Beggars in Spain (17 page)

“Ah,” Susan said. It was a sound Alice made, too. Leisha had never before made the connection. “Did you know that in the United States year-to-date the officially recorded number of
in vitro
genemods to produce Sleepless babies was 142?”

“That’s all?”

“Down from thousands, ten years ago. Even fair and thoughtful people don’t want their own children to undergo the danger and the discrimination. But if your Dr. Walcott’s research…” She left the sentence unfinished.

“Not mine,” Leisha said. “Definitely not mine.”

“Ah,” Susan said again, the single word a multilayered sigh.

T
he People versus Jennifer Fatima Sharifi. All rise.” Leisha, seated in the witness section, rose. One hundred sixty-two people—spectators, jury, press, witnesses, counsel—rose with her, one body with one hundred sixty-two warring brains. Security fields encased the courtroom, courthouse, town of Conewango, like layered gloves. No comlinks could function through the two tightest layers. Fifteen years ago, in another of the judicial system’s periodic swings between the public’s right to know and the individual’s right to privacy, New York State had once more banned recording devices from criminal trials. The press were all state-certified augments with eidectic memories, aural-neural bio-implants, or both. Leisha wondered cynically how many just happened to also possess unmentioned genemods.

Next to the reporters, the newsgrid holo-artists held their CAD’s on their packed-together laps, minute flexes of their fingers sculpting the holos for the afternoon news. There was no identified gene site for artistic ability.

“Oyez, oyez. The Superior Court for the County of Cattaraugus, State of New York, is now in session, the Honorable Daniel J. Deepford, judge, presiding. Draw near and give your attention and you shall be heard. God save the United States and this honorable court!”

Leisha wondered if only she heard the fevered exclamation point.

It was the first day of testimony. Two and a half weeks of relentless questioning had been needed to empanel a jury: Do you, Ms. Wright, think you can make an unbiased decision about the defendant? Have you, Mr. Aratina, seen anything on the newsgrids about this case? Are you, Ms. Moranis, a member of We-Sleep? Of Awake, America! Of Mothers for Biological Parity? Three hundred eighty-nine dismissals for cause, an unthinkable number in any other
voir dire.
The jury had ended up eight men and four women. Seven white, three black, one Asian, one Latino. Five college-educated, seven with high-school certification or less. Nine younger than fifty, three older. Eight biological parents, three childless, one with legal egg-donor surrogate status. Six working, six on the Dole. No Sleepless.

“
A citizen shall be tried by a jury of his peers.
”

“You may begin, Mr. Hossack,” the judge said to the prosecuting attorney, a heavy man with thick gray hair and the considerable trial asset of being able to command attention through stillness. Like everyone else in the United States with access to a comprehensive database, Leisha now knew all about Geoffrey Hossack. He was fifty-four years old, had a win/loss ratio of 23 to 9, and had never been audited by the IRS or reprimanded by the ABA. His wife bought only real-wheat bread, three loaves a week. Hossack subscribed to two newsgrids and a private channel for Civil War buffs. His oldest daughter was failing trigonometry.

He and Judge Deepford both had records as fair, honest, and capable practitioners of the law.

Weeks ago Leisha, sitting before her terminal after her meticulous combing of Deepford’s trial record, had pondered Deepford’s and Hossack’s dossiers. She hadn’t expected that Sanctuary could manipulate the choice of either judge or prosecuting attorney; Sleepless power was mostly economic, not political. There weren’t enough of them to constitute a voting bloc, and they were too resented to gain elected office. Sanctuary could of course buy individual judges, lawyers, or congressmen, and probably did, but nothing indicated that Hossack or Deepford were for sale.

More important, Deepford was not a Sleeper fanatic. Whatever his personal feelings, he had presided over nine civil suits with Sleepless litigants—there were very few criminal cases against Sleepless—and in each case Deepford’s performance had been fair and reasonable. He tended to adhere closely to narrow interpretations of both the rules of evidence and the law itself, but that was the only point on which Leisha would have challenged him.

Hossack’s opening statement to the jury set out his case swiftly and cleanly: Evidence existed to prove that the Y-energy deflector on Dr. Timothy Herlinger’s scooter had been tampered with. Further evidence would tie this tampering to Jennifer Sharifi. “The scooter was equipped with a retina scanner, ladies and gentlemen, which showed three prints: a neighbor child who had been playing outside that morning. Dr. Herlinger himself. And the print of an adult Sleepless female. We will further demonstrate that this Sleepless woman was someone in the very highest reaches of Sanctuary power, someone who controlled the most advanced technology in the world.”

Hossack paused. “We will be entering in evidence a pendant found in the parking garage at Samplice, beside the spot occupied by Dr. Herlinger’s scooter. That pendant contains a microchip so advanced, so different, that government experts still can’t duplicate it. We can’t understand how it was made, but we
can
understand what it does. We tried it. It opens the gates of Sanctuary. In short, the State will prove that the scooter tampering was part of an elaborate illegal scheme planned and carried out by Sanctuary. We will then prove that the only person who could have masterminded this scheme was Jennifer Sharifi, creator and director of illicit power networks that include infiltration of the national banking system and even of government data storage, a concern so grave it is currently under investigation by a special task force at the United States Justice Department—”

“Objection!” Will Sandaleros called.

“Mr. Hossack,” said the judge, “you are clearly beyond the boundaries of an opening statement. The jury will disregard all reference to any parallel investigations, by anybody, in this murder case.”

The jury were all staring at Jennifer, straight-backed in her white
abbaya
behind a bulletproof shield. The word “power” hung in the air like a high-density charge. Jennifer never glanced sideways.

“Ms. Sharifi’s motive,” Hossack continued, “was to suppress patents which, if developed and marketed, would enable Sleepers to become Sleepless, with the same biological advantages as Sleepless. Sanctuary does not want us—you and me—to have these advantages. Sanctuary, led by Jennifer Sharifi, was willing to commit murder in order to prevent that.”

Leisha studied the jury. They were listening hard, but she could tell nothing from the rigid Sleeper faces.

In contrast to Hossack, Will Sandaleros sailed into his opening statement in low key. “I’m at a loss to refute the prosecution’s actual case,” he began. His handsome, sharply-chiseled face—the Sleeper parents who rejected him, Leisha remembered, had purchased extensive appearance genemods—looked modestly bewildered. No Sleepless, Leisha well knew, could afford to approach a jury with anything that could be interpreted as arrogance. She leaned forward, ignoring the inevitable curious stares from other spectators, studying Sandaleros closely. He looked focused and energetic. He looked competent.

“The fact is,” Sandaleros continued, “that there
is
no case to refute. Jennifer Sharifi is innocent of murder. The prosecution has no conclusive evidence, as I shall show, to tie Jennifer Sharifi,
or
the corporate entity of Sanctuary, to the scooter tampering, to any patent dispute, or to any murder conspiracy. What the prosecution does have, ladies and gentlemen, is a thin web of circumstance, hearsay, and forced connections. And something else.”

Sandaleros moved very close to the jury box, closer than Leisha ever allowed herself to get, and leaned forward. A woman in the first row shrank back slightly. “What the prosecution has, ladies and gentlemen, is a thicker web—much thicker than its web of evidence—of innuendo, prejudice, and unwarranted connections built on hatred and suspicion of Ms. Sharifi because she is a Sleepless.”

“Objection!” Hossack called. Sandaleros rolled on as if he hadn’t heard.

“I say this to bring the real issues of this trial out where we all can see them. Jennifer Sharifi is a Sleepless. I am a Sleepless—”

“Objection!” Hossack called again, with real anger. “Counsel is attempting to put the prosecution on trial here. The law makes no distinction between Sleeper and Sleepless in the commission of a crime, and neither shall our use of the rules of evidence.”

Every pair of eyes in the courtroom—Sleeper, Sleepless, augmented, clouded, tunnel-visioned, uncertain, fanatic—looked at Judge Deepford, who didn’t hesitate. He had obviously thought this issue through beforehand. “I will allow it,” he said quietly, thereby departing from his own record, and making clear how very wide a latitude he would allow Sandaleros to avoid the appearance of prejudice in his courtroom. Leisha found that the nails of her right hand were digging into her left. There was a trap here….

“Your Honor—” Hossack began, very still.

“Objection overruled, Mr. Hossack. Mr. Sandaleros, proceed.”

“Jennifer Sharifi is a Sleepless,” Sandaleros repeated. “I am a Sleepless. This is the trial of a Sleepless accused of murdering a Sleeper, accused
because
she is a Sleepless—”

“Objection! The defendant stands accused by a grand jury’s consideration of the evidence!”

Everyone gazed at Hossack. Leisha saw the moment he realized he had played into Sandaleros’s hands. No matter what the evidence said, everyone in the courtroom knew that Jennifer Sharifi
had
been indicted by the twenty-three Sleepers on the grand jury
because
she was Sleepless. Fear, not evidence, had indicted her. By denying it, Hossack himself looked either dishonest or stupid. A man who could not name ugly reality. A man whose statements should be doubted.

Hossack, Leisha saw, had just had his own sense of fairness and justice used against him, to make him look like a hypocritical ass.

Jennifer Sharifi never moved.

The first witnesses were people who had been at the site of Timothy Herlinger’s death. Hossack paraded a variety of street-team police, pedestrians, and the driver of the car, a nervous thin woman who barely restrained herself from crying. Through them, Hossack established that Herlinger had been exceeding the speed limit, had made a sharp left turn, and, like most scooter drivers, had probably relied on the automatic Y-energy deflector shield to keep him the standard foot away from anything on the other side of him. Instead he had crashed head-first into the side of the groundcar driven by Ms. Stacy Hillman, who had already started to pull forward as the traffic field changed. Herlinger never wore a helmet; deflectors made helmets superfluous. He had died instantly.

The street-team police robot had made its gross check of the scooter and discovered the failed deflector—or, rather, since deflectors never failed and such a possibility was not in its programming, it had listed the scooter as performing safely. This was so contrary to witness reports that a policeman had cautiously mounted the scooter, tried it, and discovered the failure for himself. The scooter had been sent to Forensic, Energy for expert analysis.

Ellen Kassabian, chief of Forensic, Energy, was a large woman with the slow, measured speech that juries found authoritative but which, Leisha knew, could conceal a stubborn inflexibility. Hossack questioned her closely about the scooter.

“What specifically was the nature of the tampering?”

“The shield was set to fail at the first impact at a speed above fifteen miles per hour.”

“Is that an easy tampering to create?”

“No. A device was attached to the Y-cone to bring the failure about.” She described the device, quickly becoming incomprehensibly technical. Nevertheless, the jury listened intently.

“Have you ever seen such a device before?”

“No. To my knowledge, it’s a new invention.”

“Then how do you know it does what you tell us it does?”

“We tested it extensively.”

“Could you now, as a result of your testing, duplicate the device?”

“No. Oh, I’m sure someone could. But it’s complicated. We had Defense Department specialists look at it—”

“We’ll be calling them as witnesses.”

“—and they said,” Kassabian continued, undeflectable, “that it involved new technology.”

“So a very sophisticated—even unusual—intelligence would be needed to engineer this tampering?”

“Objection,” Sandaleros said. “Witness is being asked for her opinion.”

Hossack said, “Her professional opinion is well within the ground established by her credentials.”

“I’ll allow it,” the judge said.

Hossack repeated his question. “So a very sophisticated—even unusual—intelligence would be necessary to do this tampering?”

“Yes,” Kassabian said.

“An extremely unusual person, or group of persons.”

“Yes.”

Hossack let that hang in the air while he examined his notes. Leisha watched how the jurors’ eyes searched the courtroom for the Sleepless, an intelligent and unusual group of persons.

Hossack said, “Now let’s consider the third retina print registered on the scanner the morning Dr. Herlinger died. How can you be so sure it was that of an adult Sleepless female?”

“Retina prints are scans of tissue. Like all tissue, it breaks down with age. There’s what we call ‘blurring,’ places where cells are broken and haven’t regenerated—it’s nerve tissue, remember—or are malformed. Sleepless tissue doesn’t do that. It regenerates, somehow—” Leisha heard the ambivalence on ‘somehow,’ the bitter wistfulness she had first heard twenty-one years ago from Susan Melling “—and the retina scans are very distinctive. Sharp. No blurring. The older the subject, the more surely we can identify a Sleepless print. With young children, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference, even for the computer. But this was an adult female Sleepless.”

“I see. And it matches with no known Sleepless?”

“No. The print isn’t on file.”

“Clarify something for the court, Ms. Kassabian. When the defendant, Jennifer Sharifi, was arrested, her retina print was taken?”

“Yes.”

“And does it match with the scan on Dr. Herlinger’s scooter?”

“It does not.”

“There is no way Ms. Sharifi tampered with that scooter herself.”

“No,” Kassabian said, thereby allowing the prosecution to make this point before the defense could put it to more dramatic use.