“I’m seven,” Stella said. “Almost eight.”
“You’re a very large five. Your birthday is March 23. Can you do this, Stella?”
“Yes,” the little girl said. Her voice was stronger.
Leisha stared at Alice. “Can you do this?”
“Of course I can,” Alice said. “I’m Roger Camden’s daughter.”
* * *
Alice half-carried, half-supported Stella into the Emergency Room of the small community hospital. Leisha watched from the car: the short stocky woman, the child’s thin body with the twisted arm. Then she drove Alice’s car to the farthest corner of the parking lot, under the dubious cover of a skimpy maple, and locked it. She tied the scarf more securely around her face.
Alice’s license plate number, and her name, would be in every police and rental-car databank by now. The medical banks were slower; often they uploaded from local precincts only once a day, resenting the governmental interference in what was still, despite a half-century of battle, a private-sector enterprise. Alice and Stella would probably be all right in the hospital. Probably. But Alice could not rent another car.
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 in the hospital, 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, 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, and tried 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, 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 towards 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 stood 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 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 co-beneficiary 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, h
er 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—”
“She’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 meantime she won’t be returned home. 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 man 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.
LIVING WILL
Alexander Jablokov
Within the last few years, Alexander Jablokov has established himself as one of the most highly regarded and promising new writers in SF. He is a frequent contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing, and other magazines. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he is involved in working on a projected anthology of “Future Boston” stories being put together by the Cambridge Writer’s Workshop; he himself has written several stories set in the “Future Boston” milieu. His story “At the Cross-Time Jaunters’ Ball” was in our Fifth Annual Collection; his novella “A Deeper Sea” was in our Seventh Annual Collection; and his “The Death Artist” was in our Eighth Annual Collection. His first novel, Carve the Sky, was released in 1991 to wide critical acclaim, and his second novel, A Deeper Sea, will be out soon. He’s at work on a new book, tentatively called Nimbus, and I have little doubt that he will come to be numbered among the Big Names of the nineties.
Here he relates the powerful story of a far-sighted man who makes all the necessary preparations for his eventual death—including a few that most people would not think of.…
The computer screen lay on the desk like a piece of paper. Like fine calfskin parchment, actually—the software had that as a standard option. At the top, in block capitals, were the words COMMENCE ENTRY.
“Boy, you have a lot to learn.” Roman Maitland leaned back in his chair. “That’s something I would never say. Let that be your first datum.”
PREFERRED PROMPT?
“Surprise me.” Roman turned away to pour himself a cup of coffee from the thermos next to a stone bust of Archimedes. The bust had been given to him by his friend Gerald “to help you remember your roots,” as Gerald had put it. Archimedes desperately shouldered the disorganized stack of optical disks that threatened to sweep him from his shelf.
Roman turned back to the screen. TELL ME A STORY, it said. He barked a laugh. “Fair enough.” He stood up and slouched around his office. The afternoon sun slanted through the high windows. Through the concealing shrubs he could just hear the road in front of the house, a persistent annoyance. What had been a minor street when he built the house had turned into a major thoroughfare.
“My earliest memory is of my sister.” Roman Maitland was a stocky, white-haired man with high-arched, dark eyebrows. His wife Abigail claimed that with each passing year he looked more and more like Warren G. Harding. Roman had looked at the picture in the encyclopedia and failed to see the resemblance. He was much better looking than Harding.
“The hallway leading to the kitchen had red-and-green linoleum in a kind of linked circle pattern. You can cross-reference linoleum if you want.” The antique parchment remained blank. “My sister’s name is Elizabeth—Liza. I can see her. She has her hair in two tiny pink bows and is wearing a pale blue dress and black shoes. She’s sitting on the linoleum, playing with one of my trucks. One of my new trucks. I grab it away from her. She doesn’t cry. She just looks up at me with serious eyes. She has a pointy little chin. I don’t remember what happened after that. Liza lives in Seattle now. Her chin is pointy again.”
The wall under the windows was taken up with the black boxes of field memories. They linked into the processor inside the desk. The screen swirled and settled into a pattern of interlocking green and pink circles. “That’s not quite it. The diamond parts were a little more—” Another pattern appeared, subtly different. Roman stared at it in wonder. “Yes. Yes! That’s it. How did you know?” The computer, having linked to some obscure linoleum-pattern database on the network, blanked the screen. Roman wondered how many more of his private memories would prove to be publicly accessible. TELL ME A STORY.
He pulled a book from the metal bookshelf. “My favorite book by Raymond Chandler is The Little Sister. I think Orfamay Quest is one of the great characters of literature. Have you read Chandler?”
I HAVE ACCESS TO THE ENTIRE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HOLDINGS.
“Boy, you’re getting gabby. But that’s not what I asked.”
I HAVE NEVER READ ANYTHING.
“Give it a try. Though in some ways Elmore Leonard is even better.” H
e slipped Chandler back on the shelf, almost dumping the unwieldy mass of books piled on top of the neatly shelved ones. “There are books here I’ve read a dozen times. Some I’ve tried reading a dozen times. Some I will someday read and some I suppose I’ll never read.” He squatted down next to a tall stack of magazines and technical offprints and started sorting them desultorily.
WHY READ SOMETHING MORE THAN ONCE?
“Why see a friend more than once? I’ve often thought that I would like to completely forget a favorite book.” From where he squatted, the bookshelves loomed threateningly. He’d built his study with a high ceiling, knowing how the stuff would pile up. There was a dead plant at the top of the shelf nearest the desk. He frowned. How long had that been there? “Then I could read it again for the first time. The thought’s a little frightening. What if I didn’t like it? I’m not the person who read it for the first time, after all. Just as well, I guess, that it’s an experiment I can’t try. Abigail likes to reread Jane Austen. Particularly Emma.” He snorted. “But that’s not what you’re interested in, is it?” His stomach rumbled. “I’m hungry. It’s time for lunch.”
BON APPETIT.
“Thank you.”
Roman had built his house with exposed posts and beams and protected it outside with dark brick and granite. Abigail had filled it with elegant, clean-lined furniture which was much less obtrusive about showing its strength. Roman had only reluctantly ceded control of everything but his study and his garage workshop. He’d grown to like it. He could never have remembered to water so many plants, and the cunning arrangement of bright yellow porcelain vases and darkly rain-swept watercolors was right in a way he couldn’t have achieved.
At the end of the hallway, past the kitchen’s clean flare, glowed the rectangle of the rear screen door. Abigail bent over her flowers, fuzzy through its mesh like a romantic memory, a sun hat hiding her face. Her sun-dappled dress gleamed against the dark garden.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 14