. Her thin mouth twisted in a snarl, but in her eyes was a fear that Jordan recognized—Hawke had taught him to recognize it—a fear not of bone-and-blood people but of the degrading choices those people had indirectly caused: two dollars for a half pack of cigarettes, or two dollars for a pair of warm socks? Extra milk for the kids above the Dole allotment, or a haircut? The fear was not of starving, not in a country of prosperity built on cheap energy, but of being shut out from that prosperity. Second class. Not good enough for that basic badge of adult dignity, work. A parasite. The anger oozed out of Jordan; sadly he felt it go. Anger was so much easier.

  As gently as he could, he said to Mayleen, “Leisha Camden’s here because she’s my mother’s sister. My aunt.”

  He wondered how long it would take Hawke this time to redeem him.

  “AND EACH SCOOTER TAKES SIXTEEN assembly-line operations?” Leisha asked.

  “Yes,” Jordan said. They stood with Leisha’s bodyguards, everybody in hard hats
and goggles, watching Station 8-E. Two dozen scooters were swarmed over by three workers, who in their zeal completely ignored the visitors. The zeal was more notable than the results. But of course Leisha would already know that.

  Six months ago, at his little sister’s eighteenth birthday party in California, Leisha had questioned Jordan about the factory so closely that he had known, like cold water around his bones, that eventually she would ask to visit. What he hadn’t expected was that Hawke would let her.

  She said, “I thought Mr. Hawke might join us. I came to meet him, after all.”

  “He said to bring you to the office after the tour.”

  Beneath the heavy safety glasses, Leisha’s mouth smiled. “Showing me my place?”

  “I guess so,” Jordan said heavily. He hated it when Hawke, always unpredictable, descended to playing one-upmanship.

  To Jordan’s surprise, Leisha laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t mind on my behalf, Jordan. It’s not as if he’s not entitled.”

  And what could Jordan say to that? Entitlement, after all, was the entire issue. Who got what, and how, and why.

  Somehow Jordan didn’t feel like the proper person to comment on that. He wasn’t even certain who within his own family was entitled to what, or why.

  His mother and his aunt had such a strange relationship. Or maybe “strained” was a better word. And yet it wasn’t. Leisha visited the Watrous family in California only on ceremonial occasions; Alice never visited Leisha in Chicago at all. Yet Alice, who loved gardening, had a fresh bouquet from her garden flown to Leisha’s apartment every single day, at a cost Jordan considered insane. And the flowers were ordinary, hardy garden blooms: phlox and sunflowers and day lilies and lemon-drop marigolds, which Leisha could have bought on the streets of Chicago for a few dollars. “Doesn’t Aunt Leisha prefer those indoor exotics?” Jordan asked once. “Yes,” his mother said, smiling.

  Leisha always brought Jordan and his sister Moira wonderful presents: junior electronics kits, telescopes, two shares of a stock to follow on the datanets. Alice always seemed as pleased by the gifts as the kids were. Yet when Leisha showed Jordan and Moira how to use each one—how to adjust the telescope to azimuth and altitude, how to do Japanese calligraphy on rice paper—Alice always left the room. After the first few years, Jordan sometimes wished Leisha would leave, too, and let him and Moira just read the instructions themselves. Leisha explained too fast, and too hard, and too long, and got upset that Jordan and Moira didn’t remember everything the first time. It didn’t even help that Aunt Leisha’s upset seemed to be with herself, not with them. It made Jordan feel stupid. “Leisha has her own ways,” was all that Alice would say. “And we have ours.”