The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Leisha thought there was a note of impatience in his voice. He liked her to explore things first, then report on them to him later. Both parts were important.

  Leisha laughed. “You know what, Daddy? You’re predictable.”

  Camden laughed, too. In the middle of the laugh Susan came in. “He certainly is not. Roger, what about that meeting in Buenos Aires Thursday? Is it on or off?” When he didn’t answer, her voice grew shriller. “Roger? I’m talking to you!”

  Leisha averted her eyes. Two years ago Susan had finally left genetic research to run Camden’s house and schedule; before that she had tried hard to do both. Since she had left Biotech, it seemed to Leisha, Susan had changed. Her voice was tighter. She was more insistent that Cook and the gardener follow her directions exactly, without deviation. Her blonde braids had become stiff sculptured waves of platinum.

  “It’s on,” Roger said.

  “Well, thanks for at least answering. Am I going?”

  “If you like.”

  “I like.”

  Susan left the room. Leisha rose and stretched. Her long legs rose on tiptoe. It felt good to reach, to stretch, to feel sunlight from the wide windows wash over her face. She smiled at her father, and found him watching her with an unexpected expression.

  “Leisha—”

  “What?”

  “See Keller. But be careful.”

  “Of what?”

  But Camden wouldn’t answer.

  The voice on the phone had been noncommittal. “Leisha Camden? Yes, I know who you are. Three o’clock on Thursday?” The house was modest, a thirty-year-old Colonial on a quiet suburban street where small children on bicycles could be watched from the front window. Few roofs had more than one Y-energy cell. The trees, huge old sugar maples, were beautiful.

  “Come in,” Richard Keller said.

  He was no taller than she, stocky, with a bad case of acne. Probably no genetic alterations except sleep, Leisha guessed. He had thick dark hair, a low forehead, and bushy black brows. Before he closed the door Leisha saw his stare at her car and driver, parked in the driveway next to a rusty ten-speed bike.

  “I can’t drive yet,” she said. “I’m still fifteen.”

  “It’s easy to learn,” Keller said. “So, you want to tell me why you’re here?”

  Leisha liked his directness. “To meet some other Sleepless.”

  “You mean you never have? Not any of us?”

  “You mean the rest of you know each other?” She hadn’t expected that.

  “Come to my room, Leisha.”

  She followed him to the back of the house. No one else seemed to be home. His room was large and airy, filled with computers and filing cabinets. A rowing machine sat in one corner. It looked like a shabbier version of the room of any bright classmate at the Sauley School, except there was more space without a bed. She walked over to the computer screen.

  “Hey—you working on Boesc equations?”

  “On an application of them.”

  “To what?”

  “Fish migration patterns.”

  Leisha smiled. “Yeah—that would work. I never thought of that.”

  Keller seemed not to know what to do with her smile. He looked at the wall, then at her chin. “You interested in Gaea patterns? In the environment?”

  “Well, no,” Leisha confessed. “Not particularly. I’m going to study politics at Harvard. Pre-law. But of course we had Gaea patterns at school.”

  Keller’s gaze finally came unstuck from her face. He ran a hand through his dark hair. “Sit down, if you want.”

  Leisha sat, looking appreciatively at the wall posters, shifting green on blue, like ocean currents. “I like those. Did you program them yourself?”

  “You’re not at all what I pictured,” Keller said.

  “How did you picture me?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Stuck-up. Superior. Shallow, despite your IQ.”

  She was more hurt than she had expected to be.

  Keller blurted, “You’re the only one of the Sleepless who’s really rich. But you already know that.”

  “No, I don’t. I’ve never checked.”

  He took the chair beside her, stretching his stocky legs straight in front of him, in a slouch that had nothing to do with relaxation. “It makes sense, really. Rich people don’t have their children genetically modified to be superior—they think any offspring of theirs is already superior. By their values. And poor people can’t afford it. We Sleepless are upper-middle class, no more. Children of professors, scientists, people who value brains and time.”

  “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 eighty-four 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 a
way 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.”