Beggars In Spain

by Nancy Kress

  Leisha hesitated. She knew, and probably Jennifer knew, there was insufficient evidence for even a grand jury session. The papers were gone, but the bank record showed that Dr. Walcott had been the one to remove them. The best she could possibly do was establish that some new employee or other at First National also had access to the receipts—if it had even been a new employee. How thorough was Sanctuary’s advance planning? Their covert information net was extensive enough to cover minor researchers working in third-rate biotechs, if the minor research concerned Sleepless. And Leisha would bet her eyes that no new employee at First National had ever been an old employee at Samplice. She had nothing but hearsay—and, of course, her knowledge of what Jennifer, a Sleepless, would do. But the law was not interested in her inner knowledge. That, too, was only hearsay.

  Hopelessness swamped her, frightening because it was so rare, followed by memory: Richard at seventeen, running in and out of the surf with her and Tony and Carol and Jeanine, all of them laughing, sand and water and sky opening up all around in infinite receding light… She sought Richard’s eyes.

  He turned his back.

  Jennifer said composedly, “Why exactly are you here, Leisha? If you have no legal business to transact with me or Richard or Sanctuary, and if your client has nothing to do with us—”

  “You just told me you took the papers.”

  “Did I?” Jennifer smiled. “No, you’re mistaken. I would not do or say that.”

  “I see. You just wanted me to know. And now you just want me to leave.”

  “I do,” Jennifer said, and for a bizarre moment Leisha heard echoes of the marriage ceremony. Jennifer’s mind was opaque to her. Standing in her living room, watching the green swirls form and break and reform on the window, watching Richard’s hunched shoulders, Leisha suddenly knew she would never stand anywhere in Sanctuary again.

  To Richard—not Jennifer—she said, “The research is still in Walcott’s and Herlinger’s heads. You can’t stop this from coming, if it’s real. When I go back to Chicago, I’m going to have my client write it all out and put multiple copies in very safe places. I want you to know this, Richard.”

  He did not turn around. She watched the bent curve of his spine.

  Jennifer said, “Have a nice flight.”

  ADAM WALCOTT DID NOT TAKE DISAPPOINTMENT WELL. “You mean there’s nothing we can do? Nothing?”

  “There’s insufficient evidence.” Leisha got up from her desk and walked around it to sit in a chair opposite Walcott’s. “You have to understand, Doctor, that the courts are still struggling with the limitations of electronic documents as evidence. They’ve been struggling with it longer than I’ve been alive. At first computer-generated documents were treated as hearsay because they weren’t originals. Then they were barred because there were just too many people who could break systems security. Now since Sabino v. Lansing they’re treated as a separate, inherently weaker category of evidence. Signed hard-copies are what count, which means burglars and thieves who can manipulate the tangible are kings of even electronic crime. Right back where we started.”

  Walcott did not look interested in this informal judicial history. “But, Ms. Camden—”

  “Dr. Walcott, you don’t seem to be focused on the main point here. You have all the research in your head, research that could change the world. And whoever took your documents has only nine-tenths of it because the final piece is only in your head. That’s what you told me, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “So write it down again. Now. Here.”

  “Now?” The wispy little man seemed taken aback by this idea. “Why?”

  And Jennifer thought that Leisha was an innocent. Leisha spoke very carefully, choosing her words. “Dr. Walcott, this research is potentially a very valuable property. Worth billions, over time, to you or to Samplice or, more likely, to you both in some percentage deal. I’m prepared to represent you with that, if you so choose—”

  “Oh, goody,” Walcott said. Leisha looked at him hard, but he truly did not seem sarcastic. His left hand wrapped absently around the back of his head to scratch his right ear.

  She said patiently, “But you must realize that whenever billions are involved, thieves are involved. You’ve already seen that. And you’ve told me you haven’t yet filed for any patents because you didn’t want Director Lee to know what you were working on.” After a moment she added, “Correct?” There was no point in assuming anything with this man.

  “Correct.”

  “Fine. Then what you must also realize is that people who will thieve for millions might also—I don’t say this would happen, only that it could—might also—”

  She couldn’t finish the sentence. The pains in her stomach were back, and she folded her arms across her abdomen. Richard, holding her in his shabby bedroom in Evanston, she fifteen years old, meeting a fellow Sleepless for the first time and filled with exhilaration like light…

  Walcott said, “You mean the thieves might try to kill me. Me and Timmy. Even without the final part of the research.”

  Leisha said, “Write it all down. Now. Here.”

  She gave him a free-standing computer and a private office. He was only in it twenty-five minutes, which surprised her. But, then, how long could formulas and assumptions take to write down? It wasn’t like a legal brief.

  She realized that she’d been expecting him to fumble over the task because he was a Sleeper.

  She made eight hard-copies of the papers on the small free-standing copier she used for privileged client-attorney information, resisting the desire to read them. She probably wouldn’t have understood them anyway. She gave him one copy, plus the free-standing deck. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding, Doctor. These seven copies will go into various vaults. One in the safe here, one at Baker Enterprises, Kevin Baker’s firm, which I assure you is impregnable.” Walcott gave no sign of knowing who Kevin Baker was; it wasn’t possible for any genetic researcher to not know who Kevin Baker was.

  “Tell as many people as you like that there are multiple copies of your current unnamed research project with different people. I’ll do the same. The more people who know, the less of a target you are. Also, I urge you as counsel to tell Director Lee what you’ve been doing and to file patents on this work, in your own name. I should be with you when you approach Lee, if we’re going to establish personal ownership of part of this work apart from Samplice.”

  “Fine,” Walcott said. He combed his hand through his negligible hair. “You’ve been so frank…I feel I have to be frank, too.”

  Something in his tone made Leisha glance up sharply.

  “The fact is, I…the research I just wrote out for you…” He ran the other hand through his hair and stood on one foot, an embarrassed diminutive crane.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s not all there. I left off the last piece. The piece the thieves don’t have either.”

  He was more cautious, then, than she had suspected. On the whole, Leisha approved; reckless clients were worse than untrusting ones. Even when the person untrusted was the client’s own attorney.

  Walcott looked past her, out the window. He still stood on one foot. The weirdly intermittent forcefulness returned to his voice. “You said yourself you don’t know who stole the first copy. But it’s potentially very valuable to replicate. Or not replicate. And you’re a Sleepless, Ms. Camden.”

  “I understand. But it’s important that you write down that last piece as well, Doctor, for your own protection. If not here, then somewhere else completely secure.” And where, she wondered, was that? “You should also—this is an important point—tell as many people as possible that all the research exists somewhere else besides your head.”

  Walcott finally lowered his raised foot to the floor. He nodded. “I’ll think about that. Do you really think I could be in actual physical danger, Ms. Camden?”

  Leisha thought of Sanctuary. The queasiness returned to her stomach; it had nothing
to do with what did or did not happen to Walcott. She folded her arms across her belly.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  10

  JORDAN WATROUS POURED HIMSELF ANOTHER DRINK at the Hepplewhite secretary set up as a bar in his mother’s living room. His third? Fourth? Maybe no one was counting. From the deck cantilevered over the ocean floated the sound of laughter. To Jordan’s ears the laughter sounded nervous, as well it might. What the hell was Hawke saying now? And to whom?

  He hadn’t wanted to bring Hawke. This was his stepfather’s fiftieth birthday; Beck had wanted a small family party. But Jordan’s mother had just finished decorating her new house and she wanted to show it off. For twenty years Alice Camden Watrous had lived as if she had no money, not touching the inheritance from her father except, Jordan later learned, to pay for his and Moira’s schooling and computers and sports. She had treated her money as if it were a large, dangerous dog she had custody of but would not approach. Then, on her fortieth birthday, something apparently happened inside his mother, something Jordan didn’t understand. That didn’t surprise him. Much of people’s behavior baffled him.

  His mother had suddenly built this big house on the ocean at Morro Bay, where a few miles out gray whales lifted their flukes and spouted past. She had furnished it with expensive, understated British antiques bought in Los Angeles, New York, and London. Beck, easily the sweetest-tempered man Jordan had ever met, smiled indulgently, even though his wife had hired a different contractor, not Beck, to build the house. Some days Jordan, driving out to the site with his mother, had found Beck working alongside the union carpenters and their robots, nailing boards and aligning joists. When the house was finished, Jordan had waited apprehensively for what new sides of his mother might emerge. Social climbing? Plastic surgery? Lovers? But Alice had ignored their fashionable neighbors, let her stocky figure stay stocky, and hummed contentedly about her British antiques and her beloved garden.

  “Why British?” Jordan had said once, fingering the back of a Sheraton chair. “Why antiques?”

  “My mother was British,” Alice said, the first and last time Jordan had ever heard her mention her mother.

  The birthday party for Beck was also a housewarming. Alice had invited all of her and Beck’s friends, her colleagues from the Twin Group, Moira’s graduate-school friends and professors, Leisha Camden and Kevin Baker, and a Sleepless whom Jordan had never laid eyes on before, a pretty young redhead named Stella Bevington whom Alice had hugged and kissed as if she were another Moira. Calvin Hawke had invited himself.

  “I don’t think so, Hawke,” Jordan had said in the factory office in Mississippi, and with anyone else that would have ended it.

  “I’d like to meet your mother, Jordy. Most men don’t speak as well of their mothers as you do. Or as often.”

  Jordan couldn’t help it; he felt himself flush. Since he was in grade school he had been open to the charges of being a mama’s boy. Hawke hadn’t meant anything…or had he? Lately everything Hawke said stung. Was that Jordan’s fault or Hawke’s? Jordan couldn’t tell.

  “It’s really a family celebration, Hawke.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t want to intrude on family,” Hawke said smoothly. “But didn’t you say it was a big housewarming, too? I have a gift I’d like your mother to have for her house. Something that belonged to my mother.”

  “That’s very generous of you,” Jordan said, and Hawke grinned. The manners Alice had drilled into her son amused Hawke. Jordan was astute enough to see this, but not astute enough to know what to do about it. He steeled himself to frankness. “But I don’t want you there. My aunt will be there. And some other Sleepless.”

  “I perfectly understand,” Hawke said, and Jordan thought the matter was closed. But somehow it kept coming up. And somehow the stings got worse in Hawke’s innocent-sounding phrases, and because they were innocent Jordan felt guilty at snapping back at Hawke. And somehow now Hawke stood out on his mother’s deck talking to Beck and Moira and an admiring crowd of Moira’s college friends while Leisha, completely silent, watched Hawke with a blank expression, and Jordan slipped away to splash his third—fourth?—whiskey into his glass so fast it spilled on his mother’s new pale-blue rug.

  “It’s not your fault,” said a voice behind him. Leisha. He hadn’t heard her footsteps.

  He said, “What do you do for whiskey spills? Carbo-eaters? Or would they hurt the rug?”

  “Forget the rug. I mean it’s not your fault that Hawke is here. I’m sure you didn’t want him to be, and I’m sure he steamrolled right over you. Don’t blame yourself, Jordan.”

  “No one can ever tell him no,” Jordan said miserably.

  “Oh, Alice could have, if she’d wanted to. Don’t doubt that. He’s here because she said it was all right, not because he maneuvered you into an invitation.”

  The question had bothered him for a long time. “Leisha, does Mom approve of what I do? Of the whole We-Sleep Movement?”

  Leisha was silent for a long time. Finally she said, “She wouldn’t tell me, Jordan,” which was of course true. It had been a stupid question, stupidly blurted out. He mopped ineffectively at the rug with a napkin.

  Leisha said, “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “We don’t talk about…Sleepers and Sleeplessness.”

  “No, I can believe that,” Leisha said. “There’s a lot this family doesn’t talk about, isn’t there?”

  He said, “Where’s Kevin?”

  Leisha looked at him with genuine surprise. “That wasn’t a non sequitur, was it?”

  Embarrassment flooded him. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “It’s all right, Jordan. Stop apologizing all the time. Kevin had to see a client on an orbital.”

  Jordan whistled. “I didn’t know there were Sleepless on any of the orbitals.”

  Leisha frowned. “There aren’t. But most of Kevin’s work is for international clients who aren’t necessarily, or even usually, Sleepless but who—”

  “—are rich enough to afford him,” Hawke said, coming up behind them. “Ms. Camden, you haven’t spoken to me all night.”

  “Was I supposed to?”

  He laughed. “Certainly not. Why would Leisha Camden have anything to say to a union organizer of underclass morons who waste a third of their life in zombie nonproductivity?”

  She said evenly, “I have never thought of Sleepers that way.”

  “Really? Do you think of them as equals? Do you know what Abraham Lincoln said about equality, Ms. Camden? You published a book about Lincoln’s view of the Constitution, didn’t you, under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kaminsky?”

  She didn’t answer. Jordan said, “That’s enough, Hawke.”

  Hawke said, “Lincoln said about the man who is denied economic equality: ‘When you have put him down and made it impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul in this world and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out as in the darkness of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have roused will not turn and rend you?’”

  Leisha said, “Do you know what Aristotle said about equality? ‘Equals revolt that they may become superior. Such is one state of mind that creates revolutions.’”

  Hawke’s face sharpened. To Jordan it actually seemed the bones grew even more pointed; something moved behind Hawke’s eyes. He started to say something, evidently thought better of it, and smiled enigmatically. Then he turned and walked away.

  After a moment Leisha said, “I’m sorry, Jordan. That was unforgivable at a party. I’m too used to courtrooms, I guess.”

  “You look terrible,” Jordan said abruptly, surprising himself. “You’ve lost too much weight. Your neck is all scrunched up, and your face is drawn.”

  “Looking my age,” Leisha said, suddenly amused. Now why should that amuse her? Maybe it wasn’t the Sleepless he didn’t understand; maybe it was women. He turned his head toward the deck for a glimpse of the tin
y flashing lights Stella Bevington wore in her red hair.

  Leisha leaned forward and gripped his wrist. “Jordan—do you ever wish you could become a Sleepless?”

  He stared into her green eyes, so different from Hawke’s: her eyes reflected all light back at you. Like a parcel refused. All of a sudden his uncertainty left him. “Yes, Leisha. I do wish it. We all do. But we can’t. That’s why I work with Hawke in unionizing underclass morons who waste a third of their life asleep. Because we can’t be you.”

  His mother came up behind them. “Is everything all right in here?” Alice asked, looking from her son to her sister. She wore, Jordan suddenly noticed, her usual warm expression and a truly hideous dress, an expensive green silk that did nothing to flatter her stoutness. Around her neck was the antique pendant Beck had given her. It had once belonged to some British duchess.

  “Fine,” Jordan said, and couldn’t think of anything else to say. Twins—they were twins. The three of them smiled at each other, silent, until Alice spoke. Jordan was startled to see that his mother was a little drunk.

  “Leisha, did I tell you about the new case registered with our Twin Group? Twins raised apart from birth, but when one broke his arm, the other felt pain for weeks in the same arm and couldn’t figure out why?”

  “Or thought he felt the pain,” Leisha said, “in retrospect.”

  “Ah,” Alice said, as if Leisha had answered some other question entirely, and Jordan saw that his mother’s eyes were more knowing than he had ever seen them, and fully as dark as Calvin Hawke’s own.

  IN THE EARLY MORNING THE NEW MEXICO DESERT was incandescent with pearly light. Sharp-edged shadows, blue and pink and colors Leisha had never imagined shadows could be, crept like living things across the vast emptiness. On the distant horizon the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rose clear and precise.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Susan Melling said.

  Leisha said, “I never knew light could look like that.”

  “Not everybody likes the desert. Too desolate, too empty, too hostile to human life.”