Beggars in Spain (33 page)

He made an impatient gesture—exactly how old was he now? Twenty-five. “I don’t believe you, Leisha. I want what I’ve always wanted. You and Sanctuary.”

That did catch her by surprise—half of it, anyway. Sanctuary. It had been a decade since Drew had so much as mentioned it to her. Leisha thought the childish dream of revenge or justice or conquest, or whatever it was, had faded long ago. Drew sat in his chair, a powerfully-built man despite the crippled legs, and his eyes didn’t falter when they met hers. Sanctuary.

He was a child still, in spite of everything.

She went to the north patio. Kevin stood there alone, examining a stone shaped by desert wind into a long, tapered shape like a sandstone tear. At the sight of him Leisha realized that she felt no more than she had at the sight of Richard. Age had killed Alice’s body; it seemed to have worked instead on Leisha’s heart.

“Hello, Kevin.”

He turned quickly. “Leisha. Thank you for inviting me.”

So Drew had lied to him. It didn’t seem to matter. “You’re welcome.”

“I wanted to pay my last respects to Alice.” He stood awkwardly, and finally smiled ruefully. “Sleepless aren’t very good at this, are we? At death, I mean. We never think about it.”

“I do,” Leisha said. “Would you like to see Alice now?”

“Later. First there’s something I want to say to you, and I don’t know if I’ll get another chance. The funeral’s in an hour, isn’t it?”

“Kevin—listen. I don’t want to listen to any apologies or explanations or reconstructions of events forty years old. Not now. I just don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to apologize,” he said, a little stiffly, and Leisha suddenly remembered herself saying to Susan Melling, on the roof of this same house,
Kevin doesn’t see there’s anything to forgive.
“What I wanted to say to you was on a different topic altogether. I’m sorry to bring it up just before the funeral but as I said, there might not be another time. Has Drew told you what business I handle for him?”

“I didn’t know you handled any business for him.”

“Actually, I handle it all. Not his tour bookings—there’s an agency that does that—but his investments and security needs and so forth. He—”

“I should think the amount Drew makes would be pretty small compared to your usual corporate clients.”

“It is,” Kevin said, without self-consciousness, “but I do it for you. Indirectly. But what I wanted to say was that he insists I secure his investments exclusively in funds or speculations traded through Sanctuary.”

“So?”

“Most of my business is with Sanctuary anyway, but on their terms. Dealing Earth-side when they don’t want their own people to come down, and especially doing the security on their Earth-side transactions. There are still a lot of people out there who hate Sleepless, despite the benevolent social climate on the grids. You’d be surprised how many.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Leisha said. “What is it you want to tell me?”

“This: There’s something starting to happen on Sanctuary. I don’t know what it is, but I’m in a unique position to see the outer fringes of their planning for whatever it is. Especially through Drew’s tiny
investments because he wants them as close into the heart of Sanctuary dealings as they’ll permit. Which, incidentally, was never very close, and now it’s getting even more distant. They’re liquidating whenever they can, converting investments not to credit but to equipment and to tangibles like gold, software, even art. That’s what my watchdog program flagged in the first place: There’s never been a Sleepless who collected art seriously. We’re just not interested.”

This was true. Leisha frowned.

Kevin continued, “So I went on digging, even in areas I don’t handle. The security is harder to crack than it used to be; they must have some very good younger wizards up there, although there’s no formal record of it anywhere. Sanctuary’s spent the last year moving all investment it doesn’t liquidate into holdings outside the United States. Will Sandaleros bought a Japanese orbital, Kagura, a very old one with a lot of internal damage, used mostly for genetic breeding experiments on altered meat animals for the luxury orbital trade. Sandaleros bought it in the name of Sharifi Enterprises, not of Sanctuary. They’ve acted strange with it—they evicted all the tenants but there’s no record of moving out any of the livestock. Not so much as a single disease-resistant goatow. Presumably they brought their own people in to care for the animals, but I can’t crack any of those records. And now they’ve started to move all their people on Earth back up to Sanctuary. The kids at grad school, the doctors doing residencies, the business liaisons, even the occasional kook who’s down here slumming. They’re all going back to Sanctuary, by ones and twos, inconspicuously. But they’re all going back.”

Leisha frowned. “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know.” Kevin put down the wind-sculpted stone. “I thought you might be able to guess. You knew Jennifer better than any of us left here.”

“Kev, I don’t think I ever really knew anybody in my life.” It just slipped out; she hadn’t planned to say anything so personal. Kevin smiled thinly.

Drew drove his chair onto the patio. His eyes were red. “Leisha, Stella wants you.”

She went, her mind full of Sanctuary’s movements, of Alice’s death, of the exploitive congressional tax package, of Drew’s investing in Sanctuary, of Kevin’s concern, of her irrational fear of Drew’s art—it was irrational, she knew that. She didn’t seem to have the energy to stay rational that she’d had when she was younger. There was no way to think about so many things at once. They were too different. The human mind could not encompass them. A different way of thinking was needed.
Daddy, you failed—you should have provided that in the genemod, too. A better way of integrating thought, not just better thoughts.

Leisha smiled, without mirth. Poor Roger. Blamed for everything Alice wasn’t, everything Leisha was, everything Leisha wasn’t. It was funny, in a way. But only in the unhumorous way anything recent was funny. In another eighty years, maybe she would find it hilarious. All it took was enough time, piling up like dust.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

It was Jordan who had chosen the beautiful, painful, sentimental words, Drew knew. Drew had never heard the funeral service before and he wasn’t sure what all the archaic phrases meant, but looking at the faces gathered around Alice Camden Watrous’s grave, he was sure that Jordan had chosen the words, Leisha disliked them, and Stella was impatient with them. And Alice? She would have liked them, Drew knew, because her son had chosen them. That would be enough for Alice. And so for Drew, too.

Shapes slid quietly in and out of his conscious mind.

It was Eric who read the words—Alice’s grandson, Drew’s old enemy. Drew looked at the handsome, solemn man Eric had become, and the shapes in his mind deepened, slithered faster. No, not shapes, this
time he wanted the word. He was determined to find the word for Eric, who might be dust but if so only a high-quality real-leather solid-platinum dust that would never be passed over and known no more because Eric was a Sleepless, born to ability and power, no matter how much youthful rebellion he had acted out once. Drew wanted the word for Richard, eyes downcast beside his Sleeper wife and little boy, pretending he was like them. The word for Jordan, Alice’s son, torn in two all his life between his Sleeper mother and brilliant Sleepless aunt, defended only by his own decency. The word for Leisha, who had loved—if what Kevin Baker had told Drew was true—Sleepers far more than she had ever loved any of her own kind. Her father. Alice. Drew himself.

He couldn’t find the right word.

Jordan was reading now, from some different old book, they all knew so many old books: “Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war, death after life…”

Leisha looked up from the coffin. Her face was set, unyielding. Light from the desert sky washed over the planes of her cheeks, the pale firm lips. She didn’t look at Drew. She glanced at the wind-smoothed stones on either side of Alice’s in the little plot,
BECKER EDWARD WATROUS
and
SUSAN CATHERINE MELLING
, and then straight forward, at nothing. At air. But even though no glance passed between them, Drew suddenly knew, from the fluid shapes inside his mind and the rigid shape of Leisha outside it, that he would never bed her. She would never love him as anything but a son, because a son was how she had seen him first, and she didn’t change her major shapes. She couldn’t. She was what she was. So were most people, but for Leisha it was even more true. She didn’t bend, didn’t flex. It was something in her, something from the sleeplessness—no, it was something
not
in her. Something the very fact of sleeplessness left out. Drew couldn’t define what. But the Sleepless all had it, this inflexibility, this inability to change categories, and because of it Leisha would never love him the way he loved her. Never.

Pain clutched him, so strong that for a moment he couldn’t see
Alice’s coffin below him on the ground. Alice, whose love had let Drew grow up in a way Leisha’s never could. His vision cleared and he let the pain flow freely, until it became another shape in his mind, jagged with lacerations but more than itself, more than himself. And so, bearable.

He could never have Leisha.

Then all that was left was Sanctuary.

Drew looked again around the circle. Stella had her face hidden against her husband’s shoulder. Their daughter Alicia rested both hands on the shoulders of her small daughters. Richard had not raised his head; Drew couldn’t see his eyes. Leisha stood alone, the clear desert light revealing her young skin, unlined eyes, rigidly compressed lips.

The word came to Drew, the word he had been hunting for, the word that fit them all, Sleepless mourning their best beloved who had not been one of them and for that very reason
was
their best beloved:

The word was “pity.”

Miri bent furiously over her terminal. Both the display and the readout said the same thing: This synthetic neurochemical model performed worse than the last one. Or the last two. Or the last ten. Her lab rats, their brains confused by what was supposed to be the answer to Miri’s experiment, stood irresolutely in their brain-scan stalls. The smallest of the three gave up: He lay down and went to sleep.

“T-t-t-terrific,” Miri muttered. What ever made her think she was a biochemical researcher? “Super”—yeah. Sure. Super-incompetent.

Strings of genetic code, phenotypes, enzymes, receptor sites formed and reformed in her head. None of it was any good. Waste, waste. She threw a calibration instrument clear across the lab, guaranteeing it would have to be recalibrated.

“Miri!”

Joan Lucas stood in the doorway, her pretty face twisted as rope. She and Miri had not talked in years. “Miri…”

“Wh-wh-what is it? J-J-J-Joan?”

“It’s Tony. Come right now. He…” Her face twisted even more. Miri felt the blood leave her heart.

“Wh-wh-what?”

“He fell. From the playground. Oh, Miri, come—”

From the playground. From the axis of the orbital…no, that wasn’t possible, the playground was sealed, and after a fall from that height there would be nothing left—

“From the elevator, I mean. The outside. You know how the boys dare each other to ride the outside of the elevator, on the construction ribs, and then duck in the repair hatch—”

Miri hadn’t known. Tony hadn’t told her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. She could only stare at Joan, who was crying. Behind Miri, one of the genemod rats gave a soft squeak.

“Come on!” Joan cried. “He’s still alive!”

Barely. The medical team had already reached him. They worked grimly on the smashed legs and broken shoulder before they moved him to the hospital. Tony’s eyes were closed; one side of his skull was covered with blood.

Miri rode in the emergency skimmer the short distance to the hospital. Doctors whisked Tony away. Miri sat unmoving, unseeing, looking up only when her mother arrived.

“Where is he!” Hermione cried, and a small, cruel part of Miri’s mind wondered if Hermione would finally look directly at her oldest son, now when everything that made looking worthwhile was gone. Tony’s smile. The expression in his eyes. His voice, stammering out his words. Tony’s words.

The brain scan showed massive damage. But, miraculously, consciousness survived. The drugs that dulled his pain also dulled what made him Tony, but Miri knew he was still there, somewhere. She sat by his side, holding his limp hand, hour after hour. People came and went around her but she spoke to none of them, looked at none of them.

Finally the doctor pulled a chair close to hers and put a hand on her shoulder. “Miranda.”

Tony’s eyelids fluttered more that time; she watched carefully—

“Miranda. Listen to me.” He took her chin gently in his hand and
pulled her face toward his. “There’s nervous system damage beyond what can regenerate. There might be—we can’t be sure what we’re looking at. We’ve never seen this pattern of damage.”

“N-n-not even on T-T-T-Tabitha S-Selenski?” she said bitterly.

“No. That was different. Tony’s Mallory scans are showing highly aberrant brain activity. Your brother is alive, but he’s suffered major, nonreparable damage to the brain stem, including the raphe nuclei and related structures. Miranda, you know what that means, you research in this area, I have the readouts here for you—”

“I d-d-d-don’t w-w-want to s-s-s-see th-them!”

“Yes,” the doctor said, “You do. Sharifi, talk to her.”

Miri’s father bent over her. She hadn’t realized he was there. “Miri—”

“D-d-d-don’t d-d-do it! N-n-no, D-D-Daddy! N-not to T-T-T-Tony!”

Ricky Keller didn’t pretend to not understand her. Nor did he pretend to a strength Miri knew, under the chaotic horrible strings in her mind, he didn’t possess. Ricky looked at his broken son, then at Miri, and slowly, shoulders stooped, he left the room.