The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “Tony? Leisha.”

  “The answer is yes, yes, no, and go to hell.”

  Leisha gritted her teeth. “Fine. Now tell me the questions.”

  “Are you really serious about the Sleepless withdrawing into their own self-sufficient society? Is Jennifer Sharifi willing to finance a project the size of building a small city? Don’t you think that’s a cheat of all that can be accomplished by patient integration of the Group into the mainstream? And what about the contradictions of living in an armed restricted city and still trading with the Outside?”

  “I would never tell you to go to hell.”

  “Hooray for you,” Tony said. After a moment he added, “I’m sorry. That sounds like one of them.”

  “It’s wrong for us, Tony.”

  “Thanks for not saying I couldn’t pull it off.”

  She wondered if he could. “We’re not a separate species, Tony.”

  “Tell that to the Sleepers.”

  “You exaggerate. There are haters out there, there are always haters, but to give up . . .”

  “We’re not giving up. Whatever we create can be freely traded: software, hardware, novels, information, theories, legal counsel. We can travel in and out. But we’ll have a safe place to return to. Without the leeches who think we owe them blood because we’re better than they are.”

  “It isn’t a matter of owing.”

  “Really?” Tony said. “Let’s have this out, Leisha. All the way. You’re a Yagaiist – what do you believe in?”

  “Tony . . .”

  “Do it,” Tony said, and in his voice she heard the fourteen-year-old Richard had introduced her to. Simultaneously, she saw her father’s face: not as he was now, since the by-pass, but as he had been when she was a little girl, holding her on his lap to explain that she was special.

  “I believe in voluntary trade that is mutually beneficial. That spiritual dignity comes from supporting one’s life through one’s own efforts, and trading the results of those efforts in mutual cooperation throughout the society. That the symbol of this is the contract. And that we need each other for the fullest, most beneficial trade.”

  “Fine,” Tony bit off. “Now what about the beggars in Spain?”

  “The what?”

  “You walk down a street in a poor country like Spain and you see a beggar. Do you give him a dollar?”

  “Probably.”

  “Why? He’s trading nothing with you. He has nothing to trade.”

  “I know. Out of kindness. Compassion.”

  “You see six beggars. Do you give them all a dollar?”

  “Probably,” Leisha said.

  “You would. You see a hundred beggars and you haven’t got Leisha Camden’s money – do you give them each a dollar?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Leisha reached for patience. Few people could make her want to cut off a comm link; Tony was one of them. “Too draining on my own resources. My life has first claim on the resources I earn.”

  “All right. Now consider this. At Biotech Institute – where you and I began, dear pseudo-sister – Dr. Melling has just yesterday—”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Susan Melling. Oh, God, I completely forgot – she used to be married to your father!”

  “I lost track of her,” Leisha said. “I didn’t realize she’d gone back to research. Alice once said . . . never mind. What’s going on at Biotech?”

  “Two crucial items, just released. Carla Dutcher has had first-month fetal genetic analysis. Sleeplessness is a dominant gene. The next generation of the Group won’t sleep either.”

  “We all knew that,” Leisha said. Carla Dutcher was the world’s first pregnant Sleepless. Her husband was a Sleeper. “The whole world expected that.”

  “But the press will have a windfall with it anyway. Just watch. Muties Breed! New Race Set To Dominate Next Generation of Children!”

  Leisha didn’t deny it. “And the second item?”

  “It’s sad, Leisha. We’ve just had our first death.”

  Her stomach tightened. “Who?”

  “Bernie Kuhn. Seattle.” She didn’t know him. “A car accident. It looks pretty straightforward – he lost control on a steep curve when his brakes failed. He had only been driving a few months. He was seventeen. But the significance here is that his parents have donated his brain and body to Biotech, in conjunction with the pathology department at the Chicago Medical School. They’re going to take him apart to get the first good look at what prolonged sleeplessness does to the body and brain.”

  “They should,” Leisha said. “That poor kid. But what are you so afraid they’ll find?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. But whatever it is, if the haters can use it against us, they will.”

  “You’re paranoid, Tony.”

  “Impossible. The Sleepless have personalities calmer and more reality-oriented than the norm. Don’t you read the literature?”

  “Tony—”

  “What if you walk down that street in Spain and a hundred beggars each want a dollar and you say no and they have nothing to trade you but they’re so rotten with anger about what you have that they knock you down and grab it and then beat you out of sheer envy and despair?”

  Leisha didn’t answer.

  “Are you going to say that’s not a human scenario, Leisha? That it never happens?”

  “It happens,” Leisha said evenly. “But not all that often.”

  “Bullshit. Read more history. Read more newspapers. But the point is: What do you owe the beggars then? What does a good Yagaiist who believes in mutually beneficial contracts do with people who have nothing to trade and can only take?”

  “You’re not—”

  “What, Leisha? In the most objective terms you can manage, what do we owe the grasping and non-productive needy?”

  “What I said originally. Kindness. Compassion.”

  “Even if they don’t trade it back? Why?”

  “Because . . .” She stopped.

  “Why? Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing them anything? Be as honest as I know you are.”

  Leisha put her head between her knees. The question gaped beneath her, but she didn’t try to evade it. “I don’t know. I just know we do.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t answer. After a moment, Tony did. The intellectual challenge was gone from his voice. He said, almost tenderly, “Come down in the spring and see the site for Sanctuary. The buildings will be going up then.”

  “No,” Leisha said.

  “I’d like you to.”

  “No. Armed retreat is not the way.”

  Tony said, “The beggars are getting nastier, Leisha. As the Sleepless grow richer. And I don’t mean in money.”

  “Tony—” she said, and stopped. She couldn’t think what to say.

  “Don’t walk down too many streets armed with just the memory of Kenzo Yagai.”

  In March, a bitterly cold March of winds whipping down the Charles River, Richard Keller came to Cambridge. Leisha had not seen him for four years. He didn’t send her word on the Groupnet that he was coming. She hurried up the walk to her townhouse, muffled to the eyes in a red wool scarf against the snowy cold, and he stood there blocking the doorway. Behind Leisha, her bodyguard tensed.

  “Richard! Bruce, it’s all right, this is an old friend.”

  “Hello, Leisha.”

  He was heavier, sturdier-looking, with a breadth of shoulder she didn’t recognize. But the face was Richard’s, older but unchanged: dark low brows, unruly dark hair. He had grown a beard.

  “You look beautiful,” he said.

  She handed him a cup of coffee. “Are you here on business?” From the Groupnet she knew that he had finished his Master’s and had done outstanding work in marine biology in the Caribbean, but had
left that a year ago and disappeared from the net.

  “No. Pleasure.” He smiled suddenly, the old smile that opened up his dark face. “I almost forgot about that for a long time. Contentment, yes, we’re all good at the contentment that comes from sustained work, but pleasure? Whim? Caprice? When was the last time you did something silly, Leisha?”

  She smiled. “I ate cotton candy in the shower.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “To see if it would dissolve in gooey pink patterns.”

  “Did it?”

  “Yes. Lovely ones.”

  “And that was your last silly thing? When was it?”

  “Last summer,” Leisha said, and laughed.

  “Well, mine is sooner than that. It’s now. I’m in Boston for no other reason than the spontaneous pleasure of seeing you.”

  Leisha stopped laughing. “That’s an intense tone for a spontaneous pleasure, Richard.”

  “Yup,” he said, intensely. She laughed again. He didn’t.

  “I’ve been in India, Leisha. And China and Africa. Thinking, mostly. Watching. First I traveled like a Sleeper, attracting no attention. Then I set out to meet the Sleepless in India and China. There are a few, you know, whose parents were willing to come here for the operation. They pretty much are accepted and left alone. I tried to figure out why desperately poor countries – by our standards anyway, over there Y-energy is mostly available only in big cities – don’t have any trouble accepting the superiority of Sleepless, whereas Americans, with more prosperity than any time in history, build in resentment more and more.”

  Leisha said, “Did you figure it out?”

  “No. But I figured out something else, watching all those communes and villages and kampongs. We are too individualistic.”

  Disappointment swept Leisha. She saw her father’s face: Excellence is what counts, Leisha. Excellence supported by individual effort . . . She reached for Richard’s cup. “More coffee?”

  He caught her wrist and looked up into her face. “Don’t misunderstand me, Leisha. I’m not talking about work. We are too much individuals in the rest of our lives. Too emotionally rational. Too much alone. Isolation kills more than the free flow of ideas. It kills joy.”

  He didn’t let go of her wrist. She looked down into his eyes, into depths she hadn’t seen before: It was the feeling of looking into a mine shaft, both giddy and frightening, knowing that at the bottom might be gold or darkness. Or both.

  Richard said softly, “Stewart?”

  “Over long ago. An undergraduate thing.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own.

  “Kevin?”

  “No, never – we’re just friends.”

  “I wasn’t sure. Anyone?”

  “No.”

  He let go of her wrist. Leisha peered at him timidly. He suddenly laughed. “Joy, Leisha.” An echo sounded in her mind, but she couldn’t place it and then it was gone and she laughed too, a laugh airy and frothy as pink cotton candy in summer.

  “Come home, Leisha. He’s had another heart attack.”

  Susan Melling’s voice on the phone was tired. Leisha said, “How bad?”

  “The doctors aren’t sure. Or say they’re not sure. He wants to see you. Can you leave your studies?”

  It was May, the last push toward her finals. The Law Review proofs were behind schedule. Richard had started a new business, marine consulting to Boston fishermen plagued with sudden inexplicable shifts in ocean currents, and was working twenty hours a day. “I’ll come,” Leisha said.

  Chicago was colder than Boston. The trees were half-budded. On Lake Michigan, filling the huge east windows of her father’s house, whitecaps tossed up cold spray. Leisha saw that Susan was living in the house: her brushes on Camden’s dresser, her journals on the credenza in the foyer.

  “Leisha,” Camden said. He looked old. Gray skin, sunken cheeks, the fretful and bewildered look of men who accepted potency like air, indivisible from their lives. In the corner of the room, on a small eighteenth-century slipper chair, sat a short, stocky woman with brown braids.

  “Alice.”

  “Hello, Leisha.”

  “Alice. I’ve looked for you . . .” The wrong thing to say. Leisha had looked, but not very hard, deterred by the knowledge that Alice had not wanted to be found. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” Alice said. She seemed remote, gentle, unlike the angry Alice of six years ago in the raw Pennsylvania hills. Camden moved painfully on the bed. He looked at Leisha with eyes which, she saw, were undimmed in their blue brightness.

  “I asked Alice to come. And Susan. Susan came a while ago. I’m dying, Leisha.”

  No one contradicted him. Leisha, knowing his respect for facts, remained silent. Love hurt her chest.

  “John Jaworski has my will. None of you can break it. But I wanted to tell you myself what’s in it. The last few years I’ve been selling, liquidating. Most of my holdings are accessible now. I’ve left a tenth to Alice, a tenth to Susan, a tenth to Elizabeth, and the rest to you, Leisha, because you’re the only one with the individual ability to use the money to its full potential for achievement.”

  Leisha looked wildly at Alice, who gazed back with her strange remote calm. “Elizabeth? My . . . mother? Is alive?”

  “Yes,” Camden said.

  “You told me she was dead! Years and years ago!”

  “Yes. I thought it was better for you that way. She didn’t like what you were, was jealous of what you could become. And she had nothing to give you. She would only have caused you emotional harm.”

  Beggars in Spain . . .

  “That was wrong, Dad. You were wrong. She’s my mother . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  Camden didn’t flinch. “I don’t think I was. But you’re an adult now. You can see her if you wish.”

  He went on looking at her from his bright, sunken eyes, while around Leisha the air heaved and snapped. Her father had lied to her. Susan watched her closely, a small smile on her lips. Was she glad to see Camden fall in his daughter’s estimation? Had she all along been that jealous of their relationship, of Leisha . . .

  She was thinking like Tony.

  The thought steadied her a little. But she went on staring at Camden, who went on staring implacably back, unbudged, a man positive even on his death bed that he was right.

  Alice’s hand was on her elbow, Alice’s voice so soft that no one but Leisha could hear. “He’s done now, Leisha. And after a while you’ll be all right.”

  Alice had left her son in California with her husband of two years, Beck Watrous, a building contractor she had met while waitressing in a resort on the Artificial Islands. Beck had adopted Jordan, Alice’s son.

  “Before Beck there was a real bad time,” Alice said in her remote voice. “You know, when I was carrying Jordan I actually used to dream that he would be Sleepless? Like you. Every night I’d dream that, and every morning I’d wake up and have morning sickness with a baby that was only going to be a stupid nothing like me. I stayed with Ed – in Pennsylvania, remember? You came to see me there once – for two more years. When he beat me, I was glad. I wished Daddy could see. At least Ed was touching me.”

  Leisha made a sound in her throat.

  “I finally left because I was afraid for Jordan. I went to California, did nothing but eat for a year. I got up to 190 pounds.” Alice was, Leisha estimated, five-foot-four. “Then I came home to see Mother.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” Leisha said. “You knew she was alive and you didn’t tell me.”

  “She’s in a drying-out tank half the time,” Alice said, with brutal simplicity. “She wouldn’t see you if you wanted to. But she saw me, and she fell slobbering all over me as her ‘real’ daughter, and she threw up on my dress. And I backed away from her and looked at the dress and knew it should be thrown up on, it was so ugly. Deliberately ugly. She started screaming how Dad had ruined her life, ruined mine, all for you. And do you know what I did?”

 
; “What?” Leisha said. Her voice was shaky.

  “I flew home, burned all my clothes, got a job, started college, lost fifty pounds, and put Jordan in play therapy.”

  The sisters sat silent. Beyond the window the lake was dark, unlit by moon or stars. It was Leisha who suddenly shook, and Alice who patted her shoulder.

  “Tell me . . .” Leisha couldn’t think what she wanted to be told, except that she wanted to hear Alice’s voice in the gloom, Alice’s voice as it was now, gentle and remote, without damage any more from the damaging fact of Leisha’s existence. Her very existence as damage. “. . . tell me about Jordan. He’s five now? What’s he like?”

  Alice turned her head to look levelly into Leisha’s eyes. “He’s a happy, ordinary little boy. Completely ordinary.”

  Camden died a week later. After the funeral, Leisha tried to see her mother at the Brookfield Drug and Alcohol Abuse Center. Elizabeth Camden, she was told, saw no one except her only child, Alice Camden Watrous.

  Susan Melling, dressed in black, drove Leisha to the airport. Susan talked deftly, determinedly, about Leisha’s studies, about Harvard, about the Review. Leisha answered in monosyllables but Susan persisted, asking questions, quietly insisting on answers: When would Leisha take her bar exams? Where was she interviewing for jobs? Gradually Leisha began to lose the numbness she had felt since her father’s casket was lowered into the ground. She realized that Susan’s persistent questioning was a kindness.

  “He sacrificed a lot of people,” Leisha said suddenly.

  “Not me,” Susan said. She pulled the car into the airport parking lot. “Only for a while there, when I gave up my work to do his. Roger didn’t respect sacrifice much.”

  “Was he wrong?” Leisha said. The question came out with a kind of desperation she hadn’t intended.

  Susan smiled sadly. “No. He wasn’t wrong. I should never have left my research. It took me a long time to come back to myself after that.”

  He does that to people, Leisha heard inside her head. Susan? Or Alice? She couldn’t, for once, remember clearly. She saw her father in the old conservatory, potting and repotting the dramatic exotic flowers he had loved.

  She was tired. It was muscle fatigue from stress, she knew; twenty minutes of rest would restore her. Her eyes burned from unaccustomed tears. She leaned her head back against the car seat and closed them.