The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “My father values brains and time,” Leisha said. “He’s the biggest supporter of Kenzo Yagai.”

  “Oh, Leisha, do you think I don’t already know that? Are you flashing me or what?”

  Leisha said with great deliberateness, “I’m talking to you.” But the next minute she could feel the hurt break through on her face.

  “I’m sorry,” Keller muttered. He shot off his chair and paced to the computer, back. “I am sorry. But I don’t . . . I don’t understand what you’re doing here.”

  “I’m lonely,” Leisha said, astonished at herself. She looked up at him. “It’s true. I’m lonely. I am. I have friends and Daddy and Alice – but no one really knows, really understands – what? I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  Keller smiled. The smile changed his whole face, opened up its dark planes to the light. “I do. Oh, do I. What do you do when they say, ‘I had such a dream last night!’?”

  “Yes!” Leisha said. “But that’s even really minor – it’s when I say, ‘I’ll look that up for you tonight’ and they get that funny look on their face that means ‘She’ll do it while I’m asleep.’ ”

  “But that’s even really minor,” Keller said. “It’s when you’re playing basketball in the gym after supper and then you go to the diner for food and then you say ‘Let’s have a walk by the lake’ and they say ‘I’m really tired. I’m going home to bed now.’”

  “But that’s really minor,” Leisha said, jumping up. “It’s when you really are absorbed by the movie and then you get the point and it’s so goddamn beautiful you leap up and say ‘Yes! Yes!’ and Susan says ‘Leisha, really – you’d think nobody but you ever enjoyed anything before.’”

  “Who’s Susan?” Keller said.

  The mood was broken. But not really; Leisha could say “My stepmother” without much discomfort over what Susan had promised to be and what she had become. Keller stood inches from her, smiling that joyous smile, understanding, and suddenly relief washed over Leisha so strong that she walked straight into him and put her arms around his neck, only tightening them when she felt his startled jerk. She started to sob – she, Leisha, who never cried.

  “Hey,” Richard said. “Hey.”

  “Brilliant,” Leisha said, laughing. “Brilliant remark.”

  She could feel his embarrassed smile. “Wanta see my fish migration curves instead?”

  “No,” Leisha sobbed, and he went on holding her, patting her back awkwardly, telling her without words that she was home.

  Camden waited up for her, although it was past midnight. He had been smoking heavily. Through the blue air he said quietly, “Did you have a good time, Leisha?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad,” he said, and put out his last cigarette, and climbed the stairs – slowly, stiffly, he was nearly seventy now – to bed.

  They went everywhere together for nearly a year: swimming, dancing, to the museums, the theater, the library. Richard introduced her to the others, a group of twelve kids between fourteen and nineteen, all of them intelligent and eager. All Sleepless.

  Leisha learned.

  Tony’s parents, like her own, had divorced. But Tony, fourteen, lived with his mother, who had not particularly wanted a Sleepless child, while his father, who had, acquired a red hovercar and a young girlfriend who designed ergonomic chairs in Paris. Tony was not allowed to tell anyone – relatives, schoolmates – that he was Sleepless. “They’ll think you’re a freak,” his mother said, eyes averted from her son’s face. The one time Tony disobeyed her and told a friend that he never slept, his mother beat him. Then she moved the family to a new neighborhood. He was nine years old.

  Jeanine, almost as long-legged and slim as Leisha, was training for the Olympics in ice skating. She practiced twelve hours a day, hours no Sleeper still in high school could ever have. So far the newspapers had not picked up the story. Jeanine was afraid that, if they did, they would somehow not let her compete.

  Jack, like Leisha, would start college in September. Unlike Leisha, he had already started his career. The practice of law had to wait for law school; the practice of investment required only money. Jack didn’t have much, but his precise financial analyses parlayed $600 saved from summer jobs to $3000 through stock-market investing, then to $10,000, and then he had enough to qualify for information-fund speculation. Jack was fifteen, not old enough to make legal investments; the transactions were all in the name of Kevin Baker, the oldest of the Sleepless, who lived in Austin. Jack told Leisha, “When I hit 84 percent profit over two consecutive quarters, the data analysts logged onto me. They were just sniffing. Well, that’s their job, even when the overall amounts are actually small. It’s the patterns they care about. If they take the trouble to cross-reference data banks and come up with the fact that Kevin is a Sleepless, will they try to stop us from investing somehow?”

  “That’s paranoid,” Leisha said.

  “No, it’s not,” Jeanine said. “Leisha, you don’t know.”

  “You mean because I’ve been protected by my father’s money and caring,” Leisha said. No one grimaced; all of them confronted ideas openly, without shadowy allusions. Without dreams.

  “Yes,” Jeanine said. “Your father sounds terrific. And he raised you to think that achievement should not be fettered – Jesus Christ, he’s a Yagaiist. Well, good. We’re glad for you.” She said it without sarcasm. Leisha nodded. “But the world isn’t always like that. They hate us.”

  “That’s too strong,” Carol said. “Not hate.”

  “Well, maybe,” Jeanine said. “But they’re different from us. We’re better, and they naturally resent that.”

  “I don’t see what’s natural about it,” Tony said. “Why shouldn’t it be just as natural to admire what’s better? We do. Does any one of us resent Kenzo Yagai for his genius? Or Nelson Wade, the physicist? Or Catherine Raduski?”

  “We don’t resent them because we are better,” Richard said. “Q.E.D.”

  “What we should do is have our own society,” Tony said. “Why should we allow their regulations to restrict our natural, honest achievements? Why should Jeanine be barred from skating against them and Jack from investing on their same terms just because we’re Sleepless? Some of them are brighter than others of them. Some have greater persistence. Well, we have greater concentration, more biochemical stability, and more time. All men are not created equal.”

  “Be fair, Jack – no one has been barred from anything yet,” Jeanine said.

  “But we will be.”

  “Wait,” Leisha said. She was deeply troubled by the conversation. “I mean, yes, in many ways we’re better. But you quoted out of context, Tony. The Declaration of Independence doesn’t say all men are created equal in ability. It’s talking about rights and power – it means that all are created equal under the law. We have no more right to a separate society or to being free of society’s restrictions than anyone else does. There’s no other way to freely trade one’s efforts, unless the same contractual rules apply to all.”

  “Spoken like a true Yagaiist,” Richard said, squeezing her hand.

  “That’s enough intellectual discussion for me,” Carol said, laughing. “We’ve been at this for hours. We’re at the beach, for Chrissake. Who wants to swim with me?”

  “I do,” Jeanine said. “Come on, Jack.”

  All of them rose, brushing sand off their suits, discarding sunglasses. Richard pulled Leisha to her feet. But just before they ran into the water, Tony put his skinny hand on her arm. “One more question, Leisha. Just to think about. If we achieve better than most other people, and we trade with the Sleepers when it’s mutually beneficial, making no distinction there between the strong and the weak – what obligation do we have to those so weak they don’t have anything to trade with us? We’re already going to give more than we get – do we have to do it when we get nothing at all? Do we have to take care of their deformed and handicapped and sick and lazy and shiftless with the products of
our work?”

  “Do the Sleepers have to?” Leisha countered.

  “Kenzo Yagai would say no. He’s a Sleeper.”

  “He would say they would receive the benefits of contractual trade even if they aren’t direct parties to the contract. The whole world is better-fed and healthier because of Y-energy.”

  “Come on!” Jeanine yelled. “Leisha, they’re dunking me! Jack, you stop that! Leisha, help me!”

  Leisha laughed. Just before she grabbed for Jeanine, she caught the look on Richard’s face, on Tony’s: Richard frankly lustful, Tony angry. At her. But why? What had she done, except argue in favor of dignity and trade?

  Then Jack threw water on her, and Carol pushed Jack into the warm spray, and Richard was there with his arms around her, laughing.

  When she got the water out of her eyes, Tony was gone.

  Midnight. “Okay,” Carol said. “Who’s first?”

  The six teenagers in the brambled clearing looked at each other. A Y-lamp, kept on low for atmosphere, cast weird shadows across their faces and over their bare legs. Around the clearing Roger Camden’s trees stood thick and dark, a wall between them and the closest of the estate’s outbuildings. It was very hot. August air hung heavy, sullen. They had voted against bringing an air-conditioned Y-field because this was a return to the primitive, the dangerous; let it be primitive.

  Six pairs of eyes stared at the glass in Carol’s hand.

  “Come on,” she said. “Who wants to drink up?” Her voice was jaunty, theatrically hard. “It was difficult enough to get this.”

  “How did you get it?” said Richard, the group member – except for Tony – with the least influential family contacts, the least money. “In a drinkable form like that?”

  “My cousin Brian is a pharmaceutical supplier to the Biotech Institute. He’s curious.” Nods around the circle; except for Leisha, they were Sleepless precisely because they had relatives somehow connected to Biotech. And everyone was curious. The glass held interleukin-1, an immune system booster, one of many substances which as a side effect induced the brain to swift and deep sleep.

  Leisha stared at the glass. A warm feeling crept through her lower belly, not unlike the feeling when she and Richard made love.

  Tony said, “Give it to me!”

  Carol did. “Remember – you only need a little sip.”

  Tony raised the glass to his mouth, stopped, looked at them over the rim from his fierce eyes. He drank.

  Carol took back the glass. They all watched Tony. Within a minute he lay on the rough ground; within two, his eyes closed in sleep.

  It wasn’t like seeing parents sleep, siblings, friends. It was Tony. They looked away, didn’t meet each other’s eyes. Leisha felt the warmth between her legs tug and tingle, faintly obscene.

  When it was her turn, she drank slowly, then passed the glass to Jeanine. Her head turned heavy, as if it were being stuffed with damp rags. The trees at the edge of the clearing blurred. The portable lamp blurred, too – it wasn’t bright and clean anymore but squishy, blobby; if she touched it, it would smear. Then darkness swooped over her brain, taking it away: Taking away her mind. “Daddy!” She tried to call, to clutch for him, but then the darkness obliterated her.

  Afterward, they all had headaches. Dragging themselves back through the woods in the thin morning light was torture, compounded by an odd shame. They didn’t touch each other. Leisha walked as far away from Richard as she could. It was a whole day before the throbbing left the base of her skull, or the nausea her stomach.

  There had not even been any dreams.

  “I want you to come with me tonight,” Leisha said, for the tenth or twelfth time. “We both leave for college in just two days; this is the last chance. I really want you to meet Richard.”

  Alice lay on her stomach across her bed. Her hair, brown and lusterless, fell around her face. She wore an expensive yellow jumpsuit, silk by Ann Patterson, which rucked up in wrinkles around her knees.

  “Why? What do you care if I meet Richard or not?”

  “Because you’re my sister,” Leisha said. She knew better than to say “my twin.” Nothing got Alice angry faster.

  “I don’t want to.” The next moment Alice’s face changed. “Oh, I’m sorry, Leisha – I didn’t mean to sound so snotty. But . . . but I don’t want to.”

  “It won’t be all of them. Just Richard. And just for an hour or so. Then you can come back here and pack for Northwestern.”

  “I’m not going to Northwestern.”

  Leisha stared at her.

  Alice said, “I’m pregnant.”

  Leisha sat on the bed. Alice rolled onto her back, brushed the hair out of her eyes, and laughed. Leisha’s ears closed against the sound. “Look at you,” Alice said. “You’d think it was you who was pregnant. But you never would be, would you, Leisha? Not until it was the proper time. Not you.”

  “How?” Leisha said. “We both had our caps put in . . .”

  “I had the cap removed,” Alice said.

  “You wanted to get pregnant?”

  “Damn flash I did. And there’s not a thing Daddy can do about it. Except, of course, cut off all credit completely, but I don’t think he’ll do that, do you?” She laughed again. “Even to me?”

  “But Alice . . . why? Not just to anger Daddy!”

  “No,” Alice said. “Although you would think of that, wouldn’t you? Because I want something to love. Something of my own. Something that has nothing to do with this house.”

  Leisha thought of her and Alice running through the conservatory, years ago, her and Alice, darting in and out of the sunlight. “It hasn’t been so bad growing up in this house.”

  “Leisha, you’re stupid. I don’t know how anyone so smart can be so stupid. Get out of my room! Get out!”

  “But Alice . . . a baby . . .”

  “Get out!” Alice shrieked. “Go to Harvard! Go be successful! Just get out!”

  Leisha jerked off the bed. “Gladly! You’re irrational, Alice! You don’t think ahead, you don’t plan a baby . . .” But she could never sustain anger. It dribbled away, leaving her mind empty. She looked at Alice, who suddenly put out her arms. Leisha went into them.

  “You’re the baby,” Alice said wonderingly. “You are. You’re so . . . I don’t know what. You’re a baby.”

  Leisha said nothing. Alice’s arms felt warm, felt whole, felt like two children running in and out of sunlight. “I’ll help you, Alice. If Daddy won’t.”

  Alice abruptly pushed her away. “I don’t need your help.”

  Alice stood. Leisha rubbed her empty arms, fingertips scraping across opposite elbows. Alice kicked the empty, open trunk in which she was supposed to pack for Northwestern, and then abruptly smiled, a smile that made Leisha look away. She braced herself for more abuse. But what Alice said, very softly, was, “Have a good time at Harvard.”

  5

  She loved it.

  From the first sight of Massachusetts Hall, older than the United States by a half century, Leisha felt something that had been missing in Chicago: Age. Roots. Tradition. She touched the bricks of Widener Library, the glass cases in the Peabody Museum, as if they were the grail. She had never been particularly sensitive to myth or drama; the anguish of Juliet seemed to her artificial, that of Willy Loan merely wasteful. Only King Arthur, struggling to create a better social order, had interested her. But now, walking under the huge autumn trees, she suddenly caught a glimpse of a force that could span generations, fortunes left to endow learning and achievement the benefactors would never see, individual effort spanning and shaping centuries to come. She stopped, and looked at the sky through the leaves, at the buildings solid with purpose. At such moments she thought of Camden, bending the will of an entire genetic research Institute to create her in the image he wanted.

  Within a month, she had forgotten all such mega-musings.

  The work load was incredible, even for her. The Sauley School had encouraged individual exp
loration at her own pace; Harvard knew what it wanted from her, at its pace. In the last twenty years, under the academic leadership of a man who in his youth had watched Japanese economic domination with dismay, Harvard had become the controversial leader of a return to hard-edged learning of facts, theories, applications, problem-solving, intellectual efficiency. The school accepted one out of every two hundred applications from around the world. The daughter of England’s Prime Minister had flunked out her first year and been sent home.

  Leisha had a single room in a new dormitory, the dorm because she had spent so many years isolated in Chicago and was hungry for people, the single so she would not disturb anyone else when she worked all night. Her second day a boy from down the hall sauntered in and perched on the edge of her desk.

  “So you’re Leisha Camden.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sixteen years old.”

  “Almost seventeen.”

  “Going to out-perform us all, I understand, without even trying.”

  Leisha’s smile faded. The boy stared at her from under lowered downy brows. He was smiling, his eyes sharp. From Richard and Tony and the others Leisha had learned to recognize the anger that presented itself as contempt.

  “Yes,” Leisha said coolly, “I am.”

  “Are you sure? With your pretty little-girl hair and your mutant little-girl brain?”

  “Oh, leave her alone, Hannaway,” said another voice. A tall blond boy, so thin his ribs looked like ripples in brown sand, stood in jeans and bare feet, drying his wet hair. “Don’t you ever get tired of walking around being an asshole?”

  “Do you?” Hannaway said. He heaved himself off the desk and started toward the door. The blond moved out of his way. Leisha moved into it.

  “The reason I’m going to do better than you,” she said evenly, “is because I have certain advantages you don’t. Including sleeplessness. And then after I ‘out-perform’ you, I’ll be glad to help you study for your tests so that you can pass, too.”