The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  “Leisha. I’ll need your legal help, if you’ll give it. They’re trying to fight me on Sanctuary. Please fly down here.”

  Sanctuary was raw brown gashes in the late-spring earth. It was situated in the Allegheny Mountains of southern New York State, old hills rounded by age and covered with pine and hickory. A superb road led from the closest town, Belmont, to Sanctuary. Low, maintenance-free buildings, whose design was plain but graceful, stood in various stages of completion. Jennifer Sharifi, looking strained, met Leisha and Richard. “Tony wants to talk to you, but first he asked me to show you both around.”

  “What’s wrong?” Leisha asked quietly. She had never met Jennifer before but no Sleepless looked like that—pinched, spent, weary—unless the stress level was enormous.

  Jennifer didn’t try to evade the question. “Later. First look at Sanctuary. Tony respects your opinion enormously, Leisha; he wants you to see everything.”

  The dormitories each held fifty, with communal rooms for cooking, dining, relaxing, and bathing, and a warren of separate offices and studios and labs for work. “We’re calling them ‘dorms’ anyway, despite the etymology,” Jennifer said, trying to smile. Leisha glanced at Richard. The smile was a failure.

  She was impressed, despite herself, with the completeness of Tony’s plans for lives that would be both communal and intensely private. There was a gym, a small hospital—“By the end of next year, we’ll have eighteen AMA-certified doctors, you know, and four are thinking of coming here’’—a daycare facility, a school, an intensive-crop farm. “Most of our food will come in from the outside, of course. So will most people’s jobs, although they’ll do as much of them as possible from here, over datanets. We’re not cutting ourselves off from the world—only creating a safe place from which to trade with it.” Leisha didn’t answer.

  Apart from the power facilities, self-supported Y-energy, she was most impressed with the human planning. Tony had Sleepless interested from virtually every field they would need both to care for themselves and to deal with the outside world. “Lawyers and accountants come first,” Jennifer said. “That’s our first line of defense in safeguarding ourselves. Tony recognizes that most modern battles for power are fought in the courtroom and boardroom.”

  But not all. Last, Jennifer showed them the plans for physical defense. She explained them with a mixture of defiance and pride: Every effort had been made to stop attackers without hurting them. Electronic surveillance completely circled the 150 square miles Jennifer had purchased—some counties were smaller than that, Leisha thought, dazed. When breached, a force field a half-mile within the E-gate activated, delivering electric shocks to anyone on foot—“But only on the outside of the field. We don’t want any of our kids hurt.” Unmanned penetration by vehicles or robots was identified by a system that located all moving metal above a certain mass within Sanctuary. Any moving metal that did not carry a special signaling device designed by Donna Pospula, a Sleepless who had patented important electronic components, was suspect.

  “Of course, we’re not set up for an air attack or an outright army assault,” Jennifer said. “But we don’t expect that. Only the haters in self-motivated hate.” Her voice sagged.

  Leisha touched the hard-copy of the security plans with one finger. They troubled her. “If we can’t integrate ourselves into the world … free trade should imply free movement.”

  “Yeah. Well,” Jennifer said, such an uncharacteristic Sleepless remark—both cynical and inarticulate—that Leisha looked up. “I have something to tell you, Leisha.”

  “What?”

  “Tony isn’t here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In Allegheny County jail. It’s true we’re having zoning battles about Sanctuary—zoning! In this isolated spot! But this is something else, something that just happened this morning. Tony’s been arrested for the kidnapping of Timmy DeMarzo.”

  The room wavered. “FBI?”

  “Yes.”

  “How … how did they find out?”

  “Some agent eventually cracked the case. They didn’t tell us how. Tony needs a lawyer, Leisha. Dana Monteiro has already agreed, but Tony wants you.”

  “Jennifer—I don’t even take the bar exams until July!”

  “He says he’ll wait. Dana will act as his lawyer in the meantime. Will you pass the bar?”

  “Of course. But I already have a job lined up with Morehouse, Kennedy, & Anderson in New York—” She stopped. Richard was looking at her hard, Jennifer gazing down at the floor. Leisha said quietly, “What will he plead?”

  “Guilty,” Jennifer said, “with—what is it called legally? Extenuating circumstances.”

  Leisha nodded. She had been afraid Tony would want to plead not guilty: more lies, subterfuge, ugly politics. Her mind ran swiftly over extenuating circumstances, precedents, tests to precedents … . They could use Clements v.Voy …

  “Dana is at the jail now,” Jennifer said. “Will you drive in with me?”

  “Yes.”

  In Belmont, the county seat, they were not allowed to see Tony. Dana Monteiro, as his attorney, could go in and out freely. Leisha, not officially an attorney at all, could go nowhere. This was told them by a man in the D.A.’s office whose face stayed immobile while he spoke to them, and who spat on the ground behind their shoes when they turned to leave, even though this left him with a smear of spittle on his courthouse floor.

  Richard and Leisha drove their rental car to the airport for the flight back to Boston. On the way Richard told Leisha he was leaving her. He was moving to Sanctuary, now, even before it was functional, to help with the planning and building.

  She stayed most of the time in her townhouse, studying ferociously for the bar exams or checking on the Sleepless children through Groupnet. She had not hired another bodyguard to replace Bruce, which made her reluctant to go outside very much; the reluctance in turn made her angry with herself. Once or twice a day she scanned Kevin’s electronic news clippings.

  There were signs of hope. The New York Times ran an editorial, widely reprinted on the electronic news services:

  PROSPERITY AND HATRED: A LOGIC CURVE WE’D RATHER NOT SEE

  The United States has never been a country that much values calm, logic, rationality. We have, as a people, tended to label these things “cold.” We have, as a people, tended to admire feeling and action: We exalt in our stories and our memorials, not the creation of the Constitution but its defense at Iwo Jima; not the intellectual achievements of a Stephen Hawking but the heroic passion of a Charles Lindbergh; not the inventors of the monorails and computers that unite us but the composers of the angry songs of rebellion that divide us.

  A peculiar aspect of this phenomenon is that it grows stronger in times of prosperity. The better off our citizenry, the greater their contempt for the calm reasoning that got them there, and the more passionate their indulgence in emotion. Consider, in the last century, the gaudy excesses of the Roaring Twenties and the anti-establishment contempt of the sixties. Consider, in our own century, the unprecedented prosperity brought about by Y-energy—and then consider that Kenzo Yagai, except to his followers, was seen as a greedy and bloodless logician, while our national adulation goes to neo-nihilist writer Stephen Castelli, to “feelie” actress Brenda Foss, and to daredevil gravity-well diver Jim Morse Luter.

  But most of all, as you ponder this phenomenon in your Y-energy houses, consider the current outpouring of irrational feeling directed at the “Sleepless” since the publication of the joint findings of the Biotech Institute and the Chicago Medical School concerning Sleepless tissue regeneration.

  Most of the Sleepless are intelligent. Most of them are calm, if you define that much-maligned word to mean directing one’s energies into solving problems rather than to emoting about them. (Even Pulitzer Prize winner Carolyn Rizzolo gave us a stunning play of ideas, not of passions run amuck.) All of them show a natural bent toward achievement, a bent given a decided boost by the one-
third more time in their days to achieve in. Their achievements lie, for the most part, in logical fields rather than emotional ones: Computers. Law. Finance. Physics. Medical research. They are rational, orderly, calm, intelligent, cheerful, young, and possibly very long-lived.

  And, in our United States of unprecedented prosperity, increasingly hated.

  Does the hatred that we have seen flower so fully over the last few months really grow, as many claim, from the “unfair advantage” the Sleepless have over the rest of us in securing jobs, promotions, money, success? Is it really envy over the Sleepless’ good fortune? Or does it come from something more pernicious, rooted in our tradition of shoot-from-the-hip American action: Hatred of the logical, the calm, the considered? Hatred in fact of the superior mind?

  If so, perhaps we should think deeply about the founders of this country: Jefferson, Washington, Paine, Adams—inhabitants of the Age of Reason, all. These men created our orderly and balanced system of laws precisely to protect the property and achievements created by the individual efforts of balanced and rational minds. The Sleepless may be our severest internal test yet of our own sober belief in law and order. No, the Sleepless were not “created equal,” but our attitudes toward them should be examined with a care equal to our soberest jurisprudence. We may not like what we learn about our own motives, but our credibility as a people may depend on the rationality and intelligence of the examination.

  Both have been in short supply in the public reaction to last month’s research findings.

  Law is not theater. Before we write laws reflecting gaudy and dramatic feelings, we must be very sure we understand the difference.

  Leisha hugged herself, gazing in delight at the screen, smiling. She called the New York Times: Who had written the editorial? The receptionist, cordial when she answered the phone, grew brusque. The Times was not releasing that information, “prior to internal investigation.”

  It could not dampen her mood. She whirled around the apartment, after days of sitting at her desk or screen. Delight demanded physical action. She washed dishes, picked up books. There were gaps in the furniture patterns where Richard had taken pieces that belonged to him; a little quieter now, she moved the furniture to close the gaps.

  Susan Melling called to tell her about the Times editorial; they talked warmly for a few minutes. When Susan hung up, the phone rang again.

  “Leisha? Your voice still sounds the same. This is Stewart Sutter.”

  “Stewart.” She had not seen him for years. Their romance had lasted two years and then dissolved, not from any painful issue so much as from the press of both their studies. Standing by the comm terminal, hearing his voice, Leisha suddenly felt again his hands on her breasts in the cramped dormitory bed: All those years before she had found a good use for a bed. The phantom hands became Richard’s hands, and a sudden pain pierced her.

  “Listen,” Stewart said, “I’m calling because there’s some information I think you should know. You take your bar exams next week, right? And then you have a tentative job with Morehouse, Kennedy, & Anderson.”

  “How do you know all that, Stewart?”

  “Men’s room gossip. Well, not as bad as that. But the New York legal community— that part of it, anyway—is smaller than you think. And, you’re a pretty visible figure.”

  “Yes,” Leisha said neutrally.

  “Nobody has the slightest doubt you’ll be called to the bar. But there is some doubt about the job with Morehouse, Kennedy. You’ve got two senior partners, Alan Morehouse and Seth Brown, who have changed their minds since this … flap. ‘Adverse publicity for the firm,’ ‘turning law into a circus,’ blah blah blah. You know the drill. But you’ve also got two powerful champions, Ann Carlyle and Michael Kennedy, the old man himself. He’s quite a mind. Anyway, I wanted you to know all this so you can recognize exactly what the situation is and know whom to count on in the in-fighting.”

  “Thank you,” Leisha said. “Stew … why do you care if I get it or not? Why should it matter to you?”

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone. Then Stewart said, very low, “We’re not all noodleheads out here, Leisha. Justice does still matter to some of us. So does achievement.”

  Light rose in her, a bubble of buoyant light.

  Stewart said, “You have a lot of support here for that stupid zoning fight over Sanctuary, too. You might not realize that, but you do. What the Parks Commission crowd is trying to pull is … but they’re just being used as fronts. You know that. Anyway, when it gets as far as the courts, you’ll have all the help you need.”

  “Sanctuary isn’t my doing. At all.”

  “No? Well, I meant the plural you.”

  “Thank you. I mean that. How are you doing?”

  “Fine. I’m a daddy now.”

  “Really! Boy or girl?”

  “Girl. A beautiful little bitch, drives me crazy. I’d like you to meet my wife sometime, Leisha.”

  “I’d like that,” Leisha said.

  She spent the rest of the night studying for her bar exams. The bubble stayed with her. She recognized exactly what it was: joy.

  It was going to be all right. The contract, unwritten, between her and her society—Kenzo Yagai’s society, Roger Camden’s society—would hold. With dissent and strife and yes, some hatred: She suddenly thought of Tony’s beggars in Spain, furious at the strong because they themselves were not. Yes. But it would hold.

  She believed that.

  She did.

  7

  Leisha took her bar exams in July. They did not seem hard to her. Afterward three classmates, two men and a woman, made a fakely casual point of talking to Leisha until she had climbed safely into a taxi whose driver obviously did not recognize her, or stop signs. The three were all Sleepers. A pair of undergraduates, clean-shaven blond men with the long faces and pointless arrogance of rich stupidity, eyed Leisha and sneered. Leisha’s female classmate sneered back.

  Leisha had a flight to Chicago the next morning. Alice was going to join her there. They had to clean out the big house on the lake, dispose of Roger’s personal property, put the house on the market. Leisha had had no time to do it earlier.

  She remembered her father in the conservatory, wearing an ancient flat-topped hat he had picked up somewhere, potting orchids and jasmine and passion flowers.

  When the doorbell rang she was startled; she almost never had visitors. Eagerly, she turned on the outside camera—maybe it was Jonathan or Martha, back in Boston to surprise her, to celebrate—why hadn’t she thought before about some sort of celebration?

  Richard stood gazing up at the camera. He had been crying.

  She tore open the door. Richard made no move to come in. Leisha saw that what the camera had registered as grief was actually something else: tears of rage.

  “Tony’s dead.”

  Leisha put out her hand, blindly. Richard did not take it.

  “They killed him in prison. Not the authorities—the other prisoners. In the recreation yard. Murderers, rapists, looters, scum of the earth—and they thought they had the right to kill him because he was different.”

  Now Richard did grab her arm, so hard that something, some bone, shifted beneath the flesh and pressed on a nerve. “Not just different—better. Because he was better, because we all are, we goddamn just don’t stand up and shout it out of some misplaced feeling for their feelings … God!”

  Leisha pulled her arm free and rubbed it, numb, staring at Richard’s contorted face.

  “They beat him to death with a lead pipe. No one even knows how they got a lead pipe. They beat him on the back of the head and they rolled him over and—”

  “Don’t!” Leisha said. It came out a whimper.

  Richard looked at her. Despite his shouting, his violent grip on her arm, Leisha had the confused impression that this was the first time he had actually seen her. She went on rubbing her arm, staring at him in terror.

  He said quietly, “I’ve com
e to take you to Sanctuary, Leisha. Dan Walcott and Vernon Bulriss are in the car outside. The three of us will carry you out, if necessary. But you’re coming. You see that, don’t you? You’re not safe here, with your high profile and your spectacular looks—you’re a natural target if anyone is. Do we have to force you? Or do you finally see for yourself that we have no choice—the bastards have left us no choice—except Sanctuary?”

  Leisha closed her eyes. Tony, at fourteen, at the beach. Tony, his eyes ferocious and alight, the first to reach out his hand for the glass of interleukin-1. Beggars in Spain.

  “I’ll come.”

  She had never known such anger. It scared her, coming in bouts throughout the long night, receding but always returning again. Richard held her in his arms, sitting with their backs against the wall of her library, and his holding made no difference at all. In the living room Dan and Vernon talked in low voices.

  Sometimes the anger erupted in shouting, and Leisha heard herself and thought I don’t know you. Sometimes it became crying, sometimes talking about Tony, about all of them. Not the shouting nor the crying nor the talking eased her at all.

  Planning did, a little. In a cold dry voice she didn’t recognize, Leisha told Richard about the trip to close the house in Chicago. She had to go; Alice was already there. If Richard and Dan and Vernon put Leisha on the plane, and Alice met her at the other end with union bodyguards, she should be safe enough. Then she would change her return ticket from Boston to Belmont and drive with Richard to Sanctuary.

  “People are already arriving,” Richard said. “Jennifer Sharifi is organizing it, greasing the Sleeper suppliers with so much money they can’t resist. What about this townhouse here, Leisha? Your furniture and terminal and clothes?”

  Leisha looked around her familiar office. Law books lined the walls, red and green and brown, although most of the same information was on-line. A coffee cup rested on a print-out on the desk. Beside it was the receipt she had requested from the taxi driver this afternoon, a giddy souvenir of the day she had passed her bar exams; she had thought of having it framed. Above the desk was a holographic portrait of Kenzo Yagai.